Five Total Strangers

by Natalie D. Richards

  “You shouldn’t assume I’m sleeping every time my eyes are closed,” Kayla says.

  “What are you talking about?” he repeats, but he is quiet. And he looks like he knows exactly what she’s talking about.

  Kayla smirks. “I heard your little true confession phone call to your buddy.”

  “Shut up,” he says, pink staining his cheeks.

  Harper looks up. “What phone call?”

  “Go on,” Kayla says, sneering. “Tell them how they’ll never see you the same.”

  “What is she talking about?” Harper asks.

  “None of your business,” he says.

  “It feels like something we should know,” Josh says..

  Something groans above us and we stop, looking up. There’s nothing but tree-covered mountains and snow and this terrible endless creaking that burrows under my skin. And crawls deeper. Something splinters. It’s like lightning, a deafening crack that shudders in the hollows of my bones.

  I can’t see it. I can’t see what’s happening.

  “Watch out!”

  Josh yanks me back, but it isn’t necessary. The tree falls in slow motion. The trunk of the tree lands across the road with a shuddering whoomph, branches catching on the slope on the opposite side of the road. Wood snaps and bark rips as the top of the tree settles.

  And then there is nothing but silence.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  The fallen tree forces us back to the car. We pile in, a shivering heap of fear and weariness. The engine hums and warm air pours out of the vents, but we can’t go farther with a tree in front of us. We’ll have to turn around.

  I feel like I’m floating above my own body, somewhere high above the car. From this distance, I can see us like the psychological experiment Josh talked about when we first set out. It’s like this whole ordeal is nothing more than the worst nightmare we could collectively conjure. From here, I can almost pretend none of this is real.

  Logically, I know this weird numbness won’t last. This is classic disassociation—my brain’s gift, letting me float away from the harsh reality to keep myself from falling to pieces. I read about this in a grief brochure after Phoebe died. Logically, I should be grateful for this feeling, because, as Phoebe’s hospice nurse told us, numbness is a gift. It keeps us moving and helps us to survive the things that feel unsurvivable.

  I should trust the logic in this, but logic has failed me before.

  Logically, my aunt wouldn’t have ever gotten sick. Not Phoebe. Not my never-drank, never-smoked, always-ate-her-greens-and-did-her-yoga aunt. She was strong and healthy. She was a woman you’d expect to live to ninety-three, the one we were sure would die peacefully in her sleep with the full moon rising and crickets singing her home.

  Logically, that’s what should have happened. That’s the story that makes sense.

  But the story that’s true is different.

  Phoebe breathed her last at fifty-one years old. She gurgled and groaned and rattled away minute by minute in a yellow-walled hospital room that smelled like disinfectant and death. A room that seemed as eaten and worn by cancer as her body.

  Losing Phoebe taught me that when your world falls to pieces, your brain will not keep you moving. Your brain will shut down to a low static hum. Your heart will tear itself in half and ache until you’re sure you’ll die. Until some part of you wishes you could.

  It’s your instincts that will keep you alive.

  Beneath the push-push-push rhythm of blood carrying oxygen to your veins, there is something else. An animal directive that will put food in your mouth when you can’t imagine eating, that will stop at the coffee line in the hospital because your body remembers the need for sustenance even when the rest of you forgets.

  I stood in that line one year ago, a few minutes after 3:30 p.m. After Phoebe died. I knew we’d need caffeine. We had a funeral to plan. Decisions to make. I didn’t even have my wallet, and a stranger in line bought me coffee. The coffee was so hot it burned my fingers right through the cups, but instinct told me to hold them tight, to march blindly to the elevators that would take me back to the yellow room where we lost her.

  Instincts matter. And my instincts are telling me I am in danger. Something bad is coming. I don’t know what and I don’t know how—I don’t even know who. But in the marrow of my bones I’m sure that if I don’t get out of this car something is going to happen. And there will be no way to stop it once it starts.

  “What now?”

  I jump at the voice, looking around. I can’t be sure who asked, so I shrug.

  “I need to think,” Harper says. She’s back behind the wheel, and she looks like she did at the beginning, smoothed and together. But I can still see her hands shake on the wheel. I can still see the half of herself she tries to hide.

  “We have to turn around,” Josh says, twisting to look out of the windows. “And it’s going to be tricky. There are ditches on either side.”

  “Okay, we have no maps and no phones,” Brecken recaps. He’s back in the front, too. I’m not really sure how we wound up like this again—just like we were leaving the airport. “And since we also have no common sense about people who steal knives, I guess we’re all going together.”

  “One big happy family,” Kayla singsongs, the sweetness of her voice a honey-coated dart.

  “Wait,” Harper repeats. She turns sideways toward Brecken. “I want to know about the phone call.”

  “It’s not—”

  “I want to know,” she says, cutting him off and holding his gaze.

  The pink is back in Brecken’s cheeks. He’s embarrassed. Maybe angry.

  “You won’t get it,” he says.

  “Try me,” Harper says.

  He shrugs. “I have to change majors.”

  “What do you mean?” Josh asks.

  “I failed biochem for the second time. Genetics, too. I can’t stay in premed.”

  I’m confused and my voice shows it. “Wait. That’s your dark confession? Can’t you just switch to another major?”

  “Obviously I can switch,” Brecken says, “but that’s not the point. I have no idea how to say this to them. There isn’t another major. There’s medicine. That’s it.”

  Kayla sweeps a dismissive hand at Brecken, giggling. “Oh my God. I totally thought you’d knocked up a high schooler or something.”

  Harper turns on her. “You said you’d heard his call.”

  “I did! But he was all I fucked up and It’s bad and They’ll never see me the same way.” Kayla’s laugh is a cruel bark. “It was a whiny rich boy sob fest, but I had no idea it was all because of a widdle bad gwade!”

  “What the hell do you know?” Brecken asks.

  Kayla’s eyes narrow until I think of the blade on the knife she stole. “I know that your biggest problem is that you’ll have to find a different way to get even richer than you already are. Hardly the stuff of Lifetime movies.”

  “It’s that simple, right?” Brecken asks, face contorted in a snarl. “Never mind that my parents are both doctors. My uncles, too. And my grandfathers and their brothers before that.”

  “So?” Kayla asks.

  “So, it’s expected,” Harper says softly, her eyes never leaving Brecken. “His family has certain expectations.”

  “Expectations?” Brecken’s laugh is anything but funny. “Mandate from on high is probably closer to the truth. I will be the first son in five generations to not be a doctor. Five! And it’s not because I have some alternate grand life plan. It’s because I can’t hack it.”

  Quiet descends. I think of my father holding me on his shoulders at the lake. I was seven—and listing out all the jobs I knew, and Dad was assuring me I’d be great at them all. My parents have only ever had one refrain when it came to the future: be happy—that’s the real measure of success.
/>   “I’m sorry,” I say, for lack of anything better.

  “Is there anything you want to do?” Harper asks. “If you could be anything at all—”

  “I’d be a damn doctor!” Brecken says. He lets out a shaky breath and closes his eyes for one second. And another. When he opens them, his voice is softer. “Look, I don’t know anything else. I grew up trying on my dad’s white coats. Half of my childhood pictures show me playing with old stethoscopes or otoscopes. My uncle called me Little MD for years, and it’s killing me that I’ll be letting all of them down.”

  “Can’t you just join a study group?” I ask.

  “Or work harder?” Josh mutters softly. It doesn’t feel like he means it to be helpful.

  “I’ve tried everything. Study groups. Tutors. Meetings with the professor. I studied four hours a night for two weeks for my final, and I still only pulled a C minus.”

  “But C minus is technically passing, right?” I ask.

  “Passing isn’t enough,” he says. “My adviser strongly recommended that I consider a different major program.”

  “So?” I shrug. “Screw him.”

  “He made the same recommendation last time when I failed the courses. I retook both classes. Second time around, I failed one and only barely passed the other.” Brecken shakes his head. “The worst part is I know he’s right. It won’t get easier. I’m not going to be able to do this.”

  I can’t imagine my parents caring about me changing a major, but I can’t imagine interrupting a five-generation family legacy, either. It’s hard to piece together the different things I see in Brecken. Every time I think I get him, he slips sideways, changing my perspective.

  I still don’t think I trust him. For all I know, this could be an act. He looks genuinely upset, but looks can be deceiving.

  “Okay,” Harper says softly. She readjusts her hands on the steering wheel and nods, her voice stronger when she says it again. “Okay.”

  “Okay what?” Josh asks.

  “I’m sorry this is happening,” she says, and she sounds sincere. “I think we’re all going through something right now. But we can’t do anything about it, not from here. Which is why we can’t stop moving. I’m going to turn around and retrace our drive back to the main road. We’ll head west until we find a gas station or a police officer. Anyone that can help us get home.”

  “I hear you, but we’ve got a lot of backtracking to do,” Brecken says.

  “We passed a lot of roads that probably cut back up to that main drag,” Josh says.

  “Okay, then let’s find one that heads south,” Harper says. “We can take that to the county highway we were on, right?”

  “Right,” I say.

  So, we head out. Harper does not drive like Brecken. It’s been a while since she’s taken a long stretch, but there’s something equally unnerving about the level of care in her every move. It takes her a long time to turn around, and then she inches along in the tire tracks we made coming down this road. We roll through the valley so slowly, I can feel my shoulders tightening with every half mile we pass.

  “We can go a little faster,” Brecken says. Harper ignores him.

  Josh is antsy, too, turning this way and that. Looking left and right and even behind us. Finally, he points, inhaling sharply. “There. There’s a road. Heading south on the right.”

  “I can’t see it,” Harper says.

  “You have time. I could probably get out and jog faster than this,” I say.

  Kayla mutters, “I could build a road and get it done before she got there.”

  “Do you want to drive?” Harper asks.

  I hold up my hands. “Sorry. You’re doing great. Really.”

  It reminds me of Zari getting her license. She was such a wreck; she drove like an eighty-year-old woman, her hands at ten and two and her nose maybe four inches from the wheel.

  For all the trouble we had, this nightmare would be ten times easier with Zari. Once upon a time, everything was easier with Zari.

  I close my eyes, feeling a wave of homesickness at the thought of how things were. It wasn’t wild or movie-worthy. It was just normal. And now, I don’t know what that word means. God, I hope I can find it again.

  Harper rolls to a stop a few feet behind a green street sign. She softly swears and I don’t blame her. There are no tire tracks to follow. There is a field on the left, an endless carpet of glistening white. On the right, there is a mound of snow covering what I’m guessing is a guardrail or a concrete barrier. Beyond that, the earth slopes down sharply into a valley.

  Snow is drifted across the road. Plumes of white powder swirl up into the air, turning crystalline against the inky sky. It’s beautiful. Almost breathtaking. But it also looks dangerous as hell.

  “How deep is that drift?” I ask, nodding toward the mound on the right side of the road. It looks taller than any guardrail I’ve ever seen.

  “I have no idea,” Brecken says.

  “Let’s look for another road,” Harper says. “I can’t even see this one.”

  “It’s not great, but I bet it’s the field,” Brecken says. “It might be better around that bend.”

  “Or it could be worse!” Harper says. “We should keep going.”

  “It could take us two hours to get back at this rate. This will shave a ton of time off our trip,” Brecken says.

  “If we don’t get stuck in that snowdrift,” I say.

  “No,” Josh says, sounding convinced. “There might not be another one. This is where we need to turn. There’s a guardrail under that giant mound. We can use that for reference.”

  “That’s great,” Brecken says. “Except we can’t see the road.”

  “Yeah, but I...” Josh pauses, shaking his head. “I think I know this road.”

  “Like…biblically?” Kayla asks.

  “No, it just…looks familiar. Ptolemy Road. I swear I saw it earlier on my GPS. Did you see anything like this at the rest stop?”

  “Maybe,” Kayla says, nodding slowly. “I can’t be sure, but it sounds familiar.”

  “You studied the map on the wall in the rest stop?” I deadpan, finding it hard to believe she realized there even was a map at the rest stop. Or hell, that we were at a rest stop at all.

  “Do you remember what highway it intersects with? I know I saw an intersection,” Josh says.

  Kayla chews her lip thoughtfully, but eventually she shakes her head.

  “You seriously want us to drive into that?” Brecken asks, gesturing out at the snow.

  “It can’t be that deep,” I say, but looking out over the blowing slopes of white, I frown. “Can it?”

  “We can always back out,” Harper says. “We’ll try it. And we’ll go back if it doesn’t work.”

  Harper begins to roll forward, and it’s immediately clear the snow is deeper near the guardrail side. Too deep to drive through, so Harper dutifully stays to the left.

  “Put it in four-wheel drive,” Brecken says.

  “It’s been in four-wheel drive,” she says, and she’s still too close to the deeper snow on the right for my comfort, but I’m sure it’s weird driving on the wrong side of the road. I’d probably drift right, too.

  “Steer left,” Josh says. “Go to the other side of the road. Near the field.”

  “What if a car comes around that curve?” she asks.

  “Please. We are the only people desperate enough to drive through this,” Brecken says.

  “What if this gets worse? We could get stuck.”

  “It’s going to be okay,” Josh says.

  “It’s drifting because of the field,” Brecken says. “See that tree line up ahead? It’ll be better once we get past this. Just stay left.”

  He might be right about the field, and the drifting only being bad in this part. But he’s wrong abou
t going to the other side of the road. As soon as Harper eases another few feet to the left, everything goes wrong. The car lurches through a hard ridge of snow, and then there’s an awful jolt, and the driver’s-side tires drop. Harper yelps as the car tips, following the tires in a downward, sideways slide into the ditch beside the road.

  We come to a gentle stop. My center of balance shifts, and I grip the seat hard. My stomach tilts, and my vision swirls like the whole world has gone sideways. I shake my head, but my balance doesn’t settle. Because we are sideways, or, at the very least, listing to the left like a boat at the mercy of a big wave. I shift, trying to push myself away from Josh. I’m mashed against his body, and Kayla is mashed against me.

  The whole car is tipped to the left. We drove off the road and directly into a ditch.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  We can’t get the driver’s-side doors open at all. Harper tries, and then huffs when the door sticks. She rolls down the windows, and the smell of snow and trees rushes in. Josh pokes his head out to see the damage.

  The window isn’t mashed into the snow, but I can see from here it’s close. It’s hard to process the ground at that strange diagonal angle, but it’s clear we aren’t getting out of that door.

  “Holy shit,” Josh breathes.

  He pulls his head back into the car, and I strain against gravity, my seat belt biting into my left hip.

  “Is it bad?” Harper asks in a thin, high voice.

  No one answers. I don’t know how she could think it’s anything but bad. The whole car is tilted at a forty-five-degree angle. Basically, we’re teetering off the edge of a road we never should have tried to navigate.

  “It’s not good,” Josh says, sounding remarkably calm.

  I grab the sides of each of the front seats, trying to hold myself in place. My palms are slick on the leather despite the arctic rush of air streaming through the open windows. I’m pinned between Josh and Kayla, and everything feels too close. Too intense.

  “How steep is the drop on your side, Brecken?” she asks. “Can we get out?”

  “Do we have a choice?” Kayla asks. Her breath is a warm huff in my hair, but she’s struggling with the door. She pulls the handle and pushes with her hands. Then her feet. I tense, squirming under the press of her weight against me. And my weight against Josh. I can feel the material from his jacket and the hard length of his arm underneath. I can feel Kayla, too, and I don’t like this. Not any of it.