The Ethan I Was Before

by Ali Standish

  “I need to tell you something too,” she says. “Let’s go.”

  Coralee Cove

  CORALEE AND I BIKE almost all the way back to school. After we cross the bridge over the inlet, just before we get to Mack’s, she pulls off the road, into a gnarled grove of wind-warped trees. She drops her bike in the sandy soil.

  “We walk from here,” she says.

  I lay my bike next to hers and follow her down a narrow footpath that winds its way between the inlet and the grove. Yellow lichens speckle the trees that grow at funny angles from the ground. The ever-present cricket chorus is rowdy here, like they have to chirp louder to be heard over the waves lapping against the shore.

  “Watch out for snakes,” Coralee calls over her shoulder.

  The trek is short, just a couple of minutes. The path ends, and Coralee cuts through the brush, weaving between the stunted trees. Then the soil turns to rocks, the underbrush disappears, and we are standing a few feet above a slice of beach that looks out on the inlet.

  “Wow,” I say. “This place is awesome.”

  “Yeah,” she says, climbing onto the rocks. “I found it a couple of years ago. I’ve never brought anyone here before.”

  I can’t decide if I should be hurt that Coralee hasn’t shown me her hideout sooner or honored that she is showing me now.

  I decide on honored.

  She hops down onto the beach. When I follow her, I see that the rocks are built up around a large storm drain. Its mouth opens tall enough that Coralee could probably walk in without having to duck down and wide enough that I could spread my arms without my fingertips reaching the concrete. The tunnel rests at the edge of the sand, but otherwise the little beach is pristine.

  “Don’t alligators live in those?” I point to the drain mouth, remembering something I read in Mr. Charles’s class about gators traveling from pond to pond through the drains.

  “That’s what this is for,” Coralee replies. She points to a chicken-wire grid, which has been duct taped over the entire entrance.

  “Did you do that?”

  She nods proudly. “Mack gave it to me. I couldn’t have any alligators coming to spoil my spot,” she crows, puffing out her chest and grinning. “No alligators allowed at Coralee Cove!”

  “Coralee Cove?” I ask. “You named it after yourself?”

  “Sure did,” she says. “Who knows if anyone or anything else in this world will ever be named after me? But this bit of beach is mine.”

  She plops down, planting her feet in the sand and squinting up at the late-afternoon sunlight. I sit down beside her. There is suddenly nothing I would like to do more than just sit here, feeling the sunlight soak into my skin and watching the inlet waves lick at the shore.

  But Coralee is looking at me expectantly. “You still want to tell me something?”

  I nod, dig out the mini Snickers, and hand them to her. “It might take a while.”

  “That’s okay,” she says, taking the chocolate. “I’ve told you lots of my stories. But I don’t know any of yours. I don’t know Ethan’s story.”

  Ethan’s Story

  THE FIRST THING YOU have to understand about me and Kacey is that we have been best friends since before I can remember. Literally.

  Our families lived on the same street since before we were born, four days apart at the same hospital. When our moms brought us home, they put us down for naps in the same crib while they had coffee or made lunch together. Our parents grew apart, but not me and Kacey. Most years we had all the same classes and teachers at school, but even the years we didn’t, we still spent all our time together. Roddie even treated Kacey like his own little sister, racing her at sprints and stealing food off her plate when she came over for dinner.

  Over the years, lots of kids at school and even some of our teachers would say how weird it was for a boy and girl to stay best friends. But it wasn’t weird to us.

  The second thing you should know is that, even though she was popular, Kacey didn’t act like most of the popular girls we went to school with. Instead of wearing trendy labels or expensive boots, she usually wore gym shorts or sweatpants and tennis shoes. She kept her hair in a ponytail or braids because she didn’t like having it in her face (and because most days she didn’t bother to brush it in the morning). Instead of posters of boy bands on the wall in her room, she hung posters of the US women’s national soccer team.

  But Kacey was so pretty that it didn’t matter that she kept her hair back and only wore sweats. And she was so funny and easy to talk to that people who should have been intimidated by her weren’t. She had this laugh like ribbons blowing in the wind. It made everyone around her want to laugh too.

  She also played starting forward on the girls’ soccer team.

  She probably could have been the star of the boys’ team too, if they had let her. Because it wasn’t just that Kacey could keep up with boys. She was better than almost anyone at almost everything she tried. Like, when I bought a skateboard, she bought one too, and within a week she was doing kick turns and board slides. When I told her I was going to try out for the baseball team, she agreed to be my practice pitcher. She got so good that Brandon McDavies, the boys’ pitcher, told us we weren’t allowed to practice on the school field anymore. Even though he said the field was reserved, we both knew it was because Kacey had embarrassed him by being better than he was.

  Seventh grade started out just like every other year. We walked home from school together, helped each other through our homework, and sometimes played baseball or video games when we were done.

  But it got boring, passing day after day doing the same stuff in the same quiet neighborhood. Some days you felt like you were too big for it, like you were a ten-pound lobster trapped in a grocery-store fish tank, like you might explode if you didn’t get out or do something new.

  So we dared each other.

  Dare you to cannonball off the high dive.

  Dare you to say “quack” after every sentence at school.

  Dare you to skateboard down the windshield of Ms. Kim’s minivan.

  Dare you to order thirty pizzas to Brandon McDavies’s house.

  Sometimes we completed the dares, sometimes we didn’t. Either way, we always laughed about it afterward.

  When Kacey joined her club soccer team in October, she had less time to hang out. She went to team dinners after practice on Thursdays and competed in tournaments that lasted all weekend long. She even had to miss school sometimes to travel for games.

  You probably think that we were finally drifting away from each other. But we weren’t. Okay, sure, I didn’t get to see her as much, but when Kacey and I were together, it was like we had never been apart.

  After Thanksgiving, Kacey started bringing one of her soccer friends around the neighborhood to hang out with us. Her name was Briana Juarez, and she played keeper. She stood a few inches taller than Kacey and had crinkly brown eyes and freckly cheeks. I liked Briana okay, but she mostly talked to Kacey about things that I didn’t know or care about, like Lydia’s fake-out in their last game or the US women’s team’s chances in the next World Cup.

  But what bugged me more was that I had never seen Kacey look at anyone the way she looked at Briana. It was almost like she admired her or something. Which was odd because Kacey didn’t admire anyone. She didn’t admire me. And it’s not like I admired her, either. You don’t admire someone who you’ve seen puking on the carpet in the movie theater lobby because she was dared to eat two whole buckets of popcorn during Lethal Force III. You don’t admire your best friend because you don’t need to. You’re equals.

  When Kacey asked me to go with her to Briana’s birthday party the weekend after winter break, I said yes. It didn’t really matter to me what we were doing, as long as we got to hang out together. She had been invited to some prestigious soccer camp in Europe for the entire summer, so there were already two months ahead that I wouldn’t get to see her at all. It would be the first summer I could re
member that she wasn’t going to come camping with us.

  A huge snowstorm struck a couple of days before the party, which was great because it caused the power to go out, and Kacey’s practice got canceled, so she came over to our house to roast marshmallows and play cards by the fireplace with me and Roddie.

  By the day of Briana’s party, the power was back on. But another flurry the night before meant there was a fluffy coating of fresh snow atop the packed icy layer beneath. It was the perfect kind of snow, because you could sled in it, build with it, and make snowballs out of it.

  Which is why it was particularly annoying that Briana’s party was inside.

  When we got to her house, Mrs. Juarez ushered us down to the basement, where a dozen or so other kids played pool or watched a movie. I didn’t know any of them, and as it turned out, neither did Kacey. They all came from Briana’s school.

  I wondered if that was why Kacey had chosen today to wear eye makeup for the first time ever. Because maybe she was nervous about meeting all these new people. That’s why I decided not to kid her about it, even though it looked so weird to me.

  Briana gave me a quick hug and talked with Kacey for a while about their upcoming game. But then some kid wearing a cloud of cologne arrived, and Briana let out a squeal and ran to hug him. After an hour of watching them flirt, Kacey and I finally laid down our pool cues. We had already beaten some guys we didn’t know three times in a row.

  Which was just like Kacey, to be able to beat anyone at pool even though her eyes had been glued to Briana the whole time.

  “Let’s get out of here,” I whispered.

  “My dad isn’t coming to get us for another hour,” she replied.

  “Yeah, I know we can’t leave,” I said. “But we can go outside. Do something fun. I’m bored down here, and that guy’s cologne is making me want to puke all over this carpet. Oh, wait, that’s your thing.”

  Kacey laughed and followed me upstairs. We walked through the kitchen, where Mrs. Juarez was pulling a cake out of the oven.

  “Looking for the bathroom?” she asked.

  “No,” I said. “We were wondering if we could hang out in the backyard for a while.”

  Mrs. Juarez cocked her head and wiped her hands on her apron. “I suppose that’s okay for a few minutes,” she said. “As long as you wear your coats and boots. I’ll make you some hot chocolate to warm you up when you come back in.”

  After we had wrapped ourselves up in our parkas and snow boots and wool scarves, we wandered around in Briana’s yard, dodging each other’s lazy snowballs. I could tell that Kacey’s heart wasn’t in it. Otherwise her snowballs would’ve stung like punches when they hit me, which they always did.

  Another thing about Kacey is she was almost never upset, not even when she lost an important soccer game or when she fractured her ankle when we were ten. “It’s no biggie,” she would say. Or, “At least I’ll get to miss school for a few days.”

  But now she stared up at the slate sky, which was threatening another storm, and sniffled like she was holding back tears. I figured it had something to do with Briana ignoring her.

  “Hey!” I called, tossing a snowball at her. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” she said, catching my snowball before it could hit her shoulder. She dropped it and kicked it into a spray of powder. “It’s nothing.”

  I didn’t know how I was supposed to make Kacey feel better. I’d never had to do it before. So I did the only thing I could think of.

  “If it’s nothing, then you won’t mind if I dare you to climb to the top of that tree.”

  I pointed to the far end of the yard, where a huge tree rose out of the ground, its snowy limbs like a collection of giant bones.

  “That is, unless you’re too scared.”

  For a second, she didn’t respond, and I thought I had made her feel worse. Then she attempted a grin. “Scared? I don’t do scared. How about I climb to the top of that tree and peg you with a snowball?”

  “Dare you to try.”

  “Dare accepted.”

  Kacey took off, with me chasing behind her. The air was thick with sugary snow that sprinkled down from the tree as Kacey made her way up. I stuck my tongue out to catch some of it in my mouth. Then I cheered her on from below by yelling insults at her.

  “You call that climbing? My grandma could climb faster than that!”

  “Both your grandmas are dead,” Kacey called down.

  “Which should tell you how slow you’re going!”

  Two-thirds of the way up, a big gap between branches made her pause. She couldn’t quite reach the higher one. So she edged farther out to where the one above her bowed down toward the one she was standing on, which had begun to buckle under her weight.

  “What are you doing?” I called.

  “I can grab it,” she said, pointing to the higher branch, “if I can just get a little farther out.”

  She was right. She could reach it if she shuffled out a few more feet. But a few more feet and the branch she was standing on narrowed to the size of my arm.

  “I don’t know, Kacey. The branch you’re on doesn’t look that stable,” I said.

  “Who’s scared now?” she called down. “Even if I fall, I’ll just land in a foot of snow.”

  So I closed my mouth and said nothing else.

  And that’s the last thing Kacey ever heard me say.

  Nothing.

  I watched her make her way farther out onto the branch. Her feet dragged sideways, first the right sliding out a few inches, then the left shifting to meet it. The branch above her was within her grasp. She reached her arms up to grab it, the tips of her fingers brushed against it, and then crack!

  That’s when the branch broke.

  It felt like she took forever to fall.

  But really it was over in less than a second.

  That’s how long it took for a life to end.

  She fell in a shower of white and landed with a sickening thwack on the snow-covered ground. Then she was still.

  I screamed her name.

  But I knew she couldn’t hear me. I ran to her and knelt beside her. A thick halo of blood seeped into the snow around her head. My hand trembled against her snow-cold cheek.

  I started shouting for someone to come help us.

  That was the last time I ever saw Kacey, lying there, arms and legs sprawled out, spilling red blood into the snow.

  And then Mrs. Juarez was there, pulling me away from Kacey, and then the red lights and the hospital and the afterness.

  The light in Kacey’s window.

  The square of white paper.

  You killed her, Ethan Truitt.

  The Mysterious One

  CORALEE DOESN’T SAY ANYTHING when I’ve finished. Not at first. Hot tears are splashing down my face, and I swallow a sob, which makes me hiccup. The sun still shines bright and white-hot, but it can’t seem to warm me. The sand feels like snow on the bottoms of my feet.

  Coralee doesn’t stare at me or shush me like I’m a baby. She looks out at the water and scrunches her toes up and down in the sand until I’ve wiped my tears away.

  “Did she break her neck?” she asks gently.

  I cringe as I remember the paramedics easing Kacey’s body up from the snow. Her head lifting to reveal the rock, gray with jagged edges, smudged with dark blood.

  “Her head hit a rock,” I whisper.

  Coralee doesn’t flinch. “So you think it’s your fault?”

  “My psychologist back in Boston calls it survivor’s guilt,” I say. “She says it’s common in people with post-traumatic stress disorder.”

  “That may be true,” Coralee says. “But I don’t see any expensive doctors hovering behind you now. So why don’t you tell me what you think.”

  “What I think?”

  “Do you think it was your fault?”

  I can feel frustration begin to simmer inside me. Coralee doesn’t understand. No one does.

  “I don
’t think it was my fault,” I say. “I know it was my fault. If I hadn’t been there, if I hadn’t dared her, she wouldn’t have been in that tree. She wouldn’t have fallen. And she wouldn’t be—”

  But I can’t finish. If I finish, my anger and sorrow will swallow me whole.

  To my surprise, Coralee doesn’t argue with me. “Okay,” she says. “So it’s your fault.”

  I nod. “She wouldn’t have fallen if I hadn’t been there.”

  “No question,” she replies. “But let’s say it was you in that tree instead of her. Let’s say she dared you, and you fell.”

  I don’t tell her that I wouldn’t have fallen, because I’m taller than Kacey and I would have been able to grab hold of the branch she was trying to reach. I don’t tell her how often I’ve thought about the exact same thing.

  “What’s your point?” I ask.

  “Would you blame her? If it was you?”

  Coralee is staring at me now. I grab a handful of sand and let it run slowly through my fingers.

  “No,” I say finally.

  “And if she was here, do you think she would be mad at you?”

  I breathe out a long sigh. “No.”

  “So maybe it is your fault,” Coralee says. “But that doesn’t mean you have to blame yourself.”

  I’ve never thought about it like this before, and I can’t think of anything to say. After a while, I feel Coralee’s slight arm drape around my shoulder, and I’m reminded again of the day in the cafeteria when she led me to her table.

  “I haven’t told anyone,” I say. “Nobody here.”

  “I won’t either,” she replies solemnly. “I promise. Is that the real reason your family moved here? So you could start over?”

  “Yes.”

  The sun has begun to drop. I haven’t called Mom since I told her I would be a little late coming home from school. She’s probably worried sick.

  “We should go,” I say.

  “Yeah. It’s almost dinnertime.”

  “Do you want to come over to my house? For dinner? Grandpa Ike and I can drive you home so you don’t have to bike in the dark.”