I yanked my hand away and shoved it underneath my legs. I didn’t want to be touched, or consoled, or eased into being dumped. At this point, I wanted to be left alone.
I quickly swiped at the lone tear I could feel rolling down my cheek. Until a month ago, I didn’t even like Alex Furey and couldn’t figure out why my sister was so utterly fascinated with him. But he’d come to visit me every day in the hospital, stopped by each night while I was at home. He did everything he could think of to try to pull me out of the darkness in my mind. And when I’d come back to school, he protected me, shielded me from the questions and speculation. That was what Maddy saw in him. That was the Alex she knew and loved. And I’d destroyed that like I’d destroyed her.
“Go,” I told him. He started to argue with me, and I pushed him away. “I’m fine, Alex, go.”
He kissed my cheek before reaching into the backseat for his bag. “I love you, Maddy. That won’t ever change.”
The cold air hit me as he opened the door, the few pieces of paper I had left on the floor taking flight. Alex caught a gum wrapper, balled it up, and shoved it into his coat pocket. The other piece of paper, the one I’d been carrying around in my back pocket, the one about Molly, managed to make it outside the car. He picked it up and stared at it, his face going white as he realized what it was.
Dropping his bag to the ground, he climbed back into my car and locked the door. Tossing the article onto the dashboard, he turned in his seat to face me. “Talk, Maddy. Now.”
38
“Why are you bringing this up?” Alex asked. “You put this behind you a long time ago, Maddy. We put it behind us. Leave it there.”
Maddy hadn’t put it behind her. She’d buried it in a shoe box in her closet with a bag of pills. And judging from the most recent addition to her quasi scrapbook, which incidentally was a copy of the anime club’s September newsletter, she had revisited the memory often.
I suspected Maddy’s interest in Molly’s drug tests was more than friendly concern. It wasn’t like Maddy had kept shoe box files on her other friends. But judging from the panic I could see written across Alex’s face, I’d have bet my life—if I still had mine to give—that Maddy felt guilty, that she’d done something she regretted and couldn’t fix. Something that had been slowly, painfully eating her alive.
Now I needed to figure out how deep that connection went. “Why did you let me do it? If you love me so much, then why didn’t you stop me?”
I held my breath as I waited for his response, hoping that I was wrong and Maddy had nothing to do with any of this.
“If you remember correctly, I tried. I told you it wasn’t worth it, that I didn’t care if you were captain of the field hockey team or a JV player who never made it off the bench,” Alex said.
“That’s not true,” I said, baiting him so he’d tell me more. Alex loved being popular, he and Maddy both did.
“So you’re guilty of what—giving her one too many beers last year at one of my parties? Let it go at that, Maddy. For both our sakes, please, let it go at that.”
“I didn’t just give her a beer,” I fired back. I was walking a fine line now and risked exposing myself. But I needed the truth. I needed to know what huge secret of Maddy’s I was supposed to live with. “I have the bag of pills.”
“Jesus, Maddy. Why didn’t you get rid of them? Why are you hanging on to them?” Alex shook his head, his tone softening. “You slipped a pill into her beer on Saturday night. It’s not like you had any idea that they were going to test the entire team at Sunday’s practice. It’s not like you would’ve done it had you known.”