“Larry the Lion, huh?” Toni said between crunches.
“Yeah. I finally got that shot I’ve been trying for.”
“The one that makes him look lonely and not like a jacked-up plastic lion that wants to eat your face?”
“Exactly.” Even though my back was to her, I smiled. It was nice to know someone listened to me when I babbled about my photography.
“Are you going to submit it now?” she asked through a mouthful of chips.
I’d been building my portfolio to apply for a summer course at the local college. It was a small class and highly selective. “Nah. It’s not ready.”
“You won’t ever think it’s ready,” Toni huffed. “Then you won’t have to apply and risk being rejected.”
Toni’s favorite hobby was psychoanalyzing me. I cast a look at her over my shoulder. “I’ll apply. Just not yet.”
She pointed a chip at me. “No offense, Morgan, but you’ve always been the kind of girl who sits back and lets things happen to her.”
I resisted an eye roll. “And who should I be?”
“The kind of girl who goes out and makes things happen.”
I saved the photos and shut my laptop. “Believe me. I want to be in this program. That’s why I’m taking my time. My portfolio has to be perfect.” I was a little aggravated, but knew her nagging came from a good place. I playfully stuck my tongue out. “So stop pressuring me.”
She made a face right back. “I’m your best friend, that’s my job.” She paused, and her casual tone turned serious. “So did you go . . . into the park?”
I shook my head. “Not today.”
“How are you doing . . . today?” She emphasized the last word.
I should’ve known she’d remember the date. Three months ago today Flynn was killed in a hit-and-run accident. I hadn’t gotten any messages or calls from my other friends. My parents never mentioned Flynn much after his death. They were raised in the school of “the problem doesn’t exist if you don’t talk about it.”
But Toni remembered. She knew today would be hard on me. That’s what I loved about her. Her world was chaos back home, but she still worried about me.
I opened my laptop again and pretended to be doing something important. “I’m all right.”
“Look at me,” she demanded.
I twisted around to face her.
“He’s been gone now longer than you were together,” she said, meeting my eyes.
Technically, she was right. We’d only dated for about two months, and he’d been dead for three, but that didn’t make it okay. It wasn’t like there was some grief formula. If you knew someone for X amount of time and he’d been dead for Y amount of time, you will be over the whole thing in X plus Y divided by Z.
I wish it were that simple.
“I just hate to see you so sad,” she said.
“Lots of people in the world are sad,” I countered.
“But they’re not my best friend. Who cares about those losers?” She cracked a smile, and I mirrored it.
“I get what you’re saying,” I said and gave a little shrug. “But I can’t just magically shut the feelings off, you know?”
She sat up straighter on the bed and folded her legs underneath her. “What if we nudged it along?”
I narrowed my eyes. “What do you mean?”
“It’s the three-month anniversary of Flynn’s death. Maybe you should do something closure-y.”
“I love the way you make up words by putting a y at the end of them.”
“I love the way you avoid a conversation you don’t want to have by making an astute observation about me.”
“Don’t you mean astute-y?”
“Morgan.”
“Okay, okay. What would you like me to do?”
“Just some kind of closure.”
I leaned back in the chair and racked my brain. “Like . . . toss a wreath into the river to symbolize how he’s drifted away from me?”
Toni rolled her eyes. “Nothing that cheesy. We can start with something simple like . . .” She chewed on the ends of her sandy-blond hair for a moment. “Upload a pic of him to FriendShare with a good-bye message or something.”
“How is that any form of closure?” I asked.
“It’s public. It’s showing your friends—who are worried about you, by the way—that you’re starting to heal and move on. Having the balls to say something publicly makes it mean more.”
“I don’t have balls. I have girly parts.”
She threw a Dorito at me, but it wasn’t very aerodynamic and landed on the floor halfway between us. “Take this seriously, please.”
“Flynn hated FriendShare,” I pointed out.
“No offense, hon, but that boy hated everything except you.”
I shrugged. “He was just private. People have the right to be private.”
Toni placed a finger in her open mouth and pretended to gag. “He refused to talk about himself. He never invited you to his house.”
“He had family issues,” I said.
“He had issues, all right.”
I didn’t want to get into this. I had always known Toni didn’t like Flynn. And he hadn’t exactly made an effort to be likable to her, either. I’d found his private nature mysterious and sexy. She’d found it “douchey.” But she never told me to break up with him and hardly ever complained. If the roles had been reversed and she’d been dating a boy I hated, I would’ve nagged her a lot more.
I searched her dark eyes. This small act of closure seemed important to her. And what did I have to lose? Maybe it would make me feel a little better.
“Fine,” I said, giving in. “I’ll do it.”
She clapped and beamed like the proud parent of a child who’d made the right choice.
I logged in to FriendShare. My profile picture came up, a photo of Toni and me taken last year. We had our arms around each other’s shoulders, which was a little awkward since I was so much taller than her. I glanced in the mirror resting on my desk and then back at the picture. It’s amazing how a photo can tell you so much about a person in one quick glance. In the picture, my blue eyes were brighter, my black hair shinier. I glowed. Everything about me in the mirror now seemed dulled in comparison.
This was the right thing to do. I had to get on the “path of healing” (to quote one of Toni’s well-meaning speeches).
I paused with my hands over the keys, then typed: Gone, but not forgotten.
“Good,” Toni said from over my shoulder. “That’s good.”
Then I clicked to upload the only picture I had of Flynn. One that he hadn’t even known I’d taken. I took it the first day I met him, in King’s Fantasy World. I went into the park to get shots for my portfolio and stumbled upon this mysterious boy, all alone, and it was like my camera had a mind of its own.
The icon in the center of the application swirled for a moment as the photo loaded. Then Flynn’s face filled the screen. My chest squeezed as I fought off the urge to cry. Even in this innocuous photo, he seemed like a tragic figure. Leaning against the wall of the fun house, full lips slightly parted, his face tilted just a degree as his steely gray eyes searched for the source of the sound in the abandoned park. The sound had been me.
The outline of a box opened around his head as FriendShare’s facial recognition software attempted to tag him with a name. It was a handy application if you were uploading a big group picture or a bunch of photos that you wanted done quickly. But I knew it was a waste of time for this picture. Flynn had never been on FriendShare. He thought it was “weird” and “intrusive.” Which was an observation I found poignant and smart, and Toni again found douchey.
But the operation ended and a message read:
Is this Evan Murphy? YES. NO. DONE TAGGING.
“What the hell?” I said.
Toni brought her face closer to the screen. “Who’s Evan Murphy?”
“I don’t know, but FriendShare seems to think he’s my dead boyfriend.”
She shook her head. “Stupid website. It’s probably glitchy or something. Just say ‘no’ and then hit ‘post.’”
My finger hovered over the mouse, but I didn’t click “no.” My muscles tightened into steel coils. It was probably nothing. It had to be nothing. But I needed to see.
With a trembling hand, I clicked on Evan’s name.
“What are you doing?” Toni asked.
“I just want to see who he is,” I said. “Now I’m curious.”
“You’re postponing the closure. I knew you’d chicken out. You need to do this!”
She continued to lovingly lecture me, but I couldn’t hear her anymore. All I heard was the rush of blood through my head and the ragged, sharp intakes of my own breath.
Because the page had loaded. Evan Murphy lived a few towns away and looked exactly like Flynn. Except he was very much alive.
CHAPTER 2
Doritos hit the floor as the open bag fell from Toni’s hand. “Whoa . . .”
“Yeah,” I breathed.
“What? Who?”
Toni continued her one-word questions as I clicked around, trying to access anything else on Evan Murphy’s page. But he had a good amount of privacy settings on, and the only thing I could see was that one small profile picture and his town name, Littlefield—only fifteen minutes away.
Toni jabbed a finger at the photo. “It’s Flynn. I mean, it is him, right?”
“It can’t be,” I said. “I don’t know.”
“How can you not know?” Toni screeched. “FriendShare matched his face to this guy. It’s him! Look!”
I didn’t know how I was staying so calm. Toni was clearly going bananas. But it was like my brain had shut off all emotion so it could focus. I clicked on the photo in an attempt to enlarge it, but the resolution was terrible when I tried to zoom in. The face was Flynn’s face. Those steely gray eyes that were so hard to ignore. The slope of his jaw. The sly, one-sided grin.
But it couldn’t be him. I searched for something sane to grasp on to.
“He’s wearing a baseball hat,” I said quickly. “Flynn never wore hats.”
“He also never said his name was Evan Murphy and he lived in Littlefield. Being an undercover hat lover obviously wasn’t his biggest secret.”
I needed to get away from the computer, from the familiar face smiling at me on the screen. I pushed the chair back and stood up. “It’s just someone who looks eerily like him.”
“Not eerily,” Toni said. “Exactly.”
I pulled my hair back and held it at the nape of my neck. “Could he, like, have a twin living in another town with a different last name?” I said, thinking out loud. “I know it’s crazy, but what else could it be?”
“He could be alive,” Toni said.
I sank down onto the edge of my bed as a wave of nausea washed over me. I put my face in my hands and rubbed circles on my forehead. Could Flynn really be alive? How would that be possible? And . . . he let me think he was dead? Would he do that? How could he do that?
I dropped my hands and looked up at Toni. She was staring at me with a wary expression, probably waiting for me to lose it.
“It’s impossible,” I said.
“There was no funeral,” she countered.
That was true. I’d never met Flynn’s parents. He never wanted to talk about them, and I assumed he never told them about me. I never got word about a wake or funeral, and it wasn’t printed in the paper. Flynn had lived in town only a couple of months, and he didn’t even go to our school. He went to St. Pelagius. He didn’t know anyone in town. I always assumed his family had a memorial service back where they’d come from. Somewhere in New Hampshire.
But now my brain was going haywire. No one I knew had seen his body. So how did I really know he was dead?
“The last time you saw him,” Toni said gently, “he was still alive, right?”
“Yeah, but a nurse at the hospital told me he didn’t make it.”
Toni shrugged. “Maybe she was wrong. The hospital has a gazillion patients. She could’ve mixed things up, thought you were asking about someone else.”
I paused. That night was such a blur, especially in the hospital. I hadn’t been allowed past the waiting area. I called my parents. I was hysterical, to the point where a doctor prescribed a sedative, which my mom gave me when they forced me to go home. It wasn’t until the next morning, when I woke and called the hospital, that I found out Flynn was dead.
“But the cops came and took a statement,” I said. As useless as it had been. All I’d seen was a black SUV. I hadn’t seen the plate. I couldn’t even accurately pick out the make or model from the book they’d shown me.
“Did the cops say he was dead?” Toni asked.
I searched my fuzzy memory. “I don’t think so. I just remember them asking me to describe the vehicle.”
Toni sat beside me on the bed and ran her hand over the goose bumps on my forearm. “A hit-and-run doesn’t have to end in death to be a crime,” she said. “The police would still come investigate.”
I shook my head until my neck felt sore. This was crazy. Crazier than crazy. To even entertain the slight possibility that Flynn could be alive . . . it was nuts.
“Just think it through,” Toni said anxiously. “What evidence do you have of his death? He was alive when they put him in the ambulance. The only person who ever told you he was dead was a nurse, who could’ve been talking about the wrong patient.”
What if he didn’t die? And then he, what? Just . . . slipped away? Became someone else?
No. I wasn’t going to be lured by Toni’s crazy-talk. She was notorious for jumping to the wildest conclusions. A neighbor talked too long to the mailman—affair! Birds fell from the sky in Guatemala—aliens! I usually rolled my eyes and ignored her insanity. But I had to admit, this time, as ridiculous as it sounded, it held a kernel of possibility.
Or maybe I just wanted it to be true.
Toni walked over to my desk and put her hand on the mouse.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Sending him a friend request.”
In one swift motion, I rose and pulled her hand away. “No, don’t.”
“Why not?”
“If he’s not Flynn, what would we even say? ‘Hey, don’t mind us, you just look exactly like this dead kid.’”
Toni’s eyes traveled back to the photo. “And if it is Flynn?”
“Then I don’t want to scare him away. I don’t want him to know I found him. Not yet.”
CHAPTER 3
The next morning I got ready for school on autopilot. I showered, dressed, and headed downstairs for breakfast. I passed the long mahogany table in the dining room that we only used on holidays when my grandparents came to visit from Florida. Day to day we ate casually, at a small round table in the nook of the kitchen, perfect for three. Or two. Or sometimes, just me.
I ate a bowl of cereal, the clinking of the spoon echoing in the quiet, my mind drifting. I snapped out of my trance when Mom bounded into the kitchen.
“I’m heading to work,” she said, kissing my cheek as I rinsed my bowl in the sink. A line of gray shimmered from the part in her hair, a reminder of the extra time and money she no longer had available to spend at the salon. “I made you lunch. It’s in the fridge.”
“You didn’t have to make me lunch, Mom.” She got up at some ungodly hour every morning to get things done—laundry, bill paying, ironing Dad’s shirts before he left for work, etc. Juggling two jobs, she had to find the time where she could. “I can do it myself. I know you’re rushing.”
She gave me a little smile, but it barely disguised her exhaustion. Th
at’s how my family operated. Always polite and pleasant, never acknowledging the real feelings beneath the perma-smiles. Even I played along. Whenever college came up, I always told my parents I was only a junior and I’d worry about it next year. But the truth was, I worried about it now. A lot. Thoughts of choices and applications and financial aid sometimes kept me up at night. But I didn’t want to add more to their stack of Things to Worry About. For all I knew, that could be the thing to finally bring the pile crashing down. I preferred our tradition of pleasant denial.
Mom reached out and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. “I’m working double shifts today, so I won’t be home for dinner. And Dad . . . well, you know his hours. So making your lunch was the least I could do.”
She picked at a fingernail and forced a smile, but I knew she felt guilty. She hated that I was here alone so much.
“Don’t worry about dinner,” I said, grabbing the paper sack from the fridge. “Toni and I have plans anyway.”
Lies flowed easily from me when I thought they’d make people feel better. Maybe I’d ask Toni to go out for pizza to turn it into a truth.
“Great,” Mom said cheerily. “You girls have fun!”
I kept the perma-smile on until she walked out the door.
• • •
River’s End High School was built when the town was thriving. As things went downhill and people moved away, our schools thinned out. Teachers were laid off. Classrooms were closed and locked, their heating vents shut off to save money. Sometimes I found myself drawn to these unused rooms, with their empty desks and blank boards, feeling the draft of cold air seeping out from under the crack of the door.
This morning I went right to my locker. I was there for only thirty seconds before Toni appeared, from out of nowhere. She had this way of moving silently, like a ninja.
She leaned into me and whispered, “How are you doing . . . ?”
I took a deep breath. “It’s all I can think about, but I don’t know what to do. The first step would be figuring out if Evan is a real person. It could be a fake profile page or something. If only I had a mutual friend in common, I could try to find out more, but I don’t.”
Forget Me Page 2
