I ignore Garrett’s demand that I remain in the car, and I fly across the road to hold him. He shakes hard in my arms, the sobs racking through his body. I don’t know if he even knows I’m touching him. I should ask the question, the words are on the tip of my tongue. I’m desperate to learn what he knows, but I’m terrified at the same time.
I know that as soon as I know the truth, nothing will ever be the same. I’m barely functioning as it is. Once I hear the truth… it’s done. Done.
“J… Jill.” Finally, Garrett notices me. He rests his hand on top of mine, not snatching away from me any longer. That upset me before, but somehow this is so much worse. “J… Jill, she’s g… g… gone. She’s gone.”
“Gone where?” To the hospital? To a friend’s house? She’s run away from home…?
“Dead. She was hit by a drunk driver and she’s dead, Jill. Sadie died.”
No. No way. Not Sadie. I scoot away from him. No. This can’t be true. Garrett is lying, playing a sick joke. This is some kind of fucked up revenge or something.
“Why are you saying that?” I gasp. “You are wrong. They got it wrong. Sadie is fine…”
He shakes his head sadly, spraying the road with his tears as he does. “I saw her, Jill. I saw Sadie with my own eyes. There is no way that she could have survived that. Not a chance.”
I squeeze my eyes closed. This doesn’t feel real, it isn’t real. Any minute now I will wake up and this will all be the worst nightmare that I have ever experienced. Even worse than the earthquake one I had when my father got trapped in a hole, dying and leaving me an orphan. That felt real, but this is worse.
This is my fault. I might as well have pushed Sadie in front of the car myself. I kissed her.
Knowing that my best friend is gone is one thing, but knowing that she died not only hating me, but because of me - is killing me. I want to trade places with Sadie, I want to die in her place, I’m the one who deserves it.
“Oh my God, Jill.” Garrett flings himself at me and he holds me tight, sobbing, screaming through the night. “Jill. I lost her, we’ve lost her. She… she didn’t deserve to die, Jill, she didn’t.”
Even though he’s holding me I can tell that Garret wishes it was me. If he had to choose between losing Sadie and me, he would want me gone, and he would be right to want that. It should be me. I hug him back and cry with him, but I don’t feel like I have earned my tears. They are selfish.
“Jill…” All of a sudden, my father is behind me. I don’t even know how he’s aware of all of this, but he has his hands under my arm pits and he’s pulling me apart from Garrett. I don’t want to leave him. I don’t deserve him but me and Garrett need each other more than anything else in the world right now. We share this guilt, this blame, this grief. We share all of it, no one else in the world can understand. “Jill, come on, honey.”
His kind voice only makes me weep harder. My father will never understand what I’ve done. He should just leave me here in a pile on the road, to die myself.
“We have to go home, Jill. We need to leave Garrett and his family. I have already offered our help and they don’t want it. All we can do is go home and wait for them to call us.”
I’m breaking, literally falling apart. My father is trying his best to hold me together while he pulls me to his car, but it isn’t working. My insides are spilling out, a massive part of me is dead on the road beside Sadie. I will never recover from this, I am nothing without her.
“Did you see her?” I ask in a whisper to Dad. “Was it really her? It can’t be, I don’t believe it…”
“It was her, Jill,” Dad replies firmly. “Definitely her. I don’t want it to be just as much as you. Some drunk idiot who shouldn’t have been behind the wheel hit her from behind as she tried to walk home. It was an accident.”
What they don’t know is that it happened because of me, because of my lies, because of what Sadie saw in the barn. It shouldn’t have. Sadie should have been having fun at the party with Warren, but she wasn’t. She was walking home from the party alone because she couldn’t stand the idea of being in a car with me and Garrett after we lied to her.