“Jess . . .” I looked down at the floor, already scuffed with shoe prints even though the day had just started, and felt like that. Worn out. Down. “I know how much you love him, and . . .”
“And what?”
“And you’ll be happy,” I said. “You’ll be really happy together. Look, I gotta go to the guidance office and talk about my independent study, so—” I looked at her. She was trying to look angry, but she’d always been terrible at it. She just looked hurt instead. “I’ll see you in class, okay?”
“Can’t you stay and talk for just a second? I’ve been so mad at you for blowing me off and making Lissa cry, and I’m still mad at you, but I think that if we talk then maybe . . .” She kept talking and I tried to listen. I really did, but her words slid right off me.
She made a noise, a strangled furious sob, and said, “I get that you don’t care, okay, but Meggie, it’s like you’re not even here. Like now, when I was talking, you weren’t even listening. You looked—” her voice cracked, and she took a step toward me. “What’s going on with you? Why don’t you want to talk to me anymore?”
“I—” I started, and then shrugged.
“That’s it?” she said, her voice rising. “That’s all you do anymore, you know that? You say one word, maybe two, and then you shrug and vanish. It’s like you don’t care about anything. Something is seriously wrong with you.”
Trust Jess to get it right, to really see me and come right out and say what no one else would. Everyone looked at Jess and saw a quiet, sweet girl. Almost no one got that there was more to her, that she always saw things for how they were and not as everyone wanted them to be.
For the first time in ages, I smiled at her and meant it. I saw her, and really felt our friendship.
“You’re right,” I said, and I felt our friendship, knew it was gone. I’d ruined it, and knowing that hurt. It hurt a lot.
“Meggie?” she said, blinking like she was surprised, but I turned away and walked back outside, back into the cold.
I drove home. Mr. Reynolds was sitting in the backyard when I got there, his breath frosting the air as he sipped a beer and stared at a picture of Beth. He’d come home the morning after Joe and I had talked by the side of the road, and he’d left as soon as Joe came home from work that night, carefully backing the truck down the driveway and driving off. He didn’t come back until Joe had to leave for work in the morning.
He did that every day, went out at night, all night, and then sat in the backyard during the day, drinking and looking at that picture and never seeing Joe.
I never even saw them speak to each other.
I thought about that, their silence and Mr. Reynolds sitting by Beth’s grave like everyone knew he did. Mr. Reynolds, sitting by Beth like he could somehow soak her in before he left town again.
For some reason, it made me think about my parents.
My parents, who had started to wait up for me every night, sitting in their bedroom until they heard me swing up onto the roof and drop into my room. I would hear them moving around as I lay down to wait for sleep that wouldn’t come, see the light from their room flicker off.
They’d stopped asking me how I felt and whenever I caught them looking at me I saw a deep, sad fear in their eyes. They knew something wasn’t right about me, and I knew that was why they’d stopped asking me how I was. Why the fear was there. It hurt but I would see them watching me and knew that if I told them what was true, if I told them how lost I really was, it would break their hearts, and I couldn’t bring myself to do that. I’d seen how much they’d suffered when David was born and even after they’d been told he’d get better. After he did get better.
I wasn’t so sure that I could.
And so that night, when I climbed out onto the roof to run, I looked over at the Reynolds house. Moonlight was reflecting off the windows and I paused, staring at Beth’s. The curtains were pulled closed like she was in there fast asleep and dreaming.
If it hadn’t been for one day—just one day—she might have been.
Beth had died on a Tuesday. She’d taken the bus home from school, unlocked her front door and waved at my mother, who was waiting for David to get off the bus, and gone inside. She’d had an asthma attack an hour later. Mr. Reynolds was out at the county unemployment office, Mrs. Reynolds was on her way back from visiting her mother in Derrytown, and Joe was in detention for falling asleep in first period.
Beth did everything she was supposed to. She did her breathing treatment, and when that didn’t work, used her inhaler. When that didn’t work, she called 911 and then went downstairs and sat by the front door to wait for the rescue squad. She stayed on the phone with an operator the whole time.
She died before the rescue squad got there.
Joe got home just as they were taking her out of the house. Mr. Reynolds got there soon after, and the police had to take Joe away so Mr. Reynolds wouldn’t hurt him. Crazy with grief, everyone said. That’s what everyone said to explain how Joe’s family imploded, how Beth’s death flung them away from each other. Her death was a loss they simply couldn’t overcome.
I wasn’t home when Beth died. I was over at Jess’s, talking about Brian with her and Lissa, and by the time I did get home, the Reynolds house was quiet and dark, just like it was now.
I looked away from Beth’s window, shivering, and climbed down onto the porch. My shadow fell over the porch light, and when I looked at it brightness flooded my gaze for a moment, my vision swimming gold and then shifting to a hazy, flickering red.
“Hey,” I heard, and turned, saw Joe standing at the bottom of our porch steps, hands shoved into the front pockets of his jeans. He looked tired.
It was a relief to turn away from that red glow, even though spots of it danced in the corners of my eyes. “What are you doing here?”
He shrugged. “I saw you come out the window. When it took you a long time to come off the roof I thought—for a second I thought you’d fallen or something. So I came over to make sure you’re okay. Are you okay?”
“Yeah. I was just thinking.”
“Well, okay then.” He grinned at me, and I wondered what he remembered when he thought about that day. Did he remember everything? Did it make it easier, or harder?
“Actually, I was thinking about when Beth died.”
His grin faded. “Oh.” He took a step back and gestured at the empty driveway, his dark house. “I should go. Have a good run.”
“Okay.” I watched him walk down the driveway. It didn’t take long for him to be swallowed by the dark. I made it about halfway down the driveway myself and then stopped because behind me, I thought I heard the sounds of someone—Carl—cracking his knuckles.
I wasn’t going to turn around and look. I wasn’t.
“You aren’t running?” Joe said from the darkness at the end of our driveway.
I shook my head and heard the sound again. Knuckles cracking one by one, and my vision tunneled but wouldn’t fade. Wouldn’t let me go.
I sat down so I wouldn’t fall down, feeling the world tilt around me. My head throbbed, a strange sparking pressure not like a headache but worse, like something inside me was trying to break free. I pressed my hands to my forehead, trying to make it stop.
“What are you doing?” Joe said. He was crouched down next to me, staring as I moved my hands away from my head, and I blinked at how close he was. I hadn’t heard him walk over to me. There were grass stains on the knees of his jeans yet again. I tried to focus on them.
“I’m sitting.” My voice sounded thick, far away.
He looked at me for a second more and then glanced over at his house, lifting his gaze up to Beth’s dark window.
“I still remember exactly what it looked like when I got home the day she . . . the day she died. There were all these cars, all these flashing lights, and our front door was open a little bit. I could see people inside, just standing there, and then . . . then I saw her feet. They were bare and that’s wh
en I knew. She wouldn’t go anywhere unless she had her shoes on, was always afraid she’d step on something and have to go to the emergency clinic for a shot. She hated that place so much, hated getting shots . . .” His voice cracked, and he fell silent. He didn’t stop looking at her window.
“The guy sitting next to me on the plane hated shots too,” I said. “He had a heart attack and had to get one in the emergency room, medicine or something, and he said he told them to just go ahead and let him die because he didn’t want any needles . . .” I trailed off, something lurching sickly inside me.
Carl had told me that story. He’d told me about his heart attack and the emergency room doctor who had given him the shot he didn’t want and how he’d woken up to see his wife crying over him and saying he was lucky, so lucky.
I hadn’t remembered that before. The memory had just come and suddenly I was there on the plane, watching Carl stretch out his hands to show me how big the needle was, exaggerating its size and then thumping his chest with a fist to show his heart was still beating. Smiling at me until I smiled back, then dipping one hand into his shirt pocket and pulling out a picture, saying, “This is Owen. Turns two tomorrow. Came back early to go to his party and steal me some of that birthday cake when Gladys isn’t looking. Forty years we’ve been married, and that woman’s eyes are still as sharp as when I first saw her.”
Oh God. Carl had been coming to see his grandson, his family, to be with Gladys. He was going to go to a birthday party. He was going to eat cake. I remembered all of that, could hear his voice, his story, and instead of going home he’d—
Joe touched my arm. I flinched, pulling away, and stood up. “I—”
“Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to—I know you were thinking about what you said. About that guy. But I just . . . I was thinking about it too. What it was like for them at the end, I mean. And I think it was . . . I think it was okay for them, that when—that when death comes, it doesn’t hurt. I think you just slip away. So they didn’t know, you know?” His voice was so quiet. So hopeful.
So wrong.
“Beth didn’t just slip away,” I said, and my voice was so fast and so angry it sounded like it belonged to someone else. “She knew she was dying and everyone on the plane knew because when you die like that, when there’s time to feel it, you know. You can’t not know because you feel how much it hurts, how much everything hurts, and you’re afraid and alone and—”
“Shut up,” he said, standing up too and taking a step back, away from me. “She wasn’t—Beth didn’t—everyone said she didn’t feel a thing. Everyone—” He let out a noise, like a gasp but sharper, more raw. “What do you know anyway? You walked away from that crash and left everyone behind. You don’t know what happened to them, how they—”
“Stop,” I said, a weak whisper, and felt something inside me give way, stumbled and sank down onto my knees. What if—what if he was right? What if I’d seen someone who was alive and left them? Had I done that?
I lay down and all around me the grass turned from night dark to burning red flame. I tried to move away but there was nowhere to go. The grass flickered, drawing closer, and I saw it wasn’t grass at all. The ground was pure flame, melting metal and dirt, and my feet were bare, my hands holding melted rubber and flailing, circling the air like a kid flapping his arms when he pretends to fly.
I couldn’t get the flames away. They were crawling closer and closer, coming for me, and I—
“Megan, what are you doing?” Joe was staring down at me, a strange look on his face. I was curled up into myself on the lawn, knees tucked into my chest. My arms were outstretched, shaking, and they stilled as I saw the darkness around me, felt the wet, cold grass soaking into the back of my shirt.
“I . . . the grass wasn’t here, there was fire and I—” I clamped my mouth shut as the look on his face grew stranger still, then sharpened with understanding. I stood up, biting the inside of my cheek hard so I wouldn’t sway, wouldn’t break open now, and wiped bits of grass off, focusing on their slippery feel.
When I finally looked at him, he was looking at me, and I saw that his eyes were blue, a strange dark blue, beautiful. I’d always thought his eyes were brown. Over ten years of living next door to him, over ten years of my heart slamming into my chest whenever he was near, and I’d been so hung up on him that I’d never really seen him.
He had blue eyes, and there were tears in them.
“I’m sorry about before,” I said. “What I said about Beth, I mean. I—I was upset.”
“But you were right.” He stared at me, eyes glistening, and I saw so much grief and understanding there that I had to look away. “She . . . she must have been so afraid. She was always so scared when she had an attack. It was the one thing she couldn’t—she could never learn enough to stop them. She shouldn’t have been alone. I—I told her that when I saw her, when it was too late and . . .” He sniffed once. “Fuck. I should have been there. I tell her that every time I see her.”
I looked at him and thought about the grass stains on his jeans, how I’d seen them over and over again. “You—you go and see her just like—”
“Yeah. Just like my dad. The one thing we have in common, except I don’t drink when I’m there. Not that we ever talk about it or anything. He won’t even say her name.”
He blew out a breath. “I have to move out, you know. Having me around when he’s home makes it harder for him.” He glanced over at me. “Guess you know that. Kind of hard not to hear, right?”
“Yeah. I—sorry.”
Joe nodded. “Guess you know he’s gone again too. And that he took the truck with him.”
“I heard him leave.” We all had, during dinner. It had been impossible not to. He’d yelled, “No one asked you to come back here!” before he’d backed his truck down the driveway so fast we’d heard the tires squeal, slipping as he turned onto the road.
“He—I wanna hate him, you know? For being so . . . for being how he is. But I can’t because everything—everything inside him died when she did but he . . . he’s still here.”
The front porch light flicked off and then on, and I looked over at the house and saw the shadow of my father through one of the tall, thin frosted-glass windows on either side of the front door.
“Oh. Guess my dad’s up.”
He glanced at the door, then back at me. “Do you think he knows I’m out here?”
“Don’t know.”
He nodded and then leaned over and gave me a hug, quick and awkward, like he wasn’t used to giving them. Our front porch light flicked off and on again.
“He definitely knows I’m here,” he said, and then turned around, headed back down the driveway, into the dark. I heard his feet crunch across the gravel scattered on the road, and then he stopped.
“See you around?” he said, his voice quiet.
“Yeah,” I said, and turned toward the house. I heard Joe walking up his driveway as I went inside.
Dad was waiting in the front hallway. There was a sleep crease on his left cheek, and he was running one hand through his hair the way he used to when I’d sneak downstairs at night to see him and Mom talking about David back when they’d just brought him home from the hospital.
“Out kind of late,” he said. “Especially on a school night.”
I shrugged, and we both looked at each other. He was the first one to look away.
“You—you look tired, Meggie.” He had his eyes closed, like he was hoping. Praying.
“I am,” I said, and went to bed.
Nineteen
Coach Henson was in the parking lot when I got to school the next morning, and this time he pointed at me as I drove by, crooking a finger to show we needed to talk.
I pretended I didn’t see him, and parked as far away from him as I could.
He came over right as I got out of the car, his face red from running or anger. Or both. “Guess you didn’t see me.”
I didn’t want to deal with him
and leaned against the car, pretending I was looking through the window for something inside. Maybe he’d take my silence for the hint it was and go away.
“Meggie, I’m talking to you.”
Guess not. I looked at him, still leaning against the car. I was so tired I felt like I needed something to help hold me up. “Sorry, it’s just a little early for me. Not totally awake yet, you know?”
“I’m going to cut right to it,” he said. “You still haven’t checked in with the guidance office about your independent study project and your grades—well, if you were still playing soccer, you wouldn’t be for much longer. At this point your parents are going to get a call and have to come in right away and talk about whether or not you’re even going to graduate. What do you think about that?” He gave me a look, arms folded across his chest, clearly waiting for me to speak.
What could I say? I want to care, but I don’t. I look at you and all I feel is tired. I walk through school and all I want to do is leave. I wake up in the morning and don’t know why I’m here. I feel like I’m not real. I feel like I died when everyone else on the plane did and I’m the only one who’s noticed.
I shrugged.
He threw his hands up in disgust. “That’s it? That’s all you’ve got? A shrug? I can’t understand what you’re thinking. Do you just not care or do you just not get it? I’ve bent over backwards for you. Everyone here has bent over backwards for you. And in return you’ve—”
“Let everyone down.”
“So you do get it. Then the real question is, what are you going to do about it?”
“Nothing,” I said, and got back in the car. He stood behind it, frowning, but when I started to back up he moved, shaking his head sadly.
I saw Jess and Lissa in Jess’s car as I drove off. They were heading toward school, and pretended not to see me. I saw David too. His bus was pulling into his school and he was sitting in the back, knees up against the seat in front of him as he talked to his mutant friends. One of them saw me and waved, said something to David.
David didn’t look at me. He just pressed his middle finger, pointing sky high, against the glass.
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