“Oh,” I said, caught off guard and not sure what else to say.
Kelsi sighed. “I just want to go home,” she said finally, in a voice so quiet I could barely hear her. “I just want to go back to the way it was before.”
I knew exactly what she meant. And she knew I knew.
Silently, we stood up, dusted our jeans off, and got back into the car. As Kelsi started the engine and pulled out of her spot, I looked out the window, turning my face away from the rolling green cheerfulness of the darkest place I’d ever seen. I knew that as we pulled back on to Summer Street, if I looked toward the cemetery, I would see my father’s grave. It was on the crest of a little hill midway into the cemetery. Although I’d only been there once, the day of his funeral, his grave’s location was burned into my mind, and I knew it as well as I knew the location of my own fingers and toes.
? ? ?
It was nearly three-thirty by the time we turned onto Main Street on our way back to school. We were just a few blocks inland from the harbor, the same rocky, jagged jut of coastline the Pilgrims had landed on four hundred years ago. I could smell the salt in the air and feel it on my skin, the way I always could when the wind was blowing west. Today, even though the afternoon had warmed up, the breeze made me shiver.
Kelsi and I weren’t talking, but it wasn’t the same kind of weird, uncomfortable silence that had filled the car during our roundabout drive to the cemetery. Something had shifted between us.
“Hey, Kelsi?” I said as we pulled up to a red light.
She looked at me, a question on her face.
“What if we did this more often?” I ventured.
Kelsi laughed. “Skip school so we can go smoke and cry in the parking lot of the cemetery?”
“No.” I smiled. “This. I mean, it feels normal now, doesn’t it? I mean, not normal normal. But more normal than we feel at school, anyhow. What if we got together sometimes?”
The light changed, and Kelsi eased her foot back onto the gas. She gave me a funny look. “Why would we do that? It’s not like we’re even friends.”
Ouch, I thought. But still, I pressed on. “Because with me, you don’t have to be Kelsi Whose Mom Died. And I don’t have to be Lacey Whose Dad Died. You know?”
Kelsi was silent for so long that I began to think she wasn’t going to respond. Then, finally, in an almost inaudible voice, she said, “Yeah. I know.”
“Maybe we can see if Logan wants to come too,” I said. As Kelsi turned left into the school parking lot, kids were pouring out of the buildings toward the cars. The final bell must have just rung.
“Whatever,” she said casually, like she didn’t care. But then she added, “Maybe we should ask Mindy Rodriguez, too. She’s a freshman. I heard her mom died last year.”
“And Cody Johnson,” I said.
Kelsi frowned. “So you want to start, like, some kind of club for kids with dead parents or something?”
“Not really.” The plan was forming in my mind as I spoke, and I wasn’t sure if it was stupid or not. “What if it’s just us getting together and hanging out sometimes without feeling like outcasts?” I asked. “I mean, we can talk about our parents if we want to. But we don’t have to. We can feel like we did before.”
Kelsi pulled into a parking spot, cut the ignition, and stared at her lap for a long time. Finally, she looked up at me. “Okay,” she said. “I’m in.”
chapter 8
Once I’d had the idea of getting us all together, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I thought about it at school. I thought about it at home. I lay in bed at night thinking about how I just might be able to help everyone who hurt the same way I did. I imagined scenarios in which the program was such a success, I would be asked to travel all around the country to talk to grown-ups about how to help kids who’d lost a parent.
But I was getting ahead of myself. I hadn’t talked to anyone but Kelsi about it, and I hadn’t even researched how to go about setting up an informal group of teens who got together to be with other people who didn’t make them feel like outcasts. Still, I knew in my gut that it was something I had to do. I just had to figure out how.
Jennica came over after school on Friday to do our weekend trig homework, and then my mom drove us to Jennica’s house. I’d told her we were having a sleepover, which wasn’t exactly a lie, since I really was sleeping over at Jennica’s place. But we were also going to a party at Brooke Newell’s house, and I knew my mom would probably say no if I asked her. Ever since the accident, she’d been completely freaked out about anything that involved teenagers, cars, and possibly alcohol. Not that I blamed her. But it wasn’t like we were going to drink and drive. I knew what could happen when you got in a car, even when alcohol wasn’t a factor.
“It’ll just be me and Tanner tonight at home,” my mom said as she drove. She glanced in the rearview mirror at Tanner, who was sitting beside Jennica and gazing out the window.