The Girl Death Left Behind (5 page)
“Sure,” Teddy said. “You want to play
one last game of Horse? For old times’ sake?”
Beth didn’t. She just shook her head. “You write me, you hear?”
“I’ll write.”
“And don’t make a pest of yourself with Marcie.” Tears blurred Beth’s eyes. “The two of you are my best friends in the whole world, and I’m going to miss you like crazy.”
“Me too,” Teddy mumbled. He walked over, pulled Beth to her feet, and put his arms around her.
She began to cry but held on tight, the way a drowning person would hold on to a rope in a wind-whipped lake.
“The car’s packed and ready,” Jack said, coming into the kitchen.
Beth looked up at him. “Already?”
Her uncle put his arm around her shoulder. “I’m sorry, honey. I wish there was some other way. I wish none of this had happened.”
Teddy’s father would help get the contents of the house into storage once they were gone, and a realtor would begin showing
the house to prospective renters as soon as it was cleaned and painted. Beth nodded, not trusting her voice. She felt like a condemned prisoner.
Outside, the trailer containing all her bedroom furniture, books, clothes, pictures, and keepsakes had been hooked to a rental car for the ten-hour drive to Tampa. Her memories were in there—her very life was packed into that trailer. What was left of it, anyway.
Teddy and his family gathered on the driveway, and they all hugged goodbye. “I’ll watch after your mother’s flowers,” Faye said.
“That would be nice,” Beth said. “Mom liked her flowers a lot.”
She struggled to hold back tears as she climbed into the backseat, where Terri was already settled in, her nose in a teen magazine, a wad of gum in her mouth. Terri blew a bubble, popped it, and kept reading. Beth plopped her bed pillow between them like an imaginary line.
Don’t cross over
, it said.
“You want anything?” Aunt Camille asked from the front seat.
Beth shook her head.
Uncle Jack backed out of the driveway, tooted his horn, and waved to the Carpenters. Beth gazed out at her neighborhood sliding past the car window like photos in an album. All the pretty houses, in neat, orderly rows. And the trees, lush and green with summer leaves. Beth had spent almost fourteen summers in this place. Her lifetime.
Jack drove down Signal Mountain and across the Tennessee River and merged into traffic on the expressway. When the car moved onto Interstate 75, Beth saw a sign announcing that Atlanta was 103 miles away. In the distance, the foothills looked blue and hazy, the sky a murky bluish gray.
Against the sky, in her mind’s eye, Beth saw the faces of her mother, father, Allison, and Doug as they had looked on the day they left for the picnic. She was going off to a new life, leaving them behind, just as death had left her behind when it had taken them.
Beth slipped on her sunglasses, hoping to shield her eyes, not from the glare of the
sun, but from the stares of passing motorists. For surely they might wonder why a girl who looked for all the world as if she were headed off on vacation with her family was sitting in the backseat crying hard.
INTER
Hey Marcie
,
I know I’m e-mailing you every day, but you’re my only friend, and I really miss you. I miss home too. And Teddy (but don’t tell him—it’ll go to his fat head)
how lucky you are to have a mother?” I stay in my room as much as I can, but Aunt Camille is always dragging me and Terri someplace. She says I need to get out more. As if!
I was wrong about Terri having no friends. She has two, LuAnne and Kasey. They’re a lot like Terri. They giggle a lot and talk about boys ALL the time. When school starts next week, I plan to stay as far from them as possible. Which is another thing. I’ll be going to Westwood Jr. High. They do things different down here. No middle schools, but jr. highs and high schools. Wish I could start 9th grade in high school like back home
.
When you wrote about shopping for school clothes, it made me cry. Mom should be shopping with me. I keep remembering last year and all. Who’d have ever guessed that it would be my last shopping trip ever with my mother?
I know Aunt Camille is trying hard to help me be happy here, but all I want to do is go home. I want things back the way they used to be. Got to sign off now, but I’ll write
again tomorrow. Unless I think of something else I have to tell you today.
Bye for now. And go hug your mother
.
Beth clicked on the Send E-mail button just as there was a knock on her bedroom door. “I’m busy,” she called.
“I want to ask you something.” It was Terri. “It’s important.”
Reluctantly Beth opened the door. “What is it?”
Terri entered, her gaze darting everywhere. “Um—my friend LuAnne is having a pool party Saturday night and she wants us to come.”
“I don’t want to go.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t feel like partying.” Beth turned away.
“It’s the last party before school starts. Everyone will be there. It’ll be fun.”
“Fun for you, maybe, but not for me.”
“How do you know?”
“I just know, that’s all.”
“You never want to do anything.” Terri sounded pouty.
“Look, I just don’t feel like going to some party. Don’t you get it?”
“You could make friends.” Terri’s tone turned cajoling.
“I have friends. They just don’t happen to live in Tampa.”
Terri put her hands on her hips. “You have to make new friends, Beth. You live here now. This is your home.”
Beth wanted to slap her. “I live here because I have to live here. But I don’t like it one little bit.”
Terri looked shocked. She took a step backward. “What’s so horrible about living here? You’ve got everything you could want. All you have to do is say one word to my mother and she jumps to give you anything. I don’t see what’s so horrible about that.”
“Would you like to trade places with me?”
Terri’s cheeks colored, and she dropped her gaze. “No … I don’t want to trade places with you. But I do want you to come to the party with me. The truth is if you don’t go, I can’t go. Mom won’t let me go without you.”
“Why didn’t you tell me that in the first place?”
Terri shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“You know, Terri, if you’d just be honest with people, maybe you wouldn’t have to argue about everything you want.”
“I didn’t think you’d go if you thought you were doing me a favor.”
Exasperated, Beth shook her head. How little her cousin knew about her! “I’m not that way. I know how to be nice. I’m not above doing somebody—anybody—a favor.”
“Even me?” Terri looked contrite.
“Yes,” Beth said after a pause.
“Then you’ll come to the party?”
With a start, Beth realized she’d painted herself into a corner. She still didn’t want to go, but if she said no now, she’d come across as petty and mean. “Oh, all right,” she mumbled after a long pause.
“Great.” Terri was all smiles. “We’ll have fun. We really will.”
Terri sailed out of Beth’s room, and Beth closed the door behind her. A sudden sadness overcame her. She shouldn’t be going to parties. Not when neither Allison nor
Doug could ever attend one again. It wasn’t right. Beth sagged onto the bed, tears pooling in her eyes. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t.
LuAnne’s backyard swarmed with kids Beth didn’t know and didn’t want to meet. The pool and patio blazed with lights, and underwater swimmers took on distorted, rippled shapes. Hamburgers smoked on a massive grill, and a table overflowed with bowls of chips, cold drinks, salads, and desserts. Terri immediately locked onto Kasey, and Beth edged away from the crowds without being noticed.
At the far end of the backyard she found refuge beneath a large banyan tree. The tree’s aerial roots hung down like the legs of a spider, and looking through them was like looking through the bars of a cage. With a heavy sigh, she leaned against one of the thicker root-trunks and kicked at the bare ground with the toe of her sandal. The sounds of splashing, laughter, and music coming from the party seemed offensive to her. How could everybody be so happy when she felt so sad and alone?
“Are you hiding on purpose, or did you just lose your way?”
Beth turned to see a boy approaching her. He balanced a paper plate of food in one hand. “I’ll bet you’re Beth.”
“How do you know that?” He didn’t look familiar.
“Word gets around. I’m Jared Harrison.” He stopped in front of her and grinned. “And I’ve come to rescue you.”
“M
aybe I don’t want to be rescued.” Beth wished Jared would go away.
“Well then, you can rescue me. I hate these parties.”
“Why’d you come?”
“Nothing better to do. Would you hold this for a minute?” He handed her his plate of food and pulled himself up onto a low branch of the banyan tree. He reached down for the plate. “Come on up. There’s plenty of room.” She hesitated. “Or you could go back to the party.”
Beth struggled up onto the branch and
settled beside him. They weren’t very high off the ground, but the new perspective made her feel better. She couldn’t say why.
“Want a bite?” Jared offered his plate.
“I’m not hungry.”
“I’m
always
hungry.” He bit into his hamburger. “So, what are you doing this far from the party?”
“I don’t feel much in a party mood.”
“Yeah, I’ll bet. I heard about your family.”
“How?”
Jared gestured with his burger. “Terri told Kasey and LuAnne. They told everybody else.”
“That’s my personal business.” It upset Beth so much to think that Terri and her friends had gossiped about her.
“Not when you’re around the Mouth of the South. Or Terri the Tattler, as she’s also sometimes known.”
Beth smiled, feeling a perverse pleasure in her cousin’s nicknames.
“I’m sorry about what happened to your parents,” Jared said. “That’s a pretty bad thing.”
She hung her head. “Nobody understands.”
“Maybe not about that, but I
do
understand what it feels like to be the new kid on the block.” He munched on a chip. “My parents divorced a few years ago. Mom remarried when I was twelve and we moved here. So I was facing being the new kid in school two years ago, like you are now. Starting in a new school can be pretty awful, if you let it.”
“I’m not looking forward to it.” She glanced toward the party. The tree’s leaves obscured her vision, but she imagined Terri huddled with her friends, blabbing on about some guy or her newest outfit. Sometimes it made Beth sick to her stomach.
“We’re not such a bad bunch,” Jared said. “Not everybody travels in groups. There are a few of us Lone Rangers around.”
“You’re a Lone Ranger?”
He saluted. “Let’s just say I don’t hang out with any group of kids in particular. I like everybody, and I hang out with anybody I feel like.”
“You remind me of someone.”
“Who?”
“A boy back home.”
“Your boyfriend?”
“He’s a boy and he’s my friend. So I guess he’s my boyfriend. But no, not in the way you mean. His name’s Teddy and he lives—lived next door to me.”
“I had a friend where I used to live too. Her name was Kelly. But I did like her as a girlfriend.” Jared dropped his empty paper plate to the ground. “But what did I know? I was twelve.” He laughed. “And by now I’m sure she’s forgotten my name.”
“I won’t ever forget my friends,” Beth said with emotion.
“You don’t forget them, but they do sort of fade.”
She didn’t like the idea. If memories of her friends faded, what about memories of her family? “What about your real father? Has he faded away?”