It has been an overwhelming taste of what I can expect to be dealing with for the next few weeks. Penny or Will? An impossible choice to begin with, and I’ve only been focused on how it affects me. On my eighteenth birthday I’ll be giving one family back their child and the other…nothing.
I now know with sinking certainty that the family whose child I don’t choose won’t be in my life anymore and I’ll have lost not just one of my two best friends but another set of parents as well.
The burden bears down on me like a heavy meal sitting undigested in the pit of my stomach. I push the door to Will’s room closed behind me with a quick snap and collapse onto his bed.
There, I take several deep breaths into the fabric of his comforter—sucking in the scent of coconut suntan lotion—before pulling my face from it so that I don’t cover the whole thing in snot.
My chest rises and falls in shallow puffs as I stare down my nose. I’m in Will’s room. For a boy’s room, it’s clean if not neat, and it’s clear Ms. Bryan hasn’t done anything to tidy it up in the last couple of days. I’m in Will’s room. I pull myself up into a sitting position. I’m blinking, eyes wide now. I scurry off the edge of the mattress. The turn of conversation has chased all thoughts of the scavenger hunt from my mind, but here I am. Will’s great, big, epically magnificent, cowabunga awesome birthday surprise. For a second, it feels almost too easy, too fortuitous, and I imagine Will up here leading me to the answer, because surely this must mean that I need to find the wishes, that they’ll work their magic somehow. Why else would Will have chosen a scavenger hunt? Of all years, why this one?
If only I’m smart enough to figure out the trail to where he wanted me to go.
I cross the room and let my fingertips trail along the length of his desk, which is crammed against the window. There’s a paperback lying facedown. I put my thumb in the spine to hold the page and flip it over. The book is a copy of an old Joe Hill novel called The Heart-Shaped Box. The open page is three-quarters to the end. Quietly, I read the last few lines that Will must have read before he died, searching for some clue as to what he was thinking.
I quickly set the book aside and lean back against the desk. I haven’t gone a day without speaking to Will in over a year, and now I’ve gone two and it’s like he’s simply been lifted out of the world and I’m struggling to pull him back.
After fifteen minutes of checking in drawers, under the bed, in his closet, in the dirty-clothes hamper, and between the books in his shelves, I’m no closer to finding the hidden wishes or to figuring out the first step in how to get them. I’m frustrated, hungry, desperately sad, and borderline angry when a knock sounds on the door. “Lake, are you in there?”
I pinch the bridge of my nose, close my eyes, and count to three.
“Come in!” I say and try to rearrange my face into something suitable for the parents of my dead boyfriend.
In the last ten days I’ve become a Will and Penny anthropologist. Maya asks me to eat lunch with her and I do, but we don’t have much in common, given that she’s kind of a tech-nerd and has a weird obsession with playing Dragon Con 6 on her phone. Most of the time I zone out and watch Will and Penny.
I can’t figure them out.
They aren’t dating, but they do act like a married couple. From afar, I see Penny snatching a Snickers bar from Will’s lunch, hiding it, and trying to slyly replace it with something unappetizing, like carrot sticks. They argue. Penny usually wins. It’s…confusing. I’ve never been friends with a boy aside from my brother, and I’m aware that totally doesn’t count.
On the surface, Penny and Will don’t even seem like they’d hang out, let alone be inseparable. Everyone loves Will, teachers, students—upperclassmen, lowerclassmen, it doesn’t matter. He tends to make small talk while using expressive gestures and I even witnessed him remembering the janitor’s birthday with a card and candy from the vending machine. Penny is confident and unbothered, but she tends to keep to herself unless she’s making signs for Greenpeace or recycling or endangered animals.
The two of them just have this aura. People listen to them. For instance, Peng and Harrison haven’t bothered me since Penny shut them down.
Neither of them has spoken more than two words to me at a time since my first day of school. Short of stalking—okay, a little stalking—I have spent my free time searching for my opening, hoping they would invite me to sit with them or hang out after school.
I realize I could make the first move, but I don’t want to be an intruder, I want to be part of them. The desire to belong within a friendship that close fills me with a longing I didn’t know I had until I stumbled on it between the two of them.
That’s why I’m surprised to find Penny alone. It happens so fortuitously, I’m half convinced that I should take it as a sign. Class is already in session, and I’m headed back from the office, where I’ve been wrestling with a school administrator once again over the details of my schedule.
I’m walking through our school’s breezeway when I notice Penny a short distance away, kneeling beside a clump of trees. I slow down to study her, one of my new favorite hobbies, and it’s then that I hear the telltale sniffles of crying.
Crying.
I glance around, thinking Will must be nearby before realizing that he’s not and she’s alone. I take a deep breath, unsure of what I’ll do or say. I’ve never been exactly good with girls my age. I think that’s why I’ve tended to gravitate toward physical activity—if it involves a thrill that makes talking either impossible or irrelevant, that’s even better. I mean, I don’t even talk to my previous best friend, Jenny, anymore, and when I did, it’s not like we shared big secrets or I’d tell her when I was sad or anything. Those things had been reserved for Matt or my mom.
I step off the path, cutting across the crunchy grass toward Penny.
I gently call her name. “Are you…Are you okay?”
She turns to look at me. “Oh, hi, Lake, it’s you.” She doesn’t seem either surprised or disappointed. Instead, she looks like she’s had pinkeye for three weeks straight. Her nose is dripping two slimy rivers that fork off over her lips. I’m instantly fearful. Something is deeply, deeply wrong.
“What happened?”
She is toying with the braided leather necklace and amethyst charm that dangles from her neck. “It’s dying.” She looks away from me and her eyes flood with new tears.
“What is?” But I see the spots of pink blood on Penny’s fingers and try to stave off the rising panic. “You’re bleeding, Penny. God. Here, I’ll help you to the nurse’s office.” I hold out my arm. I’m not sure where she’s hurt or what’s taken place, but she is clearly a girl in distress.