It wasn’t a question, but I nodded anyway.

“We’ve done this hundreds of times, Maddy. Literally hundreds.”

“I know.” Maddy and Alex had spent the better part of our junior year with their lips locked together and served their fair share of time in detention for getting caught kissing in the hall. And if the accidental glimpse I’d got of Maddy’s diary was correct, then they’d spent most of their summer rolling around in bed, or in the backseat of his Jeep, or on the beach, or … “I’m sorry, but I can’t. Not yet.”

He flashed me a grin and settled into the bed next to me. “I’ll tell you what, we’ll take it slow. It’s Sunday, right?” I nodded, and he went on. “So, tonight we can hold hands. Next week we’ll give kissing another try, and by the week after that, you should be good to go. What do you say? Sound like a plan?”

I nodded. That gave me two weeks to try to figure something out. Two short weeks, but at least it got me off the hook for tonight.

14

I spent an hour standing inside my sister’s closet after Alex left and another twenty minutes this morning. It didn’t matter what I put on, nothing felt right. Sweatpants and T-shirts had been my outfit of choice for the past few weeks, but I couldn’t exactly wear those to school. Not if I was going to be Maddy.

My inspiration came not from my own wisdom, but from a picture Maddy had tucked in the corner of her mirror: her and Alex at the Fall Festival the week before the accident. She was beautiful, amazingly so, and I wondered why I’d never seen it until now.

I took that picture with me into the closet and went about assembling the exact same outfit—low-riding jeans and a wide brown belt that barely fit through the loops. Squinting at the picture, I tried to figure out which of three nearly identical gray hooded sweaters she had on. It was a closer peek at her hands that gave it away—the sleeves of the top had holes for her thumbs. I added a second long shirt, a pair of boots, an ugly scarf, and I was good to go. I was dying of heat, suffocating under the layers, but after one more quick scan of the picture, I was confident that I was dressed exactly like her.

Hair and makeup … well, that was a different story. I didn’t have the slightest idea where to begin. Luckily, my left wrist was still in a cast. I could blame my less-than-perfect appearance on my inability to pull my lid taut with my left hand as I applied my eyeliner.

I wrapped the scarf around my neck one more time, pausing to breathe in her scent. The smell of her perfume mingled with a slight hint of Alex enveloped me, and for a second it was like she was there, giving me a hug. I missed everything about her—the way she smelled, the way she yelled at me for leaving my wet towels on the bathroom floor or using her crazy-expensive shampoo. I missed the amusement in her eyes when Dad told his lame jokes at dinner and the way she’d quietly poke her head into my room every night before she went to bed. Being surrounded by her clothes, her smell, her life made the heartache of losing her nearly unbearable.

The door nudged open, Bailey’s nose inching in, pulling me from my memories. “How do I look?” I asked. He whined and lay down in the doorway. He’d been doing that since I got home—following me around, nudging my hands or my legs, begging me to acknowledge him. When nobody was looking, I would bury my head in the fur at his neck and remind him that I was still me.

“Come here, Bailey.” I bent down and clapped my hands, hoping he’d finally enter Maddy’s room. But he never did. He’d sit at the doorway and beg for me to come out, sometimes bark, but never once did Bailey come in. Probably because Maddy had trained him to stay out of her room by hurling her shoes at him if he so much as put one paw across the threshold. She hated my dog, claiming he smelled like dirt and slobbered too much. He did, but that’s why I loved him.

“Treat?” I asked, and Bailey stood up, ears pointing forward. He stood there for a second, then turned around, walked into my old room, and climbed up onto my bed. Lucky him.

“He still won’t come in?” Mom asked. She was staring at Bailey as he circled my bed looking for a comfortable spot to sprawl out.

“Nope. But I don’t know why I care,” I quickly added. Mom had been watching since I got home and had made more than one curious comment about why he was following me around. “He was Ella’s dog, not mine. I feel bad for him. He misses her.”

“That’s why you care, because he’s Ella’s dog?”

Mom and Dad had been trying to get me to talk to them for days, thought I needed to open up, that I couldn’t start to heal until I did. That’s what her question was, an opening for me to walk through. I wouldn’t.

When I stayed silent, Mom sighed and came into my room. “You sure about this?” she asked as she handed me an apple—which I presumed was supposed to be breakfast—and the doctor’s note excusing me from gym for the foreseeable future. I also had a note I was instructed to hand to any teacher or administrator who questioned my prolonged absence. I doubted I’d need it. Everybody, including the principal, knew why I’d been out.

“Yeah, I’m sure. I want to go back. I need to go back.”

I grabbed the apple from her hand and headed for the kitchen. She was following me, her quiet footsteps echoing behind me on the stairs. I took a quick glance at the fridge, briefly wondering if I was supposed to pack a lunch. Hmm … I didn’t remember Maddy standing in the lunch line, but then again, I never saw her toting around an ugly brown paper bag either. Crap, it was barely seven in the morning and I was already stumbling.

“You hungry?” Mom asked. “I can fix you something to eat if you want.” She looked confused and mildly optimistic that I’d say yes.

I was starving and wanted nothing more than a stack of pancakes with a side of sausage, but I didn’t have time. Plus, I hadn’t seen Maddy eat anything pork-related since middle school. “Nah, I’m good.”

I grabbed my keys off the counter and headed out the door. “Remember to be home by six,” Mom called after me. “I made an appointment for us to see the therapist tonight. You’ve been so…”

“Quiet? Closed off? Different?” I supplied when she struggled to find the right word. I’d always been those things. Problem was, I was no longer me. “I’m fine, Mom. We already had this conversation. I don’t want to talk to somebody about what happened. I want to forget it and go on.”

“We discussed this, Maddy. You’re—”

“No, we didn’t,” I said, cutting her off. The last thing I was going to do was let some shrink go mucking around in my lie. I was having a hard enough time keeping it together as it was. “You said you wanted me to see a therapist. I never agreed to go.”

“Maddy, sweetheart, your father and I met with the doctor. He thinks we need to come in as a family, try to work our way through this so that…”

“Work our way through this?” I could hear my voice climbing with each syllable. I didn’t need to talk about it. I relived it every night. My hands crushing the steering wheel. The smell of pine and dirt as the branches shattered the windshield. The blood trickling down Maddy’s face. Her dead eyes staring at me from the passenger seat. Those images were my constant bedtime companions.

“You want to know what I need?” I asked. “I need everyone to stop talking about it, stop making me think about it. I want to go to school, go watch field hockey practice, and then come home. I can’t fix what happened. I would if I could. I’d trade my life for hers, gladly put myself in that grave so she could have her life back, but I can’t. And I don’t see how meeting with a shrink is going to help!”

Not wanting to listen to her reply, I slammed the car door closed. I didn’t want to see the anguish in her eyes, hear the concern lacing her voice. And I didn’t want her to see me cry. I couldn’t pull this off if everybody was coddling me, asking me how I was, and reminding me it wasn’t my fault. None of that, no matter how well intentioned it was, was going to help.