“Absolutely shitty?” Katy finishes for me, and as I nod, we both burst into laughter. At this moment. The sheer absurdity of it. Then the laughter morphs into sadness.
There are people in this town, this stiflingly bland town, who know I had a baby brother. Who have known for years that he’s gone. And I just found out days ago.
There are people in this town who know all about the first—the only—boy I’ve ever loved, and I just found out his name.
“You said nobody else knows that I got the second splice?” I ask Katy.Please say nobody else knows.
“I swear,” she says. “I’d never do that to you.”
I believe her. I know this is not her fault—she was trying to do whatIwanted—but why would she let me go through with it? How could she let me erase such a big part of my life?
When I ask her that, she says sadly, “I know you want a better reason, but all I have is that it was what you wanted. It was going to help you. It felt, at first, like an adventure. We planned out how we would do it, the IDs, what we would tell different people. We cleaned out your room, removing every single thing that was related to Zach. It felt like this daring, secret thing I got to do with my best friend, and it seemed kind of…”
“Kind of what?” I push.
“Special. That you were trusting me to keep this secret for you for the rest of our lives.” She chews on her nail. “That even when we were in college, hopefully both in New York”—in the absence of wood, she knocks on the dashboard—“we would always be linked by this one thing.”
“I thought you said the other day that you were already keeping a million secrets for your other friends? That you were sick of too many secrets?”
Katy rolls her eyes. “Um, I wascovering my ass.” She laughs now and I manage to force a laugh too. “And please, Sullivan. Are you new here? Best friends come before the-yo-ter friends. By definition, that means I like your secrets better than I like theirs.” She laughs again now, but adds, “Yours feel like mine.”
I want to keep pushing Katy for more and more answers, but really, there’s only one person I want to hear the truth from. The real Zach.
“Speaking of secrets,” I say, and urge her to tell me about Mitch Enns, and how her bracelet got to be in his car, and just how often they’ve been “hanging out.” It turns out to be quite a lot, and she doesn’t even seem ready to start referring to him as Rich or Fitch yet.
“The second he seems bored, his new name is Glitch,” Katy says, and I laugh.
“I don’t think he’ll get bored, Katy.” I hope she stays with him long enough to find this out herself.
“Everybody does eventually,” she says, and I think she means her dad and Jason and all the other boys she’s dumped before they had a chance to get sick of her and do it to her first.
“You can want things, you know,” I tell her now. “Other than Juilliard.”
“Shut up,” she says, half laughing.
“It’s true,” I insist. I want to say,You can want a boy to call, and cry about it when he doesn’t, or you can call him yourself. You can want solos and your parents’ love and you don’t have to passive-aggressively fight for them or invent crises.But what I say is, “When you first came to Lyndale, I bet Mrs. Dubois would have given you more solos if you’d asked.”
“And robbed you of your billions, Chosen One? I doubt it,” she says dismissively. “Did I mention Mitch has a special ringtone for me?”
As she talks about him, her cheeks redden and she plays with her braid again.
I wonder if I was this embarrassed the first time I told Katy about Zach. I wonder when I knew I loved him.
“Hey, Addie? There will be other boys, okay?” Katy says just before we climb out of the car and head back for the rest of the day.
I swallow and nod, then shut the car door and follow her.
I know she must be right, but I can only think of one boy at the moment. Well, two, if you count Memory Zach.
All through last period, I keep glancing at the clock. I might as well have not even come to Spanish for the amount of attention I am paying. But I decide to wait it out. Then, with thirty minutes left in the period, I hand Mr. Hilton the note my “mother” supplied about my dentist’s appointment and leave. I feel Katy’s eyes on me as I walk out, that one perfectly trimmed eyebrow with its acrobatic curve. She’s worked for years on getting it to tilt up just like that to show surprise or curiosity, and it does so now, like,Dentist’s appointment, huh, young lady,even though she wrote the note herself. Fighting a laugh, I run—or slide, thanks to the snow—all the way to my car, crank up the heat, and drive the fifteen minutes to Meridian High. Massive trees, white with snow, leaves bitten off by winter, guard the redbrick building. A few cars wait in front of the entrance, and a couple of students are already walking toward their cars or talking to each other, but school hasn’t let out yet.
My heart is staging a stampede, each beat a heavy-booted kick to my chest, and I have to fight with myself, argue with my fear, to step out of the car at all. I drag myself toward the building but stop under a tree. I try to blend in, to look like a student who has gotten out early and is waiting for a friend or a ride or a sibling.
I thought about bringing Memory Zach with me to do this, but I could see things getting awkward quickly. I don’t know if my mind can take the real Zach and the invisible version of him both in one place.
I try to figure out what I’ll say, what I’ll do, when I see Zach. Should I just walk up? Should I lethimwalk up?
I’m turning over seventeen different scenarios in my mind when a sharp trill pierces the air. Instantly the heavy doors of the school burst open and people begin to pour out, laughing, talking, yelling to be heard over each other.
