Remember When **Under MAJOR Editing**

Chapter 9

"Where were Mike and Dade headed when you hit each other? "Lily asked from the backseat as Mckenzie sped their rusty Datsun through the warm morning. Hitching a ride with them was the best way I could think of to reconstruct last night. They could take me by Zack's for a visit and debriefing. Then I'd go with them to the swim meet and grill the team about what happened, though I wouldn't compete. And I didn't think I should drive myself. The headache was still marble-sized, but I felt like I was standing on marbles too. I might lose my balance at any second.

"I don't know where they were going," I said, hoping I wasn't supposed to know. I'd been trying to get Lily and Mckenzie to tell me what happened since they'd picked me up. It was harder than I'd thought. I'd admitted to them only what I'd told Dade: that I didn't remember the wreck itself. More than this and I was afraid they would report it to their mother, she would try to report it to my mother but get my dad instead, and he might actually make good on his threat to have me committed.

The twins didn't automatically offer a recap of events. Very frustrating. And as I prompted them, I had to choose my words carefully so I didn't give away how little I knew. I couldn't say I had such a great time at the football team's party or I had such an awful time at the football team's party because the opposite might have happened. After a few seconds of a boy band wailing on the CD player, I settled for, "Wow, what a party. I'll remember it for the rest of my life."

"Why?" they asked at the same time.

I threw up my hands like they were so dense. "Because of what happened. You know."
"No," Mckenzie said, "we don't know. You told us you couldn't find Zack, and then you disappeared. Then it started raining, so Lily and I came home.

What happened?"
"Oh, just the usual," I said.
"What was so great about it that you'll remember it for the rest of your life?" Lily persisted. "Maybe I was drunker than I thought, but it sounds like we weren't at the same party."

"My head hurts," I said out the open window. We'd reached the straight stretch of the road into town, where my dad had said I'd wrecked. Sure enough, black tire tracks careened across the road, and broken glass twinkled in the grass on the shoulder. A deer stood in the trees, chewing, watching traffic. I shook my fist at it.

"You're nuts,"Mckenzie said.

We reached downtown. The high school and the football stadium. City hall. The police station. The county courthouse where my mom worked. A historic town square with striped awnings on storefronts, including the police station and my mom's office. The dried skeletons of petunias in pots outside her office door, because no one was there to water them. It was a quaint little downtown like any small town's, built in an era before tourists cared about the beach. The only difference was that ours was built on sand.

Mckenzie turned the Datsun off the square, down the road with new housing developments: the one where Gabriel lived, then the one where Mckenzie and Lily lived. After a couple of miles, the impressive entrance to Zack's neighborhood appeared, an enormous facade of an antebellum mansion with faux marble columns painted to look like they were smothered in wisteria. The neighborhood itself was a grid of brand-new identical brown brick houses, one story, on such narrow lots that they'd put the front door on the diagonal, set back from the wide two-car garage door dominating the front.

"And I thought all the houses on our street looked alike," Lily said. "How do you find him in here?"

"Count three streets over and then six houses down," I said. Not that I came over much. We'd been together only a week, and he'd been busy. I had cruised by a few times on my way home from swim practice in case he was outside. His family didn't seem to be outdoorsy types. His house was always shut tight.