by Dawn Klehr
The surgeon told us the surgery went as well as could be expected, but there were no guarantees. Her injuries were severe and we wouldn’t know how badly her brain was damaged until the swelling went down and she woke up. If she woke up.
That’s when I started saying my goodbyes.
I had to say them each day over the next month.
Despite what my parents wanted to believe, Brit was gone. She wasn’t coming back to us. And all I could think was someone had to take the blame.
Travis Kent.
Gamer geek Travis Kent.
Brutally intense Travis Kent.
Possessive and dangerous Travis Kent.
My secret boyfriend Travis Kent.
Sister-hater Travis Kent.
I met Travis at the end-of-year Skip Day. I never went to these things, but Brit needed a ride home and I’d already taken all my finals so my schedule was pretty open. Plus, my summer tutoring gig was a few weeks out and frankly, I had nothing better to do.
That year, Skip Day was at a park. People were playing Frisbee, lying out in the sun, dancing, and getting high. Typical. Brit had decided to do the latter. Usually she stuck to alcohol, so I’m not sure why she had the sudden urge. I also didn’t really care.
The smell of pot gave me headaches and stoned people made me irritable, so I declined to go along with it. Trouble was, not a soul from my ASP group was in attendance—nobody I even knew casually. I was on my own.
I grabbed a book from my summer reading list, aka ten books every college freshman should read. I’d have mine read before junior year even started. I found a comfortable spot under a tree, opened Wallace’s Consider the Lobster, and began to read the collections of essays that would supposedly help me become a more accomplished critical thinker.
I hadn’t finished the first page before Travis showed up. He was always quick to make a move. Though I had no idea why he’d chosen me that day.
Travis Kent was hard to explain. He was a geek, a gamer, and a bad boy all rolled in one. He had a few friends, but mostly kept to himself. I knew his name because we’d had a class together the year before. I’d watched him even then. Most girls did. While he was still considered a bottom-feeder, he made good eye candy. He always looked nice. He wore the standard dark jeans and T-shirts—except his were pressed, with no holes and rips. Built of lean muscle, he seemed taller than he was. He had what Dad would call a presence. He wore his hair long and secured it in a low tail, showing off his deep blue eyes. Yet, with all of that, he still couldn’t climb the social ladder. He was like one of those creatures in the wild that keep the animals at bay with a built-in defense mechanism. I never found out why that was.
“Are you actually reading on Skip Day?” he said, taking a seat next to me.
“It would appear so.” I answered his stupid question without looking up from my book.
“Isn’t that defeating the purpose of this event?”
“Not sure that I care. I’m only here to give my sister a ride, anyway.”
He was either bored or looking for someone to bother, and I was not going to be his afternoon entertainment, so I continued to ignore him as he chattered on.
“And you’re not interested in partaking in the festivities over there?” he asked, motioning to my sister and her friends surrounded by a plume of smoke.
“Not my thing.” I finally looked over at him, and when I did, I no longer seemed to mind the interruption.
“Hmm.” He scratched his invisible chin-stubble. “What is your thing?”
That’s when I got it. He was into me. Maybe. Possibly. It was the very first time a boy had taken interest in me without the promise of Brit Waters’s attention. It felt … unreal. Nice. Wonderful. Which is precisely why I shouldn’t have trusted it.
Still, I allowed it to go on. I let him flirt, and sit under my tree, and feed me treats from his not-so-picnic picnic basket. I let him in.
Thankfully, he left before Brit came back all pie-eyed—though not before making plans for the next day. Those plans lasted most of the summer.
Though he was the one to approach me, Travis was just as secretive about our relationship as I was. It made me feel safe. Special. Plus, I was thrilled to have something that was mine and mine alone. Travis’s little brother would occasionally see me come and go, but we were never introduced. I never met his dad; we never went out with his friends; and we never talked in school.
It was our secret.
11
Johnny
It’s morbid, but I used to hang out at the accident site all the time. It’s a fairly normal part of the grieving process for some people, I guess. That’s what I read anyway.
Cassie came with me the first time. But after that, she said it was unhealthy. “There’s a fine line between grieving and obsession, Johnny,” she said. “So don’t go freaking out on me.”
After that little lecture, I didn’t tell her that I continued to make frequent visits. It was an easy bus ride from our house. And I only had to make one transfer, so it was cheap enough to come out whenever I felt the need.
Still, the location was somewhat remote for being so close to downtown. Our favorite pizza place wasn’t in this area, so Mom must have driven out of the way. She must’ve taken this route to avoid traffic—all to please her inconsiderate son. I never even gave it a second thought. Never really appreciated what she did for me. Every damn day.
On the side of the street where it happened, there were dead flowers, dirty ribbons, and a deflated silvery balloon. I think some of Cassie’s friends put up this makeshift memorial. The road winds down from the top of a hill, and kids love to race down it after weekend parties. It’s amazing there aren’t more mini-tombstones in the area. Flanked with dead trees on one side and an abandoned office building and parking lot on the other, it’s a place that looks like death.
That particular day, I sat on the cold ground staring at the street—trying to piece together the accident. Soon it’d be covered in snow and everything would look different, so I soaked it all in.
I looked down the road and imagined Mom driving up the hill. It was just approaching dusk—dim, but still light enough to see. Brit Waters was coming down the hill. Neither of them speeding. Or on the phone. Or texting. According to the report, anyway.
Still, they hit each other. Head on.
At fifty miles per hour, it was enough to kill them both. They said Mom died instantly. That’s the only thing that got me through it, I think. They only thing that’s held me together. Knowing she didn’t suffer.
But why did they hit each other? What was it that made them overcorrect and sail across the middle line? That’s something the investigators couldn’t explain. They said, there are some pieces of that night that we’ll never know.
Contemplating all of it, I didn’t hear her approach.
At first, I thought she was a ghost. Brit coming to talk to me from beyond the grave with a message from my mom or some shit. I was in rough shape back then.
“What are you doing here?” she asked me.
“What are you doing here?” I repeated, getting slightly spooked at that point.
Once she came farther into view, it hit me. Brit’s twin—Becca Waters. She was pale and skinny, holding a coffee cup in her long fingers.
I didn’t really know either one of the Waters twins. I knew who they were, of course; they were the fantasy of most of the baseball team. Hot twins. It doesn’t get much better than that. But I don’t think I’d ever said a word to Brit. Definitely not to Becca—she was the shy one, and somewhat of a loner. Seeing her at the site, though, made me want to get to know her.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” I told her after some brief small talk.
“Thank you,” she answered.
I hoped we could somehow commiserate together, thought it would be nice to talk to someo
ne about the accident for a change. Dad and Cassie couldn’t talk about it. Or wouldn’t. They were going through the motions—they’d grieved the appropriate amount of time and were starting to get their lives back on track, just as they were supposed to. Textbook, really. But I knew it would only take a few words from me—questioning the accident, talking about my nightmares, bringing up Mom—to cause them to fall, desperate, back into the hole of despair.
So I tried to talk about the crash with Becca, but had no luck. At first, anyway.
All she did was pull out her tape measure and notebook and start measuring things and writing down various numbers and graphs. She got low and stared at the road from every possible angle.
I watched, curious. “What are you doing?” I asked.
“Investigating,” she said without looking up.
“The accident?”
“Yes,” she said, scratching in her notebook.
“Why?”
“Because I don’t think it was an accident.”
She then talked about the impact of the crash, the way the cars were mangled, the injuries, the fuck all of it. My stomach dropped right out from me. And my lunch came up with such force, it not only splattered on my hands when I leaned over to relieve myself but made its way out my nose as well.
None of it fazed Becca.
She just grabbed some tissues from her bag and handed them to me.
“What? It hasn’t crossed your mind?” she asked.
I shrugged, pushing a finger to each nostril to blow out any leftover chunks of vomit stuck in my nasal passage—almost gagging again as the putrid taste of puke went back down my throat. I could still taste it in the back of my mouth.
“Don’t you think the circumstances surrounding the accident are odd?” she continued.
“What do you mean by odd?” I asked, not wanting to give away my theories.
“Suspect?”
“What are you saying?” I said, getting irritated that she wouldn’t spit it out.
“I’m saying it wasn’t an accident, as I mentioned when you first started grilling me.” She went back to her measurements.
“And what, exactly, could your genius mind tell you that the investigators missed?”
“Quite a lot, actually,” she said.
Of course I wanted to know. I wanted to know it all. “Well, then. Do you need some help?”
“Just let me handle it,” she said, continuing to take measurements. “I’ll let you know when I have enough evidence to prove it.”
It seemed Becca had her own theories, and she was here looking for proof.
12
Becca
The suffocating guilt grabbed me by the throat and continued to squeeze during all those long days at the hospital … waiting. That waiting can mess with a person’s mind. We were waiting for her to die. Waiting so we didn’t have to make the decision to let her go. And in classic Brit fashion, she made a difficult situation even harder to bear. It was the way she worked. Though, if I’m being truthful, I actually made the decision that sealed her fate—when I took my boyfriend’s side against hers.
Despite how secretive we’d been, Brit was onto my transgressions with Travis from the very beginning. But she waited until the fall, when it became serious, before she stepped in with her authoritative approach.
“Listen to me, Bee,” she said, after admitting she knew we were together. “You’re out of his league.”
“You mean, you’re out of his league and it’ll make you look bad if anyone finds out I’m dating him,” I countered.
“That’s not it.” She began working me over. “He’s odd, and a total loner.”
“Yeah? Well, so am I.”
“Not true. You deserve so much better.”
“Try again,” I said.
“People talk about him, you know. I heard that he used to beat up his old girlfriend.” She paused, waiting for my reaction.
She didn’t get one because I already knew this. Though by now I was getting to the real reason why our relationship bothered her so much. She didn’t want to be linked any of that “talk.” I mean, how tragic.
“That was one incident,” I said, making light of it even though the mounting accusations against him were disturbing. Still, I wasn’t going to let her get her way this time. “He also explained the whole thing to me. It was a misunderstanding. Charges were never filed.”
Call me sick, but I liked Travis’s dark side and the cloud of mystery and danger that hung over him. Brit didn’t understand this because she always got attention. For me, it was new and exciting the way he fussed over me. I liked his possessiveness. It made me feel precious or something. That is, until I felt like a precious possession.
I knew our relationship was becoming more intense. I knew Travis was unpredictable. I knew I shouldn’t have let Brit go over there to threaten him. But I tried, didn’t I?
“You need to end it,” she said, once again governing my life as she had been since she’d learned to talk.
I wanted to ask my sister if she could actually hear herself speak. Hear how demeaning and patronizing she was. But I didn’t. Because I was scared. I mean, the girl had even tried to snuff me out in the womb. Like with dogs in a pack, the runt often dies. I’d been very close to dying. My sister, conversely, was Darwin’s finest example. And since her actions toward me before birth didn’t work, she eliminated me in other ways. Silenced me every chance she got. She was the girl who had an innate sense of survival, no matter the cost—even to me.
Still, I couldn’t fault her for it.
Genetics, I suppose.
Mathematically, I knew all about genetics. Dominant and recessive genes; DNA; patterns. Emotionally, I’d never understand it. The desire to protect someone just because they shared the same genes, and all the feelings that went along with that.
How could you completely love and hate someone at the same time?
Brit didn’t back down on Travis. She went on about his alleged sketchy history and said that if I didn’t call it off, she’d tell our parents about all the rumors surrounding him. That’s when I knew I didn’t stand a chance. Brit had this way of appearing she knew what was best for me. “I’ll look out for her,” she’d always say. And our parents would go along with whatever she said.
So instead of fighting, I played her game for a few months, agreeing not to see him if she promised not to tell Mom and Dad.
Of course, that wasn’t going to work for me, so Travis and I upped our security protocol, throwing Brit (and her spy friends) off our scent. We had this whole adventure going on, stealing moments to meet whenever we could, devising excuses, and finding new hideouts. As the stakes grew higher, so did my feelings for Travis. For the first time in my life, I was impulsive and illogical. It was an amazing high—not that I would know about that. My brain cells have always been too important to me. Like the waifs in school who wouldn’t risk eating a piece of pizza for the sake of their waistlines, my brain was something I’d never take for granted.
Though, and I hate to confess it, maybe I wouldn’t have stuck with Travis as long as I did without all the excitement—without that triumphant feeling of defying Brit (which was incredible, by the way). It was freeing. I wasn’t a we anymore when I was with Travis; I was me.
It was wonderful in the months it lasted.
In October, Brit finally found out we were sneaking around behind her back. She was so angry I’d lied to her, she tried to call Dad on the spot. Thankfully, I was able to intercept. Didn’t matter, though. I knew she’d tell them eventually.
I needed a more permanent plan, so I lured her in.
“I will break up with him, Brit,” I said. “Promise.”
“Too late for promises. I don’t trust you anymore.”
“Well, what am I supposed to do then? Bring you with me when I drop t
he news on him? I think that would be a little extreme, don’t you?”
“Nothing is too harsh for that asshole,” she said.
“I wish you could do it for me.”
“What?” she asked, her ears almost visible perking up. “Break up with him?”
I nodded.
“Hey, now, that could work.” She twirled her hair, the way she always did when she was thinking really hard. “Then I could be sure. I could do it the right way and leave no room for negotiation.”
“What’re you talking about?” I asked. She couldn’t be serious.
“I’ll break up with him.” Brit pulled her shoulders back. “I’ll go over there and pretend I’m you.”
“He’ll know.”
“Not a chance,” she said. “It’s the perfect plan. Who’s the genius now?”
Well, apparently neither one of us was pushing three figures on our IQ scores, because I called Travis and told him about the plan. I couldn’t stand the thought of her blindsiding him.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, I fueled his rant and agreed that my sister was a bitch for not understanding him. And when I said I was tired of her pushing me around and keeping us apart, and that we had to do something about it? Well, I just made the situation so much worse.
His wheels were turning, and I knew these weren’t happy thoughts. Still, I didn’t stop it. And I let him handle it his own way.
I thought he’d just scare Brit—threaten her or something. Travis had a way of making people do what he wanted. He was even better than my sister. I figured he’d threaten her, she’d cave in, and then I’d be free from her clutches.
He did more than that. He went ahead and went through with it, making her pay like he’d been saying he would.
Brit called me when she saw him following her. Her voice wasn’t right. It was high and unsteady. She gave me the play-by-play as it was happening. I wanted to get off the phone with her and confront Travis, but it sounded as if he was too far gone.
I was beginning to believe that Brit could be right about him. She was right about a lot of things.