Chapter 15 #2
“Evie, hi,” she says. She sounds breathless.
I haven’t seen her since the last time I was here.
She looks like she has more color, but there are bags beneath her eyes and her hair is limp.
There’s a brittleness to her movements, as if she isn’t sure of herself or anything she touches.
“Ash let us know you were coming over. How have you been?”
“Good,” I say reflexively, then catch myself. I shouldn’t lie to them. “I mean—sorry, actually kind of bad. Right in this moment I’m okay.”
Even her smile is brittle. “I’m glad to hear that. And your mom?”
“She’s keeping busy. Mostly dealing with . . . me. She says hi.”
“Hi to her too. Are you hungry? Do you want anything to eat?”
“I’m okay,” I say. Should I lie about that, though? Should I let her feed me? It might make her feel better. I glance at Ash.
“We’re going to play CoH,” he tells her.
“Oh, okay. Have fun.”
We head upstairs. Once safely inside Ash’s room, he says, “Sorry, I was trying to get you past them.”
“It’s okay. It wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be.” His mom wasn’t normal, but she wasn’t a wreck, either. Nothing like at the funeral. “Your mom seems like she’s doing better.”
He drops into his chair. CoH is still running on his computer; his character is standing on the Fenhallow campus. “She’s getting good at pretending. I guess you pretend long enough and one day it becomes real, and you’re better. Hasn’t worked for me yet, but maybe I haven’t tried hard enough.”
I get the feeling he’s not just talking about Alissa.
I help myself to his bed and pull my computer out of my backpack, taking the moment to figure out how I want to word my question.
I don’t ask about this often, and I don’t want to upset him, but that thing he said after we ran out of church has been floating in the back of my mind. “They think we do this to ourselves.”
“Was it bad like this after the crash?” I ask.
I glance over and find his expression surprisingly open. He takes a beat to answer, his fingers pinching at the fabric of his sweatpants on his right leg.
“You mean, did I feel the way I do now?”
“Yeah.”
He scratches the back of his neck. Looks around, his dark eyes settling on different spots in the room, anything but me.
“You don’t have to tell me,” I say.
“No, it’s okay. I’m just trying to . . . I don’t remember a lot from that time. Well, I do remember it, but I try not to, you know? It’s hard to think about.”
“Yeah.” Maybe it will be that way with Alissa’s death, for me. Hopefully I won’t remember much, just a long blur of darkness and hurt, but nothing specific. I don’t know if I want that, but it seems like it would make things easier.
Ash fists his hand in his sweatpants now; he’s going to worry a hole through the fabric, if he’s not careful. “What was I like after the crash? I know how I thought I was, but nobody really talks about it with me, and if I was an asshole, I want to know.”
“You want the truth?”
“I wouldn’t have asked you if I didn’t.”
I cross my legs and set my computer aside for the moment.
“Okay. You were really scary. You glared at everyone. I remember the room always being on edge whenever you were around because nobody knew if you were going to blow up, or break something.” I stop as his expression starts to twist into disgust. “You’re good now, though,” I finish lamely.
“I’m really sorry,” he says. “I never wanted to scare you.”
I don’t know how to make him feel better about that, so instead I ask, “What was it like?”
He pauses again, long enough that I think he might not answer, but then he motions to the bed. “Can I come sit with you?”
I scoot over. He pushes out of his desk chair and in one long stride is sliding onto the bed next to me, curling his legs up. The right one moves only a little less fluidly than the left. He faces me, looking down at his hands, a little pocket of space between us.
“It’s easier for me to talk like this,” he says, sounding embarrassed. “It’s like, not as much space for the words to escape and other people to hear them.”
“I get it.”
He takes another second. The words come slowly but steadily.
“So, you know the basics, right? Everyone does. A drunk driver hit me off that weird S-turn on Lincoln Street. I guess the first thing is that I think about that moment all the time. My music was too loud, I wasn’t paying enough attention, I took the turn too fast. For the first couple of months after the crash, all I could do was replay that moment in my head.
Like, imagining the ways I could have avoided it.
It’s kind of torture to sit there and fix a fucked-up situation in your head over and over and over again when there’s nothing you can do about it in real life.
“I don’t remember the actual crash. Just headlights and squealing tires.
Then I woke up in the hospital to my mom crying next to the bed.
I hate it when my mom cries; she cries when I really fuck up, when I’ve hurt her feelings.
But that time she was crying because she was scared I could’ve died and she was happy I was alive.
I’d never seen her like that. I could tell my dad had been crying too.
And Alissa, obviously. And I just felt like I’d fucked up so spectacularly.
I’d made all of them worry so much. I didn’t feel like .
. . I didn’t feel like they should be crying over me.
If I’d made them feel like that, I wasn’t worth it.
“So that’s the first thing, and then the doctor tells me all the shit that’s broken.
How close I came to dying. I don’t think that part ever really set in; all I cared about was that my leg had gotten wrecked.
” He laughs. “I actually asked if I was going to be able to play in the soccer game that Saturday. The doctor and my parents looked at me with—God, I hate thinking about it—with all this pity, like I wasn’t going to be able to handle it when they told me I’d be out for the rest of the season.
That I’d have to learn how to walk again.
“They were right; I couldn’t handle it. I was stressed as fuck because I got in a life-changing accident, and I couldn’t play the game that helped get my stress out.
Couldn’t walk, couldn’t do things for myself, had to have help getting dressed and taking showers and .
. . all kinds of things. I know there are people whose lives are like that all the time, and I got used to it, but it’s a serious adjustment, and when it happens so suddenly, it really sucks.
“And on top of all that there’s the pain.
It hurts so much, all the time. They give you meds.
. . .” He pauses, frowning. “But you can only take so many a day, and sometimes you wake up in the middle of the night and you can’t move and you can’t think because everything is just a constant throbbing pain.
All your bones are set in place with metal pins and things have to regrow, and then they put you in physical therapy and by that point you just want to stop having doctors’ appointments, you want people to leave you alone, you want to stop feeling anything for like five fucking minutes—”
His cheeks are red, and he takes several long, steadying breaths. I settle my hands on his knees and wait.
Finally he starts talking again. “I hated everything. I hated that drunk asshole who ran into my car. I hated my dad for making me go to physical therapy. I hated my mom for asking me if I needed anything. I hated Alissa for having working legs. I hated my friends who joked around because I wanted them to know how much it hurt, and I hated my friends who were serious because I needed them to lighten up. I hated myself for hating everyone. I even . . .”
“Hated me?” I say.
“Yeah,” he admits. “For not, I don’t know, treating me like I wanted you to treat me. It was a stupid way to think. I didn’t really hate you, and you didn’t do anything wrong.”
“How did you want me to treat you?”
He glances up, meets my eye, smiles a little bit, ashamed. “Kiss it better. Tell me it was going to be okay, and that I was still good-looking even though my face got cut open.”
I smile back. “If I had known I was allowed to do that, I might’ve. For the record, you are still very good-looking. Even better than before.”
He laughs and scoops the hair away from his face with one hand.
“Anyway. Yes, that time was bad. It got better slowly. My leg healed, the physical therapy started to work, the pain lessened and eventually went away. The first day I was able to run again—that was back in January, you remember that? I just went running barefoot in the snow—I felt like a whole new person. I felt like things could be okay again. It wasn’t perfect, but it was better than it had been.
But there’s always that fear that it could happen again.
You could go back to that place, and maybe you won’t come out the second time. ”
He pauses once again. His voice softens.
“And then Alissa died, and I felt like I’d spent months being so wrapped up in my own bullshit that I didn’t notice what was going on with her.”
Silence falls. I want to hug him, or kiss him, or swaddle him in soft blankets and put him somewhere he can be safe and comfortable forever.
I want to do whatever will make him feel better the fastest, but I don’t know what that is.
So I say, “It wasn’t your fault. I didn’t see it, either. No one did.”
“But I should have. We used to be close. When we were kids, I could tell she was hurt on the playground before she started crying. I was always the one who would bring her to Mom or Dad, or get the Band-Aids myself. I wasn’t even that much older than her, but it was my job.
I was her big brother.” His voice hitches on was.