Aria looked at the others. “What’s going on?”
“Do you think…?” Spencer whispered.
“What if Ali—” Hanna started.
“Guys.” A voice came from behind them. Ali stood in the great room doorway. Her arms were at her sides and her face was pale—paler than they’d ever seen it before.
“What happened?” everyone said at once.
Ali looked worried. “I don’t know. But it wasn’t my fault.”
The siren got closer and closer…until an ambulance wailed into the Cavanaugh driveway. Paramedics poured out and rushed to the tree house. The rope had been lowered down.
“What happened, Ali?” Spencer turned, heading out the door. “You’ve got to tell us what happened.”
Ali started after her. “Spence, no.”
Hanna and Aria looked at each other; they were too afraid to follow. Someone might see them.
Spencer crouched behind a bush and looked across the street. That was when she saw the ugly, jagged hole in Toby’s tree house window. She felt someone creeping up behind her. “It’s me,” Ali said.
“What—” Spencer started, but before she could finish, a paramedic began climbing back down the tree house, and he had someone in his arms. Was Toby hurt? Was he…dead?
All the girls, inside and out, craned to see. Their hearts began to beat faster. Then, for just a second, they stopped.
It wasn’t Toby. It was Jenna.
Several minutes later, Ali and Spencer came back inside. Ali told them all what happened with an almost-eerie calmness: the firework had gone through the window and hit Jenna. No one had seen her light it, so they were safe, as long as they all kept quiet. It was, after all, Toby’s firework. If the cops would blame anyone, it would be him.
All night, they cried and hugged and went in and out of sleep. Spencer was so shell-shocked, she spent hours curled in a ball, wordlessly flicking from E! to the Cartoon Network to Animal Planet. When they awoke the next day, the news was all over the neighborhood: someone had confessed.
Toby.
The girls thought it was a joke, but the local paper confirmed that Toby had admitted to playing with a lit firework in his tree house, accidentally sending one at his sister’s face…and the firework had blinded her. Ali read it out loud as they all gathered around her kitchen table, holding hands. They knew they should be relieved, except…they knew the truth.
The few days that Jenna was in the hospital, she was hysterical—and confused. Everyone asked her what had happened, but she didn’t seem to remember. She said she couldn’t recall anything that happened right before the accident, either. Doctors said it was probably post-traumatic stress.
Rosewood Day held a don’t-play-with-fireworks assembly in Jenna’s honor, followed by a benefit dance and a bake sale. The girls, especially Spencer, participated overzealously, although of course they pretended not to know anything about what had happened. If anyone asked, they said that Jenna was a sweet girl and one of their closest pals. A lot of girls who’d never spoken to Jenna were saying the exact same thing. As for Jenna, she never came back to Rosewood Day. She went to a special school for the blind in Philadelphia, and no one saw her after that night.
Bad things in Rosewood were all eventually gently nudged out of sight, and Toby was no exception. His parents homeschooled him for the remainder of the year. The summer passed, and the next school year Toby went to a reform school in Maine. He left unceremoniously one clear day in mid-August. His father drove him to the SEPTA station, where he took the train to the airport alone. The girls watched as his family tore down the tree house that afternoon. It was like they wanted to erase as much of Toby’s existence as possible.
Two days after Toby left, Ali’s parents took the girls on a camping trip to the Pocono Mountains. The five of them went white-water rafting and rock-climbing, and tanned on the banks of the lake. At night, when their conversation turned to Toby and Jenna—as it often did that summer—Ali reminded them that they could never, ever tell anyone. They’d all keep the secret forever…and it would bond their friendship into eternity. That night, when they zipped themselves into their five-girl tent, J. Crew cashmere hoodies up around their heads, Ali gave each of them a brightly colored string bracelet to symbolize the bond. She tied the bracelets on each of their wrists and told them to repeat after her: “I promise not to tell, until the day I die.”
They went around in a circle, Spencer to Hanna to Emily to Aria, saying exactly that. Ali tied on her bracelet last. “Until the day I die,” she whispered after making the knot, her hands clasped over her heart. Each of the girls squeezed hands. Despite the dreadfulness of the situation, they felt lucky to have each other.
The girls wore their bracelets through showers, spring break trips to D.C. and Colonial Williamsburg—or, in Spencer’s case, to Bermuda—through grubby hockey practices and messy bouts with the flu. Ali managed to keep her bracelet the cleanest of everyone’s, as if getting it dirty would cloud its purpose. Sometimes, they would touch their fingers to the bracelet and whisper, “Until the day I die,” to remind themselves of how close they all were. It became their code; they all knew what it meant. In fact, Ali said it less than a year later, the very last day of seventh grade, as the girls were starting their summer-kickoff sleepover. No one knew that in just a few short hours, Ali would disappear.
Or that it would be the day she died.
1
AND WE THOUGHT WE WERE FRIENDS