I stood there and watched his faith in me disappear, his optimism deflating as my true intentions finally took form. “You’re still going to be her? You still want to be her?”

What I wanted had nothing to do with it, but that didn’t change my answer. “Yes.”

He shook his head and backed up, put what felt like miles of distance between us. “Then I can’t help you. In fact, as far as I’m concerned, I don’t know you anymore.”

He walked away from me. No I understand. No If you change your mind, I’ll be here. Not even an It will be okay, we’ll figure it out. Nothing more than a clearly delivered, soul-crushing I don’t want you in my life anymore.

“Did you mean what you said last night? Before you left?” I called after him.

Slowly, Josh turned around, his anger still firmly in place. “Did I love Ella? Is that what you are asking me?”

I nodded, quite aware that every word I spoke was being uploaded to YouTube or texted across the entire school.

“I meant it. I have since the day I met her. Still do.”

“Then why didn’t you ever tell her? You spent nearly every second of every day together and you never thought to tell her? Never thought she’d want to know or that perhaps she felt the same way?”

He took a step toward me, then stopped. His hands tensed at his sides, his tone low, guttural as if he was fighting to speak through his gritted teeth. “She was never, ever, on her own. And as for why I didn’t tell her … well, she never seemed ready to hear it. Still doesn’t.”

34

I couldn’t move, couldn’t even muster the resolve to look around me. It took an enormous amount of effort just to stay upright, not to dissolve in a pile of tears in the middle of the hall.

“Trouble with your sister’s boyfriend?” I swung my head around at the sound of her voice, wondered exactly how long Jenna had been standing there and how much she’d heard.

“Piece of advice,” she said. “Try worrying less about your dead sister and more about yourself.”

It was no secret that Jenna had had no use for Ella. She’d made that clear at the party the night my sister died. Part of me hoped it was a façade, something she did in public to keep up her image. To hear her express it in private, to me, wounded me in a way I wouldn’t have thought possible.

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“Oh, please, Maddy. Are you blind? Have you looked in the mirror lately? You look like crap, and your behavior kind of reminds me a bit of Molly’s. You want to be her? The fragile girl who everyone thinks is crazy?”

“Are you kidding me, Jenna? Do you have any idea what she—”

Jenna cut me off with a wave of her hand, the sarcastic grin spreading across her face too telling. “Oh, I know exactly what she went through. But they let her back on the team this year, so I guess all is forgiven.”

I was confused as to why Jenna found this amusing. Her reaction, frankly, was downright twisted. I didn’t care about pretending to be Maddy in that moment, didn’t care if I slipped up and she figured out who I really was. I wasn’t going to spend the rest of the year being her friend. Forget Alex and his you-have-to-play-nice-with-Jenna attitude. I was done with her.

“I don’t get you. For the life of me, I can’t figure out why we are even friends.”

“Because we’re exactly the same,” Jenna replied.

I shook my head. I refused to believe that. The Maddy I’d shared a room with for the first ten years of my life, the Maddy Mom and Dad adored, the one who still made cards for our grandmother at Christmas could never be as cruel and self-serving as Jenna.

“Deny it if you want,” Jenna continued. “You and I both know it’s the truth.”

“No. It’s not.” I don’t know where my courage came from, but I didn’t care. I had waited three long years to tell Jenna what I thought of her, and I wasn’t going to stop myself now. “I am nothing like you. I don’t use my family problems as an excuse to treat everybody like crap, and I would never go crying to my best friend’s boyfriend about how mean my father is or how broke we are. You think crying to Alex is going to gain you sympathy points, gonna make him dump me to take care of you?”

Jenna reached over and grabbed my arm, towed me into the girls’ bathroom across the hall. She kicked open each stall to make sure they were all empty before turning to the two girls staring at us from the sink. “Get out,” she yelled. “Now!”

She slammed the door shut behind them and put her ear to the wood—I presumed to make sure no one was eavesdropping. I didn’t know how she could tell, but I guessed certain types of people, those who are well versed in gossipy behavior, had their ways.

“You have shut me out for nearly a month, letting Alex be your go-between. I don’t know why, and, to be honest, I don’t care because it’s absolutely working in my favor.”

“In your favor? How is my accident working in your favor?”

“Alex loves you. I’ll give you that. But he’ll only put up with this”—arms fluttered in my direction—“for so long.”

I didn’t try to keep the contempt from my voice. I embraced it and let my words come out in a low growl. “Put up with what?”

“Oh, come on. Did you hit your head that hard?”

I toyed with actually answering her. I had hit the tree hard enough that I had no freaking clue who I was when I woke up. It took staring at my cold, dead sister in the hospital morgue to jar my memory. So yeah … kinda.

“For the first couple of days, I thought you were upset, you know … torn up about your sister and feeling guilty, but you had Alex answering my texts and returning my calls.” She paused long enough to laugh. “But you have even shut him out completely.”

“That’s not true,” I fired back. She had no idea what Alex and I had talked about when he was at my house, no idea how many times he sat there quietly holding my hand when I refused to talk. I hadn’t shut Alex out. The only person I was keeping on the outside was Jenna, and that was purposeful.

“It’s true, and you know it. If you pulled yourself out of your own pity party for half a second, you’d see it.”

I’d killed my own sister; I think that alone entitled me to a bit of self-inflicted guilt. But that wasn’t what had me broken and stumbling through the motions of being Maddy. She wasn’t merely my sister. She was a part of me, the one person I knew would always be there. And now she was gone. I missed her, and no matter what lie I told or how much time passed, I couldn’t get the overwhelming feeling of complete emptiness to go away.

“So what if I was a little distant. It’s to be expected given what I’ve been through.” I knew for a fact nobody would think twice about me being quiet, more reserved than the Maddy they knew. In fact, the one time Mom had brought it up to my doctors they told her it was normal, that anger and refusal to talk were normal stages of the grieving process.

“There is a difference between being quiet and completely freezing someone out, Maddy. When was the last time you and Alex slept together?”

I was genuinely confused. I didn’t know the answer to that, couldn’t hazard a guess. He’d tried that night in my room, but I’d pushed him away, not wanting to go there.

“You can’t even remember, can you?” she continued when I didn’t answer. “When was the last time you were on a date with him or let him kiss you? Not coddle you, but actually kiss you.”

“That’s none of your business.”

“He’s not forty, Maddy. And you sure as hell aren’t married. He’s eighteen. He has absolutely no reason to stick by you.” She eased forward over the sink and adjusted her hair in the mirror. “And there are plenty of others more than willing to take your place.”

“And by others, you mean you.”

Jenna turned around and grinned. “I didn’t say that.” She didn’t exactly not say it either. “But I have come to a decision about something else.”