He looked at me with serious eyes.
I said nothing. I didn’t know how to begin.
“We can just be friends, if that’s what you want,” he said. “There’s no pressure to be anything else, if that’s not something you want to deal with at the moment.”
“Is that what you want? To be just friends?” I shouldn’t have asked that; it wasn’t fair given what I’d already decided, but selfishly I wanted to hear the answer.
“No,” he said. “It’s not.”
For a second, my heart held still, trapped in an alternate world in which that made all the difference. A world in which I didn’t know that he’d already been spoken for—that I was nothing more than an accidental interloper in a relationship that should have been, would have been, Anna’s. A world in which I could look at his face without imagining her broken body lying beneath his window. And then my heart started again, started beating back in the real world.
“We can’t be anything,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
He frowned. “Why not?”
I struggled to come up with a version I could tell him. So much was off-limits. “You liked Anna,” I said. “I thought it didn’t matter, but I was wrong.”
“Why does that matter?” he asked. “I did like Anna, I did, but I didn’t even know her that well.”
“I think she’s what connected us,” I said. “I think she’s the reason you talked to me in the first place.”
“That’s not true,” he said.
“Okay, then tell me you would’ve stopped in the hallway no matter who I was,” I said. “Tell me it didn’t matter for one moment that I have her face. Tell me you never once thought I was your second chance.”
His body tensed, like he was wrestling with the request; then he sagged against the banister. “You guys were twins. Of course I noticed. Of course I wanted…” He shook his head. “That doesn’t mean I don’t like you, doesn’t mean that what I feel for you doesn’t count.”
You’re not wrong, I thought. But you’re not right either. Because I don’t think you would ever have fallen for me if you hadn’t already fallen for her.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Me too,” he said. “I think we could’ve been kind of amazing.”
He looked at me and I saw it: all the time we’d had together, all the future moments we could share. Maybe I could push it all down, I thought. Maybe he’d never find out that he was the one she was going to see. Maybe I could make myself believe it doesn’t matter.
But then I saw Anna, and how she glowed that night, thinking of him. How she smiled like she had a secret. A good one. Finally, a good one.
So I said nothing.
And when he pushed himself off the banister and kept on going up the stairs, I didn’t call out and stop him, didn’t reach for his arm as he brushed past.
I just watched him go.
A FEW DAYS LATER, I went to Anna’s room and retrieved her poems from the bookcase. I sat on her bed and started reading through them again.
Last time, I’d read them quickly, searching for clues. Hadn’t balanced each word on my tongue, hadn’t paid attention to how they fit together to tell a story, to make a larger image. How the poem about a flower wasn’t just about a flower but about how she’d seen the flower, about her memory of it and what it had meant to her. Mr. Matthews might have been worried about her, might have liked her as a person, but in terms of her writing I suspected he’d simply been stating the truth: she was becoming a wonderful writer, and he was so glad to have her in his class.
The love poem I left to the side, unsure whether I could cope with reading through it again, knowing that I might now see Charlie in every line.
I’d gone through most of the stack before I heard a soft knock on the side of the door, and then Mom slowly pushed it open.
“Hey,” she said. “I wanted to let you know we’ll be eating in about half an hour.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll come down and help set the table in a few minutes.”
“That would be great.” Her gaze settled on the pile of poems beside me. “What are you reading?”
“Poems,” I said. “Of Anna’s.”
“Can I look?” she asked. The question came out casual, nonchalant, but there were traces of something else there, something echoed in the creases that had appeared at the corner of her eyes and her mouth.
I hesitated briefly, not wanting to let them go. Then I remembered the box, and I nodded.
She sat down beside me. I watched her read through two of the nature ones. Saw her smile and occasionally silently mouth some of the phrases. I had expected to feel a sense of loss watching her absorb Anna’s words, but it wasn’t like that. It made me feel lighter inside, like there was less pressure.
Still, when she picked up the love poem, I felt myself start to reach forward, wanting to take it from her. I stopped myself, though. It’s okay. I thought. You don’t know that it’s about him.
She read the poem twice. I could tell by the way her eyes tracked down the page.
“It’s lovely,” she said. Her hand held it lightly, as if that piece of paper were more fragile than the others.
“I guess. It’s a little sappy.” It was hard watching her hold it, and I wanted her to move on from it, to put it back down, so my words were sharper than I intended.
She furrowed her brow and looked at me quizzically.
“Sappy?”
I shrugged. “You know what I mean. Just a generic love poem.”
She shook her head slowly. “Sweetheart—I don’t think it’s a
