Free In Search of the Rose Notes by Emily Arsenault Page A

didn’t you? And she liked you. Rose really liked you.”
    “I never got that sense.”
    “She did. She liked you better than me.”
    I wondered how that could possibly matter now.
    “Oh, I don’t know…” I mumbled.
    “Why do you think that was, Nora?”
    “I… don’t know. Doesn’t matter much now, though, does it?”
    “It does to me. You know, Nora, I’ve been wanting to talk to you about her. I’ve had a feeling, lately, that maybe we should talk about her.”
    “Lately?”
    “Well, yes. I thought maybe there was something you wanted to say to me about her.”
    I waited for her to continue, sipping my coffee and trying not to grimace at its strength. But she just gazed at me expectantly.
    “What?” I said.
    “I thought you’d want a chance to talk about it,” she said. “Before you go. Am I wrong?”
    “Umm…” I said, perplexed. “Maybe.”
    Apparently this was Charlotte’s strange way of saying good-bye. We’d been such close friends as little kids, and now we suddenly wouldn’t be near each other anymore. We’d never live on the same street again. There was something sad about that, but maybe this conversation proved that Rose was the only thing we’d had in common for a very long time.
    “I don’t think about her that much anymore,” I admitted. “I try not to.”
    “You try not to? Why not?”
    “Because of what happened to her.”
    Charlotte narrowed her eyes. “What happened to her?”
    “I don’t know. But I mean it was probably pretty terrible, whatever it was.”
    I hesitated, staring into my coffee. I’d drunk only half of it but was already feeling shaky. Coffee in the afternoon didn’t agree with me. I was going to have to work on that for college.
    “Like I said,” I explained, “I really do try not to think about her. It’s too… sad.”
    Charlotte nodded, perhaps finally understanding. She avoided my gaze for a moment. I wondered if it embarrassed her, my talking about what made me sad. Of course, I meant “sad” in the regular way, not in the aspirin-overdose, psych-ward-stint way I’d become famous for. But I didn’t know how to ensure her of this distinction without making us both even more uncomfortable.
    “So… are you as crazy to get out of here as I am?” I asked, trying to relieve us both with a change of subject.
    Charlotte bit her lip, then smiled. “Almost, I’m sure.”
    “It’s going to be nice to start over with a whole new group of people. I can hardly believe it some days—I’m going to get up in the morning and go to class and look around and not see the same faces around me I’ve seen since I was six.”
    “It’s a little scary, actually,” Charlotte said.
    “Is it?”
    “To me anyway,” she added.
    “A lot scarier would be sticking around,” I pointed out.
    “Mmm-hmm,” Charlotte said, watching me carefully as I took another sip.
    A tiny smile crossed her lips as I failed to suppress a pucker from my black coffee. Then the smile faded, and her light green eyes avoided mine again.
    “I’ll miss you, though,” she said, so softly I wasn’t sure I was even supposed to hear it, or to reply.
    As my coffee now grew cold, I found myself squinting into Deans’ Auto Body, trying to discern if Toby Dean was one of the men tinkering about in the shadows of the large garage.
    It had been a surprise to hear his name come out of Charlotte’s mouth yesterday—I’d forgotten to think about him for years. Toby Dean. That boy with the name like a sausage, my mother used to call him. Since he was a boy and a whole year older than us, Charlotte and I didn’t pay him much attention when we were little kids. On the rare occasions when we did come in contact with him, he was usually doing something that didn’t make much sense—like carrying a dead garter snake around in a greasy brown paper bag or whacking at his father’s overgrown hedges with a golf club.
    When we were really small, everyone called him Eyeball. He had a lazy