Page 83 of The Design of Goodbye
He smiledandlaughed at what I’d written.
Mission accomplished.
* * *
“Hey, Madison.”
I jumped. My phone went flying out of my hand, bounced on the pavement of the school’s parking lot, and landed near Liam’s feet.
“Sorry,” he said sheepishly. Liam was sitting on the curb next to my car but got up and handed me my phone. “I thought you saw me. Are you okay?”
“I’m okay.” And then, even though I hated myself for it, I glanced around the parking lot to make sure no one was watching us.
Liam noticed. “We can go somewhere else if you—”
“No!No. We don’t need to do that.”
Liam didnotdeserve how I treated him and our friendship. He didn’t deserve to be a secret, but I was too scared of the implications if he weren’t.
He still hovered away from me, unsure, so I stepped closer to him. “What’s up?”
“I wanted to give you this.”
He held out our truth book. My fingertips burned when they touched the cover.
“Can you not read that here?” he asked when I went to open it. “It’s kind of personal.”
“Of course.” I put the notebook in my purse. “I’ll wait.”
A gust of wind blew, opening his sketchbook that was on the ground behind him. Ineededto look through that. I stepped forward to grab it, but Liam gently held me back.
“Are you nervous?” I asked.
“Kinda,” he admitted. “No one ever looks at my art.”
“In case you’ve forgotten, I have one of your paintings on my nightstand. I look at it every night.” He let go of my shoulder as I added, “And you used to take art classes.”
“That’s different. But if you really want to...”He handed me his sketchbook. “Here.”
He watched me nervously as I studied each painting, careful not to rip the thin, warped pages. Each one was equally amazing—with his signature drip and splatter technique—but they were colorless and all different species of birds.
“These are incredible, but why do you only draw birds?”
“I didn’t always. They’re all I draw now, though.”
“Why?”
He nervously kicked a rock, and it hit the tire of a car a few spots away. “You ever feel trapped?”
I thought about Jules and high school and all the social expectations I followed because, if I didn’t, I wouldn’t survive. I thought about my dad and how the fear of him leaving consumed me. I thought about my mom, how I missed her so much I felt like I’d never move on.
“All the time,” I finally said.
There wasn’t another rock, so he kicked at some loose gravel instead. “Birds represent freedom to me. I draw them because I feel like I’m...I dunno—I feel like...”
I’d thought of my unwelcome companion—sadness. How, some days, it filled my lungs like smoke. “You’re suffocating?”
“Yeah.”
