Joe works his wedding ring back into place. He stands up, positions himself behind Richie’s shoulder, and follows his gaze.
“What happened that night? Did you and Liz get into a fight? Did you confront her?”
“No. She didn’t know that I knew.”
“Why wouldn’t you tell her? Come on, Richie. You were angry. You were hooking up with her stepsister. I get it; you wanted to hurt her for what she’d done.”
Richie turns around. “You’re wrong. I was angry, sure. I guess that, on some level, I wanted to get back at her by messing around with Josie. And I knew I’d have to confront her eventually. I knew we’d probably break up because of what she’d done.”
Joe looks at him skeptically. “But not yet?”
“No. Not yet.”
“And why is that?”
“Because,” Richie says, looking at the boat again. He takes his thumb and holds it up in his line of vision, as if to eradicate the Elizabeth from his view. “I didn’t want to ruin her birthday party. I loved her too much.”
Eight
There’s so much I can’t remember about my life. I can’t recall exactly what I was doing the night I died, or a week earlier. Aside from the brief flashback that I experienced, when I saw myself with Richie in his car, I barely remember being at the junior prom at all. I can’t recall the last time I spoke to my parents while I was alive. I can’t even say for sure whether or not I was cheating on my boyfriend. But I remember running.
The act is worn into my bones; I can remember the cadence of my footsteps against concrete and earth; I remember the gradual process of awakening that took place every morning as I stepped out my front door and worked myself into an easy pace by the time I reached the end of High Street. I remember how it felt to start out cold and dry and tired, then finish sweaty and warm and exhilarated. Running was magic. It was solitary bliss. It was everything, and I miss it more than almost anything.
So there is some fierce irony to the fact that, in my own personal afterlife, I’m wearing ill-fitting cowgirl boots that pinch my already blistered toes. These boots are the only source of pain I can feel, for reasons I don’t understand at all. In life, I adored them. I never imagined they’d become a permanent part of my apparition.
Alex and I are sitting on the white linoleum against a wall of lockers on the second floor of Noank High. It’s the first day of what would have been our senior year, and there’s a palpable sadness in the hallways, thanks to the recent death of everybody’s favorite socialite. The students are quieter than usual; it’s like nobody wants to seem too happy. Outside, the flag is flying at half-mast. My unofficial parking space in the student lot remains empty. Already this morning I’ve heard kids talking about the fact that there are grief counselors hanging out in the library, waiting to console anyone who might be overwhelmed by my untimely passing.
“Was it like this after I died?” Alex asks quietly.
As much as I’m glad to have some company, there are times—like right now—when I am so annoyed that he’s still around. It seems like he’s always full of probing questions and biting observations precisely when I’m enjoying the solitude that comes with being a ghost, a silent observer. For a moment I’m tempted to say, “No, of course not. You weren’t popular.” But I’m not that bad of a person—at least not now. If I was as terrible when I was alive as Alex claims, at least I’m trying to do better in the afterlife. Instead I say, “It was kind of like this, yeah.”
But it wasn’t; not exactly. To my surprise, I find that some memories start to flash of the days following his death. I remember coming back to school last year after Alex was killed. The school did everything that was expected: lowered the flag, supplied a handful of counselors—they even orchestrated a schoolwide moment of silence during morning announcements. But I remember other things, too: the slew of yearbooks being passed around that morning, open to Alex’s tenth-grade photo, so that people could accurately remember who they were supposed to be mourning. And the moment of silence in my homeroom was interrupted when one of my friends, Chad Shubuck, let out an obnoxious, very audible fart. Almost everyone laughed.
I blink myself back into reality, beyond relieved that Alex didn’t see my memory. I feel a pang of pity for him.
I can see Chad Shubuck now, standing among a group of students in the lobby at the end of the hall, where the administration has displayed a framed, blown-up picture of me, taken from last year’s yearbook. He stares quietly at my face—it’s a fantastic picture of me—and then he slowly crosses himself, like he’s just finished a prayer.
I stare down the hallway to look for my other friends. Not ten feet away, Richie is standing at his open locker, staring at the contents. He seems lost in thought as Topher and Mera approach, their hands in each other’s back pockets.
Topher, dewey eyed and almost glistening as an all-American boy, wears a red-and-white football letterman’s jacket over his T-shirt and jeans, chews a wad of what’s undoubtedly sugarless gum (he is obsessed with oral hygiene—after all, his father is Noank’s most respected dentist and oral surgeon), and flashes a sympathetic smile to reveal two rows of sparkling white teeth as he leans against an adjacent locker.
“It’s crazy, isn’t it?” he says, running a hand through his tousled hair. “Being here without Liz?”
“It’s horrible.” Mera has clearly been up before dawn to work on her hair, which is styled in countless perfect blond ringlets. Her fingernails are smooth acrylic French tips. “Everybody’s gonna want to know what happened. And since I’m the one who found her, I’m the one who has to tell them.”
I knew it. I knew she would milk her discovery of me for every drop of attention that it’s worth. It’s so typical of her. I’m dead, for God’s sake. You’d think that, for once, she could restrain herself from seizing an opportunity to be the center of attention.
“Don’t tell them anything. There’s nothing they need to know.” Richie shrugs off his jacket. Underneath, he’s wearing an almost threadbare Yale T-shirt and wrinkled jeans that look like they’ve been rolled in a ball on his floor for weeks. His hair isn’t combed. There are puffy circles of grayish white beneath his big eyes. Richie has never been too fixated on his appearance, but he’s definitely far more disheveled than usual. He doesn’t seem to care a bit.
“Don’t take this the wrong way, Richie,” Mera says, frowning at him, “but you look awful.”
Inside his locker, there’s a picture of the two of us taped to the door. It was taken on my parents’ front lawn, before last year’s homecoming. The photo only shows our faces and upper bodies, but there’s someone just outside the frame whose hand is slung around my shoulders, her fingertips resting on the back of Richie’s neck. It’s Josie. Richie sees it, too, and I can tell he wants to do something with the picture—maybe take it down? Throw it away?
He doesn’t do anything, though. “I have to be somewhere,” he tells Mera and Topher. He lets out a long breath; it’s like he’s trying to summon a semblance of his typically cool, confident self. But there’s a weary quality to his voice when he speaks. “What do you need?”
Topher leans in a little closer, lowering his voice. “Hey, buddy. I know it’s a rough time for all of us, but can you help a brother out?”
“What’s he talking about?” Alex murmurs.
“Shh.”
“Is he talking about drugs?”
I look at Alex. “Are you deaf as well as dead? I said shh.”
“What do you need?” Richie asks again, closing his locker and glancing at the clock hanging in the hallway. “I’m gonna be late, dude.”
“You know … a quarter?”
Alex shakes his head in disbelief.
“What? What’s that look for?” I demand.
“You and your group. You think you can get away with anything. Topher’s on the football team. Don’t they drug test?”
My gaze drifts to my boots. My feet are positively throbbing. Even though I know
it won’t work, I’ve tried to take the boots off a few times, but sooner or later I look down and there they are again. It’s like magic. They are, at least for now, a permanent part of me. “There are ways around that,” I say.
“What do you mean?”
“The drug tests are supposed to be random,” I explain, “but Topher was MVP last year. They aren’t going to kick him off the team.” I pause, trying to explain further without sounding like the entitled snob that I know Alex thinks I am. “I’m just saying, there are things a person can do if he doesn’t want to get caught.”
“Right. Or he could, you know, just not do drugs.”
“Come on, he’s a good guy.” But there’s no conviction in my voice; not after witnessing Topher’s treatment of poor Frank Wainscott in the cafeteria.
Alex looks at me with what I can only describe as suppressed horror. “Of all the people to end up dead with,” he says, shaking his head, “it had to be you, didn’t it?”
“You’re kidding me, right? I could say the same thing about you.”
“No, you couldn’t.” His tone is firm. “I’m a nice person. I never did anything to hurt anyone. But you … you and your friends.” He takes a moment to look up and down the hallway, which is starting to empty as homeroom approaches. “Admit it, Liz. Isn’t there a part of you that’s embarrassed to be sitting here with me, even though nobody can see us?”
I don’t answer him. My silence is enough of a response.
Once Topher and Mera have left, I expect Richie to go to Mr. Franklin’s room, which is where he and I have both been in homeroom since the ninth grade. But he doesn’t. Instead, Alex and I follow him down to the first floor, through the cafetorium (which is a combination cafeteria/auditorium—Noank High is a small school), and outside to the field house. He stands at a closed office door in a darkened hall and fidgets, waiting to knock.
Richie is no athlete. He’s the kind of guy who barely manages a C in gym class—the only mediocre grade on his otherwise impeccable academic record—and is an anomaly among our typically athletic, popular crowd. He has always been far more interested in books and music than in anything physical. Still, as soon as I see him heading toward the field house, I realize exactly who he’s looking for.
My cross-country coach, Mr. Riley, sits quietly at his desk in a small, cluttered office. I remember a good bit about him—small factual details about people seem to come pretty easily to me. Aside from being the cross-country and track coach, he teaches the high school boys’ gym classes and tenth-grade health, which puts him kind of low on the faculty totem pole. He isn’t adorable and witty like our English teacher, Mr. Simon. I’ve never seen him spontaneously drop to the gym floor and start doing one-armed push-ups, like the football coach, Mr. “Call Me Todd” Buckley. Unlike the cheerleading coach, Mrs. Casey, he never would have dreamed of supplying alcohol to minors. But he was always my favorite teacher. He’d been my coach since I was in the seventh grade, and he was good at it. He understands what it means to love running. Looking at him now, I remember noticing him two weeks earlier at my funeral. It was the only time, I think, that I’d ever seen him wear a tie. And it was certainly the only time I’d ever seen him cry. At least I think it was the only time. I’m not sure about anything, not now.
As close as I remember being with Mr. Riley, he never warmed to Richie, even though they were both at every one of my cross-country meets and had plenty of opportunities to get to know each other.
“I’m not surprised,” Alex says when I tell him. “Everybody knows Richie’s a drug dealer.”
“Do they really?”
“Of course.” He pauses. “It’s a small town, Liz. People aren’t good at keeping secrets.” The words feel weighted with significance, somehow. I get the sense that he’s alluding to something, but I’m not sure exactly what.
It’s funny—I can remember a lot about Mr. Riley, but not everything. I know that he was my coach. I know that he didn’t like Richie. But I don’t remember many specifics from the time I spent with him.
So I try to bring some of them back. I’m getting more and more used to falling into memories now, and it almost feels gentle and natural when I close my eyes and let myself slip into the past.
I see a slightly younger, very slightly heavier version of myself standing in his office. Judging from my appearance, I’m guessing that it’s sometime during my sophomore year—if it’s cross-country season, it’s the fall. We are alone together. The light in Mr. Riley’s windowless office comes from a dim, erratically blinking fluorescent fixture in the ceiling. Dead insects are visible against the translucent sheet of plastic that covers the bulb. The effect is creepy in the otherwise deserted building.
Mr. Riley is in his early thirties. On his desk, there’s a photo of what I assume is his wife and baby daughter. I get the feeling I’ve met them before, maybe multiple times, although I can’t remember much of anything about them at the moment.
Mr. Riley is a quiet, kind of nerdy guy with a good tan from so much running outdoors and the wiry build that’s so typical in endurance athletes. “Liz,” he says to me, gesturing to a chair in front of his desk, “have a seat.” He reaches into a minifridge humming on the floor of his office and pulls out a bottled water. “Here,” he says, putting it down in front of me, “drink. You just ran six miles. Your body needs hydration.”
“I know that.” I open the water and take a long drink. It’s obviously right after cross-country practice. I’m wearing gray cotton shorts and a pink tank top made of very thin material, so thin that my white sports bra is clearly visible beneath my shirt. Mr. Riley looks at the far wall, at the picture on his desk, anywhere but at my body. I can tell that being alone with me makes him uncomfortable.
“You aren’t going out with the rest of the team?” he asks, keeping his tone light.
“What? Where would I go with them?” My tone is flippant and uncaring, and I can guess why. Aside from me, nobody on the cross-country team was what you’d call popular. I wasn’t friends with any of them. Thinking about the fact now, it seems like a shame that I was so quick to write them off.
“They’re going out for Chinese food together,” Mr. Riley says. He meets my gaze. “You didn’t know?”
“I knew. Of course I knew.” But from my voice, I can tell that I had no idea. They didn’t invite me.
“Liz.” Mr. Riley hesitates. “I think you should consider being a little bit … warmer toward your teammates.”
From outside his door, I hear someone clearing his throat. I don’t even have to look to know that it’s Richie, waiting for me.
“What do you mean, warmer? I’m plenty warm. I just don’t hang out with them outside practice, that’s all.” I shrug. “It doesn’t bother me. They’re losers.”
Mr. Riley flinches at the word “losers.” As I watch my younger self, so do I.
“That’s exactly what I mean,” he continues. “Liz, you might want to reconsider your social circle. I’ve been your coach since seventh grade. I’ve watched you grow into this … this girl who is consumed by the material, by the social ranking of who she surrounds herself with. I know it’s not really you.”
I place my water gently on his desk. “How do you know that?”
“Because I know you’re only trying to protect yourself. You don’t want to get hurt again, so you surround yourself with people who would do anything to stay in your good graces. And you push everyone else away.”
I lean forward, narrowing my eyes. “What do you mean, I don’t want to get hurt again? When did I ever get hurt?”
He hesitates. For a long moment, he doesn’t say anything. As I stare at him, my gaze almost challenging him to say whatever he’s thinking, I focus on his eyes, which are two different colors: one is light blue, while the other is black, all pupil and no iris.
Finally, he says, “Your mother.”
Oh, Mommy. As I watch the two of us, I can tell that the mere mention of my mom hurts; the idea of her is
so raw, so fresh, even so many years later. I don’t want to talk about it; that much is obvious.
I bite my bottom lip. “Mr. Riley,” I say, “can I ask you something?”
He shrugs. “Sure.”
“What happened to your eye?”
The question startles him. He looks around the room again. For a second, I’m afraid I’ve made him angry, that he’s going to kick me out of his office.
But he doesn’t. Instead, he says, “Okay, Liz. You want to know what happened?”
“Yes.” I nod.
“I’ve never told another student this.”
I give him a genuine smile. “I won’t tell anyone. Cross my heart.”
“I was seven. I was a nerdy kid … still am a nerd, I guess.” He half smiles. “Anyway, the kids in my neighborhood never invited me out to play with them. Then one day one of the guys—his name was Charlie Sutton—comes to my front door and asks my mom if I can come out to play some baseball. This was back when people still let their kids go outside without a whole lot of supervision. And I was absolutely thrilled. I grabbed my bat and my mitt and went running outside so fast. You can’t imagine how excited I was.”
He pauses. He closes his eyes.
“So?” I lean forward in my chair. “What happened? Did you get hit by a baseball or something?”
“No.” Mr. Riley looks me square in the eye. “When I got outside, to the ballpark behind my house, Charlie Sutton and a few of the other kids were waiting for me. They had a pellet gun. You know—a BB gun. And they shot me.” He shrugs. “They hit me a good half a dozen times on my body, you know, just fooling around, not enough to break the skin or anything. I was crying by then. I started to back away, getting ready to run to my house, and one of the BBs hit me in the eye before I had a chance to turn around. It destroyed my iris. I’m legally blind in my left eye now.”
Even at sixteen, the story is enough to visibly move me. I put a hand to my mouth. “Oh my God,” I tell him. “That’s awful. What happened to them? Did they get in trouble?”
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