If I Die

world that I won’t be here after tomorrow. So I don’t have any choice except to go on living for the next twenty-four hours, trying to distract myself from how mind-bendingly final the whole thing seems by bringing down our demon teacher.” And by spending time with a living dead boy whose interest in me I’d discovered much too late to properly explore.

And by trying to explain to Nash why I’d kissed his brother, then asking him for forgiveness he had no reason to give either of us.

“I know. I’m sorry.” Emma sniffled and pulled a tissue from the minipack in her purse. “It just feels like you’re leaving me. Senior year’s going to suck with no best friend.”

“Yeah, sorry about that.” But at least she’d have a senior year….

“I wish there was something…” Em began, but then the late bell cut her off, and Mr. Beck closed the classroom door.

Math sucked even more than usual that day, mostly because every single minute counted down by the clock over the door felt like a minute of my life wasted. And I didn’t have that many minutes left to spare.

I watched Mr. Beck as he went over the homework I hadn’t done, then called people up to the board to help him demonstrate the day’s lesson. There was nothing inappropriate about him in class, and I had to keep glancing at Danica’s empty chair to assure myself that I hadn’t imagined the whole thing.

During the rush for the door after the bell rang, I caught Mr. Beck watching me and Emma—the very first overtly predatory look I’d seen from him—so I pretended to search through my backpack for something until we could reasonably be last in line for the exit. Then I threaded my arm through Em’s and glanced over my shoulder, shooting Mr. Beck my best vixen smile, trying not to show the nausea churning in my stomach.

Emma spun to face him from the doorway and held up eight fingers, silently mouthing “eight o’clock.” He nodded, anticipation firing in his gaze like sparks from a bonfire, and she tugged me into the hallway.

Where I almost ran smack into Nash and Sabine.

“Can I talk to you?” Nash asked, before I’d recovered from the near-collision, and that’s when I realized he’d come looking for me. Neither he nor Sabine had any other reason to be in the math hall between first and second period.

“Yeah.” We both had class in four minutes, but school had never mattered less. This might be my only chance to explain what had happened and why. To see for myself how he was handling the breakup. To ask him to forgive Tod, even if he couldn’t forgive me—it was killing me that I’d come between brothers, and I wanted to clean up at least that part of the mess we’d made before I lost the chance.

“I’ll see you later, Em,” I said, and I couldn’t help noting the fury on Sabine’s face as she and Emma watched us walk off together toward the parking lot. But there was something more there, beneath her anger. She was… worried. About what? That I’d try to take him back?

Nash took an immediate left when the glass doors closed behind us and wound up leaning against the wall, just out of sight from the hallway. For nearly a minute, we both stared at the ground, and I assumed that, like me, he wasn’t sure how to start this conversation. So I jumped in.

“I’m so sorry about yesterday,” I said, through the lump that had formed in my throat. “I didn’t mean for that to happen. Any of it.” Though my lame apology couldn’t possibly make things okay between us, any more than his apology was able to fix things when he’d messed up.

“I was kind of hoping you’d say that.” Nash leaned with one shoulder against the bricks, facing me from a foot away, and I couldn’t quite interpret the intense swirl of greens and browns in his irises. “I don’t want to fight, Kaylee. Especially now. I don’t want you to die mad at me, or thinking that I’m mad at you. So if you say it meant nothing, I’ll believe you. It’s Tod I’m pissed at anyway, not you.”

The second period bell rang, and my head rang with it, and it actually took me the length of that clanging to figure out what he was really saying. And when it finally sank in that he wanted to get back together, my guilt was almost too thick to breathe through.

“Nash, I…” I glanced at the ground, at a complete loss for words. He didn’t know Tod and I had moved beyond that first kiss, and he’d obviously come to school assuming that if he forgave me, we could pick up right where we’d left off. “Things aren’t the same anymore.”

“I know,” he said, before I could decide how to continue. “Everything must feel so weird for you now, knowing it’s all going to end. I don’t even want to think about you being gone. I just want to spend this last day with you, and we can forget about what happened yesterday. That’s not important now. What’s important is salvaging what time we have left together.”

Crap. I’d never felt more guilty in my life, and it was worse knowing that he wasn’t mad at me when he had every right to be, and if I weren’t about to die, we both knew he would be.

“Nash, I really appreciate that—” Lame. “—and I know you’re just trying to make sure that my last day on earth doesn’t suck.” True. “But we can’t get back together just because I’m going to die tomorrow. That’s not a real reason.”

“We shouldn’t have broken up in the first place,” he insisted, and I realized he was only hearing what he wanted to hear. Competing vines of unease and guilt wound slowly up my spine, tightening as he continued. “When I messed up, you forgave me. Now I’m forgiving you. You were scared and confused—who wouldn’t be in your position—and he was there, like he’s always there.” Nash shrugged. “I’m still gonna kick his ass the next time he has the balls to face me, but today’s about us. You and me. So let’s get out of here and have some fun. This may be our last chance.”

He reached for my hand, but I pulled away before he could touch me, and an irritated twist of green shot through his irises, piercing stubborn composure to reveal something stronger and darker than mere determination.

Uh-oh.

“Nash, I need you to understand something,” I said. “Tod was the catalyst for our breakup, but he wasn’t the reason. He’s not the source of our problems. Nothing’s been the same between us since the winter carnival.” Since the thing we didn’t talk about. It was always there between us, making him too cautious and putting me on edge. “You know that.”

“That’s not true.” He shook his head firmly, stubbornly. “We moved on. We were fine. It was working.”

“No it wasn’t. Not like it used to.” I was always afraid he’d slip up, and it would happen again—even Sabine had told him that. Hell, he had trouble trusting himself half the time. “I’ve tried to put it behind me. I tried so hard, and I didn’t realize it wasn’t really working until I felt something that did work.”

“What are you saying?” He looked like I’d just smacked him in the head with a two-by-four—like he didn’t know whether to cry or strike back.

Why was there no greeting card for letting a guy down easy the day before you’re scheduled to tumble into the dark hereafter? “I’m sorry for what I did. I’m sorry for how this happened. And I’m so, so sorry that I didn’t see the problem sooner. I didn’t want to see it, because I wanted us to work.” My vision blurred with tears and I had to swallow the lump forming in my throat. I didn’t want to say what needed to be said, but it wasn’t fair to either of us to leave this hanging. “But we don’t work. Not as a couple. Not anymore.”

Nash shook his head, frowning, more frustrated than surprised now. “Yes we do.”

“Nash, you need someone with more than I have to give you. More than I’d have, even if I were going to live.” Someone who didn’t have to talk herself into trusting him. “You need someone who understands the way you think and sees into your soul.”

“That’s you.”

“No, it’s not. I don’t understand what’s going on in there most of the time.” I glanced at his chest, where his heart beat beneath his shirt, then back up to his face. “I don’t know what you want from life. I don’t know where you want to go to college. I don’t know where your father’s buried. I don’t even know how you feel about losing Scott and Doug. You don’t tell me any of that.”

“Because I don’t want to scare you!”

“That’s my point. You need someone you aren’t worried about scaring.”

“He’s not getting it,” Sabine said, and I whirled around to find her walking toward us, from the direction of the quad, her sneakers silent on the spring grass. How long had she been there? “Maybe because you’re leaving out one important detail.” She stepped onto the sidewalk and aimed an angry, challenging look my way. “Why don’t you tell him what this is really about?”