She followed me into the study when I went in there to do my homework and started talking. She said she was sorry she’d pushed me to go to the mall, that if she’d hurt me by talking about getting a haircut she didn’t mean it.
You should have heard her, J. I always wanted her to sound the way she did then. I wanted that pleading note in her voice. I always wanted her and Dad to feel the way I did around them. I wanted them to realize that you can be in a room with someone and yet not really be there to them.
And yeah, it felt okay. But it didn’t feel great. I sat there, watching her talk and trying so hard, and I—I felt sorry for her. For Dad. Things had changed so much for them so fast, and here she was stuck at home with me in the middle of the afternoon. She wasn’t working on a paper or going over stuff for a class or talking to Dad or doing the things that used to make her glow.
She and Dad might not have noticed me before, but hell, at least they were happy.
“I’m sorry,” I told her. “I’m—this really sucks.”
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“Amy,” she said, her face crumpling. “Please don’t say that. Your father and I are trying so hard, and if you would just let us—”
“No, I mean, I’m sorry for you. It sucks that you have to do all this. It must be really hard.”
She started to cry. Like, really cry. She just stood there, face in her hands, her whole body shaking.
“This is never what I wanted for you,” she said after a while, the words muffl ed by her fi ngers. I wanted to hug her, but I was afraid to. What do I know about comfort, about making things better? I only know how to make them worse.
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T W E N T Y - T W O
158 DAYS, and I saw Laurie this afternoon.
For once, I’d actually been looking forward to seeing her. I figured if anyone would be willing to point out how horrible I am for what I’ve been thinking about J, it’s her.
“I’m mad at Julia,” I said as soon as I walked in, and waited for the pen clicking to start.
When it didn’t, I sat down and added, “I’m mad at her for dying. I’m mad at her for listening to me that night.
I . . . sometimes I hate her.”
Laurie nodded. That was it. She nodded.
I stared at her. She stared back at me.
“Did you hear me?” I said. “My best friend died because of me, and sometimes I hate her.”
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“Why do you hate her? For dying? Or because she listened to you?”
“Both!” I said, almost shouting. “I made sure she saw her boyfriend cheating on her. Made sure she saw it, and didn’t just hear about it. Then I told her we should go because she . . . she didn’t tell him to go to hell like I thought she finally would. She didn’t . . . she was so sad, and I did that. I broke her heart.”
“Amy—”
“There’s more,” I said. “You know it. I know it. I told her to get in the car. I told her to drive. She did all that, she listened to me, and I hate her for that.
She died and I hate her for that too. What’s wrong with me?”
Laurie sighed. “Did Julia always do what people told her to?”
“You didn’t listen to anything I said about her at all, did you? She always did her own thing. But that—” I broke off and glared at Laurie, because I knew what she was doing and I was sick of it, sick of her. “I know what you’re going to say, I know what you’re thinking, but it doesn’t—it doesn’t mean what you think it does. Julia didn’t choose to die.” My voice was shaking. My whole body was shaking.
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“No, she didn’t. But she chose to get into her car and drive, just like you chose to drink.”
“That’s it?” I said, and I was yelling now, full of fury and something else, something I didn’t want to think about. “Just like that, just that simple, you say she chose to get into the car and I’m supposed to . . . what? Forget what I did? Say ‘I see it now, I do, and yay! Laurie’s made everything’s okay!’ and move on?”
“If you can see your choices, why can’t you see hers?”
“Because it’s not that simple. Because you can’t—you can’t make everything all right,” I said, and stood up. I walked out of her offi ce, and I slammed the door behind me so hard it shook. I wished it would crack in half. I wished Laurie’s office would crumble around her.
To my surprise, she came right out after me.
“No one ever said what happened was simple,” she said, her voice firm. She motioned for me to come back inside.
“Why?” I said. “So you can tell me more about choices?”
“Because you’re right,” she said. “I can’t make everything okay for you.”
I hadn’t expected that, so I went back in and sat down.
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She followed me, and as soon as she was in her chair, she picked up her pen. I knew it was coming at some point, but now? I glared at her and started to stand up again, but then stopped, frozen. Frozen because I knew what I’d felt right before I left. I was angry, so angry, but I also wanted—I wanted to believe her too. But like she said, she couldn’t make everything okay.
“You know what?” I said, staring at that stupid pen and hating myself for wanting to believe her. For wanting to think I didn’t kill Julia. “Here’s something new for you. I had sex with someone. Why don’t you tell me how I should feel about that?”
Laurie just looked at me.
“Go on,” I said, my voice rising again, and she said,
“How do you want to feel about it?”
“I don’t feel anything,” I said, but my voice cracked a little. “It was just—it was the first time I did it when I wasn’t drunk and it was . . . it was different. That’s all.”
Laurie uncrossed and recrossed her legs. “Different how?”
“I don’t know. Just different.”
“I see.” Laurie clicked her pen, finally. And when she did, when I heard that click, something clicked in me, 248
and I got why she did it. Why I’d heard all that pen clicking time after time after time.
Laurie clicks her pen when she thinks I’m lying to her.
When she thinks I’m lying to myself.
“It was different—it was different because I liked it,” I said after a moment, my voice quiet. Saying what I knew but hadn’t been able to let myself say before. Hadn’t even been able to let myself see before. “I liked being with him. I never cared about being with guys before. But with him it was—it meant something to me, and I . . . I don’t know.”
I waited for her to say something. Anything. I’d told her everything, I’d told her the truth I hadn’t wanted to see.
She just looked at me.
“Aren’t you going to say something?” I fi nally asked.
“What do you want me to say?”
“I don’t know.”
“I can’t make everything okay for you, Amy. You said it yourself. But I can tell you this. What you told me just now isn’t about Julia. It’s about you. And you have to make choices of your own, choices only you can make, so I’m going to ask you something, and I want you to answer honestly. Can you do that?”
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“No.”
For a second, I swear she almost smiled. “Do you want to be happy?”
“Yes. No. I don’t know. What kind of question is that?”
“A simple one,” she said. “Do you want to be happy?”
“I don’t—I don’t think I know how.”
“So you can learn,” she said.
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DURING DINNER TONIGHT, Mom and Dad asked me to watch a movie with them. I took a bite of black bean burrito and chewed for as long as I could, hoping they’d ask me something else, or at least stop looking at me. I was still processing the Laurie thing from yesterday, was still raw from the things she said, the things I’d felt, and wasn’t ready to do anything else, much less play happy family.