Page 71 of If We Say Goodbye
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I openthe door and let everything fall to the ground. I kick my shoes off, letting my feet breathe. My socks are covered in brown patches from my trek, so I pull them off too.
The stairs that separate me from my bed might as well be the rocky mountains because my thighs burn with every step up. My entire body is in dire need of exercise, considering how sore I am from just walking for a mile.
When I reach the top of the stairs, I freeze.
Light seeps into the hallway from Ethan’s open door, sending chills through me. The closer I inch toward his room, the more my heart races. Mom and Dad’s voices carry out into the hallway, but there’s no logical reason they should be in there. None of us have stepped into it for three months, not once, and I assumed we had an unspoken rule to keep it that way.
Inside, there are large moving boxes popcorned around the room. Mom is next to his bookshelf pulling books off, and Dad is putting Ethan’s clothes into one of the boxes.
“What are you doing?” I demand.
Mom spins around. “I didn’t know you were home.”
I shake my head, looking around with my hands pulling my hair. This is wrong. We shouldn’t be in here. As long as we never open the door, we can tell ourselves that Ethan is still alive. That he’s just in here hiding. Stepping into the room ruins that. It makes his death too real.
I can’t deal with this right now.
Tears fill the corners of my eyes, and there’s no stopping them from spilling over.
“Stop!” I scream. I run over to Dad and rip the clothes out of his hands, shoving them back into Ethan’s open drawer.
Dad gently puts his hands on my shoulders. “Becca–”
“No!” I shake him off. “Put it back!” My lip quivers, and I toss more of his clothes out of the box. Shirts and pants fly around the room.
Mom hugs the book in her hands to her chest. She takes a step closer to me, her voice cracking when she speaks. “We needed to–”
“No!” My voice is hoarse. “You didn’t need to do anything!”
Mom locks eyes with Dad, searching for help.
“This is what you needed to do?” I scream at Dad. This horrifying scene is what replaced our trip to the movies? “You stood me up for this?”
“Becca, that’s not what happened,” he says.
His words fly over my head. The room is swaying, and I can’t see anything through my tears. My head becomes so heavy I start to wobble, and it takes everything I can muster to stand up straight. Still, I go to the next box, dumping out everything inside.
A shiny black cell phone hits the floor, and my heart drops. I freeze.
Its cracked screen mocks me.You killed your brother.
The truth is that the accident was my fault.
Ethan turned up the music.
It was too loud.
I turned it down.
“Oh, come on,” he said. “It’s not that loud.” He turned it back up.
I rolled my eyes and turned it down again.
He turned it back up with a teasing smile.
“Fine,” I said, taking his phone to turn it off.