What Happened to Goodbye(7)
Author: Sarah Dessen

I never picked the moment. It always chose me. I just knew, somehow, what would work at the exact instant that I needed it to.

“I’m Liz,” I said, turning back to her.

I liked the sound of it. Simple, three letters.

“Liz,” she repeated, sealing the deal. “It’s nice to meet you.”

Back at the house, I unpacked my suitcase, finished putting away the groceries, and moved our couch four places in the living room before deciding it looked best in the very spot my dad and I had unceremoniously dropped it the day before when we brought it in from the U-Haul. Just to be sure, though, I plopped down on it with a glass of milk and booted up my laptop.

My home page was still set to my last Ume.com home page, the one for Beth Sweet. At the top was a picture of me, taken on the beach, our bungalow a pink-and-green blur behind me. There was my list of activities (yearbook, volunteering, student council) and interests (travel, reading, hanging with my friends). Said friends were just below, all one hundred and forty-two of them, face after tiny face I would, most likely, never see again. I scrolled down to my comment section, scanning the handful of new ones there:

Girl, we miss you already! The last board meeting sucked without you.

Beth, I heard from Misty you moved. Awful short notice, hope you are ok. Call me!

What happened to goodbye?

I leaned a little closer to the screen, reading these four words again, and once more. Then, against my better judgment, I clicked on the face beside them, bringing up Michael’s page.

There he was, sitting on the seawall, in his wet suit, his hair wet and wicking up in the back. He was looking to the right, at the ocean, not the camera, and seeing him I felt that same little nervous tug in my stomach. We’d only known each other a couple of months, since meeting on the beach one morning when I was taking a walk and he was out catching early swells. I spent 6:45 to 7:15 with him for weeks, working up to . . . well, nothing, as it turned out.font>

But he was right. I hadn’t said goodbye. It had been easier, like always, to just disappear, sparing myself the messy details of another farewell. Now, my fingers hovered over my track pad, moving the cursor down to his comment section before I stopped myself. What was the point? Anything I said now would only be an afterthought.

In truth, since my parents’ split, I hadn’t had much faith in relationships and even less of an inclination to start any lasting ones of my own. At home, I’d had several friends I’d known since grade school, girls I’d played Rainbow Soccer with and stuck close to in middle school. I’d had a couple of boyfriends, and gotten my heart broken more than once. I was a normal girl in a normal town, until the divorce happened.

Then, suddenly, I wasn’t just one of the group anymore: no one else had a coach for a stepdad, a scandal at home, and new siblings on the way as an aftermath. It was all so public and awful, and while my friends tried to be there for me, it was too difficult to explain what was going on. So I pulled back from everything and everyone I’d known. It hadn’t been until we got to Petree that I realized I’d been changing even before we started moving, that my reinvention began when I was still in the most familiar of places. Once the setting was totally new, though, I finally could be, as well.

Since we’d been moving, I’d gotten smart about dealing with people. I knew I wouldn’t be staying forever, so I kept my feelings at the temporary stage, too. Which meant making friends easily, but never taking sides, and picking guys I knew wouldn’t last for the long haul, or any haul at all, for that matter. My best relationships, in fact, usually started when I knew we were about to move to a new place. Then, I could just go all in and totally relax, knowing that whatever happened, I could cut and run. It was why I’d started hanging out with Michael, a boy who was older, out of school, and with whom I could never have had any sort of future. That way, when I didn’t, it was no surprise.

I clicked back to Beth Sweet’s page, then signed out. BE THE U IN UME! the subsequent page read. SIGN UP FOR YOUR NEW ACCOUNT NOW! I was just typing my e-mail address and Liz Sweet when my computer made a cheerful beeping noise and my webcam activated itself.

Crap, I thought, quickly putting down my laptop on the coffee table and darting into the kitchen. HiThere!, the video-chat application, had come preloaded on my computer, and no matter what I did I couldn’t seem to disable it. Which shouldn’t have been an issue, really, as none of my friends used it anyway. Unfortunately, someone else did.

“Mclean?” A pause, some static. “Honey? Are you there?”

I leaned against the fridge, closing my eyes as my mother’s voice, pleading, drifted through our empty house. This was her last resort, after I’d ignored her messages and e-mails, the one way she still, somehow, was always able to track me down.

“Well,” she said now, and I knew that if I looked at my screen, I’d see her there, craning her neck, looking around for my face in yet another room she didn’t recognize. “I guess you’re not home. I just had a free moment, wanted to say hello. I miss you, honey. And I was thinking about your applications, if you’d heard anything, and how if you end up here at Defriese, we can—”

This thought was interrupted by a sudden shriek, followed by another. Then, babbling and what sounded like a truggle before she spoke again.

“Okay, you can sit in my lap, but be careful of the computer. Connor! What did I just say?” More muffled noises. “Madison, honey, look in the camera. Look there! See? Can you say hi to Mclean? Say, hi, Mclean! Hi, big—Connor! Give me that pencil. Honestly, both of you, just—”

I pushed off the fridge, then out the kitchen door onto the deck. Outside, the air was cold, the sky clear, and I just stood there, looking at that basketball goal, her voice finally muffled behind me.

From where I was standing, I had a partial view of the dining room of the house next door, where a woman with short, frizzy hair, wearing a plaid sweater and glasses, was sitting at the head of the table. There was an empty plate in front of her, the fork and knife crossed neatly across its center. To her left was a man I assumed to be her husband, tall and skinny, also with glasses, drinking a glass of milk. Their faces were serious, both of them focused on whoever was sitting at the other end. All I could see, though, was a shadow.

I went back inside, pausing in the kitchen to listen. There was only silence and the fridge whirring, but I still approached my laptop with caution, creeping around to the front and peeking over to make sure there was only the screen saver in view before I sat down again. As I expected, there was a HiThere! message bubble, bouncing cheerfully from side to side as it waited for me.