All This Time
Page 2
I get in the car and slam the door.
Berkeley. The word echoes around my head, every syllable a fresh stab of betrayal.
Berkeley. Berkeley.
She applied and she didn’t even tell me. She sent in supplemental essays and updated transcripts, and got in months ago, and she just sat there pretending. Pretending while we picked out dorms and classes and talked about road trips home for breaks, knowing all along she was never going to go to UCLA.
She told Sam.
Why didn’t she tell me?
I’m ready to get out of here, but she slides into the passenger side before I can pull the gearshift out of park. I pause for a moment, wanting to tell her to get out, but I can’t bring myself to do it.
We have to figure this out. The bracelet is still in my pocket.
I put my foot down on the gas and we take off through the parking lot and out onto the main road, the wheels sliding on the wet ground as we turn.
“Kyle!” she says, clicking her seat belt into place. “Slow down.”
I flick my windshield wipers on to the fastest setting, but it’s still not fast enough for the sheets of rain pummeling the now-fogging glass.
“This makes no sense. We’ve been planning all year. You, me, Sam. Our plans.” I reach up, swiping at the condensation to make a space big enough to see. My fingers hit the tiny disco ball slung around my rearview mirror, sending it swinging. It does make sense, though, in a Kimberly kind of way. I think of all the times she’s changed her mind at the last minute, leaving me and Sam hanging. Like when she ditched our freshman-year formal to hang out with the varsity cheerleaders, or dropped us in the middle of a group final to work with the valedictorian instead. Moments I bury deep until we’re fighting, like now. “You just decide, ‘Screw it! I’ll do what I want.’ Just like you always do.”
There’s a clap of thunder, and the lightning that follows reflects off the glittering silver of the ball, scattering it all around the car.
“What I want? I never do what I want. If you just listen to me for five freaking seconds.” She stops talking as we whiz past the street to my house, her head turning as it fades away. “You missed the turn!”
“I’m going to the pond,” I say. I just keep thinking if I can get us there, I can salvage this night. I can salvage this.
“Stop. No, you’re not. The pond will be an ocean right now. Just turn around.”
“You’ve been thinking about this for a while, haven’t you?” I ask, ignoring her. A tractor trailer barrels past us, sending a shower of water onto our windshield. I grip the steering wheel tighter, slowing down to steady the car. “You must have been. Kim, you could’ve just said you wanted to go to Berkeley, not UCLA. It’s not like I have the football scholarship anymore. I don’t care where we go, as long as we’re togeth—”
“I don’t want to be together!”
The words slap me right across the face. I jerk my eyes from the road to look at her, this girl I’ve loved since third grade. I don’t even recognize her right now.
We’ve “broken up” plenty of times in the past, but not like this. Small, dramatic fights that are over the next day like a stomach virus. She’s never said that.
“I mean…” She stops and her eyes turn away from me, widening. “Kyle!”
My head whips back to the front windshield just in time to see a blinking pair of yellow hazard lights in front of us. I hammer the brakes, and the car slides underneath us without slowing.
Suddenly I don’t have any control over the direction we’re going in.
I fight against it as I try to avoid a stalled car in the dead center of our lane, gripping the steering wheel tightly as I attempt to steer into the skid. The car miraculously regains traction just in time, and we swerve out of the way of the stopped car.
I pull onto the shoulder and carefully slow to a stop, my chest heaving.
That was close.
“I’m sorry.” I take a long, steadying breath, looking over at Kimberly to see she is pale, shaken, the sharp curve of her collarbone intensifying and receding as she struggles to catch her breath.
She’s okay.
But we aren’t.
I don’t want to be together.
“Are we…?” I start to say, the words struggling to come out, fighting their way to the surface. “Are we breaking up?”
She turns her eyes to me, and I can see the tears lightening the blue of her irises. Normally, I would wipe the tears away and tell her everything will be okay.
But this time I need her to tell me that.
“I need you to listen to me,” she says, her voice quivering.
I nod, the near accident wiping the anger away and replacing it with something even more intense.
Fear.
“I’m listening.”
I tighten my jaw as she gathers her thoughts, my hand already reaching up to feel the charm bracelet inside my jacket while my heart thumps loudly in my chest just above it.
“I’ve only ever known myself as Kyle’s girlfriend,” she finally says.
I stare at her, taken aback. What does that even mean?
She sighs, taking in my incredulous expression. She searches for the right words. “When you blew out your shoulder—”
“This isn’t about my damn shoulder,” I say, hitting the steering wheel with my palm. This is about us.
“It is,” Kimberly says, matching my frustration. “It fucking is. You had so many dreams, and you were going to get them.”
Her words catch me off guard, hitting their mark. I wince as a phantom pain radiates unexpectedly across my shoulder. I see the hulking lineman barreling right at me. The number 9 on his jersey as his hands wrap around my throwing arm, flinging me to the ground. Then… the sickening crunch of my bones and the tearing apart of my ligaments as his body slams into mine. Game-winning throws and college scholarships and a blue-and-yellow jersey with my name on the back. All of those things right at my fingertips. Gone with one play.
“I’m sorry,” she says quickly, like she’s seeing it too. “I can’t imagine what it’s like to have it all disappear, to have the scouts stop coming, the scholarships dry up—”
I clench my jaw and focus on the rain. Is she trying to hurt me more? “Why are we talking about this? It has nothing to do with you and me—”
“Kyle. Stop. Listen.” Her voice is firm and instantly silences me. “I loved you.”
My insides turn to solid ice. Loved. Past tense.
Fuck.
“But when you couldn’t play ball anymore, you changed. You became… I don’t know,” she says, searching for the word. “Scared. You were scared to take chances, scared to try anything else. And I became your enabler. Your crutch. You always had to have me there.”
She has to be kidding me.
That’s what she thinks of me? Seriously? That I’m scared and pathetic? That I can’t do anything on my own?
Has she been with me all these months out of pity?
“I’m sorry you felt so burdened by me,” I say, forcing myself to look back over at her as my hand instinctively reaches for my shoulder. “I’m sorry you had to miss a few parties. I’m sorry Janna and Carly went to the Bahamas while you felt obligated to sit by my bed and feed me soup because I couldn’t lift my arm. But that’s not on me. You could have walked away at any time—”
“Could I? Would you have let me?” she asks me, shaking her head. “Seeing each other every day at school, same classes, same routines, but not together? Every time we broke up, we never even made it a day.” Would I have let her? What does that mean? We always got back together because we wanted to. Now… she’s saying this?
“So, what? You just… pretended?”
“I didn’t pretend. I just hung in there because I…”
Her voice trails off, but I already know exactly what she was going to say.
“Because you knew we wouldn’t be going to the same college,” I say, feeling like I’m going to be sick.
“You’d be rid of me.”
“No,” she says, closing her eyes as she fights to get the words out. “I’m not trying to be rid of you. But—I do want to know what it’s like to turn around and not see you there.” Her voice cracks, but her spine straightens. She means this. She really means it. Her eyes hold mine, steady and sure. “I want to be me, just me, without you.”
The words throw me off-balance, but I hold her gaze. We stare at each other, the rain still falling in sheets against the roof of my car. How long has she felt this way? How long has she not loved me?
“Kyle, come on,” she continues, her voice soft. “Think about it. Don’t you want to know who you are without me?”
I stare out at the headlights flickering in the storm. Without her?
We’re Kimberly and Kyle. She’s part of me, so I can’t be me without her.
Her hand slides into mine, and her fingers gently tug against my skin as she tries to get me to look at her.
I can’t bring myself to do it, though. I look at the steering wheel and the windshield wipers and the rearview mirror, before my eyes finally focus on the tiny disco ball.
I feel it in my bones that this is my last chance to make her see. To show her that my future wasn’t just about football.
It was about us.
“I know who I am with you, Kim,” I say as I reach into my jacket. I have to show her the charms, everything we have. The empty links will remind her of what is to come. “Before you make up your mind, please, just think about everything we’ve—”
The disco ball lights up, the tiny mirrors shooting photons of light around the car.
Then, impact.
My body is thrown forward. I feel the burn of my seat belt as it clenches around my chest, so tight it pushes the air right out of my lungs.
Everything registers slowly but in unison.
The car spinning.
The blare of a truck horn.
Headlights showering light across the windshield as we careen into an oncoming truck, a solid wall of metal that races toward us.
Time stops just long enough for me to look at Kimberly, her cheeks dotted with little freckles of refracted light, her eyes wide with horror. She opens her mouth to scream, but all I hear is twisting, shrieking metal.
Then darkness.
2
It hurts to breathe.
Everything is bright and out of focus, voices and faces coming in bursts of color and sound. I want to close my eyes, to sleep. But I’m in some sort of constant motion.
“Severe head trauma.”
“Depressed cranial fracture.”
White ceiling tiles blur. Machines beep. Gloved hands touch me.
“Kyle? Kyle. Look at me.”
I zero in on the voice and see it’s coming from a woman. Her red hair is tied into a rushed, messy ponytail, strands falling around a pair of intent blue eyes that quickly come into focus.
“Good. That’s good. I’m Dr. Benefield. I’m a neurosurgeon,” her mouth says, and I focus on the movement of her lips to try to grasp on to what she’s talking about. “I’m going to take care of you, okay?”
There’s a halo of light around her head, blazing, the red of her hair on fire. I stare at it as another voice calls out.
“Fractured femur and intrascapular lacerations…”
“Talks a lot, doesn’t he?” she says, giving me a quick, confident wink.
Her blue eyes study my forehead as she begins to ask me about what kind of music I like. An overwhelming exhaustion tugs at me as I talk about the genius that is Childish Gambino, my words getting harder and harder to say.
I force everything else to go quiet except the doctor. Something about her calmness reassures me in all this chaos. The yelling voice, the beeping, the tearing sound of my clothes being ripped off me, fade. There’s nothing but the ring of burning light encircling her hair. The smile on her face.
I start to smile back, but then I see…
Oh my God.
In her glasses, I see my reflection.
Blood is painted across my nose. A flap of my forehead lies open like an envelope, exposing the white bone underneath. Cracked white bone. My skull. Broken.
I start to panic, the sounds all pouring back as a wave of fear crashes into me. “Is that…? Is—that’s my…?”
“You’re okay,” she says with a smile. I can’t imagine how bone sticking out of my face is okay, but her expression remains as calm as ever. Why is she not freaking out at this? She reaches up toward my face, and it takes me a minute to realize she’s touching my forehead, my jaw, my cheekbones.
“I can’t—I don’t feel that. Am I supposed to feel that?”
I think I see her smile falter for a fraction of a second, but then I’m sure I imagined it because she just continues on, her hands constantly moving.
I’m still trying not to freak the fuck out when the double doors into the emergency room slam open behind Dr. Benefield, and another gurney is wheeled in.
I start to close my eyes, the last of my energy pouring out of me, but then I see it. A shock of blond hair coated in a layer of blood.
No.
No, no, no. It all rushes back to me. The pouring rain. Our fight. The seat belt locking across my chest.
“Kimberly,” I try to scream, but it comes out weak, my eyelids heavy. Everything is so damn heavy.
“Stay with me, Kyle,” the doctor’s voice says. “OR three. Now,” she calls to the other voices in the room.
I fight to keep my eyes open, fight to keep them on Kimberly, but suddenly I’m moving, the fluorescent lights blinding me as they flash overhead, one after another, after another, faster and faster and faster. Flash flash flash flashflashflash…
No! I want to yell. Go back! But I don’t have the strength to form the words and everything around me keeps moving.
I see a doctor carrying a child.
Flash.
An elderly woman getting oxygen.
Flash.
A girl reading a book. She looks up just as we round a corner.
Flash.
Then Dr. Benefield, her white jacket whipping ahead of me, blurring and expanding into a glow that consumes the entire hallway, until there’s nothing left but the blinding white light.
3
“Kyle.”
Images swim before me.
A shattered disco ball.
Sheets of rain.
Kim’s blond hair, matted and bloody.
Then pain. It radiates across my head, through my whole body. I grip the sheets until it recedes enough for me to make out a voice calling my name again, clearer now.
“Kyle?”
Mom.
I try to open my eyes, to focus on her face in front of me. I see her nose, her mouth, but her image is too bright. Blurry. Distorted. Like an overexposed photograph.
“Mom,” I croak out, my throat as dry as sandpaper.
She takes my hand, squeezes.
I feel tired. So tired.
The doctor moves into my field of view. She shines a bright light into my eyes, asking me what I can and can’t feel, then to follow her finger.
I can’t—I don’t feel that. Am I supposed to feel that?
And that’s when the panic rushes back. The bloody, matted hair. The gurney. Kimberly.
“What happened—Kim—is she…?”
She doesn’t say anything, just focuses on something in her hands. A clipboard. A pen clicking. A note on her chart.
“Kyle, do you remember me? I’m Dr. Benefield. You’ve suffered a serious brain—” Her voice is cut off by the blare of a horn, the noise so loud I squeeze my eyes shut, desperate for it to stop.
When I try to open them, there is nothing but pain. Searing pain trying to swallow me whole. So I let it.
* * *
When I wake up again, I have no idea how long it’s been, but everything is clearer. The white tile of the ceiling, the teal hospital walls, a TV in the corner, the flat-screen black.
“Sam,” I manage to get out, and his head whips over to me. His eyes are red and bloodshot, his cheeks wet.
Instantly, dread bubbles through me.
Our entire lives, I’ve only seen Sam cry twice. Once when we were ten and he broke his arm falling off his bike, and then when his family’s golden retriever, Otto, died three summers ago. But this doesn’t feel like either of those times.
It feels worse.
“Sam?”
I can’t ask the question and he doesn’t answer. He just turns his bloodshot eyes out the window, and I see the tears falling faster now.
“Sam,” I say again, desperately struggling to sit up with a body too weak to comply, until my arms give out and I fall back onto the bed. “Sam?”
But still he doesn’t reply.
Kim’s smiling face dances in front of my eyes, and I struggle to breathe, horror and guilt wrapping tightly around my lungs as a bolt of pain ricochets across my head.
She can’t be…
I relive it all. Starting with Berkeley, the fight, and ending with her wide, panicked eyes in the glow of the headlights.
And as the truck makes impact, I feel my entire world shatter, the pain from my head building and building until my entire body explodes into a million pieces, pieces that won’t ever be put back together.
4
I rest my bandaged head against the cool glass of the car window and watch as the droplets of rain catch the shining red of the brake lights in front of us as Mom drives. It’s been two whole weeks and I still can’t believe it.
I thought that losing her in the breakup was the worst pain I could ever feel, but this… I can’t fix this. I can’t take out a charm bracelet and make things right.
She’s really gone. Buried at the local cemetery five days ago in a ceremony I was too busted up to attend.