I shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s different now. I’m different now.” Different in that I wasn’t Maddy and had never loved Alex. Different in that all these things—this room, this bed, the pictures tucked into the mirror, the boyfriend sitting next to me—weren’t mine.
Alex tilted his head, the silent question How? reflected in his eyes. I took a deep breath and held it, searched for the courage to speak my greatest fears out loud. “I’m different now. I’m not the same girl I was before the accident. Not even close.”
Alex smiled, not the sarcastic grin I was expecting, but one of quiet understanding. “You’re nervous.”
It wasn’t a question, but I nodded anyway.
“We’ve done this hundreds of times, Maddy. Literally hundreds.”
“I know.” Maddy and Alex had spent the better part of our junior year with their lips locked together and served their fair share of time in detention for getting caught kissing in the hall. And if the accidental glimpse I’d got of Maddy’s diary was correct, then they’d spent most of their summer rolling around in bed, or in the backseat of his Jeep, or on the beach, or … “I’m sorry, but I can’t. Not yet.”
He flashed me a grin and settled into the bed next to me. “I’ll tell you what, we’ll take it slow. It’s Sunday, right?” I nodded, and he went on. “So, tonight we can hold hands. Next week we’ll give kissing another try, and by the week after that, you should be good to go. What do you say? Sound like a plan?”
I nodded. That gave me two weeks to try to figure something out. Two short weeks, but at least it got me off the hook for tonight.
14
I spent an hour standing inside my sister’s closet after Alex left and another twenty minutes this morning. It didn’t matter what I put on, nothing felt right. Sweatpants and T-shirts had been my outfit of choice for the past few weeks, but I couldn’t exactly wear those to school. Not if I was going to be Maddy.
My inspiration came not from my own wisdom, but from a picture Maddy had tucked in the corner of her mirror: her and Alex at the Fall Festival the week before the accident. She was beautiful, amazingly so, and I wondered why I’d never seen it until now.
I took that picture with me into the closet and went about assembling the exact same outfit—low-riding jeans and a wide brown belt that barely fit through the loops. Squinting at the picture, I tried to figure out which of three nearly identical gray hooded sweaters she had on. It was a closer peek at her hands that gave it away—the sleeves of the top had holes for her thumbs. I added a second long shirt, a pair of boots, an ugly scarf, and I was good to go. I was dying of heat, suffocating under the layers, but after one more quick scan of the picture, I was confident that I was dressed exactly like her.
Hair and makeup … well, that was a different story. I didn’t have the slightest idea where to begin. Luckily, my left wrist was still in a cast. I could blame my less-than-perfect appearance on my inability to pull my lid taut with my left hand as I applied my eyeliner.
I wrapped the scarf around my neck one more time, pausing to breathe in her scent. The smell of her perfume mingled with a slight hint of Alex enveloped me, and for a second it was like she was there, giving me a hug. I missed everything about her—the way she smelled, the way she yelled at me for leaving my wet towels on the bathroom floor or using her crazy-expensive shampoo. I missed the amusement in her eyes when Dad told his lame jokes at dinner and the way she’d quietly poke her head into my room every night before she went to bed. Being surrounded by her clothes, her smell, her life made the heartache of losing her nearly unbearable.