Chapter 1 #3
Cassandra grinned, picking up her purse and blazer from the chair. “Okay, I won’t be gone more than fifteen, in case Eli’s late.”
“I’ll be fine, Cass.”
Her smile faltered, but she nodded.
When the door clicked shut behind her, I took a breath, relishing, for a moment, the quiet. The sounds of the hospital still filtered in through the door, but at least they were out there. At least, for a moment, I was alone.
I’d only have a minute. I flipped back the thin hospital blanket, grimacing at the bandages on my legs. There were three of them. One ran along my right thigh. One wrapped around my right foot, the other was on the inside of my left calf.
But the worst was the one they wouldn’t let me see. It was the windshield that had gotten me, the doctor said. It had separated from the frame and twisted into the cab, slicing my face.
The doctor, a woman who looked to be somewhere between my age and Cass’s 35, kept telling me I was lucky. “People don’t often survive trauma such as you went through.” But she kept saying it. Lucky. She said it enough times that I knew she was trying to compensate.
I slid my feet onto the cold vinyl of the hospital floor.
“Let it heal a little first,” Cass had insisted, worrying her hands together. “It looks much worse than it is.”
A cart with a squeaky wheel rolled by outside.
I grasped hold of the IV pole, crying out at the pinch in my foot.
My chest ached where my ribs were still so bruised.
But with a creak of four tiny wheels, I shuffled around the end of the bed, closing what felt like a hundred miles to the bathroom.
Pain ripped through my foot where the bandage brushed the floor—walking was agony.
But I had to see.
The bathroom door was closed, the gap between it and the floor a strip of dark shadow.
My hand was damp with sweat, from nerves or exertion, I wasn’t sure.
I pressed my palm against the door, pausing as the cold from the door sucked up into my skin.
For the briefest moment, a desperate jolt of fear rocketed through me.
Maybe I should figure out the other things first.
What happened with Seamus? Why had I gotten into his truck? Even what I was supposed to do with the rest of my life felt easier, at this moment, than opening this door and looking in the mirror.
I knew this was the last moment I’d have to picture myself as I was. To know myself as the woman before the accident. I knew I was changed, and it wasn’t just going to be in the way I looked.
Outside, I heard a deep male voice. Someone agitated. Eli.
Shit. I only had a moment before he’d be here.
I turned the handle, pushing the bathroom door open without a sound. There, across from me, was a full-sized mirror stretching from the counter to the ceiling. I was backlit by the comparative brightness of my room, but I could still see.
Even as I reached up for the bandage, something in me screamed, Don’t look. Don’t look. Don’t look!
Footsteps pounded down the hallway. “This way?” The voice sounded. Definitely Eli. He’d probably heard that Cass had left me alone.
I was out of time. I closed my eyes, reaching for the light switch at the same time as I used my other hand to claw at the tape affixing the bandage to my skin, ripping it free. Then, taking one quick, bracing breath, I opened my eyes.
The woman in the mirror wasn’t me. I was a monster.
A scar, a raised, angry red gash stitched with black sutures, ran from the right side of my forehead over the bridge of my nose and across my left cheekbone.
Both my eyes were puffy and bruised black and purple.
An ugly brown bruise pressed over one side of my mouth and chin, and a split ran right down the middle of my bottom lip.
My hair was the only thing that looked like me—long brown waves hanging over my shoulders.
It felt wrong, seeing that hair with this face.
It felt incongruous, like the Chelsea that hair belonged to was someone else.
Someone who died in that wreck. Now I knew why Cass hadn’t let me turn on the light in the bathroom. Why she hadn’t let me use it alone.
“Sir!” A woman’s voice stopped Eli.
I strode to the counter. There was my cosmetic bag, unopened. Cass brought it with aspirations that I might clean myself up. I pulled down the zipper, feeling around in the bottom for what I knew was in there.
“Sure,” Eli was saying outside. “So how much longer?”
I couldn’t hear the response.
I pulled out the scissors.
If I was gone—if the old Chelsea was gone—I wanted no part of her here. There was no point.
I held out a chunk of my hair and closed the blade over it, snipping without hesitation. The length left in my hand belonged to her. The remaining inches that flopped back onto my skull were me.
I kept going, chopping and slicing until a blanket of hair lay on the counter and I was left with hair only a few inches long; an uneven mass of brown. I smiled, feeling a hot tear slip from my swollen eye, stinging as it rolled over the gouge in my face.
Maybe seeing myself like this should have alarmed me.
Maybe what I’d just done should have alarmed me.
Instead, for the first time since I woke up, I felt like I had control over one small part of me once again.
I couldn’t control what had happened to me or what would come next, but I had hold of this.
I backed up until I was standing in the bathroom's doorframe once more. Now I was someone new.
Eli came through the door then.
“Chels!” he exclaimed to my back. “What are you doing out of bed?”
His voice was incredulous, but it was nothing compared to his expression when he came behind me to stand in the doorway.
He didn’t look at my face in the mirror at first. He was staring at my shorn scalp.
“Chelsea? Did they do this to you?” His normally strong voice had gone crackly.
Then he looked into the bathroom; the mess of hair on the counter and sink. Then at me.
“Jesus Christ,” Eli said.
Then my big brother began to cry.
“Eli,” I said, “it’s okay.”
And it was. Or it would be.
But Eli, tears streaming down his face, balled his hands into fists.
“Seamus,” he said. “This is Seamus’s fault.”
“What?” Suddenly, I was snapped out of my own head and into reality. “No!” I exclaimed. “It’s not him.”
“It is him! He was driving, Chels, he did this! I’m going to fucking kill him.”
“Eli!” I shouted, grabbing at his shirt. But the movements only made my face scream with pain. The fabric slipped from my fingers and I gripped the doorframe for balance, waiting for the pain to pass.
But when I turned back, Eli was gone.