I thought that somehow the image at the bottom of the stairs was a trick of that light, like when you think you see something out of the corner of your eye that isn’t really there. My brain couldn’t register the image at first.
Then my body went cold. My heart punched my rib cage. I ran to my sister.
She was lying on her back with her neck twisted to the right and her eyes shut. Her feet and calves sloped up the bottom two steps of the stairway. One of her arms was down at her side, the other bent up at the elbow and with the wrist swiveled at an awkward angle so that her fingernails pointed to the concrete floor beneath them.
Concrete. Her head smashed on concrete. Her face looked smaller, empty, like the real Skylar had seeped out.
But there wasn’t any blood. Nothing to see.
I knew enough not to move her. I watched her chest and it didn’t rise. I held my palm less than an inch from her lips to feel the warmth from her breath but there wasn’t any.
My heart slammed against my chest. Again and again and again. My lungs evaporated and left me gasping. This wasn’t real.
It wasn’t like Skylar to fall for no reason.
She shouldn’t have gone without me.
Why didn’t I help her when she’d asked?
How long can a person survive without oxygen?
How long had she been lying at the bottom of the stairs?
I was wasting seconds Skylar didn’t have. I sprang up the stairs, fighting for breath, snatched the cordless phone from the kitchen and dialed 911. Then I sprinted back to the basement with the phone pressed to my ear, nearly tripping myself halfway down the stairs.
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I lunged for the handrail and found my footing.
My eyes still couldn’t believe what they were seeing. My body was in denial. I couldn’t speak loud enough for the 911 operator. I had to say my address four times. “I think she’s dead,” I kept saying. “I think she’s dead.”
It wasn’t until I saw my mother later that I was lucid enough to consider how terrifying the basement could’ve seemed to someone like Skylar, who was only seven years old and hadn’t stopped thinking about ghosts since that haunted-house documentary. And she’d gone downstairs without me anyway because that’s what she was like. She wouldn’t have wanted the fear to stop her. In a way that makes me proud of her. She wouldn’t give in like I am now. She’d fight.
But I hope she wasn’t afraid when she flicked on the light and started down the steps.
It’s all bad enough without that thought. It’s really all bad enough.
More than I can take. The fact is, I don’t have it in me to live with this anymore.
I’m sorry Skylar sorry Mom and Dad sorry Jules and anyone else who’ll be sad, but I’m not as strong as you want me to be. I’m really not strong at all.
I’m done.
twenty
ashlyn
Sometimes I try to think back to the moment before the darkness and the stars. Was that previous moment the instance of my death or was there something in between? Instinctively I know I’m almost there now, my memory restored until what must be the precipice of my final days on earth, and I’m wondering—as I wondered about the time beyond my second year at Farlain Lake—if I truly want to know all my own secrets.
What if I can’t handle them?
And will the good about being Ashlyn Baptiste outweigh the bad?
Now that I remember being fifteen (and almost sixteen) I know that one of the things that I wanted for my adult future was to have the chance to really help people. I hadn’t figured out yet whether that meant being a social worker, a psychologist or even a school guidance counselor. Becoming any of them would have meant that one day I would’ve been better at helping Breckon Cody than I am now. I wish I could borrow that knowledge from the future I’ll never have. Why not? I ask the universe. If it would help him, why not let me?
The universe never answers. No one does. There are no deals when you’re dead. If there were deals to be made I wouldn’t be deceased, I’d be walking around in my Ashlyn skin, delighting in things like the feel of raindrops on the back of my neck, dancing with my friends as we sing so hard="0"j#x2019;t b that my voice gets hoarse, soaking in a hot bath with strawberry-scented bubbles, and staring at Ikenna Shepherd’s beautiful face from across our shared history class.
Ikenna …
I would have kissed him and more if I’d had the chance. I thought there’d be more time. More time for everything.
I never got to explore most of the exotic places I yearned for. There were two family trips to Florida (mostly just Disney World and SeaWorld), multiple ones to Vancouver to visit Mom’s parents, two to Scotland to see Aunt Sandra and one to England. The first time my family went to Edinburgh I was ten and Callum and Ellie were away at summer camp for the entire first week. My aunt and uncle rented a minivan and drove us up to Loch Ness and around the Highlands. The second week, when my cousins were back home, it rained nonstop and I caught a nasty bug and had to be taken to my aunt and uncle’s doctor for antibiotics. I spent most of my time in bed in the second guest room, a room that I was initially supposed to share with my sister, but she slept on the family room couch rather than risk getting sick.
Uncle Ian moved the small TV from his and my aunt’s room in with me to keep me from getting bored, and I watched repeats of old American sitcoms, hours and hours of CSI and a collection of British shows including The X Factor, one show called Casualty about a hospital and another called Waterloo Road about a school.
The second trip to Scotland when I was fourteen (during ninth grade) was much better. I stayed healthy, for one thing, and though it was Christmastime, the days were mild compared to Canada. We spent three days in London—visited Buckingham Palace, Harrods, the British Museum, the Tower of London and the London Eye—and then caught a train to Edinburgh, where my aunt and uncle met us at the station. One day my aunt took my mom, Celeste, Ellie and me to Glasgow to see the biggest shopping mall in Scotland. The stores were mostly different from the ones at home and my mom let me and my sister each buy some new clothes. Then we stopped in at a restaurant called Wagamama and ate big bowls of ramen noodles and sticky rice.
I didn’t think it would feel right being away from home at Christmas but I was wrong, it felt more like Christmas than ever being with my cousins and aunt and uncle for the holidays. The Edinburgh Christmas lights and decorations were beautiful. We stared down on them from the Ferris wheel in the center of town and then went ice-skating at the Winter Wonderland outdoor rink in Princes Street Gardens.
Celeste, Ellie and I became a trio. We shopped together, went to the movies together, baked shortbread cookies together and met Ellie’s best friend, Natasha, and her boyfriend, Jack. Callum was out with his own friends a lot, which meant we didn’t see much of him, but it’d been so many years since we’d really spent time together that I didn’t expect any different. If I hadn’t seen him at various points in between I might not even have recognized him as the boy I’d known when I was seven. He was nearly six feet tall, had his hair shaved so short that you could tell his ears stuck out a little, and mostly smelled like a mixture of smoke, citrus body spray and the mint shampoo my aunt stocked the bathroom with. Ellie said her parents were furious that he’d taken up smoking, that it’d been going on for over a year now and that they
My Beating Teenage Heart Page 20