Wrong in All the Right Ways

by Tiffany Brownlee

  “I should probably head back, too. Your sister will kill me if I sprain my ankle out here.”

  “She’d kill you, and then me for suggesting we do this. So in the end, we’re both screwed.” We chuckle, but then all of a sudden, things go back to being weird. This is our first real connection since our breakup—our chat at the benefit wasn’t deep enough to classify as a connection—and I want to apologize for the way things ended between us, but I chicken out when our eyes meet again. “I’ve missed everything about you, Emma.”

  “Have you really?” I ask, playfully.

  Keegan scoots closer to me—so close that I can see the bits of gold in his eyes—and says, “Of course. I hated how things ended between us.”

  They’re so green, I find myself thinking, and before I can stop him, Keegan leans in to kiss me. I almost lose myself in him, but then I think of Dylan, and my body freezes up.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, pushing him away.

  “No, I’m sorry,” he answers bashfully.

  “It’s okay. You did nothing wrong. This mess is all me.” I reach for the necklace hidden underneath the collar of my sweatshirt and rub the golden charm with my name on it between my thumb and pointer finger. Forgive me, Dylan. I didn’t mean it.

  “You okay?” Keegan says, bringing me back to reality.

  “Yeah. Just … when you said you’d be here for me, I thought you maybe meant as my friend. Right now, I don’t think I’m capable of anything serious.” I don’t tell him that it’s because my heart belongs to Dylan, but I figure that’s an ethical omission.

  “Oh.” I see a flush of color sweep across his olive cheeks.

  “I’m sorry.” My heart is heavy.

  “No, no. Not your fault. I read the signs wrong.” He scratches his head and scoots away from me. “But if a friend is what you need right now, then a friend is what I’ll be.”

  chapter 24

  WITH EACH PASSING day, somehow it’s been getting easier. My heart still longs for Dylan, but I don’t feel shrouded in sadness anymore. Keegan and Karmin pick me up when I fall into one of those moods. They, unlike my parents, understand that I need to keep up the distractions. My parents have been in this heartbroken trance for so long that it doesn’t even affect me anymore.

  * * *

  When the last bell rings, I take the long way to the student parking lot. Earlier today, I made the mistake of passing by the “Get Well, McAndrews” table that someone set up in the middle of the hall. The school has embraced my mother’s philosophy that positivity will breed more positivity, and so they placed a glass box on the table for us to drop notes into for Dylan. When he wakes up and is in recovery, they’ll present the box to him so he can know that his Cedar Pointe High family was thinking about him the whole time. When I saw the display earlier today, I felt a pang of sadness pierce through my lower abdomen. It took me a little while to get my breathing back under control, but Karmin finally settled me.

  “I’ve heard that it’s less dangerous to walk when you’re looking up, but that could be hearsay,” Keegan says when I finally make it to my car. I have to keep my eyes on the ground as I walk or else they’ll wander to the empty space where Dylan’s car used to sit every day. “What took you so long?”

  “I wanted to go the scenic route,” I retort with slight agitation. The way he constantly questions my actions is starting to get on my nerves. I get that he’s checking up on me to make sure I’m okay, but sometimes I feel like he’s suffocating me. My eyes meet his as he looks up from the school newspaper; his left eyebrow is raised, and I can tell that he thinks I’m lying.

  “You don’t have to lie.”

  “I’m not, I just…”

  “Didn’t want to pass by the table again? Don’t worry, I understand completely.”

  “I’m craving a smoothie right now. Do you want to join me?” I say, trying to change the subject. Keegan knows that I don’t like talking about Dylan, but he always seems to bring him up anyway. He nods stiffly, probably in reluctance, and then starts to make his way toward his truck.

  Once we order our usual—a Strawberry-Kiwi Supreme for me, and a Very Vanilla Bean Shake for him—we grab a booth by the window.

  “Where were you at lunch today? I was looking for you,” he says. I try to avoid Keegan’s stare, but he won’t let up. His eyes find mine as he asks, “Well?”

  “I didn’t feel like holding any Spanish conversations with Señora Esperanza today, so I left before the late bell for third period rang and returned right after lunch.” I can see the disappointment fill his eyes. He knows me as the good girl. The girl who never missed a class unless I was so sick that I couldn’t crawl out of bed. The girl who got straight As with little to no effort. “It’s not like it matters anyway. Since the accident, everyone has given me a free pass to use at my leisure.”

  “Since when did you become so badass?” he asks, his face twisting into a scowl. “This isn’t you. I think that brown hair dye has gone to your head.”

  “Ha-ha, very funny,” I say, pulling my vibrating phone from my back pocket and setting it on the table. “I heard that they updated the ranks again today. Did you swing by the office to see where you stand?”

  “Couldn’t. It was jam-packed up there. I guess everyone wants to talk about … you know.”

  “Yeah, I know.” He’s right. I haven’t been able to get up to the counselor’s office since Dylan’s accident. It’s actually kind of annoying. I mean, I was the one who was closest to him. If anything, I should be up with special access to guidance. Not the other students who didn’t even know Dylan. “Can you believe that we’re going to be Cedar Pointe graduates in just a few months?”

  “I know. Sometimes it feels like I’m moving in fast motion. Like, I’m so focused on what’s to come in the next year or so that I’m not taking enough time to enjoy these last couple of months at Cedar Pointe.”

  “I agree. But I actually want time to go by faster. I’m ready to leave this place.”

  “Given everything that’s happened? I get that.” There he goes again, trying to bring up Dylan. It’s like I can’t go five minutes without someone or something reminding me of his absence. It’s unbearable.

  “It has nothing to do with Dylan. I’m just ready for college.”

  Reacting to my terse words, Keegan can’t change the topic fast enough. “I got my acceptance letter from USC last week. I’m one clean baseball season away from a full scholarship.”

  “That’s great,” I say, grabbing his hand from across the table to give it a friendly squeeze.

  “I’m happy that I’m not going too far away, so that I can still visit when I get homesick.”

  “Or when you need your mom to turn your pink underwear back to white, right?”

  “That was one time,” Keegan erupts with a huge smile on his face. I can tell he’s embarrassed by the amount of red that’s overtaking his cheeks, but I don’t comment on it. “I can’t believe Karmin told you that. I’m gonna kill her.”

  “You can’t.” I play along. “Then who will I tell all of my secrets to?”

  “Secrets? You keeping things from me, Em?” Yes. Loads. I purse my lips to keep my secrets from pouring out, and he must take it as a sign that he needs to change the subject again. “Anyway, what about you? Did you hear back from … where do you want to go again?”

  Just open them, the voice in my head echoes. The dance bag at my feet holds the answers to the questions in my head. A few unopened envelopes are the only things standing between me and my future.

  I gather the array of different-sized envelopes and spread them out across the table. Brown. Berkeley. Stanford. Duke. Westminster. Columbia. UCLA. Just looking at them, I can already tell that I got into Berkeley, Duke, and Columbia. They’re all big envelopes. Colleges send out the big ones only to accepted students. Small ones either mean No, or that you’ve been waitlisted—from what I’ve read, anyway.

  My hands brush against the Stanford envelope. H
opefully, I haven’t thrown anything away in neglecting the initial letter that came when Dylan was first in the hospital.

  “Well, what are you waiting for?” Keegan asks giddily, as if he’s going to rip them open any second if I don’t do it myself.

  Dylan. “Nothing, I guess.” I start with the big envelopes. They start out exactly as I expect them to: We are pleased to inform you that … blah blah blah.

  I stack the remaining four letters and open them one by one. First Stanford and UCLA. We are pleased to inform you … (Okay. Maybe the small envelope theory is a myth.) Then, Brown and Westminster. We regret to inform you … (Okay. Maybe not.) The balloon in my heart deflates a little when I read these last two.

  “So where do you think you’re gonna go?” His question is so simple, but it feels complex when I actually start to think about my answer.

  I was wrong. With what I told Karmin, I was so wrong. Dylan being absent for the opening of my college admissions letters doesn’t make it any easier to process my feelings. I’m still stuck, rotating between the familial and romantic relationships that I have with him.

  I push away all but two envelopes: Duke and UCLA. Both of them are offering me serious scholarships—nothing close to full tuition, but enough to pay for room and board—but UCLA’s package includes a special first-year internship at L&B Books, a huge publishing house in Los Angeles. It’s simple, Emma. At Duke, you’ll start out as a nobody, but if you go to UCLA, you’ll at least have a foot in the door.

  I think back to my four years at Cedar Pointe High. For three of them, I was on the outside of it all, waiting on the popularity door to swing open and let me in. I don’t want the next four years to be the same. If the door is open, I might as well step through it. UCLA it is.

  “Earth to Emma,” Keegan half shouts at me, waving his hands in front of my face as if he’s trying to hypnotize me. “What are you thinking?”

  “I need to talk to my parents.” I grab my phone and dial my father’s number as quickly as I can. He’s going to flip out when he hears this. He answers on the third ring. “Hey, Dad, guess what? I—”

  “Emma Leanne Ellenburg,” my dad’s voice booms through the earpiece. He’s so loud that I bet Keegan can hear every word. “Where are you?”

  “I’m—”

  “Actually, I don’t want to know. You just better be on your way to Dr. Turner’s office. Therapy starts in ten minutes!” Click.

  “Okay. Bye, Dad,” I say, embarrassed, but Keegan doesn’t buy it for one second.

  “Emma, I’m sorry,” he says, sympathy flooding his eyes. “Is everything okay?”

  “My dad wants me to go to some stupid family therapy session. We go every Monday, and, after that call, I think I’m gonna skip that today, too.”

  Keegan’s thick eyebrows crinkle with confusion. He doesn’t understand my reason for not wanting to go, so I answer his silent question for him. “It’s supposed to be for all of us, but my parents are the only ones who need it. They’ve been fighting a lot recently. Little things at first, but now they barely talk to each other, unless it’s a fight. My dad doesn’t go visit Dylan anymore, and it’s been getting to my mom. I guess they think that therapy is going to fix us. Like we could ever get back to normal.” I finish off my smoothie, slurping the last remnants through the straw, before grabbing his cup and taking a sip of it.

  “The whole thing is stupid, though. I mean, the entire session is them debating who’s to blame for our family falling apart, and each time we are left on a cliffhanger—‘Will we find out who should be held liable? Will Matthew ever stay awake through an entire session? When will Dr. Turner give up the creases in her pantsuits? Find out on the next episode of The Blame Game.’”

  I hope to get a small chuckle out of Keegan, but he doesn’t give me that satisfaction. Instead, he says three words: “Go to therapy.” After all of that, I was expecting him to be on my side and tell me that I’m right for wanting to skip. I wanted to hear him say that it isn’t fair that my parents are making me go see a therapist every week, but he doesn’t say any of that.

  “Did you not hear what I just said? I don’t need it, so therefore, I don’t want to go.”

  “I think the reason you don’t want to go is because you can’t face Dylan. Like his accident hurt you in a way that you still don’t understand and so to numb the pain, you ignore him.” My stomach drops. Did Karmin tell him my secret?

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Really? Because I haven’t seen your name on the hospital’s visitor list in about a month.” I feel his eyes all over my face, but I can’t look at him. He’s right. “Freshman year, Karmin and I lost our dad in a car accident.” This is my first time hearing either of the Ortega twins talk about their father. I’ve been to their house many times, and I’ve noticed his absence, but I figured he was just absent, not deceased. “He was out drinking, and apparently, he was way over the limit. He ran off the road and crashed into a ditch in the middle of the night, and by the time the ambulance showed up, he was already dead.”

  I want to ask what his story has to do with me, but I keep quiet out of respect. I guess he sees the crash as the connector.

  “I avoided my feelings forever, telling everyone that I was fine when I was really torn up. I missed him, but I was mad at him. Talking about it was too much for me to handle back then. Sometimes it still is. But do you know what I would give for him to be in a coma right now, instead of in the Cedar Pointe Cemetery?” His eyes start to fill up with tears that he probably didn’t expect to still have. All I can do is watch as the stoic baseball player before me breaks down. “Go to therapy, Emma. It’ll help you deal with whatever it is that you’re not telling me, with whatever it is that you’re hiding from everyone,” he says in between sobs. “Promise me you’ll go.”

  I don’t see how my going to therapy just to conceal my real feelings from my parents is going to help, but when I look Keegan in the eyes, I feel a weight drop in my stomach. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him look so serious.

  “Okay,” I say slowly. “I promise.”

  * * *

  I’m only ten minutes late when I arrive at Dr. Turner’s office. A light and familiar scent finds its way to my nose as I walk through the double doors. Vanilla. Just like my mom always wears. After having me sign in, the woman at the front desk ushers me to the room down the hall. I place my head on the door and listen before I go inside. My mom is speaking, and I can tell she’s been crying because her voice is raspy and sounds as if she’s struggling to form the words that she wants to say. On the door is a sign that reads SESSION IN PROGRESS, but I ignore it.

  “Sorry I’m late,” I say as I enter. The couch that we usually sit on is across the room, so it feels awkward to have to interrupt their conversation to find my seat. “Traffic,” I lie. I’ve been getting good at lying to my parents lately. And because they’re in some trancelike, depressive state, they believe my every word.

  “It’s okay,” Dr. Turner says, turning to me. She’s a tiny woman. Dark-skinned and undeniably beautiful, with big brown eyes that she keeps hidden behind a pair of dark-rimmed glasses. “Your mother was just telling us about how she’s been having a hard time keeping hope when no one comes to visit your brother anymore.”

  I want to correct her and let her know that Dylan was not yet part of our family, but I swallow the mean thought. I can’t have an outburst here. Not in front of my parents, and especially not in front of Matthew.

  The way Dr. Turner has our sessions set up makes me feel like I’m in an Alcoholics Anonymous support group. Each of us goes around the room and says how we’re doing now that it’s been a few months since his accident, each trying to outdo the other with how bad we feel. It starts off with Matthew, then goes to my mom, then my dad, and always ends with me. To my parents’ displeasure, I pass every time. I never say a word in here; to me, it’s pointless. But since Mom and Dad are doling out a ton of money to have her help us, I can’t tell them
I don’t believe in it. That would only add insult to injury.

  As soon as I take my seat on the couch, I regret letting Karmin French braid my hair during PE today. I usually wear my hair down so that I can listen to low music through my earbuds; it helps the time pass by quicker than if I just sit here doing nothing. But now that my ears are exposed, I have to actively listen to the entire session, which is, by far, the cruelest form of torture I’ve ever had to endure.

  “I guess I haven’t been to visit him because I’m having a hard time dealing with what I saw that night in the ambulance. My wife didn’t ride in the ambulance with him, so I don’t think she understands why I can’t face him.” My dad sniffles.

  “I’m very sorry to hear that, Daniel,” Dr. Turner says robotically, almost rehearsed. “I understand that it’s hard to face Dylan right now, but you have to realize … he didn’t die. Whatever fears you have, you’re going to have to let them go. Not only for yourself, but also for your children. You have to lead by example. If they see you being hopeful for his recovery, then they will also feel that way.” For a moment, I believe in her words and sincere smile, but then I remember something that Dylan once said about therapists. The longer they keep you in their office, the more money they make. I bet she’s secretly hoping that Dylan never wakes up.

  My father’s eyes meet mine and Matthew’s as he shifts in his spot on the sofa. “I’m not sure I can do that.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m talking about,” my mom cuts in. “I don’t know if I can take this much longer.”

  “Take what?” Dr. Turner asks, readying the pen in her right hand.

  “His pessimistic attitude. It’s hard being the glue that holds this family together. It’s hard being the only parent who cares about Dylan’s recovery.”

  “So, it’s Dylan. You think he’s the problem? The reason you guys have been … off?”

  “No, no, no. Not at all. If anything, he brought us closer when he came into our family.”

  “Hmm.” Dr. Turner’s pen flies across the paper, noting something important. “What about you, Emma? Do you have anything to share in regard to this topic?”