“You know what Madison let me do?” Leah asks. She’s excited to tell me something; I can tell by the way she’s standing on her tippy toes, like she wants to get the words to me faster.

“No, what did she let you do?” I ask, scooping Leah up on my hip, and carrying her up the stairs. Maybe she’ll be so distracted by this story to feel sad about the news I’m going to give her at the top.

“She let me ride her pony,” Leah beams.

“Did she?” I ask. Great, now she’s going to want a real pony.

“Uh huh! And I fed it a carrot. And then we watched it poop,” she giggles. I laugh with her, not letting myself look at the closed door across the hall from me.

“Well that sounds like you had a pretty good day,” I say.

Leah nods.

“I have to tell you something, and I want you to remember that today was a really good day. And…when I’m done, I want you to know that there’s a present for you, okay?” Thank god Paige left a present.

“Present?” Leah says. Her front teeth are larger than the rest, and it makes her lisp her S’s. It’s may be my favorite sound on earth. I’ve recorded her saying the seashell thing a dozen times.

“Yep,” I smile. It takes work to hold it in place, because telling her Paige is gone is like going through it all over again—and it makes me so unbelievably sad.

“You know how Paige came to live with us because she really needed a place to go?” I start. She’s smiling at me for now, and nodding. “Well, her sister needed her to come live with her again. And she needed her just as much as Paige needed us for a while.”

She did need me. For a while. And I know she loved me somewhere in there.

“She’s not here anymore?” Leah asks, her bright smile falling. She’s looking at the closed door, her hand picking at the bottom of her dress.

“No, sweetie. But…” I walk her to her room, opening the door so she sees the gift on her bed. “She left something for you.”

Leah looks up at me for permission to go to her gift. I tilt my head toward her bed, urging her on. She walks toward it tentatively, pulling the letter out from under the ribbon that I tucked back in there after reading it earlier today. She holds it up for me to read to her, so I do. She likes that Paige calls her a princess. I like it too. It was a nice touch.

When I’m done reading, she has a faint smile on her face, and she pulls carefully at the lid on the perfectly-square pink box, almost peeking inside, afraid to see it all too quickly. She catches a glimpse of something she recognizes, then pulls the lid away, tossing the few sheets of tissue paper out of her way too. What she holds up is a very tall, very pink, very expensive-looking high heel. They’re the exact shoes Paige was wearing the first time she met Leah at the stairs. My daughter loved her then.

I think maybe I did too.

She reaches into the box for the other one, next working her fingers on her sandals, kicking them away and putting her feet inside Paige’s shoes. Her feet swim in them, but she stands and slides forward a few feet along the carpet, scooting in a circle so she can face me. Her smile—it lights up the room.

It lights up the emptiness in my heart, too.

And again, I have Paige to thank for that.

Chapter 17

Paige

Thank god they switched rooms. This is the room I started in, and I didn’t want to be somewhere totally new…again. Nate felt guilty having the bigger room, so he talked Ty into moving back. They’ve repainted everything white, too. Cass said the floor’s resident assistant got in trouble for letting them paint in the first place.

I like the white. It’s clean—like a fresh start.

It’s been a week. I don’t think time has ever moved so slowly. Every morning, my routine is the same. I wake up before Cass and Rowe. I shower. I dress. And then I spend an hour hiding out in the hallway surfing the Internet, obsessing over Twitter, looking for a sign of anything more than what’s come out.

That one story is still the only one that comes up. I know Chandra left campus. Cass said she thinks she took a medical withdrawal. I suppose that looks better on a college transcript than a forced trip to rehab. I hate that she was allowed to take a medical withdrawal. I’d rather see FAILURE stamped on her files. I’m spiteful when it comes to her—and I’m okay with that.

My video hasn’t seemed to spread any farther either. Most days, I look for that first. I care about me more than her. I’m okay with that, too.

You would think that I would grow less worried over becoming a viral hit the more time that passes, but I don’t—I worry more. I feel like the longer it takes to leak to the world, the more bang it will have when it does. But it seems that I’m just not worth going viral. I wish I could have predicted this would happen before I had a very honest and frank discussion with my father on Monday. Houston never cashed my check for the first month’s rent, which means money that was supposed to come out of my checking account never disappeared. My mom freaked out, so I lied.