The Last Time We Say Goodbye
Page 31

She folds her arms across her chest. “Crazy? You think you’re crazy?”
I smooth down a corner of the letter. My nails are short, jagged, bitten. I don’t even remember biting them; it’s a bad habit I’ve never had before. That all by itself is like proof that there’s something wrong with me.
Sadie shakes her head. “You’re not crazy.”
I glance up. “How do you know?”
“Because crazy people never wonder if they’re crazy. Come on, Lex. If you’re insane, then the rest of us are in big trouble, is all I’m saying.”
I don’t find this very reassuring.
“Even if you are crazy, which you’re not, and even if the ghost isn’t real,” she points out, “the letter’s still real, and it’s definitely intended for Ashley. So you should give it to her.”
I should give it to her, she says. This girl who broke my brother’s heart. This cheerleader.
I shake my head. “No,” I murmur.
“Don’t you think you should respect his wishes?” Sadie asks.
My shoulders are instantly tight. My lungs start to close up. It feels like it’s all coming down on me at once—bad dreams, bad memories, bad choices. It’s too much. “What wishes did Ty respect?” I throw back at Sadie. “Why doesn’t anyone ever ask that, I wonder. Where’s the respect there?”
“Lex, hey, it’s okay . . . ,” Sadie begins. “I know—”
“You don’t know.” I cut her off. “I didn’t ask for this. I’m not Ty’s messenger boy. If he wanted this girl to have the letter, he could have mailed it. He could have left it where someone else would find it. Not me. Why does it have to be me?”
“Maybe he wanted you to r—”
“No. I don’t believe in this stuff. I won’t. I don’t want—”
I can’t finish the sentence. The hole ratchets itself wide open in my chest. I’m out of air.
“You don’t want him to be in your house,” Sadie murmurs.
It’s the most horrible irony, Ty hating his life so much that he chose to end it, only to wind up right back in our house, back in his room, stuck, as helpless to change his situation as ever.
It’s the worst thing I can think of.
I won’t believe it.
I sit for a minute not-breathing. Sadie lays her hand on my shoulder and squeezes. She doesn’t say anything but pulls me into a hug, and I let her. When we were younger she smelled like cheap laundry detergent and Ivory soap and kid sweat, from all her running. Now the aroma coming off her is a fruity perfume, some kind of melon, mixed with a whiff of cigarettes.
After I regain the ability to take air into my lungs, Sadie pulls back. “Do you need to punch something?” she asks. “I find that punching something is therapeutic.”
I shake my head, embarrassed, wheezing. Nobody has had such a front row seat for the hole in my chest before. “I’m sorry. I’ve been kind of a spaz lately.”
She flaps a hand at me, like whatever. “Don’t be sorry. It is what it is. When my dad died I thought I was going mental for a long time. I had all this pain and I didn’t know what to do with it, so I just puked it out on people. My mom and Seth got the worst of it.”
I stare at her.
Her dad died. I knew that, somewhere in the back recesses of my brain. It happened three years ago, the summer we were fifteen. Her dad had been playing catch with her brothers in the backyard, and then he just sat down on the grass and said he was out of breath. And then he died.
I was at math camp in Vermont that summer. My mom called to tell me. I didn’t go to the funeral. Sadie and I, we’d grown apart by then.
God, I think. What kind of selfish, horrible friend am I?
I forgot her dad died.
That’s why her mom’s not home. Her mom had to get a job. That’s why the house is so empty.
“It’s okay,” Sadie murmurs.
It is not okay. It is not okay.
I don’t know what to say. I suck.
Right then, the door behind us opens, and Seth wanders out. He’s wearing camo pajama bottoms and nothing else, his short blond hair tousled. He rubs his face and gives us a sleepy grin.
“Hey. What’s going on?” His gaze moves over to me. “Hey, Lexie.”
“Hey, Seth.”
He’s different than I remember, too. He’s taller, obviously. Filled out from the lanky teen he used to be, with muscles and tattoos splashed across both biceps, a black dragon stretching down his ribs. He raises a pierced eyebrow at me.
“Long time no see,” he says.
I nod. “Are you just getting up?”
Sadie snorts. “He sleeps all day. Slacker.”
“I am not a slacker,” Seth argues, unfolding his half-naked frame unceremoniously on the couch next to me. Where Sadie has just a hint of nicotine on her, Seth has a cloud of stale cigarette smell floating over him. “I work nights.”
“He’s a desk clerk at the Residence Inn off the Cornhusker Highway,” Sadie informs me, like this is the most slacker job ever. “He basically sits on a stool all night and brings people extra towels.”
The side of Seth’s mouth quirks up. He turns his attention to the television. “Don’t tell me you’re watching the ghost stuff again. That stuff’s bullshit, you know. Do they ever get a real ghost on tape? No. They get strange orbs, weird floating lights, mysterious creepy sounds. No real evidence of a ghost. It’s a fucking scam.”