I’m about to say something about it when Dylan’s car pulls up and I’m saved from opening my mouth. The three of us get out of our cars at the same time, congregating on the sidewalk in front of the house like we’re scared to go inside.
Dylan looks at me. “Why do you want her stuff, Corinne?” he asks, and his voice has an edge to it I wasn’t expecting.
“I . . .” I falter. “Because—because I want something physical of hers and running is what we had together . . .”
He sighs. Stands there, staring at me.
“Let her have it, Dylan,” Elissa says, surprising me. Dylan glances over at her, and she shrugs. “What else are you going to do with it?”
He chews on his bottom lip. “I . . . okay.” He pulls a key out of his pocket and unlocks the door.
Her house smells the same. Not like her, not quite, but cozy in that way other people’s houses smell.
“Come on,” Dylan says, and starts up the stairs, Elissa and me trailing behind him.
I stop as we’re going up the stairs, can’t help but look at the photos of Dylan and Maggie that line the walls—them at Disney World when she was a kid, last year in New York in front of the marquee for Phantom of the Opera, Maggie grinning ear to ear. The resemblance between the two of them is uncanny in photographs, and I hate that’s all that’s going to be left of her, these photos and whatever runs through Dylan’s head each time he looks in the mirror.
The three of us stop in front of her room. The door is closed, but other than that, everything looks the same. Like we’re all just waiting for her to come back.
“Her running stuff is still in the closet,” Dylan says. “I . . . you can do this without me.” Elissa reaches out a hand and touches Dylan on the shoulder, but he shrugs her off. “I’ll be downstairs,” he says shortly, and then disappears. She looks over at me.
“You ready?”
“No,” I say. But I’m the one who wanted to do this.
“Do you want me to go in with you?”
“I . . . in a minute,” I say, and she nods.
“I’ll wait out here.”
I take a breath and steel myself, then push the door open.
It looks the same. I don’t know why I thought it wouldn’t. The walls are still lavender. I’d tease her about that, because it was such an Easter-bonnet little-girl color, but she didn’t mind. I’d tease her about the horse posters shoved under her bed, too, the Twilight books proudly hanging out on her bookshelf, because she was so typical, because she was such a girl.
The only thing that’s changed is the bulletin board above her headboard. What was covered with brochures from Oklahoma State, Florida State, is now covered with a recruiting letter from Villanova.
Seeing that letter makes my chest burn. Not from jealousy, not from the fact that Maggie was being recruited by Division I colleges when I’m not, but from the fact that she wanted to travel all the way to Pennsylvania for college, that she’d made up her mind without me.
I was so scared of her leaving me, and now she has.
Her bed isn’t made. I try not to look at it, try not to think of the hours we spent kissing in that bed when no one was home or the warmth of her back against mine when I slept over, or or or—
God, I can’t do this.
I turn my back to the bed, press my hand over my mouth so Elissa can’t hear me crying. It takes a minute before I can go into the closet and look at the box of her running stuff. It’s an old cardboard box, one that maybe held a Christmas present or some childhood toys in the attic and now all it holds is what’s left of Maggie’s running.
I close my eyes and open the box, just feeling around her running clothes and her spikes and Leesboro’s cross-country handbook. And then my fingers brush across something else, and I know immediately what it is.
I pull it out, open my eyes. In my hand is the lime-green scrunchie she wore every meet. There are a few strands of her hair still caught in it and I try not to think about that as I slip it around my wrist.
It smells like her. I don’t want it to but it does, more than her room does, more than anything in this box, this scrunchie smells like her shampoo and her perfume and race days and us.
She thought it was lucky. She swore it was, swore she performed better when she wore it.
I slip it around my wrist. I don’t feel any luckier. Maggie’s gone and I’m standing in her room with a box of her running stuff and all I feel is angry and sad and lost.
“Corinne?”
I look up. Elissa is standing in the doorway, concern all over her face.
“Is that it?” she asks, and I wipe at my eyes.
“Yeah.”
She comes over and bends down beside me, settling herself on the floor. She doesn’t go for the box. Instead, she reaches in the closet and pulls out a stack of papers—playbills from shows—and begins flipping through them.
“There was one Halloween we dated where she made me dress up like the Phantom, and she was Christine,” Elissa says. “I think I still have the mask in a closet somewhere.”
“God, she loved that musical,” I say. “But she hated the movie.”
“Oh, you couldn’t get her started on it, she’d go on about it for ages,” Elissa says, and she laughs. “Did she make you watch the filmed live version, though?”
“Only like, five times,” I say. “I never told her I slept through one of them.”
“Same,” Elissa says, and she catches my eye. “It’s nice,” she says. “Being able to talk about her with you. With—with someone who really knew her.”
I want to agree with her. I really, really do. But then I remember that Maggie never told me about her, Elissa knew who I was but Maggie never told me and she knew all these things and I—
I don’t say anything. I clutch the box to my chest, eager to get out of her room suddenly, her house, because I don’t know who I’m angrier at, Maggie for never telling me or myself for never asking.
Seven Months Before.
I list the boys on my fingers, my head on her stomach, her hands in my hair.
“There was Bryce Hinson, back in Colorado,” I say. “Though he was in middle school, so he didn’t really count. Jeremy Hayes, when I first moved here. And Trent Moore, a few months ago.”
“Why’d you break it off with Trent?” she asks.
I shrug. “He wanted me to meet his parents and come over for Thanksgiving, and I just—I couldn’t. I liked him but I couldn’t. So I ended it.”
She nods. “Was it different with them?”
“Yes and no. I mean . . .” I trail off.
I didn’t have to hide it with the boys, but now doesn’t feel like the time to bring that up.
I should ask who she dated, but I don’t want to know. Don’t want to think about other girls before me, what she was like with them.
She sits up and pulls me to her, kisses me, and soon I forget about Trent, Bryce, Jeremy, everyone in our past who isn’t her.
Four Days G O N E.
I wake up on Friday groggy and delirious, reach for my phone, forgetting for a second—
And then I remember. The wake. The funeral. Elissa, riding in her truck, the fact that everyone seemed to know her.