“I had a headache,” I mumble, my eyes on my feet as I climb the stairs.
“For three days?” He reaches the top of the staircase first, then turns to face me. “For three days, you couldn’t pick up your phone and answer a text? You had me going crazy, you know. I almost went over to your house, but I thought maybe you got in trouble with your parents and they grounded you or something.”
I pause on the second stair from the top, my knuckles white on the railing. It would be so easy to use that as an excuse, to tell him my parents grounded me and took away my phone, but they hadn’t. I’d done everything possible to make it seem like I rang in the New Year alone—answered every check-in text they sent, forwarded the landline to my cell in case they called the house, kept the lights on for the nosy neighbors. My parents are blissfully unaware of what happened that night.
I kind of wish I was too.
People stream around us like water channeling around rocks, and I finally look up at Ethan. The desperation in his face makes my heart squeeze. I’m hurting him, and I don’t know how to stop. It’s like pain surrounds me, infecting everyone who loves me. Everyone I dare to love. My body may seem whole, with intact ribs and a beating heart and breath in my lungs, but I’m just as broken as Aubrey was, lying dead in the road.
“Talk to me, Dara.” Ethan moves down a step and places his hand over mine, still wrapped tight around the railing. “Tell me the truth. I think you owe me that much.”
He’s wrong. I owe him everything. My honesty is just a drop in the bucket of all the things I owe him, all the things I’ll never be able to pay back.
“New Year’s Eve was the best night of my life,” he says, low enough for only me to hear. “Then I woke up and you were gone. You just left. No warning, no explanation. Nothing. How am I supposed to take that?”
I slide my hand out from under his and step around him. “I can’t do this right now.”
“We have to do this right now,” Ethan says, catching up with me again. “Or I’m going to spend the rest of the day torturing myself over it, and I’ve already done enough of that over the weekend.”
We reach my locker and I bend my head over the combination lock, letting my hair spill forward. “What do you want from me, Ethan?” My voice sounds steady behind my curtain of hair, but my fingers tremble on the lock, betraying me. I will them to keep still, like the rest of me.
“I want you to tell me we’re still good. That’s it. That’s all I need to hear and then I’ll leave you alone.”
My lock finally pops open, but I don’t move my fingers from it. Because if I do, I’ll probably end up touching him. I’ll touch him and kiss him and assure him we’re still good. That we’ll always be good. And I can’t. After being in Aubrey’s room, after lying on her purple comforter and trying to soak in what was left of her, I find it hard to believe that anything good can come out of something so unspeakably horrible.
“You probably would’ve been better off hating me,” I say.
“What?”
I flick my hair off my face and look at him. “When I came back here. You were probably better off hating me instead of—” My voice breaks and I take a deep breath, steadying myself.
“What? Loving you?” Ethan says. When I don’t answer, he stares at me for a moment and then shakes his head. “Right. I think I get it now. You want me to make your life hell as some sort of payback for an accident that happened a year and a half ago. You think people should hate you, and any other possibility freaks you out. Because if people don’t hate you, then you might actually have to face the possibility that it wasn’t your fault and you aren’t a terrible person.”
The truth in his words makes my face burn and I bend over my lock again, sliding it from its latch with a shaking hand. When I pull open my locker, a folded sheet of paper falls out and flutters to the floor. My breath hitches in my chest. Already? School has barely been open ten minutes. How is it possible that someone dropped this off so quickly?
Unless it’s been there since before Christmas break. I didn’t visit my locker at the end of that last day, I remember. I felt sick after lunch, so I went home early. Whoever left this for me probably did it to cast a little pall over my two-week vacation from school. Or to remind me that even when I’m not here, they still have the power to ruin my day.
I make a grab for the paper, but Ethan gets to it before me and opens it up, his eyes scanning whatever waits inside. And it’s clearly nothing good, because his body tenses and his eyes go flat and the anger arrives the same way it always does, like a switch going off in his brain, soaking everything in darkness.
“Ethan. Give that to me.”
He’s not listening. His hurt over me is colliding with his rage over this and the result is downright scary. I reach out to take the paper from him, desperate to remove it from his sight, but he evades me and walks away. His stride is quick and purposeful, like he knows exactly where he’s headed and what he’s going to do when he gets there. Several other people in the hallway watch him too, apprehension on some faces and drama-hungry excitement on others.
I hurry after him, catching up just as he rounds the corner to another bank of lockers. Travis Rausch stands at one of them, a pen lodged between his teeth as he sifts through some books on the top shelf. I open my mouth to say something, snap Ethan out of it before he does something he’ll probably regret, but he’s on Travis before I even get the chance.
“You think this is funny?” he snarls, shoving the paper into Travis’s chest hard enough to send him reeling back against the locker door. His jaw drops in surprise and the pen tumbles to the floor.
“What—” Travis straightens up and locks eyes with Ethan. “What the fuck is your problem, McCrae?”
Moving closer, I put my hand on Ethan’s arm. It’s like touching marble. He ignores me and keeps his eyes on Travis, pinning him in place with his glare. I step back out of the way as he pushes the paper into Travis’s chest again. This time, Travis is prepared and braces himself.
“Did you put this in her locker?”
The bell rings, punctuating Ethan’s question. Travis’s gaze shifts to me, then behind me to the hallway, where a small crowd has gathered. No one moves to go to class. All eyes are riveted on Ethan’s rage-filled face and on Travis, as he takes the paper and looks at it. His face reddens.
“Dude,” he says, shoving it back at Ethan. “Aubrey was my friend. Why the hell would I draw something like that?”
Ethan’s fists tightens on the note, crumpling it. “Who did it then, if it wasn’t you?”
“I don’t know. Anyone could’ve put that in Dara’s locker. She’s not exactly well liked around here.”
“Yeah, you made sure of that, didn’t you.”