Read Online Things Too Huge to Fix by Saying Sorry by Susan Vaught - Free Book Online Page B

dark, dark red for its eyes and the blood dripping from its mouth. I didn’t want to bother Indri while she drew, and I didn’t feel like writing, so I kept looking at the canopy of leaves over our head, watching how the shadows danced on the table when the branches moved, and thinking.
    The whole friendship ending thing—I hadn’t considered it much before Worm Dung pulled his trick at my locker. Iknew from listening to my parents talk that people “drifted apart” sometimes when they get older, but I couldn’t see that happening to Indri and Mac and me. I thought we’d go to high school together, and college, and then—well, I didn’t know what next, but it never occurred to me that we wouldn’t still be friends.
    Only now, we wouldn’t be, because Worm Dung messed everything up.
    So, if I had to make a list of what could make best friends just stop talking to each other like Grandma and Avadelle did, the first thing on that list would be one friend being a butthead to the other one and messing everything up, just like Worm Dung. Only to me, one friend would have to do something so bad that saying “I’m sorry” wouldn’t be enough to fix things. And the other friend would have to stay so mad, they didn’t care if the butthead friend apologized.
    It still didn’t make sense though. How could two people who really cared about each other be that stubborn? How could anything be that bad?
    Could something make Indri stop talking to me and stay angry with me forever? Something like . . . keeping a big secret? The thought made me sick to my stomach.
    I needed to tell Indri about the envelope and key my grandmother left for me. She might be mad that I waited two weeks, but I’d apologize and everything would be fine.
    Right?
    I had to work to breathe for a minute. When I finallycalmed myself down enough to talk, I said, “I looked up the definition of grove once. It means a little group of trees. So this Grove has to be misnamed, because it’s like, what, ten acres of magnolias and gum trees and really old oaks?”
    â€œForty species,” Indri said, filling in a spatter of blood near her demon-horse’s front hooves. “That’s what the website said last time I looked. People take tree tours with that map they can print.”
    Stop it, I told myself. Just talk to her. I mean, really. How bad could it be? Words wouldn’t come to me, so I opened my pack and took out Grandma’s envelope. I pulled her papers out and laid them on the table in front of me. Indri kept right on drawing, and I didn’t interrupt her. I fiddled with the key and waited, getting more and more miserable each passing second.
    Finally, Indri sat back and studied her sketch. Then her eyes flicked to me, and to the stack of papers and key in front of me. “What are you doing with all that stuff, Dani? You writing a novel?”
    â€œUm, no.” I tapped the key on the papers and tried not to panic. “My grandmother started talking out of her head. At least I thought she was. About papers she wrote for me, and a key, and how I was supposed to get it out of her purse once she was gone. And I couldn’t decide if she was gone, or gone enough, you know? But I went to look a couple of weeks ago, and they were really there. The papers. And this key.”
    Indri’s eyebrows lifted, and her eyes slitted down to crazed robot proportions.
    I talked faster. “See, she said something about writing it down, and I can’t help wondering if it’s about what happened between her and Avadelle, but it’s hard to read what she wrote so far, so I haven’t read much of it, but Grandma’s staying upset and she’s crying too, and I need to help her, so I thought maybe I should finally read all the rest of this and figure out what this key unlocks, but I can’t make myself get past the first few pages because