by Amy Giles
Lila doesn’t notice for a while until we pass the Unisphere, the twelve-story metal globe in Flushing Meadow Park.
“Hey . . . Hadley! You’re going the wrong way!”
My foot presses down on the gas.
“Hadley! That’s the World’s Fair! We’re in Queens!”
My hands clench the steering wheel until my knuckles go white.
“Hadley!” she screams now, her voice pitching with a hint of panic. It breaks my resolve.
“Okay!” I say, easing back into the right lane and pulling off onto the next ramp.
I find a gas station and pull in, my legs trembling as badly as if we’d just avoided a head-on collision with an eighteen-wheeler.
“Do we need gas?” Lila asks, a hint of nervousness lingering in her voice.
I roll my head back and forth along the headrest.
“I just need to get it together,” I say.
With a credit card in my father’s name, a phone my father is using to track my every move, and twenty-three dollars, I thought I could just keep driving and get away with it. As Charlie would say, it was a fucked-up plan.
now
“Hadley?” Janet pokes her head into the rec room as I sit alone at the game table playing solitaire. Rowan left yesterday. Our good-bye was unspectacular. A quick hug and a promise to stay in touch. And then her mother and brother swept her away. Rowan already feels like a lifetime ago.
Grandma pokes her head in next to Janet with a plastered-on smile. She’s been here to visit a bunch of times but never with that nervous look on her face. Something’s up.
I stand up to meet her halfway. Grandma’s arms reach around me and squeeze, but nowhere near the fierce hugs she used to give me before the accident. These new tepid ones are reserved for broken, fragile me.
“The man who’s been investigating the plane crash is here to see you,” Grandma says, releasing me from her embrace. “He has a few questions.” She fiddles nervously with the straps of her purse.
“Okay.” Grandma and Janet both stare at me. “Oh. You mean now?”
Janet nods. Then Grandma turns to Janet.
“Before we go, can I have a word with Hadley? Privately?”
“Sure,” Janet says, then offers a smile.
Grandma looks around the room and gestures to a smaller table by the window, away from the couches. We sit facing each other.
She sets her purse in her lap. “He’s been here a few times, but your doctors were waiting for you to be . . . in a better frame of mind,” she chooses her words carefully.
“Oh,” I say.
“Do you think you’re up to it, dear?” She bites her lip, leaving a film of coral lipstick on her teeth. I run my finger along my teeth to tell her to wipe it away. I won’t have people staring at my grandmother like she’s a nutty old lady who walks around all day with lipstick on her teeth.
“Yuck. Let me get a tissue.” She opens her purse. “Oh, here. I brought these for you.” She hands me a box of Lorna Doones then continues searching through her purse. Finding a tissue, she dabs it at her front teeth then hides it back in her purse.
“Oh. This is for you too.”
She pulls a sheet of notebook paper with the familiar bleeding purple marker from inside her purse and hands it to me.
I hesitate. Grandma watches me, so I unfold it, pressing it to my nose first, smelling the scented marker, the chemical grape smell still fresh.
Dear Hadley,
Are you mad at me? Why haven’t you written back? If I did something to make you mad, I’m REALLY sorry.
I don’t like being here without you.
Please, please, please, please, please, PLEASE come home soon.
Circle YES or NO.
Love,
Lila
PS: Grandma lets me eat tomatoes as a vegetable!
“Hadley? Did you hear what I said?” Grandma asks.
I nod. “Sure.”
“Are you ready then?”
I’ve known since the day of the crash that this day would come. I thought I was prepared. But Lila’s note has me rethinking everything.
I stand up.
“Ready.”
then
Charlie watches me from the bottom of the stairs as I make my way down, clutching the banister for balance. I shrug my shoulders and grimace, offering a silent apology for disappearing during the most revered minute of the year for every couple across the planet. Unfortunately for both Charlie and me, at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve, I was puking my guts up in the bathroom.
The downstairs is filled with a dozen or so bodies hugging and kissing, the promise of a new year mixed with lots of champagne bringing out the most lovable version of everyone. Wrapping an arm around my shoulder, he leans close to my ear. “You okay?”
“Better,” I offer. He kisses my head. I suspect he’s not too excited to kiss me on the mouth after I just hurled.
“For someone who never drinks, you were really knocking them back,” he says, waiting for some kind of explanation. One I don’t give.
Over in the living room, Meaghan holds on to Noah, crying.
“I just love you so much,” she sobs, hanging on to his arm. “And I want you to find someone who appreciates what a special person you are . . .”
Noah looks at me beseechingly from across the room and mouths, “Help!”
I shrug and smile. We both know Meaghan gets a bad case of the feels when she’s been drinking.
“Do you want to go home now?” Charlie asks me.
Surprisingly, that minute of puking did the trick. My stomach isn’t churning anymore. My head isn’t even too fuzzy. I don’t want to go home. But I definitely don’t want to be here either.
“Not home,” I suggest, and bite my lip. Charlie takes two steps with me back to a quieter corner of the room. He bends down to whisper in my ear. “My mom is at the apartment.”
“We can just go park somewhere.” I nuzzle up to him, grazing my fingers down the back of his neck, my thumb circling his ear. His eyes flutter closed for a second, and he groans.
“You’re bombed,” he says.
“I’m not that bombed,” I counter with a smile.
He shakes his head, almost to humor me. “I’ll get your coat. We’ll go for a ride or something.” With a quick kiss on my forehead, he heads upstairs. While he goes to weed through the pile of coats on Meaghan’s bed, I walk over to my friends. Meaghan lets go of Noah and rushes into my arms.
“Oh, Hadley! I just love you so, so much!” she slurs, and wobbles on her ridiculously high heels.
“I love you back, Meaghan.” I hug her fiercely. “I really do. Okay? Like, don’t ever forget it.”
I reach for Noah next. “You too, Stretch. I love you.”
“Not you too,” he groans. “The two of you are killing me with your drunk talk! She’s actually crying over my breakup with Matt!”
I lean back and grab his arms. “Noah, listen to me, okay? You have been my voice of reason and closest friend forever. I love you. I want you to know that.”
He laughs warily. “You actually seem kind of sober.” His sharp eyes scrutinize me.
“I mean it.” I squeeze his arms.
“I love you too, Hadley,” he says, measuring out his words carefully. His long arms wrap around me and pull me into a thick embrace.
“Happy New Year,” Noah says in my ear, and my throat constricts.
Charlie’s behind me, holding my coat. I slip my arms in and take a last look at my friends.
“Call us when you get back from Ithaca!” Noah calls after me.
I pretend I didn’t hear him and follow Charlie out the door.
On the walkway, Charlie plucks the keys out of my cold hands. “No driving for you tonight.”
The cold air clears my head. “I feel fine,” I say, and I do, until I trip; Charlie’s grip on my elbow tightens before I can stumble to the ground. I glare down at the walkway that reached up to grab my toe out of
nowhere.
He hits my key fob, unlocking the door. “Phone?” He sticks his hand out. I dig it out of my purse and hand it to him. He throws it in the glove compartment and locks the door. With his hand on the small of my back, he helps me into his car before shutting the door.
We drive toward town. I try to sneak closer to him, but the console is in the way.
“Let’s get some food in you,” he offers as we approach the diner.
My hands are in his hair, twirling around his ear. “Let’s go to the beach.”
“Hadley . . .”
“What?” I giggle.
He glances at me from the corner of his eye, then turns right at the light and drives toward the bay.
The beach gate is down, blocking us from going to the parking lot. Charlie turns the car around, and I point out a road hidden by the darkness. “Turn in here.”
“It’s private,” he notes, reading the sign.
“I know the family who lives here. My dad golfs with their dad. They’re in Hawaii.”
We pull over to the side of their private road. Charlie turns the engine off. I reach over to kiss him, and he gives me his cheek.
“That was awkward,” I complain. He smiles at me and squeezes my hand. Undeterred, I unbuckle and get up on my knees to wrap my arms around his neck.
“Is it because I threw up?” I murmur against his ear.
He grimace-smiles and shrugs. “Kinda? Sorry.”
I kiss his ear. “I rinsed with mouthwash,” I offer, tugging on his earlobe with my teeth. I crawl over the console onto his lap, my knees on either side of his hips, pinning him.
“Come on,” I tease. “It’s New Year’s Eve. Push the seat back.” He kisses my neck, wrapping his arms around my waist. Then he groans and pulls away.
“Hadley . . . I don’t have a condom.”
I blink. “Oh.” It may have slipped my mind, but not Charlie’s. I’m not on the Pill anymore, not since my father threw them in the fireplace a little over a week ago. “Why not?”
He shrugs and looks away uncomfortably. “I knew my mother was going to be home. And I don’t want to have sex in the car.”
“Why?” I press my lips against the corner of his. “I don’t mind.”
“Hadley.” My name is so sweet on his lips. He sweeps my hair behind my ear. “Because I’m a fucking romantic when it comes to you. Because you’re bombed. And because hooking up in a Honda Civic isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”
Everything else he said is eclipsed by his last sentence.
“And you know this from experience?” I snap.
His eyes flash. “Yeah, I do. Happy now?”
I groan, my spine collapsing as my bravado slips away. Of course I’m not happy. I deserved that. The steering wheel presses against my back, a nagging reminder of the crushing disappointment of the night. Charlie doesn’t make any movements to inch the seat back.
I get a second wind and lean forward. “It’s okay. Just this one time.” I kiss his jaw, his neck.
He pushes me back a little more firmly this time. “Hadley, you getting knocked up our senior year is not okay.”
Rejection and despair and anger and fear and desperation all become one murky stew in my stomach. I put my hand against the window to balance myself. The glass is cold and wet. When I lift it, I leave behind an imprint of my hand in the condensation that’s all my doing. I’m the only one hot and bothered in here.
The familiar sting behind my eyes begins, and I don’t have the energy to fight it. Charlie’s arms wrap around me, consoling me, but I’m in the most vulnerable position, straddling him in my skirt while crying into my hands.
“Hadley, everything’s fine. You just had too much to drink.”
“It’s not fine,” I blubber.
His laugh rumbles under me. “You’re a mess when you drink, you know that? Come on. We have a lot of time ahead of us. A lot of new years together.”
It just makes me cry harder.
“Hadley, come on. Please? I’ll make it up to you, okay? When you get back. We’ll have a New Year’s Eve do-over, at my place. Just you and me. It’s going to make tonight look like amateur hour.”
The tears won’t stop pouring out of me, for everything I still have to lose.
then
Daggers of light slash through my blinds against my closed lids. I shield them with my hand and turn to look at my clock on the nightstand. It’s after eleven. No one’s ever let me sleep this late before. I worry that something happened, maybe everyone succumbed to carbon monoxide poisoning except for me. Before the anxiety takes hold, evidence of life coalesces in my consciousness: music from Lila’s room, the clatter of pots in the kitchen downstairs.
Standing up, I walk across my room to my desk to check messages that came in during the night.
The first one is from Noah:
Charlie and I brought your car home. The keys are in the glove compartment. Go get them before someone steals your car. You know, ’cause you live in such a rough neighborhood.
Charlie drove me back to Meaghan’s last night, just to get my phone, then home. He wouldn’t let me drive myself. He was convinced that my hysterics last night were because I was drunk.
They weren’t.
The next one is from Charlie:
I hate that we started the new year off on the wrong foot.
Let me make it up to you. Can we get together?
Mom’s working.
I love you.
I make my way downstairs.
“Good morning,” Mom says. “How was Meaghan’s party?”
I shrug and open the fridge for some orange juice. I’m so parched, I’m tempted to drink straight from the jug. I would, if my mother wasn’t standing right here watching me. Instead, I sit down with a glass and pour it to the rim, chugging half of it back, the tart sweetness washing away the nasty taste in my mouth. Mom looks at me knowingly.
“I’m going to let you off the hook today,” she says with a smug smile. “I know Noah brought your car home last night.”
“Oh,” I mumble with my eyes downcast.
“Your father doesn’t know. It was here when he woke up. So were you. That’s all that matters.” She sits down with her coffee.
“Thank you.”
“So.” She smiles brightly. “Tomorrow’s a big day, huh?”
“Yeah.” I swirl my juice around, controlling the waves that almost crest over the top. “I guess.”
She pours herself another cup of coffee, and I finish what’s left of my juice.
“I need to pick out an outfit.” She flaps a packet of sweetener back and forth.
“For what?” I lick the rim of my glass. I’m still thirsty. I should probably drink water, but the orange juice hit the spot. I get up and open the refrigerator door.
“For tomorrow,” she says simply, as if we’re both on the same page.
A chill runs through my body, but it has nothing to do with the open refrigerator. “Where are you going tomorrow?”
She rolls her eyes and feigns playful exasperation. “We’re coming with you to Cornell!”
“We?”
“Yes, all of us.” She reaches past me for her sugar-free, fat-free, flavored creamer.
My arm freezes inside the fridge, holding the orange-juice jug handle.
“Why?” It comes out whiny. “Lila’s arm,” I remind her. “She can’t bang it around.”
She waves my concern away with her hand. “I spoke with Dr. Sher. He says it’s fine.”
“It’s just supposed to be Dad and me,” I remind her. “We’re just flying up to look around and talk to the lacrosse coach, then coming back home. There’s no point in all of us going. I’m only doing it to make him happy anyway.”
She stirs her coffee and takes a sip, stubbornly trying to hold on to her fragile good mood. “Your father decided to make a trip out of it.”
“That’s stupid.” I groan. “It’s upstate New York in January! It’s cold! It’s s
nowy! There’s nothing to do!”
She snaps. “Maybe I’d like to get out of the house!” She shakes her head in exasperation. “For God’s sake, Hadley. We’re coming. End of story.”
My mouth gapes open. There are so many things I want to shout back at her. But the familiar fist wedges in my throat, making it impossible.
“I just really wish you would stay home and take care of Lila.” I try to appeal one last time to her maternal instinct.
“Yeah, well, you want to know what I wish?” she snaps back.
I don’t. I turn and storm away.
The four walls of my room feel like a cage. I put on my running clothes and go to the basement of my own free will. My skin itches with nerves, even after an hour on the treadmill running through my pain, my hip that’s still a little sore even though the burn has healed. A hot shower usually calms me, but today I exhaust every last drop of hot water from the tank and I’m still as jittery as that one time I had three cups of coffee to cram for a midterm.
It’s this house. Every room echoes with his fury, her neglect. I march back downstairs and grab my bag and shoes.
“Where are you going?” Mom asks.
“I need to run some errands,” I say. “And get some air.”
She nods. “Be home by six. I’m going to the Wileys’ for dinner. You need to stay home with Lila.”
Slipping my arms through my sleeves, I turn to face her, processing this new information. “Is Dad going with you?”
The way her shoulders stiffen, I know the answer.
“No,” she answers simply. A soft sigh escapes my lips. It didn’t have to be like this. We didn’t have to be like this.
My eyes reach for hers like open arms, pleading with her to be more nurturing, more protective, more of a mother. Right now, it could change everything. She turns her back to me and busies herself fluffing an immaculate pillow.
I turn and leave. In my car, I take out my phone.
Reading Charlie’s text, I finger the claddagh around my neck hidden under my collar. It steadies me before I write back.
Can’t today. Have to get ready for the trip tomorrow.
He texts back right away:
Okay. Well then as soon as you get back. I miss you. And all that that implies. ;)