Answering a question with a question. Nicely played. “I asked first.”
Her lips twitch. “Well, I asked second.”
“Like you don’t know why I come here,” I answer.
She raises one eyebrow. “If I did, I wouldn’t have asked.”
The meaning of her words hits me like a shockwave. “You don’t know?”
“Uh...no.”
“You don’t know who James Cohen is,” I state.
She tilts her head. “He’s a dead guy. Over there. And you’re obsessed with him.”
I’m numbed by the fact that she knows nothing and has never, until now, asked. That’s all everyone does—ask.
Everyone asks, but I can never speak. I don’t know how to explain what happened or what it was like, because the nightmare is tucked away behind a see-through wall. The memories, they torture me every second I’m awake and at night while I sleep, but the wall prevents me from connecting with it, talking about it, and I’m not sure if that’s good o {ate ar bad.
I’m unnerved when Stella inches over into the sunlight and begins her daily ritual of sunbathing. No one’s abandoned this conversation before. While I’m grateful, part of me wants to matter to her because she matters to me. “Talking with you, being with you...it’s the only time I feel normal.”
The leaves crackle as her head moves and I know Stella’s scrutinizing me, but I don’t have the guts to meet her gaze. “You feel normal hanging out with me?”
Strangely enough. “Yeah.”
“You realize most people think I’m weird and will tell me that—as often as they can.”
I inwardly flinch. She means Cooper. It’s what he mock-mumbled when she walked into American Lit today and once again, I said nothing in her defense. When she’s only experienced Cooper’s bad side and doesn’t know how he’s been a friend to me, it’s hard to make her understand. “He’s not that bad a guy.”
Stella’s off the ground, her arm barely missing hitting me in the process.
I jump up after her. “Stella!”
She doesn’t run, but she’s fast. My heart drums like it’s in the final stages of a death march. I don’t want to lose the feeling I have when I’m with her. “Stella!”
I catch up and when she doesn’t stop, I take her hand. Stella grinds to a halt and while still facing forward, she tries to yank her hand away, but I wrap my fingers around hers to keep her there. “Please don’t go.”
She whips around and I’m horrified by the wetness in her eyes. “You laughed! Year after year, you laughed!”
It’s like she jolted me with a stun gun and thousands of currents of electricity are invading my body. I cringe and her hand slides away from mine.
“I’m sorry,” I say pleadingly.
“Are you? It seems to me sorry is the convenient thing to say when people want something. Because if you were really sorry, you wouldn’t have laughed.”
I knead both of my hands over my face, feeling like I’m standing at the gallows watching a noose swing in front of me. I’m on trial for crimes I committed, crimes almost everyone perpetrates, but never have to encounter judgment for. “I am sorry.”
“Because you want something from me,” she repeats.
I stare straight into her eyes. “I didn’t always laugh.”
She blinks once and something moves inside me: a boulder that had been bracing back the sludge I try to repress when it comes to Stella. Call it guilt. Call it my conscience. Either way, there’s no denying what I have and haven’t done.
“You know that already, don’t you?” I say.
Stella already knows when I laughed and when I didn’t. She could probably tell me each article of clothing I wore the times Cooper made her the butt of his jokes. I know this about her, because I could tell her every sound and every taste in the air the night James Cohen died. When horrible things happen your mind will never let you forget.
The knowledge in her eyes—it’s like a movie screen that plays the recordings of all the previous years of her life.
“It doesn’t matter,” Stella whispers. “Not laughing doesn’t make it okay.”
“No,” I agree, and not because I w {t bkneant something from her. It’s because she’s right. “It doesn’t.”
Stella turns to walk away, then stops. “You need to go. Not me. This place is mine and I’m not the one who doesn’t belong.”
I shove my hands in my pockets and move in the direction of my car. I’m here because James Cohen died. He’s in the ground and buried and I know I can’t continue to live like this.
10
Stella
Ten minutes before the bell signals we can head to our lockers and go to class, I’m wandering the stacks of the library. Lots of classics, and while a ton of girls at my school eat up anything that has the words ’tis or thee or long-ass descriptions involving powdery sheep on rolling hills with millions of twinkling stars, I don’t. I always have a worn copy of something written by Gena Showalter to keep me company at lunch.
In fact, I should be tucked away in the beanbag chair on the other side of the library reading about true love and all that, but since my fight with Jonah last night, it’s hard to concentrate on the words on the page. It’s as if I developed post-traumatic dyslexia.
I run my fingers along the bindings of the books and pause when a single red rose clutched in a fist pops through the shelving space less than a foot in front of me.
“Hey, Stella.” The voice is faux high-pitched, but I’d recognize Jonah anywhere.
I c**k a hip to the side and cross my arms over my chest, glaring at the “talking” rose. “What?”
“Jonah’s sorry.” The rose moves from side to side to mimic a puppet talking.
I glance around, but we’re so far back in the stacks that no one else notices. I’ve replayed the fight we had again and again in my mind, trying to figure out how something I’d been enjoying over the past couple of weeks went toxic so fast. What bothers me more is that it went so wrong on the day he bought flowers for Lydia.
The rose tips all the way to the side. “Still with me, Stella?”
Am I? “I know he’s your friend, but Cooper’s a jerk.”
The rose droops and then disappears back into the stacks. In a second, Jonah walks around the corner with the rose in his hand and a baseball cap on backwards. “I’m the jerk. I know what he’s done to you—what I’ve done—and I never should have tried to defend any of it.”