Surviving High School

imagined throwing him in the pool, jumping in after him, and forcing him to the bottom. She imagined keeping him there until he took a deep lungful of water.
    Nick looked stricken, but Emily kept talking. “You put her in your car and drove off the road and killed her.”
    “Emily,” he said. “I wasn’t driving.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN
    The yearbook room glowed with the faint blue light of computer monitors and smelled like rotten eggs, and Emily, despite being used to the constant scent of chlorine, made a face as she walked in.
    “Sorry about that,” said Nick. “We still have a traditional photo-processing lab in back, and the chemicals kind of stink.”
    “What are we doing here?”
    “I’ve got all my photos from the last year stored here. I figured if you really wanted to get to know your sister, this would be a good place to start.”
    He booted up the computer and clicked through a few files before getting to one called Summer/Fall/Winter Sara Photos.
    “These pictures didn’t exactly make it into the yearbook,” said Nick, his finger hovering over the mouse, ready to click open the folder. “Sara made a big deal over keeping our relationship a secret. Almost no one at school knew about it. Then after she was—gone—she kind of became this legend, you know? The girl who’d given up everything for her swimming. Most people didn’t know she even had a social life. And when I saw your dad in the ER the night she died, he wouldn’t even let me go into her room. I tried calling him a couple of days later, to see if I could come to the funeral, but he wouldn’t talk to me other than to say I’d better stay away. I think he preferred to pretend that I didn’t exist, that I was just some stranger. Maybe she and I—our relationship—didn’t fit with the image of the perfect daughter he had in his head.”
    Emily sat glassy-eyed, trying to take it all in. Her father had known about Nick and Sara?
    “You said you weren’t driving,” she said, remembering why she’d come here in the first place. “Who was?”
    “I was teaching her. We’d been practicing for weeks. When she was supposed to do her jog home, I’d get in the passenger seat, and she’d get behind the wheel. Your dad wouldn’t give her lessons. He said it would be too dangerous. Really, though, I think he didn’t want her to be able to go where she wanted. He didn’t want to give up that control.”
    “Sara was driving?”
    “She begged me to teach her,” he said. “She’d never driven in the rain before. It was late and wet, the first storm of the season. Before sunset, I’d been leaning out the window, takingphotos of the clouds as your sister drove. And then it was dark. Time to go home. Except we didn’t make it back to your place. We came around a bend—not even going fast or anything—and the car just kept skidding on a patch of water. Right over the side of a ditch.”
    “My dad—he never told me. He always said that you—”
    “What’s it matter?” Nick asked. “It’s still my fault. Even if I wasn’t behind the wheel, I was still the one who let her drive. Everyone just assumed I was the driver—and I felt so guilty about what happened—I let them think what they wanted. We’d always kept each other’s secrets. I wanted to keep this last one.”
    Emily turned back to look at the monitor.
    “Can you open the folder?” she asked. “I want to see the photos.”
    Nick double-clicked the file and took a step back. A dozen thumbnails of photos filled the screen.
    “There’s a few hundred pictures in there if you scroll down,” he said. “Why don’t you look through them? Take your time. I’ve got—uh—work to do over in the next room. Come get me when you’re done.”
    For the next hour, Emily looked at Nick’s photos one by one.
    She saw Sara sitting on a mountaintop at dusk, her light brown hair dark with shadows.
    Sara in a Ferris wheel car at an amusement park, smiling wider than Emily had even thought possible as the city’s lights glimmered in the background.
    Sara doing a cartwheel at the beach.
    Sara towering over a bowl filled with thirty-two scoops of ice cream, a huge spoon in hand, her mouth open wide as if prepared to swallow everything whole.
    Sara grabbing a snowman by his carrot nose.
    Sara on the beach, covered in sand shaped to look like a mermaid’s tail.
    Sara asleep on an unfamiliar couch.
    Sara curled up against Nick, nuzzling into his chest.
    Emily was crying