by Jamie Ayres
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Literature Circle Questions
Sample Chapter from 18 Truths (sequel to 18 Things)
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To all the teachers out there,
you show me every single day that there is such a thing as immortality
because you go with us on our journeys in our hearts and minds, touching lives forever.
This book is for you because all the thanks in the world will never be enough.
“The Universe is but one vast symbol of God.”
—Thomas Carlyle
The best sight on the lake was Conner after he slid out of his shirt. I hid behind my Seventeen magazine, an effort to conceal my ogling. His sandy colored hair swept low over his forehead, just a gleam of sweat under his eyelids. His lashes are obnoxiously long, I thought, before I noticed his quizzical stare. He leaned in close to me, lips parted. The scent of his energy drink still lingered on his breath, drawing me closer. I licked my lips, dreaming of our first kiss.
He strained, like he was trying to look around me. “What smut are you reading, Olga?”
Typically, I’m not a Seventeen reader, but the magazine was an impulse buy at the bookstore where I worked. Better study your enemy, since half the girls at school are in love with Conner too.
The breeze blew around us, my hair flying in all directions. After placing the magazine on my lap, I took the hair tie off my wrist and secured my curls in a ponytail before answering. “I just flipped to this month’s featured friendship quiz; it’s about honesty.”
He yanked the pages from between my thighs. “Okay. Number one: Tell me honestly, do you remember how we met?”
Looking upward, I took a deep breath of fresh air, thinking back through all my memories of Conner. “In kindergarten; I hid under the slide every day at recess because some boy would call me Olga Ugly. One day you stopped him. Just like magic, I found my guardian angel to protect me through harsh years of pre-adolescent angst.”
I placed one hand over my heart and pretended to wipe a tear with the other.
He beat his chest. “That’s me, Defender of Justice. Number two: What song reminds you of me?”
At first, I thought about answering with a quip remark; the choices were endless, and I was scared of giving away too much about how I really felt. Then, I remembered the quiz title.
“Easy. Home by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes.” The song spoke of home being wherever I’m with you, one of Conner’s favorites.
“Interesting.” He looked down at the magazine, blushing.
Is my honesty making him nervous?
“Next one. Oh, this ought to be good. What do you hate about me?”
That I’ve been in love with you for almost a dozen years now, and you still haven’t asked me out! “You date too many cheerleaders.”
We both laughed until I gestured with my hand for him to continue.
“Give me a nickname and explain your reason.”
I scratched my head. “Forrest. Because you run fast and act slightly retarded sometimes.”
Crossing his arms over his abs, he laughed deeply. “Not bad, not bad at all. I’ve taught sarcasm to you so well that I think my nickname should be Master Yoda.”
“I’m not calling you anything that involves Master.”
Leaning forward, he delivered the last question with a devilish grin. “Have you ever wanted to tell me anything, but couldn’t?”
I shoved him backwards in the boat. “It does not say that!”
He flung the magazine at me. “See for yourself.”
I glanced at the page. “Well, seeing this is the fifth question, I think I’ll plead the fifth.”
He waggled his finger. “Nuh-uh. Give me the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”
“You can’t handle the truth!” I yelled in my best Jack Nicholson impression.
“Try me.”
It was my idea to go sailing today. We always took our first spring sail together when the weather got warm enough. Now I curled my arms around my knees as a shiver ran through me, wishing I’d just gone home to study instead. My heart sped up to a million beats per second, telling me I so wasn’t ready to finally tell Conner I was in love with him.
A smile flitted across his face as the sound of thunder rolled across the dark clouds coming in from the north, and a flash lit up the sky. “Guess you’re saved by the bell. We better head back.”
“Wait.” I closed my eyes and felt the cool air whipping across my shoulders and neck, urging me on. “I’ll tell you on prom night.” That gave me one week to gather my courage. I couldn’t hold back forever if I wanted next year, our senior year, to be the best ever.
“Can’t wait.” Conner covered his bare chest with his long-sleeved flannel, buttoning it up all the way. Studying the sky for a moment, he rubbed the wispy soul-patch on his chin and handed me an extra flannel. “It feels like another cold front moving in already.”
“You’re always prepared, aren’t you?”
“It’s the Boy Scout way of life.” Conner held up three fingers.
I nodded toward the threatening clouds. “We probably only have a half-hour before the bad weather hits, don’t ya think?”
Before he answered, the storm descended upon us, raining down ferociously, leaving us nowhere to hide. I searched frantically for the lifejackets, but the rain was blinding. “Conner, where are the—?”
Boom! A sharp, loud crack pierced the sky like a gunshot.
My mouth hung open. Conner gripped the stern; his hair stood on end, and a strong smell I didn’t recognize entered the atmosphere. The sailboat mast made this weird crinkling noise, and a trembling hand flew to my chest, breathing heavily but silently.
“Conner!” My voice was shrill, but before I could properly warn him, lightning struck.
Literally.
Struck.
Conner.
Time moved in slow motion. His hair caught fire, and the force of the bolt sent him flying off the boat. My heart stopped, my eyes burned from the pelting rain. I didn’t even notice my sobbing until I tasted the salty tears.
I couldn’t see him anywhere. The realization made my heart restart, pounding faster and harder than ever.
“Conner!” I threw a floatation device overboard, took a deep breath, then dove into the freezing water. Once, I dove to the bottom of an almost frozen swimming pool to look for a ring I lost. The cold sucked really bad but didn’t have anything on what I suffered through now. Cold worse than the dead of winter. Titanic cold. But I knew I had only twenty seconds to rescue him before he’d be floating face up, twenty seconds before I’d never see him again, twenty seconds before he died.
CPR training covered that.
I found him drifting away from the boat. Unconscious. A feeling of despair swelled in my belly. I reached under his armpits and hooked my hands together around his chest. Leaning back, I kicked toward the surface, but he bogged me down. Kick, kick, kick, I chanted in my head over and over while struggling to hold onto his body. Under any other circumstance, my efforts would’ve been futile. I’d have an easier time hauling a sack of bricks. But pure adrenaline pumped through my veins, my legs propelling me like a motorboat. With each kick, my body wavered between burning and feeling numb, but I gritted my teeth and stayed focused on my task.
His shirt buttons dug into my hands, but I didn’t dare loosen my grip. The pain became distant as a part of my mind played the what if game: what if Conner died? What if I died? What if we both died?
The black void of the storm eclipsed my senses of time and space, but I knew the surface couldn’t be much farther now. I kept my eyes on the red blur floating j
ust above my head and gripped him tighter, reaching. In a frenzy of gasping, splashing, and screaming, I scrambled to pull him up. Draping Conner over the lifebuoy, I pushed and swam.
The wind cut steadily at my arms and face. The blue-gray froth lapped at my head, constantly covering Conner’s body. My throat grew thick from trying not to cry. Tears streamed in my vision as I lost the battle, and I gripped Conner tighter around the lifebuoy. The realization this might be the last time I ever held Conner threatened to drown us both, but the task of saving him was mine alone. I would save Conner.
I had to.
Nothing but darkness stretched across the horizon as my numb limbs moved through the water toward our boat. I wasn’t just fighting the current now but myself too. My arms were so stiff they wouldn’t move. The lake was a black hole into which every sound, every sight, every feeling had been sucked.
Only two kicks away, I kept telling myself, until it was finally true. I reached out and placed a hand against the smooth wood of our sailboat, an anchor in this storm.
I climbed aboard, clutching the string attached to the buoy so Conner wouldn’t float away. The wind howled like a pack of wolves, and I turned my back to it. I retrieved his phone out of his backpack, then punched 9-1-1. The call took three attempts, my fingers fumbling as my body rocked violently with shivers. Cold so intense I wished I was the one knocked unconscious.
Barely able to form words, I forced myself to shout to the operator over the pounding rain. My teeth chattered uncontrollably, and my hearing was muffled as though I was still underwater. I tried deciphering the woman’s response over the line and dug in the backpack for my inhaler, coughing and wheezing. When I couldn’t find it, I laughed deliriously, imagining the stupid headline. “Girl Survives Lightning Strike and Near Drowning but Dies From Asthma Attack.”
I glanced at Conner and noticed he wasn’t breathing.
At all.
I dropped the phone inside the backpack and risked flipping the boat by pulling him up. The fourteen-footer tilted and swayed and almost dumped me. Breath floated around me as I panted from exertion. My mind flashed to when Conner and I were kids, obsessed with seeing our own air in winter. We’d down hot chocolate and run outside, blowing ‘smoke’ out of our mouths. Now, I couldn’t believe I had any warmth left in me to cause this phenomenon. One arm clung to the boat, the other to Conner as I hauled him up, falling backwards. His body collapsed on top of me. His face was chalk colored as if he was dead.
I flipped him over. His flannel shredded, I briskly rubbed my knuckles over his chest, trying to wake him as my heart pounded.
No response.
I checked for a pulse on his neck … faint but there. I opened his airway, tilted his head, and put my ear to his mouth.
No airflow.
No chest movement.
I pinched his nose and administered a rescue breath—big enough to make his chest rise. Watched his chest fall. Repeated.
His lips were blue. Each breath of my own was agony. I couldn’t feel a good portion of my body as I repositioned his head and repeated. The rain stopped as suddenly as it came. The only sound was water lapping against the boat. I knew this sound would haunt me the rest of my life.
Despite my shortness of breath, I repeatedly blew into his mouth. I heard voices. Maybe I was hallucinating from lack of oxygen. I struggled again to draw in breath, but I valued his life more than mine. So I repeated. Every five seconds, like clockwork.
This is not how I imagined our lips touching for the first time. Something knocked me hard in the back of the head, and I faded away into darkness as horizon gave way to light. I didn’t know if it was Heaven or our rescue.
My mother helped me into the wheelchair. The ambulance ride and my time at the hospital blurred together. Had minutes passed? Hours?
“You’re going to be okay, Olga,” a nurse reassured me. “We’ve taken care of your hypothermia, but you need an MRI and—”
Someone screamed, loud and bloodcurdling.
I glanced into the trauma room across the hall and spotted Loria on her knees. Robert fell next to her and held his arms around her shaking frame.
Conner was lying still on a table.
Too still. His body, except for his head, covered by a sheet.
“No, no, no!” I tried to stand, but the nurse restrained me, instructing me to stay calm. “But that’s my best friend!” My arms flailed. “Conner!”
I wailed until his parents looked at me, and their sneers shocked me into silence.
Conner’s death was my fault.
I should’ve realized he wasn’t breathing sooner. I replayed the accident in my mind. Should I have called 9-1-1 first, or gotten him out of the water and started CPR right away? Was it the lightning that killed him, or did he have hypothermia like me?
The doctor in the trauma room closed the door.
Mom and Dad wrapped their arms around me.
“What happened?” I pleaded. “I don’t understand.”
“I’m sorry, sweetie.” Dad touched a finger to my forehead and swept a piece of hair behind my ear.
I hit his hand away, and he shuffled back a step or two.
The nurse wheeled me toward a row of chairs against a wall, out of the way from other nurses and doctors rushing around the ER.
“We didn’t want to tell you until we knew you’d be okay,” Dad explained. “Conner was already in cardiac arrest when they brought him here. They’ve been working on him for the past hour, but the doctor just came out and said there’s nothing more they can do. A respirator is keeping him breathing for now, but he’s brain dead.”
I placed a hand over my heart, checking to see if it was still beating. It was, but how could I be alive when Conner wasn’t?
“You wanted to wait until you knew I’d be okay?” I echoed his words back to him, sobbing. “I’ll never be okay again. Conner’s my best friend!”
I buried my face in my hands, and my body rocked again. From grief this time, not cold.
“We know, honey. We know.” Mom rubbed my arm, crying with me.
“You don’t know. I wanted him to see me as more than his nerdy best friend. And it might’ve been working. He flirted with me on our sail earlier. I had my chance to tell him how I really feel. But I didn’t. I was gonna tell him I love him at prom next week instead. How can this be happening? How can this be God’s plan?”
Dad frowned and took my hands in his. I yanked my hands away, then put them on the wheels of my chair and pushed myself toward the trauma room.
“Olga!” Nicole ran through the ER’s front entrance with Sean and Kyle behind her. “Thank God you’re okay. We heard a news report that a seventeen-year-old was killed after being struck by lightning while sailing on Lake Michigan, so we drove to the hospital, worried it was—” She stopped short. “Is Conner okay?”
The question felt like a punch to the face and I gripped the sides of my head, squeezing my eyes shut as the tears fell.
“Oh God,” Nicole whispered, pulling me into a hug.
“Jesus!” Sean shouted. “No!” Kyle screamed, his eyes bulging, looking from me to Conner’s parents.
The words of our friends exploded around the room like bombs. Loria and Robert stood and staggered toward us.
But my mission was the same. “Can I go in and see him?”
Loria’s breathing was uneven. She pulled a hand through her hair in the same manner Conner often did and then silently slumped into a plastic chair against the wall.
Robert tugged his horn-rimmed glasses to the edge of his nose and peered down at me.
“What—?” He broke down in tears, unable to finish his sentence.
I knew he wanted to ask what happened. But there’d be time for that later.
He nodded a slight yes before joining Loria, dropping his head on her tiny shoulder. Her face was a mixture of sadness, anger, confusion, and hatred. Hatred directed toward me, but I wheeled my chair into their son’s room anyway.
&nb
sp; Nicole tried to push me from behind.
“No.” My voice was firm. “I want to go in alone.”
I slowly approached the bed; the smell of disinfectant in the air made me nauseous. The sounds of the monitors weren’t loud, but they were impossible to ignore. Tears formed in my eyes. A thousand conversations whirled in my head, made me dizzier. Discussions of our future, studying for and taking the SAT’s, searching the web for the colleges we might attend, talking about how cool it’d be for his band to score a record deal and for me to land a scholarship. All these words seemed bittersweet now. I grabbed his hand. It was already cold to the touch even though those must’ve been third degree burns, and I wondered what his internal body temperature was compared to mine.
Did I kill him? Why did I pick today to go sailing? I knew the answer. I was jealous Conner asked Tammy, the head cheerleader, to prom today. I wanted to make her jealous in return by proving I could go on a ‘date’ with him whenever I wanted.
I stared down at his lifeless hand; a couple fingernails were missing. Maybe they were blown off by the impact, but I couldn’t focus on that or I’d puke again. I stood and placed my other hand on top of the sheet, where I thought his heart would be, and closed my eyes.
“Jesus, please bring Conner back. Please, don’t take him. I need him more than I need life. I refuse to accept this. You said we can ask anything in your name and it will be given. I’m asking you this now—no, begging. Please, God, please.” When I opened my eyes, Conner’s vacant expression stared back at me, his usual easy smile gone. I shook him, pounded on his chest. “Wake up, wake up, wake up!”
Little red dots littered his pale face. I had them, too. The nurse said they were from capillaries bursting underneath the skin. I wondered how his tan could’ve disappeared so quickly. His eyebrows were singed. A bald spot stretched across the top of his head, a red circle resembling a giant hickey taking the place where hair used to be. I guessed this was where the lightning struck him and remembered the flash of flames before the electricity flung him off our boat.
It was probably too late for this to be a Lazarus and Jesus situation, but I still couldn’t let Conner go. I decided to bargain with God.