by E. R. Frank
Jason nods. How can his parents let her do that to him?
“You were looking some of it up that night at Ellen’s, weren’t you?” My brain seems to be working, even though my heart is sort of stopped.
Jason nods again. “I stole it from the Gersons,” Jason goes. “I could have just gone to the library or bought my own, but it was right there.”
“Ellen knows,” I tell him. “She doesn’t care.”
“It was stupid,” Jason goes. “Cowardly. But … I guess …” He thinks for a second. “Cowards can be judged only from an unbiased point of view.”
“I won’t tell anybody,” I say, not bothering to ask which backseat book he’s quoting from. “I promise. Seriously.”
He stares out the window at his grandmother and then huffs tons of breath onto the glass, blurring her.
“Couldn’t you even try being straight?” I can’t help asking it. “I mean, not that I care. But … wouldn’t it be easier?”
“I would love to be straight,” Jason says to me. “Believe me.”
I think about what it must be like to be gay. I let myself really think about it for the first time, without all the jokes and stupid assumptions. Jason pulls the door handle and lets in a blast of cold air and shouting.
“’Men with men committing what is shameful, and receiving in themselves the penalty …’”
“I believe you,” I tell him.
• • •
Jack and I are eating pizza in the kitchen. Half spinach and mushroom for him, half cheese for me. My mom’s at some faculty Christmas party, and my father’s working late at the bank.
“I get the car this Saturday.” Jack lifts a wedge from the box.
“Okay,” I say. “I’ll spray it with with that lemon stuff. It still has that smell you hate.”
He looks at me funny.
“What?” I go.
“Nothing.”
“Why are you looking at me like that?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Like that.”
“I was just thinking about when we used to fight about the car.”
“You mean when I was small?” I ask him. He tears at the crust with his teeth.
“Yeah,” he says with his mouth full. “That’s exactly what I mean.” He’s being sarcastic, though.
“You mean,” I keep going, “like, less than six months ago?”
“Yeah,” he goes. “I guess so.”
We chew for a while and wipe our messy hands on paper napkins.
“What are you doing Saturday night?” I ask him.
“Rob’s,” Jack says. “We might go to Lucas’s to hear this band. Frozen Shakespeare. Then maybe we’ll go to Patty’s.”
“You’re going to Patty’s?” I put down my pizza slice.
“Maybe,” Jack says.
“You’re going to a party?” Somehow I thought neither of us would ever go to a party again.
“I was just thinking about it,” he says. “That’s all.” It’s the first time I’ve heard him sound guilty about anything. He sits back in his chair, leaving the pizza alone. “It’s not like I’m planning on it.”
I didn’t mean to make him think I was accusing him of something. “You’re allowed,” I tell him. Because there aren’t any rules. “You’re allowed to go to a party.”
We all signed up for the same location and day. I drive Lisa, Seth, and Ellen. Her new short cast goes from below the knee to the toes, and she uses crutches now. The wheelchair is gone for good.
Jason drives himself and meets us there. Only, he’s a little late, and a few minutes after he rushes in, some other guy rushes in too, and they both look red in the cheeks. The guy has a blue sweatshirt on, with black stripes across the chest. TAYLOR ACADEMY is printed down the left arm. I glance at Ellen. She hasn’t said a word about her conversation with Jason. I haven’t told her about mine. It feels wrong somehow, but then again, so much has been wrong these past couple months that it doesn’t feel as big of a deal as it could have, before.
The driving was fine. I can’t wait to tell Frances. Only one blip from my chest for a split second and slightly sweaty palms. Other than that, a total breeze.
The testing is hard. At first I think my right eye is acting up again and making things blurry, but then I figure out what’s really happening: The screen I have is greasy with fingerprints. You’d think somebody would Windex them or something. It’s a little distracting.
We get one break, during which we all gather in a huddle and share cupcakes. Seth brought them.
“Did you make these?” Lisa asks.
“My mother did,” Seth says. “From scratch. Except for the frosting. She wanted to make that from scratch too, but I wouldn’t let her. I like the kind from the can better.” He licks some right off the top of his cupcake. “I bought a ton of it.”
“With your send-a-dollar money?” Ellen asks him.
“Yep,” he goes.
“How much have they sent so far?” Jason asks. He’s glancing over at the sweatshirt guy. I see the sweatshirt guy glancing back.
“Seven hundred and twenty-one,” Seth goes.
“That’s a lot of frosting,” I say. They look at me and crack up. I wasn’t even trying to be funny.
But it’s all ruined, after.
Kids are streaming out of testing rooms. It’s a lot like the halls at school between classes. Only, everybody’s more giddy. Like it’s the last day of the year or the day before Christmas break. Stupid SATs.
“I’m driving with Jason,” Ellen goes. She’s leaning her back against the wall and her armpits on the crutches. Jason seems nervous. He’s scanning the hall. This girl is shrieking and chasing some guy past us. She’s pretty loud. I watch Jason keep scanning.
Then I get it. Oh my God. He didn’t just meet Sweatshirt here. Jason drove Sweatshirt here.
“No,” I say to Ellen. The guy being chased has button-hooked back around, toward us again, and the girl is still running after him, screaming. She’s screaming and screaming and screaming. “Drive with me,” I tell Ellen.
“What’s wrong?” Ellen asks.
“Nothing,” I say. “Just go in my car.”
“Is it the driving?” Lisa asks. “You’re all red.”
Seth nods and frowns. “You are.”
I watch Jason catching Sweatshirt’s eye. That girl won’t stop screaming.
“I’m not red,” I say. The running guy turns again, and the girl follows. Screaming and screaming and screaming.
Jason looks at me now. He seems really worried.
“Ellen’s going with me,” I say, to try and reassure him.
“You’re sweating,” Jason answers.
“What’s going on?” Seth touches my face. The dark rings around the brown of his eyes are so beautiful.
“Are you okay?” Lisa and Ellen ask at the same time.
The girl chasing the guy is coming toward us again. Screaming and screaming and screaming.
“Would you shut up!” Ellen snaps as the girl passes.
And the screaming stops.
22
IF YOU HAVEN’T EVER KILLED ANYBODY, YOU MIGHT THINK THERE’S nothing worse than shaking and vomiting uncontrollably on the floor of the hall of the SAT building where about two hundred kids, half of whom you don’t even know and one of whom is your sort-of boyfriend and one of whom is your best friend collapsed on the floor nearby in a mess of crutches, are staring in horror and have absolutely no idea what to do and will tell the story a thousand times tonight at the after party, without you there because you’re home in bed stoned out of your mind on legal stuff, and then they’ll tell it a million more times for the rest of your life.
Usually, Frances explains, we pick up where we left off the last time. It’s Monday morning. I’m missing school. I’m an emergency. Usually, Frances reminds me, we work with an image. But today we’re not going to do the usual. We’re going to work with what’s happening now. And what’s happening now,
she says, is not an image. It’s the screaming. No, I tell her. It’s not the screaming. It’s the screaming, stopped. So that’s what we start with: the screaming, stopped.
My negative belief about myself is “I am a killer.” Frances won’t let me use that one, though, because she says the truth is that I was behind the wheel when Cameron died, and even though I wasn’t responsible for Cameron’s death, EMDR won’t change the fact that I was involved. So she asks, if I am a killer, what does that mean about me? I say I am very, very bad. She lets me use that.
Target: the screaming, stopped. Negative belief: “I am very, very bad.” What would I rather believe? That I’m good, I guess. Right. On a scale of one to seven “I am good” gets a one. When I think of the screaming, stopped, what emotions do I feel? Terror, shame, helplessness. How disturbing are those feelings? A ten. Where do I feel it in my body? All over, shaking and heart pounding, and nausea and sweating.
“Go with that,” Frances tells me. So I do.
23
IT’S DARK, AND SOMETHING IS POKING MY EYE, AND I’M CRUSHED on my left side, and Ellen and her blood are heavy, and the smell of plastic is underneath the screaming and screaming and screaming, and when the screaming stops, my body vomits, telling me that the screaming, stopped, is sickening, is somebody’s life, stopped, and I want to wipe the heavy wetness off me and get up and run and make the somebody start screaming and keep screaming, to make them be alive, please, please, please, and it’s like a wave of blood frozen in a massive curl, a big “Fuck you” to gravity and nature and everything that’s supposed to be, and it’s wrong, it should keep going, it should fall and roar over everything, but it doesn’t, it’s a frozen wave of screaming, stopped, of someone dead.
• • •
Frances is here, telling me to take a deep breath and let it go and what’s happening now, and I see her certificates on the wall, with that left middle one all crooked, and I feel the cool, smooth suede of the pillow under my forearms and there’s the red of the couch and the brown of her freckles, and I say, “It’s weird how sick and sad I feel but also know that I’m here, and it’s over.”
And she says—big surprise—“Go with that.”
And I’m thinking about how it’s over, only it’s not over. The screaming is over, and Cameron’s life is over, and the beginning of my life is over, along with Jack’s and Ellen’s and Cameron’s little brother’s, and I see those two kids on the ocean trampoline, that brother and sister with those nut-colored eyes, and they’re jumping, and then I see a little boy who looks just like Cameron, with natural platinum hair paired with dusky skin, and I think, What’s he going to do? What’s he going to do without her? And my brother’s bedroom door slams, and I’m left on the other side, small and alone and not knowing what to do, and Frances is handing me her tissue box, and I feel it like waves, just waves of despair washing over me, and I cry and cry and cry, and my bones are soggy, and then I see Jack’s head flat on the table, next to his laptop, and broken glass strewn across the living-room floor, and broken glass and flashlights glittering underneath the dangling earth, and the earth turns into soil, and then a blade of grass grows up out of the soil, and it’s joined by other blades, and then there are brown leaves and fingers picking them up one by one, Jack’s fingers picking up the leaves, and then his face looking at me, his face saying, If you had just stayed home and picked up the leaves, maybe none of it would have happened, and Frances turns off the buzzers.
There’s all these balls of tissue in my lap, and I shake my head and cry, and Frances doesn’t have to ask me to breathe or what’s happening because I kind of get the rhythm of it all now, and so I breathe on my own.
“It’s my fault,” I tell Frances. “If I’d done what my dad told me to do, we’d have gotten to the party later and probably left later or earlier, and we wouldn’t have been passing by Cameron on the road right at that second, and she could have swerved and been fine.”
She doesn’t say anything this time. She just nods and turns on the box.
The thing is, if you don’t do what my father asks, he ends up being right, and you end up with serious consequences because you are just wrong and bad, and I see his face screaming and that vein and the spit at the corners of his mouth, and he’s screaming and screaming and screaming, and I wish it would stop. I wish his screaming would stop, I wish he would stop. I wish he would die. And if you wish people to die, then you are very, very bad.
“Take a deep breath,” Frances says. I breathe in, slow and long.
“I’m so mad,” I tell her, and I’m crying again, and I tug another tissue, and she turns on her box, but I drop the buzzers and hold up my hand, and she waits, and when I can find my voice, I add, because it feels important, “And I’m scared of how mad I am. I mean … not scared exactly. Ashamed.”
The word shame keeps marching by, like on a big city building’s electronic ticker. Shame, shame, shame, just marching by, repeating itself in yellow bulbs over a black background, and it feels like I could throw up again, and my heart is heavy, and it moves across the screen of my mind: shame, shame, shame. And then my mother is there, curled around me, holding me tight with one arm and pulling a shade over the ticker with another, and I can feel her warm breath in my ear, and she’s not far away in the corner of the house or fuzzy in the horizon, she’s right here holding me and saying, “Shhh, shhh. I’m here, I’m here,” and then I’m waking up in a twist of damp bedding from a nightmare, and my mother is still wrapped firmly around my back, and my father is there plumping my pillow, and Jack is there, watching from the doorway, and nobody’s blaming me or thinking I’m bad, even though the sadness in the room is thick, like another blanket, twisted and heavy and everywhere.
I cry some more, with the buzzers off, and then I get this image with the sound gone, so there’s no screaming, and no screaming, stopped.
“It’s like a silent movie,” I explain to Frances. “Everything is frozen. Ellen’s ponytail and the cops, and Cameron lying on the pavement, dead. Even though I never saw her that night. I see her now. I’m sitting up, looking at her.”
Guess what Frances says?
• • •
Cameron stands up out of herself, the way the movies show souls leaving bodies, and she walks over to me, and she kneels down, and she’s all in one piece and perfect with those slender pink fingers and that skin and no blood, and she says, “You two are a lot more alike than you think,” and she means Jack and me, and she floats away and up toward a lighted place far above us with a white sidewalk and wet green grass, and the echo of her voice says it again: “You two are a lot more alike than you think,” and there’s something comforting about what she’s said because if it’s true—and it must be, because dead people know the truth—then maybe I’m not so bad, because Jack isn’t, because he thinks I can fly and tries to stop the waves.
“What’s happening now?” Frances asks.
“I’m thinking about my brother,” I tell her.
I see his shoulder blades, sharp as knives, slicing the water.
“I don’t know,” I tell Frances. “I’m tired. And if you say ‘Go with that,’ I think I’ll scream.”
She just looks at me and turns on the buzzers.
Screaming again, only now the screaming is different. It’s not screaming like the way it was that night. The night of the accident. It’s screaming like the way kids scream. Little kids. When they’re playing. And then there’s Cameron, a knobby-kneed girl, missing two front teeth. Her toddler brother is wearing nothing but a diaper, and they’re playing in a sprinkler, which is going snickety, snickety, snickety, and young Cameron is squealing, the way little kids do when they’re happy. And then I see me, and I’m my same age now, only I’m as small as a five-year-old, and I’m on the white sidewalk of this front yard where Cameron is skipping through the sprinkler, and I’m curled up in a ball, crying, and Cameron sees me and stops squealing, and she comes over, and she asks if I want to run through the sprink
ler with her, and I ask if my brother can come too, and Jack is there, his age and size now, and he runs through the sprinkler and back, hogging it, and then he grins at us and says, “I can stop the water,” and he presses his foot on the spout and the water stops and the snickety sound stops, and Cameron and I shriek at him, and her little baby brother stares at us with his droopy diaper, and then Jack lifts his foot and the water shoots out, drenching us all, and that’s it.
“We’re really little,” I tell Frances. “We’re playing outside in the summer, and we’re all sort of shouting and squealing.”
“And when you go back to what we started with, what do you get?”
I take a deep breath, and I try to get it back into my head. “It’s hard to hear it,” I say. “I mean, I know it happened, but I can’t hear the screaming anymore. And I can’t hear the stopped.”
“What do you get instead?” Frances asks.
I try to think of that night. I try to think of the accident. Of that moment, when Cameron died, and I knew she died, even though I didn’t know I knew it.
“It’s not Ocean Road at night anymore,” I say. “I mean, it is Ocean Road, far away in the background. But sort of in front of it and closer is this empty yard with wet grass and the sound of a sprinkler.”
“How disturbing is it to you now?”
“It’s still sad,” I say. “And … I don’t know … ominous a little bit.” A good SAT word. How about that. “I don’t know why, but I’m uneasy. But it’s not as bad as when we started. So I guess it’s at about a three.”
“You’ve done a lot of work today,” Frances says. She leans back a little in her black leather chair, and I glance at the clock. We’re five minutes over. How weird. It seems like we only just started.
“I’m really tired,” I say, surprised.
“Yeah,” she nods. “That happens.”
She doesn’t make me leave right away, even though she probably has somebody else waiting. Instead she lets me close my eyes and imagine my safe place for a minute. We’ve ended like this before. I like it. The smell of coconut. The warmth of dazzling blue.