One Moment (25 page)

“You can ‘if’ yourself to death—
if
you want—but I’d advise against it.” Dr. Guest crossed one leg over the other and leaned back in her chair. “You have enough to sort through without simultaneously playing out every other possible outcome.”

I nodded. Because I’d already thought of that. “What am I supposed to do now?”

“What do you think?”

“I hate when you do that,” I said. “Turn a question back on me.”

“Usually you have the right answers. I just encourage you to dig deep enough to reach them.”

“I’m thinking I’ll just ignore it. Pretend I still forget for the rest of my life. I haven’t told anyone yet.” I looked at her, narrowing my eyes. “Everything I say to you is confidential, right? So it’s, like, against the law for you to tell?”

Dr. Guest smiled. “What do you suspect might happen if you try to ignore all of this? It’s pretty big.”

“Ignoring it might make it go away.”

“What if it makes everything worse?”

I clasped my hands together, folding them in my lap. I thought of walking into school in the fall for my senior year with the gray cloud of Joey’s death, all his lies, and Shannon’s betrayal hanging over me. I knew it would suffocate me. Eventually.

“Maybe you should just tell everyone the truth.” Dr. Guest threw her hands up in the air, like she’d just had some epiphany.

“The truth?” I asked. “As in, the
whole
truth?”

Dr. Guest shrugged. “It’s just an idea. Sounds like there are already an awful lot of secrets.”

“If I let everything out, if everyone knows the truth, people will hate me. It’s
my
fault Joey died.”

“Some people might be angry. But when they hear the entire story, I suspect most people will support you. And that support might just help you learn to stop blaming yourself, Maggie.”

I shook my head. “You don’t understand. Joey was this legend at our school. Bigger than all of us put together. Everyone knew him. And everyone loved him.”

“Do you still wonder if anyone
really
knew him?”

I thought about that. Just a few months ago I thought I’d known Joey. All of him. But I’d been wrong. “Maybe Shannon did,” I said, the words twisting around my heart and pulling tight.

Dr. Guest nodded her head, a serious look crossing over her face. “Then maybe she’s the best place to start.”

“Shannon?” I shook my head. “No way. I can’t ever speak to her again.”

“It might be worth a shot, Maggie. You still have your senior year to get through. She’s been like a sister to you almost your entire life.”

“No. I can’t.”

“Think about it,” Dr. Guest said. “I’m not suggesting that you try to rebuild your entire friendship. Just that you go to her and deal with the feelings that are making things so messy right now. Show her that you can face everything that’s happened. Free yourself from this prison Joey and Shannon built around you.”

I imagined myself walking into Shannon’s bedroom. Sitting on her bed, where I’d slept so many nights. Where Joey may have slept … with her. I visualized opening my mouth to speak. But all I could hear was me telling her off.

“What about Adam?” Dr. Guest asked. “Have you talked to him since the night you found him on the cliff top?”

I shook my head.

“That’s another thing you’ll have to figure out.”

“This is one hot mess.”

Dr. Guest chuckled. “It might feel like that, Maggie. But actually, you’re doing very well—making monumental progress with your memories and ability to share. If you think about how you want it all to look in the end, if you take the right steps to get there, you might actually find yourself feeling happy again.”

I snorted. “Doubtful.”

“You have all the pieces in your hands,” Dr. Guest said. “You just have to decide where to put them.”

I thought about that, playing with the idea throughout the rest of our session. I knew I had all the pieces, I could feel the different textures sliding in my hands. The problem was, most of them were jagged-edged, slicing into me when I tried to figure out how to order them, how to stitch them back together. So I envisioned throwing them all up in the air, running, and hiding from them forever.

23

The Very Center of Our Lives

I wasn’t going to do it.

Not.

Ever.

But when I left Dr. Guest’s office, new thoughts started pinging around in my head. If I spilled all my secrets, maybe Shannon would do the same. If I told her the one thing she needed to know, maybe she would tell me the thousand things I wished I could avoid. As much as I didn’t want to hear about her and Joey, I knew ignoring them wasn’t going to fix anything. Tanna had been right: the only way to the other side of this was straight through. And as much as I hated to admit it, I needed Shannon to help me get there.

It took a few days, thinking of how I would say all that I needed to. How I’d escape if she leaped toward me, assaulting me with the blame that I was trying to erase from my mind. Thinking of the insults I’d hurl if she attacked me with those words.

But even with two days of planning, I hadn’t been able to prepare myself for her reaction when I shared the story of what had actually happened on top of the cliff.

Instead of rage-inspired threats, Shannon crumpled into a ball on the floor of her bedroom and stared at a patch of sunny carpet near her right foot.

“Shannon,” I said. “Are you okay?”

I looked down at her, the way she’d started rocking slowly back and forth, her arms wrapped around her knees.

“It was the bracelet?” Shannon asked. “That’s what did it?”

I nodded. “That’s when everything clicked into place.”

“It worked, then.” Shannon looked up at me with tears dripping from eyes. “I
wanted
you to know.”

I sat next to Shannon on the floor, leaning against her bed, oddly numb in the moment of my big revelation.

“I left clues all over the place,” she said. “My barrette. His shirt. A pack of gum. My favorite pen. But you never figured it out. I had to think of something that I
knew
would work.”

“Your random clues were kind of normal, though. We all have each other’s stuff, Shan.” I looked at the carpet, wanting to close my eyes and squeeze everything out. But I couldn’t. Not anymore. “Why didn’t you just tell me?”

“Joey would have killed me. He wanted it to end naturally between the two of you so it wouldn’t seem so wrong when we ended up together. But then he kept dragging things out. Playing these games that made me think he was about to end it with you. Then we’d all hang out, and I’d hear some story about the great night the two of you’d had alone. I was so confused. And getting really angry.”

“When did Adam find out?” I asked.

Shannon’s eyes squinted tight. “I honestly don’t know. I think he suspected for a while, but he wasn’t sure. Joey kept stuff from me because he didn’t want me to freak—and I
was
freaked about what we were doing to you—but I just had all these feelings and I didn’t know what to do with …”

“Spare me, okay?” I said.

“Right.” Shannon swiped her palm across her cheeks, wiping away her tears. “I know Adam was pissed, Maggie, and he wanted Joey to tell you. Then Adam threatened to tell you himself, the night of Dutton’s party.”

“So that’s what the fight was about.”

“Yeah.” Shannon sighed. “I wanted you to know, too. But I didn’t know how to tell you. I wasn’t sure I could—so I just didn’t.”

“I don’t understand the bracelet,” I said. “If you knew Joey was going to tell me, why give him that bracelet to wear? It’s like a slap in my face.”

Shannon squeezed her eyes. Tight. “He broke up with me. The night of Dutton’s party.” Shannon sucked in a deep breath. “He said he’d been wrong. That he loved you, not me. He wanted it to be over between us before he told you.”

“That’s … crazy.”

“I know.” Shannon laughed, this choked sound that resembled a cry. “Joey was crazy. But I was, too. Crazy pissed off. He’d always been yours, and I thought it was time he was mine. So when he dropped me off the second time that morning, I told him to wait. That if it was over, I wanted him to have something to remember me by. I ran inside and grabbed my necklace and tied it around his wrist before he left.”

“Because you knew I’d figure everything out if I saw those beads.”

Shannon nodded. “I’m sorry. I was just so … wrecked.”

“And you wanted me to be wrecked, too?”

“Kind of. God, I know that’s awful, but I couldn’t believe, after all that time, he was choosing you. That I was so monumentally stupid to think he ever would have chosen me.”

“It wasn’t so stupid. You two had been together for a long time.”

“Yeah. In hiding. Because I wasn’t good enough to be seen with in public.”

“I’m sure it wasn’t about that,” I said. “Sounds like, in his twisted mind, he just wanted to keep us all together.”

“And look how it ended. A complete disaster.”

I could not believe that we were sitting there just talking this whole thing over like it was nothing. But then I thought of all the emotion that had swelled up since Joey’s death, the explosive night on the Fourth of July, how long we had been friends, and this moment somehow seemed to fit. It was the only way for us both to get what we needed.

“Mrs. Walther reamed me when she found out.” Shannon caved into herself as she said the words.

“You talked to Joey’s mom?”

“Yeah. After the Fourth of July, when Rylan told her about me and Joey, she called and asked me to go over there. She’d heard about me going to the cops, and let’s just say she was more than a little pissed.”

“I was, too,” I said, thankful that Mrs. Walther wasn’t angry at me, knowing that I needed to go see her soon. “Still am.”

“I’m sorry,” Shannon said. “I shouldn’t have gone to the police. It was stupid, but I know everything now, so I can fix it.”

“I don’t know if it can be fixed,” I said. But I didn’t mean the stuff with the cops. I meant everything else—Joey’s death, my memories of him, the lifelong friendship we all had shared. The important stuff had been ruined, and there was no way to get it back.

“Will we ever be friends again?” Shannon asked.

I shrugged. Thinking about it made me feel
all
that I had lost. Joey’s death should have brought the five of us closer together. Instead, it had ripped us apart.

“When I tied my necklace around Joey’s wrist, making it into a bracelet for him, I didn’t care about my friendship with you. I just wanted to shove the big secret out in the open. But now I hate myself for being so focused on the wrong thing. And I can see that this mess isn’t just Joey’s. It’s mine, too. Problem is, I’m the only one left to clean it up.”

“We can help each other, you know,” I said.

“How?” Shannon asked.

“The cops. They still have lots of questions. I could maybe go to the station with you to tell them everything.”

“The part where everything is
my
fault, you mean?” Shannon dipped her face into her knees. “If I hadn’t given him that stupid bracelet, he’d be alive right now, Maggie.”

“Shannon,” I said, “I’ve been blaming myself in one way or another since the day he died. But the thing is, while we all played a part in what happened, it was an accident.”

Shannon looked up at me, tears streaking her face. “Yeah,” she said. “Maybe you’re right.”

“Does that mean you’ll go talk to the detectives with me?”

I stood then, holding my hand out for Shannon to grab. She looked at me, her cheeks glistening with fresh tears, and grabbed on tight, letting me pull her up.

“Here,” I said, shoving my hand into the pocket of my shorts and pulling Joey’s bracelet out into the rays of sunlight streaming through Shannon’s bedroom windows. The light winked off the smooth surface of the glass beads, splashing brilliant blue puddles into the space between us. “This is yours.”

“Maggie, I—”

“Shannon. I don’t want it.”

Shannon didn’t say another word as she tugged the leather strap from my fingers and turned, walking to her dresser, arm outstretched toward the velvet-lined box that had housed those turquoise beads for so many years. When she pulled the top off, I saw it buried snuggly within. The picture that had been taken the previous summer at Gertie’s Dairy Farm. The one where all of us had gathered around Joey, arms raised in celebration after he conquered the Ten-Dipper Challenge, mouths spread in wide, carefree smiles. I realized as I stood there in the middle of Shannon’s sunny bedroom that Joey had positioned himself right where he thought he belonged—in the very center of all of our lives.

24

Back to the Beginning

“I like this hiding spot so much better than the other one,” I said as I stepped from the trail, walking to the rock where Adam was standing and looking down at the water. I kicked my shoes off and sat back on the cool rock beneath us, listening to the trickle of the creek as the sun slowly dipped behind the thick of trees just off to our west.

Adam sat next to me, the movement stirring the air enough that I smelled him—the soapy, sweaty, summery scent making my vision swim. Adam tilted his head toward me, his face glowing in the sugary pink tint of the sky.

“I figured you’d never speak to me again,” Adam said. “After the cliff top last weekend.”

“You’re lucky,” I said.

“I know I am.”

We were silent for a while, the good kind of silent you can only have with a close friend. I sat there next to him, breathing in the scent of the summer, listening to the call of the crickets, a lazy breeze blowing through my hair.

“You ready to tell me what happened at Shannon’s house on the Fourth of July?” Adam asked, breaking the stillness that had settled around us.

I shrugged. “You were there.”

“I’m not talking about the stuff I could see. You went into that strange daze again, just like the day of Joey’s accident. Totally freaked me out. I’d appreciate it if you’d stop doing that.” He poked me in the side with his elbow.