Julie sat alone at a small table by the window. The pink streaks were gone from her hair, and her face was more angular than Sorrow remembered, making her look years older than twenty-four. Her hands were resting on the keyboard of her laptop, but she was staring out the window rather than looking at the screen. What struck Sorrow most of all was how thin she was: arms like sticks, collarbone jutting like blades, the kind of thin that would have Sonia remarking how unhealthy she looked and Andi scolding her for being judgmental of somebody else’s body.
Sorrow stepped up to the counter to order some iced tea. While it was being made, she kept glancing over her shoulder, afraid Julie would see her and slip away. Sorrow had found out—by asking Kavita, who had asked Mahesh, who had asked his girlfriend, who worked at the café—that most afternoons Julie could be found here with her computer. Filling out job applications, apparently, which seemed to Sorrow the kind of thing that shouldn’t have been anybody’s business, but this was Abrams Valley, and Julie was an Abrams. People had noticed that she wasn’t working. They definitely noticed when she fled her parents’ house every day.
Tea in hand, Sorrow approached Julie’s corner table.
“Julie?” she said.
Julie started and looked up. Her eyes widened, and she slid her headphones off.
“Um, hi,” Sorrow said. “I’m—”
“You’re Sorrow.”
“Yeah.” She had considered and practiced a dozen smooth introductions on her drive into town, but none of them felt right now that she was standing here. There was only one way to start. “Can I ask you something?”
“I guess,” Julie said warily.
“You were her friend, weren’t you?” Sorrow said. She put a hand on the back of the chair opposite Julie, gripped it nervously to steady herself. “You and Patience were friends.”
Julie studied her, and as the silence stretched Sorrow grew certain she was going to deny it. She was going to scowl, say she had no idea what Sorrow was talking about, say she would never be friends with a Lovegood girl, demand that Sorrow leave her alone, and she would say it loudly enough that heads would turn throughout the little café, and Sorrow would slink away in embarrassment, and her memory of that gray day in the orchard would be only that, a memory, not a key, not a door, not an answer.
Then Julie said, “Yeah. We were. For a little while.”
It wasn’t an invitation, but Sorrow pulled out the chair and sat down. She jostled the table with her knee, grabbed the edge to keep it from rocking. “But you kept it secret, right? I didn’t know until that day. When we saw you in the orchard.”
Julie didn’t ask what day she meant. “We didn’t hang out for very long. Just those few months when I wasn’t at school. Why?”
“I was just wondering—”
Sorrow’s voice cracked; she took a sip of tea. Her face was growing warm, and the longer Julie looked at her with those suspicious blue eyes, the worse she felt. She had been hoping that when she mentioned Patience, Julie would smile, she would open up to her, she would offer to talk, to remember. But Julie was leaning away from her and she was twisting the cord of her headphones in her fingers, and maybe Sorrow had gotten it all wrong. She had only that one memory, a cold day in the orchard, a single fraught conversation clipped from the end of a friendship she hadn’t even known existed before that moment.
She set her cup down, caught a drop of condensation with her fingertip.
“I just want to talk to somebody who remembers what happened.”
There was a pause. Then Julie said, quietly, “Everybody remembers what happened to her.”
“I mean, not—that’s not what I mean,” Sorrow said, but when she looked up, Julie’s expression was softer, more considering than suspicious. “I mean somebody who knew her. Who liked her. She didn’t have many friends.”
Julie took a breath, let it out. “Yeah, she mostly kept to herself, didn’t she?”
Not by choice, Sorrow thought, but she didn’t want to interrupt.
“And it didn’t help that she was kinda weird—sorry.” A smile quirked Julie’s lips. “But you know she was.”
“I know.” Sorrow’s heart was thudding. “It runs in the family.”
“I liked that. I did like her. She was different. She was fun.” Julie picked up her cup, set it down again when she saw it was empty. “But yeah, we kept it secret. I was petrified my parents would find out.”
Tell me about the night she died. The words were right there, hammering at the front of Sorrow’s thoughts. Tell me why your sister thinks Patience started the fire. She held them back. Ethan had denied it, had made a good case for why it wasn’t true, but Sorrow couldn’t get past the echo of Cassie’s words going around and around in her mind, compounded with every turn by the force of Cassie’s bitterness, the venom in her voice when she’d realized who Sorrow was. Nobody said something like that without a reason, and being a jerk out of the blue to somebody you didn’t even know wasn’t a reason.
“Can I ask—how did you even become friends?” Sorrow asked. “With our families so . . . you know.”
Julie didn’t answer right away, but her expression was thoughtful now, not guarded. “I guess the first time I actually talked to her, it was just random chance. I was home that winter—the school counselors decided I needed a break—but I hated being cooped up in the house all the time, so I spent a lot of time outside. Just walking around and stuff.” Julie turned toward the window, and the look in her eyes was unfocused, distant. “I was on the trail up to Lily Lake when I realized there was somebody behind me. It was the middle of winter, so there weren’t many hikers. . . . Do you mind hearing this? It doesn’t bother you?”
“No, it’s fine,” Sorrow said quickly. “Really. I want to know.”
Another shrug of those razor-thin shoulders. “She told me I looked sad,” Julie said.
You do, Sorrow thought. She dropped her gaze to the table, where Julie was fidgeting with her headphones cable. Her fingers were childlike and small, her wrists bony, and Sorrow had the sudden urge to reach out and still her nervous motions.
“About the last thing I wanted to do was talk to the creepy Lovegood girl who was following me in the woods, but . . .” Julie lifted a hand to tuck a strand of pale hair behind her ear. Sorrow watched the motion without thinking, looked away quickly when she met Julie’s eyes. “She just sort of walked beside me for a while, telling me about how she always came out to the woods when she was feeling sad, because she liked to think that the . . . she felt like the trees and the mountains and, I don’t know, the rocks or whatever, they would listen to everything she said even if she didn’t say it out loud.”
Listen, Patience had said, pressing her hands to the granite in the caves by Peddler’s Creek. Listen, and Sorrow had tried, oh, how she had tried, but all she’d heard was the moan of wind through the trees.
“I knew it was just, you know.” Julie smiled. “Lovegood weirdness. But it made me feel better. I guess we became friends after that. But it was, I don’t know. We didn’t have much in common except wanting to get out of Abrams Valley.”