The Accident

by Devyn Forrest

  Poppy opened her lips to protest, but Mr. Collins explained that we were out of time and couldn’t argue about it anymore. He pointed toward the back lab table, directly next to the one Zed, Clinton and Theo shared, and Poppy and I both marched over to it. I felt my heart stirring around, black and volatile. I had a sense something horrible was about to happen.

  I placed my water bottle on the table and scanned the print-out we had been given, the directions for the lab. Mr. Collins passed around the various ingredients we needed for the experiment, including a very low pH bottle of acid. It usually boggled my mind to think about acid, that it could eat you up and burn you, despite being only a liquid.

  I began to arrange the half-tubes of glass and the measuring cups. Poppy eased her lips toward my ear and muttered, “You really thought you had something with those boys, didn’t you? You were falling in love with them. And now they’ve abandoned you.”

  I kept my eyes focused on my fingers. I didn’t want to shake with anger.

  “Oh, Poppy, is that all you can think of?” I asked, locking eyes with her. “How’s the new trainer, by the way?” I shot her a feigned smile. “Feels to me like you might have hired the extra help due to intimidation? Maybe someone might kick your ass at Nationals? Is that why he’s on your parent’s payroll? I knew damn well I hit a nerve.

  Poppy’s false grin fell off her face. She reached for one of the measuring cups I had arranged, then whacked it with the flat of her hand so that it fell and shattered off the table. A few of the flickers of glass crept over and dotted the bottom of my jeans.

  “Hey! What’s going on over there?” Mr. Collins cried from the front of the class. “You know that if you break more than one thing in class, your grade will be deducted half a letter grade. Be careful. These things don’t buy themselves.”

  “No. But our parents buy them,” Poppy scoffed under her breath. “Oh, sorry, Rooney. Not yours, I guess.” Then, she twirled around and called, “Terribly sorry! My partner is super clumsy. But I guess we all know that from the mid-semester competition. Right, Rooney?”

  Mr. Collins grabbed his collar and tugged at it. He seemed not to know what to say. He reached to the side and grabbed a broom and marched it over to me. When he reached me, he stabbed it out and said, “Clean it up, please, and don’t do it again.”

  Everyone in the class burst into laughter. Mallory, the other gymnast who lived in the basement, said, “She’s a klutz. What do you expect?”

  It’s hard to describe what it’s like to have twenty-some kids laugh at you at once, belittle you, and not give a shit at all that somebody had actually tried to kill you in front of hundreds of people. I knew I was a strong and capable person—nearly seventeen goddamn years old, in fact, and I had basically raised myself, but in the face of all that, I just kind of shivered and dropped down and scraped up the glass with the brush. When I popped back up, I walked over to the wastebasket and swept the glass back inside. Mr. Collins glowered at me as I passed the broom back to him. I had to find a fucking way out of this—one day at a time.

  When I returned to my table, I caught Zed’s gaze. There was a strange glint behind his eyes like he tried to tell me something without the words being attached. I furrowed my brow and muttered, “What the fuck?” Because dammit, I had thought we had been friends—or maybe even a little bit more than friends, and I had this inner fire that made me want to tear into them and demand why they were so fucking afraid.

  But a second later, Zed mouthed, “Don’t drink the water.”

  What?

  I returned to the table and blinked over at Poppy, who had started on the second portion of the lab experiment—drawing up amounts of acid into a little eyedropper. She blinked at me and said, “Look at how steady my hand is, Rooney. I’ve measured everything precisely, and now…” She dropped little dribbles of the acid into the next glass mixture and beamed at me, like a child who’d done the bare minimum and wanted to brag about it.

  “That’s fantastic,” I scoffed, ready to puke by just looking at her. My heart pumped in my throat. I reached forward and wrapped my hand around my water bottle. As I did, Poppy’s eyes flashed toward my water bottle as well, and they glinted evilly. I shook the water bottle around and the water sloshed inside.

  “It’s really important to stay hydrated, isn’t it?” Poppy said. “I always try to get more than the doctor-recommended eight ounces.”

  “Wow, totally mind blown on the advice,” I smirked while locking eyes with hers. “You should write out a list of other obvious and lame advice you might have for me. Like, what makes Poppy the number one gymnast in the country?” I swept my hand out in front of me like I presented a banner with the saying. My eyes flashed to Zed’s one more time and I watched as he shook his head as he looked at my bottle.

  Was it possible that she was trying to poison me? Again? I hadn’t been gone long from the table, but it was possible that she’d yanked open the top of my water bottle and poured acid inside. Mr. Collins had been focused on me and my clean-up. She could have done whatever she wanted.

  “Thanks again for the heads-up about the hydration,” I said. I twisted off the top of the water bottle and, with a wild motion, burst back so that the water bottle tipped toward her very-expensive Chanel shoes. She lurched forward, grabbed the water bottle to put it upright again and screeched.

  “You klutz!” she cried.

  I had to hand it to her—her reflexes were quick. Only a splash of water got out of the water bottle and dotted itself across the bottom part of her jeans and her shoes. Before my very eyes, little white holes burned themselves into the jeans, and even a bit of the shoes was torn off. It was like—they had been there, and then you could see the skin beneath like magic.

  “Wow,” I hissed. “Two can play that fucking game?”

  Poppy gaped at me. Her eyes looked like they might drop from her head. “You knew what you were doing. You were trying to throw—“

  “I’m sorry? What do you mean? I’m pretty sure this is just water. And you were just talking all about how I need to drink more of it. I’m just so clumsy,” I said.

  Mr. Collins rushed over to us. His cheeks were blotchy and rage swam over his face. “What the hell is the problem, Poppy and Rooney?” He blinked down at Poppy’s jeans and shoes and cried, “Have you actually spilled the acid? My god!” He yanked Poppy over to the side of the room, where there was a little shower, just in case of acid spills. He cried, “I’ve never had to do this before,” and then he popped open the faucet and water poured down over Poppy, like enormous rain clouds opening up over her head. Her perfect ponytail fell flat down her back, and her expensive designer clothing, her jeans, her feet—everything was drenched. Through the whole thing, she just kept her eyes on me. She looked like a very angry kitten left out in bad weather.

  After all that excitement, Poppy was sent back to her room to change. Nobody spoke while she trudged away. I busied myself with the experiment, kept my head down, and actually finished up all the steps fifteen minutes before everyone else. When I walked out, I felt people glance up at me—like they weren’t quite clear on what the hell had happened with Poppy. Regardless of what they knew or what they thought, I marched out of there with an A- and this fiery feeling in the gut of my stomach: I had beaten her this time. And probably it meant she would come at me ten-fold next time. But what the fuck did I care? I could handle it.

  Chapter Seven

  I wasn’t cleared to start practice again until mid-November, which was still two weeks away. Although since the acid incident, Poppy had kept her distance from me—so had nearly everybody else. People didn’t meet my eye when I walked down the hall; they cracked jokes about how I was a curse and even made bets about how much longer I would stick around Denver Top-Athletics. “Poppy will find a way to get away with it sometime,” I heard somebody mutter that Saturday afternoon during lunch. “So, I give her till early spring semester. But there’s no way she’ll still be around by Nationals.
”

  During this particular exchange, the two runners actually bet each other two hundred dollars. I half-smirked about it because the idea of having two-hundred dollars to just throw around about somebody else’s health and well-being boggled my mind.

  Just then, Chloe swept her hand over mine at the lunch table and squeezed it.

  “Ouch!” I said. “Since you added those weight lifting sessions, I think you lost all sense of how strong you are. Fuck, that hurt.” I looked at her and gave her a silly pout.

  “Oh. Sorry,” Chloe said and took a large bite of her sandwich. A dab of spinach dribbled onto her chin and I reached up and swiped it off.

  “Slob.” I chuckled.

  Chloe rolled her eyes. “I’m always so hungry! These practices are killing me.”

  “Ugh. I’m jealous,” I answered. “The walks I’m doing aren’t cutting it. I feel like the past fourteen years of training are flying out the window. And meanwhile, Poppy is tearing through her practices. Jeremy Cotter is a great trainer, and she’s already getting better. You can see it.”

  “Don’t talk about her like that,” Chloe said in a stern voice that sounded much older than her years.

  “Like what?” I asked and raised an eyebrow.

  “Like she’s better than you. That’s just poisonous to one’s ego,” Chloe returned. “She’s just insecure and she’s probably been told her entire life that she can do whatever the hell she wants, and you and I have never had that. We’ve had to fight for what we want. We have to ignore the other voices.”

  Max sat across from us and chewed his sandwich contemplatively. Sometimes, I think we forgot he was there when we got into our deep conversations. I blinked at him and tried to think of what to say. In the past weeks, nobody else had even spoken to me, except for Zed’s whole warning about my water bottle, and I really was grateful for Max and Chloe. They gave me Oreos when I was too sad to go on, and they sat with me when I might have otherwise died of loneliness.

  “I guess her mom was really pissed that her shoes got destroyed and took it up with Mr. Piper,” Max said suddenly.

  “Oh?” I hadn’t heard this.

  “I heard they were trying to get you expelled, but Mr. Everton stepped in,” Max said. “And said you would never do something like that. There was some kind of stand-off and money changed hands. Mr. Piper believes Mr. Everton over everyone, even Poppy. It seems like you have a guardian angel on your side.”

  They didn’t know the half of it. I hadn’t told anyone that Mr. Everton had paid for the last part of my tuition. I scraped the last bites of food off my plate and told them I would catch them later. For whatever reason, I just couldn’t sit in that cafeteria anymore. Everyone’s gaze found me every few minutes like I was this strange oddity they wanted to ogle at. Outside, I zipped my second-hand yellow jacket up to my neck and headed out toward the line of trees, where miles and miles of forest trails traced through the mountains that surrounded the school. I’d hardly been out on the trails in the months since school had started since I had been so pinched on time. But in recent days, I had taken up three-mile-long walks, anything to stretch out my legs and feel like a shadow of my once-active self.

  It was nearly Halloween, and you could feel it in the way the air simmered with smells of molding leaves and dying plants. It was chilly, but the sky was bright, almost too blue like it cut into your gaze and demanded attention. Deep within the trees, you caught just brief glimpses of that blue, sandwiched between the tip-tops of trees. So far into the forest, I could piece through my many thoughts, learn to give the right one's power and ignore the other ones.

  A good mile into my walk, my phone buzzed. I drew it out to find a text from Jeanine. I had seen her a few times since the incident. She had been at the hospital twice during that rough first week. I had seen it in her eyes: she ached to know what was really going on but felt too anxious to ask. She didn’t want to press me. Instead, she took to those sessions with me to try to boost my morale and get my head straight. The list of common sport catch-phrases she shot at me was long and oddly hilarious. “You have to overcome with your head and think with your heart,” was one of them. Another was, “When you’re out on that mat, you have to leave it all out there. Use all the passion and pain of your life. I know you’ve had so much more of it than you were ever supposed to. But maybe that’s your strength.”

  Jeanine: How are you feeling?

  I paused for a second, and my thumbs flickered over my phone. I dropped my head back and inhaled that cider-leaf-smell. What the hell could I tell Jeanine that wouldn’t sound like a full-on lie?

  Me: Oh, fine. I can’t wait to start training again.

  Jeanine: Cool. You’d tell me if there was something off, right? You know I’m only a twenty-minute drive away.

  I wanted to tell her more. I wanted to explain how the entire school had pin-pointed me as someone to be avoided, someone who might bring a black mark to their sterling athletic record. But instead, I just sighed and stabbed my phone back into my pocket. Everything had to be fine. I wouldn’t remember these in-between times. Not when I had that Olympic medal around my neck.

  Suddenly, there was a shuffling of leaves, the thud of feet across the mud. I swept around to see Zed further ahead on the trail. He stretched his long legs out and his brown curls wafted out behind him. Despite the chilly air, he wore loose shorts and a sweatshirt, along with a white sweatband around his wrist. When he spotted me, he kind of ambled to a stop and looked at me the way a deer does when you discover it out in the wild—like it’s just as surprised to see you as you are to see it.

  We were over a mile away from the school, stitched between thick forest. I lifted my hand and gave a little wave. Slowly, I walked toward him. I had him kind-of trapped since he seemed to be headed back toward the school and I was there, a block in the course. When I stopped, I was about two feet away from him. I inhaled the soft smell of his body, his sweat. He caught his breath and gave me this half-smile, an arrogant one. I could feel it: we both swam with thoughts of kissing in the bathroom at Theo’s. My fingers flickered with sudden desire. I wanted to touch the flat of his stomach, creep under his loose shorts and feel him.

  God, it had just been so long since anyone had really looked at me the way he was now. A bird whipped overhead and drew a dark shadow across his cheeks.

  “I didn’t expect to find you out here,” he said. His voice was low and his eyes flashed wickedly.

  “I should say the same to you,” I replied and shuffled my weight to my other foot.

  “I like to do my weekend runs by myself,” he said, running a hand through is hair. “It clears my head.”

  “Do you have a lot of things to clear up?” I asked.

  Wait. Don’t be nice to him. He’s treated you like trash, like everyone else.

  Then again, he was the one who warned me about the water bottle. He saved me.

  Zed palmed the back of his neck. “Lots of shit going on back home, as usual. Hard for the boys to understand.”

  Right. Zed also came from nothing. I always forgot.

  I shrugged. “You know you can talk to me about that kind of thing. I might get it.”

  Zed’s arrogant smile fell, maybe just because he could sense how serious, how genuine I really was. He batted his eyelashes and said, “You know, I really appreciate that.”

  “I appreciate you warning me about the water bottle the other day. Who knows what would have happened if…”

  Of course, my head had gone there. Me, lifting that water to my lips. Feeling the acid dot across my teeth and my lips and my tongue and then trickling down my throat, carving out a little hole that led into my heart.

  “She’s fucked up, you know,” Zed whispered. “When I saw her do it, I literally couldn’t believe it. I know she’s been known to do some really fucked up shit, but that was off the scale. The shit she did last year to the other girl, it was… I mean. But watching her get doused in water was maybe the most rewarding th
ing I’ve ever…” His eyes looked heavy. “Do you want to go for a walk? There’s this really beautiful creek over here.”

  I nodded. Zed turned on his heel and walked alongside me in silence for a few minutes. The chatter of birds filled the air and I smiled inwardly but made sure not to show it. It just felt nice to be seen, to be talked to. The trickle of the creek met my ears a few minutes later, and Zed’s fingers grazed over my hand. I blinked up at him, but his eyes remained straight ahead. The air felt taut.

  “My mom and dad are getting divorced,” he offered suddenly. “And my little sister dropped out of high school because she’s—get this—pregnant. It’s so fucked back home. And they look at me like this privileged asshole who got out. So they don’t tell me what’s going on until way after it’s happened.”

  We reached the creek. It bubbled and burst against large grey and silver stones and crept down the slant of the mountain. It was difficult to imagine where it was going or where it had started, but I had this sense that it broke out from the very tip-top of the mountain, like where the mountain gave birth to life. The only sounds were the water, the sweep of the wind, the chirp of the birds. A movement toward the far-right made both Zed and I curve around to spot the fluffy tails of two deer, who broke between the trees and hustled away like we were death itself.