That was the last time they ever went to the fair, though Kennie brought the pickles up on a regular basis as a not-so-subtle hint. The appeal of carnival games and rides beneath an open sky had disappeared.
In the picture, Julia was still beautiful and brilliant and fully alive. Clear too, without the poison leaking out at the edges. And Kennie. She was laughing, of course, laughing like she used to—so loudly that an echo reached Liz through all the years and secrets and mistakes. God, how long had it been since she had heard Kennie laugh like that?
This was the before picture, and it broke Liz’s heart.
Liz stared at her phone. She wanted to go back. She wanted to be a little girl again, the one who thought getting high meant being pushed on the swings and pain was falling off her bike.
I want to go back.
I wanted her to come back too.
CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN
The Abortion Clinic
Silence in the Mercedes.
And then.
“Want me to go with you?” asked Liz.
Kennie bit her lip. Her eyes were closed, but Liz could see her eyelashes glimmering with the tears she was trying so hard to hold back. Kennie wasn’t wearing any makeup. Liz couldn’t remember the last time she had seen Kennie without makeup.
Liz couldn’t stand it. She leaned forward and hugged her tight, and tried to swallow the lump in her own throat. “Hey,” she said, but her voice was a plea. “It’ll be okay. Okay?”
Kennie nodded against her shoulder but said nothing. She got out of the car.
Liz sat in the parking lot alone. There it was, the silence again. It grew and pounded until at last she moved, savagely, jammed the keys into the ignition and backed up with a squeal. She drove down the street to the gas station, where she grabbed a pack of condoms, slapped it on the counter, and dared the cashier to comment.
She went back to the clinic, and when Kennie came out, Liz gave her the condoms. Kennie stared at them.
“I can’t,” she said. “Not for a month, at least. I’ll tell Kyle I’m on my period.”
For a month? Liz wanted to say. She didn’t. “Just in case.”
Kennie closed the condoms in her fist. She shoved them in her purse and didn’t look at Liz.
And only then, when it was too late, Liz wondered if she’d made a mistake. Here, she’d wanted to say. You still have Kyle. You have us.
Liz dropped Kennie off and watched her walk into the house, and she began to cry. She cried as she drove, and she didn’t care that she couldn’t see the road.
You still have me.
The worst part of being forgotten, I think, is watching.
I watched her cry. There had been silent tears and ones that barely leaked out. There were tears that heaved from her in great sobs. They all slipped through my fingers when I tried to catch them, they fell around her in oceans.
I watched her carve her mistakes in stone, and they arranged themselves around her,. They became a maze with walls that reached the sky. Because she learned from so few of them, she was lost. Because she didn’t have faith in anything, she didn’t try to find a way out.
I watched her try to face her fears alone, too proud to ask for help, too stubborn to admit she was afraid, too small to fight them, too tired to fly away.
I watched Liz grow up.
You still have me.
CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT
One Day Before Liz Emerson Crashed Her Car
After lunch, they had a Random Pep Assembly.
Their principal had established RPAs—because that was actually what they were called—last year to “boost student morale,” the lack of which became the official excuse as to why Meridian’s test scores had failed to meet state standards yet again. No one complained because it meant shorter classes and an afternoon of doing nothing.
Today, the teachers would have a free-throw competition, and the Future Farmers of America (a club that Liz often ridiculed) held a fund-raiser for their spring trip to the National Dairy Expo (seriously, they made it too easy), letting students buy votes to nominate a teacher to kiss a pig. They raised more than two thousand dollars.
Liz remembered why she used to like school. It was an escape from her enormous, silent house. School was always noisy, filled to the brim with different and irritating people. But between sophomore year and junior year, she began to want to escape school too, because now the hallways were filled with people she had torn apart.