The Saddest Song - By Susie Kaye Lopez Page 0,36

believing that I had now seen the look it in regards to me. It wasn’t appropriate in our situation. We were friends, the best of friends. We would have been family if Garrett hadn’t died and left us in this mess.

Of course, Rainey had no idea that I had seen and understood her reaction to Lalie. I never mentioned it, and neither did she. I just hoped that her going to see her grandparents was not simply to avoid being around me. I didn’t think I could survive it if she was suddenly awkward around me, or worse, didn’t want to see me at all.

Sighing, I threw on some sweats and an old band T-shirt and went in search of food. As soon as I hit the stairs the smell of waffles filled my nostrils. Sunday brunch had stopped abruptly with the death of my brother. Before that, mom had prepared a great one every week. She always alternated between Garrett’s favorite blueberry pancakes, and my favorite, Belgium waffles. My stomach growled and I hurried to the kitchen.

“Good! He’s up! Let’s eat!” Dad said, gathering the Sunday paper off of the table.

“Morning Sweetie. I was just getting ready to wake you up,” Mom said. She poured Orange juice into wine goblets at each place setting and I saw she had set one for Rainey.

“Rainey is going to be bummed she missed this. She went up to Pasadena to visit her grandparents today.”

“Oh, good for her. I’m sure her grandparents will be thrilled to see her,” she said as she put two large waffles on my plate. “When will she be back?”

“Tonight, you know we have school tomorrow,” I said quickly. I was out of sorts but I felt bad. “Mom thanks so much for making these.”

She smiled happily and sat down to eat.

“It’s weird not having her here,” Dad said, taking a bite.

“Yeah, it is”, I said, stabbing my waffle with my fork. And I didn’t like it one bit.

Chapter 13

Rainey

An entire day away from Max made me realize a couple of undeniable truths. First, I missed him when he wasn’t around. I had to stop myself from texting him non-stop while I was at Grandma and Grandpa’s house. I kept it to a respectable twenty or thirty. Still, it made me smile when his reply came back mere seconds later. So different from his brother who had always texted back an hour later, “Sorry babe, I was….fill in the blank. Playing video games, football, basketball, weight lifting…. I forgot how much time I was apart from Garrett. I would have said we were inseparable. After the past three months with Max, I now knew we weren’t, not really.

The second truth I realized was that I did feel possessive of Max, and probably in an unhealthy way, if I really was honest. I didn’t care. The black cat girl had made me see how close I had gotten to him. Kara told me to pay attention to my feelings when I saw her and I was doing that. I was the one Max was usually smiling down at, laughing with, even crying with. I felt replaced seeing him with someone else. I didn’t know what I would do when he began dating again. But if Kara was attempting to tell me that I had romantic feelings for Max, she was wrong. No, I wasn’t buying that at all. My feelings were platonic. And so were Max’s towards me.

By Monday morning when I ran out the front door to hop in his truck I was feeling no awkwardness at all. Everything was back to normal. I greeted him like I did every morning and he seemed like the same old Max. Any weirdness that I had felt was behind me. I was happy to be back to normal. Our normal was good enough for me.

We met for lunch under our shady tree as always. The weather was cooling down since we were going into November, but it was still around 70. Fall in California was rarely cool, although it was supposed to rain later in the week. It would be the first real rain in months so I was looking forward to it. Caitlynn walked up halfway through lunch and plopped down beside me. “Hey guys, I had fun bowling, we should do it again soon.”

“Yeah,” Max smiled, “I need to beat you, Cait.” They laughed and we talked for a few minutes until Hudson wandered over. He spoke to all