What You Left Me

by Bridget Morrissey

  Petra screams: two short yells then one long wail, like a flatlining heart monitor.

  30

  I hear two short yells then one long wail, like a flatlining heart monitor.

  It’s me. I’m screaming.

  But not aloud.

  I’m screaming in my mind.

  I shoot up from Daniel’s bed, panting, covered in sweat. My hands fumble for the bedside lamp. A warm glow lights up the black sheets and casts shadows on the wall it’s closest to, but in the corners, where a soft breeze from the open window makes waves with the curtains, darkness still lurks. I need that air to wake me up. Shake my nightmare’s hold on me. I open Daniel’s closet door and throw one of his hoodies on over his track T-shirt. Head covered by the hood, I tiptoe down the stairs, past Aminah and Cameron asleep on the sectional and Daniel on the chaise, over to my shoes. One shoe on, the other in my hand, I hop out the front door and into the still world of nighttime suburbia, triggering the motion-censored porch lamp. It casts a spotlight on me. I scurry onto the sidewalk.

  The night above is clear and confident. I set my pace to match it. As I move into the breeze, it cools the sweat slicked onto my skin. I walk streetlamp to streetlamp, crossing empty intersections and past red lights. It doesn’t take long for my body to go numb, a helpless soldier to my thoughts, carrying me to the only place that makes sense right now. The beginning and the end of all of this madness.

  There’s an opening in the chain link fence that surrounds the football field. I slip through as I’ve seen countless others do, sneaking into and out of class. Just as Ryan once did to catch me walking out of school. Hey! Petra, right?

  The field is vast. No gym classes. No Friday night game lights. No white plastic chairs lined up in endless rows.

  Just me.

  • • •

  Petra took me to a masquerade straight out of a movie I’d never admit to enjoying. A mask was on my face that I couldn’t take off, and Petra didn’t seem to want to believe that I was me. It was like I hurt her somehow, sometime between the hill dream and this one.

  My doing nothing was definitely not helpful. Another bad idea from Martin McGee.

  Rocking back and forth with my arms around a girl’s waist. I have that down cold. But talking to Petra meant real dancing. Lots of spinning around and carefully timed steps. I was better than I’ve ever been in life, that’s for sure, but it was still hard. We swayed and swirled, and she spoke like she was older. The mask on my face wouldn’t come off. Instead, it kept changing.

  She was scared of me.

  I was scared of me.

  Who the hell am I anymore?

  Saying I was stuck between living and dying was old news to her. Everyone in the real world knows way more about me than I do. And she said it’s been only three days. Three freakin’ days.

  It’s been a century for me.

  Still I asked for help, and man, do I love that glowing girl, because she got up and wrapped her hands around the edges of my mask. She pulled back so hard she fell. I felt a pain completely different than the accident. Not bones crushing, but like, my entire personhood going away. I was trapped in a faceless body, reaching for her. She was yelling at me. Why did you do that? Why did you leave? People are dead!

  People are dead?

  What does that mean?

  Every time I think I understand, it becomes clear to me that I don’t know a thing. These questions multiply. This place is a vacuum, sucking me up then shooting me back out, leaving nothing clean.

  • • •

  I lie down on the fifty-yard line. Right in the middle. The grass is cold and dewy. It leaks in through my hoodie, the cotton flirting with the dampness, making my back feel prickly and warm all the same, like it’s a towel wrapped around me after a long swim. The sky is an impossible distance away from where I am. There is space for entire life spans between us. So much spare room for every ugly thing tumbling around inside of me. Masquerades with Martin and Ryan. Collided. Colliding. My mind tangling the two of them up in a battle for my attention.

  For a while, I convinced myself that I loved Ryan. The idea of him at least. The way his presence broke up my routine. How everyone’s eyes opened wider on me, wondering how love would change me, watching close as I pretended to care more about another person than I did about myself. It’s a rite of passage to have your heart broken in high school, and I wanted that award like I wanted all the rest. But it didn’t work out quite right. Just like the rest. It was the wrong guy at the wrong time. The wrong intentions steering me down the wrong course, ending with his right hand over my mouth. His left between my legs. Up too high. Fingers moving. Pressing. Fighting. Too much. Too soon. The flesh of his palm clamped around my teeth.

  I thought I knew, but I knew nothing.

  I’m sick, Mom. I can’t go to my final today.

  The voicemail he left me the night before graduation. “I’m back in town. Just let me talk to you.”

  His calls streaming in between my parents and my sisters: an insistent, steady pest, always buzzing right outside my ear, never swatted away.

  I wasn’t ready to talk a year ago. I’m still not ready now. I don’t know if I’ll ever be.

  He doesn’t have a right to be here, written into the pain on my face, holding on to the tear falling down my cheek, resting as a hulking anchor at the pit of my stomach, but he is all the same.

  A part of me wants to tear into him with my every spiteful word. Break his spine through the sheer force of my verbal tirade.

  Another part of me wants to bleach every trace of his existence.

  Beneath my skin and all my organs, in the place where instinct lives, a core that has no place in medical books, no identifiable source, I feel this conflict with such immensity that it goes into territory that can never be mapped. There is so much, too much, power in the unknown.

  It is boundaries crossed. Apologies unsaid. Explanations not given.

  It is night. It is secrets.

  It is Martin and me singing songs in this very spot. Nudging elbows. Stealing laughs. Hammering into the well of possibility with the first hesitant clinks, unsure of how much there is to mine from such a new, delicate source. All I haven’t gotten the chance to know about him infects my bloodstream. He could be someone to me.

  The complete, devastating, tantalizing unknown.

  But someone is dead because of that car crash. Some man whose life story never before intersected with mine. Someone who had dreams and nightmares and fears and joys. A full person with a full world I’ll never know. It doesn’t seem right or fair, yet I cannot blink it away. It is not my nightmare. It’s my reality.

  Maybe fairness is nothing but an idea we’ve made up. Maybe we’ve all tricked ourselves into believing kindness equals fairness, when really kindness masks the truth of things, and fairness doesn’t have a moral compass. Why didn’t I tell my friends what Ryan did? I thought, That’s not fair to put that on them, but no, it was kindness, a courtesy. Don’t wear this burden with me. Go on thinking that we’re all fine. We must keep soldiering on. We must survive high school.

  And they did. They made it to the top of the mountain, as Cameron says. But I got lost last year, and I never recovered. Now I’m tumbling back down, falling farther away from the peak I was supposed to reach on Friday afternoon, slamming into every rock I sidestepped on the way up. Ryan Hales is still in my head, continuing to distract me from the things I should be doing.

  My last chance at this final is hours away. One more shard of the glass he shattered inside of me, waiting to be swept up. And I don’t know if I can. Because of him. Again.

  And Martin.

  He keeps asking me to help him. This I want to do—it’s all I’ve been doing the past few days—but I’m not a doctor. I’m not a psychic. I am just a girl who dreams so big that other people can climb inside and take ref
uge. I don’t know why it’s me, but I know it matters. Maybe it started as a way to avoid my problems, but it’s so much bigger now. It is the size of the space between the sky and me.

  I cannot fight fairness. I cannot fight death. The only thing I can fight is myself. Stop my fears from clouding my dreams. Steal the last remnants of Ryan’s power over me and use it to give Martin a moment like the one I’m in now, my back on the wet grass of the fifty-yard line, small stars peeking through the blackness like secrets the night reveals only for me. Not running from or falling into anything. Not right now, at least. Tomorrow. Always tomorrow. But not now. In this moment, in the dark of the complete unknown, nothing can hurt me.

  I breathe in. I breathe out.

  At least I am alive.

  31

  The masquerade has been restored to its original state: opulent and joyous. Petra places herself back into the action. Her dress is now simpler. A sleek silhouette, black and fitted, seams tickling the edge of the parquet. Her long hair flows loose. The ringlets turn inward to frame her face. She wears no mask.

  Martin, she thinks over and over, his name her only internal monologue. She wants Martin here. He appears in a well-tailored tuxedo with hair to match the part, slicked down and to the side. No mask either.

  “What happened?” he asks as Petra pulls herself into him. The two begin to dance to an internal beat. Their slow, close rhythm does not match the cotton candy dancers around them, so Petra wishes them away. Her living room becomes the empty football field cloaked by star-speckled night.

  “I’m sorry,” she says, “I keep letting fear win.”

  The two step side to side, forward and backward, always in harmony.

  Martin sucks in air. “That’s not true at all,” he tells her. “I think you keep beating fear.”

  Petra rests her head on his shoulder. They continue to move to the beat of their secret song.

  “What did you mean when you said people are dead?” Martin asks.

  Petra places her finger on his lips to shush him. “Not now.” Her hands wrap back around Martin’s neck. “Be patient,” she says. “Just exist with me.”

  Martin holds tighter to her waist. “Existing is goddamn underrated,” he says back.

  The countless stars above blanket them, making everything soft and safe. In the dark of the complete unknown, nothing can hurt either of them.

  They are alive.

  And for now, that is enough.

  Part Four

  32

  It is the last day of high school, the sun is shining, the newly tuned Caravan’s driving smoother than ever, and all Fly can think about is some girl he sat next to at graduation? Congratulations! Let me pull over and buy you a trophy, Spencer thinks to himself. He presses his foot into the gas pedal. This is flying, Fly. Earn your nickname. When he looks to see Fly’s reaction, he finds Fly reaching for the steering wheel.

  There is a dot on the scenery beyond the passenger window. A piece of dirt that keeps getting bigger, trying to erase everything in sight.

  Oh.

  It’s a car.

  “Fly, look out! Look out!” Spencer yells. He slams on the brakes.

  Fly tugs the steering wheel to the left.

  The car smashes into the passenger side of the White Whale, halfway between the front seat and the back seat. Forward and sideways forces combine to slam Spencer into the airbag and door. As his head collides with the heavy pillow of the bag and the glass of the window, breaking his nose and jumbling his brain, he can find only one thought.

  I might’ve killed my best friend.

  Because Fly swerved the wheel.

  Once the car finally stops shoving the Caravan away, Spencer breathes again. He can’t seem to use his nose, so it’s a desperate gasp through his mouth. Unbridled sobs release from deep inside of him. He looks over to see what’s happened to Fly: his aggravating, annoying, frustrating best friend in the entire universe.

  The seat belt keeps Fly’s body upright, and the airbag has his head propped up at an awkward angle. Spencer unbuckles and leans over the gears to try and hold together body parts that seem to be falling off. He screams out as many swear words as he can come up with, none of which seem to capture what it is to be holding his dying friend in his arms.

  Fly coughs. His eyes flicker open.

  Spencer stops cursing. “Fly?” No response. “Marty?”

  The body goes limp in Spencer’s arms once again.

  33

  MONDAY, JUNE 11

  If I live or if I die or if I’m forever in this Between, the people I love are still hurting. Apologizing into thin air certainly didn’t do a thing to change that. Doing nothing did, well, nothing. Big surprise. Asking for help doesn’t make much sense. No one can get me out of a place they’ve never been themselves.

  Small changes. That’s what it is. The loop Spits is caught in must be changed until it’s fixed, no matter what it means for me. Spitty needs to move on. It’s not all his fault.

  It’s mine too.

  • • •

  Flat on my back, Daniel’s hoodie soaked by dew and freezing my skin, I can only half remember how I arrived here. It started with a nightmare and a need for air. Now the light of a new day lifts the veil off the sleeping world, and I’m lying in the middle of the football field. I’ve woken up in some odd places this weekend, but none stranger than here.

  • • •

  Petra pulled me back to the masquerade, but this time without all the bad things. It was just her and me dancing, alone on the football field, dressed in our finest. Her dream lasted for its own eternity, then faded out like a movie you could watch over and over, letting it play all the way through the end credits. The beauty of the way she looked, the way we moved together, the quiet of the night—it was exactly what I needed to know I’m not alone.

  • • •

  It’s coming back to me. Martin and I dancing on the football field, dressed in our finest. He kept asking questions, but I didn’t answer. I asked him to exist with me. Be patient for once. He listened. He let me dance with him.

  I clutch my chest, pulling the perfect night in close. Whenever I need to, I can transport myself back to the star-covered football field, rest my head on Martin’s shoulder, and let the warmth of the memory lift my feet off the ground.

  • • •

  Petra asked me to be patient. I reminded myself of that as I came back to the scene of the accident. Being patient there meant putting up with the pain of pushing against the invisible fortress of Spitty’s memory. Knowing that moving the steering wheel wouldn’t be enough, but it would be a start. Small changes.

  I almost stopped it all from happening.

  Almost.

  • • •

  With a thud, I come crashing down. Someone is dead.

  Then panic shoots through every vertebra of my spine. It’s Monday.

  The exam is today.

  • • •

  It might be a coincidence, or it might be a result of the small change, but things are shifting again, like they did the first time I died. If I squeeze my eyes, which seem to somehow be back in the head I sort of have again, there is something like sound. White noise. I’m not remembering it. I’m hearing it, like it’s really there.

  It should scare me, but it doesn’t. I have a safe place. A mind I can trust, even when everything turns to chaos. Someone who can find me when I think I might be lost forever.

  I have Petra.

  34

  Slipping in as I slipped out, I find everything the way I left it. I’ve felt an overwhelming sense of nausea since I left the school. Among many other things, I remembered that I left Daniel’s door unlocked and I didn’t bring my cell phone. Seeing the peaceful sleeping faces of my three best friends helps settle my nerves a bit. The little night trip was just for me, and I’m
the only one who will ever know. I tiptoe up the staircase and back into Daniel’s room. My cell phone sits on the nightstand beside Daniel’s bed. I grab it to check the time.

  It’s still so early. I have hours before I need to be at the school for my final.

  I clear out all my voicemails so that I never have to listen to my parents’ pleading messages or Ryan’s incessant begging for a chance to talk. Feeling emboldened, I send him my own message.

  I owe you nothing. I don’t have to speak to you if I don’t want to. And I don’t want to. There’s nothing more to say than that. Please leave me alone. Goodbye.

  I block his number.

  It’s so simple, yet so powerful. One small step toward a bigger change.

  I glance at the rest of my unread texts and notice one from my sister Jessica.

  I’m sorry that I didn’t tell M&D where you were. Mom said Dad threatened to kick you out and then you actually left. When I got home last night, Dad was crying in the kitchen. It was the weirdest thing. I don’t know if that helps, but I know he feels bad. We all do. Please come home. Or call me. You could call Caroline too I guess, but we all know I’m your favoritest sister ;) I love you, Petty. And I’m sooo proud of you! Eleventh in the class is only two lower than my rank. Screw Caroline and her valedictorian crown! Haha! But really, a little secret. In college, none of what you did in high school will matter.

  My parents still haven’t told my sisters about the whole not officially graduating thing. Maybe they’ll never have to. That would be nice.

  I take a shower.

  With a towel wrapped around my head and not a stitch of makeup on my face, I throw on whatever clothes I can scrounge together. I can’t believe it was only three days ago I stood in front of my mirror getting ready for Martin’s party, making sure my makeup portrayed my casual coolness and my hair showed my effort without screaming it. Now I’m grateful Aminah grabbed clean underwear.