When You Were Everything Read online

  BOOKS BY ASHLEY WOODFOLK

  The Beauty That Remains

  When You Were Everything

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2019 by Ashley Woodfolk

  Cover art copyright © 2019 by Rebecca Glendining

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Woodfolk, Ashley, author.

  Title: When you were everything / Ashley Woodfolk.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Delacorte Press, [2019] | Summary: In this story set in New York City and told in alternate timelines, teenaged best friends Cleo and Layla fall apart.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018060503 (print) | LCCN 2019000095 (ebook) | ISBN 978-1-5247-1592-2 (el) | ISBN 978-1-5-247-1591-5 (hc) | ISBN 978-1-5247-1593-9 (glb)

  Subjects: | CYAC: Best friends—Fiction. | Friendship—Fiction. | New York (N.Y.)—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.1.W657 (ebook) | LCC PZ7.1.W657 Wh 2019 (print) | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  Ebook ISBN 9781524715922

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

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  Contents

  Cover

  Books by Ashley Woodfolk

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Now

  What’s Past Is Prologue

  A Theory & a Snowman

  Ready for Battle

  Then: July

  Evil Genius

  You Over Everyone

  The Chorus Girls

  Now

  Exits and Entrances

  Dolly’s

  A Warning

  Then: August

  The First Day

  The Stacks, Part I

  Now

  You Actually Care?

  The Hot Seat, Part I

  Then: September

  Milkshakes

  The Park

  Now

  Lolly & Pop

  The Greystone

  Ambition

  Pretty Little Lies

  Priceless People

  Then: October

  We So Suck at Parties

  Something Wicked This Way Comes

  Todd

  Empty Threats

  Now

  Lunchtime Blues

  When You Were Everything

  Lipstick & Monologues

  Then: November

  Little Betrayals

  The Stacks, Part II

  Now

  Small Plates

  How It Feels to Break

  Auras

  Then: December, Week 1

  Feelings Change

  We’re Good

  Anywhere but Here

  Now

  A Chaperone

  Charity

  A Chance

  Then: December, Week 2

  Nobody

  The Patriarchy

  Now

  The Best Friend I Can Be

  The Rumor

  You Deserved to Know

  Then: December, Week 3

  What’s Done Cannot Be Undone

  The Musical

  Now

  She Tells Me Everything

  Men Should Be What They Seem

  Duh

  One More Terrible Truth

  Then: December, Week 4

  All About Me

  London

  Now

  Stormy Skye

  A New Beginning

  Spinning Stories

  Still Now

  The Hot Seat, Part II

  They’re Just People

  The Cover Girls

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  To all the girls who broke my heart.

  Losing you wounded me. Probably more than you know. If I hurt you just as deeply, I’m sorry.

  And I want you to know our friendship meant something to me.

  It always will.

  And to all the girls who feel left behind, forgotten, forsaken by a friendship that wasn’t supposed to be so tenuous, by a person who wasn’t supposed to be impermanent.

  The hurt will always be there. But it gets better.

  I promise.

  The band that seems to tie their friendship together will be the very strangler of their amity.

  —William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra: act 2, scene 6

  What’s done cannot be undone.

  —William Shakespeare, Macbeth: act 5, scene 1

  now

  WHAT’S PAST IS PROLOGUE

  Everything feels like a memory in a city when it snows.

  It goes all blurry around its edges, like even as it’s happening it’s already an old photograph. The whole world seems softer, gentler, quieter. And when New York is the city where it’s snowing, it’s more like the version that’s suspended in my snow globe collection, where everything about it appears to be small and clean and pretty, and where anything feels possible.

  I climb the sixty-six slippery stairs that lead to the Manhattan-bound platform at the subway station closest to my family’s Brooklyn apartment, looking down at my floral combat boots and humming along with the Nina Simone song swimming through my headphones. And for a moment I feel happy.

  But the snowy morning is making me nostalgic for something I can’t name; for a place or a moment that doesn’t really exist. I think of the past but also of new beginnings bright with possibility. I can’t help but think of Shakespeare, my favorite writer, whose stories are old but somehow still so right. My mind keeps spinning to friendship.

  I haven’t spoken to my best friend, Layla, in twenty-seven days, but the snow is making everything feel a little less real—even that. As I look out at the blurry city, I embrace the illusion that everything is fine because it’s snowing. And in the snow, I can pretend that the sad things in my life are just dreams I’ve misremembered.

  Maybe it’s the weather; maybe the song. But I hear Gigi’s voice in my head. My grandmother’s been gone for four years now, but memories of her still hit me in waves. Today is the day your life changes, Little Bird, I hear her say. Today things can be different and new and maybe even better.

  But then my wintry, soundtracke
d, semiperfect bubble bursts when I slip on the platform. And as I slam into the ground, the harsh truth of my own reality lands heavily, right on top of me.

  “Damn, girl! You aight?”

  “Oh my God!”

  “Is she okay?”

  “Everybody, back the fuck up!”

  “Give them some room!”

  “Pull her up, pull her up!”

  About eight arms reach for me all at once. My left earbud has fallen out, but my right one is still tucked into the curve of my ear so that I hear the screech of trains entering and exiting the station and everyone’s concern on one side and, now that the Nina song is over, Louis Armstrong singing “What a Wonderful World” on the other.

  A little kid hands me my glasses, scuffed but unbroken, and a woman wearing a hijab, hipster glasses, and bright red lipstick digs through her backpack and offers me a Band-Aid without taking out her own earbuds.

  “Thanks,” I say to the kid and all the other strangers, because it’s times like these when I really don’t get why New Yorkers have such a bad rep. When shit goes down, they’re there for you.

  Once I’m upright, I tuck the other earbud back into my ear so I’m drowning in sound again, just the way I like it, and take stock of my unfortunate situation. The leggings I’m wearing under my uniform skirt are ripped and one of my knees is scraped and bleeding a little, and worse, I see that my shoe is untied. I don’t know if the rogue lace is the reason for my fall, but with my luck, it probably is.

  Totally-Avoidable-and-All-My-Fault is kind of my brand.

  People are still staring at me and I feel my chin wobble, an embarrassed rage-cry in the making. But then a garbled announcement that no one understands peals through the station.

  “What?” a dude with a handlebar mustache says to no one in particular. “What the hell did it say?” There’s some kind of delay and everyone groans. A dozen hands pull out a dozen phones. And just like that, no one cares about me anymore. This is why I both love and hate New York. In a city like this one it’s easy to fade into the background. But it’s also inevitable that at some point, by someone, you’ll be overlooked. Or completely forgotten.

  And that’s when it hits me the way it always does: the fact that I’m alone; the fact that Layla is really lost to me. The unshakable certainty that we are never going to be friends again.

  It’s just like it was—just like it still is—with Gigi. I can forget about her for hours or even whole days, and then the truth rushes back like a brush fire, burning me from the inside out.

  That person you loved? They’re gone.

  Gigi taught me to pay attention when the world is trying to tell you something. So for a second I allow myself to look and listen, to notice the world around me. But inevitably, that leads to noticing my utter aloneness, and to thinking of every ugly thing I’ve done that has led to this moment.

  I limp over to the closest bench. I pull out my water bottle and squirt a little of its contents over my bleeding knee. And instead of taking in the world, the way I know Gigi would have wanted, I sulk.

  There’s a line in The Tempest about the past being prologue to everything that comes after, and I can’t help but remember it as memories of Layla fill my head. The thing I didn’t realize about having a best friend while I still had one is just how wrapped up she is in everything I do. Every outfit I wear or song I listen to. Every place I go. Losing someone can leave you haunted.

  I look up, through the lens of still-falling snow, feeling the familiar burn of tears forcing their way to the surface. The Louis Armstrong song that reminds me too much of the day I met her is still pouring into my ears. I swallow hard and yank out my earbuds. I push the tears back down.

  I’m sick of crying every time I see or hear or feel something that reminds me of her. But before I can move on, I have to shake off the weight of my past. Of our past. I need to rewrite our prologue before it destroys me.

  So that’s exactly what I’m going to do.

  A THEORY & A SNOWMAN

  When the train finally shows up, it’s so crowded that I end up smashed into a corner between a stroller and the doors, and the guy in front of me is wearing a backpack he refuses to take off. One of the buckles is pressing against my boob.

  I want to growl at this guy to put his bag on the floor, for everyone to give me some goddamn space, but I don’t, because I don’t do stuff like that. If Layla were here, she’d tell the dude off.

  But she isn’t! I shout inside my own head. For fuck’s sake, stop torturing yourself.

  So I imagine a clean sheet of paper. Mentally, I start making the list I need to rid myself of thoughts like these. The steps I need to take to rid myself of Layla…for good. The systematic way I’m going to unhaunt my whole life.

  I get off a few stops later when we reach Layla’s station—the one where she’d hop on the train every morning and find me. I’d always sit in the first car so she’d know to walk to the front of the platform to wait. When the train pulled in, I’d look for the smear of her black hair, or the blur of her hand as she waved at me. We met and rode to school every day that way.

  I follow the flow of bodies toward the stairwell, push my way through the turnstile, and step out onto the sidewalk. I slip my earbuds back in, put on Ella Fitzgerald, and look left and right, making sure no one who knows me is around. The coast looks clear, so I turn my music up, cross my fingers, and keep moving. Something about skipping school makes me feel like I’m actually in control of my life.

  I walk down Layla’s block, taking in all the familiarities of the street. The way the door to the bodega on the corner doesn’t close all the way. The ragged rainbow flag hanging from the fire escape of the building beside hers. The same yellowed flyer’s been taped in the window of the deli advertising their “new” kosher salami since I was twelve.

  We always got Popsicles at that bodega in the summer. We challenged each other to jump and touch the hanging threads of that flag whenever we walked past it. We never tried the salami, but we’d get sandwiches and ninety-nine-cent Arizona iced teas at the deli almost every time I slept over. If it was warm out, we’d eat on Layla’s stoop.

  I keep walking, past Layla’s building and into the park where we first met. Its lawn is wide and a little green even though it’s February. The grass is dusted with snow and it’s still falling fast. I go to the exact spot where I was sitting the day I met Layla—the exact spot where she saw me crying about Gigi and where she started singing to make me feel better—and I text my dad.

  Daddio, I send. You’re off today, right?

  His response comes almost instantly. Yep.

  Can you meet me?

  Cleo…

  Daddy…

  You better be on your way to school.

  Not exactly.

  SIGH.

  I start typing another response, but then my phone starts to vibrate with a call.

  “I…fell on the subway platform,” I say to him instead of hello. It’s a low blow, but I’ll say whatever I need to get him here. “The trains were delayed and my leggings are ripped and it’s snowing, and you know how the snow reminds me of Gigi. I just had an awful morning, okay? Please don’t give me a hard time about this, Daddy. Not today.”

  He sighs, long and low. “Cleo, this seriously has to be the last time. If it isn’t, I’ll have to talk to your mother.”

  I gasp.“Et tu, Brute?” My dad knows almost everything about Layla, and that I’ve been skipping school to avoid her. But as long as my grades don’t slip, he lets me get away with pretty much whatever I want. My mom’s another story.

  “This is the last time, Cleo.”

  I’m pretty sure it’s an empty threat, so I grin.

  “It will be. I promise. Now, can you meet me?”

  “Where are you?” he asks.

  * * *

&nb
sp; —

  He arrives about twenty minutes later. I grabbed a cup of coffee for him, and a tea for me, from the café across the street while I waited, so as soon as I spot him, I run over and push the steaming cup into his gloved hands.

  “Oh, honey,” he says as soon as he sees my leggings. He straightens his glasses and pulls me to him. He plants a kiss on my forehead and his bristly goatee tickles my eyebrow. “Why did you want me to meet you here? You should have just come over.”

  “I want to build a snowman,” I say, hating that I sound like a five-year-old. “Correction: I need to.”

  He makes his Librarian Face—an expression of both confusion and intrigue. He makes this face when he’s cautiously interested in or fascinated by a book, an idea, or a person. I’ve seen him use it with patrons at the library where he works when he’s asked a particularly strange question, and as he reads articles on his tablet in the mornings. Since he moved out a few months ago I’ve seen this face (and him) a lot less, but it’s still so recognizable that I grin at his eggshell-brown skin and dark freckles; his wide, scrunched-up nose. “A snowman,” he says, and it’s a statement and a question all at once.