The Secrets We Keep (10 page)

When I stayed silent, Mom sighed and came into my room. “You sure about this?” she asked as she handed me an apple—which I presumed was supposed to be breakfast—and the doctor's note excusing me from gym for the foreseeable future. I also had a note I was instructed to hand to any teacher or administrator who questioned my prolonged absence. I doubted I'd need it. Everybody, including the principal, knew why I'd been out.

“Yeah, I'm sure. I want to go back. I need to go back.”

I grabbed the apple from her hand and headed for the kitchen. She was following me, her quiet footsteps echoing behind me on the stairs. I took a quick glance at the fridge, briefly wondering if I was supposed to pack a lunch. Hmm … I didn't remember Maddy standing in the lunch line, but then again, I never saw her toting around an ugly brown paper bag either. Crap, it was barely seven in the morning and I was already stumbling.

“You hungry?” Mom asked. “I can fix you something to eat if you want.” She looked confused and mildly optimistic that I'd say yes.

I was starving and wanted nothing more than a stack of pancakes with a side of sausage, but I didn't have time. Plus, I hadn't seen Maddy eat anything pork-related since middle school. “Nah, I'm good.”

I grabbed my keys off the counter and headed out the door. “Remember to be home by six,” Mom called after me. “I made an appointment for us to see the therapist tonight. You've been so…”

“Quiet? Closed off? Different?” I supplied when she struggled to find the right word. I'd always been those things. Problem was, I was no longer me. “I'm fine, Mom. We already had this conversation. I don't want to talk to somebody about what happened. I want to forget it and go on.”

“We discussed this, Maddy. You're—”

“No, we didn't,” I said, cutting her off. The last thing I was going to do was let some shrink go mucking around in my lie. I was having a hard enough time keeping it together as it was. “
You
said you wanted me to see a therapist. I never agreed to go.”

“Maddy, sweetheart, your father and I met with the doctor. He thinks we need to come in as a family, try to work our way through this so that…”

“Work our way through this?” I could hear my voice climbing with each syllable. I didn't need to talk about it. I relived it every night. My hands crushing the steering wheel. The smell of pine and dirt as the branches shattered the windshield. The blood trickling down Maddy's face. Her dead eyes staring at me from the passenger seat. Those images were my constant bedtime companions.

“You want to know what I need?” I asked. “I need
everyone
to stop talking about it, stop making me think about it. I want to go to school, go watch field hockey practice, and then come home. I can't fix what happened. I would if I could. I'd trade my life for hers, gladly put myself in that grave so she could have her life back, but I can't. And I don't see how meeting with a shrink is going to help!”

Not wanting to listen to her reply, I slammed the car door closed. I didn't want to see the anguish in her eyes, hear the concern lacing her voice. And I didn't want her to see me cry. I couldn't pull this off if everybody was coddling me, asking me how I was, and reminding me it wasn't my fault. None of that, no matter how well intentioned it was, was going to help.

And none of it was true.

It was my fault, all of it, and I had every intention of fixing it. I was going to give them back Maddy, become Maddy. But in order for me to do that, I needed them to stop making me miss myself.

I jammed the key into the ignition, my entire body vibrating with so much anger that I could barely get my hands to move. After three tries and one silent plea for strength, I finally got the key to turn a notch, far enough to get the radio and heat going. I wasn't going to cry. I refused to cry. But my hands shook, and tears I hadn't let fall in days came pouring out. I cursed each one, tried to banish them all to the tightly locked box I held inside my mind.

This was a brand-new car. It smelled like leather and new carpet. Different make. Different model. The car I'd totaled was a pale blue Honda. This was a Ford Explorer. It was a different color—black—and there wasn't a lip gloss tube stuck to the floor or cleats shoved under the backseat. There were no pictures of Alex taped to the glove box, no discarded bra stuffed under the floor mat. So how was it possible that no matter where I looked, all I saw was her?

I didn't want to do this. I couldn't. The simple task of putting the car in reverse, tapping the gas, and driving the same route I had to school for years suddenly seemed impossible. My hands shook, my knuckles going white as I grasped the steering wheel. My mind was racing along the street and I could feel every turn, every catch of the tire as I struggled to stay on the road. It was so real, so present, and yet only in my mind.

The tree I'd hit had been cut down, the cement curb replaced, or so Alex had said. The only remnant left from that night was a wooden cross with Ella's name … my name etched into it. And to get to school, to get anywhere, I'd have to drive by it.

I swore and let my head fall to the steering wheel. Maddy wouldn't be sitting here in the driveway frozen in panic. She would've driven away by now, swallowed down her fear and simply done it. She was that confident, that determined. And if I had any hope of truly becoming my sister, then I needed to be as well.

“Maddy,” Mom called as she knocked on the window. I rolled it down. She reached for me, and I flinched. I didn't want to be soothed. I didn't deserve it.

“Why don't you let me drive you today? We'll get some breakfast on the way and then I'll drop you off later. Nobody expects you to—”

I shook my head and held my hand up for her to stop. That was where she was wrong. “Everybody expects me to,” I fired back, remembering my last conversation with Maddy. Everybody expected something from her, wasn't that what she said? That it would be easier to be like me, to have nobody expect anything from you? “I expect myself to.”

It took more effort than I ever would have imagined to turn the key that last notch. I heard the ignition catch, felt it waver as if it were in tune with me. I picked my head up and swiped at my tears. “I gotta go,” I said as I put the car into gear.

There was no point in looking back as I pulled out of the driveway. I knew Mom would be standing there, watching, hoping that I'd let her help.

 

15

I was a senior and hadn't missed more than a week of school ever. I knew every hallway and how to make my way from the gym to the parking lot without having to pass by the office or cafeteria. I knew the exact number of steps it took to get from Josh's locker to mine and could navigate his combination as easily as my own. I knew the gym floor had been replaced last year and that there was a small hole above the mirror in the boys' locker room, one that looked directly into the girls' showers. There wasn't a thing about this school that should have surprised me, and yet, today, standing in the parking lot, staring up at the front doors, it seemed foreign.

I reached out, my hand falling short of the door handle. I felt like a freshman—not knowing who I'd meet or what I was walking into, hoping people would accept me, terrified that they wouldn't. But unlike that first day of school our freshman year, I didn't have my sister as a buffer. Today, I was truly on my own.

You can do this,
I said to myself as I willed my hand to rise and demanded that my feet shuffle those few paces into the school. I had friends here. Maddy had friends here. And Maddy had Alex. I wasn't on my own. I just wasn't me.

Who knows what I expected to be waiting for me inside, but silence wasn't it. Quiet, hushed whispers followed me down the hall. My eyes caught the pitiful stares of two girls waiting outside the front office. I nodded and gave them a small wave. They quickly looked away, pretending to be interested in the notices hanging on the student info board. I think I preferred the hushed whispers to the pity I could feel pouring off them.

I picked up the pace and kept my eyes trained straight ahead as I tried to pretend they didn't exist. It was no use trying to insulate myself. No matter what way I looked, regardless of which hallway I turned down, they were still there—hundreds of eyes watching me, waiting for me to crack.

With my head down I shuffled along faster, but that didn't stop the sickening feeling from overtaking me. There was nowhere to hide. Ignoring my classmates didn't mean they weren't there, whispering about how I was doing.

I let my feet guide me, not once stopping to think where I was going. I rounded the corner and climbed two flights of stairs, my feet propelled by rote memory. I came to a stop in front of locker number 159 and reached for the combination lock. It wasn't until I had it open, until I saw Josh's most recent drawing taped to the inside of the door, that I realized where I was. My locker. Ella's locker.

The hall fell deadly silent, the muffled chatter that had followed me now gone. I dropped my backpack to the floor and searched my mind for something to say, some excuse … some justification for why I was here, for why I was standing in front of what everybody assumed was my dead sister's locker.

Alex broke the silence. I couldn't make out what he was saying: it was stifled and not intended for my ears. But I knew the inflection of his voice—the way it rasped when he was struggling to contain some emotion, how it ground deep when he was angry. Instinctively, I turned and sought him out. He'd help me—help Maddy—through this.

Josh was standing there, three lockers down, like he used to every morning before the accident. His dark, haunted eyes met mine, his gaze burrowing through me as if searching for the truth. I saw a flash of recognition, brief and full of forsaken hope before it faded away.

“Maddy?” Alex said.

I tore my eyes from Josh. I could handle the anger I'd seen in him at the burial and deal with the misplaced stares from my morbidly curious classmates, but what tore me apart was the agony I could feel radiating from Josh. I couldn't take his pain away, not without telling him I was Ella, not without crushing Alex and my parents, not without going back on my promise to Maddy … the one that traded my life for hers. Either way, somebody lost.

“Maddy?” Alex repeated. “What are you doing here?” he asked as he physically backed me away from the locker and kicked it shut with his foot. “Why are you going through Ella's locker?”

I shook my head, the physical motion jarring me back to the present. “Her stuff…” I said, not bothering to keep the emotion out of my voice. “Why is it still in there? Why has nobody cleaned it out?”

Alex looked past me to Josh as if somehow he had the answer. I watched the silent conversation play out between them, nothing more than an elaborate game of who was going to answer first. I'd never seen this before, never seen Josh hesitant to answer me, to talk to me. But then again, in his mind, in his reality, I was somebody completely different.

“Why?” I had to clear my throat, to swallow a mouthful of tears to get the words out. “Why is Ella's stuff still in there?” I asked again.

“I couldn't,” Josh said as he turned around and buried his face in his own locker rather than look at me.

“Couldn't what?” I asked.

Josh ignored me, and I took a step toward him, wanting to demand an answer and soothe his grief at the same time. Alex stopped me, hooked his arm around my waist, and gently pulled me in to his chest.

“Your parents were going to do it. I offered to help. I thought it'd be easier for everybody if I cleaned it out myself and brought her stuff home in a box. I figured you could go through it when you were ready,” Alex told me.

“But—?” I asked when he paused.

“Josh wanted to do it himself. He promised me he'd have it done before you came back.”

I caught the forgiveness in Alex's voice, knew he understood how hard this was for Josh. My guess was that that was why Alex had offered to clean out my locker in the first place—he wanted to spare Josh and my parents the pain of having to do it themselves.

I looked at my locker, then back to Josh. If it'd been him, if it was his locker that I'd been charged with clearing out, I'd have done the same thing: let everything he owned sit there undisturbed on some insane notion that he'd be back, that whatever had taken him from me was nothing more than an impossible nightmare I'd soon wake up from.

“I'll do it,” I said as I yanked myself free of Alex's hold and emptied the contents of my bag onto the floor. I'd need to make two trips to my car to get everything out, but if it saved Josh from having to do it himself, I'd gladly be late for my first class.

The top shelf was easily cleared off, the textbooks stacked next to me on the floor. I'd turn those in to the office, or the teachers, or whoever was responsible for collecting textbooks, once I got everything else cleaned out. I went for the door and was carefully trying to peel the tape off the pictures when Josh exploded.

“Leave it!” he shouted. I'd never heard such rage in Josh's voice before or seen his body vibrate with such raw emotion. I stopped and looked at him, my hand still clutching the corner of a picture. “I. Said. Leave. It,” he repeated.

I nodded and let it go, took two steps back to give him some space. He looked like he was about ready to lose it.

We'd accumulated quite a crowd of spectators. Every available body in the school—teachers and students alike—was there, waiting to see what I'd do. At this point I didn't care; they could grab some empty wall space and watch the show if that's what they wanted.

“Let it go,” Alex whispered in my ear. “I'll talk to Josh and ask your parents to help clear Ella's locker out.”

I nodded, knowing quite well that my parents wouldn't help Josh. They could barely enter my room, let alone go through my personal things. And from the looks of it, Josh had no intention of clearing out the remnants of my life either. He already had the textbooks stacked neatly back on the shelf and was smoothing out the crinkled photo on the door.