The Last Time We Say Goodbye (16 page)

FRIDAY. I'M ALREADY ON EDGE
when I get to school. I haven't burned the letter or shredded it or thrown it away yet, all things I've been tempted to do so I don't have to get involved in this Ashley/Ty/Grayson affair. I have it with me, still stuck in the pages of my notebook. I can't leave it home on the off chance that someone else—insert: Mom—will find it. I can't let anybody else find it. In that way, it belongs to me.

I'm hungry. I walk to the vending machine in the corner and fish out a crinkled dollar. I missed breakfast (i.e., Mom didn't get up to make it, and I didn't have the energy to pour myself a bowl of cereal). I put the dollar in. The machine spits it out. I put it in. It spits it out.

It's worse than the Lemon. “Come on,” I plead. “I require sustenance.”

Not that there's anything good in the machine to eat. Dried
fruit. Granola bars. Whole-grain pretzels. Organic gluten-free seaweed chips. This is Nebraska, for crying out loud, land of meat, potatoes, corn, corn, and corn as the five basic food groups.

I'm suddenly struck by a memory of Ty standing in this exact spot, banging on this exact machine until a bag of dried apricots dropped into the slot. He picked it up. Scowled.

“I don't care what the First Lady says,” he complained, loudly enough that the people around us started nodding in agreement. “This is not a Pop-Tart. I need my junk food, man. How's a growing boy to survive on all this healthy stuff? Am I right?”

He's right.

My throat closes. I miss him I miss him I miss him. The hole in my chest explodes. I can't breathe I can't breathe. There are people waiting for the machine behind me, so I don't have time to let the hole pass on its own. I stumble to the side and force my legs to move away, down the hall to the restroom, where I almost run to the last stall and sit down on the lid of the toilet and bend my head over my knees and gasp and gasp and think maybe this drug thing Dave suggested isn't a bad idea after all.

I'm not doing well, here. Clearly.

When the hole fills in again, my body feels achy, like I'm coming down with something. I flush the toilet as if I was in there for a good reason. I go out, take my glasses off, and splash some water on my face. The girls on either side of me don't say anything; they just return to meticulously washing their hands.

I lean forward to take a long look at myself in the mirror. There are dark circles under my eyes, and my lips are chapped and
colorless. I swipe at a wet tendril of hair that's clinging to my forehead, but then it just sticks to a different spot. The whites of my eyes look like road maps, veiny and red-rimmed and swollen, like I've been crying, even though I haven't been crying.

I look wrecked.

This whole thing has warped me, I think. I'm a board left out in the rain, and it's impossible to go back to being straight and undamaged ever again. This is who I am now.

The girl whose brother died.

Plus there's the fun fact that I am losing my mind. I'm here at school freaking out about a stupid letter that my dead brother wrote for his ex—why exactly?

Because some part of me thinks that Ty's still around. Because I think maybe that drawer being open that night and that letter being in that drawer means that he wants me to deliver it. Because, no matter how much I try to be rational, some part of me wants to believe that I am seeing his freaking ghost.

This, for some reason, makes me laugh. The sound is sharp and bounces off the tight white-tiled walls of the bathroom.

Hilarious.

One of the girls next to me gets the heck out of there—she just bolts for the door. But the other girl waits for me to pull myself together. She hands me a paper towel to dry my face. And when I put my glasses back on, I realize it's Ashley Davenport.

Awesome.

“Hi,” she says. “I saw you come in here, and I wanted to talk to you, so . . .”

So she witnessed my little breakdown. Even more awesome.

She's wearing a bright pink cardigan over a white sequined tank top, silvery lip gloss gleaming off her Cupid's-bow lips, and a gold heart-shaped necklace that's resting in the hollow of her throat. She's beautiful. What sticks out to me most about her is that she looks . . .
healthy
is the word that comes to mind. Not just in her athletic legs and shiny red hair and bright eyes and dewy porcelain skin. It's more than that. She has all the signs of a person who life has left almost completely undamaged. I bet her parents are still together and still hold hands and still kiss. I bet she volunteers for some kind of charity. I bet the most tears she's ever shed in her whole life were over her childhood dog when it died of old age.

She's not an a-hole, I think. She's a nice girl.

But that doesn't change how I feel.

“There's nothing I want to talk about,” I say. “Not with you.”

She puts her hand on my arm. Gently, but insistently. “Wait. I know you saw me and Grayson in the cafeteria yesterday. You looked upset, so I thought, you might have thought . . .”

“I might have thought what?” I challenge. “That you cheated on my brother?”

Her eyes widen. “But I didn't cheat on Ty. I would never. He broke up with me, not the other way around. I would never have cheated on Ty. I—”

“But what about the fight? When Ty punched Grayson? Why would he do that?”

She bows her head. “I was . . . sad after Ty broke it off. He didn't even tell me why. He just came up to me that morning and
said things weren't working out between us. He said he was sorry, and then he walked off. I was shocked. I thought we were—I cried. I was upset. People thought he was being a jerk. And the next day Grayson said something rude to Ty about it, and . . .”

“Ty hit him,” I fill in.

She squeezes my arm. “I wasn't into Grayson back then. We just started dating like a week ago. I swear.”

I don't know what to say.

Her lip starts trembling. A tear shines on the edge of her eye.

I wish I could cry so easily.

“Your brother was an amazing guy,” she continues. “Everybody liked him. They were only mad at him because of me, but they would have gotten over it. . . . I don't know why he would . . .” She pauses, of course she does, but then she looks at me like I'm going to tell her now, why Ty did it, why someone like my brother, who everybody liked, who was cute and funny and popular, thought his existence was so terrible that he chose to end it.

Because I'm his sister. I should know the reasons why.

“I should have realized that he was . . . I didn't know . . .” She lets go of my arm and presses her lips together, like she's about to start really crying. “I'm sorry. I'm really sorry, Lex.”

“I have to go.” I back away from Ashley, then push out of the bathroom and into the noisy, crowded hall. I walk on autopilot back to my locker. I lean against it, watching everybody pass by, ready to head toward class, ready to start their days.

I lean my head back until it touches the cool metal of the locker, and close my eyes.

She didn't dump him. She didn't cheat on him.

It's not her fault.

She doesn't even know why he broke up with her. Which makes Ty the a-hole in this scenario.

My eyes snap open. I unzip my backpack, pull out my five-subject notebook, and retrieve the letter. I don't give myself any time to think about what I'm doing. I don't make a plan.

I just head down to room 121B.

I wait outside the door for the students to trickle in.

“Hey, Lex,” Damian says, slinking up to me. He gives his head a little shake to get his hair out of his eyes. Smiles. Fidgets. “Fancy meeting you here.”

“Yeah.”

“Did you finish
Heart of Darkness
?”

I nod distractedly. “Oh, the horror.”

He laughs. “The horror. So what are you doing here? Not that I'm complaining. But aren't you a little old for this class?”

“An errand,” I say. “I'm running an errand. Hey, uh, it's good to see you, Damian, but you should probably . . .” I gesture toward the classroom. “I don't want to be responsible for you getting marked tardy.”

“It's good to see you, too,” he says, smiling his painful-looking smile again, and then he goes to take his seat.

Ashley shows up just as the bell rings. This time she doesn't bowl me over when she appears from around the corner. She slows
down when she sees me, suddenly unsure of herself. Then she stops.

“Hi,” she says.

“Hi,” I say back. “Sorry about before. Sometimes I get overwhelmed by . . . everything.”

She bites her lip. For some reason she looks frightened. Maybe she can sense what's coming.

“I was wrong, earlier,” I say quickly, and before I can lose my nerve, I pull the letter from the inside pocket of my coat and hold it out. It trembles between us. “This is for you. From Ty.”

If it's possible for her face to get any whiter, it does. Even her lips drain of color. She doesn't reach for the letter.

“Take it,” I say, thrusting it at her. “He wants—he wanted you to have it.”

She takes it.

I feel lighter the second the envelope leaves my hand.

Ashley stares down at it, her eyes tracing Ty's sloppy letters spelling her name.

“I didn't read it,” I feel compelled to tell her. “I don't know what it says, but it's for you.” I can't think of what else to say, and we're both late to class, so I whisper, “I'm sorry,” although I don't know what I'm apologizing for, for Ty or for me, and then I walk away.

I hope it's the right thing. It feels like the right thing. Probably. Maybe.

But at least it's all over with now. It's done.

My parents used to tell this story, over and over, year after year, about the first time I ever saw Ty.

According to family legend, I was playing at the park by my house when it happened. I was on the swings being pushed by my grandmother, who'd been looking after me while my mother was at the hospital. When my parents came into view, walking slowly across the grass toward us, Grandma lifted me out of the bucket swing, set me on the ground, gave me a little push, and said, “Go. Meet your brother.”

I ran to my parents.

They'd prepped me about this, of course, with months of talking about a new baby brother and what a good big sister I'd be, feeling Mom's distended belly, singing to it, reading books about how we have to be quiet when the baby's sleeping and we have to sit down to hold the baby and never poke the baby in the eye. They'd shown me the new baby's freshly painted room and moved me into a “big girl bed” so he
could have my crib. They'd even bought me a T-shirt that had the words
BIG SISTER
in silvery sparkly letters across the chest. I was wearing it, that day. Or so they tell me.

It was a lot of hype. Too much hype, probably.

When I reached them, my dad knelt and showed me the blue-wrapped bundle in his arms: a tiny disgruntled person with a round, purplish face, eyelids that were so swollen it was hard to tell what color the eyes were, and a head that bore only a small thin tuft of brown hair.

He wasn't the best-looking baby, my brother.

I looked at him.

He looked at me.

Then he went cross-eyed.

“He's not cute” is what I famously said, clearly disappointed. “I thought he was going to be cute.”

Apparently I've always had a problem with calling it like I see it.

But then I laid my hand on the top of the baby's nearly hairless head. “Hello, brother,” I said, by way of introduction.

“Tyler,” Mom provided. “His name is Tyler.”

“Ty,” I confirmed. “Can I hold him?”

I sat down cross-legged right there in the grass, and Dad laid Ty carefully in my lap. I looked up at Mom and smiled. “He's mine,” I announced. “My baby. Mine.”

Yep, that's how the story goes. 2 minutes into meeting my baby brother, I claimed him as my own personal property. He may not have been cute, but he was my brother. Mine.

I realize that almost everybody has a story like this. It's not unique. I read somewhere that approximately 80% of Americans have at least
one brother or sister. There's a predictable formula to these stories: Older sibling meets younger. Older sibling says something cute (or rude, or funny, but always cute) and everyone laughs, and the older sibling eventually gets used to the idea that he/she isn't the center of the world anymore. There's a reason we tell these stories again and again—because they define us.

The first time I was a sister.

The first time we were all together as a family.

Now I try to remember that day as more than a story I've heard. I try to call up the wind on my face as I ran across the field. My heart thumping. My dad smiling as he crouched down. The smooth heat of Ty's head under my fingers. The smell of baby powder and garden roses. The grass prickly against my knees.

But I don't know if any of that is real, or just a bunch of happy details I imagine to fill in the blanks of my parents' fairy tale, which they've told so many times it's started to feel like memory. I was 2 years old when Ty was born.

But I do remember this:

He cried. I think he cried every night, really, but I remember this one particular night. I woke to the sound of him crying, a thin wail that filled the house. I got out of bed and padded in stocking feet into his room, then boosted myself over the railings of the crib and lay down beside him.

He stopped crying to look at me.

I pulled his blanket back over him. He'd kicked it off. He was cold.

“Don't worry,” I said. “I'll take care of you.”

We stayed that way for I don't know how long, looking at each other.

Then Dad was there, smiling down at both of us, his hand cupping the back of my head, and he said, “Well, look at you two, all quiet and cozy. You calmed him right down. Well done, Peanut. Well done.”

And I remember being proud. I had made things right when they were wrong.