Mr. Riley shrugs again. “They probably got hit—this was years ago, when some people would spank their kids, too—but nothing major ever came of it.” He leans back in his chair. “We moved away shortly after that. It was hardest on my mom, really. She saw how excited I was that day, how happy I was to finally get to play with the other kids on my street. But it was all just a joke.” He stares at his desk. “You know how kids can be. It’s all right. I have a good life now. No complaints here.”
I take a long drink of water. My hair is pulled into a ponytail that trails down my back. My face is still sweaty. My eyes are wide with pity.
“I’m so sorry that happened to you,” I tell him.
“It’s okay, Liz. I probably shouldn’t have even told you. But that’s the thing—I want you to be careful who you hang out with. Your priorities aren’t in the right place. You might regret it someday.”
From the hallway, Richie clears his throat again.
I fidget in my seat. “I’ve gotta go, Mr. Riley.”
“I’m sure you do. Your prince awaits.” He’s being sarcastic.
I watch myself leave his office and go into the hallway, where Richie is leaning against the wall, looking bored. We walk silently out of the building, hand in hand. Once we’re in the parking lot, I ask him, “Did you hear what he said in there?”
Richie only nods.
“That’s awful, isn’t it?”
“Uh-huh.”
Caroline, Mera, and Josie are waiting for us. They’re in a black Mercedes with the top down. When my friends see us, Mera honks the horn and waves us over.
“What the hell took you so long?” Josie snaps as Richie and I climb into the backseat. There isn’t enough room for the three of us to sit side by side, so my younger self curls up on Richie’s lap. I can only watch, standing just outside the car.
“Chill out,” Richie says to Josie. “We’re here now, aren’t we?”
“What’s the matter, Liz? You’d rather hang out with Crazy-Eyes Riley and the dorks on the cross-country team?” But then she grins at me, and the edge to her voice breaks. “It’s okay. I’ll still love you.”
I wink at her. She winks back. I stick my tongue out at her. She crosses her eyes.
“Seriously,” she says, giggling, “what took you so long? You prefer to spend time with your coach? He’s so weird looking.”
“He’s not weird looking. His eyes are just two different colors.” I lace my fingers through Richie’s.
“Yeah, that’s weird.” She sniffles. “What a freak.”
We’re still sitting in the parking lot. The Mercedes is idling.
“He’s not a freak,” I tell her. “He’s nice. And you shouldn’t say things like that about him. It isn’t his fault that his eyes are different.”
As I’m watching myself, witnessing the scene unfold, I notice that Richie squeezes my hand when I don’t elaborate.
“Whatever,” Josie says, snapping her gum. “It doesn’t matter if it’s his fault, Liz. He’s still a freak.”
“Shut up,” I say to her. “He’s a good person.”
“All of you, shut up,” Mera says, turning up the radio. “Let’s go!”
I watch as we all drive away, the music blaring, the tires on the Mercedes squealing as Mera speeds out of the parking lot.
So maybe Alex was right—maybe I wasn’t that great of a person. I certainly didn’t have any friends on the cross-country team.
But I was friends with Mr. Riley. I cared about him. And, obviously, he cared about me. So that’s something. Right now, in light of all the memories I’ve seen of myself, I’ll take anything to prove that I wasn’t—as Alex so clearly articulated—a nightmare of a human being.
And with a blink, I’m back in the present, standing in Mr. Riley’s office with Alex and Richie. Right now, Mr. Riley rests his chin against his hands and says, “Well, if it isn’t the brilliant Richie Wilson. Looks like you’ve wandered to the wrong side of the sandbox.”
My boyfriend crosses his arms and leans against the doorframe. His posture might be casual, but I can tell from the tension in his clenched jaw that he’s nervous. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
For a moment, I can tell that Mr. Riley wants to kick him out. Alex is right—he probably did know what Richie was up to recreationally. It’s not like Richie ever went to great pains to hide it. Sometimes I thought he wanted to get caught—like it would almost be a relief.
“Look, I know you don’t like me,” Richie says.
Mr. Riley doesn’t argue. But he isn’t mean, either. “I won’t try to pretend I understand how you’re feeling. I know this has got to be awful for you, Richie.” He sits up straight, fidgeting nervously with the stopwatch hanging around his neck.
Even though he’s only seventeen, I can imagine that Richie would be intimidating to someone like Mr. Riley. They are so different: Richie is thick bodied and confidently slow as he almost strolls wherever he goes, his head full of all the countless books he’s read, yet somehow he’s so cool, so absolutely not nerdy—while Mr. Riley is all fast-twitch muscle fiber, more of a simple, nice guy, single-mindedly passionate about the concept of putting one foot in front of the other, over and over again, until there’s nothing but body and road and breath. No way any seven-year-old wielding a BB gun could catch him now.
“I’ve been going running,” Richie blurts. He doesn’t look at Mr. Riley. His gaze settles on the bookshelf behind my coach’s head, packed with titles like Changing Bodies, Changing Lives; Zen Running; Born to Run; and the embarrassing Let’s Talk about Sex! A Guidebook for Young Bodies on the Verge of Adulthood.
I’m more surprised than anyone in the room to hear what Richie’s been up to in the two weeks that have passed since my death. Alex and I haven’t seen him out running at all. I’d assumed he was spending most of his free time looking for comfort in the back of Josie’s mouth.
“Running? From whom—the cops?” Mr. Riley stretches his neck, touching his ear to his shoulder.
Richie takes the question seriously. “No, not from the cops. I mean running running. Like, recreationally. I don’t know why I’m doing it. It’s like I woke up one day last week and felt like I needed to move.” He swallows. “Liz used to talk about that. Sometimes I’d ask her, ‘What do you think about when you’re out there running for hours on end?’ And she’d always say, ‘Nothing.’ ”
I smile. “He’s right.” I look at Alex. “You don’t know how that feels, do you? To think about absolutely nothing for hours at a time? It’s like heaven.”
He gives me a disappointed half smile. “Like either of us would know what heaven’s like.”
Mr. Riley is caught off guard; this clearly isn’t what he was expecting from Richie. “Well, that’s true,” he says. “Running is meditation. It clears your mind. It calms you down.”
“She was running for hours at a time, like sometimes three or four hours,” Richie continues. “Did you know that? Before she died, I mean. Did you notice how much weight she was losing? She was passing out. Shouldn’t you have done something? You were her coach.”
Alex gazes at my body. “Now that they’re mentioning it, Liz, you are awfully skinny. I mean, you’re too skinny.”
I frown. “Runners are always skinny. Besides, you said I was hot.”
“A hot mess, maybe,” he murmurs. I ignore him, choosing instead to pay attention to what’s actually going on in the room. Richie. Running. In a million years, I never would have expected it from him. I’d tried to get him to come with me plenty of times, but he was never interested.
“Calm down, Richie,” Mr. Riley says. “I know all about that. We’d talked about it, believe me. But I couldn’t stop her from running on her own.” He pauses. “I didn’t realize how dire the situation had become. But I did try to help her. At the end of last year, I told her that if she lost any more weight, I’d keep her off the team.”
“You did?” Richie pauses. “She didn’t tell me about that.??
?
“You didn’t tell him much of anything lately, did you?” Alex says.
I flick his earlobe. “You. Quiet.”
“It was right after she got her concussion,” Mr. Riley says. “That’s when I realized things were going downhill for her.”
I press my palm to the side of my head. “Oh … that’s right. I remember this.” And when I close my eyes, I see it; even though I’m outside my body, I’m standing so close to my seventeen-year-old self that I can almost feel it happening. I’m at the top of the stairs in my parents’ house, stretching, facing the big window at the landing in the upstairs hallway. I’m looking out at the water, the Elizabeth tied to the dock behind our house, and the beach stretching in a graceful curve against the horizon. I reach up with the tips of my fingers, stretching onto my tiptoes in my dirty—but very comfortable—running shoes. Then I bend over, letting my fingertips graze the oriental rug I’m standing on. I see shades of maroon, beige, forest green, and crimson in the pattern. But then my balance stutters; my knees buckle, and I take a step back, trying to find my footing on the landing.
I want to reach out to myself, to stop what I know is about to happen. But all I can do is watch.
Just as I think I’ve found my footing on the landing, I step over the edge of the stairs. Then I’m falling. I watch, helpless, as my body tumbles to the bottom of the steps. When I finally come to a stop, my rail-thin form crumpled on the hardwood floor in the foyer of our house, I’m obviously unconscious.
I open my eyes; I see Mr. Riley sitting at his desk. I blink and blink, trying to go back to the scene. When I find a memory again, I realize that I’ve gone forward in time to almost two days after the fall. I’ve just gotten out of the hospital; I can tell because I’m still wearing my plastic ID bracelet. My father has picked me up by himself. I watch the two of us alone in the car together as we drive home in near silence. I don’t speak to my dad. I only stare outside, watching the landscape pass by out the window.
Finally, my dad closes his chubby hand over my bicep. His fingers easily go all the way around my arm.
“What are you trying to do, Elizabeth?” he asks. His voice is quiet. My dad has always been this way: calm, mellow, understated, everything kept inside, beneath the surface. Even when my mother died. Even when his own daughter died.
I don’t look at him. Instead, I stare out the car window, seeming to concentrate on the trees beginning to bud in the spring air, the blooming flowers, the grass growing in countless determined individual blades against the sharp wind of New England that seems to slice across the landscape. It’s life that’s emerging.
Just from looking at myself, I can sense that I’m starving. All that life, outside, juxtaposed with what I’m sure is a knot of throbbing hunger in my concave belly. My hunger seems to be everywhere. It’s in my eyes. It’s all over my face. It permeates the space between my father and me in the car.
When he speaks, my dad sounds like he’s trying not to cry. “You aren’t your mother,” he says.
“I know that,” I tell him.
“Then what is the matter? Why are you doing this?” He turns the car into our garage, shuts off the engine, and locks the doors.
“You’re not getting out until you give me an answer,” he says.
But I don’t respond. I stare straight ahead, at the wall of the garage, where my stepmom’s bicycle hangs from two mounted hooks.
“Therapy,” my dad finally says. “You’re going to see a doctor. I’m going to make an appointment for you.”
I don’t say anything.
“You’ll go,” he continues, “or there will be consequences. Understand?”
But as I watch myself, I know that I had no intention of going to therapy. I certainly don’t remember ever seeing any doctors for my eating or exercise habits. And it wasn’t like my dad would be able to really force me, anyway. He was too distracted. He worked eighty-hour weeks before I died, sometimes more. It wasn’t like we needed the money; he just loved to work. He was almost never around. I’m surprised he was home long enough to pick me up from the hospital.
My father waits for a few moments, looking at me expectantly, before he gets out of the car, slams the door, and leaves me alone in the cool darkness. I press the back of my palm to my forehead. I look like I’m in terrible pain, like I can barely stand to be conscious.
As the memory drifts away, I see Mr. Riley stand up from behind his desk. “If you really want to run,” he tells Richie, “you could join the cross-country team.”
“Oh no. I couldn’t do that,” Richie says.
“Why not?”
“Oh, I’ve got … well, you know. I’ve got other obligations. I’m not exactly a team player.”
“Of course you aren’t.” Mr. Riley glances at his watch. “You’ll be late for homeroom.”
“I was wondering if you could take a look at my shoes.”
Mr. Riley pauses. “What?”
“My shoes. My sneakers.” And Richie picks up his foot and rests it on the edge of Mr. Riley’s desk.
“What do you want to know?” Mr. Riley only glances at his shoes. “They’re fine. You should get new ones every three hundred miles or so. You’ve got plenty of wear left in them.”
“I don’t know about that,” Richie says. “I’ve only been running a week and a half, and my feet are in rough shape.” He stares at the shoes. “You know, Liz bought these for me over a year ago. She wanted me to come running with her. I never went, though.”
Mr. Riley is clearly uncomfortable. “I’m sure she’d be happy you’re running now.”
“Everybody thinks they know what would make me happy now,” I murmur to Alex.
He nods in agreement. “Yeah. People tend to do that after you die.”
“I keep thinking,” Richie says, “that maybe if I’d spent more time with her, this might not have happened. If I hadn’t fallen asleep that night, she would be okay. You know how they say that even the smallest detail can change a person’s destiny? Like someone swatting a mosquito over in Africa can cause a tsunami on a different continent? Maybe if I’d gone running with her, or even tried to talk to her more—”
“Hey. Stop it.” Mr. Riley studies my boyfriend’s expression beneath the ugly glare of the fluorescent light. “Don’t do this to yourself. There was no way you could have helped her.”
Richie lowers his foot back to the floor. He bites his lip. “People are talking about me,” he says. “I know that. People want to turn it into a drama. They’re talking about it like maybe it wasn’t an accident.”
Mr. Riley holds very still. He barely breathes. He doesn’t say a word.
“Maybe it wasn’t,” Richie says. “All I remember is falling asleep that night. Who knows what happened after that? There were six of us on the boat.” His eyes are wet. Aside from my funeral, this is the only other time I’ve ever seen Richie cry. “Somebody must know what happened. Don’t you think, Mr. Riley? You knew her. She was special. People like her don’t just slip away, do they?”
Mr. Riley shakes his head. “I don’t know.”
“I feel like I need to listen very carefully,” Richie continues. “And something’s telling me that I have to run.”
I can barely move. “It’s me,” I whisper. “I’m right here, Richie. I’m with you.”
“Okay.” Mr. Riley nods. “Then that’s what you should do. Find me after school,” he says. “I’ll be at the track. I’ll check your form. We’ll see if we can figure out what’s hurting your feet.”
As they both leave the room, Mr. Riley turns his light out, leaving Alex and me in the dark. I try to wiggle my toes in my boots, but they barely have room to move.
Nine
My friends are stealing my clothes.
“It’s not stealing if you can’t wear them anymore,” Alex points out. We are in my bedroom, which is an absolute mess: my oak canopy bed is unmade, the pink-and-white-striped sheets and comforter in a tangle at the foot of the mattress.
The surface of my vanity holds a slew of makeup, everything from bronzer powder to multiple tubes of mascara to body glitter to what must be at least three dozen tubes of lipstick collected in a pricey designer purse that I apparently used exclusively for cosmetic storage. I don’t remember being such a slob. I’m almost embarrassed for Alex to see my room in such disarray.
“But this is my stuff.” I pout. “It’s only been a few weeks. They could wait a little bit longer.”
“Yeah, well, they’re your friends. I mean, you’ve gotta expect them to jump at the opportunity for free clothes. Be reasonable, Liz. To them, this is better than a clearance at JCPenney.”
I wince at the suggestion. “Alex. My friends and I do not shop at JCPenney.”
I feel incredibly sad looking at my old things. There is a history documented in the mess, a genuine illustration of who I was. As I look at everything, fragments of memories surface in my mind, providing small pieces to what seems like an impossibly large—and growing—puzzle. A corkboard hanging above my dresser is crowded with cross-country ribbons. They’re mostly for second and third place—like I’ve said, speed was never my biggest strength—but there are dozens of them. In a corner of my room, beside my dresser, there is a pile of running shoes. I used to go through a new pair every six weeks or so, but I never liked to get rid of the old ones. Instead, I hoarded them. There are probably twenty pairs collecting dust in the corner, their soles worn almost smooth from so many miles against the sandy, salty roads. On the side of the left shoe from each pair, I used to write the purchase date with a permanent black marker, so I’d know roughly when they were kaput.
I have an overwhelming desire to touch everything—to feel the cheap cloth of a hard-won ribbon or the tight threads in the seam of a shoe—just one last time. Knowing that I can’t makes me feel so helpless and frustrated, so … dead.
My friends—Mera and Caroline, along with Josie—are in my closet, which is a walk-in nearly half the size of my bedroom.
“Oh, you have got to be kidding me,” Alex says when he sees them. All three are in bras and underwear, ready to start trying on my clothes. He gives me a wicked smile. “If this is hell, go ahead and chain me to the wall.”