The Last Words We Said Read online

  “Come on, Deenie,” I protest. “You’ve known Danny for years. You must have had a private moment with him. All I want is one little anecdote.”

  “I never had a private moment with him,” she shoots back. “That would have been yichud, and it’s not allowed. I thought you knew that.”

  She’s referring to the rule Danny and I broke about a thousand times: a boy and a girl can’t be alone in a room together. Most of the religious kids I knew got around that by simply leaving the door open. For Danny and me, a millimeter crack was our loophole. For Deenie, however, looking for a loophole was a betrayal of the spirit of the law.

  “I’m not accusing you of anything,” I assure her. “I just thought you could add to my collection. Please? There must be something you remember about him. Something I don’t know.”

  She looks up at me for the first time, and a spark of fear flickers in her eyes. “Is he here now?” she demands in a low voice.

  “What?”

  “Danny. Is he here now? In this room with us.”

  I know that he isn’t. But I glance over my shoulder anyway, as if to prove that I have nothing to hide. “No. Of course not.”

  She relaxes a little and fiddles with her pencil. “He’s not going to suddenly walk in as I’m talking to you?” she persists.

  “No. It doesn’t work that way.”

  “It doesn’t?”

  “Not at all. He’s not some ghost that stalks me.” I’m trying to be confident, to chase away the paranoia in her eyes. Except I don’t exactly believe myself anymore. Danny has been appearing unexpectedly these days. Much more often than before. Past curfew hours sometimes. And he’s not always the comfort I’m expecting. Sometimes he has his own agenda.

  “So—you’re in control?” she asks. Her body is still tense, as if she’s waiting for our friend to jump out and yell, Surprise!

  “Yes.” I deliver the lie without hesitating. What else am I supposed to do? The truth is too weird and confusing. “I’m totally in control.”

  “Okay.” She eases back into the chair and takes a deep breath. Her eyes are still darting around the room, but she appears to believe me. “I have a story to tell you.”

  “Great.” I flip open my notebook in anticipation.

  “You remember how Danny was afraid of horses?”

  “Of course. His friend got kicked in the face when he was little. He saw it happen.”

  She nods and stares at her ledger again. “Yeah. But I got him to go riding with me once. About a year ago.”

  “What?”

  She swallows hard. “It was really cute. He was so scared. But he got up on the horse. He even trotted a little by the end!”

  “Really.”

  “Yup. You should have seen him.” Her voice is hollow and sharp; there’s no trace of the soft sincerity that I’m used to. I barely recognize this Deenie. “He helped me feed the horses afterward,” she continues. “One of them, Gretel, started chewing on his hair.” She makes a panicked face. “This was what he looked like!” She laughs, waving her hands in the air. “He was totally freaking out! Just batting at the poor horse, yelling, ‘Let go! Let go!’ Stupid Gretel. I guess his hair did look like a pile of hay, didn’t it?”

  “Pretty much.” I lean over my notebook and pretend to jot her story down. But I haven’t recorded any of it. Instead, I write what I’m thinking: What the hell, Deenie, what the hell??

  Because here’s the thing: Danny never went horseback riding with her. I’m absolutely sure of this. About a month before he disappeared, I tried to convince him to go with me to Cedar Crest Farm, mostly for the Instagram photo op. After an embarrassing amount of begging, he finally agreed. But then he asked if Deenie could come along. She’s been trying to get me to go forever,” he explained. “And I keep saying no. If I go with you and don’t include her, she’ll feel bad.

  I’d thought it was sweet of him. I still do. But we never actually went through with the plans. Things fell apart pretty quickly after that, and so neither of us mentioned the idea to Deenie.

  So, the only true thing that she’d said so far was “I have a story to tell you.” Because her entire tale was fiction, start to finish.

  FICTIONAL KISSES: AS SEEN ON TV

  I didn’t want to tell Deenie and Rae that Danny and I were finally official because I was worried that it would change our friend dynamic. But Danny insisted on being honest with them, so I took them aside the next day after school to let them know the news.

  Their reactions were both predictable and a bit anticlimactic.

  Rae gave me an exaggerated look of shock and exclaimed, “What? You guys are dating?! How on earth will we be able to tell the difference?”

  But Deenie didn’t react at all. She seemed completely unsurprised. “You guys are going to be shomer?” was the only thing she asked.

  I assured her that we were because at the time, I didn’t doubt we would be.

  My shomer commitment with Danny was an achievement that made me proud, so I shared our progress on Instagram, a little documentary about our triumph over temptation. We had a whole series of romantic shomer pics: at the Georgia Aquarium standing side by side with a dolphin photobombing us from behind; at Lullwater Park, beaming at the camera, our arms wrapped fondly—around the tree between us; Danny presenting me with an enormous bear he’d made out of marshmallows and glue (I discovered the glue after I attempted to eat it). Each of my pics garnered about a hundred likes. The pic where Danny posed suggestively behind the giant bear got over a thousand. Still, despite my commitment, I spent hours fantasizing about our first kiss, and of course I couldn’t help sharing those dreams with my friends.

  We liked to compare famous TV and movie romances and rate them according to hotness. Rae, Deenie, and I had wildly different ideas about which TV kiss was the best of all time. Deenie’s answer was sort of predictable, as she’d been obsessed with Pam and Jim from The Office and had watched it so often that she sometimes quoted lines from the show without realizing it. So that first kiss between the two best friends, after Jim confessed his love, was hands down Deenie’s favorite. “He loved her for years, and he could never tell her!” she gushed.

  Rae rolled her eyes. “Oh, please,” she said. “He was just scared she’d reject him.”

  “Fine,” Deenie huffed, turning her back to her. “Ellie, what do you think was the best kiss of all time?”

  I had my answer prepared.

  “That’s easy,” I told them. “Christina Ricci and—”

  “Oh my God, that was mine, too!” Rae exclaimed, to my surprise. “You’ve seen Around the Block?”

  “Around the what?”

  Rae looked confused for a moment, and then her face flushed. “Oh. Never mind.”

  “I was talking about Christina Ricci and James McAvoy in Penelope. Who did you have in mind?”

  “It doesn’t matter.” Rae gave an irritated shrug. “It wouldn’t have been your thing, anyway. Penelope was cute. A bit vanilla. But cute.”

  “Cute?” I clasped my hands together. “How can you say that? Don’t you remember the scene? There’s this amazing buildup of tension and romance that ends in this kiss that just—”

  “Yeah, yeah.” Rae waved her hand, dismissing my passionate description. “So, what you’re saying is—you still haven’t kissed Danny?”

  “What?”

  “I said—you and Danny still haven’t—”

  “I heard you,” I snapped. “And no. We haven’t.”

  Next to me, I felt Deenie bristle. “Rae, leave her alone. I don’t know why you keep bringing it up.”

  “Hey, I don’t care what they do when they’re alone,” Rae protested. “It’s just that Ellie so obviously wants to.”

  “Of course I want to,” I replied. “And I know that he does. That’s not the point.”

  “So? What is the point?”

  Deenie and I exchanged looks. She understood my resolution to stay shomer. She was my shomer buddy, streng
thening me when I needed a boost of self-control, applauding me when I told her about our “touch-free” dates.

  I shrugged. “I’ll tell you. But only if you promise not to judge.”

  Rae’s eyes flashed. “Judge? Look who’s talking. That’s the entire basis of your religion, isn’t it? To decide who’s clean and who’s dirty? Isn’t that what you’re about to tell me? That if I sleep with my boyfriend, I’m ruining myself? While the two of you are staying pure?”

  “It’s not about purity!” I exclaimed. I needed to say something to break up the cloud brewing over Rae’s head. “That’s what people don’t understand. And it’s not about judging anyone. Being shomer is about building a relationship based on communication, not physical attraction.”

  “That’s a nice idea,” Rae said. “But I think you can have both. Greg and I fool around, and I know more about him than anyone else.”

  Deenie bit her lip; I could literally hear her swallowing her thoughts.

  “I’m serious,” Rae insisted, answering her look rather than her words. “Do you know that his name was Gedaliah until he changed it, like I changed mine? Do you know that he can’t speak his mind at home, because his parents and older brothers act like they can’t hear him? When he started asking challenging questions, they decided it was just easier to ignore him until he grew out of it.”

  “That’s sad, but not every religious person is like his parents—” Deenie protested.

  “Well, that’s all he knows.” Rae shook her head. “The last girl he dated? She actually broke up with him because she said that he wasn’t religious enough for her. It broke his heart.”

  “I remember that,” Deenie admitted. “Wasn’t she kicked out of seminary last month for selling her brother’s ADHD pills?”

  “Yep. That little hypocrite. He denies it, but I think he still hasn’t gotten over her.”

  Deenie raised her eyebrows, but Rae waved off her doubtful look.

  “And I’m okay with that,” she assured us. “We all have someone we’ll never really get over. And no one actually ends up with their high school boyfriend anyway.” She grinned at me. “Except you, Ellie. You and Danny will ride off into the sunset together one day. On separate horses, of course. So that you don’t accidentally touch each other.”

  I couldn’t help smiling at the image. Horseback riding would make a great Instagram post. I wondered if I could book a lesson at sunset. And somehow get Danny to overcome his fear of horses. “You can make fun if you like, Rae,” I told her. “But while you’re wasting time with the wrong person, the right one might pass you by.”

  “The right one will never look at me that way!” she retorted. She paused and shook her head, as if regretting what she’d just said. “I mean, Greg is fine with a bit of messing around. He doesn’t expect anything deep from our relationship.”

  “Okay, well, I guess Danny and I are the opposite, then. We want the deep part, without the messing around.”

  She opened her mouth to reply and then paused and crossed her arms over her chest. “Hold on. So, Danny is on board with this?”

  “Of course he’s on board!” I hesitated, glanced between Rae’s teasing face and Deenie’s encouraging eyes. “I mean, it isn’t easy. We’re both human. But he respects me and wants this to work. So, we find other ways to make each other happy.”

  Rae grinned and gave me an approving nod. “So—sexting?”

  “A little bit.” I felt the color rising to my cheeks. I lowered my voice and leaned toward them. “Actually, Danny really likes it when we—”

  “Wow, that’s great, Ellie!” Deenie interrupted, clapping her hands together. “I don’t think we need the details, though, right?”

  Rae shrugged her surrender. “Whatever. As long as you’re both happy, I guess.”

  Chapter 15

  I hadn’t intended to start interviewing adults until I’d covered most of Danny’s classmates, but Ms. Baker sidelines me during recess a few weeks after I start my project.

  “I have a story for your collection,” she says, motioning me back into the classroom.

  I hesitate and slowly follow her back to her desk. She indicates a chair opposite her, and I settle into it reluctantly. It’s not that I dislike Ms. Baker. She’s actually a great teacher, and a genuinely kind person. But she makes me uncomfortable for some reason. I feel like she’s waiting for me to fulfill some lofty goal; she’s like an overeager mama hen hoping that her baby bird will one day soar into the air. And I’m that miserable chick waddling around muttering, “I’m a chicken! And chickens don’t fly.”

  I just want her to believe in someone else and leave me alone already.

  “Who told you I was gathering stories?” I ask her suspiciously.

  She shrugs and draws a folder from her desk. “I’ve been debating showing you this for quite a while. Do you remember that writing assignment I gave your class last December? It was due right before break.”

  I nod, and my throat gets tight. We were supposed to hand in an original composition using Lois Lowry’s The Giver as inspiration.

  “I wasn’t sure what to do with Danny’s paper. It seemed, at first, to be a breach of confidence if I showed it to anyone. Then I thought perhaps I should hand it over to Danny’s father.” She sighs. “I called him a few weeks ago—but he told me to keep it until his son returns and then give it to him.” She glances up at me, and her pale eyes grow large with sympathy. “It’s been more than nine months. I think it’s okay to share this now. And, anyway, it was so obviously written for you, Ellie. I believe he meant for you to have it.”

  I’m so curious about the contents of that folder that I forget my earlier question. It doesn’t matter who told her about my project. She has something from Danny, something he wrote down. Something for me!

  It’s hard to keep a calm face as I wait for her to hand it over. She doesn’t know the value of what she holds. Danny told stories to me every day. And yet, no matter how many times I urged him to, he never wrote a single one down. I look at you, and I tell you a story meant for you, he explained to me. I can tell by your eyes, by your reaction, where the story is meant to go. How am I supposed to speak to people I’ve never met?

  “But I want them on paper so I can read them whenever I want.”

  “What’s the point?” he replied with a shrug. “I’ll always be here to tell you a new one.”

  Except now he wasn’t; he hadn’t been for a long time. I was dying to hear him tell me a new story. Not the ones I told in his voice, but authentic Danny.

  Was it possible that he’d actually pushed through his self-doubt and recorded one of his ideas? I’m holding my hands in my lap, my fingers intertwined in a painful fist; it’s all I can do not to grab the folder from her and run.

  But she doesn’t seem to be done yet. Apparently, “I have a story for your collection” didn’t mean just Danny’s composition. Ms. Baker has something to tell me too.

  “He was one of my best students,” she says with a smile. “I was going to use his essay on Leaves of Grass as an example for future classes. But when I announced the creative writing assignment, I actually saw his face fall. The first draft he handed in was a silly little poem that I refused to grade.” She flips open the folder and draws out the first sheet.

  “There once was a boy who was blank

  Whose writing actually stank.

  His girlfriend was lost,

  Their stars were all crossed,

  So he just watched his GPA tank.”

  I feel my stomach tighten as she reads the poem out loud. The words may seem silly to her, but they hit me like a fist to the gut.

  “What does he mean when he says, ‘his girlfriend was lost’?” she asks when I don’t speak.

  I hesitate before answering, then realize that there’s no reason to hold back. Most of the class knows what happened between us. “We were fighting when Danny wrote that,” I explain. It hurts to talk; I’m scraping the words out one by one. “Nor
mally I would have helped him with the story assignment. But we weren’t speaking to each other then.”

  She nods silently and looks down at the folder again.

  “I mean, I wasn’t speaking to him,” I amend miserably. “He was speaking to me. He was trying to, anyway. I wasn’t listening.”

  “I see.”

  I’m pretty sure she doesn’t. From where I sit, I can make out the date scribbled on the corner of the paper. She can’t possibly know that the night before he’d written that poem, he’d sat outside my window during the bitterest freeze in Atlanta history, with his phone clasped in his chapped hands.

  Please talk to me, Ellie. I’ll wait as long as it takes. Please.

  I was going to, of course. Eventually. But I was still so angry. I thought I would punish him a little longer.

  That was the last text he ever sent me.

  Ms. Baker is watching me closely; she turns to the next page and begins reading the passage out loud, but after a moment she pauses and seems to reconsider. With a quick motion, she flips the folder shut and slides it over to me.

  “Maybe you’d like to read it for yourself, Ellie?”

  I would, but not now, and not in front of her. I need the privacy of my room, the safety of solitude. Her sympathy is choking me.

  “Can I take this home with me?”

  “Of course.”

  Time skips. There are three more classes, a car ride home with Deenie and Rae, and a phone call from my grandmother that I have to pass through to get where I need to be. The only thing that matters is closing my bedroom door and being alone with my precious folder.

  Danny is sitting on my bed when I finally hurry to my room.

  “You have it,” he says as I settle down next to him.

  “I’m scared,” I tell him.

  “So don’t read it.”

  I tear my eyes away from the typed page in front of me and look at him. He’s only inches away, his thin shoulders jutting forward, his arms on either side of me. I can almost feel the warmth of his cheek near mine. Almost.