This is What Goodbye Looks Like (14 page)

I add a memory card to the mental list of supplies I’ll need to pick up from that photography store. Then I stick the card back in my camera and rest it gently on my nightstand. I grab my backpack from the base of my bed, and it only takes me a couple moments to crack open my Chemistry textbook and immerse myself in the latest chapter. A swirl of numbers and theories and equations fills my mind, driving back the squeal of crunching metal.

For a little while, at least.

Chapter Fourteen

For the first time, Prosecutor Whittaker looked visibly agitated, his bushy eyebrows furrowed as he paced in front of me. It was my third day on the stand, and he had abandoned his casual sitting and patient questions. The court session had started only a few minutes ago, but I could already tell that things were going to proceed differently today. The hushed audience in the courtroom seemed to think the same, and the room was filled with wide eyes lined with dark bags.

“Now tell me, Miss Alessio,” he said, using that phrase I despised. “Was the accident a direct result of your mother’s drunkenness?”

In my mind, I saw our car approaching the darkened bend in the road. “I’m not sure, sir.”

“Did you see the accident happen?”

“Yes, sir. I told you, I was conscious throughout the accident.”

And after. I was awake to see Parker’s broken body lying next to his wrecked car, to try to run over and help, to scream in agony when my shattered legs refused to move right. To scream even louder when I realized Camille couldn’t move at all.

Whittaker nodded curtly. “Yes, I’m sorry you had to witness it. But can you please describe what happened in the moments leading up to the accident?”

I stopped to take a sip of water from my flimsy, styrofoam cup, and my shaking hand made some slosh into my lap. I stared at the droplets as they soaked into my skirt, the cool water chilling my throbbing knee.

“Parker Ashbury’s car came around the bend on Greystone Road, and we collided.”

Whittaker rubbed at his neatly trimmed beard, muffling a sigh. “Yes, that’s already been established multiple times. But who caused the accident?”

My eyes drifted up to the front row of seats, locking with Mom’s. She was sitting with her shoulders straight and her hands clasped in her lap, but even from up on the stand, I could see the tremors running through her. I thought of all the brownies those shaking hands helped me bake, all the patches they sewed onto my Girl Scouts uniform, all the math homework they helped me solve. How could they also be the hands that steered straight into Parker’s path?

I knew it wasn’t too late to turn over the video. I could clear up the events of the accident without leaving a single speck of doubt. I could give the Ashbury family honesty and closure, even if it was such a pathetic offering compared to what had been stolen from them.

Or I could save my mom from a prison sentence and keep my own family intact.

I took a shuddering breath. “You’re right when you say my mom was drunk,” I murmured into the microphone.

Whittaker raised his eyebrows, as if surprised I’d actually admitted it that bluntly. “But is this what caused the crash?”

The scene flashed in front of me, making me flinch. Mom’s SUV had hit a small pothole and lurched out of control for half a second. If anyone sober had been driving, it would have caused a single moment of panic before the car righted itself. But Mom had jerked the wheel too hard, dragging the car into a sharp correction that sent us skidding into the opposite lane.

The same lane where Parker Ashbury was driving toward us at forty miles per hour.

“Miss Alessio?”

I shook my head to clear it as Whittaker’s voice broke me out of the memory. He must have thought it was an answer, because he said, “Please remember to speak out loud and into the microphone for the record. Did your mother cause the accident on the night of May fourth?”

I forced in a deep breath. “My mom wasn’t the only person who had been drinking that night,” I said, reciting exactly what my dad had told me to say. “Parker Ashbury had alcohol in his system, too. The coroner’s report said so.”

Parker’s name was like acid on my tongue, and I wanted to spit it out and apologize to his family for daring to use it. In the corner of the courtroom, I heard a sharp gasp, but I didn’t need to look up to know who it belonged to. Parker’s mother seemed to have been stripped of words, but her small gasps were like sharpened exclamation points stabbing into me every few minutes.

“Yes, Parker had alcohol in his bloodstream,” Whittaker said with one of his careful nods. “But it was a perfectly legal amount.”

“Barely,” I said. “It was at point-zero-six percent, right? That’s nearly illegal, and more than enough to get most people tipsy.”

More gasps came from Parker’s family, but now murmuring from the jury box joined in. Shame coursed through my veins, hot and thick. No matter how many times Dad told me it was a reasonable argument, I knew it wasn’t. Parker was a twenty-one-year-old who drank regularly and was close to six feet tall. He might have been close to being drunk by legal standards, but in reality, he probably would have needed several more drinks to really get drunk.

Whittaker gave an exasperated sigh. “What exactly are you saying, Miss Alessio? That Parker was the one who caused the accident?”

I remembered the horror on Parker’s face in the split second before the accident. His bright blue eyes had been frozen like that when he died—pained and terrified and shocked.

I opened my mouth to tell the truth, but then I pictured another scene—my sister waking up, and her blue eyes mirroring that same expression as she discovered the aftermath of the accident. Months lost to a coma, her normal life completely ripped to shreds. I couldn’t rip her mom away, too. Losing Parker had devastated the Ashbury family. I couldn’t sentence Mom to rot away in prison and inflict the same sort of loss on my little sister.

“Miss Alessio, please answer the question,” Whittaker said, his voice tense with impatience. “Was it your mother who caused the accident, or was it Parker Ashbury?”

“Parker came around a bend in the road,” I murmured, my voice quiet despite the microphone in front of me. “We barely even had time to see him. He hit a pothole, and he lost control and swerved into our lane. And that was when he hit us.”

Part Two

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Chapter Fifteen

Seth’s restless from the moment I step into the library, his usual mug of tea clutched in his hand, and his long legs carrying him back and forth along the shelves in the corner of the library. Koda paces uncertainly at his side, her tail drooping lower than usual.

“Hey,” I say, sitting at the same table we were at yesterday. “You okay?”

He nods, but quickly changes it into a shake of his head. “I was going over the photo part of Parker’s project last night,” he says. “He was about a third of the way done with it when he passed away.”

“Oh,” I murmur.

He pauses, frozen between two shelves of classic novels. Koda lets out a soft whine and nudges his hand, and he runs his fingers through her thick scruff, clinging to the fur a little longer than he needs to.

“I still can’t figure out what Parker was aiming to do with it,” he says, his tone so low it sounds almost like a confession. He slips his glasses off and rubs at his eyes, and judging by the dark bags smudged below them, I’m guessing he was as sleepless as I was last night. “I think I might have asked for your help too soon,” he mutters. “If I can’t figure out Parker’s thesis, there’s no way we can finish his project.”

I pick at a loose thread on the strap of my backpack, winding it around the tip of my finger. I know Seth can’t see me, but I still don’t want to look up and watch the grief in his eyes.

“You said he wrote a paper, right?” I say. “Doesn’t that explain what the photos are supposed to contain?”

Seth presses the heel of his palm to his forehead. “No. The paper was about how certain literature concepts can be applied to photojournalism, too. So I know he was going to create a series of photos following a literature concept, but I don’t have many details beyond that.”

“What about asking his professors?” I ask. “I mean, didn’t they have to approve his project before he started working on it?”

“His lead professor approved it verbally, but she did the same thing for at least forty other graduating students in his major. Parker went to San Diego State University. You’re from San Diego, right? So you must know how the university is.”

“It’s considered pretty prestigious,” I say hesitantly.

Seth gives an impatient sigh. “Yeah, prestigious enough to draw over thirty thousand students. It’s over-crowded, and Parker and his project have completely slipped through the cracks. His supervising professor can’t remember what thesis she approved for him, and she’s doing me a giant favor by letting me turn in a project for him at all. So it’s not like I can go poking around the university asking for more information. It’s a dead end.”

“But he left at least a beginning for you to work off of, didn’t he?” I say. “I mean, you just said he got the project like a third of the way done.”

Seth gives a sharp nod. “Yeah. He left a file with a bunch of photos, plus a copy of his paper and some handouts he was using for research. But that’s it.”

“Did you try talking to other people in his class to see if they had more info? Or maybe his roommates?”

“Of course,” he snaps, but then he winces at his own harshness. “Sorry. It’s just, I thought I’d have this figured out by now. But no one at his school has any idea what the photo part of his thesis was. And Brie and Landon have gone over the photos like twenty times with me, and we still don’t know what the hell he was trying to do with them.”

He rakes a hand across his scalp, ruffling up his hair. “Sorry, I don’t mean to sound snippy. Don’t take it personally. You haven’t done anything wrong.”

“I didn’t stop her,”
I want to say. “
I could have stopped my mom from driving, but I didn’t, and I could have turned over the video evidence, but I didn’t, and your brother could still be alive now, or your family could at least be at peace with his death, but he isn’t and they aren’t. And I’ve done everything wrong. Everything.”

But I hold in the words, and instead, I just say, “If I’m going to take any pictures, I need to get my camera fixed. So why don’t we just focus on that for today? We can figure out the thesis later.”

Seth slumps into a chair across from me, but he offers a hesitant smile, the expression strained yet sincere. “Landon owes me a ride into town. We could go to that camera shop today, if you wanted.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Let’s go get it fixed up.”

***

Landon agrees to drive us, but not before making it abundantly clear that he’ll never forgive us for it. Apparently, asking for rides into town on a Saturday morning is a mortal sin in Landon’s book. Or maybe it only counts as a sin on mornings like this, when he’s hungover and wincing at every little noise. Harting’s party scene is way smaller than my previous school’s, but it definitely exists, and I’m only surprised I haven’t seen more evidence of it before.

I almost feel bad for Landon. Almost. My pity for hungover people has pretty much disappeared since the accident, and Landon’s sloppy driving snuffs out the last of it. I want to yank the wheel out of his hands and take over, so we’ll stop taking the icy corners so sharply. But I haven’t dared to touch a steering wheel in months, and I’m not even sure my screwy legs could work the pedals, so I just grit my teeth and focus on not hyperventilating.

Seth seems to have about as much pity as I do, because after Landon moans dramatically about his headache for the eighth time, Seth reaches over and swats at the dashboard until he manages to switch on the radio. The pained groan Landon lets out is five times louder than the pop song playing through the speakers, but he still makes sure to thoroughly cuss out Seth as he smacks the radio off.

We spend the rest of the short ride into town in silence, but as we park in front of the photography shop, Seth fishes through the glovebox until he finds a bottle of Aspirin. He shakes out a couple of the pills and hands them over to Landon, and even though I’m pretty sure he rattles the bottle louder than he has to, Landon grumbles his thanks and snatches up the peace treaty.

Landon cuts the engine, and Koda lets out a small whine as the car’s heater shuts off. She’s snuggled up beside me in the backseat, her head resting on my lap and her back pressed against the heater vents, hogging all the warm air. I run my hands through her thick coat, scratching under her vest, where she seems to like it best.

Landon leans back in his seat and closes his eyes. “See?” he grumbles. “Even the dog thinks it’s stupid to be out this early on a Saturday.”

“You owed me a ride,” Seth reminds him for maybe the twentieth time.

“And you picked the worst possible time to cash in the favor,” Landon mutters as he pops the Aspirin in his mouth. “Asshole.”

“Sorry, Landon,” I say.

“No need to apologize,” Seth says to me, shoving open his door and letting a gust of chilled air into the SUV. “You’re not the one who decided to do tequila shots last night.”