Page 28 of A Thousand Little Goodbyes

“And your great-aunt in Chicago… She’s a nice woman? You trust her? She’ll take good care of you?”

“I hope so.” River spoke in a doubtful way that did little to make Chrissie feel better about the girl’s situation. She swallowed thickly and added, “Why are you being so nice to me? Scarlett’s right, you know. I could be anyone. I might have a whole crew following behind us waiting to steal everything you have so we can run off with it in the night. We could rob you and leave you for dead.”

That sounded so much like something Kat would say—sarcastic, smart, chip-on-her-shoulder Kat—that Chrissie almost laughed.

“If everyone in the world only offered to help those who’d proven themselves worthy of it ahead of time, what would be the point? No one should have to earn kindness. It should come standard.”

Aware of how little she was taking her own advice, Chrissie plucked the phone from Scarlett—and right in time, too, since it sounded as though her questions were taking adrasticallypersonal turn. No one who asked a man about what, exactly, had caused his ex-wife to run off was doing it out of the kindness of her heart.

“In case I haven’t mentioned it enough yet, thank you for doing all this, Walsh.” Chrissie spoke with only a trace of the embarrassment she might have felt a few minutes earlier. “I know you keep saying it’s not a big deal—and toyou, it probably isn’t—but it is to me. I don’t have a lot of people I can count on. Kat’s lucky to have you in her life, and so am I.”

She could tell she’d taken him by surprise by the way he coughed and then remained silent for a full twenty seconds.

“Sorry to put you on the spot like this,” she said. “I won’t thankyou again unless you manage to get Rufio to actuallyusethat Astroturf or if you somehow pull a miracle and get Lily and Kat to sit in a room together without clawing each other’s eyes out.”

He sighed in a way that managed to combine sympathy, exhaustion, and something that made her heart squeeze.

“I don’t understand the two of them,” he said. “On paper, they should be best friends. They both love volleyball and anime, eat way more peanut butter than any human being should, and act like feelings are a four-letter word. You’d think we wouldn’t be able to keep them apart.”

“Unfortunately, that’s not how friendship works,” Chrissie said as Scarlett started making kissy faces at the phone—ones that quickly turned pornographic. “When it comes to teenage girls, I’ve always found that it’s the opposites who attract.”

Chapter TenPortland, OR

2004

There were only sixty minutes in an hour and twenty-four hours in a day. Seven days in a week and fifty-two weeks in a year.

Scarlett was starting to get seriously annoyed about all of it.

With that much time to call her own, she should have been able to spend a hefty chunk of her days with Chrissie. Even though they went to different schools, nightly chats on the phone helped take the edge off, and whenever Chrissie had an afternoon to spare, she pedaled her bike over to the apartment so they could watchCharmedtogether.

Unfortunately, afternoons to spare were becoming harder and harder to come by.

“I’m sorry, Scarlett, but I have piano practice” was the most common excuse, but there were other ones in there, too. About chores and homework, Chrissie’s discomfort with bicycling on the highway after dark.

The solution to this problem seemed easy enough to Scarlett: Chrissie could just stay the night with her. Grandma was happy tomake another school stop in the morning, and what was there waiting for Chrissie at her big, stupid house anyway?

A mom who couldn’t look at her without seeing her dead son? A dad who worked and worked and worked until he could drink enough whiskey to collapse on his bed at night?

“I told you those things in secret,” Chrissie said one day while the two of them sat on the beach of Powers Marine Park, their bare toes digging deep into the wet sand. The park was located almost exactly halfway between their houses, so they often found themselves meeting up there.

Today was overcast, so they were huddled under a blanket that Chrissie had packed in the little white basket affixed to the front of her bike. Scarlett would have been warm enough in her favorite oversized hoodie and the fluffy beige Uggs she’d had to beg and beg Grandma to buy her for her twelfth birthday, but thanks to her fancy private school’s dress code, Chrissie was chronically undressed for the weather.

Chrissie always looked so pretty in her pleated khaki skirt and the fitted blue blazer, her (for now) long hair in two tight braids, but she also looked miserable, like she was wearing someone else’s skin. In her most private thoughts, Scarlett coveted a similar dress code so she could do things like roll the waistband of the skirt up a daring six inches or sew her white blouse extra tight around the bosom the way the cool girls always did in the movies, but she’d never say so to Chrissie.

Chrissie would have been too scandalized. She didn’t like anyone to see her knees, let alone the shape of her bosoms, which weresomuch bigger and better than her own.

“I’ll ask if I can sleep over the Saturday after this one,” Chrissie promised as she huddled closer to Scarlett for warmth. “Maybe I can even stay the whole weekend.”

But that was a wholeninedays away (two hundred and sixteen hours), and Scarlett was having none of it.

“Why not this weekend?” she asked. “Or both? You know I’m right about your parents. They won’t care whether or not you’re there.”

She regretted the words the moment they left her mouth. Not because she was wrong—Chrissie’s parentswouldn’tcare—but because Chrissie seemed to shrink into herself hearing them.

“I have a recital this weekend,” she said as she traced swirls into the sand with her pointer finger. “And they both promised to be there.”

Scarlett was forced to accept this. She didn’t want to, and she didn’t believe that Chrissie’s parents cared two straws about the upcoming recital, but part of being theVery Best Best Friendwas pretending to agree with something even it was the last thing you wanted to do.