listening to the washing machine chug and spin. I don’t know what to talk about. I don’t know if I should talk about school, about McDonald’s, or not. I can’t think of anything to say. I stand up. “Well, I guess I’ll get going.”
She starts to smile, then lets it go, biting her lip. “Are you still mad at me, Evelyn?”
I don’t know what to say. I never know what to say. I did not plan on having to talk to her today, and although I have been thinking about this question all summer, I still do not know the answer. Yes. No. A little. I sit back down. She pushes her lips together, and I can see she is trying not to cry.
“I miss you,” she says. “I want us to be friends again.”
Dead brown leaves rustle on the windowsill. They are already dying, the leaves of this year, dried out from the hot summer, not even bothering to change to red or yellow before they fall. I look at the sugar bowl in the middle of the table.
“It wasn’t right, what you did,” I say.
She rubs her eyes. “Oh God, Evelyn. You can be so mean, you know that? It wasn’t like I had this all planned out. It wasn’t like I did it on purpose. I just…” She stops. “I just didn’t not do it on purpose.” She frowns and shakes her head. “It sounds bad when I put it like that, but that’s how it was.”
This sounds fishy to me, this logic, but I don’t tell her that. I don’t want her to start crying. Not doing something on purpose would be doing something accidentally, accidentally forgetting to take the pills, accidentally throwing them away. I think about her doing this, coming home the night I told her that Travis was going to break up with her, walking through the sleet and slush to all this dark and quiet, her grandmother asleep in the next room.
But even though I have not said anything, she cries. Of course she does. “You’re my only friend, Evelyn,” she says. “Besides Travis, you’re it.”
This is terrible. The more she cries, the more I wonder if there is a possibility that I am actually the mean one. Or maybe we have both been mean. The washing machine buzzes loudly, and she starts to stand up.
I hold up my hand. “Okay. Don’t. I’ll get it.”
“Thanks.” She falls back into her chair, sniffing. I hand her a Kleenex, and she blows her nose. “Um, my pink blouse has to be set out. But everything else can just go in the dryer.”
I open the lid of the washer. Inside, there are new blue-and-white-striped sheets, the pink pillowcases. Everything is tangled together. Deena’s large, colorful maternity shirts are wrapped around Travis’s underwear, her bras knotted up with his socks. Something about the cold wetness of their clothes, the clean smell of the laundry detergent and the way they are all tied together, makes me feel bad about touching them. Later there will be bibs and tiny shirts in the dryer too, all of their clothes spinning together, then folded neatly in the same basket, buttons and snaps fastened by each other’s fingers.
It’s just the way it is now. It’s just the way it is.
“Does it look okay?” she calls out. “Nothing ruined?”
“No.” I take out her pink blouse, lay it out flat on top of the dryer. “It’s fine.”
On the first day of eleventh grade, Libby is back, her long hair cut short and darker than it was. She can walk, but she has to use a cane. Dr. Queen asks me to share a locker with her, since we have both lost our partners. I move my things to her locker, to the shelf that used to be Traci’s.
Because of the cane, Libby can’t always get all the books she needs out of her locker and put others away at the same time, so I help her during passing time, holding her books. She shows me the leg exercises she has to do every night for her physical therapy, twenty-five on each side, a rubber band around her ankles for resistance.
“My little brother’s got a rubber band like that,” I tell her. “He has to do exercises too.”
“They suck,” she says. “Tell him I sympathize.”
When the accident first happened, people kept saying how lucky Libby was, the sole survivor of the wrecked car. I don’t know if she feels lucky or not. She told