Say Something by Jennifer Brown Page A

bustled over to the window. She reached up and pulled the Venetian blinds open. I squinted against the early morning sunlight.
    “You’re in a suit,” I said, shading my eyes with my forearm.
    She reached down with her free hand and smoothed the camel-colored skirt around her thighs. It was tentative, like it was the first time she’d ever dressed up before. For a minute she looked as insecure as I was, which made me feel sad for her.
    “Yeah,” she said, using the same hand to pat the back of her hair. “I figured since you were going back to school, I should, you know, start trying to get back full time at the office.”
    I pulled myself to a sitting position. My head felt sort of flat in the back from lying down so long and my leg twinged a little. I absently rubbed the dent in my thigh under the sheets. “On my first day back?”
    She stumbled over to me, high-stepping over a pile of dirty laundry in her camel-colored high heels. “Well… yeah. It’s been a few months. Dr. Hieler thinks it’s fine for me to go back. And I’ll be there to pick you up after school.” She sat on the side of my bed and stroked my hair. “You’ll be fine.”
    “How can you be so sure?” I asked. “How do you know I’ll be all right? You can’t know. I wasn’t okay last May and you didn’t know that.” I pulled myself out of bed. My chest felt tight and I wasn’t sure I wasn’t going to cry.
    She sat, gripping the cordless in front of her. “I just know, Valerie. That day won’t ever happen again, honey. Nick’s… he’s gone. Now try not to get all upset…”
    Too late. I was already upset. The longer she sat on the side of my bed and stroked my hair the way she used to do when I was little and I smelled the perfume that I thought of as her “work perfume,” the more real it was. I was going back to school.
    “We all agreed that this was best, Valerie, remember?” she said. “Sitting in Dr. Hieler’s office we decided that running away was not a good option for our family. You agreed. You said that you didn’t want Frankie to have to suffer because of what happened. And your dad has his firm… to leave that and start all over again would be so tough for us financially…” she shrugged, shaking her head.
    “Mom,” I said, but I couldn’t think of a great argument. She was right. I’d been the one saying that Frankie shouldn’t have to leave his friends. That just because he was my little brother didn’t mean he should have to change towns, change schools. That Dad, whose jaw tightened angrily every time someone brought up the possibility of our family having to move to a new town, shouldn’t have to build a new law firm after working so hard to build his. That I shouldn’t have to be stuck in my house with a tutor or, worse, to switch to a new school my senior year. That I’d be damned if I’d slink away like a criminal when I’d done nothing wrong.
    “It’s not like everybody in the whole world doesn’t know who I am anyway,” I’d said, running my fingertips along the arm of Dr. Hieler’s couch. “It’s not like I could find a school where nobody has heard of me. Can you imagine how much of an outcast I’d be at a new school? At least at Garvin I know what to expect. Plus if I ran away from Garvin, everyone there would be even more sure I was guilty.”
    “It’ll be tough,” Dr. Hieler had warned. “You’re going to have to face a lot of dragons.”
    I’d shrugged. “What else is new? I can handle them.”
    “Are you sure?” Dr. Hieler had asked, his eyes narrowed at me skeptically.
    I’d nodded. “It’s not fair that I should have to leave. I can do this. If it’s terrible I can always transfer at the end of the semester. But I’ll make it. I’m not afraid.”
    But that was back when summer stretched in front of us, impossibly long. Back when “going back” was just an idea, not a reality. As an idea, I still believed in it. I wasn’t guilty of anything except