by Kaitlin Ward
“Not getting any less perfect,” I whisper.
One of his hands slides around my back, and his lips move to mine. I can hear myself breathing. I lean into him, but the cup holder stabs the edge of my knee like it’s guarding him.
His hands move up my sides slowly like he’s counting each of my ribs with his thumbs. My tongue grazes his lip. It tastes a little like chocolate. I realize his breathing is just as uneven as mine, and I try to press closer to him again.
The emergency brake stops me this time, knocking against my shin, reminding me that I’m in a car.
On a first date.
And maybe we shouldn’t get carried away.
“Liam,” I whisper. “Thank you for taking me to the Insectarium. Was it even fun for you?”
“Very, actually.” He leans back against his seat, his chest rising and falling heavily. His hands leave my sides, but one slips down to rest on my leg for a moment before he twists the key, which sends his car rumbling to life. “I learned a lot about bugs.”
“Is the educational element something you’re usually looking for in a date?”
He laughs and glances at me as he pulls back onto the road. “I brought you there, Amelia. I wanted to go, and I’m glad we went.”
His voice is so earnest, I can tell he means it, which is completely baffling to me. My insect hobby has always been something I do by myself. When Mom took me to the Insectarium, she politely pretended to care when I think in reality she was kind of dying inside. Liam doesn’t even like insects, but he knows how much I do, and he’s just … I twine my fingers around the hand he rests in my lap, unsure what to do with this heavy feeling of fondness that makes me want to wrap my arms around him and never let go.
Liam comes to a stop outside my house at 10:01, according to the faded green numbers on his dashboard. “I know you don’t have to be home until eleven,” he says, “but I want your parents to let me take you out again. Parents like boys who bring their daughters home early.”
“Oh yeah? I like that you’re an expert on what parents want you to do with their daughters.”
He grins. “Just simple observations. Come on, I’ll walk you to your door.”
“Do parents like that, too?”
“I don’t think parents have a preference one way or the other,” he says. “But I’m pretty sure your brother would prefer I stay in the car.”
I glance at the picture window in the living room. Mom’s on the couch, facing away from us and reading a magazine. And, of course, Hunter and Sky are both pressed against the glass. Sky looks excited. Hunter, not so much.
“Your mom isn’t watching, right?” Liam asks when we reach the door.
“Right,” I confirm, glancing over his shoulder.
“Then … good night.” He pulls me close and kisses me. A good, deep kiss. It would be better if I didn’t think it was partly for the benefit of our little audience, though.
“I’ll call you later this weekend, okay?” Liam says when he pulls away. I can’t do anything except nod. I don’t move until he’s in his car, driving away. The kiss must’ve affected me more than I thought because I can only sort of feel my legs.
Sky and Hunter abandon me Monday morning when we arrive at school. They did this Friday, too, except I didn’t care because I was so fixated on my date. Today, I kind of do care. I find Grace, Tera, and Roman hanging out near the arts building. Grace has straightened her hair and is wearing it in two loose braids. I tell myself that this is totally fine and normal and that seeing her wearing a completely new hairstyle that looks just as good as her regular hair doesn’t make me feel anything inside. I yearn for the days when figuring out how I felt about Grace—and about girls—was my big focus. It was complicated, sure, but I didn’t feel a specter of death looming over my shoulder like I do now. I’m so torn between figure it out and let it go that I’m frozen in a state of doing nothing and feeling like crap about it.
Liam, I remind myself. He’ll help you with this.
“Let’s hear it,” says Tera the second I approach. “Since I basically match-made you, I deserve to hear all about your date.”
“You match-made?” Roman interrupts.
“Yeah, obviously. I started dating you, then several months later, you told Amelia that Liam liked her, and now here we are.”
“Oh, of course. How did I not put that together?” Roman laughs. Every time I hear male laughter now, I try to feel something from it, but the sensation of memory seems to be fickle. I wish that I understood more about memory and psychology and brains. I’ve done some reading online, but it’s a different kind of science than I gravitate toward normally, and a lot of it is beyond me.
“It went well,” I say. Out of habit, I reach to feel the smooth wood of the necklace that isn’t there. I should get a new necklace so I can stop looking like a weirdo who strokes her clavicle. But I can’t bring myself to. It’s silly to be so in mourning about that necklace, but here we are.
“That is an extremely inadequate summary.” Tera folds her arms and stares me down.
I don’t want to talk about this in front of Grace. It makes me feel like I’m cheating on the crush I have on her, which is absolutely ridiculous. Her expression is neutral, and she’s certainly been pushing me toward Liam as much as anyone else, so …
I give them a much more detailed story, ending with the part where Liam asked me to be his girlfriend when we talked on the phone last night. Tera practically swoons over this. She is a big romantic. And saying out loud that I have a boyfriend makes me feel kind of … well, excited, for the first time since my accident. My lingering aches and pains and fears all melt away and I’m just a girl with a new, hot boyfriend.
“How does Hunter feel about this?” Grace asks, and I deflate immediately.
“He’s not thrilled. But I didn’t see him much this weekend, so he can’t be that displeased about it.”
“Yeah, I mean, not his place to have an opinion anyway, right?” She inspects her nails, which are white with navy-blue French tips.
I wish I had any idea what was going on in her brain. Sometimes I feel like maybe she likes me, too, and then I figure I’m being delusional. She’s my friend, and she cares about me. It doesn’t mean she wants to kiss me. But if she did … Wow, I should not be thinking about this two seconds after I stopped being single.
“Not his place,” I confirm. “Not at all.”
* * *
Sky and Hunter go off together somewhere at lunch, too, and it puts me in a mood for the afternoon. It’s not that I don’t have other friends, it’s just that Sky is my best friend and now that the secret’s out about her relationship with Hunter, it seems like she’s totally consumed by it. This wasn’t something I considered when she first told me. I worried it would be weird (and gross) to watch her kiss my brother and that when I fought with either of them, I wouldn’t be able to vent to the other anymore. I didn’t think about how we’ve been a trio since we were kids and how this relationship between them might change our entire dynamic.
The team’s in the state playoffs now, which means soccer practices have amped up, which means I’m stuck waiting around even later for Hunter to be done, and Sky isn’t here with me, because she has a dentist appointment. I finish all my homework, listen to two entomology podcasts, and read three articles about a new insect they discovered in Brazil. They really do not put an adequate amount of detail in these articles. I know most people don’t care about receiving a full, in-depth account of the discovery, but some of us do. We are the ones they should be catering these articles to.
Restless, I pace the athletic building lobby and start thinking about Sky again. I get a little bit dizzy, and now I’m thinking about Sky and my accident. How she and Hunter fought here in this very building, how someone could have overheard them talking.
There’s nothing better to do, so I head down the hall to the pool stairwell. I open the door at the top and listen to the echo it makes all the way down when I le
t it close heavily. It’s a long flight of stairs with frequent turns and echoey walls, which makes it a popular spot for people to make out. If you’re somewhere in the middle, it’s practically impossible for anyone to catch you in the act.
I drum my fingernails against the metal stair railing. It’s so loud. The door is thick and solid, but I still think if you were arguing loudly here at the top, someone outside it could probably hear you. I peek out the single narrow glass pane in an otherwise metal door, craning my neck to see how far my range of vision is. Someone could definitely hide just out of sight. And the boys are now headed down the hall to the locker room.
I wait for them all to go by before I emerge, because I don’t need any pesky questions—like “why were you hanging out in the stairwell alone like a weirdo?”—and then I head back to the lobby and sit with my backpack until Liam appears.
“Hey,” he says, and reaches for my hand.
“Hello.”
Feeling bold, I kiss him, even though there are people around right now who will definitely have strong opinions about this. His disarming grin afterward makes me not care about anyone else’s opinions.
“Waiting for Hunter to drive you home?” he asks.
“Yeah. As usual.”
“You know, he’s not the only one who could drive you home.” He’s holding both of my hands now. One normally, the other with his fingers looped around my cast as best as they can loop. I wish he was touching my skin instead of my bulky plaster nuisance.
“That’s true. Are you offering?”
“No,” says a voice behind him. Hunter, approaching with a scowl.
“Hunter.” His name huffs out of my mouth in an annoyed sigh.
“Another time,” Hunter says firmly, and I’m not going to argue with my brother here in the athletic building lobby.
“Fine.” I look up at Liam. “I’ll see you tomorrow?”
He nods and doesn’t look too put out. I rise onto my toes, and he dips his head to kiss me. It’s pretty chaste, but it still makes heat burn through me. Hunter has politely looked away, but he’s scowling our whole walk back to the car. The weather has cooled, and I wish I’d worn a warmer jacket. Between the cold and the dark, I am deeply concerned that it might snow before the playoff finals on Friday. Fleetingly, I think it might be best if they don’t make it to the finals, but then I feel bad. Hunter and Liam both deserve to go out with a win.
“Could you be, like, thirty percent less rude to him?” I ask as I plop into the passenger seat of the car. Hunter and I used to switch off which of us drove, and I miss it. The neurologist has instructed me not to drive again until I’m having no dizzy spells, and I’m starting to feel like that will never happen.
“I can do ten percent.”
“It’s not funny, Hunter. What would have been so bad about him driving me home?”
“I don’t know. Nothing. He’s just— You know I don’t like him.”
“Sure, but did you really think you would like everyone I ever dated?”
“Yes,” he says sullenly, and then after I glare at him, he laughs. “I guess not. I’m sorry, Amelia. You just picked the one person I can’t even start to get on board with.”
“Why not, though? I mean, seriously? Because you guys were middle school rivals and Liam kicked a soccer ball at your face in ninth grade? Come on, Hunter.”
Hunter glances in my direction. “That’s not why I don’t like him. Do you really want to have this conversation?”
“I do, actually. You know his life hasn’t been that easy, and you guys all ostracize him anyway.”
“We don’t ostracize him. He was invited to Alec’s party and Alec doesn’t even like him. Most of the other guys don’t have any problem with him. His personality is fine, but he also gives off this air like he’s better than the rest of us. It’s not overt, it’s just … an air. I don’t know.”
“So he has an air of superiority and that’s why you two can never be friends?”
“No. I just … I don’t know how to explain. We have a long and complicated history, and I don’t trust him, and I want you to be careful, but I will try harder. I will be twenty percent nicer.”
I roll my eyes, but he’s being very earnest. “I’ll take it.”
“Good. Thank you.”
“By the way, though, can you also please keep Sky from me, like, a little bit less?”
“Amelia,” he says, exasperated. “I’m not keeping Sky from you. We’re dating. I don’t know if you know this, but people who are dating spend a lot of time together.”
“Oh, do they? I wouldn’t know. My brother wouldn’t let my boyfriend drive me home from school.”
He ignores that completely. “If you’re not happy with how things are with Sky, you need to talk to her about it, not me. I’m just trying to, you know, make her happy.”
“Okay. Got it.” I don’t want to talk to Sky because I can’t tell if I’m being irrational. I want Hunter to realize on his own that he’s taking her over. But I can see now that his priority is her, and it shouldn’t hurt me, but it does. “Hunter?”
“Yeah?”
“If the soccer ball incident wasn’t the thing that confirmed you and Liam never being friends, what was?”
He’s quiet for a very long time. “There wasn’t any one thing, Amelia. We just don’t get along.”
I don’t know why he’s doing it, but I know without a doubt that, once again, my brother is lying to me.
Over the next few days, I start to feel like myself again. Like a regular girl who just started dating a boy and has no nagging questions about what happened to her when she almost died. It’s surprising how much more smoothly every single aspect of your life goes when you aren’t fixating all your energy on something there’s no way you could ever solve.
My concerns aren’t gone; they’re still lurking in the background, waiting for me to let my guard down so they can emerge. Like right now, as I sit in the bleachers, watching the soccer team warm up before their final playoff game.
Should I be thinking more about this? Should I be trying to deal with whatever happened to me so it doesn’t happen again to others? I’m finding myself reaching a whole lot of dead ends, and I’m not confident in my Suspicious People list. It’s so short and based on so little evidence. The only person on it who gives me a real creep vibe is Mr. Omerton, and he gives me such a creep vibe that I don’t want to be anywhere near him. Which means I don’t know how to rule him out. And there’s Liam’s dad, based on nothing except the fact that I still haven’t met him and Liam practically develops a storm cloud over his head when he mentions him. And Clarissa, who’s done nothing really to earn her place but who I can’t quite cross off, even though my gut feeling is that whoever did this to me was male.
I haven’t remembered anything new from that day, and my neurologist says it’s extremely unlikely that I ever will. I told her about what happens sometimes when I hear laughter, and she seemed to think it was just a coping mechanism for my brain. I want to remember something so badly that I’m making it up, basically. But there’s still that feeling of someone pushing me, too. And my necklace snapping loose. She’s probably right. She certainly has a much better understanding of how brains work and how they process trauma. It just all feels so real, it’s hard to let go of.
Sky returns from the vending machine in the athletic building, and she’s picked up Grace on the way. I’m relieved to see them, because being alone with my thoughts doesn’t seem to be working for me.
The stands fill up quickly as the game time approaches. If we win tonight, we’ll be state champions for the third year in a row. Fans of both teams are tense, and the players are, too. Hunter has his Serious Frown and Liam’s shoulders look like they’re being lifted by puppet strings.
The game is close and stressful; I can’t stop cleaning my glasses on my shirt as though one speck of dust might prevent me from seeing all the action. Sky’s bitten her nails to stubs. Grace doesn’t care so mu
ch about soccer as she does about hanging out with us, but even she sits unmoving except for intermittent hisses of breath when something bad happens.
Sometime during the fourth quarter, I have to pee badly enough that the porta potty on the edge of the field finally starts to look acceptable. I regret it the moment I enter the overwarm box of sewage and upsettingly moist air. And as much as I love spiders, the number in here disturbs me slightly.
On my way back to the bleachers, I stop short. Clarissa has broken away from a cluster of her friends, and she’s headed this way. I’ve been wanting to get her alone for weeks, to talk to her and convince myself that she doesn’t belong on my list.
“Good luck,” I say when she passes me. “It’s gross in there.”
She gives me the same look of disgust that I gave the porta potty, and it makes me furious.
“Hey, what is your problem, exactly?” I turn to face her, arms folded tight. “You’ve never liked me, and I’ve never done anything to you.”
“Oh, you haven’t?” Her eyes flash with genuine anger. It surprises me. “You think I don’t know that you told your brother he should dump me from day one? Must be pretty happy now that you’ve got him dating the exact person you want him to.”
Her gaze flicks to the bleachers in the distance, and I know she’s looking at Sky. As though having my best friend become more interested in my brother than she is in me is exactly what I needed right now.
“Hunter’s dating life is none of my business. I certainly never told him how he should or shouldn’t feel about you. But you didn’t like when he spent time with me, which is pretty ridiculous, you know. If your boyfriend’s going to hang out with another girl, isn’t it ideal that the girl he’s hanging out with is his sister?”