The Last Time We Say Goodbye (6 page)

ASHLEY DAVENPORT
, according to the yearbook, is a cheerleader. She's a sophomore. She has long blond hair, or at least I think she does—it's hard to tell from the 1-by-1.5-inch black-and-white photo on page 173.

She could be the one.

There are 1,879 students at my high school, and nineteen of them are named Ashley: about 1 percent. Over the past two days I've already checked off Ashley Adams, who's practically married to her boyfriend (so clearly not the droid I'm looking for), Ashley Chapple, who's a senior and I know her and no way she dated Ty, and Ashley Chavez, whose raven's-wing-black hair doesn't match my memory of the girl Ty took to homecoming.

So now I'm to the
D
s, and Ashley Davenport. Blond. Sophomore. Cheerleader.

Ashley Davenport is today's objective.

Also: it's Valentine's Day. Which sucks.

Last year on the dreaded V-Day I discovered a white paper daisy slipped between the upper slats of my locker when I arrived at school. It was paper, but I still stood there holding its green wire stem between my fingers, smiling stupidly, before I bent my head to smell the petals. It smelled like books, a heady mix of paper and ink and glue, a sweet knowledge.

There was no note on the flower. No card. No name.

A mystery.

We weren't dating yet—we didn't officially start dating until June—but I knew the flower was from Steven. He never confessed to leaving it there for me, but I knew. Because of something I'd said once when we were wandering around in a grocery store together that year, trying to find a last-minute gift for Mrs. Seidel, our chemistry teacher, who was in the hospital with cancer. “I don't get the point, really,” I'd said as we contemplated the plastic-wrapped roses. “Why give a girl something that's supposed to represent love that's only going to wilt and die in a matter of hours?”

Steven laughed and said that was a pretty pessimistic way to view life, and I shrugged.

Then he said, “All the best things are like that, though, Lex, the most beautiful things. Part of the beauty comes from the fact that they're short-lived.” He picked up a bouquet of deep-red roses, held it out to me. “These will never be as beautiful as they are at this moment, so we have to enjoy them now.”

I stared at him. He scratched the back of his neck, a little red-faced, then gave me a sheepish grin. “Just call me a romantic,” he said.

I wanted to say that there were some things in this world, some rare things, that were beautiful and stayed that way. But instead I took the bouquet out of his hand. “Okay. Flowers it is,” I said, and we laughed and bought the roses for Mrs. Seidel.

Then, just a few weeks later, the paper daisy. A flower that would never die. I still have it, pinned to the edge of my corkboard above my desk at home.

Today when I go to my locker, there's no flower waiting. I knew there wouldn't be. I get out my books for first period and slam my locker closed. I tell myself that it was never going to work, Steven and me, and it was for the best to cut it off when I did. Still, I can't help but look for him in the flux of incoming students in the hallway. So many of them are smiling, wearing red and pink and lugging boxes of candies to their oh-so-significant others, and finally I see Steven, walking with his head down, his backpack slung over one shoulder. He glances up. He sees me. He lifts his hand in a faint wave.

I look away. I don't have time for this, I tell myself. I have a task to accomplish here. An objective. So I turn and wander toward the section of sophomore lockers, scrutinizing the blond girls.

One of them is Ashley Davenport, I'm pretty sure.

I just don't know which one.

I spot a group of Ty's old friends, the jock squad, off in a corner laughing at something. They always seem to be laughing, like they're at a frat party already. I look at their faces and try to summon names, but I don't know Ty's high school friends the way I knew his friends from middle school, and I'm not good with names,
so all I get is: the guy with the fauxhawk; the kid with the multiple gold medals sewn to his letterman's jacket; Tall Guy from the basketball team; Grayson, although I don't know if this is his first or last name; and a guy who's a swimmer or wrestler or something that makes his body ridiculously triangle-shaped.

One of them, Tall Guy, looks up and notices me staring. This is the part where I should go over and ask them,
Hey, do you know an Ashley? The girl Ty took to homecoming? What's her last name? Is it Davenport?

But as I stand there looking at them, suddenly I'm thinking, There should be a space. Where Ty used to stand with them. But there isn't. They're arranged in a half circle with the requisite twelve inches between them, guy spacing, and there's no room for anyone else. The space where Ty used to be, they've closed it in.

Which makes the freaking grief hole open up in my chest. I wait for it to pass, but it doesn't, not for what feels like much longer than the normal thirty seconds. As usual I start to feel like there's something physically wrong with my body—I can't breathe, my heart is beating too fast, I can't breathe I can't
breathe
. And Tall Guy has definitely said something about me to Triangle Man, because the members of the jock squad are all looking at me now with the same slightly wary expressions.

Then somebody jostles me from behind, hard enough to knock one of my books to the floor, and all of a sudden my lungs work again.

“Hey,” I gasp to no one in particular. “Watch where you're
going.” Stiffly I bend to retrieve the book, but someone grabs it before I can.

“I got it,” he says.

I inhale and exhale a couple of times to prove to myself that I can do it, then look up. “Oh, hi, Damian,” I say.

My book rescuer is Damian Whittaker: sophomore, one of those skin-and-bones types who hasn't grown into himself yet, all baggy shirt and greasy hair falling in his eyes and acne dotting his chin. He's a shy kid, inconspicuous, the kind who keeps to himself and doesn't seem to be interested in anything or anyone. A loner, according to the school's social strata.

But these days Damian is trying to be my friend.

He and Ty were best buds a couple years back, the summer my dad took off for Megan's house. Damian and this other boy, Patrick, and Ty were like the three musketeers that year. They spent every available afternoon playing Halo and Guitar Hero and lounging around in our old playhouse listening to Led Zeppelin and the Doors. They thought they were being so classic and cool. But that was a long time ago. Damian hasn't darkened our doorstep since Ty started high school and sports and vying for Mr. Popularity. But Damian always makes an effort to smile and say hello when he sees me. As if he were my friend, instead of my brother's. Which means that lately he's been popping up all around school and trying to engage me in conversation.

It's kind of sweet, even if it's the last thing I want.

And it is—the last thing I want. When I see Damian, all I can think about is how I'm never going to see Ty. When Damian
tells me about a movie he saw last weekend, I think, Ty will never see that movie. He'll never play that new video game that Damian loves. He'll never pass his sophomore year. And Damian will.

And it will not seem fair.

“Oh, the horror,” Damian says to me now.

“What?”

His smile is timid as he hands me back my book. “
Heart of Darkness
,” he says.

“What?” I ask again.

“You're reading
Heart of Darkness
. There's this famous line at the end. ‘Oh, the horror.'”

I feel stupid, which is not a normal state of being for me. “Oh, right. Yes. The horror.”

“I liked that book,” he says.

I'm about a quarter of the way through
HoD
, an assignment for AP English, but so far it's exactly the kind of book I hate, where the story seems simple enough, interesting, but then I get to class and the teacher starts going on and on about the hidden meanings, the metaphors, the significance of the color yellow. All this meaning that the author was trying to say to the reader, like a message written in a secret language.

Not my cup of tea.

I don't know what to say to Damian. He looks expectant, like he and I are about to have a thought-provoking literary discussion of Joseph Conrad.

“I—uh, I haven't finished reading it yet,” I say.

His smile drops. “Oh. Spoiler alert. Sorry.”

I'm so tired of the word
sorry
.

“Hey, do you know Ashley Davenport?” I blurt out, because I've just remembered what I am doing in sophomore land. “She's a cheerleader?”

Damian's eyes, which are a watery shade of gray, are instantly remote. “Yeah,” he mumbles. “I know her. Why?”

“Do you know where I can find her?”

He shrugs. “She's in my biology class.”

“Which biology class?” I ask.

“Mr. Slater's.”

“When?”

He glances up at the digital clock on the wall over our heads, which reads 6:56 a.m. “In like four minutes.”

“Thanks,” I say quickly, already moving away from him. “I should—I have to get something out of my locker. Before the bell rings.”

“Okay,” he says simply, and smiles again. “See you around, Lex.”

“Bye.” I make a beeline back toward my locker. To get the letter. To get down to the science wing and back to AP English in less than four minutes.

I'm suddenly so freaked out by the prospect of finding the real Ashley (and then what am I going to do, huh?) that when I get back to my locker, I almost miss it.

The flower.

A rose, this time, stuck in the locker slats. It's still made from plain white paper, but more intricately built than last year. There
are words written on it in faint pencil, a single sentence that I have to turn the flower around to read across the petals.

I love you as the plant that never blooms but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers.

I close my eyes. Heat rushes to my face. Crap. What red-blooded girl wouldn't go weak in the knees at that?

Oh, Steven, I think. What are you doing?

And now I have approximately two minutes. I should throw the rose away. I don't know if Steven's watching, but I should get rid of it in case he is. That would show him that it's over, because he clearly doesn't think it's really over if he could give me this flower.

I walk to the trash at the end of the hall. My hand trembles moronically as I hold the flower over the gaping gray mouth of the trash can. There's a half-eaten breakfast burrito in there, some random papers and flyers—
Try out for the school play! Gator Girls basketball team bake sale, this Saturday!
—an assortment of empty soda cans, a broken pencil.

Do it, I think.

Let go.

The bell rings. I sigh and walk back to my locker, where I tuck the paper rose into my backpack, into a side pocket, where it won't be crushed by all my other baggage. I grab the letter for Ashley and slip it into the front pocket of my five-subject notebook, not that I'm planning to give it to her right now if she turns out to be the right one—I can't think that far ahead—but because, for some illogical reason, I want to have the letter with me. Then I speed-walk to Mr. Slater's classroom. If I remember correctly, that's room 121B.

I arrive at 121B with a good minute to spare before the tardy bell rings, but before I can get a look inside I'm run down by a redhead in a cheerleader uniform. She's in such a mad rush to get to the classroom before the second bell rings that she smacks right into me. Our books and papers go all over the carpet in front of the door.

“I'm sorry,” she says as we're both on our knees sorting out which stuff is whose. “I am so sorry.”

The bell rings.

“Ashley,” I hear Mr. Slater's voice boom out from inside the classroom. “You're tardy. Again.”

She gives me a smile. “Sorry, Mr. S. Be right there,” she calls back.

“Ashley Davenport?” I ask.

She looks startled. “Yes. You're . . . Ty's sister, right?”

My fame as the-girl-whose-brother-died has spread far and wide.

I look Ashley over. She's a cheerleader, all right, and a sophomore, and pretty, with large royal blue eyes and skin so pale it has a translucent quality, so clear I can see a faint blue vein branching out under the surface of her temple and disappearing into her hairline. But the hair's all wrong. It's too short, pulled back into a tight ponytail that ends in a nub that barely brushes the back of her neck. And it's the color of a coil of copper. Red.

She's not the girl with the long blond hair I saw Ty dancing with that night.

Wrong Ashley.

I let out the breath I was holding. “That's me,” I say to answer
her previous question. I hand over her biology notebook and straighten up.

“Is this . . . mine?” she asks, and I see she's got the envelope from Ty, frowning now because there's her name written right on it.

I snatch it out of her hand. “No. It's mine.” And with no more explanation, I'm on my feet, heading off at a half jog because I'm late, too. For English. For Ty.

For everything. I'm too late.

STEVEN IS IN MY ENGLISH CLASS.
Of course he is—Steven and Eleanor and Beaker are in all my honors classes. There was a time when that was a good thing, a great thing, even. But not today. I'm five minutes late, but the desk I usually sit at, the one on the far right between Steven and Beaker and in front of El, is still empty. Waiting for me. Steven looks up and smiles, and I feel my face heating again, thinking about the rose.

Crap.

Mrs. Blackburn stops talking and stares at me from her perch at the edge of her desk, puzzled by my highly unusual tardiness.

“Sorry,” I mumble, and then I slink to the back of the classroom and find a seat on the left. I can't deal with my friends right now.

Especially Steven.

Mrs. Blackburn continues the lecture she was giving. She's starting us on an exercise in etymology, she says—the study of the
origin of words. She shows us a website where you can type in any word and it will spit out the word's roots: its definition, where and how that word originated, and how the usage of the word changed over time. In conjunction with our
Heart of Darkness
reading she demonstrates how the website works using the word
heart
(which goes back to the Old Norse
hjarta
) and the word
darkness
(Old English
deorcnysse
) and takes us back through the history of each word.

“So, class,” Mrs. Blackburn says when she's done with the general history lesson about the birth of the English language. “What are some other words that you associate with
Heart of Darkness
, so far?”

I raise my hand, which surprises her because I'm not typically so quick to volunteer in this setting (not my cup of tea, remember), then suggest the word
horror
, which the website tells us comes from early fourteenth-century French.

Oh la horreur.

Mrs. Blackburn looks pleased that I have apparently already finished the book and know the significance of the word.

Thank you, Damian.

Then she sends us off on the class laptops to look up our own set of words. “Research a word that's been on your mind,” she instructs.

I stare at the blank screen for a long time before I actually type in a word that's on my mind.

As in: there's not even a
ghost
of a chance that what I saw—what I've been seeing, I guess is a more accurate description, as it's happened two times now—is real. It seems real, in the moment. It feels real. But it is not real.

Ghosts do not exist. I am a rational person. I know this.

Which leads me to:

A lapse of sanity.

A break.

This seems like a far more likely explanation.

I open my notebook and stare at the edge of the Ashley letter
peeking out of the front pocket, the way the ink is slightly smeared on the letter
y
. Ty was a lefty; he always had this smudge on the side of his hand at the end of the school day from dragging his hand through everything he wrote.

For Ashley. Not
to
Ashley, but
for
her.

For
has too many meanings.

“All right, class,” Mrs. Blackburn says abruptly. “That's enough time, I think, to ponder the significance of a word. Let's share.”

I can't share this.
Ghost. Hallucination. For
. Hello, class, I'm a crazy person.

I sit quietly panicking while Mrs. Blackburn begins to wander between the rows of desks, occasionally stopping and gathering a word from a student:
baseball
from Rob Milton,
beautiful
from Jen Petterson,
book
from Alice Keisig—we're a terribly original bunch, and apparently stuck on the
B
s. “What I hope that you're coming to understand as you study etymology is that a word is not simply
a word,” Mrs. Blackburn says with that teacherly touch of drama, like this is life-changing stuff she's giving us here. She's that kind of teacher—the type who inflates everything, calls us by our last names instead of our first so that our conversations sound more formal, stresses the importance of each book we read, each essay we write, like it's the most important thing for us to know before we head out into the big bad world.

We will become cultured intellectuals if it kills her.

She continues: “Each word has a specific history, a context, a slow evolution of meaning. Most of the words we use today come from a clash of cultures: Norman against Saxon, Latin versus Germanic, smooth against guttural.” She stops next to Eleanor. “Give me a word, Miss Green.”

“
Brave
,” El says. Which is of course a word that El would come up with. El once caught a guy trying to steal the license plate off the back of her car on the street outside her house and ended up chasing him through the neighborhood with a baseball bat yelling like an Amazonian warrior queen. El is fearless.

“French, am I right?” queries Mrs. Blackburn.

“Yes.”

“And what do you like about this word,
brave
?”

“I like that it's derived from a verb,” El answers. “Brave isn't something you are. It's something you do. It comes from action. I appreciate that.”

“Excellent,” Mrs. Blackburn says, moving on. She turns around and heads back up the row. “Mr. Blake,” she says. “A word.”

Steven clears his throat. His face goes slightly pink, but his
voice doesn't waver when he answers. “I picked
love
.”

Mrs. Blackburn widens her eyes and smiles. “Love? So that's what's on the young man's mind.”

“It's Valentine's Day,” he explains with a hint of a smile. “So I'm thinking about it, yes.” His gaze touches mine and then moves quickly away.

“
Love
as a verb or a noun?”

“A verb,” he says.

I love you as the plant that never blooms but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers
.

Crap.

Mrs. Blackburn nods. “And where does the word
love
come from?”

“Old English,” he reads off his laptop. “
Lufian
. To cherish, show delight in, approve. Which comes from the Old High German
lubon
, which meant something like joy.”

“Something like joy,” Mrs. Blackburn repeats like she's reciting a poem. “Wonderful. How about you, Miss Riggs?”

I'm startled, and I'm not ready. Why would she call on me? I'm at the other side of the freaking room. Is my association with Steven that ingrained in everyone around us? “What?” I ask, like maybe I didn't hear her correctly.

“What's your word?”

“Oh. Mine's not very good,” I say.

She waits.

I sigh. My eye falls on a word on my screen. “Delusion,” I say as my fingers type it in. See the seat of my pants, and see me flying by
it. “From the Latin,
delusio
, it means ‘a belief that, though false, has been surrendered to and accepted by the whole mind as a truth.'”

“Interesting,” Mrs. Blackburn says thoughtfully. “What made you pick
delusion
?”

“Well, we were talking about love, right? Love is a classic example of a delusion.”

Mrs. Blackburn chuckles. “Oh. I see. Not a romantic then, are you?”

“No,” I say flatly. “I don't believe in romantic love.”

“Why not?” she asks.

Here we go. “Because what we associate with the idea of love is purely chemical. It can be broken down into scientifically proven phases: it starts with a dose of testosterone and estrogen, what we would think of as ‘lust,' followed by the goofy ‘lovesick' phase, which is a combination of adrenaline, dopamine, and a drop in serotonin levels—which, by the way, makes our brains behave exactly like the brains of crack addicts—and ends up, if we make it through phases one and two, with ‘attachment,' where the body produces oxytocin and vasopressin, which basically make us want to cuddle excessively. It's science. That's all.”

“Hmm,” says Mrs. Blackburn. “That's quite the speech, Alexis.”

Steven smiles at me again, but it's a sad smile this time. A pitying smile.

It makes me mad.

So I keep talking. “All this Valentine's Day stuff comes from big business capitalizing on the delusion of love. All the candy, the candlelit dinners, the flowers . . .” I meet Steven's gaze and hold it
for a second and then look away. “It generates more than a billion dollars in revenue every year. Because people want to believe in love. But it's not real.”

Mrs. Blackburn shakes her head, frowning. “But have you considered the notion that what we believe in—what we choose to believe in—
is
real? It becomes real, for us.”

I push my glasses up on my nose and stare at her blankly.

“Perhaps you're right,” she adds, “and what we feel as love is nothing more than a combination of certain chemicals in our bodies. But if we believe that love is this powerful force that binds us together, and if this belief brings us happiness and stability in this tumultuous world, then what's the harm?”

My chin lifts, like I have something to prove here. Maybe I do have something to prove. “In my experience, love doesn't bring happiness and stability. But believing in love can cause a substantial amount of harm.”

Like with my parents.

Like with my brother.

Mrs. Blackburn straightens her wedding ring on her finger for a minute before speaking again. “I find that love is a concept much like bravery, Miss Riggs. I, for instance, have been married to the same man for thirty-two years. And, in all that time, I haven't felt ‘in love' with him every day, not in the way love is described in romantic comedies and romance novels, but I have loved him. Love is a choice I've made. A verb. And that, because I believe in it, because I act on it, is real. Love is a very real thing to me.”

The class goes silent. The discussion has veered off into weird
too-personal territory. We don't want to think about the romantic lives of our teachers.

I stare at my hands for a minute. I know I shouldn't argue with her. I don't even know why I want to argue with her—because I don't want to let Steven get away with the rose?—but I can't seem to help myself.

“There was this study,” I say finally, “where a scientist made people ‘fall in love' with a simple series of actions: he had them talk about certain personal topics and look into each other's eyes for a determined period of time and have this specific physical contact, and if you put those factors all together then, bam—anyone can fall in love with anyone. Some of the people in that study got married later, and they had a lower divorce rate than the national average. It's that simple. You do these certain things, you fall in love. It's biology. Period. That people believe in it as anything else is just proof of how deeply ingrained the delusion is in our society.”

Mrs. Blackburn gazes at me all red-faced like she'd like nothing better than to send me to the principal's office, but she can't think of a good enough reason—being the official rain cloud over the V-Day love parade is not going to cut it.

The back of my throat feels tight. I swallow against it.

The round clock over the doorway ticks off its seconds. Then Jill, always the one to come to the rescue in moments of social awkwardness, says, “Hey, I have a word.
Moist.
I hate the word
moist
—it just sounds yuck. Who would come up with a word like
moist
?” She refers to her notebook. “It turns out that it comes from something called ‘Vulgar Latin'—whatever that means—
muscidus
,
which means ‘slimy, musty, moldy.' Yuck, right? And then somewhere in the thirteenth century it morphed into the Old French word
moiste
, which means ‘damp.'”

Mrs. Blackburn blinks, like she'd forgotten what she was going to say, then gives a short laugh.

Thank you, Beaker.

“I've never liked that word, either,” Mrs. Blackburn says as she glides smoothly back to the front of the class. “Something about the way it sounds is unpleasant, I agree.” She laughs again. “The study of words always brings out an examination of our feelings, which I think has become evident today, hasn't it? That's what words do. At the basic level they are simply a collection of symbols grouped together in order to represent an object.
C-H-A-I-R
represents this”—she puts her hand on the back of her empty seat—“chair. But each word represents something different for each of us.”