“Why?”
He shifted back and forth, for once looking as awkward as I usually felt. “I’ve been worried. Ever since Thanksgiving. With the scarf.”
“You think I came here to kill myself?” I asked, surprised. Though after a moment of consideration, I realized my behavior had been pretty suspicious.
Rush shrugged.
“I’m not suicidal,” I assured him.
“So what are you doing out here?”
“I needed to see the tree. You know. The one she hanged from.”
“That’s morbid.”
It was my turn to shrug. “I guess it is. I just needed some closure.”
“So which tree is it?”
“I don’t know. I thought I’d be able to tell.”
Rush sat down in the dirt and leaves and snow. I sat next to him. We looked at the trees together in silence, trying to pick out the same one as Lizzie, the tree that was special enough to die beneath.
“I wanted to be close to her for a little while,” I said. “And the snow…maybe it seems stupid, but snow makes everything feel safe and clean.”
“Snow is a symbol for purity, if you can trust my community college English lit professor anyway.”
We both laughed at that, louder than we should have, because it wasn’t really that funny. But it was like being scared of the dark. With a little light, the shadows disappeared, and your surroundings weren’t so frightening.
“I brought these,” I said. I reached into my backpack and took out a stack of photos. The photos Enzo wanted to turn into art.
Rush flipped through the pictures. “Where’d you get these?”
“I took them from Enzo’s.”
“Don’t you think he might want them? Especially now?”
“Enzo doesn’t deserve them. I want to leave them here. Like a memorial.”
So Rush helped me arrange the photos in an arc on the ground. I knew the snow would ruin them and the wind would scatter them. By next summer, by the anniversary of Lizzie’s death, the photos would be unrecognizable. That was OK though. The place where Lizzie died now held a small glimmer of her life, and that was enough. A moment is all any of us has, really.
“Why do you think she did it?” I asked Rush.
“I don’t know. Maybe there wasn’t some big reason. Maybe she was just unhappy.”
“She didn’t seem like an unhappy person.”
“I saw her crying once,” Rush said. “I’d left the locker room after everyone else, and Lizzie was in the hallway crying. She must have thought no one was around.”
“People cry all the time. That doesn’t mean they’re suicidal.”
“It wasn’t that. When she saw me, she just stopped. Like, from sobbing to perfectly OK in two seconds. I asked her what was wrong, and she told me it was nothing, that she was just being dumb. Then we left for a party, and she seemed happy for the rest of the night. But I always wondered, if she could turn her feelings off like a switch, how much was she hiding from us? It made her seem mysterious. Which is stupid. She wasn’t mysterious; she was depressed.”
Could the answer be as easy as that? The person I’d admired and hated and envied and compared myself to for years was depressed. I looked down at the pictures of Lizzie. One of the versions of Lizzie anyway. I’d assumed she switched personalities to put on fronts for other people, but maybe she’d actually been lying to herself. Hoping that if she reinvented herself enough times, one day, she’d become a Lizzie Lovett who wasn’t deeply unhappy.
“I shouldn’t have believed her,” Rush said. “I should have made her talk to me. Maybe things would be different now.”
“I doubt there was anything you could have done.”
“I guess we’ll never know.” He looked at the pictures of Lizzie for a little while, then back at me. “Everyone’s worried about you, you know.”
“By everyone, you mean Mom and Dad?”
“And me. Don’t I count?”
I shrugged.
“Connor keeps asking about you,” Rush said.
“He does?”
“Half the time, I think he uses me as an excuse to see you.”
I raised my eyebrows at that unexpected bit of information.
“You need to let go of this thing with Lizzie,” Rush said. “Stop obsessing over her. Stop wishing you had her life. Even Lizzie didn’t want to be Lizzie.”
A month ago, I wouldn’t have believed him. I thought Lizzie had been born with some magical luck that I missed out on. I wasn’t so sure of that anymore. Maybe the luckiest people are the ones who know that no matter how bad things seem, there’s always something to live for.
“Do you think I’m horrible?” I asked.
“What? Why?”
“For the whole werewolf thing.”
“No,” Rush said. “You’re not horrible.”
He put his arm around me and pulled me close, the way he used to when we were little kids and he thought it was his job to protect me from the rest of the world.
I felt safe. Out there in the woods, where a girl had killed herself, during the first snow of the season, sitting next to my big brother, who was doing his best to look out for me, I felt safe and content. For the first time in a long time, I felt like maybe, probably, everything was going to be OK.