Between (13 page)

I smile. “He’s right.” I look at Alex. “You don’t know how that feels, do you? To think about absolutely nothing for hours at a time? It’s like heaven.”

He gives me a disappointed half smile. “Like either of us would know what heaven’s like.”

Mr. Riley is caught off guard; this clearly isn’t what he was expecting from Richie. “Well, that’s true,” he says. “Running is meditation. It clears your mind. It calms you down.”

“She was running for hours at a time, like sometimes three or four hours,” Richie continues. “Did you know that? Before she died, I mean. Did you notice how much weight she was losing? She was passing out. Shouldn’t you have done something? You were her coach.”

Alex gazes at my body. “Now that they’re mentioning it, Liz, you
are
awfully skinny. I mean, you’re
too
skinny.”

I frown. “Runners are always skinny. Besides, you said I was hot.”

“A hot mess, maybe,” he murmurs. I ignore him, choosing instead to pay attention to what’s actually going on in the room. Richie. Running. In a million years, I never would have expected it from him. I’d tried to get him to come with me plenty of times, but he was never interested.

“Calm down, Richie,” Mr. Riley says. “I know all about that. We’d talked about it, believe me. But I couldn’t stop her from running on her own.” He pauses. “I didn’t realize how dire the situation had become. But I did try to help her. At the end of last year, I told her that if she lost any more weight, I’d keep her off the team.”

“You did?” Richie pauses. “She didn’t tell me about that.”

“You didn’t tell him much of anything lately, did you?” Alex says.

I flick his earlobe. “You. Quiet.”

“It was right after she got her concussion,” Mr. Riley says. “That’s when I realized things were going downhill for her.”

I press my palm to the side of my head. “Oh … that’s right. I remember this.” And when I close my eyes, I see it; even though I’m outside my body, I’m standing so close to my seventeen-year-old self that I can almost
feel
it happening. I’m at the top of the stairs in my parents’ house, stretching, facing the big window at the landing in the upstairs hallway. I’m looking out at the water, the
Elizabeth
tied to the dock behind our house, and the beach stretching in a graceful curve against the horizon. I reach up with the tips of my fingers, stretching onto my tiptoes in my dirty—but very comfortable—running shoes. Then I bend over, letting my fingertips graze the oriental rug I’m standing on. I see shades of maroon, beige, forest green, and crimson in the pattern. But then my balance stutters; my knees buckle, and I take a step back, trying to find my footing on the landing.

I want to reach out to myself, to stop what I know is about to happen. But all I can do is watch.

Just as I think I’ve found my footing on the landing, I step over the edge of the stairs. Then I’m falling. I watch, helpless, as my body tumbles to the bottom of the steps. When I finally come to a stop, my rail-thin form crumpled on the hardwood floor in the foyer of our house, I’m obviously unconscious.

I open my eyes; I see Mr. Riley sitting at his desk. I blink and blink, trying to go back to the scene. When I find a memory again, I realize that I’ve gone forward in time to almost two days after the fall. I’ve just gotten out of the hospital; I can tell because I’m still wearing my plastic ID bracelet. My father has picked me up by himself. I watch the two of us alone in the car together as we drive home in near silence. I don’t speak to my dad. I only stare outside, watching the landscape pass by out the window.

Finally, my dad closes his chubby hand over my bicep. His fingers easily go all the way around my arm.

“What are you trying to do, Elizabeth?” he asks. His voice is quiet. My dad has always been this way: calm, mellow, understated, everything kept inside, beneath the surface. Even when my mother died. Even when his own daughter died.

I don’t look at him. Instead, I stare out the car window, seeming to concentrate on the trees beginning to bud in the spring air, the blooming flowers, the grass growing in countless determined individual blades against the sharp wind of New England that seems to slice across the landscape. It’s
life
that’s emerging.

Just from looking at myself, I can sense that I’m starving. All that life, outside, juxtaposed with what I’m sure is a knot of throbbing hunger in my concave belly. My hunger seems to be everywhere. It’s in my eyes. It’s all over my face. It permeates the space between my father and me in the car.

When he speaks, my dad sounds like he’s trying not to cry. “You aren’t your mother,” he says.

“I know that,” I tell him.

“Then what is the matter? Why are you doing this?” He turns the car into our garage, shuts off the engine, and locks the doors.

“You’re not getting out until you give me an answer,” he says.

But I don’t respond. I stare straight ahead, at the wall of the garage, where my stepmom’s bicycle hangs from two mounted hooks.

“Therapy,” my dad finally says. “You’re going to see a doctor. I’m going to make an appointment for you.”

I don’t say anything.

“You’ll go,” he continues, “or there will be consequences. Understand?”

But as I watch myself, I know that I had no intention of going to therapy. I certainly don’t remember ever seeing any doctors for my eating or exercise habits. And it wasn’t like my dad would be able to really force me, anyway. He was too distracted. He worked eighty-hour weeks before I died, sometimes more. It wasn’t like we needed the money; he just loved to work. He was almost never around. I’m surprised he was home long enough to pick me up from the hospital.

My father waits for a few moments, looking at me expectantly, before he gets out of the car, slams the door, and leaves me alone in the cool darkness. I press the back of my palm to my forehead. I look like I’m in terrible pain, like I can barely stand to be conscious.

As the memory drifts away, I see Mr. Riley stand up from behind his desk. “If you really want to run,” he tells Richie, “you could join the cross-country team.”

“Oh no. I couldn’t do that,” Richie says.

“Why not?”

“Oh, I’ve got … well, you know. I’ve got other obligations. I’m not exactly a team player.”

“Of course you aren’t.” Mr. Riley glances at his watch. “You’ll be late for homeroom.”

“I was wondering if you could take a look at my shoes.”

Mr. Riley pauses. “What?”

“My shoes. My sneakers.” And Richie picks up his foot and rests it on the edge of Mr. Riley’s desk.

“What do you want to know?” Mr. Riley only glances at his shoes. “They’re fine. You should get new ones every three hundred miles or so. You’ve got plenty of wear left in them.”

“I don’t know about that,” Richie says. “I’ve only been running a week and a half, and my feet are in rough shape.” He stares at the shoes. “You know, Liz bought these for me over a year ago. She wanted me to come running with her. I never went, though.”

Mr. Riley is clearly uncomfortable. “I’m sure she’d be happy you’re running now.”

“Everybody thinks they know what would make me happy now,” I murmur to Alex.

He nods in agreement. “Yeah. People tend to do that after you die.”

“I keep thinking,” Richie says, “that maybe if I’d spent more time with her, this might not have happened. If I hadn’t fallen asleep that night, she would be okay. You know how they say that even the smallest detail can change a person’s destiny? Like someone swatting a mosquito over in Africa can cause a tsunami on a different continent? Maybe if I’d gone running with her, or even tried to talk to her more—”

“Hey. Stop it.” Mr. Riley studies my boyfriend’s expression beneath the ugly glare of the fluorescent light. “Don’t do this to yourself. There was no way you could have helped her.”

Richie lowers his foot back to the floor. He bites his lip. “People are talking about me,” he says. “I know that. People want to turn it into a drama. They’re talking about it like maybe it wasn’t an accident.”

Mr. Riley holds very still. He barely breathes. He doesn’t say a word.

“Maybe it wasn’t,” Richie says. “All I remember is falling asleep that night. Who knows what happened after that? There were six of us on the boat.” His eyes are wet. Aside from my funeral, this is the only other time I’ve ever seen Richie cry. “Somebody must know what happened. Don’t you think, Mr. Riley? You knew her. She was special. People like her don’t just slip away, do they?”

Mr. Riley shakes his head. “I don’t know.”

“I feel like I need to listen very carefully,” Richie continues. “And something’s telling me that I have to run.”

I can barely move. “It’s me,” I whisper. “I’m right here, Richie. I’m with you.”

“Okay.” Mr. Riley nods. “Then that’s what you should do. Find me after school,” he says. “I’ll be at the track. I’ll check your form. We’ll see if we can figure out what’s hurting your feet.”

As they both leave the room, Mr. Riley turns his light out, leaving Alex and me in the dark. I try to wiggle my toes in my boots, but they barely have room to move.

Nine

My friends are stealing my clothes.

“It’s not stealing if you can’t wear them anymore,” Alex points out. We are in my bedroom, which is an absolute mess: my oak canopy bed is unmade, the pink-and-white-striped sheets and comforter in a tangle at the foot of the mattress. The surface of my vanity holds a slew of makeup, everything from bronzer powder to multiple tubes of mascara to body glitter to what must be at least three dozen tubes of lipstick collected in a pricey designer purse that I apparently used exclusively for cosmetic storage. I don’t remember being such a slob. I’m almost embarrassed for Alex to see my room in such disarray.

“But this is my stuff.” I pout. “It’s only been a few weeks. They could wait a little bit longer.”

“Yeah, well, they’re your friends. I mean, you’ve gotta expect them to jump at the opportunity for free clothes. Be reasonable, Liz. To them, this is better than a clearance at JCPenney.”

I wince at the suggestion. “Alex. My friends and I do not shop at
JCPenney.
”

I feel incredibly sad looking at my old things. There is a history documented in the mess, a genuine illustration of who I was. As I look at everything, fragments of memories surface in my mind, providing small pieces to what seems like an impossibly large—and growing—puzzle. A corkboard hanging above my dresser is crowded with cross-country ribbons. They’re mostly for second and third place—like I’ve said, speed was never my biggest strength—but there are dozens of them. In a corner of my room, beside my dresser, there is a pile of running shoes. I used to go through a new pair every six weeks or so, but I never liked to get rid of the old ones. Instead, I hoarded them. There are probably twenty pairs collecting dust in the corner, their soles worn almost smooth from so many miles against the sandy, salty roads. On the side of the left shoe from each pair, I used to write the purchase date with a permanent black marker, so I’d know roughly when they were kaput.

I have an overwhelming desire to touch everything—to feel the cheap cloth of a hard-won ribbon or the tight threads in the seam of a shoe—just one last time. Knowing that I can’t makes me feel so helpless and frustrated, so … dead.

My friends—Mera and Caroline, along with Josie—are in my closet, which is a walk-in nearly half the size of my bedroom.

“Oh, you have got to be
kidding
me,” Alex says when he sees them. All three are in bras and underwear, ready to start trying on my clothes. He gives me a wicked smile. “If this is hell, go ahead and chain me to the wall.”

I frown at him. “I thought you hated them.”

He scratches the side of his head in mock contemplation. “It doesn’t mean I don’t want to see them half-naked.”

Caroline is the only one who seems to have any reservations about what they’re doing. She stares at the carefully organized rows of clothing, hung neatly in contrast to my otherwise messy room, and reaches out with a perfectly manicured fingertip, barely touching the sleeve of a red cashmere sweater.

“Are you sure this is okay?” She gives Josie a worried look. “It feels strange. What if your mom finds us in here?”

Josie. My stepsister. My best friend. As soon as I look at her face, I can see that she’s upset, too. “It was my mom’s idea,” she says, tugging a black linen dress from its hanger.

She stares at it for a few seconds. Then she holds the fabric to her face and inhales deeply, smelling it. Searching for me. When she pulls it away, there are tears in her eyes.

“Josie?” Caroline’s tone is gentle. “Are you sure you want to do this right now?”

My stepsister takes another deep breath. She has a faraway look on her face. “Every morning when I wake up, I expect her to be home,” she murmurs. “I open my eyes and look at my alarm clock and think, ‘Liz is probably back from her morning run already.’ Then I remember that she’s … not here.” She holds the dress in a crumpled ball, staring at it. “I don’t think I’ll ever get used to the idea. We knew each other all our lives, you know?”

Mera and Caroline exchange a worried glance. Caroline moves to Josie, puts a hand against her back. “I know, Josie. It’s awful. Seriously, let’s save this for another time. We can do something else right now. We won’t leave you alone today, okay?”

Josie frowns. She shakes out the dress, holds it up to stare at it for a moment before pressing it against her body, almost like she’s hugging it. “No. I want to do it now. I want to get it over with. Besides, what else will we do with everything? Give it to the Goodwill? This stuff cost a fortune.” With one hand, she wipes at her eyes. She blinks rapidly a few times. Forcing a big smile, she looks at Caroline and Mera. “It’s fine. I’m okay.”

She’s right about my clothes, anyway. Even though it pains me to see my friends going through all of my earthly possessions, I know it’s better if they take them. Practically everything looks like it came from high-end boutiques. Even my running gear is top-of-the-line, the latest technology in spandex and microfiber.