Love You Hate You Miss You Read online

  She bolted, of course, but I was surprised she’d stopped for even that moment.

  SIX

  TODAY WAS A LAURIE DAY TOO—as if I hadn’t dealt with enough crap with Caro and lunch already. I’d hoped to miss school to see Laurie, but naturally she has afternoon hours for her “teen” patients. Lucky, lucky me. Mom, thankfully, had to do some grocery shopping and just dropped me off. I wasn’t up for a discussion about “how things are going” with her while I was stuck in the waiting room.

  Eventually, I guess Laurie must have somehow known I’d looked through all the magazines twice and was contemplating bolting and had me called back.

  She started off normally enough—for her, anyway, with the “How are you feeling?” questions and all that crap. But then she said, “Today I want to talk about Julia.”

  “Okay, well, it’s been ninety days today,” I said, because telling Laurie to shut the hell up doesn’t work. I’ve tried it.

  “No,” she said. “I mean, tell me about her.”

  “Well, the accident—”

  “No, before that. When did you first meet?”

  “She moved here when she was twelve.”

  Laurie was silent. She does that sometimes. I can never tell if it’s because I’ve said something wrong or because she’s thinking. Either way, I always end up babbling.

  “I was eleven.” See? Babbling. Does Laurie really care when I met Julia? Highly doubtful.

  “What did Julia think about your drinking?” And once again, I was right. She’d gone right for the drinking. So predictable.

  I stared at her, annoyed. She stared right back.

  “Well, if it hadn’t been for…if it hadn’t been for that night, for me, she never would have—”

  “Let’s not talk about that right now,” Laurie said. “You drank before the accident, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “A lot?”

  I shrugged. It wasn’t like we hadn’t talked about this before.

  But she kept quiet again, so I finally said, “Yeah, a lot.”

  “When did you drink?”

  “Before parties, at parties. Weekend stuff. Last year, though, I drank at school sometimes.”

  “Why parties? Why sometimes at school?”

  I made a face at her because, really, how stupid could she be? Even I know I drank because it made me feel okay about having weird red hair and being so tall. It also made me less nervous about acting like an idiot in front of other people, and parties and school were times when I desperately didn’t want to seem stupid. Drinking made me feel so much better about—well, everything.

  “Amy, I know we’ve covered this before, but I think we should talk about it again. Let me ask another question,” Laurie said, as if I could stop her. “What sort of things did you do to keep your parents from noticing you took alcohol from them?”

  “My parents don’t drink.” I knew she had all this in her little file or chart or whatever. My first week at Pinewood I talked and talked and talked about all this crap, and she was in the room when I did. (And she had her damn pen.)

  Laurie didn’t say anything, though, just gave me her interested look (You’d think they’d learn more than one expression in shrink school), so I sighed and recited what we both already knew.

  “My mom had a cousin who died from alcohol poisoning when he was twenty-two. My dad’s aunt was an alcoholic. Why don’t you just say you want me to ask them about my dead drunk relatives?”

  “Right now, I really would like to focus on you. How did you drink?”

  I rolled my eyes and opened my mouth, holding up a pretend bottle.

  She clicked her pen twice. I hate that damn thing.

  “Julia would swipe stuff from her mom or find someone who’d buy for us.”

  “So she drank too?”

  “Sure, if there was nothing else around.”

  “And if there was?”

  “If there was what?”

  “If there was something else around?”

  “Then she’d do that.”

  “I see,” Laurie said, and the minute she did I knew where she was going and it pissed me the hell off.

  “Julia didn’t like how much I drank, you know. Like, if I’d puke she’d say I should think about cutting back, and that it was stupid to drink when I could just do something that wouldn’t make me totally sick like drop aci…um. Anyway, she had to look out for me. And she did. But I—I didn’t do a very good job of looking out for her.”

  She nodded. “For next time, I want you to think about talking about Julia. Not about the accident. Just about her. What she was like. How you met, the kind of things you did together. Would you be willing to do that?”

  “I guess.”

  After that we talked about the usual stuff we do when Laurie says we’re “wrapping up”—do I want to drink, what do I do when I want to drink, a review of my “coping skills,” blah blah blah. I swear I could tell Laurie I’d just murdered someone and she’d still make me review what I’ve “learned.”

  Here’s the thing about that: how often I want to drink doesn’t seem to be a big deal to her. How can it not be? Look at what I did, at what my drinking cost…how can I even think about it at all?

  But I do.

  I also told her a little about lunch. I don’t know why, because she said she thought I should try to “strike up a conversation” with Corn Syrup. Yeah, okay, great idea.

  Laurie really doesn’t get how high school works, but that’s how adults are. They think school is so easy and life there is so great. I’d like to see them go back.

  Laurie wouldn’t last a day.

  99 days

  Well, J, it’s Friday night. Are you ready to hear my exciting plans?

  My parents have asked me to join them while they watch some special on the History Channel. So I’m here in the living room, lying on the floor and working on homework. You know, I haven’t actually done homework in ages. You and I had, what, two study halls last year? I don’t remember ever opening a book in either of them. I remember you painting your fingernails and mine. I remember talking about Kevin and your mom and my parents. I remember making plans for after school, for the weekend. It was so great when your mom gave you a car (even with the lecture about how much she sacrificed for you) and we didn’t have to take the bus everywhere.

  Remember when we decided what we were going to do once we were done with high school? We’d bailed on lunch to smoke in the third-floor bathroom, and I drank a ton of those little bottles you kept in your locker because Mom and Dad had actually fought that morning and it was all horrible silence until Mom started to cry. Then Dad put his arms around her and it was like I wasn’t even there even though we were all in the kitchen, and worse than the rare fight was the all-too-regular sight of them so wrapped up in each other that they forgot I was there.

  We decided the day after we graduated we were going to move to Millertown—out of Lawrenceville, finally!—and get an apartment. You were going to help out with Kevin’s band, and I was…whoa. Déjà vu.

  It’s…J, it’s so strong I feel almost sick. Have you ever felt memory like this? It’s like I’m there with you smiling and waving at me, your fingernails painted pink and red and blue and green. I might have been drunk then, floating through life, but it was real. I was real. You were real. This crap—lying on the floor, this stupid homework, all of it—it feels like nothing. It is nothing.

  Me again.

  Mom and Dad have finally let me out of their sight to go to bed. It was pretty obvious something was wrong with me because I couldn’t stand another moment of their stupid show about some stupid guy who built churches, and I got up and—well, I got up and just stood there, shaking. I stood there because I wanted a drink and hated myself for it. I hated myself for wanting it because it took me back to that night, to that quiet road, to the way I lay shivering in the ambulance, cold even though I shouldn’t have been, surrounded by people hovering over me but without the one pe
rson I most wanted to see.

  My parents talked and talked, said all the things I suppose Laurie and Pinewood taught them to say. The truth, J, the truth I know you already know, is that their talking isn’t what stopped me. Pinewood isn’t what keeps me from drinking either. It never has been. The reason I don’t drink is because of what happened to you. What I did.

  I tried once, the morning after you died. I rolled out of bed, rested against the floor until I felt strong enough to stand. I found a bottle in my bottom dresser drawer. I went to pick it up and saw your face, heard you crying and me promising everything would be all right. I opened the bottle, and you stared at me, eyes open and glitter dusted across your cheekbones. I took a sip, and I could see out the ambulance window. You were lying on the ground, your hands open wide, holding on to nothing. There were people standing over you, looking down at you, and I knew you’d never see them.

  I couldn’t swallow. I opened up the attic window, gagging, then grabbed the bottle and tossed it as far as I could. That afternoon my parents started talking about Pinewood. They started talking about it more when I said, “Fine. Whatever. I don’t care.”

  I thought about killing myself the day after your funeral. I was in my room, behind the locked attic door staring at the picture we had taken the time we skipped school and went to Adventure Park. Remember that? You talked that guy into letting us in for free and we rode on all the rides and bought a picture of ourselves smiling with someone in a squirrel suit. I knew Dad kept a bottle of sleeping pills in the medicine cabinet in the bathroom he shares with Mom, for the times he’s overseas and has to sleep because he has an early meeting about whatever merger his company is working on. They wouldn’t have noticed till it was too late.

  You know why I didn’t do it? It wasn’t because I didn’t want to. I did. God, I did. I didn’t because living with what I’d done to you was what I deserved. I deserved to be alone. I deserved the shaking and the headaches and the fact that every single time I took a breath I felt a squeezing in my chest, my heart beating even though I wished it wasn’t.

  I deserve to live like this now, to have tonight happen to me. I deserve to remember the way things were and realize they’re gone. That I destroyed them. I won’t drink and let myself wipe it away for a little while.

  When Mom and Dad were done talking tonight they made me sit between them on the sofa. Dad fiddled with the remote and patted my knee. Mom put an arm around my shoulders, squeezing gently every once in a while. We watched a movie, something with wacky misunderstandings and an ending where everything turned out okay. I could tell because there was happy music. It was a very long eighty-seven minutes.

  “You did it,” Mom said as the credits rolled. Dad said, “Amy, we’re so proud of you.” It made me happy to hear them say that, and I don’t deserve that either. I always wanted family stuff like this. It’s kind of funny, isn’t it? All those years of great grades when I was young, all those years of trying to squeeze into their world, and it turns out I just needed to stop caring, become a drunk who dragged her best friend into a car and—I can’t stand this, you being gone. I’m so sorry, J. You don’t know how sorry I am for what happened. For what I did.

  I know they’re just words. But I mean them, I swear. I’m sorry. Please forgive me everything.

  SEVEN

  I TOLD JULIA about tonight, but I didn’t—I didn’t tell her about school. I tried, staring at the paper, pen in my hand, but the words wouldn’t come. I don’t want…

  I don’t want her to know what I saw today.

  I was at my locker at the end of school, grabbing my stuff. Everyone was talking, planning their weekends and discussing what we’re all supposed to care about, who did what to who and why.

  I shut my locker, and Kevin was standing there. Rich, his stupid-ass best friend and the last guy I slept with—number five and the biggest waste of my time because he actually tried to act like my boyfriend afterward till I had to tell him to get lost—was standing a few feet away, acting like I wasn’t there. That didn’t surprise me. I was actually surprised either of them would come near me at all.

  “Hi,” Kevin said.

  He really said that. “Hi.” Like it was just another Friday and not ninety-nine days since Julia had strode down the hall and said, “God, I’m so glad to be free of this place till September!” Like it wasn’t ninety-nine days since she’d died.

  I stared at him.

  “I want to show you something,” Kevin said, and pushed up his sleeve. He had a tattoo spiraling around his wrist. Julia’s name, written out dark and forever.

  “She’d love it,” he said, and put a hand on my arm. He sounded so sure.

  I wanted to take his face in my hands and pull. I wanted to rip off his skin, tear it to shreds, and leave him broken. Julia’s name on his wrist, like it would fix what happened, like it could ever fix what happened: Julia’s swollen red eyes, her sobbing as we stood in someone’s house, and him staring stone-faced, not even calling her name as we left.

  I know what I did to her, and I know—I know I have no right to talk. But I hate him. God, I hate him.

  “I really loved her, you know,” Kevin said, as if I’d commented on his tattoo, as if I’d spoken. “I loved her so much. And now—” His voice broke, his eyes filled with tears, and I saw girls walking by look at him, sympathy and lust on their faces, and maybe he does miss Julia, maybe now he loves her like she always wanted. But that—that writing Julia won’t ever see, those tears and regret she didn’t get until it was too late—the wrongness of it made me want to scream.

  I pushed his hand off my arm. He gave me a dark look and smeared over it with a smile. “I forgive you for what you did, you know.”

  My vision went dark, spotted red and hazy. I shoved past him, his predictable muttering (“Be that way, bitch”) washing over me and making the red haze I saw beat like a second heart. Rich said something to me too, as if I would care what he thought, as if sex with him once (for thirty-seven whole seconds) meant something. All I could think about was Julia. Her shattered face after she saw Kevin with that other girl. My hand on her arm, guiding her away. Leading her to the car.

  I wanted to get away and couldn’t. I was trapped in the school, in walking past the thing her locker had been turned into. I was paying for telling her we should leave the party, I would always be paying. I bumped into someone just as I heard Mel say, “Hey, watch where—Hey, Amy, you okay?”

  I blinked, confused, and saw Mel watching me from a few feet away. I didn’t understand. How could he be over there when I’d just bumped into him?

  I hadn’t. I’d walked into Patrick. He just hadn’t said anything. I looked at him and he—he was looking at me. He looked at me like no one, not even Laurie, has. He looked at me like he could see everything, all the way down into the rotten places inside me.

  I didn’t like that. I hated it. I hated him. I hated everyone, everything. I wanted to rip the whole world apart so it wouldn’t be like this anymore. Patrick blinked and something passed through his eyes, a curious understanding. He didn’t say a word.

  I pushed past him and went outside to wait for Mom, but I could still see that tattoo, see Julia’s name. I could still hear Kevin saying how much he loved Julia when she wasn’t around to hear it. I could still see Patrick looking at me, and I knew none of it would go away.

  I knew I’d remember it all.

  104 days

  Hey J,

  It’s Wednesday, but that doesn’t matter. All my days are the same.

  I:

  Get up, eat breakfast with Mom. Read encouraging note left by Dad, who has to leave early every morning because his company is in talks with another company in the UK and he’s having all these teleconferences. Take shower. Get dressed. Look in mirror. Still freakishly tall. Hair still the shade of red that makes people (usually old) say things like “My, it looks like someone lit a match on your head!” I miss you telling those people to watch out or they’d get burned.r />
  Mom calls out that we’re “almost very late” and drives me to school. So far this week I have learned that Mom:

  —hates chairing the curriculum committee she’s on because the proposed changes won’t attract more students into art classes.

  —is “very proud” of my being a vegetarian and has ordered some “yummy” cookbooks. I told her she could let me know how they tasted. She laughed. I can’t remember the last time I made anyone do that.

  School is locker, class, no time for locker, class, rush to locker, barely make it to class—you get the idea. Of course there’s still lunch too. The past few days I’ve caught Corn Syrup looking at me a couple of times. For someone allowed to bask in Beth’s glow (ha!), Corn Syrup usually looks pretty miserable. Beth has probably gotten angry with her for having split ends or something.

  After school I get a ride home with either Dad or Mom. Because the UK thing is going pretty well, Dad has been able to make it so he works at home in the afternoon every other week. This week he’s home, so he picks me up.

  Things Dad likes to talk about:

  —Tennis

  —How my day was

  —Tennis

  I’m starting to think the reason my parents are so in love is that they both realize they are so boring no one else could stand being with them.

  At home I continue the excitement and work on homework. My grades are good so far, but I’m not sure I get the point of the whole studying thing. Take English, for instance. We’re reading The Scarlet Letter and all anyone talks about in class is what’s-her-name and her big red A.

  I find myself wondering what Pearl’s going to be like when she grows up.

  Oh, and get this—Mom and Dad got rid of my computer. It’s so I can “focus on my studies,” but hello, I was the one in Pinewood, and I sat through all the lectures about the “dangers” of “falling back in with old friends and habits.” Anyway, now I have to type my papers and do research in the study, which (of course) is where whoever has taken me home has camped out. I thought about telling Mom and Dad that the only person I ever talked to online was you, but the computer in the study is nicer. Mine always sounded like it was powered by a hamster running around in one of those little wheels.