“I miss her,” Haley says. “It’s not the same.”
A round of agreement echoes across the table. I pick my hamburger bun into pieces and say nothing. As we get up to dump our trays, I keep thinking about how saying nothing makes me seem despondent. Is that what I am? Is that what I have become?
I’ve heard that when someone important dies, you get surprised every time you turn to find them and they’re not there. My awareness of Alissa’s absence is so stark, there’s no way I could forget that’s she’s not there long enough to be surprised. I was wrong—it is not one thing that is different, but everything. I will never spot her raven hair down the hallway as she talks to Ms. Cross outside the newspaper classroom. I won’t smell strawberrylip balm as she stretches over her desk in chemistry and rests her chin on my shoulder to count down the seconds until the bell rings. I won’t ever make another joke about her long, long legs when I help her stretch in practice. There will be no more notes hidden in my locker with my name printed neatly on the front.
By the end of seventh period, I’ve amassed a pile of homework that would have sent me into a panic before, but now I am strangely numb to it. I get back to my locker and kind of wish I had a mound of physical textbooks to carry home, the kind Mom says she used to use, so I could feel the weight of them. They’re all online now.
A couple of the track girls, Haley and Micah, walk with me to the locker rooms. They’re talking about the upcoming spring break trip a lot of the team is taking, and I try to participate, but even I can tell how forced I am. I stop trying. Haley and Micah, bless them, restructure the conversation so that I am included without having to join in.
We walk in on a conversation in the locker room.
“—they really are having an assembly?” This is Kylie, one of the girls I sat behind at the funeral. She’s talking to the other girl who was there, Bethany. “To tell us suicide is bad?”
“Mr. Marks said it’s more of a memorial thing,” says Bethany as she puts her hair up. “We’ll get out of calc, but you know it’s going to be depressing.”
Kylie says hi, then does a double take, seeing me with Haleyand Micah. She prods Bethany with her elbow, and both of them look away quickly, faces red.
“They’re having an assembly because of Alissa?” I ask.
“Uh, yeah,” Bethany says eagerly, looking relieved that I didn’t snap at her. “I don’t know when. He said they might ask students to speak at it.”
They all wait for me to reply to this, but instead I go to my locker and start getting changed. I don’t have anything else to say. I’m too busy wondering if they’ll ask me, and if I say yes, what would come out of my mouth.
It’s forty degrees and rainy today, so we have practice on the indoor track. We start with two warm-up laps running clockwise, a ritual that on any other day would pass by in a blink and drain the day’s stresses out of me. I count my steps, losing myself to the hypnotizing drumbeat of my feet.
Because of track and cross country, I count my steps all day, every day, sometimes without noticing I’m doing it. I know it takes ten steps to get from the kitchen doorway to the refrigerator. Eighteen to get down the stairs. Fifty steps from my Spanish class to my locker. Seventy-seven from my assigned parking space to Alissa’s.
Today, every step jars my legs, my hips, my stomach, my heart. My count is off—I lose track two, three, four times, and have to start over. It makes my brain feel tight in my head, like there’s a vise that screws tight whenever I try to think. I suspect thesprinting, distance, and head coaches are all watching me from the center of the track. Alissa is a phantom running on my right. I treat her like Schrödinger’s cat: as long as I don’t turn to look at her, she could be there or not be there. Schrödinger’s Alissa.
By the second lap, I’ve fallen behind the others. My legs are heavy, my feet dragging. My count is a repeatingone one one one one.The drumbeat skews irregular. I try to push myself faster, but I can’t.
I don’t want to.
I slow, then come to a complete stop. Our fastest runners lap me. Haley, Aiden, and a bunch of the boys. A few look back, questioning. Aiden laughs and says, “You’re slower than usual! Something happen?” I don’t care; this isn’t about them.
This all seems very silly now.
“Evie, you good?” Coach Deemer calls. He, Coach Black, and Coach Russell openly watch me now, it’s not just my suspicions anymore. I look toward them, unsure what to say, what to do. I know that standing in the middle of the track and staring at them is weird. I know I should try to seem normal.Yeah, I’m good. Just tired. I think I need another day off.And they would understand, and I could leave.
But that’s just so much work. And I don’t want to explain.
“I have to go,” I say, and I collect my bags and leave the gym.
No one stops me.
Chapter 4
Two hundred fifty-six steps to my car. Or it should be. My count is off today. I get inside before I pull on my sweatshirt. I still have my shorts on, but I don’t feel the wind on my legs or the chill of the driver’s seat as I slide in.
Instead of turning right out of the school parking lot, the way I normally do to go home, I turn left. West. Alissa and I used to play softball at Westside Park; I know the way there like the back of my hand. A ten-minute drive with my old Sentra’s grumbling engine as the only music. It’s not quite baseball season yet, so the fields at the park are empty. A few parents watch their young kids play on the jungle gym and swings, and one guy throws a Frisbee to his dog in the rolling expanse of field.
The police found Alissa’s car here. I park where I think she might have, at the edge of the parking lot, facing the woods that border the park. Somewhere in that dense tangle of trees is Moss River. Alissa could have just gotten out of her car and started walking.
I shiver. My mind conjures an image of her in the passenger seat. She unbuckles her seat belt. Opens the door. I know what she’s going to do and I grab her arm. She stops. She doesn’t go. She closes the door, buckles back in, and we leave. We go to Chilly’s Chicken down the street and get a bucket of wings and a side of mac n’ cheese.
I turn the car back on, but instead of driving to Chilly’s, I head several miles downriver. A fisherman was the one who found her. He’d been out for some early spring fishing, he said, when he noticed a blue windbreaker downstream, caught between rocks. But it wasn’t only a windbreaker. He called the police. Once Alissa was identified, her car was found at the park. All her school stuff was inside. Her track bag. Her license and wallet. I don’t know if she’d planned to go to school or if she wanted to make it seem that way. She’d been missing for two days.
The place where the fisherman found Alissa is not a popular fishing spot. It’s not a popular spot for much of anything. It’s overgrown, it’s rocky, and at this time of year, after the snow and ice melt, the water overflows the banks and eats away the earth. I park at a nearby gas station, grab my backpack so it’s not left inthe car, and trek through half a mile of dead grass and brush to get to the spot.
