You’re such a dumb bitch. Useless and dumb.
She remembers that she didn’t want to see any of this. That’s why she’d flown so high before.
Now, with alarming clarity, she can not only see it, but she’s starting to feel it. The asphyxiation that took her family and friends has come for her, but there are no vines to wrap her tight. It’s all in her mind. She screams for help, a plea so disparate from any other that it’s only possible when one arrives at death’s door.
“I can’t go too!” Petra cries, thinking of how everyone she’s ever loved is now gone. “Please.”
She buries her head into her knees, imagining a world she can’t crash into, one that would be a pillow to land on. She imagines taking the breath Ryan Hales doesn’t deserve and using it for herself.
“No!” she screams, a rally cry.
Inches from the ground, darkness covering the panels of glass she once glimpsed freedom through, her plane swoops upward. A steeper incline than ninety degrees, she’s almost upside down. The angle suctions her head back into the seat. Air, pure and whole and so strong it makes her cough, fills her body.
She’s done it. She’s stopped herself from crashing.
“Hey.”
Petra turns. Martin sits next to her. “You’re here,” she says, surprised. She hadn’t realized she’d saved them both. “I’ve missed you.”
They’re headed straight toward the ceiling of the world. There is only softness around them. Airy and puffy. Swirls of clouds, like tufted cotton, decorate the pale sky. It’s a different fear now, because while Petra knows they’re going up, she can’t see anything in front of her, and the mystery of what is there waterfalls adrenaline through her system.
“Petra.” Martin says it the way people do when addressing someone for the first time, testing out the correctness of a name by whispering it. “I’m stuck.”
“You told me that before. In the pool.” The past dream springs to her mind, and with that memory comes the thought of her life outside the airplane, where Martin’s fate is not known. “Are you dead?” she asks Martin.
“No!” he says. “I’m stuck.”
She’s satisfied hearing it. She didn’t want to believe he was gone.
The plane keeps climbing.
“I think I was, though,” he tells her. “I think I—died. It was exactly like going to sleep. Instant. Empty. Uncontrollable.” He shudders. “But then, exactly like waking up, I busted back into Spitty’s dream. Now yours.” He stops and waits for her to turn. His voice is tangled and throaty. “I can’t get out. My eyes won’t open.”
“You’re not making sense,” she says. Then she realizes. “Because you’re not the real Martin.” Her waking brain is creeping in to interject rationality. She’s starting to lose a grip on this world.
Martin becomes frantic, fighting against gravity to unbuckle his seat belt. “I am! I swear!” He tries to crawl. It reminds Petra of a ride that comes to the city carnival every year, the Gravitron. It’s a circular structure that spins so fast it pulls you to the wall, and try as you might, you can’t be peeled away. But Martin works against physics, somehow winning, making his way to her.
Waking Petra has a hard time allowing this to continue, skipping back and forth between the plane and a rigid couch where she lies asleep.
The airplane starts to level with Martin’s every movement. “Listen,” he says.
Back and forth, Petra slips from one world to the other, neither sturdy enough to fully support her. The plane flies forward. Uncorrupted white-bread land stretches on for miles.
Martin grabs Petra’s shoulders. “Ask Spencer about the pact. Tell him the letters are in my closet. Top shelf, in an envelope inside the Foamposites box. He’s the only one in the world, aside from me, that knows what that means. It’ll prove I’m me.”
Petra blinks, the first after a long sleep, the real world almost flickering into steadier view.
17
SUNDAY, JUNE 10
Whoa.
We return to our regularly scheduled programming: the grayness and the nothing and the feelings that aren’t really feelings but aren’t anything else.
Martin McGee here. Not gone but not back. Incapable of forming coherent sentences when caught inside the dreams of one very smart girl. Once again stuck in this place I’m going to call the Between, because it seems to be the blurry edge that separates life and death, a line where one world ends and another begins. A first-blink pressure that holds me right in the middle of both. I tipped toward one end but didn’t fall all the way—which is good, don’t get me wrong—but I’m really wishing I could’ve overcorrected, and y’know, woken up.
• • •
It is unusually cold—a crisp, steady, air-conditioning kind of chill. My heady is buried into a crevice. No blanket covers me. I’m not at home, I realize, shooting upright, panicked by unfamiliarity. I rub my eyes, hoping against logic that this uncomfortable vinyl couch will transform into my bed. The world comes into clearer view. Cameron’s head is at my feet. Daniel spoons her. Aminah’s sprawled out on the carpet below us.
That’s right. We spent the night. This is the waiting room.
I rise up, tiptoeing over bodies to make my way into the adjacent bathroom. A mirror is on the wall, but I don’t bother with it, too groggy to comprehend my face. It’s too early. Or too late. My sense of time seems to be lost.
My mind keeps slipping back into my dream. I’m piloting an airplane. My family and friends are all dead. Ryan Hales is waving his arms at me.
Martin appears.
Martin is dead.
Martin says he isn’t.
Ask Spencer about the pact. Tell him the letters are in my closet. Top shelf, in an envelope inside the Foamposites box. He’s the only one in the world, aside from me, that knows what that means. It’ll prove I’m me.
The words push me out of my liminal space and into the unnerving stillness of the empty bathroom. I flush the toilet and wash my hands with my head down, accepting reality but not needing to see my part in it.
A voice, one I know must be my own though I don’t quite recognize it, as certain and steady as a line of permanent ink, emerges from the deepest parts of me, telling me my dream was as real as right now. Martin was there.
I need to find Spencer.
• • •
I died.
I can say it now. I’m past the point of being afraid. How can I be? It happened. I don’t know how I know it, but I know. It’s like when you say the wrong thing, but the other person plays it totally cool. It doesn’t matter that neither of you acknowledge what happened. It can’t be denied, no matter how much you pretend it’s all good.
There was a phantom pain, and it grew stronger and stronger until it left me altogether.
I left myself.
I was gone.
Then just like that, I was back in Spitty’s dream.
So I’m not pretending. I’m not trying to act like I’m making all of this up or I’m the one who’s dreaming. Not anymore. I came back from dying. That means I have to fight.
• • •
“Where are you going?” Cameron asks me. She has on her favorite shirt, a gray tee with an ironed-on profile shot of a young Art Garfunkel. Freshman year we studied the symbolism in Simon and Garfunkel’s music for honors English. Cameron got obsessed and made the Art shirt, calling him her fellow redheaded-underdog-kindred-spirit-good-luck charm. It started out as nothing more than a laughable anecdote in a laundry list of her bizarre ticks, but with every A plus that came out of wearing the shirt, and every B that happened when she forgot, we’ve all started to believe in the power of Art, at least a little. She put it on before we left for the hospital. She’d happened to pack it in her swimming bag.
Looking at Art staring off in the distance and Cameron staring at me, all thre
e of us in different states of deep contemplation, I agree to let her come along, giving her a nod in the direction of the door. I know she’s dying to understand what’s up with me, and it’s all gotten so strange that maybe it will be okay to let her in on some of it. If ever anyone could appreciate the weirdness that’s happening right now, it’s Cameron in her homemade Art Garfunkel tee. She frees herself of Daniel’s arm and joins me.
“What’s happening?” she whispers as we begin walking. Even the hallways demand libraryesque silence. She winces at the fluorescent lights. “I have a headache. Why did I drink wine coolers in the middle of the day yesterday?”
“We’re going to find Spencer.”
“Why?”
It’s too early to tell her I’m working on knowledge from my dream. I can already feel the details slipping, so to preserve what I remember, I explain to her about the shoe box and the envelope, saying Martin mentioned something about it at graduation. We go down on the elevator and walk through a few clickety halls before arriving at one of the hospital entrances. It’s still dark outside. A woman arrives to sit behind the main desk just as we approach. She glances up. “Do you need help?”
“Yes, thank you. I was hoping to see Spencer—” I come to a stop. I’m sure I’ve heard his last name over the past two days, but it’s nowhere to be found in the overflow of information clouding my brain.
“Spencer?” she inquires, as if I’m both troublesome and perplexing. The longer I pause, the wearier she grows. “Visiting hours won’t start for a while, so I’d suggest—”
“Kuspits,” Cameron declares. “Junior.” Her unrelenting friendly smile bends the receptionist’s will.
The woman plunks something into her keyboard, scans the information, and gives us directions. “I don’t think they’ll let you in!” she calls out as we head down the hallway to a new set of elevators.
“How did you know his last name?”
Cameron laughs, picking fuzz off Art’s nose. “His dad left his wallet behind.” I let out a startled gasp. “Oh stop,” she says. “I’m planning on giving it back. I found it when I heard you go to the bathroom.”
The elevator dings. We follow imaginary parallel lines inside.
“Why did Martin tell you that?” Cameron asks.
“I don’t know,” I say, and that’s the whole truth. I don’t know how or why or what it even means, but Martin keeps finding me, and I keep falling deeper. Away from my life and into the one he’s left behind.
The blueprint for this hospital must read like a maze. It’s a complicated series of turning hallways and elevator rides, all of which lead to places that look the same as what came before. It reminds me of my first week in high school, when I thought I’d never understand how to reach the east gym from the north wing, much less find my locker between classes.
Yet the desk clerk did not lead us astray. A nurse sees us walk up and looks like she’s about to stop. Then she looks at a file in her hands like she hasn’t noticed us at all.
Spencer doesn’t have the luxury of a private room. In a space curtained off at the end of a series of similar rectangular setups, he’s awake, reading a magazine. The first thing I note is the lack of flowers around his bedside. Martin’s room was inundated. Then the bruising around his dubious eyes: a side effect of slamming into his airbag. Good fortune in comparison, because juxtaposed against what I saw of Martin yesterday, Spencer might as well have a four-leaf clover sprouting from the top of his brassy mop of curls. Aside from the bandaged broken nose and a gash on his forehead, he looks downright blissful, with a resting grin even tragedy can’t seem to shake from his face. I remember seeing him at the ceremony. He’s the one that told Martin to invite me to the party.
“You,” he states, remembering me too.
“Me,” I say, now knowing confidence is key in communicating with the Martin McGee crew. “How are you?” It’s a useless question that I instantly regret, but words cannot be swallowed back once we’ve released them into the world.
“Been better.” He looks to a clock on the wall across the way. “Kind of early for visitors.”
“I know. I wouldn’t have come if it wasn’t important.” That same voice, the one from the bottom of me, urges me to keep going, but another more rational voice tells me this is too far. I can’t ask him about something from a dream. And a third—the voice that cannot be swallowed back—continues on with no notice of the conflict. “I’m sure you don’t want to talk about what happened, so I just want to say I’m sorry, if that means anything. I’m here because Martin told me something.” An uncontrolled note plunks out when I say his name. “He mentioned a pact. Something about an envelope in a Foamposites box. Said you’d know what that means.”
The magazine almost falls out of Spencer’s hands. Cameron instinctively clutches me.
“He said that to you?” Spencer asks.
My muscles are still seized as I try to do something that passes for a confirmation.
“Why would he tell you that?” he wonders, his gaze shifting upward, eyes darting back and forth, reading the blank ceiling tiles.
“I was hoping you’d have that answer,” I say.
Cameron clears her throat to get his attention, but she only gains mine. Her quizzical stare shoots from me over to Spencer’s hands. They are shaking, rather violently, and he doesn’t seem the least bit aware. He is lost to whatever’s playing out in his mind. Cameron and I observe, frozen in fascination, communicating our shared curiosity and fear telepathically. Neither of us wants to interrupt what can best be described as a memory exorcism. He jerks his head forward and locks in on me. “Can you get it?”
“The envelope?”
He doesn’t answer. He goes back to wherever he went before he asked.
Cameron jumps in. “Of course! In fact, we will go right now! Feel better!” She shuttles us out of the room. Holding hands, we fall into a hallway corner. “That was the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen,” she says.
I let go of her hand. “It’s about to get so much weirder.”
• • •
Petra’s the one who showed me what it is to fight. In her dream, she screamed like Spitty did when the car hit. She said, “I can’t go too.”
Too.
Like someone had gone before her. Someone who she’d been thinking of a lot. Or at least enough to dream of three times. We were about to crash headfirst into this jungle that’d totally overrun everything until she screamed “No!” with so much force that the plane changed course.
It should’ve been over, but she fought.
And there I was, tongue-tied, trying again to explain just where it is that I am. Trying to fight as she did. Then it started. Dream skipping. If where I am now is inside a blink, what happened then was the action of blinking. I ping-ponged back and forth so much between there and here that I rushed through everything I wanted to say. For a dude who used to get yelled at for talking too much, I’m still no good at using the right words. There’s so much I’ve never been able to say right. Or at all. But I got the point across before she tossed me back to here: my pact with Spits.
Grandpops died when I was nine. I’d never lost anyone before him. Adults tried to baby me. Katie was a wreck because she was there when it happened. My other friends couldn’t relate. There was just Spitty, whose mom passed away the year before we got really close. He came to Grandpops’s funeral. After the service, his dad dropped him off at my house to sleep over. All night we brainstormed a way to stop this horribleness from happening again. Neither of us understood how someone’s body just stopped working. It made us so mad. You couldn’t give us a person to love then take that person away.
Of course, we were a pair of nine-year-old boys. We thought there was an option of not dying at all. Actually, I’m pretty sure I thought that was an option right up until a vehicle smashed into my body on a sunny Friday afternoon
in June. Anyway, if one of us happened to mess things up—go on and die—we created a plan for the other person.
We never talked about it again, but I know Spitty still remembers. That day bonded us forever. A pact, written on loose-leaf and sealed with a spit promise. A pact to keep us from hurting the ones we love.
• • •
“Why is it always more difficult on the way back?” I ask Cameron as we try to reverse our steps.
“It does seem to take longer. We should’ve written down what the woman said.”
“No.” I hesitate. “Never mind.”
“What?” she asks, her tone teetering close to annoyance but masked with the perfume of her curiosity.
“Never mind!”
“Come on! You can’t just start to say something then stop!”
“It’s too strange to say.”
“Great. I love strange things.”
“Promise you won’t think I’ve lost it?”
“Promise.”
We both agree to turn left down a somewhat familiar corridor, reaching a new set of elevators.
“Martin isn’t dead.”
Cameron’s finger hovers over the down arrow. “I mean—” She peters off, afraid to say what she’s really thinking, which is that it sure seemed that way when Katie and her dad ran out of the waiting room. We all fell asleep waiting for news, but they never returned, and the nurses wouldn’t tell anyone anything.
“The pact thing I said to Spencer—Martin didn’t tell me that at graduation. He told me in my dream.”
Cameron plunges her finger onto the down button. The doors open instantly, and we both enter, following the same parallel lines we did riding up.
“He said he isn’t dead. He’s just stuck. He thinks he did die for a minute, but he came back. Then he said the letter thing. Told me that would prove it was really him. And look how Spencer reacted. He couldn’t believe I knew that.” My words sound absurd once spoken, but however bizarre, they express my current truth. There’s no denying the look on Spencer’s face.
What You Left Me Page 9