“Mom!” I call out, swatting tears from my face as I stagger down the stairs. “I’m taking your car!”
I don’t wait for permission or acknowledgment. I grab the keys and go. I have to get out of here. Away from that money. Those emails. That reflection in the mirror.
It’s still raining when I back out of the garage. I drive straight to Sequoia’s house and sprint for the front door. I need to talk to someone. Someone who gets it. Gets the pressure. Gets the stress.
Gets Windsor.
I ring the doorbell and she answers a few seconds later wearing her pajamas. I can tell from the crease between her eyebrows that she’s been staring at her computer screen for hours. Studying. Always studying. Always trying to maintain that 89 percent Ivy League acceptance rate they’ve been drilling into us since day one.
“Crap!” Sequoia swears, gaping at my face. “What happened to you?”
It’s then I realize how horrible I must look. With my tearstained cheeks, messy hair, and chocolate cream still on my uniform.
“I think I’m having a meltdown.”
She nods rapidly. “Hold on. I’ll get the Xanax.”
“No,” I say, grabbing her arm. “I don’t need a Xanax or a sleeping pill. I just need to talk to someone. I did something horrible. And I don’t know what to do or how to fix it.”
Sequoia stares at me like she doesn’t understand a word I’m saying. And I can’t blame her. I’m rambling so fast and more tears are streaming down my face and sobs are cutting off my words.
“I was with Dylan. In the library. And then Peabody’s and we were trying to figure out the whole test-stealing thing and then—”
“Stop,” Sequoia says, in the most forceful tone I’ve ever heard come out of her mouth. “Stop talking right now. I can’t do this. I can’t hear this. I can’t be implicated. Not when early decision letters are being sent out next week!”
“Sequoia,” I beg. “Please. Can you stop being a Windsor Academy student for one second and just be my friend?”
She holds her hands over her ears, blocking out the sound of my voice. “No. I’m sorry. I can’t.”
Then she slams the door. And I’m left crying alone in the rain, feeling even emptier than I did before.
I can’t believe she would close the door on me like that. I can’t believe she would just shut me out when I needed her the most.
She’s supposed to be my friend!
Or maybe we never really were friends. Maybe we were just horses in the same race, keeping each other company while we sprinted for the finish line. Always secretly knowing that, in the end, only one of us could win.
I wander back to my car and start the engine. I’m freezing and shivering so I blast the heat, but it doesn’t seem to make any difference. The cold is coming from somewhere inside me. Somewhere I fear will never be warm again.
I shift into Drive and pull away from the curb. I don’t even know where I’m going until I find myself parked in front of Laney’s house.
I stare out the window at the darkened, two-story brick home. The porch light is on, illuminating the familiar red door that I’ve knocked on so many times. I know which window is hers. It’s the second floor, last one on the right. I spent so many nights in that bedroom. Sleeping on her blow-up air mattress, talking until the wee hours of the morning, giggling about everything under the sun.
Laney would know what to say to me right now. Laney would know how to make everything feel survivable. She could make Everest look climbable. The entire Atlantic Ocean look swimmable. The farthest star in the farthest galaxy look like nothing but a plane ride away.
That’s what she did. She turned mountains into molehills. She talked me down from so many ledges. She was my life jacket.
And without her, I drowned.
The front door opens a moment later and Laney exits holding an umbrella. She starts skipping toward my car, like she’s been waiting for me. Like she always used to do when I would pick her up to go to school or to the movies or out for a late-night snack. She would always skip out her front door like a little kid.
And for a brief second, I dare to think that maybe Frankie was wrong. Maybe it’s not impossible to create an overlap. Maybe I just did it. Simply by driving here. Maybe somewhere in a faraway universe, in another version of this life, I’m doing the exact same thing. I’m here to pick up my best friend on a Monday night and we’re going to spend the rest of the night laughing and goofing around and being Laney and Kennedy again.
But that brief moment comes to a crashing halt when Laney suddenly stops in the middle of her front lawn and tilts her head to the side, studying my car in the limited light. Her expression quickly turns from one of excitement to one of trepidation and she takes a few steps back to the safety of her front porch.
I’m not who she was expecting, I realize with a twist of my stomach.
I’m not Austin.
I watch as she deliberates whether or not to go back inside or wait on the porch. She continues to eye my car warily, wondering what this stranger is doing parked at her curb with the motor running.
Finally, she makes a decision. She turns toward the front door and inserts her key in the lock.
I kill the engine and hop out.
“Laney!” I call.
She stiffens and turns, squinting through the darkness. I step into the light of the streetlamp so she can see that I’m harmless. I’m just a girl.
A girl she once knew. But doesn’t anymore.
“Hi,” she says tentatively. I know that inflection in her voice. She’s trying to fight her incessant instinct to be polite. Laney never had a mean bone in her body. She was the least confrontational person I knew. She had a hard time saying no to people. It’s how she always got roped into feeding dogs and watering plants and bringing in the mail for all her neighbors when they went on vacation.
She can’t even be unkind to a stranger who pulls up to her curb at eight o’clock at night and calls her by name.
Because that’s Laney.
She would never hurt anyone. Least of all me.
As I stare at her face lit by the porch lights of her house, I get a sudden flashback to that night in Austin’s basement. To the look in her eyes when she saw how much pain she had caused me. When I asked her how long it had been going on and she bravely told me the truth, even though it was like releasing an arrow aimed straight for my heart.
“I never wanted to hurt you.”
And now, on this strange moonless night, as I stand in the shambles of my perfect life, suddenly I believe her. I know she was telling the truth.
I know she didn’t fall in love with Austin out of spite or jealousy or malice. She just fell in love with him. Like she fell in love with him in this life, too.
They were always the ones meant to be together.
It was never Austin and me. It was always them. I was just the conduit. And then, I was just the obstacle.
“Do I know you?” Laney asks from her front porch, and it’s not until then that I realize I’ve been standing here staring at her like a creepy stalker.
Yes! I want to scream. You know me! I’m your best friend! We do everything together. We brought a newspaper back from the brink of death. We won three Spartan Press Awards. You were my rock and my balloon. You lifted me up and kept me grounded. And I never realized how little I gave back to you. How long you stood in my shadow without ever complaining about the cold. You betrayed me but I betrayed you, too. Because I was never the friend to you that you were to me. You were one of the best things about my life and I gave it all up. I traded it in because I thought this would be better. I thought I would be better. But I’m not better without you. I’m worse.
Obviously, however, I don’t say any of those things. They’re words that have no meaning. At least not to her. They will stay where they are forever. Trapped in my mind as echoes of the past.
Instead, I say, “No. Sorry. I must have the wrong house.”
I turn back to my car and open the door. Laney watches me. No longer with concern, now with genuine curiosity. I glance back at her one last time. Then in a whisper, I add, “But I forgive you. And I hope you can forgive me, too.”