He’s always been the logical one. Maybe he can help me make sense of this.
“Sam, I saw it ringing. I heard someone on the other end. I could tell you every detail. It didn’t feel like a dream.”
My leg buckles and I stop abruptly. My hands grab my knees as I struggle to catch my breath, spots forming in front of my eyes.
“I didn’t say you were dreaming, dude,” Sam says as he stops next to me. “But you did have a brain injury.”
“Why is this still happening? I’m doing everything the doctor said. Taking the pills, doing the memory exercises, staying active. But every time I turn around, I see her,” I say, frustrated. I straighten up, meeting his gaze. “She didn’t even want to be with me, but now she won’t leave me alone?”
I don’t know who’s more shocked by these words. Where did that come from?
Sam just looks at me, his expression unreadable.
The guilt bubbles back up, but part of me can’t help but feel there’s truth in what I said. Kimberly said she didn’t want to be with me anymore, and yet the moment I breathe a little easier, there she is, haunting every headache and twinge of pain. Every memory of the accident. Every thought about the future.
I’m trying my best to stand on my own and do what she wanted me to do. Why won’t she just let me?
“What if this never heals?” I ask as I jab angrily at my scar. “Am I going to keep seeing things and hearing things until I go crazy? It hurts too much seeing her. Thinking she’s here.”
“It hurts you?” Sam snorts, looking back at me. “Did it ever occur to you that you’re not the only one grieving, Kyle?” I notice now the rigid set of his shoulders. “I would kill to see her again.”
“Sam, I—”
“Did you ever even bother to see how I was doing? To see if I’m okay?” he asks. “You only call me when you have a problem. You never want to talk unless it’s about you.”
Hearing that makes me feel like shit, but at the same time, it was different for him. I was the one there that night. The one driving the car my girlfriend died in.
We stare at each other for a long moment, years of friendship struggling against these last few fucked-up months.
“She was my friend too,” he says, his voice low. “She was special to me, too.”
“I’m sorry, Sam. I know she was,” I say. I take a deep breath and gaze past him at the track. “I’ve been a shitty friend. I—I don’t know what I’m doing.”
He shrugs and lets out a long sigh. “Me neither, man. That’s why we can’t lose each other,” he says, patting my good shoulder. “The only thing making you crazy is you. You had a nightmare. Let it go.”
I want to tell him that it’s not that simple.
“All right,” I say instead, agreeing with him. I can’t lose him, too. “Come on.” I fix a smile on my face and nod to the track. “These laps aren’t going to run themselves.”
* * *
Later, in the shower, it happens again. In the streaming water, I’m brought back to the drenching downpour the night of the accident. I see Kimberly’s face right in front of me, like in the parking lot at the hotel, her hair soaked completely through.
I close my eyes, take a deep breath, and when I open them, she’s gone. But the memory of that night lingers.
When I step out of the shower and wipe the steam from the bathroom mirror, I flash back again to the car, to my hand rubbing the fog from the windshield.
Chill out. It’s not really happening.
I say it over and over until the pain in my head subsides, just like Dr. Benefield told me to. I push back my long hair to see my scar in the mirror, the skin healing nicely, the color still a fragile pink. I trace it, trying to convince myself that the brain and the heart aren’t like skin. They take a little longer to heal.
But it won’t ever heal if I keep thinking what I’m seeing is real. I think about my conversation with Marley. How for the first time in months I was able to talk about Kim. The real Kim, not what my broken brain keeps conjuring. So how can I get my brain to stay on the real Kim instead of imagining her ghost around every corner? My reflection doesn’t have an answer for me.
I know one thing I can fix, though.
I tug at my hair. Time for a haircut. I look like I’m about to be cast in some kind of Revolutionary War reenactment as George Washington’s cousin.
Now, that would be a nightmare.
13
Marley leans in closer to me, studying the scar, a full three days after my last vision and my first haircut in three months. It’s super visible now, and as she leans forward, I try to distract myself by staring at the grass, or the trees, or the people out for a stroll around the park. Then… she reaches up to touch it, her fingertips barely skimming my skin. She does it so gently that it leaves behind an electric feeling.
It feels strange, like my body is waking up.
“What happened?” She pulls her hand away, and I realize I’ve been holding my breath this whole time.
“I don’t tell sad stories,” I say, teasing her.
She raises her eyebrows, challenging me. “Oh, is that how this works? I give, then you give?”
I pause, realizing that that’s 100 percent not how I want this to work. I want to tell her. About the accident. About Kim. She’s the first person I’ve wanted to talk to about any of it.
“I guess…,” I say, shifting my position to rest my back against the cherry tree, my voice trailing off. “I just don’t really tell stories.”
“Yes, you do. We all do,” Marley says as she crosses her legs underneath her. “We’re telling a story right now. Deciding how to be, what to say, what to do.” She pushes her hair behind her ear. “That’s… telling a story.”
“That’s living.”
“Okay, so someone’s life story isn’t really a story?”
She has me there and she knows it.
“Can you stop being right?” I ask her, because it sure as hell seems she’s been right about nearly everything. “Please?”
She rolls her eyes and nudges me, a faint red appearing on her cheeks. “You know the best thing about telling stories?” she asks.
I shake my head, my eyes still on the flush of her cheeks.
“The audience,” she says. “Without an audience, a storyteller is just talking to the air, but when someone’s listening…”
“Ah,” I say. “So you’re saying you’re a good listener.”
She tilts her head and shrugs like it’s a no-brainer. “I am. And I’d love to hear your story. If you want to tell me.”
For the first time, I think maybe I can.
“God.” I exhale, trying to find a good jumping-off point. “Where do I even start?”
“Start at the beginning,” she says as she leans back against the tree, her shoulder brushing mine.
I give her a look. The beginning? Does she want to be here until Christmas? Though I guess I don’t really have any plans between now and then.
“Okay,” she says, arching an eyebrow. “How about the middle? Two-thirds?”
I laugh, trying to think of a good place. The right place. “How about…?” I say, picturing the way Kimberly’s lower lip would jut out when she wanted something from me. “How about I start with Kim?”
So I tell her. About the two of us fighting over the same swing at recess and Sam giving up his so we’d stop fighting. About getting up the nerve to write “I U” in her diary in middle school. I tell her about how Kim and I would ditch school on our anniversary every year and take a small road trip to a surprise location she chose in advance. The beach, the aquarium, a national park. She’d always pack the best snacks and put together the perfect playlist for the drive.
All the firsts. All the plans. All the little fights and makeups.
“I mean, we were perfect. I know we were a cliché—head cheerleader and the quarterback. But we were the couple everyone wanted to be.” I look out at the fallen cherry blossoms scattered around us in
the grass. “And even when we weren’t, after my shoulder got wrecked, everything was okay because I still had Kim.”
I turn my head toward Marley, but she doesn’t say anything, just waits for me to go on, a soft, unhurried look on her face.
So I tell her about my football career ending. How broken I felt when I saw the X-ray, years of training and dreaming destroyed in a fraction of a second, Kimberly holding my hand in the ambulance and at the hospital, too. She never left my side.
“Don’t get me wrong. We fought, too,” I admit. We’d argue over going out with the team after my injury, when I just wanted to hang out at my house. Or when she wanted to do an epic college road trip to see a bunch of schools, but I didn’t want to because I was sure I already had a full ride to UCLA. Or when… Well, we argued about a lot of things. “Probably more than most couples. But I always thought it was just because we cared so much.”
I scrape my heels across the grass. “I don’t know. It seems so stupid now. It was all so…”
“Trivial,” Marley says, looking up at me, and I can tell she gets it. She doesn’t press for more after that. Doesn’t ask me the big questions, what happened to Kim, to me. And maybe that’s why I keep talking. I tell her everything. From the graduation party to the visions.
Marley listens, without interruption, until my words trail off. Her eyes are thoughtful as she bites her lower lip, like she’s replaying my words in her head.
“Did it ever feel like that to you?” she asks, looking over at me. “That you were controlling everything?”
“No,” I say firmly, but it sounds false to my ears. Especially when I look at it now. Something about telling the whole story makes all the tiny cracks more visible. There were more of them than I remembered, enough that could lead to a big break. “I don’t know,” I say finally. “I think maybe, after I lost football, I felt kind of helpless. Like my whole future was gone. I guess I thought if she was there, I wouldn’t be alone in that. Maybe I just wanted to be in control of something.”
“Most days, I still feel that way,” she says, nodding, her eyes distant. I want to ask, but I don’t pry any further. I know for a fact that her not asking helped me. I have to trust she’ll tell me when she’s ready.
“Still want to hang out with me even though my ex-girlfriend is haunting me?” I ask to lighten the mood.
Marley laughs at that as she sits up and gathers a handful of cherry blossom petals. “Maybe she isn’t,” she says, making a fist before letting them drop from her hand one by one. “Maybe you’re still trying to be in control. Trying to keep a part of her here.”
I watch the petals drift slowly to the ground. “Pretty pathetic,” I say as I shake my head. “I mean, she dumped me.”
“I’m so sorry, but…,” Marley says, and I look up to see a smile forming on her lips. “I mean… Kim. Come on. What an idiot.”
What? Did Marley just say that? I cringe, but completely unconsciously, a laugh bursts out of me. “You can’t say that. She’s dead.”
I’m pretty certain that’s an unspoken cardinal rule. You can’t talk shit about dead people. Unless they’re, like, a dictator or a serial killer.
“Well, she broke up with you,” she says, standing and brushing away the small flecks of dirt and grass clinging to her yellow skirt. “Not smart.”
Her words catch me off guard, but her expression isn’t flirty. I think she’s just being a good friend.
It’s nice to be able to talk to someone about the breakup. Someone who will actually acknowledge I was dumped without making me feel guilty about it.
I stand, and she looks up at me, reaching out to lightly touch my arm, the point where her fingers touch feeling like a ripple of water vibrating out across my body. Her expression grows serious again.
“I’m sorry you’re hurting,” she says. And it doesn’t feel like an empty phrase, a generic sentence that everyone repeats out of politeness.
It sounds genuine.
And it’s exactly what I needed to hear. She’s not pushing me to just be better already. Not judging how I feel or what I’m doing. She’s just letting me feel it.
“Doesn’t hurt as much as it used to,” I say back, surprised to find I mean it.
* * *
After a while we walk around the park, a few of the leaves on the trees already turning orange and red and yellow. Some drift off their branches and fall in front of us, and our feet crunch noisily over them.
Marley pulls a half-finished red-and-white box of popcorn out of her bag, leftovers from an earlier pond expedition with the ducks. She holds it out to me. I take a handful, popping a few kernels into my mouth.
“Do you have any dreams outside of all of that? Outside of football? UCLA?” she asks. Our shoulders are almost touching as we walk, like some invisible barrier between us has disappeared.
I swallow, looking away at the pond peeking through the trees. It’s what my mom’s been trying to ask me. The question I haven’t had an answer to.
“I don’t know. Football was always my first choice. But since that’s out, and since my plans with Kim are out…,” I say, shrugging. “I don’t really know where to start.”
“What do you want?” she asks. “Not Kim. Not Sam. Not your mom. You.”
I take a deep breath, saying the first thing that comes into my head, completely unfiltered. “I think right now I just want to be. I don’t want to go to UCLA and pretend I have it figured out. But I don’t really want to go anywhere else, either.”
“I get that, but you don’t have to leave to start thinking about what you want. Just because you can’t play anymore doesn’t mean you can’t do something football related,” she says, a few popcorn kernels disappearing into her mouth.
“Like what?”
She chews thoughtfully. “Coaching?”
I consider it for a minute, but the idea of being on the bench still feels kind of raw. “I don’t know about coaching. But… I mean, they did ask me to write a couple of football articles for my school paper since I was stuck going to the games anyway. I liked doing that, and I think they were pretty good. But I don’t think anyone actually read them.”
“You should try,” Marley says eagerly. “Be a writer. Or a journalist. Then we’ll both be storytellers.”
I smile, her enthusiasm infectious. I try to picture it. My name in print, in something more than just the Ambrose school paper. Giving teams the coverage they actually deserve instead of some shitty clickbait.
“They’re never really gone, you know,” she says unexpectedly, stopping dead in her tracks. I look back to see her face has grown serious again. “We keep them with us, just like you and football. They’re still part of our lives.”
Still part of our lives. That’s all I’ve wanted since the accident. To find a way to live without leaving Kim behind.
My fingers unexpectedly brush against Marley’s hand, and I pull back instantly, the feeling strange and familiar all at once.
I stuff my hands in my pockets, and we walk silently for a while, but not in the painfully awkward way where you’re desperately trying to think of something to fill the silence. This is actually nice. Comfortable.
“Thanks, Marley,” I say as we round a corner of the park, tall oak trees reaching for the sky.
“For what?”
I shrug, not knowing how to put my gratitude into words. For being easy to talk to? For understanding? “It hasn’t been easy for me to really talk to anyone… since…”
She nods, already knowing. Of course she does.
“You think you’ll be back here tomorrow?” Marley asks.
“Actually, um…” My voice trails off, my brain trying to pull itself together and form a coherent sentence. “I was thinking maybe we could get out of the park for a night? Dinner at my house on Friday? As a thank-you.” I give her a big smile as I try to butter up the experience. “I’ll cook.”
Marley shoots me a side-eye. “I didn’t know you cook.”
�
��Of course I cook,” I say, looking offended. “I’m a pizza rolls aficionado.”
14
“All right,” my mom says, grabbing a grocery cart, a look of determination on her face. “Divide and conquer. You get the rib eye and some turkey from the deli, I’ll get the veggies, and we’ll meet at the checkout counter in ten. Good?”
I nod, eyeing the cart. “You’re using a whole cart just for a small bag of potatoes?”
She glares at me. “I may grab a few other things. See where the wind takes me.”
“See where the wind takes me,” I repeat, laughing and shaking my head. Classic. “Maybe the wind will take me to the dessert aisle!” I call over my shoulder to her, her sarcastic laugh trailing behind me.
I move off in the direction of the meat counter and get two fresh-cut rib eyes. Marley and I decided on six o’clock for dinner tomorrow. I’m going to make my mom’s secret family rib eye recipe, which… could definitely go either way. It’ll be good to hang somewhere other than the park. At least, that’s what I tell myself. I don’t want to think this impromptu invitation from me was anything more than just a change of scenery.
I make my way to the deli counter, where I grab a number and wait behind an old lady getting four pounds of American cheese. She’s in for a night.
I take a Tylenol while I wait, warding off the return of the nagging headache I’ve had for most of the day. I’m getting better at figuring out how to manage the pain, but some days I still can’t get ahead of it.
“Sir?”
I look up, realizing the deli clerk has been talking to me. He wipes his hands on a towel and repeats his question. “What can I get for you?”
“Sorry,” I say, stepping closer to the display case. “Half a pound of turkey, please, thin cut.”
“You got it,” he says, snapping on a pair of fresh gloves. I watch him grab the hunk of turkey and drop it onto the slicer with a loud thump.
“Kyle?” a voice says from behind me.
I turn, but I see only an empty aisle of the grocery store. Light glints off plastic soda bottles and metal cans. Uh-oh. Not now. I will the Tylenol to kick in as I nervously turn back to the deli clerk. He reaches up to put his hands on the machine, his shadow moving on the wall behind him.
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