Her cheeks turned pink. “I suppose so. I wasn’t homecoming queen, but I was on the court, if that counts.” She hesitated. “I think I may still have pictures of it, if you’d like to see them sometime.”
I started to say no. Her face had opened up, though, for a second, just a sliver, and as I formed my predictable response, I could see it start to close again.
I adjusted accordingly. “That would be nice.”
She blinked. And then she smiled. A bigger, more genuine smile than before. “I’ll bring down some albums sometime. I should have them in the attic. We could go through them together.”
“I’d like that,” I said.
When I left the house, it was much earlier than when I normally met Nick, but I couldn’t wait, couldn’t sit around until the usual time. So I decided to surprise him at his house. New chapter, I thought. It was right to start it off somewhere else. Somewhere fresh.
It was a long walk, and I took it slow. Walked carefully along the uneven sidewalk, the parts that were cracked and crumbled. Everything was green now; even the trees that had been stubbornly denying the presence of spring were displaying new growth. Anna might’ve written a poem about these trees, I thought. And though I felt a pang, there was also a certain pleasure in thinking that I had, for a second, seen the world through her eyes.
I knew roughly where Nick’s house was, but I’d had to look up his exact address in the phone book. It turned out he lived in a tall, slim gray house. The windows had deep sills and tidy white shutters. There was a tall tree a few yards to one side of it that practically begged for a tree house to be built on its long, sturdy branches. Tulips were planted along the edges of the house, their heavy heads bowing their stems.
I paused halfway down the front path, steeling myself to go knock on the door. I hoped Nick would be the one to answer. That he’d open the door and smile at me like he knew precisely why I was there and what I wanted to say.
I looked down at my shirt, belatedly concerned I might have spilled something on myself during breakfast.
No crumbs, no juice.
I was buying time, I thought. I needed to move forward.
I started to look back up toward the front door. In the process, something caught the corner of my eye, something small by the tulips at the side of the house.
Something small and white with a light sheen.
I left the path and walked over to the white speck, bent over to inspect it more closely.
It was a button. A pearl button.
And through its center was a single piece of thread. Purple thread.
Anna.
Anna, here. Here at Nick’s house.
And suddenly all I knew was that I knew nothing. Nothing at all.
I was running even before I knew my feet had begun to move. Running with no coherent thoughts, just one long, loud scream inside my brain. And no matter how fast I ran, I could not escape it.
ANNA.
Nick.
Anna and Nick.
Anna’s button.
Nick’s house.
Anna’s button at Nick’s house.
Nick was the boy. Nick was the destination.
Nick was a liar.
I thought I was completely alone. I thought if anyone found out about him and me they would despise me. That I’d be the one they’d blame.
And then one day someone told me they knew—a friend of his, another guy on the team. I braced myself for him to call me a slut, a whore, but instead he said he wanted to try to help me.
And he had an idea for how.
WHEN MY MOM KNOCKED ON my door the next morning, I pulled my blankets tighter around me.
“Sweetheart,” she called from the other side. “You have to go to school. You can’t stay in your room all day. If you’re sick, we should take you to the doctor, but you can’t just stay in there.”
I could hear her leaning against the door and imagined her with her hand cupped to the door, listening for signs of life.
“I don’t need a doctor,” I said.
“Then you need to either tell me what’s wrong or you need to go to school.”
“I’m getting up,” I said. “I’m getting dressed, okay?” And I slowly made myself throw back the blankets and stand up. Because I really didn’t want to talk to her. Didn’t want to talk to anyone except Lily, who I’d left several long rambling messages about buttons and lying and how she needed to tell me what happened and how I knew everything. She hadn’t returned any of my calls.
I got dressed. And I walked to school so I wouldn’t have to deal with talking to Sarah on the bus. I ate my lunch in the bathroom and moved between classes like a ninja, avoiding anyone who might try to interact with me, including the cheerleaders handing out flyers about the big basketball game.
I did a good job avoiding people. Maybe I wasn’t a ninja, I thought; maybe I was a ghost—maybe I’d been wrong to think I’d been anything else all this time.
In English class, I sat right behind Tom—drawer of the macabre—and watched as he sketched a guy being cut in half with a machete. If you are going to go apeshit, do it now, I thought. Grab your weapon from your bag and I’ll tackle you so hard you won’t have time to aim. Or maybe you’ll shoot me and we’ll both be done with all this.
Nothing happened, of course. His backpack stayed on the floor next to him, probably filled with nothing more than mechanical pencils and textbooks. He kept on drawing in his notebook, going over one area harder and harder until it was shiny and slick with graphite. He might not be violent, but he certainly was angry.
And I envied him that. Anger seemed like such a nice clean emotion. I craved its purity, its lack of complication. All
