The Last Time We Say Goodbye Part 17

"I have big news," I say softly. "Good news." Because we could both use some good news right now.

She looks up at me, bewildered, tear-streaked. "What?"

"I got into MIT."

Her face opens up like a flower in the sun. She pulls away and stares at me for several moments, not talking, just looking at me with an expression that says maybe there is a G.o.d after all. Who has answered her prayers.

"I'm glad," she whispers when she regains her powers of speech. "I'm so glad, Lexie."

I try to smile. "Me too."

"Now you can go," she says fiercely.

"I can go?" I don't understand.

She takes me by the shoulders and gives me a gentle shake. "You can build a new life for yourself. That's what I want, for you to get away from this place. I want you to go to Ma.s.sachusetts and never look back."

She says it like we're the last people in line for a lifeboat on a sinking s.h.i.+p, telling me to leave her. Telling me to let her drown.

"It doesn't have to be like that," I croak. "You can build a new life for yourself, too."

She lets go of me and turns away. "No. My life is over."

I'm shocked to hear her say it that way. She was always an optimist, before. Even when Dad left, after she got over the initial shock, she kept saying, "He'll come to his senses. He'll come back. We'll go along the best we can until then. This isn't the end of the world." Even though it clearly was. The end of our world, anyway.

And now she's saying her life is over.

"Mom . . ." I don't even know where to start.

She's not looking at me anymore; she's staring at the mirror with the Post-it and the words below empty.

"You're not dead," I say, my voice sharper than I mean it to be. "You're alive. It's hard now but . . . you'll heal. You can still be happy, someday."

She goes to the bookshelf and returns the catcher's mitt to its proper place. "No, sweetie," she says in her official parenting voice, like I'm ten all over again and she's telling me the facts of life. "I'll never be happy. How could I, when he's not here? When I have failed him this way? No. No. I will not heal from this. My life is over," she says. "If you weren't here I'd . . ." She trails off.

"If I wasn't here, you'd what?"

She shakes her head. "Nothing." She tries to give me a rea.s.suring smile. "Don't worry about me, Lexie. I'll be fine. I won't be happy-I can't be-but I'll be fine."

I watch in silence as she continues unpacking the box, helping her find where an item belongs if she doesn't remember. Then there's only one thing left to deal with: the collage frame that Ty filled up in the days before he died, the one with the pictures of his friends and family.

That doesn't have a place where it belongs. After the funeral somebody stuck it behind his bedroom door, and it's been there ever since.

Mom lays it on the bed and looks at it.

"I don't know what to do with this. I could take the photos out and send them to the people in them, but I can't remember their names. Isn't that silly? I honestly don't know who most of these people are." She points to a picture on one edge. "I remember Damian and Patrick. The three amigos, I used to call them. And I remember the boys he played with when he was in elementary school. But his friends now . . . I was in nursing school by then. I didn't pay as close attention as I should have. I don't know them. What kind of mother am I, that I didn't know his friends?"

"It's okay, Mom."

She shakes her head. We stand for a few minutes looking at the pictures. One depicts Mom giving Ty a bath when he was just a baby, which seems odd, that he would want people to see that picture, but Mom is so beautiful in it. She's wearing curlers and a plaid s.h.i.+rt with the sleeves rolled up, one hand cupping Ty's round baby head, the other dragging a washcloth over him. She's looking up into the camera with half a smile, chagrined to be caught so undone, and she looks incredibly young and vibrant and, at the same time, maternal and sweet. She looks like a different person from the woman standing beside me now.

In another corner I spot the picture Mom took of Ty and me the night of homecoming, me in my green dress, Ty in his tux and his flawlessly makeup-covered forehead. He wanted people to see that, too. Us together. His arm around me. That's something. It's not an explanation or a goodbye, but it's something.

And suddenly it hits me: the missing photographs. This is where Ty must have put the missing photographs.

I scan the collage again, but there's no picture of Ty and Dad hunting. No picture of Dad at graduation. No picture of Dad here at all.

Like she can read my mind, Mom points to an empty slot in the collage, the only empty slot, which makes it seem deliberately empty. I noticed it at the funeral, but didn't give it too much thought. Now, though, Mom is looking at it with a sorrowful expression.

"Your dad should have gone here," she murmurs. "That was cruel of Tyler, leaving him out."

Cruel is not a word that I would ever use to describe Ty.

"Dad probably didn't even notice," I say.

"He noticed." Mom touches her finger to the gla.s.s. "I watched him that day, keeping in the back of the church, out of our way, because he wanted to stay by . . ." Her lips tighten. "But near the end, when the crowd was thinning, he came up and looked at this. He went from picture to picture, looking. And he never found himself there."

"Maybe Dad doesn't deserve to be there," I argue.

She sighs. "Maybe not. But you should have seen his face when he realized he wasn't included. He looked about as hurt as I've ever seen him. Then he just put his hands in his pockets and walked away. It was cruel. I didn't think Tyler had that kind of vindictiveness in him."

"Ty was angry," I said. "He had every right to-"

Mom lifts her hand to stop me. "I know. I just wish he hadn't ended things that way."

I chew on my bottom lip, thinking. I look at the collage again, and then I suddenly notice that right in the middle, in a place of prominence, even, there's a picture of Ashley Davenport. Not the homecoming picture of Ty and Ashley, but a black-and-white candid shot, taken by someone who was obviously trying to be artsy with the camera. It shows Ashley and two other cheerleaders in what must have been the seconds right after the basketball team made a basket, wearing their uniforms, smiling and jumping for the crowd in the background, their eyes bright, so full of action even in the picture that I can almost hear their shouts.

Mom sees what I'm looking at. "They're so pretty, aren't they?" she says. "Teenage girls are at the height of pretty, like flowers just as they bloom."

I c.o.c.k my head at her. "Me too? Am I a flower?"

She gives me an attempt at a smile. "You're a flower."

"Did you know this girl?" I ask, tapping the gla.s.s over the cheerleader photo.

"She was Tyler's girlfriend," Mom says. "Ashley. He brought her over to the house for dinner once."

My mouth falls open. "He did? Where was I?"

"A Math Club compet.i.tion, if memory serves." She sighs, remembering. "We had pot roast I made in the slow cooker. She actually brought an apple pie that she baked herself. She was lovely, inside and out, that girl. You could see it in her. A good girl. Sweet. Just the right kind of girl for Tyler to be with."

She looks away.

"Do you know why they broke up?" I ask softly.

She shakes her head. "He didn't tell me."

"I thought she dumped him, but . . ." My gaze returns to the picture. "I guess he wasn't too mad at her if he'd put her picture up here."

"I don't know if you could really be mad at a girl like that," Mom says wistfully.

Wow, I think. She was imagining grandbabies and everything, it seems.

Mom's mouth pinches up, like all this talk about Ty's lost romantic prospects is painful to her. She picks up the collage and moves it behind the door, then takes one last long look at Ty's room. She sighs, pulls a tissue out of her pocket, and blows her nose.

"Come on," she says. "We're done in here."

She turns out the light.

5 March I don't know why, maybe because I love torturing myself, but I keep going back to the first day Steven and I were officially together. Not to the bookstore, or the date, or the kiss after, although I think about those things often enough, my own personal memory playlist that's on a continuous loop, but to a conversation I had later about Steven. With Ty.

After Steven dropped me off, I floated inside on cloud 9, bursting with all that had happened in the past few hours. Mom was working, so I couldn't girl-talk with her about it. I found my brother in the bas.e.m.e.nt, bowling on the Wii.

"Where have you been all day?" he asked when he saw me coming down the stairs, his arm swinging back as he delivered the virtual ball to the gutter. He groaned.

"Around. I saw a movie at SouthPointe." I replied. "Wow, you're not even good at virtual bowling."

"Shut up," Ty said good-naturedly, and reset the Wii so that we could both play. "Loser buys the winner McDonald's."

Then he proceeded to kick my bowling b.u.t.t.

"How was the movie?" he said after a while.

"Okay. Heavy on visuals, light on plot," I replied. I was going to leave it at that, but I wanted to tell him. I wanted to share part of this monumental day in my life. So I said, "I went with Steven."

Ty's eyes didn't leave the TV screen. "The guy from your math club or whatever?"

"Steven Blake. Yes."

"What did you used to call him? Like his geek nickname?"

"Oh," I said, laughing that he remembered. In middle school we all used to have nicknames: Mine was Luthor, after Superman's Lex Luthor-the world's greatest criminal mastermind. Eleanor's was Roosevelt, which she loathed and rallied to change to Rigby, after the Beatles song, but never pulled off. Beaker's was the only one that actually stuck past 8th grade. And Steven's was- "Hawking," I told Ty.

"After the star guy."

"After the world-famous astrophysicist and cosmologist, which means he studies the origins and structure of the universe." Sheesh. Star guy.

"Yes!" Ty rolled a perfect strike. I was beginning to suspect that he was hustling me for McDonald's. "So you went on a date. How was that?"

"It wasn't supposed to be a date, but it ended up that way. It was good. Really good, actually." I picked up my controller and immediately bowled a gutter ball. "c.r.a.p."

"I approve of this Hawking dude," Ty said as I lamely managed to knock down a few pins on my next roll. "Of course, if he breaks your heart, I'm going to have to beat him up. Brotherly duty, you know."

"Thanks." I smiled and nodded and didn't say anything else Steven-related that night. We bowled, and I lost. We must have gone to McDonald's, but I guess I blocked that part out.

That was the last time I agreed to play Wii with my brother.

It was also the last time we had anything resembling a "real" conversation about our personal lives. When he said he approved of Steven.

I wish I'd told him more. I could have talked about Steven-although not about the kissing, because no brother wants to hear about his sister making out. I could have told him about how brave Steven had been, to just ask me point-blank like that, how gentlemanly he'd been for the rest of the time, and how, in spite of my modern-feminist misgivings, I'd kind of liked that. I could have told him about the paper daisy, or the things I liked about Steven: the way he made me laugh, how he infected me with his enthusiasm, his wonder, and made me feel like I was pretty when n.o.body else had ever really made me feel that way, which shouldn't have been so important but was.

I could have shared that with Ty. If I had, maybe he would have felt comfortable doing the same. Maybe he would have let me in, that snow day when we talked about Ashley and the breakup, instead of insisting that it was nothing, that nothing had happened, that everything was fine. Maybe he would have given me the details I need to understand what went down between them, the facts I'd use to figure out what to do with this letter.

Because he didn't hate Ashley. She might have broken his heart, but he still put her picture up in his collage.

Which meant that he still considered her a friend.

ON THURSDAY I CAUSE some general confusion among our respective friends by asking Sadie to eat lunch with me. I pick a table for us in the cafeteria where I can keep an eye on Ashley Davenport. The letter is stuck under the edge of my tray, where my food sits untouched. I'm too busy to eat. I'm watching this girl who was so important to my brother that he wrote her a letter before he died. I'm planning to make my move.

I'm thankful that seniors and soph.o.m.ores, by sheer coincidence, have the same lunch period. So far I've learned way more about Ashley in the cafeteria than I did in the gym. Like: she waves at nearly everyone who pa.s.ses as they make their way down the lunch line (she's friendly), and they wave back (she's popular). She picks all the tiny chopped carrots out of her salad (she's trying to lose weight?), which she nibbles with her fingers (she has bad table manners?), and she laughs a lot (she has good teeth).

She seems like a nice girl. A lovely girl, like my mom said. Inside and out.

Over at my regular table, Table Dweeb, as we like to call it, Beaker catches my eye. She keeps looking worriedly from me to Sadie and back again, like she can't believe this turn of events: me and the shoplifter. What the heck is going on? She may be forced to stage some kind of intervention. Next to her, El glances over and gives me a smile, which I don't know how to interpret. I don't know what to make of her smiling at me. Maybe now it's easier for her to like me at a distance?

And then, of course, there's Steven. He's reading, his tall frame curled awkwardly in the metal cafeteria chair, his head bent over his book. He pushes his gla.s.ses up on his nose and drags his lower lip between his teeth, something he does when he's thinking all the deep thoughts. He rests his forehead against his fist, then jots something down in the margins.

I love that he writes in books.

"Hey," Sadie whispers to me urgently. "Here's your chance."

I look up at Sadie. "What?"

She jerks her head in Ashley's direction.

I turn back. Sure enough, Ashley's friends are getting up. They give their faint "see you at practice"s and "love you"s and then they're gone. Ashley sits picking at her carrot slivers alone.

It's like the universe is giving me this opportunity. If I believed in that sort of thing.

Ashley reaches into the backpack at her feet and pulls out a book: Persuasion, by Jane Austen.

Yes. She even freaking reads cla.s.sic literature. This girl is too good to be true.

It's time. I slide out the letter and stand up. All of a sudden my heart starts beating like a bra.s.s band. Whomp whomp whomp.

"You can do it," Sadie whispers.

I can do it. I can take twenty steps across the cafeteria and hand a letter to a girl.

I can say: Hi, Ty left this for you. So . . . here.

And then I can give it to her and I can turn around and walk away.

So I won't see her face when she reads it.

Or maybe she won't read it here, with all these people around. Maybe she'll go to the library and find that empty corner behind the stacks. That's what I would do. Or maybe she'll wait until she gets home.

And maybe I should be more discreet. We're in the middle of a crowded cafeteria. People will notice. People will be listening.