What Happened That Night

4 ~ w a v e

Dedicated to Noelle for making the totally amazing new cover.

Maybe he heard the sound of my Ugg knockoff boots colliding against the wet, slippery pavement or the keychain of my PocketBac hand sanitizer with a soft holder in the shape of a polar bear hitting against the metal zipper of my backpack with every step I took toward my sister’s mini Cooper, but he glanced up from the hood of Emily’s car, which had a light dusting of white, glimmering snowflakes gathering. His nose and his ears were red—a stark contrast to his pale countenance—and the cold was making his nose run so he sniffled faintly, and he had taken off the beanie I had seen him wearing earlier and now his brown hair was visible, a few snowflakes caught in between the brunette strands, and he blinked his brown eyes at me as I neared. His eyes were a deep shade of brown, the kind that reminded you of chocolate and coffee with the perfect amount of cream and sugar. I always kind of thought that his eyes matched Griffin’s ocean blue ones—that if irises were elements that Griffin’s were the water and Kolby’s the earth.

“Hey,” he stated, as I slid my hands into my pockets, clenching my fists slightly as I neared him and caught my reflection in the windshield of my sister’s Cooper, beside Kolby’s back, and I remembered how people would remark that Emily and I looked similar with our naturally curly, honey blond hair, green eyes, and long shaped faces, although I was taller than Emily by almost four inches. When we were younger, we used to joke that we were twins but then as we got older it became more obvious who was who. Emily was smart, beautiful, outgoing in the girl next door kind of way, and trustable—until she murdered Griffin Tomlin anyway—and I was just kind of Clara, undefined. I was smart enough not to be dumb but dumb enough not to be that smart, I was pretty enough not to be ugly but ugly enough not to be that pretty. That just seemed to be me, constantly stuck in between.

“Hey,” I replied back to him, sidestepping him as I walked around the front bumper of the Cooper, accidentally bumping my knee against the white license plate as I did and I bit down on my lip as I felt the throb of the collision. I relaxed my shoulder and allowed my backpack to glide down my arm as I grabbed the keys from my pocket and unlocked the passenger door, hearing the familiar creaking of the rusted hinges as I propped it open with my back because otherwise it wouldn’t stay open and would slam shut, and I tossed my backpack onto the seat that I felt I should’ve been sitting in. I glanced at him over the hood of the car, his chocolate brown eyes concentrated on the tires or the dirty slush gathered around them, and I felt the urge to say something. I felt as if I should’ve been apologizing to him, apologizing that now he had to walk to and from school in the middle of January in the cold, apologizing that I ever said anything to my sister, apologizing that because of me, his best friend was gone. But instead, I smoothed my thumb over the chrome of the car handle and asked, “Admiring Black Beauty?”

He gazed up from the dirtied, slush ridden tires of my sister’s mini Cooper and looked over the rooftop of the car, which was dusted with a small accumulation of snowflakes, and his brow was furrowed as he looked at me, little crinkles stemming from the corners of his eyes. “The car’s red,” he said, his voice flat as if he spoke to me as I were slow, and I shrugged uncomfortably as he looked at me, using a glove-clad hand to swipe the snowflakes off of the side of the windshield closest to me, the gaps in between my fingers leaving faint trails of snow lingering on the crescent shaped spaces I had cleared. Little flakes of snow were falling against the denim of my jeans and the tops of my boots. Kolby glanced down at the car again, removing his bare hand from the pocket of his puffer vest and started brushing the snow from the driver’s window, his fingers already ashen as they began to glisten from the snow.

“I know it is,” I said after a moment as we silently continued to brush the snow from the mini Cooper’s windows, with him gravitating to the back of the car and gliding his bare palm down the cold surface of the back window, the snowflakes smearing on the window, and I noticed every few seconds he would stop to shake his hand for a moment, as if to warm it up. I wanted to say that he didn’t have to brush off the snow but whenever I tried to bring the words to my lips, I’d look at him and lose my nerve, so instead I just said that I knew the car was red. “My sister . . . uh, Emily . . . she named it that. Something about a horse—I don’t know.” I did know, though, but I wasn’t sure if this was okay, talking about Emily, especially to him.