The Last Time We Say Goodbye Part 9

Which is too bad, since I can't cook to save my life, and Mom's becoming less and less reliable in that department.

I'm suddenly hopeful as I go to answer the door. A ca.s.serole sounds amazing. I'm starved.

I open the door, and there's Sadie McIntyre, our neighbor from three doors down. Voil. But something's off. She doesn't follow the regular visitor protocol when she sees me, doesn't smile, doesn't ask how I am. She's not holding a plate of cookies or a pan of enchiladas or any kind of offering whatsoever. She's just standing there, one leg crossed over the other, staring at me with bright blue eyes, her expression neutral.

"Hi?" I say, a question.

"I'm going to Jamba Juice," she says in her cigarette-husky voice. "Do you want to go?"

This request makes no sense for a number of reasons: 1. It's February. In Nebraska. Today's a particularly chilly one; my cracked phone reports that it's hovering at around four degrees right now. Fahrenheit. When Sadie asks me, the question comes in a puff of steam.

Do you want to go to Jamba Juice?

Presumably to get a frozen drink.

2. Sadie and I haven't spent any real time together since elementary school.

When we were kids, when we were really little, I mean, we practically lived at each other's houses. I had my own secret path from my back door, across Mr. Croft's porch, along the big stone wall that stretches across Mrs. Widdison's backyard, through a gap in the lilac bushes that edges the McIntyres' property, and across their lawn to Sadie's bedroom window. I could have walked that route in my sleep.

Sadie was my first friend. I can't even remember a time before I knew her, although our parents liked to tell a story about how Sadie ran away from home when she was two and ended up in our backyard sandbox, which is how we met. A firecracker was what my parents called Sadie. She was my best friend for years. If the other kids called me Four Eyes or c.o.ke Bottles or Squinty (the gla.s.ses were a big liability back then), I could always rely on Sadie to come to my defense. She had four older brothers, and if anybody picked on either one of us, Sadie would set her brothers on the bully the way you sic a pack of dogs. I survived elementary school, in large part, on account of Sadie and the McIntyre boys.

I can still picture Sadie from those days: scrawny and tan, her curly, float-away hair bleached almost white by the summer sun, wearing a clean but faded T-s.h.i.+rt handed down by one of her brothers, which was always so long on her it would flap at her knees as she ran. Sadie loved to run. She never walked anywhere if she could get away with running there. And because I liked her so much, and because she was my friend, I always ran after her.

Until one day, when Sadie stopped running. She got a bike, and picked up a paper route from her older brother, so she could buy her own clothes when she started sixth grade. She started wearing makeup, and smiling in a different way. She made herself over into a whole new Sadie.

To be fair, I changed too, that year. I started hanging out with Jill and Eleanor and Steven. Sadie and I grew apart. It happens. As a soph.o.m.ore Sadie had an unfortunate incident with shoplifting, which the entire neighborhood knows about but doesn't speak of. She hangs out with the stoner crowd. I'm in the geek brigade. We're still friendly, but our social circles don't often overlap.

Now she's standing on my doorstep in a worn red plaid jacket and jeans with deliberate holes in the legs, her blond curls tucked under a black knit hat. She's wearing gloves and too much eyeliner. I wonder why the stoners always feel the need to wear eyeliner.

"Lex?" she prompts, because I still haven't answered her question.

Oh, right. Jamba Juice.

I can't fathom what she wants from me, what she could be up to, but I also can't think of a good excuse, and honestly, the idea of getting out of the house for a while appeals to me. So I nod and remove the rubber gloves.

"Sure," I say. "Just let me get my coat."

Jamba Juice is deserted when we arrive. Big surprise. The guy behind the counter acts startled to see us, like we must have wandered in by mistake.

"Whew," Sadie breathes with a playful smile as she saunters up to the counter. "It's a scorcher out there. I am parched."

She's joking, but it doesn't compute with Counter Guy, who puts down his phone mid-text and stares at us like this has to be some kind of punking situation, like any second now he's going to spot a camera crew filming this.

"I'll have the Matcha Green Tea Blast," Sadie says without even consulting the menu, like she's here every day. "With the antioxidant boost." She turns to me. "You get one, too, Lex. My treat. Got to combat those free renegades."

Free radicals, I think, but I don't correct her. I order the same.

"Can we sit anywhere?" Sadie asks Counter Guy after she pays. "Or do we need to wait for a table to become available?"

He waves a hand across the empty shop and goes back to his phone, annoyed like we're interrupting his free time. Sadie picks a table in the far corner, slings her sizable leather purse over the back of her chair, plops herself down, and goes right to her drink, which is, I should mention, about the same color and texture as fresh guacamole.

This should be interesting.

"Some people," she says, "have no sense of humor."

I take a tenuous sip of the smoothie. It's surprisingly good.

"So," Sadie says after our smoothies are about a quarter of the way depleted. "I want to talk to you about something."

Here it comes. The "I'm so sorry" speech. The sympathetic squeeze of the hand. The "how can I help?" offer that I will actually feel guilty about when I refuse. The part where I will become Sadie's new pet project.

"I saw you the other night," she says. "Running."

Oh. That. I blink up at her. I try to imagine what I must have looked like, out there without my coat on, tearing through our neighborhood like I was being chased by wild dogs.

An insane person, that's what I looked like. A stark raving lunatic.

"Are you taking up running?" Sadie asks.

The idea is so preposterous that I almost laugh out loud. Even in those days when I used to run around after Sadie, I always hated it. I despised every aspect of running: the sweating, the huffing and puffing, the weird taste I'd get in my mouth, the way my s.h.i.+ns ached afterward. I make it a rule to avoid physical exertion if at all possible.

But what can I tell her, I was running away from the ghost of my dead brother?

"Something like that," I mumble.

Sadie nods like she's confirming a rumor she's heard about me. "That's great," she says. "I've been thinking about running again myself. I got this app on my phone that's supposed to take you from the couch to running five K in like a month. You start out alternating running and walking and then end up running the whole time, by the end. It burns like five hundred calories per hour."

"That's what I've heard," I say.

"So maybe we could run together," she suggests casually, and fixes me with this strange stare, like she's throwing out some kind of challenge.

Uh-oh. Danger, Will Robinson. Red alert.

"Uh, sure," I manage to get out. "We should totally do that. I mean, I'm kind of busy right now, but maybe in a few weeks. And I don't know if it's a great idea to run in the cold, bad for your lungs or something. Maybe in the spring. But then I have Physics Bowl, and I have to take a bunch of AP tests, and my schedule gets pretty hairy. Maybe in the summer . . ."

Sadie's eyes narrow.

"Oh, Lex," she says then. "Whatever."

When we were in fifth grade, we went through a phase where we played this game called Whatever, which is where you're basically trying to get rid of all your cards by lying about what you have, but if someone says whatever and catches you in the lie, you have to take the whole pile. Sadie was a master of that game, I remember. She could always pick out my fibs.

She's calling me a liar.

"Sadie . . . ," I begin.

"Something's going on with you," she says, folding her arms across her chest. "You were scared, that night on the road. I want to know what you were running from."

I stare at her helplessly. "I wasn't running from anything-"

"Whatever, Lex," she says. "What-ever. You're in some kind of trouble. I can feel it."

Silence builds between us. I think, Of course I'm in trouble. Haven't you been paying attention for the past two months? And: What do you care if I'm in trouble? We haven't been close for years. It's none of your business. But then the urge to tell somebody-the urge to get the past week off my chest-crashes over me like a tidal wave. Sadie's still my friend. And she's not like my other friends; she's not super rational and scientific, and maybe she won't jump to conclusions about my dubious mental health. She could be open-minded.

She could listen.

I do a quick survey of the shop. Counter Guy is nowhere to be seen, probably in a back room somewhere. The Jamba Juice is empty.

"I was running, because . . ." I take a deep breath. "Because I thought I saw Ty. And so I had to get out of my house, for a while."

Sadie leans forward. Her eyes are absolutely serious.

"Okay," she says after what I swear are the longest sixty seconds of my life. "Tell me everything."

An hour later we're holed up in my bedroom watching Long Island Medium. After I finished giving Sadie the basic details of the Ty-could-be-a-ghost story, she insisted that I bring her home and take her down into the bas.e.m.e.nt to show her the mark on the wall from where I threw the phone at Ty, like she wanted to see the evidence herself, even though there's no real evidence. She peppered me with a barrage of questions: At what time of day, precisely, did I see my brother? Did I feel hot or cold in his presence? Was he wearing white or black? Did he look normal or was he altered in any way?

I tried to answer the best that I could.

Then she stood in the middle of his bedroom gazing into the mirror like she expected him to appear at any moment. I didn't know whether to be relieved or disappointed when he didn't show.

"Is this the note?" she asked, her eyes lingering on the Post-it in the center of the gla.s.s.

Sorry Mom but I was below empty.

I nodded.

She stared at it for a few more seconds, and her voice was low when she asked, "Did he talk to you?"

"No," I answered, and I thought, This is crazy. How is it possible that we're having a conversation about this like it really happened? "He was only there for one or two seconds, both times. It was like a flash."

"Well," she said gravely, "he'll definitely try to find some way to express what he wants. He's here for a reason, and you have to figure out what that reason is."

Right.

"How do you know so much about ghosts, anyway?" I asked.

And that's how we ended up watching Long Island Medium on my laptop upstairs. I've never seen the show before, but apparently Sadie's caught almost every episode.

"Theresa's hilarious," she says now, stretched across the foot of my bed on her stomach with her feet dangling in the air. "It's almost like she can't help herself. She has to talk to the spirits wherever she finds them."

This is true. So far in this episode Theresa-the medium, who has a thick Long Island accent and huge bleached platinum hair-has felt compelled to deliver a message from beyond to the guy at the Chinese takeout place and a girl she meets at a cooking cla.s.s.

"She always bites her lip when she hears the spirits," Sadie adds. "I love how she tells people, too. She just comes out and says, 'I'm a medium. I talk to dead people.'"

I'm not sold. Not that the show isn't entertaining, because, if I'm being honest, it is. But it seems to me that the medium is simply telling people what of course they want to hear: that the person who died is safe and happy and at peace, and they shouldn't feel guilty about whatever they feel guilty about, and everything's okay.

In my experience, everything is not okay.

"So," Sadie says after the show wraps up. "What do you think Ty's trying to tell you? Why is he here?"

I hesitate. Then I retrieve my backpack from where I left it in the corner and dump the contents out on my desk.

"Whoa, is that rose made of paper?" Sadie asks, swinging herself around to sit up. "That's amazing. Where'd you get it?"

"Nowhere." I stab a pin through the wire stem and tack the rose up next to last year's daisy before Sadie has a chance to inspect it. I really, really don't want to get into my love life right now. Instead, I pull Ty's letter out from between the pages of my notebook. I hold it for a minute, feeling its weight in my hand, unwilling to relinquish it, and then I hand it to Sadie.

"I found it in his desk," I explain, a detail I'd kind of skimmed over before. "After I saw him-later, I mean, I found it."

"Who's Ashley?" she asks immediately.

I sigh. "The girl he took to homecoming. Outside of that, I have no idea."

I show her my typed list of prospective Ashleys.

"d.a.m.n," she says, scanning down the page with her finger. "That's a lot of Ashleys."

"You're telling me."

"And you don't have any other clues?"

I swallow. "She's blond. I only saw her once, from the back."

"That's not a lot to go on." She looks at my face and scoffs. "Ah, don't feel guilty. I never know who my brothers are dating. It's like an episode of The Bachelor in my family these days. I have to find out what their relations.h.i.+p status is on the internet."

This makes me feel about 5 percent better.

And then the answer hits me.

I gasp and grab my laptop. "Of course. I'm so stupid sometimes."

"What?" Sadie peers over my shoulder.

"The internet. Ty could have posted about homecoming."

I don't spend any real time on social media, but I do have an account for most things. I log in to one of them. I go to Ty's page. It's flooded with posts from other people, messages like We miss you, Ty and Why'd you have to leave us so soon? and We won't forget you.

We really should close this down, I think. I can't put my finger on why it bothers me, the idea of Ty's internet presence still being active when Ty himself is not. But it bothers me.

"When was homecoming, again?" Sadie asks. "September? I never go to the stupid dances."

"October." I scroll down to the bottom, press OLDER POSTS, then scroll to the bottom again, back and back through his timeline until I get to October.

And suddenly, just like that, there it is. A picture of Ty and his date at homecoming. He's standing behind her in front of a blue satin backdrop, his hands on the waist of her gossamer pink gown, smiling wide. She's turning her head, looking up at him, her mouth slightly open like the camera has caught her in a laugh.

I wonder if she noticed the makeup.

Her hair is long and blond, like I remember, and I can't tell the color of her eyes from this angle. But I recognize her instantly.

She must have cut her hair. She must have dyed it.