After (6 page)

chapter 7

A
s we pulled out of the school lot, Kelsi fiddled with the radio distractedly. It made me a little nervous that she wasn’t paying enough attention. Then again, I always felt uneasy in cars since the accident.

Once we’d driven for a few minutes, she rolled the windows down and turned the stereo up. The new Star Beck song was on. The wind whipped through my hair, getting colder as Kelsi picked up speed. We were approaching the interstate, and I wondered if we were going to get on. Cape Cod was just to the south, over the Bourne Bridge. If we headed north, we’d be in Boston in under an hour, and honestly, my mom would probably kill me if she found out.

“Where are we going?” I finally shouted over the wind and music.

Kelsi didn’t answer, and I wasn’t sure she had heard me. Then she said, “I don’t know. Does it matter?”

I shrugged. The on-ramp for the interstate was coming up, but Kelsi zoomed right past it, shooting toward Milton Park, where my mom used to take me and Logan to play when we were kids. Kelsi pulled in, but instead of parking, she looped slowly around in the lot and headed back the way we came.

We drove a few minutes more in silence until we were back on Summer Street. I wasn’t paying attention until Kelsi suddenly slowed and made a hard right into a parking lot I’d managed to avoid all year.

I froze in my seat. “What are we doing here?” I asked, all my nerves on edge. I hoped that she was just turning around, like she had at Milton Park. But instead, she pulled neatly into a parking space in the nearly deserted lot.

She cut the ignition and climbed out of the car, pulling her cigarettes out of her pocket.

I stayed in the car, glued to my seat. My limbs felt stiff and uncooperative, but I wasn’t sure what I wanted them to do anyhow.

We were at St. Joseph’s Cemetery, a place I hadn’t set foot in since my dad’s funeral. It was a pretty place, really, with lots of rolling green hills and chirping birds and squirrels running around like nothing was wrong. Sunlight trickled down beautifully in little patches through the leaves of the lush, overgrown oak trees that dotted the property. But it was impossible to see it as a nice, peaceful place. I hadn’t wanted to see it at all, in fact, and deliberately turned away every time I passed it.

My mom went every Sunday morning to lay flowers on Dad’s gravestone. Sometimes, early on, Logan had gone with her, although now he was usually too busy with Sydney. Tanner went occasionally too.

But I always refused. Seeing Dad’s grave made it real. I wasn’t delusional; I knew he was dead. But sometimes I could still wake up in the morning, and for those foggy few seconds before reality dawned, I’d have a fleeting instant of wondering what Dad was going to make for breakfast.

I loved those moments. And I had the feeling that there would be fewer of them—or that they would disappear entirely—if I started visiting his grave. I didn’t want to remember him as a cold piece of stone or an eight-by-four patch of green grass.

I took a deep breath and scrambled out of the car. “I don’t want to be here,” I announced, walking over to Kelsi, who was fiddling with her pack of cigarettes.

She leaned back against her car door and drew in a deep breath of smoke, which she exhaled suddenly with a sharp cough, leading me to wonder if she was really the experienced smoker she seemed to want me to think she was.

“You want one?” she offered, holding the pack out.

“I don’t smoke.”

Kelsi rolled her eyes. “Neither did I,” she said. “Things change.”

We stood there in silence for a minute. I was trying very hard to forget where we were. I felt cold inside. I swallowed hard a few times, a weird pang in my chest.

“Give me one,” I blurted out, surprising myself with the desperation in my voice. Kelsi looked at me with mild interest, then handed me the pack of cigarettes.

“You have to shake it,” she said, smiling at my hesitation, “to get one out.”

I nodded, feeling silly, and did as she said until a cigarette dropped into my hand. I had never smoked before. I’d had it drilled into me from an early age that smoking would kill you. But then again, so would driving in your own neighborhood on a Saturday morning with your kids.

I tentatively put the cigarette between my lips and Kelsi took a step closer. She flicked the lighter a few times until it lit and held it to the tip of my cigarette. “Inhale,” she commanded.

I did, watching as the cigarette ignited with the force of my breath. All of a sudden, my lungs filled with smoke—sharp, dark, itchy smoke—and I began to cough, hard at first and then even harder, unable to control myself. I dropped the cigarette and Kelsi quickly stubbed it out while I doubled over, coughing some more. It felt like I couldn’t get the smoke out of my lungs. I gasped for air.

Kelsi shook her head. “You suck at this.” I coughed some more and glared at her. “Shut up.” Kelsi watched me hacking up my lungs, and to my surprise, she started to giggle, slowly at first and then harder. I looked down at my stubbed-out cigarette and lifted a hand to my cheek, which I knew was red from all the coughing. In a dark, weird way, I had to admit, it was a funny scenario.

Kelsi’s laughter was contagious, and soon, I was giggling and then laughing too. Here we were, two Goody Two-shoes, smoking in the cemetery parking lot during school hours. The Plymouth East gossip mill would never have believed it.

In that moment, I felt closer to Kelsi than I had to anyone—even Logan or Jennica or my mom—in ten months. After all, Kelsi knew exactly how I felt, in a way that few people did.

It was also the first time I could remember laughing—
really
laughing—in a long time. I had to admit, it felt good.

Then, I realized that the sound of Kelsi’s laughter had changed. The giggles were coming in gasps, and they trembled on their way out.

She was crying. Hard. Tears were rolling down her cheeks. I had never seen anyone laugh and sob hysterically at the exact same time. I knew I was supposed to do something, but I didn’t know what.

“Kelsi?” I asked tentatively. I watched, feeling totally helpless, as she leaned back hard against her car and slid slowly down it, eventually collapsing to the ground, a puddle of limp limbs, still crying. The laughter was gone now, having given way to pure sobs that racked her whole body. My heart ached.

Slowly, uncomfortably, I knelt down, intending to pull her into a hug, because it was all I could think to do. But when my fingertips touched her upper arm, she jerked angrily away, as if I had burned her with the tip of one of her cigarettes.

“Leave me alone!” she barked. “Just go away!”

She drew her knees up to her chest and put her face down on them, working herself into a little ball. I didn’t know what to do, so I sat down beside her, feeling miserable.

Eventually, Kelsi’s sobbing slowed. I tentatively put my hand on her arm again, and when she didn’t shake me off, I slipped it loosely around her back in a sort of half-hug, the best I could manage side by side on the ground. We sat like that for a while as Kelsi wiped at her eyes.

“It gets better,” I said.

Kelsi shook my hand off her shoulders. “Oh yeah?

When?”

I didn’t have an answer.
Did
it get better? Sure, I wasn’t the crying mess that I was for the first few weeks after Dad’s death. I was fine now. I never cried anymore. But there was still an emptiness inside me that wouldn’t go away. And sometimes, I was sure that the empty space was growing bigger and bigger, threatening to swallow me whole.

“So, do you want to go see your mom’s grave or something?” I asked.

“No,” she snapped.

“Oh,” I said, caught off guard and not sure what else to say.

Kelsi sighed. “I just want to go home,” she said finally, in a voice so quiet I could barely hear her. “I just want to go back to the way it was before.”

I knew exactly what she meant. And she knew I knew.

Silently, we stood up, dusted our jeans off, and got back into the car. As Kelsi started the engine and pulled out of her spot, I looked out the window, turning my face away from the rolling green cheerfulness of the darkest place I’d ever seen. I knew that as we pulled back on to Summer Street, if I looked toward the cemetery, I would see my father’s grave. It was on the crest of a little hill midway into the cemetery. Although I’d only been there once, the day of his funeral, his grave’s location was burned into my mind, and I knew it as well as I knew the location of my own fingers and toes.

•  •  •

It was nearly three-thirty by the time we turned onto Main Street on our way back to school. We were just a few blocks inland from the harbor, the same rocky, jagged jut of coastline the Pilgrims had landed on four hundred years ago. I could smell the salt in the air and feel it on my skin, the way I always could when the wind was blowing west. Today, even though the afternoon had warmed up, the breeze made me shiver.

Kelsi and I weren’t talking, but it wasn’t the same kind of weird, uncomfortable silence that had filled the car during our roundabout drive to the cemetery. Something had shifted between us.

“Hey, Kelsi?” I said as we pulled up to a red light.

She looked at me, a question on her face.

“What if we did this more often?” I ventured.

Kelsi laughed. “Skip school so we can go smoke and cry in the parking lot of the cemetery?”

“No.” I smiled.
“This
. I mean, it feels normal now, doesn’t it? I mean, not
normal
normal. But more normal than we feel at school, anyhow. What if we got together sometimes?”

The light changed, and Kelsi eased her foot back onto the gas. She gave me a funny look. “Why would we do that? It’s not like we’re even friends.”

Ouch
, I thought. But still, I pressed on. “Because with me, you don’t have to be Kelsi Whose Mom Died. And I don’t have to be Lacey Whose Dad Died. You know?”

Kelsi was silent for so long that I began to think she wasn’t going to respond. Then, finally, in an almost inaudible voice, she said, “Yeah. I know.”

“Maybe we can see if Logan wants to come too,” I said. As Kelsi turned left into the school parking lot, kids were pouring out of the buildings toward the cars. The final bell must have just rung.

“Whatever,” she said casually, like she didn’t care. But then she added, “Maybe we should ask Mindy Rodriguez, too. She’s a freshman. I heard her mom died last year.”

“And Cody Johnson,” I said.

Kelsi frowned. “So you want to start, like, some kind of club for kids with dead parents or something?”

“Not really.” The plan was forming in my mind as I spoke, and I wasn’t sure if it was stupid or not. “What if it’s just us getting together and hanging out sometimes without feeling like outcasts?” I asked. “I mean, we can talk about our parents if we want to. But we don’t have to. We can feel like we did before.”

Kelsi pulled into a parking spot, cut the ignition, and stared at her lap for a long time. Finally, she looked up at me. “Okay,” she said. “I’m in.”

chapter 8

O
nce I’d had the idea of getting us all together, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I thought about it at school. I thought about it at home. I lay in bed at night thinking about how I just might be able to help everyone who hurt the same way I did. I imagined scenarios in which the program was such a success, I would be asked to travel all around the country to talk to grown-ups about how to help kids who’d lost a parent.

But I was getting ahead of myself. I hadn’t talked to anyone but Kelsi about it, and I hadn’t even researched how to go about setting up an informal group of teens who got together to be with other people who didn’t make them feel like outcasts. Still, I knew in my gut that it was something I had to do. I just had to figure out how.

Jennica came over after school on Friday to do our weekend trig homework, and then my mom drove us to Jennica’s house. I’d told her we were having a sleepover, which wasn’t exactly a lie, since I really was sleeping over at Jennica’s place. But we were also going to a party at Brooke Newell’s house, and I knew my mom would probably say no if I asked her. Ever since the accident, she’d been completely freaked out about anything that involved teenagers, cars, and possibly alcohol. Not that I blamed her. But it wasn’t like we were going to drink and drive. I knew what could happen when you got in a car, even when alcohol wasn’t a factor.

“It’ll just be me and Tanner tonight at home,” my mom said as she drove. She glanced in the rearview mirror at Tanner, who was sitting beside Jennica and gazing out the window.

“Why?” I asked. “Where’s Logan going?”

“Over to Will’s house to play some video game, I think,” Mom said absently. “Or maybe to watch movies. He’s having a sleepover too, like you girls.”

Jennica and I exchanged looks. Will was Logan’s friend last year, but they hardly ever talked anymore, thanks to the fact that Logan now spent all his time with Sydney. I doubted he was spending Friday night at Will’s, but Will was the excuse he used most weekends to sneak out of the house. I hadn’t blown his cover yet, although with the way he acted toward me sometimes, it was pretty tempting.

I wondered if Logan would be at Brooke’s party too. I’d always assumed that the Will lie was a cover for sneaking out with Sydney. But maybe my brother was going to more of these popular-crowd parties than I realized.

My mom dropped us at Jennica’s, and after kissing me absently on the cheek, she drove away, back to the silent bubble of our house.

“She’s really out of it, isn’t she?” Jennica said quietly.

I sighed. “It’s been like that for a while.”

Jennica nodded. “Come on,” she said as she started toward the door. “We don’t have much time to get you dressed. I told Brian we’d pick him up in an hour.”

I looked down at what I was wearing: my favorite pair of jeans, flip-flops, a pale pink tee, and a gray hoodie that I’d gotten at the Star Beck concert Jennica and I had gone to a year and a half ago in Boston. It had the redheaded singer’s face emblazoned on the back and a handful of little sequined stars down the right front side. It was one of my favorite pieces of clothing, and I figured the sequins dressed it up enough to make it party appropriate. “What’s wrong with what I have on?” I asked.

Jennica rolled her eyes. “Everything,” she said.

She led me inside, past the kitchen, where the fridge door was open, obscuring all but the feet of Jennica’s mom, who was standing behind it, looking inside.

“Hi, girls!” she said, straightening up with a smile. “I was just about to throw something in for dinner. Hungry?”

She shut the refrigerator door, and I couldn’t help staring. I’d known Mrs. Arroyo for years now, and she’d always been the quintessential mom, so much so that I’d caught myself feeling jealous lots of times this year when my mom had retreated inside herself so much. I was used to seeing Mrs. Arroyo in jeans and a T-shirt, or covered up in an apron, with her hair tied back and little makeup on.

But today, she was wearing a denim miniskirt and a halter top. Her hair was loose and had been curled at the ends, and she had on way too much blush and lipstick.

Jennica audibly sighed. “We’ll be in my room, Mom,” she said. Then, before I could say anything or react, she grabbed my hand and dragged me toward the staircase. She smiled an obviously fake smile at me. “Divorce is fun!” she said brightly.

It had been ages since I’d been to Jennica’s house. She was always busy with Brian, and I supposed I’d been glad to have the distance between us; seeing her perfect family depressed me. But is this what had happened to all of them since I’d stopped paying attention?

I followed Jennica upstairs. She pulled me into her room and shut the door behind us, then she flopped onto her bed.

“What’s the deal with your mom?” I asked, sitting down beside her.

“She thinks she’s a teenager. Apparently, it’s her plan to get her ‘sexy’ back.” Jennica shrugged. “I mean, good for her, I guess. But
I
would never dress like that.”

“Me neither,” I said with a shudder. “And my mom would kill me if I did.”

Jennica snorted. “Don’t be so sure,” she said. “Your mom looks about as tuned in as mine does.”

I was silent. She was right.

Jennica shook her head and got up from the bed. “Anyhow,” she said. “Let’s get you dressed.”

For the next twenty minutes, I felt like a Barbie doll as Jennica made me try on outfit after outfit. She had determined that we should both be wearing tight jeans and cleavage-baring tops tonight, like all the popular girls.

“Okay,” I said slowly. “That sounds good. But I have two problems.”

Jennica simply raised an eyebrow and waited for me to go on.

“First, it’s like forty degrees outside,” I said. “I think it’s past the skimpy-top-wearing season.”

Jennica rolled her eyes. “Fine, so we’ll wear skimpy tops with jackets. Happy?”

I smiled at her without answering. “However, the second, and much more pressing, issue is that I
have
no cleavage. So a cleavage-baring top is pretty much impossible.”

“Girl!” Jennica said, shaking her head. “Don’t you know how to work what you have?”

What I
had
was an A-cup. But in Jennica’s frighteningly capable hands, and with the help of pads from an old bra she’d grown out of a couple years ago and some double-sided tape, I suddenly looked a lot different than usual in a pair of long black pants, high heels, and a low-cut sparkly silver tank top of Jennica’s that made me look much curvier than I really was.

“Voilà!” she exclaimed, stepping back to admire her admittedly impressive handiwork. I just stared at myself in the mirror.

“How’d you do that?” I asked in astonishment.

“I’m not done yet,” Jennica said. It took her ten more minutes to apply bronzer, blush, lipstick, eyeliner, and mascara to my usually bare face. I looked in the mirror with trepidation, expecting to see something horrific (or at least something like her over-blushed mom). Instead, I looked … good.

“Hellooooo, hot mama!” Jennica said, grinning at me in the mirror.

I giggled. “This is … different. You’re like a miracle worker!”

Jennica shrugged. “Nah,” she said. “I didn’t do anything. I just played up what you’ve already got!”

I stared at the mirror and shook my head in amazement. She was right; I did look like me. Just a prettier version.

•  •  •

Ten minutes later, Jennica had changed too—into jeans, heels, and a sparkly purple tank (the difference being that she actually had real curves to fill it out)—and I had persuaded her that I needed a cardigan so I wouldn’t freeze to death. Grudgingly, she had handed one over. I intended to bring my Star Beck hoodie, too, because I figured it would be cold enough outside that I’d want to layer up.

We walked downstairs and found Jennica’s scantily clad mom removing a pizza from the oven while Jennica’s little sister, Anne, sat at the table, drinking a glass of milk.

“Just in time for dinner, girls!” Mrs. Arroyo exclaimed. Jennica started to protest, but her mom turned firm. “Jennica! I can’t send you and Lacey out of here with empty stomachs, now can I?” Without waiting for an answer, she added, “Wash some salad mix and get the dressing out, will you? Lacey, what would you like to drink?”

I sat next to Anne and flashed her a smile. She looked up from her glass, and I tried not to giggle when I noticed her milk mustache.

“Hey, you,” I said. “How’s it going?”

“Fine,” she answered gruffly. “What’s up with you?” Anne was twelve and right in the middle of that tough phase when
you
know you’re grown up, but the rest of the world still treats you like a kid. I knew she was trying to sound as adult as possible. I played along.

“Not much,” I said with a shrug.

“Got a boyfriend?” she asked, turning her gaze back to her milk.

I looked at her, surprised. “Um, no,” I said. “Do you?”

She glanced at Jennica, who was pouring salad into a bowl. Then she returned her attention to me. “Yeah,” she said casually, “I got a few options.”

I looked over at Jennica in time to see her roll her eyes. It had always bugged her that Anne seemed to copy every move she made. Her younger sister had insisted she was “playing the field” when Jennica was single, but now that Jennica had Brian, Anne was always saying cryptic things about how she had lots of boyfriend options.

“Having a boyfriend isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, kiddo,” Jennica muttered. I turned and glanced at her, wondering what that was all about.

We scarfed down our pizza and salad in the same kind of silence that pervaded my house. This surprised me. I’d just assumed that Jennica’s family was just as it had always been.

Apparently, I was wrong.

After Jennica and I had put our plates in the sink and wrapped the remaining slices of pizza in foil, Mrs. Arroyo stood up to give Jennica a hug and to pinch me on the cheek, which used to annoy me when I was a kid but which I now thought was kind of cute.

“Have a good time at the party, baby,” she said to Jennica.

Jennica nodded. “We will.”

“Don’t drink too much,” her mother said, leaning in to kiss her on the cheek. “And call me if you can’t drive.”

I looked at Jennica in astonishment. But she merely nodded again, mumbled a goodbye, and grabbed my hand to drag me out the door.

“Bye!” Anne yelled behind us.

I waved, but I couldn’t even muster the words to say goodbye. I was still in shock.

As soon as we got outside and the door was shut behind us, I exploded. “Your mom
knows
you drink?”

I knew Jennica sometimes drank beer when she was at parties or out with Brian, and I thought it was wrong. She could get in huge trouble! But she was always saying that everybody did it, so why shouldn’t she?

“Yeah,” Jennica muttered. She was looking at the ground. “So?”

“Soooo,” I said, drawing the word out. “Don’t you think that’s weird?”

Jennica shrugged. “Whatever,” she said. “She’s cool, you know? She treats me like a grown-up now.”

I just stared at her. I didn’t even know what to say. What had happened to the old maternal, strict Mrs. Arroyo?

Jennica paused. “It’s just been recently,” she said. “Since my dad started dating the Spandex Leech. It’s like my mom suddenly turned sixteen again. I found her in my closet one day, trying on my clothes, when I got home from school.”

“That’s so … weird,” I said.

Jennica shrugged. “She seems happy. It’s no big deal. It’s cool.” She paused awkwardly, cleared her throat, and added, “Anyways, let’s go.”

Without another word, she strode over to her mom’s old Corolla, yanked open the door, and got inside. She slammed the door behind her and didn’t look at me. It took me a second to snap myself out of it and join her. As soon as my door was shut, she started the car, threw it into reverse, and backed out of the driveway. She switched quickly to drive, cut the wheel sharply, and peeled out from the curb, like she couldn’t get away from her house fast enough.