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Don’t you remember what they did to me at my tenth birthday party? Or how about the time in fourth grade when you, Anne Alice, and Beth formed a secret club when I was out with chicken pox?”
“Nope.” I hadn’t remembered, anyway, until she said it. And then I did. I remembered Beth and Anne Alice showing up in matching sweaters at Caro’s birthday party and talking about what a great sleepover they’d had while Caro unwrapped her gifts.
I remembered that stupid club and how excited I was to be in it. I totally ignored all the notes Caro sent when she got back asking for a hint about the club name and begging me to talk to Beth and Anne Alice for her.
Instead, I laughed with them about how badly she wanted to get in.
“Of course you don’t remember. I mean, why should you care that the last conversation I had with a real friend was about Chester, and how he was really sick and I was afraid he was going to die? Your coat’s over on that chair, by the way, and the bus stop is two blocks over.”
I stopped walking across the room. “What do you want me to say, Caro? I’m sorry I wasn’t more help when we discussed your sick dog. I was eleven. I didn’t have a degree in grief counseling.”
124
“God, you are so stupid. It’s not what you said, Amy.
It’s the fact that the last time I talked to someone I could really call a friend was when I was eleven years old.”
“Oh.”
Caro rolled her eyes at me and got up, grabbed my jacket, and shoved it at me. “Here.”
“Look, I’m—I just—” I looked at Caro, who was staring back at me, her mouth a thin angry line. “You never said anything to me.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. I guess after you and Julia told me off I should have come up to you and said, ‘Hey, Amy, I totally miss hanging out with you.’ Please. You and Julia would have made me cry again and loved it.”
“We wouldn’t have . . .” I trailed off. We totally would have. “You just—you always seemed happy. You still do, mostly.”
Caro twirled a piece of hair around one finger and smiled a huge, happy smile. Even her eyes shone bright. Her voice, however, was a different story. It was flat. Drained.
“I’ve had a lot of practice. See you around, Amy.”
I was glad to get out of there—big-time glad—but as I walked to the bus stop I kept thinking about what she’d said. The last time she felt like she’d really talked to someone was when she talked to me about Chester?
The last real friend she thought she had was me?
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Was that why she’d come after me this morning?
Did she—was today about her trying to be friends with me?
I laughed out loud then because come on, really. And then I tried to picture Caro saying anything she’d said to me to Beth. I couldn’t do it. The most I’d ever heard her say to Beth was, “You look totally amazing!” or “You are so right!”
I walked back to Caro’s house. Her eyes were red when she opened the door. “Oh,” she said, and then,
“What?”
“So what happened?”
“What?”
“To Chester.”
“He died.”
“Oh. I’m sorry. He was a nice dog.” God, I sounded like such an idiot. An idiot who should just leave and go back to the bus stop already.
“He was a great dog,” Caro said when I was halfway down her front steps. “Jane took a picture of him the night before he died. She saved it forever, and last year, she did this mosaic thing with it, like a hundred tiny pictures made into one big picture, and won fi rst place in a photography show.”
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I turned around. “Jane’s a photographer? Jane?”
Caro’s sister was never able to take pictures. When Caro and I were eight, we went to the Millertown Festival with her family and Jane was allowed to take all the pictures. Every single one of them came out blurry, or were of things like the edge of someone’s knee or the top of someone’s head and a whole lot of clouds.
“I know.” Caro laughed. “You should have seen Dad when she told him she was changing her major from busi-ness to visual arts. But she’s pretty good. She took an amazing picture of Mom over the summer. You want to see it?”
So I went back inside and saw the photo—it was actually pretty good—and Caro and I ended up talking. Not about school or Beth, but other stuff. I found out her mom had a blocked blood vessel in her brain last spring, and had to have emergency surgery.
In the photo Jane took, Caro’s mom was outside, sitting in the sun and smiling at the camera, the top of her head totally wrapped in bandages. Caro told me every time her mom gets a headache she worries something bad will happen.
“Stupid, right?” she said.
“No,” I said, and then I ended up telling her about Pinewood.
127
I don’t know why I did. I just felt like it, I guess. I didn’t even feel weird. Well, maybe a little. But she wasn’t—
she didn’t react like I thought she would. She didn’t say anything stupid, and she didn’t try to be all positive or sympathetic or anything. She just said, “What was it like?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Like how those places are, I guess. Lots of talking and stuff. Oh, and every day I had to ‘participate in active movement.’”
“Like dancing?”
“No, it was just a fancy name for gym class,” I said, and she smiled.
“So gym and talking.”
“And bad food,” I said. “I mean, I like salads and stuff, but you try sixty days with no junk food. It’s not normal.”
“No junk food at all?”
“None.”
“Ugh,” she said, and went into the kitchen, came back with a box of those super expensive chocolate-covered ice cream bars. “I was saving these for when I study for the next physics test, but you totally need one.”
I had one and wow, did I forget how great ice cream is. I never meant to eat it again, because it was something Julia 128
and I had done together, but it just looked so good. And Caro isn’t—she’s not like I remembered. She’s human, for one thing. She’s also kind of fun. I didn’t know anyone besides Julia could be fun.
129
116 days
J,
Forget what I said before . . . you know, about what happened. Promise you’ll forget it, okay? Because I’m—
things have been weird lately. Like today, for instance.
Today, I ended up spending the day with Corn Syrup (don’t be mad, okay?) and missed school.
I also got home late. (You remember how crappy the crosstown bus is.) I got home so late, in fact, that Mom and Dad actually noticed. I didn’t even get a chance to open the front door because they marched right out as soon as I came up to the house.
It was like something out of a television show, the way they started firing questions at me. “Are you okay?” “Why did you miss school?” “Have you been drinking?”
“Yes.” “I don’t know.” “No.”
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“Where were you?” “What were you thinking?”
“Nowhere special. And I just . . . I don’t know.”
“Nowhere special? And you don’t know what you were thinking when you skipped school? Nothing comes to mind at all?” That was Dad, his voice rising with every word.
“Amy, these aren’t answers.” That was Mom. She was holding Dad’s hand. I could see their fingers laced white tight against each other.
I didn’t want to talk about Corn Syrup. My parents would think it meant Caro and I were going to be friends, and I wasn’t up for explaining how high school really worked. You know how it is . . . but then you aren’t here.
“Look,” I told them. “I just wandered around. I needed to think.”