My Marley was all the things I always thought she was. And yet so foreign. She seemed so young. She was so young. And so was I, I knew, no matter what I’d seen, or how I felt, or how I’d tried to bend time forward for myself and backward to keep her around. I’d never stop being the youngest in our group. But Marley would never stop being fifteen.

How could that be right?

Aidy finished reading the third part of the journal, stoic. “Regardless of everything Olivia did, it really might be true, after all,” she said, her voice a brushstroke, barely filled with paint, daring to add her words to the untouchable canvas that was Marley Bricket’s death.

19

There was the Marley we Albany kids knew. And the one her mom knew. The one her dad knew. The one both of them knew when together. Every version of Marley had different intentions. Different forms altogether. There was the Marley I saw in every primary color. The Marley I heard in the trees. The Marley in the stars, smiling at me. The Marley that came to Nick through music and sound.

Somewhere in my quest to make everyone else remember the Marley we knew as children, I stumbled upon a Marley who needed help and didn’t know how to ask for it, too afraid to fail us by being seen as weak. As Aidy passed the journal around the circle, each person met this Marley, in all her wavering contemplations and self-loathing thoughts, tired of being what she was, and tired of thinking it at all, for she knew her life was a gift, but it was one she hadn’t asked for, and one she thought her parents wanted a return on, because their product wasn’t perfect.

“She never says it,” Bigs whispered. He wouldn’t say the word. No one could. Her eyes that day, so full of mischief, sparkling with countless plans yet to be carried out. Those eyes told me her own death was never one of her plans. But her words seemed to scream it. Which one was right?

“I can’t accept it unless she says it somewhere,” Bigs said, much louder.

“But Biggy, she was so lost,” Teeny countered, tucking her arm under her brother’s and leaning against their titanium connection. Tears fell out from beneath her fanned lashes, so long they grazed her cheekbone when she closed her eyes.

“Are you sure this is everything?” Aidy asked Harrison.

“We can definitely go back to check all the places,” he said. “I mean, I found something in every spot. So unless there’s more than one thing hidden in each place, this is everything.”

Aidy tapped my shoulder. “What about in your room, Olivia? Is there more I didn’t find?”

“I don’t think so.”

“What do you mean you don’t think so?”

“Exactly that.”

“Did you write this journal for her?”