“See what?”
“The protective way you feel about Hannah is the way we feel about you.”
She nods, granting me the point.
“So what do we do from here?” I pause, then say, “I’m guessing you don’t want to check out those dripping springs?”
“No way, Tyson,” she says. “No fucking way.”
I raise my hands in surrender. “Okay. I was just confirming.”
“Confirmed,” she says. “Now get me the hell out of Texas.”
Chapter 11
Hannah
We are twelve hours into the Texas leg of the trip, and so far, things haven’t been smooth sailing. To say the least. Our meeting with Ashley was a disaster; Tyson dropped a bomb that he and Summer were romantically involved; and Lainey just had sex with a random guy she met in the hotel bar.
As I listen to Tyson and Lainey argue, I feel a sense of overwhelming guilt. Mostly I feel guilt that it was my idea to come here in the first place, but I also feel guilt toward Tyson. I know it’s not my fault, but I feel like I should have somehow intuited that he was dealing with another layer of grief about Summer.
Deciding I need a minute alone, I excuse myself, go downstairs, and wander into a courtyard where a bustling waitstaff is setting up for an event. Based on the lavish centerpieces of white roses and pale pink peonies, and candles, I have a strong hunch that it’s a wedding.
As I sit down on a small bench, a wave of loss crashes over me, along with a barrage of questions. What would have happened if I hadn’t caught Grady in the act? Would it have happened again? Had it happened before? Was she the first? Does he have feelings for her?
I tell myself that none of it matters. What’s done is done.
I learned that lesson in futility when we lost Summer. For years, I’ve struggled to understand why she took her life. Even if the cheating rumor were true, why had she felt the need to make such a drastic decision? I have replayed our final conversation hundreds of times, wishing I could go back. I know exactly what I would tell her.
So what if you do poorly on one stupid test? The world will keep turning. You will still go to medical school and become a doctor. You will still get married and have children. You will still have a beautiful life.
Would it have made any difference? The what-ifs were excruciating, and now, knowing she and Tyson had something going on, I have even more questions. At the top of the list is why hadn’t she confided in me?
I told Summer everything, including troubling things about my mother—things that I’d held back from my high school friends, too worried that something might get back to my mother via one of their mothers. I thought she had told me everything, too. The fact that she hadn’t both confuses me and hurts my feelings. Maybe she didn’t trust me the way I trusted her. I try to talk myself out of those doubts.
I tell myself there are other reasons she might have kept that secret from me. Maybe she feared my reaction. I like to think I would have been supportive and happy for her, but maybe I would have worried that my friendship with one or both of them would become less important. Maybe I would have made their relationship about me. Maybe that’s what I’m doing now. The mere thought of that makes me feel petty, small, and ashamed.
I think back to Lainey and the scene I just witnessed upstairs in our hotel room. I wonder what she would say about this news. It’s so hard to know. Lainey and I are such different people. As much as I love her, it’s sometimes a real struggle to understand her.
I flash back to the time I was most confused by Lainey. It was the immediate aftermath of Summer’s death, when her parents came to Charlottesville. They reached out to me upon their arrival, asking if Tyson, Lainey, and I could meet with them to talk. They were looking for any small clue or insight we might have.
The following day, thirty minutes before we were due to meet them at their hotel, Lainey came back to the apartment that she and I shared. It was three in the afternoon, and she was already wasted.
What the fuck is wrong with you? I remember Tyson yelling at her as she insisted in a slurred voice that she’d only had one drink.
Needless to say, we went without her.
When we arrived at the hotel, I told myself that I had to be strong. As we sat down, Tyson gave our condolences. I nodded, noticing a bleach mark on Mrs. MacFarland’s navy sweatshirt. I recognized immediately that it was one of Summer’s sweatshirts—the same one she was wearing the night before her final exam, when we last talked.
Her mother caught me looking at it and said, “It was in her hamper. It still smells like her.”
She extended her arm, offering me the sleeve. I lowered my head and inhaled the familiar scent of my best friend. Tears filled my eyes. I did my best to fight them off, but I couldn’t. As they rolled down my cheeks, Tyson had to do all the talking for us. I still remember the lost look on his face after he’d answered all of their questions and it was time to go. There was a group of Summer’s track teammates standing in a cluster in the lobby, clearly waiting to speak with her parents next.
“We loved your daughter so much,” he said as we got up from the table. “Lainey did, too. She’s sorry she couldn’t be here with us.”
The following morning, Lainey left for Myrtle Beach. Going there the week between exams and graduation was tradition at UVA, and it was what the four of us had planned to do before Summer died.
I didn’t judge Lainey for still going—particularly because we couldn’t get our money back on our rental—but Tyson was outraged. I did my best to calm him down, pointing out that staying in Charlottesville was too painful.
“She could come with us,” he said, as we were planning to stay at his parents’ place in D.C. for a few days.
“I know,” I say. “Everyone handles grief in their own way.”
“Handling grief? Is that what we’re calling drunk sex at the beach?” Tyson asked.
“You don’t know she’s going to do that.”
“Oh, yes I do,” he said. “And so do you.”
Looking back, I don’t know how I got through that week. I couldn’t have done it without Tyson, that’s for sure. While his mother fed us the most delicious homemade meals, he and I sat in a dark room, watching movies for hours on end. Everything made me cry—comedies and dramas alike—but Stand by Me hit me the hardest. Tyson and I had both seen it before—it was one of our favorites—but the death of River Phoenix’s character broke my heart in a whole new way now. In the last scene, Richard Dreyfuss, playing a grown-up Gordie Lachance, reflected back on his childhood friendships. I burst into tears as I watched him type on his computer screen: I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was 12. Jesus, does anyone?
As the credits rolled and that haunting Ben E. King song began to play, I looked over and saw that Tyson was bawling as hard as I was. In that moment, I realized how much we take friendship for granted when we’re young, unable to grasp its significance until later in life. For Tyson and me—and Lainey, wherever she was tonight—that “later” had come. Our perspective would never be the same. That’s the thing about innocence…. Once it’s gone, it’s gone forever.
By the time we got back to Charlottesville for graduation, Tyson had let go of his anger toward Lainey. Or maybe he was just too exhausted or numb to show it. It took enough energy just to walk up the Lawn and collect our diplomas. After the ceremony, we hugged one another goodbye and left the campus for the last time. None of us has ever been back.
In some ways, Lainey’s life has changed so much since then. In other ways, though, she is still the same old Lainey. A bull in a china shop. Breaking things. Breaking herself. As I think about the way she just looked upstairs, cradling her knees on a hotel bed after having drunken sex with a stranger, I no longer buy her “I am woman, hear me roar” routine. I don’t know why it has taken me so long to see her bravado for the façade that it is.
I feel a sudden rush of worry that borders on fear—fear that something really bad might happen if we don’t find a way to help her. I take my phone out of my purse and pull up Instagram, desperate to do some kind of damage control. I type as fast as I can:
