Even when Miranda pounded her fist against the wall, slammed through the door, and left Harper alone.
Here is what Miranda remembered as she walked down the driveway to her car, trying to keep her face turned away from Adam’s house, and trying not to cry:
The sneer on Harper’s face and the ice in her eyes.
The sound of Harper laughing at her pain.
And, most of all, Harper’s words.
“Maybe if you weren’t so goddamn annoying and in my face all! The! Time!”
“Stop pretending you can understand anything about
me!
“I don’t need your pity and I don’t need you!”
And here is what Harper remembered as she sat on the edge of her bed and let the numbness seep back in:
Miranda’s eyes blinking back tears.
Miranda’s voice shaking as she spit out everything she’d been holding back.
Miranda’s attack, the words they both knew were true.
“Why is everything always about you?”
“Of course I felt sorry for you-why else would I pretend you weren’t such a bitch?”
“I’ve been your best friend for ten fucking years-you barely even knew her!”
Mostly, both girls remembered the end.
“You want to be miserable? You want to be totally self-destructive and pathetic and blow off anyone who tries to help?” Miranda asked, disgusted. “Don’t let me stop you.”
Harper opened her bedroom door and waved her hand like an usher. “Don’t let me stop you from leaving.”
And with that, they were both down for the count.
Reed was on his back under the truck, monkeying with the exhaust system, when she came into the garage. He could only see her feet and ankles: thin, black pumps with a low heel; pale, delicate ankles growing from them, narrow enough that he could probably encircle each with one hand. He’d seen those feet before.
“Hello? Is anybody here? Hello?”
For a moment, Reed considered hiding under the truck until she gave up and went away. And he might have, if his wrench hadn’t slipped out of his fingers and clattered to the floor. After that, he had no choice.
He wheeled himself out from under the truck and sat up, wiping his greasy hands against his jeans. Beth was still wearing the same outfit she’d worn the night before. It had looked perfect at the party; here, surrounded by chains and toolboxes and busted carburetors, it didn’t fit.
“What’s up?” he asked, not really wanting to know.
Her face was flushed and tearstained, and her hands kept flickering toward her head. She would twirl a strand of hair, tuck it behind her ears, put her arm down, and then, a moment later, start twirling again, as if she couldn’t help herself. “I didn’t know where else to go,” she said simply. “I thought…”
She looked so lost and fragile, he just wanted to go to her and hug her. He wanted to fix her problem, whatever it was.
But why? he asked himself. What’s she to you?
“Can we, uh, go somewhere?” Beth asked, her lip trembling.
Reed shook his head. “I got a lot of stuff to do here,” he said. “You know.”
“Maybe I could just hang out for a while?” she asked, almost pleading. “I really just need-”
“No.” It would be too easy to be happy if she were there. And he shouldn’t be happy, not with someone else. “I told you, I’ve got stuff to do. You’d be in the way.”
“Oh.” She looked like he’d punched her. “Okay.” She began backing out of the garage, her eyes whipping back and forth, searching fruitlessly for something to focus on. “See you around, I guess.”
He shrugged. “Maybe. Whatever.”
Then she was gone. He felt like an asshole. And he hurt.
He hadn’t lit up since the night before, and now, as the pain crept back into his brain, seemed like as good a time as any. He grabbed his stash out of the glove compartment and wandered outside, sitting on a small ledge behind the garage. He’d have plenty of privacy.
It was a familiar, soothing routine, parsing it out, rolling it up, sealing the blunt with a swift and smooth flick of the tongue.
A few deep breaths and he’d be able to float away, beyond all the pain and all the shit. It would stop hurting.
Reed brought the joint to his lips-and stopped.
He still missed Kaia when he was high. It was a dull, faint throbbing, like a bruise that’s turned invisible but has yet to fully heal. Not like now, when the pain was sharp and clear.
The pain was the only thing that was clear, and it burned everything else away. Maybe instead of putting the fire out, this time he should let it burn. He hadn’t cried when Kaia died, or yelled or pounded his fist into a glass window, as he’d wanted. He had just smoked up, and that made it all go away.
Just as he’d made Beth go away.
Reed didn’t know why he couldn’t let her get close.
He didn’t know why he couldn’t forget the touch of Kaia’s fingers on his neck-but could no longer picture her face.
He didn’t know if there was some time limit on what he felt, if one day he’d wake up and things would be right again-and he didn’t know what he was supposed to do if that never happened.
He stuffed the joint into one pocket, and the plastic bag into another. He was tired of being confused. Maybe, just for a while, he’d stay clear. It was worth a try. And if it was too much, relief was no more than a few lungfuls away.
In the back of Miranda’s closet, behind the stash of liquor, cigarettes, old issues of Cosmo, and a single pack of condoms that she enjoyed owning but had no expectation of using anytime soon, there was a stack of cardboard boxes. There were seven of them, each labeled in black permanent marker; one for each year, stretching back to sixth grade, and one extra for everything that had come before.
Every year, Miranda set aside an empty desk drawer and filled it with all the detritus of life that most normal people threw out. When the year ended, she dumped the contents into a box and started her collection over again. There were the obvious-ticket stubs, photographs, birthday cards-but everyone with the slightest pack rat tendency saved those. Miranda had an eye for the more subtle mementos: take-out menus, empty cigarette boxes, fliers for concerts she’d never attended, notes passed in class, detention slips, matchbooks, napkins, receipts, anything that might someday bring faded memories back to full color. Her mother liked to call her “the connoisseur of crap,” but as Miranda saw it, she was curating the museum of her life.
It was a narrow life, she saw now, sitting on the floor surrounded by half-open boxes and carefully sorted mounds of memories. There was the occasional homemade Valentine’s Day card from her little sister, and an entry pass left over from a long-ago family trip to some amusement park that had gone bankrupt only a few months later. But those were the exception; Harper was the rule.
Item: a torn scrap of lined paper, with the initials HG and SP written in neon, encircled by a light blue heart. (Pink had been out that year.) Harper had slipped Miranda the note while their sixth-grade teacher, Ms. Hernandez, had droned on and on about Lewis and Clark. Miranda knew exactly what it meant. For weeks, Harper had been drooling over Scott Pearson, universally acknowledged to be the cutest boy in the sixth grade, except for Craig Jessup, who didn’t count because he smelled like mildew Everyone knew that Scott had been planning to take Harper behind the school at recess, and kiss her. They’d disappeared after lunch, right on schedule-and now they were back in the classroom, and here was Harpers note. Miranda got the story on the walk home: He’d kissed her. It was wet, and sloppy, and gross, and now he was her boyfriend. Miranda made Harper promise to tell her every detail of everything that happened, so that she, too, could know what having a boyfriend was like. And Harper came through, recounting every moment she spent with Scott for the nine days their relationship lasted. Then Scott moved on to Leslie Giles, a seventh grader with bigger boobs, and Harper pretended her heart was broken, to get sympathy from every girl in school. Only Miranda got to hear the dirty little secret: Scott had bad breath, kissing was boring, and she was glad to be done with the whole stupid thing.