“I thought she dumped him, but . . .” My gaze returns to the picture. “I guess he wasn’t too mad at her if he’d put her picture up here.”

“I don’t know if you could really be mad at a girl like that,” Mom says wistfully.

Wow, I think. She was imagining grandbabies and everything, it seems.

Mom’s mouth pinches up, like all this talk about Ty’s lost romantic prospects is painful to her. She picks up the collage and moves it behind the door, then takes one last long look at Ty’s room. She sighs, pulls a tissue out of her pocket, and blows her nose.

“Come on,” she says. “We’re done in here.”

She turns out the light.

5 March

I don’t know why, maybe because I love torturing myself, but I keep going back to the first day Steven and I were officially together. Not to the bookstore, or the date, or the kiss after, although I think about those things often enough, my own personal memory playlist that’s on a continuous loop, but to a conversation I had later about Steven. With Ty.

After Steven dropped me off, I floated inside on cloud 9, bursting with all that had happened in the past few hours. Mom was working, so I couldn’t girl-talk with her about it. I found my brother in the basement, bowling on the Wii.

“Where have you been all day?” he asked when he saw me coming down the stairs, his arm swinging back as he delivered the virtual ball to the gutter. He groaned.

“Around. I saw a movie at SouthPointe.” I replied. “Wow, you’re not even good at virtual bowling.”

“Shut up,” Ty said good-naturedly, and reset the Wii so that we could both play. “Loser buys the winner McDonald’s.”

Then he proceeded to kick my bowling butt.

“How was the movie?” he said after a while.

“Okay. Heavy on visuals, light on plot,” I replied. I was going to leave it at that, but I wanted to tell him. I wanted to share part of this monumental day in my life. So I said, “I went with Steven.”

Ty’s eyes didn’t leave the TV screen. “The guy from your math club or whatever?”

“Steven Blake. Yes.”

“What did you used to call him? Like his geek nickname?”

“Oh,” I said, laughing that he remembered. In middle school we all used to have nicknames: Mine was Luthor, after Superman’s Lex Luthor—the world’s greatest criminal mastermind. Eleanor’s was Roosevelt, which she loathed and rallied to change to Rigby, after the Beatles song, but never pulled off. Beaker’s was the only one that actually stuck past 8th grade. And Steven’s was—

“Hawking,” I told Ty.

“After the star guy.”

“After the world-famous astrophysicist and cosmologist, which means he studies the origins and structure of the universe.” Sheesh. Star guy.

“Yes!” Ty rolled a perfect strike. I was beginning to suspect that he was hustling me for McDonald’s. “So you went on a date. How was that?”

“It wasn’t supposed to be a date, but it ended up that way. It was good. Really good, actually.” I picked up my controller and immediately bowled a gutter ball. “Crap.”

“I approve of this Hawking dude,” Ty said as I lamely managed to knock down a few pins on my next roll. “Of course, if he breaks your heart, I’m going to have to beat him up. Brotherly duty, you know.”

“Thanks.” I smiled and nodded and didn’t say anything else Steven-related that night. We bowled, and I lost. We must have gone to McDonald’s, but I guess I blocked that part out.

That was the last time I agreed to play Wii with my brother.

It was also the last time we had anything resembling a “real” conversation about our personal lives. When he said he approved of Steven.

I wish I’d told him more. I could have talked about Steven—although not about the kissing, because no brother wants to hear about his sister making out. I could have told him about how brave Steven had been, to just ask me point-blank like that, how gentlemanly he’d been for the rest of the time, and how, in spite of my modern-feminist misgivings, I’d kind of liked that. I could have told him about the paper daisy, or the things I liked about Steven: the way he made me laugh, how he infected me with his enthusiasm, his wonder, and made me feel like I was pretty when nobody else had ever really made me feel that way, which shouldn’t have been so important but was.

I could have shared that with Ty. If I had, maybe he would have felt comfortable doing the same. Maybe he would have let me in, that snow day when we talked about Ashley and the breakup, instead of insisting that it was nothing, that nothing had happened, that everything was fine. Maybe he would have given me the details I need to understand what went down between them, the facts I’d use to figure out what to do with this letter.

Because he didn’t hate Ashley. She might have broken his heart, but he still put her picture up in his collage.

Which meant that he still considered her a friend.

18.

ON THURSDAY I CAUSE some general confusion among our respective friends by asking Sadie to eat lunch with me. I pick a table for us in the cafeteria where I can keep an eye on Ashley Davenport. The letter is stuck under the edge of my tray, where my food sits untouched. I’m too busy to eat. I’m watching this girl who was so important to my brother that he wrote her a letter before he died. I’m planning to make my move.

I’m thankful that seniors and sophomores, by sheer coincidence, have the same lunch period. So far I’ve learned way more about Ashley in the cafeteria than I did in the gym. Like: she waves at nearly everyone who passes as they make their way down the lunch line (she’s friendly), and they wave back (she’s popular). She picks all the tiny chopped carrots out of her salad (she’s trying to lose weight?), which she nibbles with her fingers (she has bad table manners?), and she laughs a lot (she has good teeth).