Chapter 12

Fuck the read-the-journal-slowly plan. I need to find out what else is in here. I sit on my bedroom floor and read as quickly as I can while still paying attention to what the words actually say. Jesus. There’s a lot more about how Meg hadn’t been feeling well and how she didn’t think she had much time left. She even went to her doctor by herself one day without her parents or me or anyone knowing to get checked out. She took a fucking cab—a weak, sick, pregnant, seventeen-year-old girl taking a cab to a secret doctor’s appointment so she could find out how long she had to live. Goddammit, Meg. Why didn’t you tell me?

The doctor told her there was no real way to know for sure, but it looked to him like she didn’t have much time left. Weeks. The cancer was everywhere. Her organs were going to fail. He wanted to do an emergency C-section, get the baby out of her, give her body a final chance to bounce back. A Hail Mary pass, he called it.

She said no. It was too soon for the baby to be born. She’d accepted her fate; she just needed to hold out as long as she could—for the baby.

I throw the book against the wall and pace the room.

Why the hell would she do this? Why wouldn’t she give herself every possible chance?

It wasn’t a pro-life thing—Meg was always going on about women’s rights and equal pay and gender inequalities and “the old, white jackasses in Washington who think having a penis gives them the right to govern vaginas.” She was pro-choice. And she certainly made her choice, didn’t she?

I pick the book off the floor and flip to the next entry, searching through her scribble for some kind of meaning, some hint, some answer.

By the time I reach the end of the journal, one word has jumped out at me more than any of the thousands of others, the very last word on the very last line: legacy.

Hope’s been kicking a lot lately. It hurts when it happens, like I’m being beaten up from the inside out. But it’s okay. Actually, it’s the only thing that’s okay lately. I can’t look at my parents or Mabel, because all I see is anguish. They know I’m dying. They know it and they hate me for it. And Ryden…Ryden’s still in denial. It’s even harder to be around him. With him, I have to pretend. He still has hope, and I’m not going to take that away from him. It hurts to smile, but I will not stop. I will not take away his hope. I love him too much. And it makes me want to cry.

But then Hope kicks and I feel better, because she’s okay, she’s healthy. My little legacy.

That’s it. There’s nothing else in the book. Except the checklist.

Legacy.

Is that why Meg insisted on keeping the baby? Because she wanted something to leave behind? She could have written a book or donated her college fund to a charity or planted a goddamn tree. No, she had to do the one thing that guaranteed she would even need to leave something behind in the first place, the one thing that would ensure her thirty percent chance of survival plummeted down to a big fat zero.

I sink to my floor, the journal clutched in my hands.

Somewhere deep in my brain, sirens are going off, warning signals. Of what, I have no clue. But I go back to the beginning and start to reread.

When I get to the conversation about naming Hope, the one that sat funny in my gut the first and second and third time around, it’s like the words and letters unscramble themselves before my eyes, forming a clear message.

I know you, Meg. I know you have a reason for everything.

But this baby will have a mom and a dad.

Both of those sentences came from me. Absolute, undeniable, written-down proof that I’m an idiot. I knew Meg didn’t do anything without a well-thought-out reason. Of course she’d thought of all the possible outcomes and likelihoods. She knew from the moment she found out she was pregnant she was probably going to die but still decided having the baby was more important.

She was so insistent Hope have my last name because she knew all along that Hope wouldn’t have both a mom and dad. All that “everything is going to be fine” talk was total bullshit. She was lying to me the entire time.

I read through the rest of the journal, this newfound knowledge coloring every word.

Mabel

Alan

Ryden

This checklist means something, dammit. I’m even more sure of that now that I know Meg was keeping secrets from me. Lying to me. And I need to find out what.

• • •

I pull up to Alan’s. I texted him on my way over, and clearly he didn’t have any hot Saturday night plans because he’s waiting for me outside. “Hey,” I say, getting out of the car.

“What’s up?” he asks.

I pull Hope’s car seat out of the car, hand it to Alan, and keep moving straight toward his front door.

“Dude, what’s going on?” he asks, keeping up with my pace.

“I need to look through your room. Is that cool?” I stop on the stoop and turn to face him.

He stares at me, looking completely freaked. But he holds the door open. “Be my guest.”

I know he said there were no journals here, but I need to see for myself. I go straight to his room—I’d been here a couple of times before with Meg, back when she was still strong and barely pregnant. It looks exactly like you’d expect: twin bed covered in a neat blue comforter, books stacked, clothes put away, and hip-hop and Korean movie posters covering almost every inch of wall. There’s also a poster of Grace Park in a bikini that is hot as fuck.

I check his bookshelves first. Nothing. Nightstand, dresser…clear. All there is under the bed is a big drawer filled with winter clothes. I rummage through them, but nothing is hidden in the piles. There are a few notebooks lined up spine out on the shelf over his desk, but they’re all three-subject books and filled with Alan’s class notes. Not a journal in sight.

Alan stands in the doorway, Hope in his arms. She’s out of her car seat, awake, blowing little spit bubbles between her lips. She’s as happy in his arms as she is in my mom’s. The kid loves literally everyone except me.

“I need to check the rest of your house.”

Alan wordlessly steps out of the way.

I don’t know what I’m doing. I’ve never been in most parts of his house before. But I can’t stop. I’m desperate. I go room to room, looking through bookshelves and under beds and in dresser drawers and in closets. Some part of me knows there’s no way Meg would have hidden one of her journals in Alan’s dad’s underwear drawer, but another part of me says to look everywhere.

When I get to the kitchen, I run into Alan’s mother. I haven’t actually gotten farther than the driveway all the times I stopped by to drop off or pick up Hope this week, so I haven’t seen her in a while. “Mrs. Kang,” I say, stopping short.

She looks more surprised to see me than I am to see her. Which makes sense. She lives here. It’s not that far off that she’d be in her own kitchen. But I’m probably the last person she expected to burst through her kitchen door, red-faced and ransacking her house for my own personal version of the Holy Grail.

“Hello, Ryden! How lovely to see you. Did Alan tell you how much we love having little Hopie spend time with us? She’s such a doll.”

Hopie? “Yes,” I say, trying to calm down. “Thank you so much for taking her in. I really appreciate it.”

“Of course! Any time.” Her face suddenly loses its glow. “We all miss Meg so very much. It’s been quite a comfort to have little Hope around. Don’t you agree, Alan?”

I turn to find Alan and Hope standing behind me. “Yeah. I do.”

“Mrs. Kang, sorry if this is a weird question, but have you seen any of Meg’s journals lying around your house anywhere?”

Her eyebrows crinkle a little. “You mean those notebooks she was always writing in?”

“Yeah.”

She thinks for a minute. “No, I haven’t seen any. Not in quite a while.”

I nod. “Okay. Well, thanks anyway.”

Alan walks me back to my car.

“Yeah, so…sorry about all that,” I say.

“You going to explain now?”

I take Hope from him, and she immediately starts to whine. “I just thought…I don’t know what I thought.” I snap Hope’s car seat into the base and buckle her in. “I read some stuff in Meg’s journal…” I trail off. Suddenly I’m really tired. I close Hope’s door and let all my weight collapse against the side of the car.

I feel Alan’s eyes on me. “No offense, man, but you’re kind of a mess.”

I don’t say anything. Disagreement takes energy.

“Maybe it’s time to let this whole thing go, Ryden. I mean, really, even if she did leave two other journals somewhere—”

“She did.” I lift my head sharply and look at him. “I thought you agreed it was something she would do.”

“I said it was something she would do, not that she actually succeeded in doing it. But even if she did, and even if you do find them, what do you expect to happen? She’s still going to be gone, man. You’re driving yourself crazy. It’s not worth it.”

I push off from the side of the car and plant myself in the driver’s seat, looking back at Hope through the rearview mirror. “That’s where you’re wrong.”