Now I felt I needed to know what she was so upset about. She’d dated Brian for almost a year—his most serious girlfriend by far. Did she know more about him than I did? Did she know something that could make sense of this?
After school, I walked to Amber’s house. When I knocked on the front door, Karen, her mom, answered.
“Hello, Della,” she said. “How’ve you been?”
“Fine. Can I speak with Amber?”
“Of course.” Karen seemed too excited to have me visit. She’d surely picked up on our lack of interaction in the past year. “Have any plans for summer?”
“I’m working at the movie theater,” I said, hoping our conversation didn’t sound as awkward as it felt.
“I’ve been telling Amber she should get a summer job. Maybe I’ll suggest she apply there.”
“Sounds good,” I said.
“Amber,” she called up the stairs. “You have a visitor.”
A few minutes later, Amber appeared at the banister. She was wearing baggy pants and a tight T-shirt. She looked at me.
“Busy,” she said, and turned around.
I thought Karen might break from embarrassment. “Excuse me,” she said to me, walking up the stairs. She reappeared a minute later with a welcoming smile on her face. “Come on up, Della. Amber is in her room.”
Normally, I would have left. I wasn’t going to beg anyone, even Amber, to see me. But I was on a mission to find out as much about Brian as I could. She was the only person who might know something about him I didn’t.
I walked into Amber’s room. The walls were still pink, but there were so many posters I’m not sure I would have noticed had I not visited her room a hundred times before. Amber sat on her bed with her legs folded over one another. She lazily tossed her phone from one hand to the next.
“Hey,” I said. A chair by the door was filled with clothes. I made a neat stack of them on the floor and sat down.
“Why are you here?”
“We’ve not hung out in forever.” I wanted to be polite. I could have been nicer to her when she and Brian started dating. “How are you?”
“Fine and dandy,” she said, leaning against the wall and kicking her feet onto the bed. “Why are you here?”
“Have you talked to Brian lately?” I asked. Clearly she was as desperate to get to the point as I was.
Amber scoffed. “Not since he left. I told you I didn’t want to talk to him ever again. To either of you, really.”
I looked down. I didn’t know why she was averse to Brian, even more clueless about why she was upset with me. “I wanted to ask you about the day he left,” I said. “When you came by the house, you seemed upset.”
“I was upset,” she said. There was an urgency in her tone. “I’m still upset.”
“You said you wanted to tell him something. What was it?”
“It doesn’t matter now.” Her shoulders wilted, and she stared at the phone in her hands.
“It seemed important.”
“Yeah, well. The world’s kept spinning, hasn’t it? I’m just ready to move on.”
“Move on from what?”
She dropped the phone and crossed her arms. “Look, the only reason you’re in here is because my mom insisted. I don’t want to talk with you.”
“I’m here because I’m worried.” I said. “About people.”
“Worried about Brian and people?”
“Yes.” Saying it out loud startled me. Perhaps I should have said it sooner. But now there was a trail of clues and I was counting on Amber to help me piece them together.
“What’s going on?” Her penchant for drama temporarily reappeared.
“I don’t know exactly,” I said, looking down. “But I know something upset you that day. Something bigger than Brian going away to school. You two were broken up by then, but I’m not even sure why.”
“Because I’m a crazy stalker,” she said, twirling her finger around her temple. “At least that’s what Brian tells everyone.”
“What’s your take?”
“I was more enthusiastic in the beginning than I needed to be.” She looked away. “But I wanted out of that relationship. Not enough to break up with him myself, but I didn’t like where things were heading.”
“When did it go bad?”
“He told me you saw us after the funeral.”
“I did.” I winced. It was embarrassing, witnessing something so disturbing between my brother and my best friend.
“Well that was the first time we did it that way.”
“Had sex?”
“No.” She sounded harsh, then restarted with a calmer tone. “We’d had sex before. Normal sex. After the funeral, that’s when he got… rougher.”
“Obviously I wish I hadn’t caught you guys that night. It’s just weird,” I said. “He looked like he was hurting you.”
“He was. I thought he was just upset.” She looked at me to make sure she wasn’t offending me, then looked at her black nails. “But from then on, each time got rougher.”
“Did you tell him he was hurting you? Tell him to stop?”
“Sometimes,” she said. “I think he liked that it was hurting me.”
“Amber! Are you telling me Brian raped you?”
“No! It’s not like I wasn’t willing. He was my boyfriend. I loved him, or whatever. But I didn’t like how rough it got sometimes.”
“If you told him to stop, and he didn’t, that’s rape.”
“I try not to think about it like that,” she says, her voice shaky. “I try not to think about it at all.”
“So that’s why you broke up?” I asked. “Because
