This is What Goodbye Looks Like (2 page)

“I’ve been on vacation to snowy places,” I say. “But, yeah, this’ll be my first time living in it.”

He makes a broad circling gesture with his finger, and I hold my breath until he reaches back and grips the wheel with two hands. “Harting makes a big fuss about supporting the local community, but most of the students are still from outside Vermont,” he says. “So you won’t be the only one.”

“Good to know,” I say, not that it’s actually a surprise. After battling through Harting’s admissions process, I’m well-aware that the school’s elite academics draw students from all over the country.

The road takes a sharp turn, making my heart pick up its pace again, and Nathan slows the taxi as we enter the town of Hendrickson. My breath freezes in my lungs, and I can’t help wondering if I’m really here, or if someone has shoved me straight into a postcard. Aging brick buildings make up most of the town, dark red and impeccably maintained. Ivy clings to everything, poking through the snow and winding up the pale trunks of the maple trees lining the streets. The trees are bare right now, but the glittering icicles hanging from their branches somehow makes them just as beautiful as the rest of the town.

“It’s gorgeous,” I murmur out loud. I reach for the camera around my neck, wincing when I realize for the thousandth time it’s not there. I comfort myself by patting the backpack beside me and making sure the lump of my camera is inside. It’s ruined, the lens and screen both shattered in the accident, but it wasn’t like I could just leave it at home.

Camille gave the camera to me for my seventeenth birthday, just one month before the accident. Our parents helped pay for it, since a brand-new DSLR digital camera isn’t something a twelve-year-old could afford. But my sister had still been so proud of her gift, her grin huge and her eyes twinkling as she helped me unwrap it.

“Prettiest place you’ve ever seen, isn’t it?” Nathan says, his tone almost smug as he barges into my thoughts. “Don’t answer that. If you say ‘no,’ it’s my job as a local to hurt you.”

He glances over his shoulder to give me a teasing wink. I force myself to give him another kind-of-but-not-really smile, even though my heart thuds painfully in my chest. Can’t he just focus on the road?

We pass through the first half of the town, and after halting at an empty stop light, the taxi cruises down the main road and through the other half. This part of the town is much more modern, with updated buildings and a gorgeous library that’s surprisingly large. I let out a small breath of relief as I spot a Subway and a Starbucks sitting on the corner next to the library. Hendrickson may be a small town, but at least it’s not barbaric.

It seems fitting that Parker Ashbury is from here. Everything looks so picture perfect, just like his family. His father is an engineer, his mother an elementary school teacher, and his younger brother, Seth, is a model student at Harting. Combined with this cute little town, the pieces of Parker’s family should all fit together to spell out “middle class paradise.” And they used to, I guess.

But now Parker is dead. I watched him bleed out on a patch of cracked pavement just six feet away from me. I watched his chest heave and then shudder and then not move at all.

It was enough to ruin me, but somehow not enough to destroy his family. While my parents crumbled during the trial like moldy bread, the Ashbury family remained solid, always holding hands and turning to lean on each other’s shoulders as they cried. They lost the most and stayed the strongest.

And I need to know how they did it. I owe it to Camille to figure it out. Something kept the Ashbury family from falling apart, and if there’s any chance of me fixing the broken remnants of my own family, I need to know exactly what they did right.

A shiver tickles my spine as we leave the town, but it’s not from the cold. Ever since I decided to attend Harting, it’s seemed more like a dream than anything, and I can’t quite believe it’s actually happening. For one, I didn’t think I had any chance of being admitted to such a prestigious school or getting the scholarship I needed. For two, I’ve only been to the East Coast on short vacations to Chicago, so the concept of living at a Vermont boarding school seemed outlandish at best. And for three, Seth Ashbury goes here. His entire existence feels like a dream most of the time, and not the good kind.

We keep following the winding road for a few more minutes, my heart rate picking up with each mile that passes. Nathan starts humming the theme music from
Indiana Jones
, like we’re on some sort of grand adventure, and then he pulls sharply to the left. I yelp, thinking he’s going to crash us into a snow bank, but then I see the twisting driveway that leads away from the main road. Nathan’s just hit the climax of the theme song when we pass through a row of towering maples and come to the entrance of the school.

None of the pictures online could do this place justice. Most of the buildings are made up of the same red brick as the town, and ivy climbs up nearly everything but the tall, arched windows. The tiled roofs are covered in snow, and icicles cling to their ledges, water dripping from their crystal tips and down onto the paved pathways. With the snow insulating our surroundings, I feel like I’ve just stepped into a Robert Frost poem.

I clutch at my backpack, trying to ignore the temptation to take some pictures. Photography is my passion, my life, and I won’t let myself enjoy it when I so carelessly let other lives slip away.

“Well, here we are,” Nathan says, pulling up to one of the handicap spots that line the front of the small parking lot. Only senior students and teachers are allowed to keep cars on campus, so I guess there’s no need for a huge lot like my old school had. “I feel sort of special using the handicapped spot,” he says, shooting me a smile. “It’s like front row seats or something.”

“Yeah,” I say. “It can be convenient occasionally.”

Sometimes parking up close will save me a full three minutes of travel. Still doesn’t make up for the past eight months of surgeries, medications, and physical therapy. Not to mention the constant pain and limp that might not ever completely go away. Speaking of which...

“Can you help me get my bags out of the back?” I ask. “I’m pretty sure I’m going to fall on my butt if I try to juggle them all.”

Nathan salutes me dramatically. “Righto, ma’am.”

I think he’s trying to imitate a London cabbie, but it sounds more like a Southern cowboy with a lisp. Nathan jumps out of the idling taxi and strides around to the trunk, and I shove open my door. Icy air rushes into the car, stealing away every speck of warmth, along with the breath in my lungs. Goosebumps prickle all over me, although my left leg hardly even feels the chill. The surgeons were able to save most of the motion in my leg, but a lot of my nerves are still screwy. They sense pain and not much else.

When I first woke up after the accident, the doctors made this big fuss about how lucky I was to have escaped more serious injuries. It’s been eight months, and I still haven’t figured out how a word like “luck” plays into this situation at all.

Nathan bangs around as he tries to get my bags out from where he tucked them in the trunk. Apparently, they’re stuck, because he’s rapidly switching between cussing at them and cajoling them to behave. I rub my freezing lips, half to check they’re still there, and half to check that I’m not smiling at his antics. It’s become a habit since the accident to make sure I never look too happy. Looking happy makes other people act happy, which leads to them treating me nice, which leads to me feeling the sort of gut-wrenching guilt that makes me want to vomit.

Once Camille wakes up, I’ll let myself smile again. Hell, I’ll smile so much, I’ll probably break my face. But, until then, it’s just not right to be happy when my little sister is stuck in the horrifying oblivion of a coma.

Nathan finally manages to get the bags unstuck, and just as he releases a whoop of triumph, I hear footsteps coming toward us. A girl jogs across the campus courtyard toward the taxi, throwing out her arms as she tries to keep her footing on the slippery cement. She skids to a stop, barely managing to avoid barreling into Nathan as he brings my two luggage bags around the side of the car.

“You must be Lea!” She clasps her hands together and smiles, exposing perfect white teeth. Actually, pretty much everything about her is perfect, from her heart-shaped face covered in pristine makeup to her wavy blond hair.

I offer a hesitant smile in return. I have no idea what’s got this chick so happy, since I’m the last thing she should get excited about.

“Hey,” I say. It comes out sounding more like a cough, my vocal cords stuttering with a mix of anxiety and damaged nerves. I clear my throat a bit and add, “Yeah, I’m Lea.”

“Oh my god, we’ve been waiting
forever
for you to get here. I mean, we’re all just bored out of our brains waiting for the semester to start, and the snow is driving everyone totally insane, and then we hear there’s a new senior coming! And that’s totally cool, because people never transfer senior year, so yeah, this is making everything better.”

Her obvious California accent is strangely reassuring, and the way she chatters so quickly brings comforting memories of Camille. I ended up with a sort of vague, nondescript West Coast accent, probably because I spent too much time as a kid with my nose in books. But Camille was always the definition of a social butterfly, and my little sister talks almost exactly like this girl.

“Glad I can be a source of entertainment,” I say. But then I force myself to smile a little, so she knows I’m just being snarky and not mean.

The girl lets out a chirping laugh and extends her hand. It’s covered in a soft pink mitten with teal edging, and I get the feeling it costs more than my entire outfit. “I’m Brianna,” she says. “But everyone just calls me Brie.”

I take her hand and shake it, trying not to show my surprise at how firm her grasp is. “Nice to meet you. I’d introduce myself, but it sounds like you already know who I am.”

“Yup,” she says with a nod. “Ms. Thorne told us all about you. She’s our dorm supervisor, and you’re going to love her. Unless you land in her physics class, in which case you’ll hate her and your life. Anyway, she told us you’re from San Diego, so I asked for you as my roommate, because my old one got mono a couple months back, and she’s still home sick, and it’d just really suck to go an entire semester without a roomie, you know? But then you showed up, and I thought we’d be the perfect match, since I’m from San Diego, too.”

Nathan sets down my luggage and gently nudges Brie in the side with his elbow. “Oh my gawd, Brie!” he says in an exaggeratedly high voice. “Like, no one would
ever
guess that you’re totally, like, a Cali girl.”

She laughs and hits at him with the loose end of her scarf, which is also pink and a designer brand. “Mock the accent all you want, Nathan. I’m not the one driving a taxi and making pizzas for a living.”

“
Temporarily
driving a taxi and making pizzas,” he corrects, holding up a finger. “I’m going to culinary school soon, remember?”

“And remember we decided that wasn’t actually happening?” Brie says. “Because I’m going to die of mozzarella withdrawal if you leave. Nobody else makes pizza like you.”

They just smile at each other for a long moment. Then Brie seems to notice all the sudden how close she is to Nathan, and she takes a large step back, her cheeks reddening as she blushes down at her fuzzy beige boots. She looks over at me, probably hoping I’ll move the conversation along, but she suddenly tilts her head in a curious expression.

“Did you go to Ackerman before you came here?” she asks.

“No,” I say, recognizing the name of one of the high schools on the coastal side of San Diego. “I live further inland, so I went to Unity Creek.”

Brie shrugs. “Huh. You look familiar, so I thought we might have been in the same freshman class. I was at Ackerman a year before I came to Harting.”

Her curiosity seems innocent enough, but it still makes my stomach drop. After the accident, Camille’s picture got shared around a lot by the media and on the internet, so there’s a good chance Brie’s seen it if she’s from San Diego. Camille is a blue-eyed blond, so most people don’t immediately assume we’re sisters, since I have dark hair and grey eyes. But both of us have our mom’s refined features and sharp chin, and if you stuck Camille’s picture right next to mine, it’d be pretty obvious we’re related.

“Sorry,” I mumble, realizing I need to give an answer. “I never went to Ackerman, and I don’t even know anyone who goes there.”

Brie hesitates a moment longer, but then she just shrugs again. “Yeah, I guess I should have expected that. San Diego’s a big place.”

I let out a small, relieved breath and then quickly try to change the subject. I gesture between Brie and Nathan. “But you two have obviously met before. How do you guys know each other?” I ask, trying to keep my tone casual as I step out of the taxi.

Pain immediately lances up my left leg, and my right leg tingles with numbness as the damaged nerves try to recover from an hour of sitting. I attempt to cover my sudden wobbliness by reaching into the taxi for my cane. But it must be pretty obvious how unsteady I am, because Nathan swoops past me and snags my cane out of the backseat, offering it to me with a gentlemanly flourish.

Part of me wants to snap at him that I could have gotten it myself. But a larger part of me really doesn’t want to become known as the new girl who fell flat on her ass the minute she got to campus. So I nod my thanks to him and take the cane, trying not to look relieved as I lean against it and take some weight off my aching left knee.