We Were Never Here (16 page)

Zoe, who was on her bed, leaning against the perfect unstickered headboard, jumped. And Tim, who was seated on the floor, his back against the bed, just at her feet, looked toward me slowly, imploringly.

“What the fuck, Liz?” she said.

My hand was still on the glass doorknob. It always fell off, but
no one ever fixed it. They looked so sweet. Like they'd known each other forever. “Oh,” I said.

“What?” Zoe knocked her pencil against her notebook, which sat on her knees.

“Nothing.” I shook my head.

“Do you need something, Liz?” Tim asked.

“Sorry.” I shook my head again. Love is just sitting in your room studying together. You don't even have to be touching. It could be that easy. Who knew.

Who would you love if you could love? I thought, closing the door and heading downstairs. Maybe, for Connor, it was no one. Maybe he just couldn't. It really is sometimes best to cut the bad out. My colon. Just get rid of it. Before it explodes inside me. Perhaps Connor had been right. We were never there. We were not here either. Pretty much, we were nowhere.

If this was a different kind of story, a kind where time could bend and split, where we could hurl ourselves across time, if this story—my story—let me turn time backward, it would be to before I opened Letter Two. It would be to the time when all I feared was that Connor treated a girl who trusted him badly and that he might not love me back or that he might get a letter from me that laid my heart bare and crumple it up and throw it away.

But I couldn't bend time, and Letter Two arrived while my letter was out there in the ether. It's a feeling I remember so well: wanting to reach out into the universe and snatch my words back. Impossible, of course, and here was Connor's letter anyway.

October 12, 2013

Dear Lizzie,

First of all, Lizzie, I miss you. I won't go on about how it is here, how strange and how dark it gets at night. Like the way you said the hospital got. No city, no stars really, just black. I miss Verlaine most then. Poor Verlaine, all alone in my house. My father takes him out, I know he does, but he's not there all day.

I guess that's a whole other story, for another letter. A letter that can just tell you about life here, like the record player in the lounge area donated by some kid's famous music producer father, who believed you needed to hear the scratch of the needle, watch the record turn, and it is a whole other experience. It is true: you really do just listen.

But that's not for this letter.

I haven't told you all of it, because I didn't want you to lose respect for me. Or stop . . . liking me. I want to stay the special guy who, when he walked into your room, made you smile.

But I need to tell you now, and this might be the hardest thing I've ever had to write. The accident was not a hit-and-run. I did not just witness the accident. People did blame me, but that was because I hit the girl. I was the driver. I had my learner's permit,
and I was driving with my friend's older sister, who was seventeen and an underage person to drive with when you only have a permit. Anyway, that isn't really the important thing. The thing is I hit her. I didn't just hit her. I was also stoned. Which is horrible, I know. She just ran out in front of the car and I couldn't stop in time. She just ran out into the street. She died. I hit her. I totally hit her. I lied to you. I killed the little girl in the green dress. It was always me.

So I fell apart. I became someone I wasn't. I treated people like I shouldn't have. Until you. You made me need to be good again.

I am so so so so so sorry I lied to you, Lizzie. I wish that I could take that back too. I know it's not an excuse, but I couldn't bear you knowing this horrible thing about me.

I wanted you to see me as the good person I wanted to be, the person I know I am, inside.

I will do anything for you to forgive me. Anything.

I hope you can forgive me. I hope everyone can.

Yours always,

Connor

What can I say. Stunned, shocked, bowled over, horrified, sad, angry, shaking, betrayed. Did I mention horrified? I was all of these things all at once. It was like my body was just storage, a closet of lost toys, and instead of the tennis rackets and hockey sticks and old karaoke machines and beach balls and pails and shovels and old hats, it was stuffed with every kind of emotion available to humans. Just open it and everything would tumble out. And go where? Where do those old discarded things
go
?

What I didn't feel then was sorry for Connor. When I got that letter, I just shook and crawled up into a ball and cried for all of us: the girl, for me, and also every other person I'd ever known. Connor too, I guess, even though I almost hated him. I felt this suffering—everyone's suffering—move through me. It was awful. I even felt it for the flowers dying in my father's garden. I thought I was going insane, because there I was thinking plants had feelings and that they were suffering too.

Why me? I guess I thought this a lot then. Why did I have all this stuff to deal with—body stuff, life stuff,
death
stuff—while everyone else was just making out at dances and singing in the school musical? I got ahold of myself. I was able to, without
picking up the phone and calling . . . who? Who was I going to call? That was the thing. Connor was my connection to my self. I realized that only then, that he was the only one I could talk to about what he'd done.

Was Connor a bad person? Was Nora? Nora was reckless, but nothing really bad had happened to her yet. It could. It might. What happened to Connor was an accident. It was, like Collette said that day we came back from Fletcher's Cove, poor judgment. I couldn't think of her family, of her mother, holding her dead hand. I thought instead about Connor: it was a bad thing, but it was an accident. In a way, Connor was not unlike me. We had both been so unlucky.

But the difference between Connor and me was that he had lied. Was he a liar? Or was it just this one thing that he was keeping from me to make me love him? I had told him everything. Everything! And everything he had revealed had been a lie. Maybe the emotions were the same, maybe he was telling me his
feelings
, but the facts were plain old dirty lies.

Did that make him a liar? He was trying to talk to me. He was. It was hard not to think of the reasons he could have lied. Fear. I know the way fear works now—what wouldn't I have done to make even some of my fear go away?

What had he done to Zoe's friend? Was that what he meant by treating people badly? And driving stoned? Who was the girl he was driving with anyway? The girl me took over, the one who even then could not stop thinking about how much better all the other girls were, in every possible way. The girl me who could so easily lose sight of the rest of it, the real story.

I would never be strong enough, I thought.

So many lies. He was as far from that boy I had once thought he was, straight off a surfboard, sauntering in with his golden dog, as far beyond my reach as he could be. Imagine my luck, I'd thought then. Of all places, a boy like Connor Bryant. Was this the same person who had taken me out of the hospital and kissed me in a rowboat like it was the end of the world? Who had given me a turtle and let me call her Frog?

Yes. He was all those things. Did I love him despite what he'd done? I was learning that you had to take all of it, the whole person, whatever was left of that person, see everything, want everything, accept it all. People needed to do that for me and my new hacked-at self, my new bitter sparkly personality, and maybe one day I would have to do that for Connor. But I also had some power now. I was standing up and out of bed, and for better or worse—worse actually, in that here I was shoving myself into my jeans again—the staples had been taken out and I was standing up straighter and I could do the choosing. Would just having loved Connor be enough? Did I still? Could I? My letter hadn't reached him yet. But it would so soon. I couldn't take it back, so: What would I choose?

It was the day the letter came. On the fifteenth, well actually just a little after midnight on the fifteenth, so, I guess if we're documenting things, it was technically the sixteenth. A call from a 603 area code came in, and I just knew it was him, that it came from a place where the leaves were changing and it was getting colder and it was like what I imagine college would be. That was what I got from the 603. All of that.

But I couldn't answer it. I had been waiting for Connor to call since the day he came into my hospital room. How many nights had I waited? But the letter had only come that day. I could not talk to him about what was in that letter yet.

I let it ring and ring until voice mail, so he could still think that maybe I just had the ringer off to sleep. I waited, the phone lighted beneath my comforter, and then I waited again for the red 1 to come up on my voice-mail widget.

There it was. I listened, but there was just dead air. Nothing. Was it breathing?

And then the 603 call again. The going through the waiting again. And then this time, Connor spoke.

“Hi, Elizabeth Stoller,” he said. Still, he stopped my heart. No
matter what, no matter anything. Heart stopper. “Hi. I think you got my letter by now. I'm sure you have. I wanted to call you because, as Dr. Farrell says, it's good to be direct. I want to talk to you about everything. Will you still talk to me?” he asked. “This is our only line, and we have sign-ups for when we can use it. I will call you again. I will try to reach you. Hello, Lizzie. It's that guy from the hospital. Remember me?” he said. “I remember you.”

How could that message have been more beautiful? Forget that he had waited this long to call me. Forget that he had killed a girl and lied about it. Forget that he was sent away. Remember our hands. I remembered Connor. The feel of him.

I scrolled down, listened:

Well, this is Connor. The guy from the hospital? The guy with the cute dog? Call me sometime.

I held my warm phone close. The voice was a stranger's voice and yet it was the same voice, the boy was the same, I was the same.

So how had everything suddenly changed?

The Bottom Drawer didn't press charges. That's what Nora emailed to tell me, anyway, and what now did she have to gain by lying? Did they even have email in juvie? I didn't think so, but what did I know?
We need to make another plan,
she wrote. And then?
I will say I've got some killer new skivvies
. I ignored this when I wrote her back.
We totally do!
I wrote, regarding the plan.
Smiley face heart kiss pink elephant yellow flower
.

But I knew we wouldn't. Maybe we were just camp friends. The gum tree. The moldy old cabins. The flashlights shaking through the woods. Kid stuff. Summer things. Maybe it's not turning off the light. Maybe it's just letting the seasons change.

I couldn't help but think that about Connor too, our season. The hospital—not camp—but this eerie alt place. Maybe the real world was not for us. We were all about parallel universes.

I didn't write him back. I didn't try to call him or email or find a way to talk to him. His voice was the same, but still he felt like a stranger.

I will try to reach you. Remember me? I remember you.

As sad as I was, I could feel myself getting stronger, everything healing, the scar sealing things in securely, like a change purse.
I never liked it, that would be insane, but I had gotten used to changing the bag, all the ointments and contraptions I needed to make sure it didn't get too irritated or worse, come undone.

I was transforming from werewolf back to human. And from human it was like I could spin three times and there were my bulletproof bracelets, my lasso. My superhuman Wonder Woman speed and strength. I felt like that sometimes, like I was some girl superhero now. My dark, sad alter ego, felled by kryptonite, was the girl sick in bed in the dark, waiting for a nurse to take her blood, a girl I hope never to meet again. I wasn't much for meeting the girl I was before I got sick either. She didn't know anything. She was ashamed of everything.

I knew a lot by then. I was smaller but I was bigger. What was my special power? I didn't know. But I did know that Dee and Lydia were off on a different path. Mabel and Greta were my sidekicks now.

That's when I decided it was time to take my sidekicks in for proper training.

We went to Petiquette because, I mean, it was called Petiquette. Also it was the closest dog training place to us. We'd missed a class, but I didn't want to wait until the next session, so I drove Greta and Mabel and me to our first class, my mother in the passenger seat.

I looked in the rearview at Mabel and Greta, scratching and scrambling.

“Do
not
get distracted, Liz.” My mother turned around in her
seat. “Girls!” she said to the dogs. “Oh my God!” my mother said. “Center
lane
, please!”

Just then a text came in with a delicate
ping!

“You're driving!” My mother was borderline hysterical.

I gripped the wheel. “Mother. I'm not looking at it!”

My stomach clenched and I felt my bag. I really never didn't feel it, but sometimes it was more . . .
pronounced
than others. My mother gripped the door handle like she was in a movie. My mother was always acting like she was in a goddamn movie. Or maybe I just made her act that way. Whatever the case, we managed to arrive at Petiquette, and early too, and we signed up and I headed into the Good Citizen training, ready to go.

I checked my phone. The text was from Michael L:
One more try? I really did miss you. How about the movies with Dee and K on Fri? Wink wink clapping hands smiley face.

K.
He's going by Kenickie now. I don't even remember his actual name anymore.

K
,
I wrote back, but I think the irony might have been lost. Why the hell not, I thought. What's to lose here?

Think better of it was just one of the things I learned that night. The others? Greta and Mabel could not be in the same class. They were barely even the same species. And Greta could not go into hospitals and nursing homes, both places that don't have a lot of use for dogs that jump up and bark and get down on front legs to play and then whimper when they are dragged away. The trainer, a tall woman named Esther who had long hair with so many split ends it looked like she'd been plugged into a socket and who introduced herself by saying if she were a dog she'd be a
whippet, gave me some serious stink eye and told me this was a class for dogs who have already had training.

Oh. So this was the
AP
class.

I went to get my mother.

“That dog is way too young for hospitals,” the trainer said. “Think about it. How will she be soothing? How could her visit possibly be a comfort to someone?”

I didn't say how it totally would be, but I did think that was what we were here for, to train the dogs to be a comfort. Maybe it's not the Petiquette we need to be working on, I thought as I handed Greta over to my mom, who was reading in the waiting area, where she thought she'd be the whole hour we “trained.” She took Greta into the novice class. Like so, so novice.

As soon as my mother walked out with Greta, Mabel got on her doggie smile and sat perfectly and gave me her paw and generally was her best Mabel self. I imagined bald kids smiling when she walked into their hospital rooms. I imagined old ladies motioning to her with their gnarled old-lady hands.

That was the night I met Stella B.

Stella and her pit bull, Samantha. Stella with her Clash T-shirt and her bicycle chain bracelets and her blue suede creepers, her dark black eyeliner. Her hair—kind of like a mullet—stuck out in all directions. She had three safety pins in each ear. She waved at me and she smiled, not angry like her clothes or, like Connor, all dark and menacing, a
killer
, beneath his beachy face. Me with my bag, scarred up, no one knew what was there. Once my weakness but now, maybe my secret armor. My Superman
S
—that scar—beneath my regular clothes. None of us are what we
seem. Stella Sammy Mabel and me. Twice a week at Petiquette. Mom and Greta trailing, tangled, behind.

Who knew I had been waiting for someone like Stella?

Finally, my own girl band.