“Well, he obviously likes you,” Sara said. “Why would he kiss you if he didn’t like you?”
“But why would you avoid someone you like?” I asked, rolling a piece of tape onto the back of the photo. I made sure it was straight before I smoothed it on the bottom-right corner of Sara’s collage.
“There’s no way he’s avoiding you.” She squinted at the wall. “How do you want to put the dried flowers up?”
I stepped back to assess my work. Sara had spent all of seventh grade hanging up different postcards and mementos, magazine spreads and polaroid pictures. Raffle tickets from the Swickley carnival and a hand-drawn playbill for Annie, her elementary school play. There was a whole collage of disposable camera photos—her and her friends at a Valentine’s Day party and a pretty one of Sara in her black-and-white recital outfit. My favorite was a particularly silly photo-booth strip she and I had taken two years ago, before she’d gotten really sick. In one picture she was sticking out her tongue and in the next she was pressing it to my cheek.
“I’ll tape the stems,” I said, and tucked the ends of the dried roses underneath a Bop collage of Devon Sawa and Andrew Keegan. Fuller was sprawled out on the floor beside me, twitching and huffing in sleep.
“He’s always been in love with you,” Sara said.
“I don’t know about that…”
“Oh please! He’s always looked at you with those googly love eyes.”
“Googly love eyes?”
Sara leaned forward, her gaze unfocused and just the slightest bit cross-eyed. She smiled so wide it looked like she was wearing a rubber mask. I took a step to the right, then the left, but everywhere I went she kept staring at me.
“That’s really creepy. Stop.”
She laughed, then sat back in bed. “I’m just saying. If you really want to be with Ty, I think you’ll be with Ty.”
“But how do you know?”
“I just have a feeling.”
“So you’re psychic now?”
“Maybe.” She closed her eyes, pretending to be in a trance. “I see homemade chocolate chip cookies in my future. I see them on a tray with milk.”
“It’s almost ten o’clock. I am not baking you cookies.” I laughed. But I was already considering it, weighing how much time it would take, if we had any chocolate chips. Lately it felt like there wasn’t anything Sara couldn’t get me to do.
“It was worth a try.”
I stepped back and felt something underneath my bare foot. I knew what it was before I even looked. Sara was obsessed with Lisa Frank, and it was maddening how those stickers turned up everywhere. I’d find them in the medicine cabinet, underneath plates, and clinging to Fuller’s butt. I’d once cut a neon dolphin out of his fur.
“Seriously?” I raised my eyebrows as I peeled the rainbow unicorn off my heel.
“I’ve gotten better,” she said. “I’ve been trying to keep them all in that sticker book you got me.”
I smiled so she would know I wasn’t genuinely mad. But when I moved to throw it away she yelped.
“Just give it to me, I’ll put it in here,” she said.
She grabbed one of the books off her nightstand. Sara read more than anyone I knew, including Miss Thomas, our Swickley High librarian. After she’d blown through all the Baby Sitters Club books and everything Christopher Pike, she’d moved on to adult books like The God of Small Things and Tuesdays with Morrie (which she said was horribly cheesy). She’d even had our mom’s friend from London send her an advance copy of something called Harry Potter, which had only been published in England. As she pressed the unicorn onto a back page, I studied the cover.
“The Philosopher’s Stone?” I asked. “Isn’t this a little young for you?”
Sara paused, holding the sticker book in the air. She squinted at me, like she was confused, but then the expression passed. “It’s really great. I have a feeling it’s going to be huge. There are supposed to be seven.”
“You have a feeling about a lot of things,” I said.
Sara tilted her head to one side as she smoothed the sticker back into the book. Then she pointed to a picture of us that our dad had taken when we were kids. We were rolling around in the grass, our eyes squeezed shut as we laughed. It was tucked beside the carnival tickets.
“Do you remember the park we went to that time? It was near the old library, before it closed.”
“Kind of?”
I wasn’t even sure that’s where the photo was taken, but I vaguely recalled a huge park we went to once as kids. We’d raced to the end of the tree line, to where the grass met the woods.
“It had that garden. There was that fairy statue in the middle of it.”
It felt so far away, but I could almost see it—the stone fairy with her wings tucked behind her back. I’d wandered off. There had been something strange about the trees there, but I couldn’t remember what. Our parents had called for me and I felt like I’d done something bad, that I was about to get in trouble. Had I?
“What made you think of that?” I asked, adding a few cards to the top of the collage. One of Sara’s friends from music camp had sent her a postcard that said MULLETS ROCK.
“I don’t know.” Sara fiddled with her blanket, smoothing it down over her legs.
There was a strange, persistent silence. I expected her to say something else, to elaborate, but she didn’t. We’d been having moments like this more regularly lately. Awkward pauses and her saying something I couldn’t decipher, then not following up with an explanation. Part of me wondered if it was a sign her disease was progressing, or one of the consequences of her being at home alone all day, with no one to talk to but Lydia.
“Okay, out with it,” I said.
“Nothing, what?”
“Nothing? That’s your response?”
Another long silence, then she started picking off her nail polish, as if I might forget what we’d been talking about.
“You’re being really weird,” I said.
“I’m not.”
I rolled my eyes at her, but she was still chipping away at the polish, pastel-green flakes now scattered over the blanket. I went to the end of the bed and tried to see the wall the way she saw it. The pieces we’d added spread out above her dresser, but there was still so much blank space by the door.
“We have to find more things to add,” I said.
“When it gets warmer, maybe we can go out and take more pictures,” Sara said, finally looking up. She pointed to the space. “That whole area needs something. It’s starting to feel lopsided.”