Free Radiant by Cynthia Hand Page B

back in the day. Nineteen-sixty-three. We were roomies, living in San Luis Obispo, a little house by the beach.”
    I’m going to miss Billy, I think as she goes on. Most of the time when I look at her I can’t help but see my mom, not because the two of them look anything alike, outside of being tall and gorgeous, but because, as my mom’s best friend for like the last hundred years, Billy has a million memories like this one about Stanford, funny stories and sad ones, times when Mom got a bad haircut or when she lit the kitchen on fire trying to make Bananas Flambé or when they were nurses in WWII together and Mom saved a man’s life with nothing but a bobby pin and a rubber band. It’s the next best thing to being with Mom, hanging with Billy. It’s like, for those few minutes, when she’s telling the stories, Mom’s alive again.
    “Hey, you okay?” Billy asks.
    “Almost done.” I cough to cover the catch in my voice, then fold up the last sweater, lay it in a box, and glance around. Even though I didn’t pack everything, even though I left my posters on the walls and some of my stuff out, my room looks emptied, like I’ve already moved out of this place.
    I can’t believe that, after tomorrow, I won’t live here anymore.
    “You can come home anytime you like,” Billy says. “Remember that. This is your house. Just call and tell me you’re on your way and I’ll run over and put fresh sheets on the bed.”
    She squeezes my hand and then heads downstairs to load boxes into her truck, which she’ll be driving to California tomorrow, me following along in my car.
    I go out into the hall. The house is quiet but also seems to have some kind of energy, like it’s full of ghosts. I stare at Jeffrey’s closed door. He should be here. He should have already started his junior year at Jackson Hole High School. He should be well into football practice and his disgusting early-morning protein shakes and tons of mismatched stinky gym socks in the laundry basket. I should be able to go to his door right now and knock and hear him say, Go away , but I’d go in anyway, and then he’d look at me from his computer and maybe turn his throbbing music down a notch or two, smirk, and say, “Aren’t you gone yet?” and maybe I’d think of something smart to fire back, but in the end we’d both know that he would miss me. And I would miss him.
    I miss him.
    The front door bangs shut downstairs. “You expecting company?” Billy calls up.
    I become aware of the sound of a car pulling up in the driveway. “No,” I holler back. “Who is it?”
    “It’s for you,” she says.
    I book it down the stairs.
    “Oh, good,” says Wendy when I open the door. “I was afraid I missed you.”
    Instinctively I look around for Tucker, my heart speeding up.
    “He’s not here,” Wendy says gently. “He, uh—”
    Oh. He didn’t want to see me.
    I try to smile while something in my chest squeezes painfully. Right, I think. Why would he want to see me? We’re broken up. He’s moving on.
    I make myself focus on Wendy. She’s clutching a cardboard box to her chest like she’s afraid it might float away from her. She shifts from one foot to the other. “What’s up?”
    “I had some of your stuff,” she says. “I’m headed to school tomorrow, and I—I thought you might want it.”
    “Thanks. I’m leaving tomorrow, too,” I tell her.
    Once, when her brother and I first got together, Wendy told me that if I hurt Tucker she’d bury me in horse manure. Ever since we broke up some part of me has been expecting her to show up here with a shovel and bean me over the head with it. Some part of me thinks that maybe I’d deserve it. Yet here she is looking all fragile and hopeful, like she missed me this summer. Like she still wants to be my friend.
    “Thanks,” I say again. I smile, reach for the box. She smiles shyly back and hands it over. Inside there are a couple DVDs, magazines, my dog-eared copy of Vampire Academy