She and I didn’t make sense either. I often found her down-home Americanisms more cloying than charming. We had different interests, different goals, and widely different plans for our lives. Our friendship had more or less been cobbled together in a way that probably didn’t make sense, and still, being with her felt . . . familiar. Normal.
Like maybe I could remember what my life was like before. Back when she’d be waiting for me outside the theater, like the time maybe a month before we found out Mum was sick, and instead of groaning when I pulled out my dice to determine our way home, she pulled out two red dice of her own.
“To add spice,” she’d said.
“You’re ruining my probabilities.”
“I believe ‘enhance’ is the word you’re looking for, as in, ‘You are enhancin’ my probabilities.’”
I’d just stared at her.
“It can’t be all that ruined, girl. What, so, one in three becomes one in five? What is that, like twenty percent harder?” I was about to give in to one of my most long-suffering sighs, but she didn’t even wait for me to react before she added, “And before you fuss at me, Miss Math Genius Moriarty, just remember our conversation about the difference between being smart and being crazy smart.”
I’d rolled my dice without comment, though internally I was calculating the actual difference between a 1 in 216 chance and a 1 in 7,776 chance.
It was 3,600 percent harder.
She had decided her dice would represent how many shops we had to stop at on our way home and how many things we had to buy at each shop. This, of course, meant that she immediately rolled double sixes.
“This game is my absolute favorite,” she’d said, evidently forgetting every other time, when it was the absolute worst. I negotiated her down to one shop and one food stop, where we would try six things—all puddings as it turned out. I had never in my life tried six puddings at once, but there were a lot of things I’d never done until I’d met Sadie.
I had spent the better part of our day together wondering how in the world we were even friends. But that was the day I’d realized there isn’t always a reason why. Sometimes you don’t even decide to be friends, it just creeps up on you. Sometimes there are just these moments you share, when you buy six different headbands at Boots and each wear three on your way to Canteen for a crazy amount of cake and ice cream, moments when you take a train down to Brighton in the middle of the night and barely catch the next train back, or when you buy two bouquets each and see who can hand all her flowers out to people on the street first. When there are enough of those kinds of moments, sometimes you can’t imagine not having that person around.
Until she’s gone. Until that thing that only ever happens to other people is happening to you and no one is calling to help you escape it. I did escape, though. Even without Sadie around, I escaped into the memories of all that we did together the year before. And in those few times Dad would let me sit with my mother while she was mostly unconscious, I told her about all our crazy adventures. If I’d been gone, my mom might never have known about it. If Sadie had called, if I’d missed that time to sit with Mum at her sickbed and listen to her breathe, I might never have forgiven either of us. Maybe Sadie being around while Mum was sick would have ruined her as a friend for me anyway.
So, with her question still hanging in the balance, I found I could honestly answer, “I was never angry.”
“You should’ve been.”
I shook my head. Sadie pulled her chair closer to mine and leaned down in an attempt to pull my attention away from my notebook. Annoying, but effective.
“I should’ve been there.”
“It would’ve changed nothing.” I was surprised at the lack of emotion in my voice.
“You wouldn’t have been alone.”
“I might have sent you away, regardless.”
“You might’ve tried.” Her smile was sad but not forced, and she reached up to drape her hand over my arm—her warm brown skin and my cool white providing yet another mismatch. “I should’ve fought harder, Mori. And I’m sorry about that, because you deserve a better friend than me.”
I shook my head again and tried to go back to my trigonometry, but she attacked me in possibly the most awkward hug that ever was. I forced my arm around her back and endured it. Then spun in my chair, the minute she let go, to stare at my trig work until my eyes cleared enough to see the next problem.
x x x
I didn’t manage to gather any more information on our case the next day, or the day after that, but our next trip out on the lake was decidedly different. Lock had centered on a new theory that I was pretty sure he only brought up to tease me.
“I’m telling you, it’s the police,” he said for maybe the fourth time since we’d started our discussion. “Maybe it’s one. Maybe more. But everything points to a policeman being the killer.”
By “everything,” I was pretty sure he meant “every made--up fantasy in my own little brain,” so I challenged him. “How exactly do you come to that?”
“Well, the most obvious reason is that all the victims are criminals who weren’t fully punished for their crimes.”