Chapter 52
Tyler
December, Eleven Years Ago
Long Island
It was a completely ordinary afternoon. A Tuesday, a couple of weeks before Christmas break. The only unusual thing was that
Ingrid, instead of making Mikey his typical fifteen minutes late to the parking lot, had agreed to take Katie shopping for
some crap she needed for her upcoming winter musical instead. Mikey plopped into the passenger seat of my shitty car—it had
been my father’s; he’d left that too—and everything else was completely and utterly normal.
There was Depeche Mode on the radio—“Enjoy the Silence,” a perfect song—and Mikey was talking about his call with a scout—was it Arizona State?
Vanderbilt? No, it was Rice, it was definitely Rice, but Mikey was still thinking draft; his coaches were telling him he’d go top three in the draft easy, and that was, can you fucking believe it, four million dollars, and then his phone rang—he answered it on speaker; he’d been eating a massive sandwich; he never stopped eating, I think he must’ve eaten six thousand calories a day—and it was Ingrid, asking if we could bring cash to a thrift store up in Farmingdale, that they didn’t take credit cards and all Katie had brought was her mom’s Visa, and Mikey was refusing, he was telling her how he had one day off from training a week and wasn’t going to spend it catering to his little sister’s costume addiction, and then Katie started barking back that he had to help her, that he had no choice, that she was going to call their mom, and then Ingrid and Mikey were bickering too, and Ingrid was asking Mikey why he was such a dick to his little sister, why he couldn’t just shut up and say yes and support the one thing that mattered to her for a single afternoon, and then, just as I turned left, I said, “Mikey has a little sister? Weird, I hadn’t noticed,” and Mikey laughed and Ingrid hung up the phone because we were jackasses, because we were little kids, and then, out of nowhere, a flash of—
“TYLER! WATCH OUT!”
But it was too late, we were spinning, we were sliding; it all happened so fast, a whirl of trees, of ice, of white and brown
and hazy gray, of blinding suburban winter, of screaming branches and screeching brakes, of the shatter of glass and the pop
and shock and burn of airbags and one bloodcurdling scream, whose, I still did not know, because I was not in my body, because
I had closed my eyes, could you believe it, I’d closed my goddamn eyes, and when I opened them, everything was coated in white,
and I was sobbing, and—no, no, no—Mikey was too.
He was crushed into a mailbox. I’d hit a mailbox, a fucking USPS mailbox, iron and blue and halfway through my passenger window.
There was blood everywhere.
“Mikey?” I said. “Mikey, man—are you okay? Say something, please. Fucking say something right now. It’s not fucking funny.”
He turned to me.
I watched the light in his eyes go out.
“My arm,” he said. “I can’t feel my arm.”