Alex dropped his backpack and pulled out his wallet, then handed me a folded piece of paper he had tucked inside. It was a photocopy of a picture I drew of Maddy freshman year. We were about a month into school and the sting of her no longer wanting to be seen with me was still raw. I used to sit at the table and sketch while Josh and his friends talked. I’d draw everything from the trash can to the clock on the wall, but this one was of Maddy. It was crude—sucked, actually—but it was definitely her. And it wasn’t one I even had in the pile of contenders for my art school portfolio.

“I know where she kept the real one,” I said. “You can have it if you want.”

“No. You keep it,” Alex said as he took his copy back.

“She got in to RISD. That’s what I was talking to Josh about. They were planning on going together. That’s why he was so upset.”

“Did you think she wouldn’t get in?” Alex asked. “She was amazing, Maddy. Better than Josh.”

“I don’t know what to think anymore. I don’t know how to make any of this right.”

He shook his head, his words coming after a long sigh. “There is nothing to make right, Maddy. The roads were wet and you weren’t going that fast. I was there when you woke up, when the police questioned you. You weren’t drunk. They gave you two blood alcohol tests and both of them showed nothing. It’s been ruled an accident. What happened to your sister was an accident.”

“I know that.” I was mumbling, could hear the sad desperation in my voice. “But things are different now. I’m different now. The Maddy before the accident … it’s like I don’t know her anymore. I don’t know what to say or how I am supposed to act.”

It felt good to finally admit it, to acknowledge that I was as confused as he was. “Everything was easier then,” I whispered. “I want to go back to that night and start over, trade places with her.”

“You mean you wish you had died instead of her?” Alex asked. I didn’t expect the flash of pain I heard in Alex’s voice, didn’t expect him to shrink away from me.

“Yes. No. Maybe. I don’t know anymore. I’m tired of pretending. I’m tired of trying to be someone I am not.” It was the first honest thing I’d said to him, and it felt good, fantastic even, for once, to be myself.

“You mean you want to be like her? Like Ella?” Alex asked as he pulled me into his arms and guided my head to his chest.

“Maybe I do. Maybe I want to be exactly like Ella,” I whispered.

“That’s not who you are, Maddy.”

That’s exactly who I am, I said silently to myself.

“Remember when you first learned what happened to Molly? Remember how hard that was?”

I thought back to last year, tried to connect Maddy to Molly’s social downfall, but I got nothing. If anything, Maddy was her normal, I-don’t-have-time-for-you self. When she wasn’t home or at school, she was wherever Alex was. But that wasn’t unusual; since freshman year, since the day she first sat down at his table, they’d been inseparable.

“And?” I didn’t know what else to say and that seemed like the vaguest way to keep him talking.

“It got better. After a few months, people stopped gossiping about her. You stopped worrying so much that people would figure out what you’d done and things went back to normal. In time, this will get better, too.”

“Time,” I repeated. It seemed like such a simple solution. Such an insanely logical and completely stupid solution.

Alex reached down and picked up the backpack I’d dropped and looped it over his own shoulder. “Just be yourself—the you of the last three years, and I promise you, everything will be fine.”

31

Being the old Maddy wasn’t as hard as I thought. With Alex thinking I was two steps away from losing it, he made running interference his full-time job, deflecting any question that came my way. He opted out of lunch in the cafeteria and let me retreat to the library where no one would bother me. Although I think that was more about keeping me away from Molly and Josh than my mental stability. The reason didn’t matter; it worked the same.

I kept my distance from Josh for the rest of the day. It helped that he and Maddy weren’t in any of the same classes. I caught him glancing my way in the hall the following afternoon, but Alex quickly moved in, blocking my view and distracting me. I didn’t catch what he was saying, just the words Snow Ball and colors.

I quickly looked up at the posters covering the walls. Some were advertising ticket sales and others were promoting Jenna for Snow Ball queen. They all had some combination of pink and purple in them so it seemed like a safe guess. “Pink, I think, maybe purple,” I said, then went back to sorting books in my locker.

“You want me to wear a purple tie?”

“What?”

He took the few books I had in my hand and shoved them into my bag. “I asked if you expected me to wear a purple tie.”

I shook my head, trying uselessly to understand why the color of his tie mattered. He could wear a black-and-orange-striped one for all I cared. “Uh … no,” I said, hoping that was the correct response. “Wear a black one or a blue one. Either one is fine; I don’t care.”

“Well, what color is your dress?”

“What dress?” The closest I’d come to wearing a dress in the last ten years was an overly long shirt, and even then, I threw on a pair of wool leggings.

“The one you bought with Jenna way back in September.”

I mentally shuffled through Maddy’s closet. She had at least a dozen formal dresses in there. I’d gone through her entire closet the past three days, trying everything on in an attempt to make myself look exactly like her. But I hadn’t seen any dresses with tags or still wrapped in plastic. “I don’t know. Brown?”

“Really, brown?” Alex looked surprised and grunted in disgust.

I immediately understood my mistake. Outside of a pair of gloves and a scarf, Maddy didn’t own a single article of clothing that was brown. Nothing even tan. Crap. “Doesn’t matter, I wasn’t planning on going.”

“Uh, yeah, you are.”

“No, I’m not.” The last dance I went to was our father-daughter dance in elementary school. Dad had to split his time between Maddy and me. Half an hour in, I gave up, let Maddy monopolize his time while I played mat ball with the boys in the gym. “Why does it matter if I go, anyway? You go.”

“I am going. With you.”

I shook my head. I wasn’t budging on this one. It was one thing to be Maddy at school where I could escape to the bathroom or the library to regain my sanity. It was something completely different to be put on display, to have to walk in heels and make small talk about who was wearing what, or more accurately, who was doing who. It was only a matter of time before Jenna, Alex, and this entire school figured out what Josh already had—I was no Maddy Lawton.

“You are the one who told me to avoid Josh and Molly. I think not going is the perfect idea,” I told Alex.

He laughed and started walking away, then turned around when he was a few feet from me and held out his hand. Apparently, I was supposed to follow. “Last I checked, Josh wasn’t going,” he said. “And I doubt Molly will go without a date, so you are good there, too.”

I couldn’t help the sudden joy that filled me. I knew Kim wanted to go; she’d been talking about it since they started dating. How cool it was going to be to go to the Snow Ball with a senior. She went so far as to try to set me up with someone, figuring I could double with them. I didn’t have to put a stop to that; Josh did it for me, warning her that setting me up was nearly as horrible an idea as him going to the dance in the first place. I’d assumed by now she had worn him down.

“Josh isn’t going?”

Alex gave me a cursory glance, no doubt wondering why I cared. “Last I checked, he doesn’t do much of anything. Since the night of the accident, I’ve seen him at school and at your sister’s burial service but that’s it. Outside of school, he is a virtual shut-in.”