The Last Time We Say Goodbye
Page 25

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 sophomore 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 shins 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—”