“You know, Lexi’s been so excited about him and you didn’t even acknowledge him at our table. Haven’t you noticed Lexi smiling all of a sudden?”

“Sorry, geez, he’s always been … Well, whatever, it’s just weird. What was I supposed to do?”

“I don’t know, Ser, maybe be happy for her?”

“I am happy for her. I just didn’t know she liked him.” He was my crushy stalker boy, after all. “I mean, I just find it odd that she’s, like, going after a guy so soon after Kori.” That meek and mild, scared-of-boys Lexi was getting on with her life before me. And here I could barely bring myself to talk to Anthony and had basically been lusting after the one guy I couldn’t have—my best friend’s “need to work things out with” guy.

“Did you ever think that maybe that’s exactly why she is? You know, Kori’s death hit her hard too. She’s going through this whole I-can’t-waste-one-second-of-precious-life thing right now.”

I should know that. That’s what Cole was really saying. But I wasn’t ready to think about how Kori’s death was affecting them. I just couldn’t add any more guilt on top of what I already felt.

And even if I could, I wouldn’t know where to begin. The list of secrets I was keeping from them was out of control. I hadn’t told them about Shay or my tattoo; about Mom’s crazed outburst over “The Mini Mart Mugging,” her sordid affair, or my botched attempt at setting her up with Doc Ramsey; I hadn’t told them about how I’d visited Parker, or the latest gossip on Marci.

Problem was I was heaping secret upon secret. And it was going to take way too many postcards to be free of them all.

Cole wasn’t kidding about Lexi’s new take-life-by-the-horns attitude. But Lexi might as well have been waving a red flag in the face of a bull as she confronted me at my locker after school.

“Okay, Serena. Tonight. We are going out like we used to.”

The tacit understanding being it was time for me to start acting like a normal friend. Thing was, that was exactly what I had planned, just not with them.

Ever since I’d seen the statue of Kori, I knew what I had to do. Kori’d always wanted to be immortalized. But not their way. Not frozen in hardness, in wavy hair and apple cheeks and pearls and everything she wasn’t. She wanted to be immortalized with her music.

The statue was a crock. Kori’s family didn’t really give a crap about her, not before she died and certainly not after. I knew that more than anybody outside of her family.