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“I don’t know if we’ll ever see him again, though,” I admit.
Including in heaven.
I keep that to myself. I don’t think heaven lets in liars, but Lily’s too little to know the details.
“Then what’s the difference between where he is and dead?” she asks.
I think about that. “Maybe it feels like he’s dead to us right now,” I say at last. “But there’s a chance we’ll see him again someday. Before heaven.”
“When?”
“I don’t know, Lily,” I say, my heart twisting with pain all over again. “Someday.”
She seems to think about that for a minute. “I miss him,” she says, pulling my arm around her.
“Me too,” I whisper, hugging her hard, my throat tight with unshed tears. It’s so complicated I can’t explain it even to myself, let alone my six-year-old sister. But as much as I hate him now, I miss the dad that he was to me for all those years—the one I thought he was, anyway. I miss the father-daughter concerts, the skate sessions, the laughter, the easy way he had. You’d never have guessed he was hiding a dark side. That’s what gets me. No matter how much I go back over it looking for clues, thinking I should have known, I can’t find anything.
“There was a man outside, but Mommy told him to go away,” Lily says after a minute. “She said you didn’t want to see him.”
I don’t say anything. Did Chase really stand out there until my mother chased him away?
How embarrassing for him.
“Is that true?” Lily presses.
“Yeah, it’s true,” I say, feeling at first smug and giddy. He made a fool of himself. Chase London, all-star football player, God of Faulkner High, teen dream and all around most worshipped guy in town, made a fool of himself.
For me.
But then disappointment creeps up inside me like a magma pushing up toward the surface of a volcano, building pressure until one day it will erupt.
What did I expect, for him to barge in, follow me to my room, and beg to talk to me?
I hate myself for even thinking it. He’s with Lindsey. That’s what he would do if his girlfriend was mad at him. Not a friend. I shouldn't even be thinking about it. I can’t expect him to do that when I’m mad at him.
But there’s a tiny part of me that wanted him to.
nine
Now Playing:
“#1 Crush”—Garbage
Though I’m usually excited to turn on my phone and check my messages when Mom hands it over for the day, I leave it off the next day. I dread seeing Chase, dread seeing Lindsey. Chase pops up at my locker as he does every day. He’s wearing a tight black sweater, and he looks so good I want to die. Instead, I close my locker and walk away before he can charm me out of my anger.
He walks to class with me even though I stare resolutely ahead, pretending my heart’s not racing at his nearness. I refuse to speak to him for the rest of class, which is difficult since he sits next to me. He playfully tugs on a curl, but I just turn my face away and ignore him. I see him texting under his desk, but I still haven’t turned my phone on.
Finally he slides a paper onto my desk, his neatly printed handwriting right in the center of the page.
What did I do?
I try to focus on the lesson, but I can’t pay attention. Even when I’m not speaking to Chase, he’s all I can think about, especially when he’s so close I can feel the heat jumping from his arm to mine. Finally I give up pretending I don’t see him and scrawl a word across the bottom of the paper and push it back to his desk.
Lindsey.
After class I take Todd’s arm and walk away, not looking at Chase. It takes all my willpower to ignore him, but I’m doing pretty well so far.
I manage to ignore him the rest of the day. In algebra he walks past me and drops a note on my desk, folded tightly into a triangle. I slowly pull it open, not sure if I should read it or ignore it. I think about throwing it away right in front of Chase, but that seems too harsh. I open it and flatten it out.
