Where the Staircase Ends (19 page)

I stood up to look around, or as around as you can look when you aren’t able to move your head or body backwards.

Nothing looked any different beyond the hint of the pink trail left behind by the dragonfly. The sky was still clear, the air was still quiet and motionless. A few tiny flakes of snow drifted down from invisible clouds, but otherwise there was no movement beyond the rising and falling of my own chest. Where was everyone? Did they all
poof
and disappear?

“Hello?” I called, my voice sticking to the sides of my throat from lack of use. “Is anyone there? Can anyone hear me? Hello!”

My voice came back to me in an echo, reverberating off the stone steps like I was standing inside an empty canyon. For a moment I stood there, remembering earlier when the snow started to fall after I yelled at the sky. Someone listened to me then, so where were they now? Why wasn’t anyone helping me?

Even stranger than where everybody went was
how
they managed to get to that point on the stairs. How was it that this part of the stairs was worn down, but the part I started on was perfectly smooth and flat? It would make more sense for the beginning part of the steps to be worn down because that’s the place where everyone had to start. Right?

But the more I thought about it, the more I couldn’t be sure that I started at the bottom of the staircase. I couldn’t turn around to look behind me, so there was no way for me to know whether or not I started at the beginning. I just assumed it was the beginning, because, well, that’s how stairs usually work. But what if I appeared somewhere in the middle of the staircase? Given everything that had happened, it wasn’t farfetched to think I might have
poofed
into the center of the stairs when the car hit me, which was disconcerting. How big was this thing?

I crouched down on the step again, rocking on my heels while I tried to work it out in my head. My fingers worked around my temples the way they sometimes did when I tried to squeeze an answer out of my brain in class. What if when we died we all started at a different place on the stairs? What if there was no beginning, or the beginning was different for all of us? It wasn’t logical, but then again nothing about the stairs seemed logical.

If you assumed there was only one set of stairs for everyone and we all started at different points, then that meant I’d hit the place on the staircase that everyone else eventually reached. And if that was the place we all eventually reached, wouldn’t that mean I was close to the top?

My heart hammered in my chest, clanging against my skin like it wanted to escape. I still couldn’t see the top of the stairs, so there was no guarantee I was right. But it gave me hope. Hope that there was something waiting for me up there. Hope that I wasn’t alone after all.

I was on my feet before I knew what I was doing, running as if my life depended on it.

WORDS THAT SWIM

The sun screamed through the cheetah-printed curtains when I woke up the morning after the party. I tried hiding my head under the pillow, but the sun leaked through the sides until I finally gave up and went to Sunny’s room to see if she was awake.

Her door was cracked, so I pushed it open wider and tiptoed inside. Sunny was buried under her white duvet, a soundless lump under a mass of blankets. I took a running leap onto the bed and started jumping up and down to wake her.

“It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood!” I sang. “A beautiful day in the neighborhood! Won’t you please, won’t you please, please won’t you be my … neighbor!” I hopped on top of her when I sang the last line, grabbing at the blankets to yank them away from her body. She was curled up into a ball, her face buried inside her hands so I couldn’t see her.

“Sunny, wake up. Yoo-hoo!” I reached out to tickle her, the way she used to do when we were kids and she woke up before me at one of our ritual sleepovers. She pulled her hands away from her face long enough to slap me away, and that’s when I saw she was crying.

“Sunny?” I stopped bouncing, the grin slipping from my face as I sat down on the bed next to her. “Sunny, what’s wrong? What happened?”

She sniffled loudly and hid her face underneath one of her pillows.

“Please go away, Taylor. Please.”

Her voice was small and muffled. The bed shook with the rhythm of her crying, and I didn’t know what to do. Sunny never cried. Not when Mark Schroen dumped her, not when she lost homecoming princess to Lizzie Masters, not even when someone stole her Coach handbag from her gym locker. There was only that one time, many years ago, when her mom left.

“Sunny,” I whispered, reaching out to smooth the hair that poked out from underneath the pillow. “Sunny, what’s wrong? What happened?”

She started sobbing louder, and that made me even more nervous. My first thought was maybe someone had told her about me and Justin, but that didn’t make sense. I expected her to be mad, pissed even, but she wouldn’t cry about it. Not like this. Then I remembered someone was in the room with her when I went to bed. They were laughing, but maybe something went down after I’d gone to sleep?

“Sunny, did something happen last night? With the guy who was in the room with you?”

I waited, listening to the sound of her ragged breath under the downy pillow. When she didn’t say anything, I lay down on the bed and wrapped my arms around her. She felt small, like a frail bird shaking underneath the weight of my arms. I never realized how tiny she was; she always seemed bigger than life.

“Sunny, please. I’m your best friend. You can tell me anything. Whatever it is, I’ll help. But you have to tell me what happened, okay? I can’t help unless you talk to me.”

I squeezed her tighter, pressing my knees against the back of her legs and my face against her hair. She smelled like a hangover, a mix of last night’s cigarettes and beer.

“Come on, Sunny. Talk to me,” I pleaded. When that didn’t work I added, “If you don’t say something soon I’m going to assume it’s because you’ve gone lesbo and want me to spoon you all morning.
Ooooo
,” I said, my tone playful so she’d know I was kidding. “Maybe it wasn’t a guy you had in here last night. Maybe it was a chick with a really low voice. Are you playing for the other side now, Sunny? You better get up and look at me or I’m going to tell the whole school that you’ve joined the softball team.”

She let out a short laugh and sat up. I sat up too, looking at her red and swollen eyes straight on.

“What happened?” I asked again. Her bottom lip quivered and a single tear slid down her cheek, tracing the trail of wetness left behind by earlier tears. It freaked me out to see her that way.

“I didn’t mean for it to happen,” she said, her voice small and unsure. “We were in here talking, and then suddenly we were kissing, and then … then … ” She looked down at her hands, studying the lines on her palms. “We’d had a lot to drink, and I should have stopped him. It all happened so fast. Please don’t be mad at me.”

When she looked back at me, her eyes were wide and wet, pleading with me. It was a look I recognized from the many apologies she’d given me throughout the years. The Sunny mantra: better to ask forgiveness than permission.

“Please,” she repeated. “Please don’t be mad at me. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I was drunk and stupid and out of control. You have to believe me. You’re my best friend. I don’t want to lose you.” She reached out and took my hands, but I yanked them away.

“Who were you with last night?” I asked, my voice flat. The air in her bedroom had suddenly become thick and hot. The sunlight streaming in through the slats of her blinds warmed my skin to an almost unbearable temperature.

I thought back to the day when Logan had asked me out, to the drawing he’d done of me and the all-caps words scrawled on the bottom of the page asking me if I wanted to grab a bite sometime. I’d brought the note with me to history class to show Sunny, floating into the classroom as I held the picture out for her to see. She made a face, looking at it like it was a flaming baggy of dog poop.

“That doesn’t look anything like you,” she’d said, pushing it away.

I had looked down at the drawing, marveling at the way he’d made me look graceful, elegant. It may not have looked exactly like me, but I thought there were some similarities. And it didn’t matter if I really looked like that; what mattered was he saw me that way, and that made me feel pretty amazing. Beautiful, even.

Sunny laughed when I said the words out loud, making me wish I could have sucked them back inside my mouth. “It’s just a picture, Taylor. It’s not like he actually
said
you were beautiful. You’re not going to go out with him, are you?”

“He’s taking me out Friday.” My voice sounded small and inferior. She made a face at me again and shrugged.

“I suppose you could do worse,” she had said.

I thought about those words as I watched Sunny sitting on top of her white duvet, her bottom lip trembling as more tears threatened to spill down her cheeks. Even though I knew the answer, I wanted her to say it out loud.

“Who was in the room with you last night, Sunny?” My teeth were clenched, and my fingers were balled into tight fists.

“Please don’t make me say it, Taylor,” she whispered.

I took a deep breath and exhaled loudly through my nose. “Logan,” I answered for her. “You were in here with Logan last night.”

Her eyes darted around the room, looking everywhere except at my face. Finally she nodded and her face got red and puffy again as a new wave of tears broke free.

My thoughts were balls inside a pinball machine, knocking around inside of my brain. I thought about the way she looked at me when I first told her about Logan, the look of disgust that clouded her face, like she was too good for him and couldn’t believe I actually considered him dateable. Yet here she was, falling on her back faster than Tracey Allen at a frat party.

There were rules about that kind of thing, unspoken friendship laws that put boyfriends and ex-boyfriends completely off limits to friends. It’s like once you started dating someone an invisible fence sprung up around them, complete with barbed-wire reinforcements and razor-toothed rabid guard dogs. Technically Logan and I were still together; our relationship wasn’t even cold in the grave when Sunny did what she did, so I had every right to yell at her, scream at her, and slap her across her fat red puffy face.

Then I thought about Justin and the way it felt when we kissed. I thought about the things he said and the way we seemed to fit together, like two pieces carved from the same tree. Logan could draw a million pictures of me and I would never feel that way about him.

Normally I would have been angrier with Sunny, but the surprising thing was that
I didn’t care
. I didn’t want to be with Logan. I didn’t want to be within ten feet of Logan. If Sunny wanted him so bad, why not let her have him? It served her right.

Sunny covered her eyes with her hands and made a horrible moaning sound. It gave me some satisfaction to see her like that. She really was an ugly crier. Her face was so puffy she looked like she fell into a pile of poison ivy that had a hornet’s nest hidden in it.
Ha
.

Miss Violet Beauregard pushed her way into the room, her bat ears twitching at the sounds coming from Sunny’s mouth. She launched onto the bed to lick Sunny’s tears, so consumed by her crying that she forgot to growl at me.

“Sunny, stop it.” I finally said, not able to handle the sound of her moans any longer. “It’s okay. I don’t hate you.”

She made a few more moaning noises until I finally reached out to hug her as proof that I meant it. The dog acknowledged my presence with a snarl, its one good eye narrowing on me while the lazy one rolled to the side.

“It’s okay, Sunny. Please stop crying.”

I rested my cheek on the top of her head and wrapped my arms around her small frame. She leaned against me, and we stayed that way for a while before she finally spoke.

“You really aren’t mad?” She pulled away from me and wiped her eyes with the heels of her hands. Her brows were pressed together in disbelief, as if she couldn’t comprehend why I wasn’t going to lay into her for what she did. I was a little bit tempted to throw a few snarky comments into the mix. It wasn’t often that Sunny apologized for something. It was a golden opportunity to give
her
a ribbing for a change, but I didn’t feel up to doling out a lecture. She was obviously upset enough for the both of us.

“Let’s just say I’m over it, okay?” I crossed my arms in front of my chest, giving her a stern stare. “But he’s not a very nice guy, Sunny. Are you sure you want to start seeing him?”

She shrugged and looked down at her hands. “I was drunk and stupid. It should never have happened. Besides, I don’t want your sloppy seconds,” she added, nudging me with a grin.

I laughed and then looked back at her seriously. “Were you at least, you know, safe?”

Sunny looked away from me, and I knew the answer without her having to say anything.

“Sunny!” I chided. “What if something happened?”

“I’m sure it’s fine.” She turned her head away to check the time on the digital clock on her nightstand.

“That’s probably what every single girl on the show
16 and Pregnant
said right before they saw a plus sign on their pregnancy test. Come on, you’re smarter than that.”

“And you’re not my mother,” she snapped. Then she shook her head and said, “Sorry, I didn’t mean it like that. I’m just upset.”

“Look, I’ll go with you. We can go to Walgreen’s and get a morning-after pill or something.”

She rolled her eyes at me, but I stared her down until she shrugged and said, “Fine, I’ll go. Just drop it, okay? I don’t want to think about it anymore.”

“Are you sure? Do you want me to come with you?”

“No. I’ll be fine. Can we stop talking about it already?” She rubbed her temples and gave me a pleading look. I didn’t really want to talk about it anymore either, so I nodded my consent.

“I need some Tylenol and greasy food. Let’s get Amber and Jenny and go to Whataburger.” She pulled herself off the bed and shook her arms and legs, ridding herself of the previous night. “And please don’t say anything to them about this, okay? I don’t want them to know. Jenny can’t keep her mouth shut to save her life, and I’d rather not have to relive the whole incident through rumors in the hallway.”