“Oh yeah? Then how come I’m the one who knows the most?”

“Fine. If that’s true, what did she say, exactly?”

She was always insulting my capacity for secret-keeping. “She said that it was going to be really different that year,” I told her. “It wasn’t going to have the same goal or something. No. Same purpose. She used that word. Purpose.”

“The only thing different about that year is Marley died, Olivia.” Aidy stared at me. “Come on. You can’t tell me you don’t see it.”

Nothing’s gonna happen, I heard as a memory, Marley whispering to Nick before he pulled the trigger. Everything is Something, my letter had said. If everything was something, then Marley must’ve known what nothing meant, because even nothing was something, and nothing happened to Marley, exactly like she said it would.

“No,” I whispered. Then my whisper became a statement. “No.” Then a command. “No.” Then a scream. “No! You don’t get to do this, Aidy!” I stalked off, tears streaming down my face. “You have no idea!”

“Then tell me!”

“Leave me alone! I want to be alone!” I kept walking, not bothering to look back.

Marley, I need a sign. Let me know she’s wrong.

The breeze stilled. My shoulders lightened.

Marley was lost.

And so was I.

Part Two

Titanium Lies

8

Aidy left me at the edge of the tracks, pressed between two rusted prongs of the train’s horizontal ladder. It seemed like I too would rot away, destined to become another artifact of a town that never let things go. Every street in Cadence had its own life, filled with children that became blood by address association. Every house its own story, passed from generation to generation. No matter how time weathered our town, Cadence crossed its arms and remained unchanged by the growth of the world around us. All residents accepted this destiny.

Except Marley.

We made her the very symbol of the place she tried to escape. In all the years she’d been on my shoulders, in my mind, my heart, in everything I ever did or said, she never once told me she wanted to leave the world altogether.

Why? I kept asking, over and over.

She wouldn’t answer. My imagination had always lifted me up, and now it dropped me down lower than I’d ever been. If given enough time, I might’ve let my questions cocoon me until I hatched into a person who knew the answers. Marley couldn’t hide from me forever. I’d made myself her home.

She had to come back home.

Aidy, however, would not allow me to disappear into my own confusion. Though she left me, in a fit of tears no less, she did not abandon me. She sent Ruby in her place, and soon Ruby was beside me on the ground. She grabbed my hand and squeezed.