“I . . . do you?”
She shrugs, blows air out. “Not . . . not really? Because if I see them put her in the ground—” she stops. “I just . . . I can’t do it, you know?”
Her words echo exactly what I’ve been feeling and thinking, and for a minute I don’t feel so empty because here is a girl who gets it, who understands what I’m going through. I want to reach out to her, but every time I can feel myself trying, I think—
Why didn’t Maggie tell me about you?
“I don’t want to either,” I say, and she nods.
Maggie is going to be buried in a cemetery next to the park she used to play at as a kid. Where she fell from the slide and lost a tooth, where Mariah Davis was mean to her in the sandbox and made her cry. She is going to be buried there and her ex-girlfriend and I will not be there to see them lower her into the ground.
And then . . . that will be it.
Elissa starts her truck. “If we’re not going . . . what do you want to do?”
And the thought that I still don’t have anything tangible from her, not really, hits me again.
“I want her stuff,” I say suddenly, blurting the words out of my mouth. “Her—her running stuff.”
“Where is it?”
“Her house,” I say.
Elissa sighs, but she doesn’t move the car out of park. “Corinne . . .”
“I need it, Elissa,” I say. “I—we weren’t out, and running is what we had in common and I need—”
“I get it,” she says, cutting me off. Then, “Why weren’t you out?”
Panic rises in my throat at her question, panic and something else, something sour.
I think it’s guilt.
I know it’s guilt.
“Because—because—” I say, but I can’t get the words out. “We . . . we weren’t ready.”
Elissa frowns at that, but she doesn’t say anything else about it.
“If you want her stuff, we’re going to have to wait for Dylan,” she says. “Or her parents. You can’t just walk into their house.”
“I know,” I say. Then, “Could you come with me? I mean I know you’ll have to drive me, but I mean—could you come in with me? I don’t want to be alone.”
For a split second, her hands tighten on the steering wheel and I think she’s about to cry. Then she exhales, long and slow.
“Yes,” she says. “I can do that.”
“Are . . . are you okay?” I ask, because it occurs to me then, she knew Maggie as well as I do—did. She dated her, too.
She lost her, too.
“Funerals just kinda freak me out a bit,” Elissa says, running her fingers through her curls. “I’ll be okay.”
“Okay,” I say. “You . . . you really don’t have to go with me if you don’t want.”
“No,” she says. “I should.” She takes another deep breath. “I’ll go ask Dylan, okay? He’s probably going to the gravesite, so we’ll have to wait, but if he’s okay with it, we’ll go.”
“Okay,” I say, and wait as she gets out of the car, leaving it running.
Her question comes back to me as she shuts the door.
Why weren’t you out?
I know the answer to that question, but I can’t think about it, not now.
I start to cry again. Maggie’s gone and we weren’t out and now neither of us will get that chance, because she isn’t here and I’m too scared to do it without her.
She deserved better than me.
Elissa comes back five minutes later, and I know she smoked, because she smells even more like cigarettes.
“Dylan said we could meet him there,” she says. “His parents are staying with his aunt for the night since it’s too hard for them to be home, so. I think that’s where they’re dropping all the food off, too, so we shouldn’t run into anyone.”
“Okay,” I say. Elissa puts the car into gear and starts to drive. I keep my gaze down at my lap, resist the urge to pull out my phone.
“So,” Elissa says as we turn on a back road, “Um. How’s school?”
“You sound like my dad.”
She barks a laugh. “Sorry. We don’t have to talk if you don’t want.”
“No, the distraction is nice,” I say. “Um. It’s okay. Cross-country’s going to eat up a lot of my time. Coach wants us to place for State this year if we can, since some of the better runners are graduating.”
“How does that work?”
“Kinda like you’d expect. We’ve gotta be fast enough as a team to qualify for Regionals, then Coach submits seven of us for that, then if the team places in the top twenty-five percent, we go to State.”
“Have you been before?”
“No,” I say. “I’m not that good. Maggie . . . Maggie was, though. But she didn’t make it either last year—her team almost qualified, but not quite.”
She was going to this year, though. We’d talked about it over the summer. She was going to push herself even harder to make it to State.
She wanted me there with her.
“That doesn’t surprise me,” Elissa says. “She always was a perfectionist.”
To my surprise, I laugh. Because she’s right. Because she knows that part of Maggie.
“What about you?” I ask. “I guess you’re in school, right?”
“Yeah. I’m studying computer science, but I’m doing community college first. My dad’s a chemical engineer, so . . . yeah. He wasn’t super happy about Wake Tech but if I can get my basics out of the way it’s cheaper for us and it’s easier for me to get into a four-year program in the future.” She looks over at me. “What about you? What do you want to do when you graduate?”
“You make me feel really young,” I say, surprising myself.
“I’m only two years older than you.”
“Yeah, but . . . never mind,” I say. “And I don’t know. I thought about doing something with chemistry, maybe.”
Elissa looks surprised. “Really?”
“Well, yeah, why not?”
Though I know why not; I know what she’s going to say before she even says it.
“You don’t look like the type.”
I look down. At my navy dress from J. Crew my mom bought out of guilt for missing my seventeenth birthday, my chipped pink nail polish, the blond hair pulled back from my face. My hands, perfectly white-girl tanned from cross-country.
“What do I look like, then?” I ask.
Elissa shakes her head. “Forget it. I shouldn’t have—forget it.”
“Elissa—”
She holds up a hand, and we’re silent until she pulls into Maggie’s driveway.
Automatically I look for her car, but it isn’t here. The image of it wrapped around a tree from the news two nights ago flashes through my mind—
Oh. God. What was it like? I barely watched the news, didn’t want to see, but suddenly the only thing I can imagine is her final moments, her car swerving into a tree, phone and purse and Maggie all flying toward the windshield—
I can’t think that.