One Moment (21 page)

“Because, Pete,” I said, “there was a lot more to it than that.”

“Wait.” Tanna threw a hand up in the air. “I’m sorry? What the hell?”

“Right. I know!” I giggled, this crazy sound that sparked in the supercharged air. “That’s exactly what I was thinking when I found the pictures.”

Shannon’s entire body stiffened. Then she pulled her shoulders back and looked me right in the eyes. “You saw pictures?”

“Someone left them on my front porch. There were, like, twenty shots perfectly arranged in this cheesy little album. And the pictures, they told the story of a sweet little romance. One that had been going on for a year, if I had to guess.”

“Almost.” Shannon stared at me, a flicker of nervous excitement in her eyes. “It was
almost
one year.”

I stepped forward, my hand screaming to smack her pretty little face. It made me sick, looking at her, thinking of how many years I’d considered her one of my best friends. “You wanted me to find out, didn’t you?”

“I left so many clues, you’d have to be blind or stupid not to have—wait a minute….” Shannon looked into the fire, her face glowing in the orange-tinted light, her brain stuttering over some new thought that I wasn’t so sure I wanted to hear. “You already knew …
before
Memorial Day weekend, didn’t you? That’s what happened up there?”

“Shannon, let it go,” Adam said.

Shannon looked to the ground, her fingers twisting, twisting, twisting a ring on her left hand. Then she looked up at me again. “Joey and I might have had secrets. But yours, it’s way worse, isn’t it?”

“You were supposed to be one of my best friends,” I said, “and this is what I get after finding out you and Joey had been together, hiding some twisted romance for a year?”

Shannon shrugged. “Afraid to be out of the spotlight, Mags? Afraid of what’ll happen now that people know he loved me, too?”

“Are you serious? You think that I’m angry because of—”

“I kept it a secret, Maggie, after he was gone.
For you.
I stood there in your shadow and let everyone console you like you were the only one who mattered. So don’t try to act like I didn’t think about your feelings.”

“I’m supposed to feel sorry for
you
now?”

“No,” she said, tipping her head to the side. “And you don’t have to feel sorry for Joey, either.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“Remember that night at your house? Before the funeral, when you told Tanna and me how guilty you felt that he was still a virgin? Well …,” Shannon said, her lips curling up in a little smile.

That’s all it took.

One simple string of words.

Our friendship, the one we’d taken a lifetime to form, it vanished into nothing during the exhalation of a single breath.

“Shannon!” Adam stepped into our circle, placing his hands on my shoulders and squeezing tight. “That is enough!”

“Adam, get the hell off me,” I said, trying to pull free as he twisted me toward him. I jerked sideways, but it did nothing. His grip was solid, and I wasn’t getting away.

“Maggie, it’s time to leave.” Adam’s voice was firm, forceful. But there was something else there, too. An undercurrent of fear that swelled into every syllable. Fear that, at first, didn’t seem to make any sense at all. Until I realized the one thing that had been missing since I first confronted Shannon. Surprise.

It clicked into place when I looked into his eyes, the echo of his voice tumbling through my mind, crashing through the different levels of my awareness until I understood without question. “Oh, my God,” I said. “You and Joey were fighting about
this
, weren’t you? You knew everything this whole time?”

“Maggie, you have to let me explain.”

I shook my head. “You’ve had plenty of time to do that, Adam.”

“I couldn’t just—”

“Adam, I don’t want to listen to one thing that you have to say.”

And that’s when they started. With a triple bang, the first of the fireworks splashed into the sky, painting all of us a sparkling red, white, and blue.

All the energy that had been driving me suddenly drained away. I felt deflated, like someone had sucked the life out of me. And I had to sit down.

Right.

Then.

Right.

There.

I tucked my face into my hands and scrunched my eyes so tight I thought I might blink away the entire world.

But when I opened them, the world was still there.

I knew because of the feet circled around us.

The fireworks’ erratic drumbeat in my chest, Adam’s hand rubbing my back, his voice whispering in my ear, “Please, just talk to me Maggie. Please listen to what I have to say.”

The lip gloss and purple pen and key chain that I’d dumped from Shannon’s purse.

And the bracelet. Perched on a little tuft of grass.

The band was a thin leather strap.

I knew without thinking that it had once been tied around Joey’s wrist.

Moved with him, sliding up and down with the swing of his arm.

And the three turquoise-colored glass beads strung right in the center.

The sun had once played with those beads, like the flash from the fireworks did now, glistening off their smooth sides, spilling out to tint the world a bright shade of blue.

“Oh, Shannon.” I pressed one hand into the cool grass, the earth spinning beneath me, and reached out with the other. “You didn’t.”

Then I had it. That string of leather, laced between my fingers. Those cool beads flashing in the sparking light. Sending waves of memories through my already tormented mind.

Dash. Crash. Splash.

18

Then Suddenly I Stopped

“We’re gonna go on three,” Joey said. “You ready?”

I shook my head. “No.”

“You trust me?”

I looked at him then, took in his freckled nose, the wisps of damp hair clinging to his forehead, the way his smile always tilted to the left.

I nodded. “I trust you.”

He squeezed my hand again. “Everything’s gonna be fine.”

I ran my thumb up the inside of his wrist, feeling his blood, his life, pulsing through his body.

“One.”

The cool shock of those glass beads zapped my skin like I’d been electrocuted.

“Two.”

What was it about those beads?

“Three!”

Running.

We were running.

Almost there.

But the thunder of my feet crashed through something in my consciousness.

And I knew.

Those beads, they were Shannon’s.

A vision flashed into my mind—the dream catcher her grandmother had given her when she was little, broken, on the floor of her room, Tanna kneeling down, apologizing, while Rihanna’s voice filled the air around us. Shannon plucking the beads from the spiraled web, stringing them on a necklace that she would wear only for special occasions.

And another flash—school-enforced, ninth-grade cotillion, when Joey chose Shannon for the final song, a waltz, and I’d been so jealous I thought I might burst. Until Adam stepped up to me, his eyes intense, hand extended, and asked if he could have the honor of one single dance. I’d accepted, trailing through the room with his arms tight around me, but I’d kept track of Joey and Shannon. It was easy, the way those beads caught the light from the chandelier and threw shimmering bubbles all through the room.

Those beads, she thought they were protective. Sacred.

No one was supposed to touch those beads but Shannon.

Ever.

Yet there they were, threaded on the leather strap that was tied around my boyfriend’s wrist.

My momentum slowed, my arm tugging Joey’s back.

His hand held tight. Pulled me on.

We were only a few feet from the edge of the cliff.

And then, in a quick succession of broken images, I remembered. Her barrette in his console, lying there like it had been flung aside in a rushed moment. His shirt balled up on her bedroom floor, and the flimsy excuse she’d given for it being there. The mix CD she burned for him for Christmas that I wasn’t supposed to see. The times I’d smelled a hint of her perfume when she was nowhere near us. How their hands always lingered when they passed a bottle we were sharing. How, when we were all together and I was watching Joey, he was usually watching her. And how she was always watching me, a strange flicker of anger in her eyes.

It was like I hit an invisible wall, one that did not exist for Joey.

I had been so close to flying.

Then suddenly—I stopped.

Dug my feet into the dusty ground.

Yanked my hand from his.

And. Refused. To. Go. On.

He kept moving, though, slower, twisting back to face me, a question in his eyes.

“You and Shannon?” I asked breathlessly.

He tried to stop then, waved his arms in the air to catch his balance, the glass beads on the leather string clicking together.

“Mags, let me exp—”

And that’s all I got from him. His shoulders pulled him backward. There was too much momentum for him to stop. So he tried to twist forward again, but the movement just tripped him up, angled him for more of a dive than a jump.

The last thing I remember of Joey alive was the fear in his eyes, their electric blue sparking like embers in a raging fire. There was regret there, too.

I understood the fear. He knew. Maybe not that he was going to die. But he knew he was in major trouble. With me. With the ledge. With the water sparkling below him.

But the regret. That’s what I’d like to ask him about.

If I had one more moment with Joey, I’d ask what part of it all he regretted most in those last seconds of his life. Was it lying to me? Crushing me into nothing? Or did it have more to do with the part where he’d been caught?

19

Releasing Their Grip

“Ever since I figured out they went behind my back, I’ve had this sick feeling in my stomach,” I said as I weaved my way through the crowd at Gertie’s Dairy Farm, a cone with a single scoop of mint chocolate chip in one hand, a wad of napkins in the other. “It’s like I’m one second from puking all the time now.”

“I still can’t believe it,” Tanna said from beside me. “Joey and Shannon. It’s just
weird
.”

“He had to feel awful,” Pete said. He was right behind me, his guitar pressed between us as we made our way to the side door of the huge shop, which was packed wall-to-wall with people out for a country drive and afternoon on the farm.

“Not awful enough.” I stepped on someone’s foot, and when I turned to apologize was elbowed in my side, so I gave up. “And Shannon—keeping everything to herself after he died—she didn’t feel a bit of remorse.”

Pete pressed his lips together, silent as we separated from the main crowd.

“As twisted as it is, I think she was trying to protect you,” Tanna said through a bite of her strawberry ice cream and waffle cone.

“Like Adam?” I asked with a snort. “Don’t even get me started on him.”

“Maggie,” Pete said, “you have to understand—”

“No. I don’t. Adam’s worse than both of them. At least they had a reason to keep their twisted little secret.”

I stopped to toss my gum in the trash can by the door to the side yard, which was peppered with picnic tables and old tractors for kids to climb on. Without thinking, my eyes grazed the corkboard hanging on the wall. It was supposed to hold seven pictures of Gertie’s most daring patrons, the ones who had taken on and conquered the Big Dipper Challenge. But now there were only six. In place of the seventh photograph, marking its former existence, was a dark square of corkboard, the edges surrounding it faded by sunlight and age. My feet stopped, shoes planted to the sticky, pink tile floor.

I stood there, staring at the board, trying to remember every detail of that day from the previous summer. How Joey had accepted the challenge on a whim. How he’d let each of us pick two flavors for his ten-dipper sundae. How, when he held his stomach with a pained face, we’d all cheered him on, telling him to keep going.

“Shannon was sitting right next to him,” I said, shaking my head.

“Maggie, what are you talking about?” Pete’s face creased into that worried-about-Maggie look that was starting to make me feel crazy.

“The picture from Joey’s Big Dipper Challenge,” I said, pointing up at the empty space. “It’s gone.”

Tanna glanced over my head and sighed. “Wonder who did that?” she said, taking another bite of her ice-cream cone.

“His other girlfriend, maybe?” I asked sarcastically. “She was sitting right next to him that day. I remember her ring, glinting in the sunlight from the front window, as she handed him those tiny plastic cups of water.”

Pete pushed the door open and Tanna and I followed him out into the bright light of another humid July day. In an instant, I felt like I’d been sucked away from the present, taken back to so many moments from the past in one burst of thought. I saw him everywhere. Joey feeding the goats a handful of pellets from the dispenser. Joey balancing on the top of the wooden fence to the pigs’ pen. Joey leaning up against the silo, standing in the open door to the cow barn, leaping onto a tractor. Joey. Joey. Joey. How could he be everywhere and nowhere at the same time? How long would the realization continue to stab into me? And then, just as quickly, be followed by the slicing thought of Joey and Shannon together?

“Should we sit here?” Tanna asked. “Or do you want to walk out to the trails?”

I was about to say that I wanted to get away from the crowd, to sit in a clearing deep in the woods while Pete played us a few songs, to simply hang out and not talk about all the stuff that hurt so much. But that’s when we heard him. I knew we all did, because Pete’s and Tanna’s eyes looked as sad as I felt.

I looked over Pete’s shoulder and found him, Joey’s brother, along with several of his friends, pouring out the side door of Gertie’s, ice-cream cones in hand.

“It’s Rylan,” I said softly. “Just Rylan.”

The group walked right past us, over to the main tractor. From the corner of my eye, I saw a few of them climb the large front wheels to sit right on top of the worn tread, while three others fought for the driver’s seat and steering wheel. But not Rylan. He’d stopped just a few steps short of Pete and Tanna and me. He was just staring. Like there was something important he wanted to say.