Bend Me, Break Me

by Chelsea M. Cameron

  “Yeah, sure,” I said and then realized she had no way to get in touch with me, unless we saw each other in the dorms. So I told her my number and she typed it into her phone. A few seconds later, she sent me a message and I added her number. Despite my best efforts not to rejoin the great wide world, but I kept getting pulled back in. I could only fight it for so long, I guess.

  Lacey said goodnight and I picked up my phone, reading the messages Coen had sent me. I could feel his hurt in the simple words. Sighing and hoping he was still up, I called him. I couldn’t do this via text.

  He picked up after only one ring.

  “Hey, Ingrid. I’ve been going crazy. Are you okay? I’ve had to stop myself from just showing up at your door so many times. Marty said he was going to tie me to the bed.” I heard Marty yell something in the background and I got the gist that it was somewhat sexual.

  “I’m okay. Well, I’m not, really. I just got a phone call that just brought everything up that I’m always trying not to think about. I’m sorry I just left and didn’t explain to you but I needed some time.” He let out a long breath and then was silent for a few seconds.

  “It doesn’t matter. I’m just glad you’re okay. I was seriously worried about you, Ingrid.” I could tell. I’d been worried that he was worried and I felt like shit about it, but I hadn’t known what to do in the moment.

  “I’m sorry.” He interrupted me.

  “I know that you need your time. I’m not stupid and I’m not blind. But if you could just, like, tell me when you need a moment and that it has nothing to do with me, that would be fine. Totally fine.” He was right. I shouldn’t have just left him hanging like that.

  “Okay, that’s a deal. That’s what friends do, right?” He sort of laughed.

  “Sure. But I think our version of friendship is completely different than any kind of friendship I’ve ever been in.” That made me smile a little.

  “Same.” The tension melted and we were back to our easy banter.

  “Is it totally cliché if I don’t want to hang up?” he asked a little while later. I was wide awake and had no intention of going to sleep anytime soon. I had too much going on in my head and pumping through my blood. I wanted to get up and walk around, or clean my entire room or do all my homework for the next week. Instead I got up and made myself another cup of tea and then some oatmeal. My stomach was still sore and my abs hurt like I’d done a bunch of crunches, but I couldn’t ignore my hunger anymore.

  “No, I don’t want to either. But we probably should. I don’t want to keep you from going to sleep.”

  “You’re not. I’m too keyed up to go to bed right now.” I could tell. There was an energy in his voice that I knew was in mine as well.

  “We could do something. I mean, I don’t know what, but we could do something.” Suddenly leaving my room and going out with Coen seemed like a good idea. Reckless and good.

  “You want to? Are you sure I wouldn’t be keeping you up?” I shook my head, but obviously he couldn’t see me.

  “Not at all. I have an insomnia problem, remember?” It was useless to deny it anymore.

  “Right. Well, how about I pick you up in about ten minutes in front of your building and we’ll… I don’t know. We’ll do something.” I was suddenly excited and wiped my palms on my jeans.

  “Cool. See you in a few.” We hung up and I crammed the oatmeal in my mouth. I might regret it later, but right now all I could think about was seeing Coen.

  I wasn’t thinking about the voicemail or him or the trial or my family. That had all been shoved into a box and put in the back of my mind and I was fine with that. It was… liberating.

  She was wearing my jacket when I pulled up in front of her building. She looked so good wearing in it that I had to remember to breathe. God, she was fucking gorgeous. I did notice that she was a little paler than normal once she got in the car, but other than that, she seemed fine.

  “Hey,” she said, grinning at me.

  “Hey, Ing,” I said and then she gave me a look. The nickname had just slipped out. I hadn’t even meant to say it.

  “Ing?” she asked.

  “Sure. Why not? It’s cute.” Like her.

  She laughed and raked her hair back.

  “Sure, why not?” I had to clench the steering wheel to keep from touching her, but I wasn’t going to let it go unnoticed that she looked damn good in my jacket.

  “That looks a million times better on you than it ever did on me.” She’d rolled up the sleeves so she could use her hands, but it was still too big for her. In an oh-so-sexy way.

  “So, where to?” I asked. I wanted to do whatever she wanted. She threw her head back and laughed.

  “I don’t care. Take me anywhere. Anywhere.” She closed her eyes and I started to drive.

  “Anywhere it is.”

  I didn’t have a destination in mind. I just got on the highway and drove. I figured I’d know where I was going when it felt right.

  She turned on the radio and sang along at the top of her lungs. Compared to how she’d been earlier, it was a dramatic shift. I knew I should be wary of the change, but my need to see her overwhelmed everything else. Her mood was contagious and I also sang along to the eighties songs we’d found on a random radio station. She was surprised by how many I knew the lyrics to.

  “My mom’s a huge 80s music fan, so she played it a lot around the house when I was a kid,” I said. I used to pretend I hated it and complain, but honestly, I’d loved having the mom who belted out Depeche Mode and Queen and Blondie instead of lullabies and so forth.

  We drove for at least an hour, and I stopped to get gas and Ingrid went inside the 24 hour station to grab snacks.

  “Not a whole lot of vegan options,” she said, holding up a bag of pretzels and a bag of Oreos as well as two sodas. “I wish I had a fake ID because I would have gotten a few beers.” She’d never talked about drinking before and I was surprised that was something she’d want to do.

  “Yeah?” I asked as she ripped open the bag of pretzels.

  “It would be fun. I just feel like I want to do so many things right now. Get drunk and do something crazy.” Her eyes were wild and she looked so pretty. I couldn’t say no to her.

  “Too bad we didn’t think of that ahead of time. Marty has a few under his bed, I think.” Marty and I drank sometimes when we went out, but never took it to the extreme. I’d done enough of that when I was younger and waking up in your own vomit more than once will make you realize that you probably shouldn’t drink that much again. My little brother had yet to learn that lesson, but I guess I’d been pretty bad at that age as well, so maybe he’d get his shit together.

  “Damn. I had a fake ID once in high school, but I have no idea what happened to it. I never used it, though, so I have no idea if it was any good.” Huh. I hadn’t known that. There were still so many things to learn about Ingrid.

  We started driving again and she held the bag of pretzels open for me so I could dig my right hand in and eat while driving with my left.

  “Oh, go here!” she suddenly yelled and my heart stopped for a second. I saw the exit she was jabbing her finger at and put on my blinker. Good thing there weren’t many cars around because I had to cut across a lane to make it to the exit in time.

  “You know it’s not going to be open,” I said.

  “I don’t care.”

  “I’m pretty sure we’re going to get arrested,” I said as we skulked around.

  “Shhh,” Ingrid said, taking my hand as we approached the museum. She’d decided that the middle of the night was the best time to try to visit the Maine Shaker Museum.

  “We can come back when it’s open,” I hissed as she crept alongside the main building and peered in through a window. We were near the public buildings, but the actual Shaker community wasn’t very far away and there were still a few of them living. Since they were celibate, there weren’t a whole lot of them left. Still, they made great furniture.

&
nbsp; “I think it’s cool,” she whispered, “that they’d give everything up for what they think is right.” I really didn’t want to talk, because it increased our chances of getting caught. But Ingrid squeezed my hand and I went ahead and joined her at the window.

  We couldn’t see much and I pulled her along to the next building. They were mostly white and square. Simple, which was part of their belief system, I was pretty sure.

  “We’ve seen it, now can we go?” I said. We’d parked a little way up the road in a ditch and I really, really didn’t want to get arrested. If something like that happened, my mom would march right up to Maine and haul me back home without another word. There was no way I could fight her on that if I got thrown in jail. And I couldn’t take the risk that she would find out who I was with.

  Mom couldn’t know about Ingrid. Ever.

  “I wanna come back when it’s open,” Ingrid said, still going from window to window to try to see what she could.

  “Okay, we will. Can we go now, though?” Every little noise made me jump. I wasn’t normally so paranoid, but I had a lot at stake right now.

  She sighed and turned to me. Her eyes were bright in the dark.

  “I wish we could break in and just look around.” Now she was taking things too far. I tugged at her arm.

  “Ingrid.” I said her name with urgency. “We can’t. They probably have security cameras, at least in the store and the museum. So let’s go before something happens and we regret this.” She opened her mouth, as if she was going to argue with me, but then stopped.

  “You’re right. You’re right. I just… I wanted to do something.” I understood that, but breaking into a museum wasn’t the something we needed to be doing.

  “Come on, let’s keep driving. We can find something better. And legal.” She let out a little snort and let me lead her back to the car in a semi-crouch. I didn’t breathe fully until we were back on the highway and I was sure there were no blue flashing lights following us.

  Even though it was chilly, Ingrid opened the window and stuck her hand out. I was getting cold, but I didn’t say anything.

  “What’s up with the sudden need for recklessness?” I said. She turned toward me and shrugged.

  “I don’t know.”

  “It doesn’t have anything to do with that phone call you missed?” Oh, I was so close to saying the wrong thing, but I couldn’t stop.

  “No,” she said, going back to staring out the window. I didn’t believe her, but if I kept going, I knew it wasn’t going to be good. So I turned the radio up and shut my mouth.

  I couldn’t put into words why I wanted to do something crazy and potentially illegal. I’d just been gripped by the need to do something, anything. I’d spent months doing next to nothing. Not living, just existing. Something inside me had snapped and I just wanted to say, fuck it. I was going to do whatever the hell I wanted, because why not? We were all going to die, so why not do whatever you wanted?

  My parents and my sister were never going to get to do anything reckless. Ever again. Their right to do that had been taken away by someone who decided they didn’t matter. Their lives were nothing. Just stones in his path that he kicked away.

  The motive was supposedly money. My parents had been well off and for some reason he decided that his need to pay for drugs to pump through his worthless body was more important than their need to be alive.

  I had heard of other victims of horrible tragedy who had risen above it and forgiven the people who had ruined their lives.

  Fuck.

  That.

  I was never going to forgive him. Ever. I didn’t care if it ate away at me. Let it. I’d revel in it. I’d dance with it, love it, nurture it. I’d absorbed it into my cells and it had become part of my DNA. There was no way to separate me from it and I wouldn’t even try.

  My mind drifted as Coen drove and we put miles between us and campus. I almost asked him to just keep driving. Keep driving forever. Turn our backs on everything and start over. Be new people, with new names, new lives. I wouldn’t be Ingrid, The Girl with the Dead Family. I could be Celia or Elizabeth or Molly. I’d get new ID and dye my hair and maybe pierce my eyebrow or start wearing more skirts or get a cat. Coen could be Jaime or Nick or Tyler. We could be like secret agents, or in Witness Protection or aliens from another planet studying human life. We could be anyone. Do anything.

  “What are you thinking about?” he asked, turning the radio down.

  “Nothing. Everything.”

  “You’re so cryptic sometimes, Ing. I swear, I never really know what’s going on inside your head.” I wasn’t sure how to take that.

  “I meant that as a compliment,” he said when I didn’t answer.

  “It doesn’t really feel like that, but if you say so.” The cold air was making my skin hurt, but the burn in my lungs was worth it.

  “You scare me sometimes,” he said, so quietly I almost didn’t hear him over the sound of the radio. I reached forward and turned it nearly all the way down.

  “What do you mean?” I knew exactly what he meant. I scared me. The things that I felt and the memories in my head and the thoughts that I had all scared me. Being alive scared me.

  It would have been so much easier if I had been home. If I hadn’t gone out with my friends for pizza. If only I had been home, I wouldn’t be here wondering what would have happened if I was there with them.

  “You’ve been through so much and it makes me feel like you have something I don’t. Like I can’t understand what you’ve been through and you’re going to figure that out. You absolutely terrify me, Ingrid. For so many reasons.” Well, what the hell was I supposed to do with that?

  “You were the one who wanted to be friends. If I’m so much trouble, then why did you bother?” I didn’t say it to be mean. I was honestly interested in what it was that Coen had seen in me to try to get past all the roadblocks I’d thrown in front of him.

  “Because I had to, okay? I had to.” I’d never seen him clench his jaw that hard and suddenly we were careening over to the side of the road as the car slammed to a halt. Before I knew what was happening, he was getting out and hopping over the divider and starting to walk toward the trees that lined the road. I scrambled after him, calling his name.

  “Coen!” I jogged to catch up with him and then he whirled around to face me.

  “What’s going on?” A cold drip of fear made its way down my spine.

  I knew that without him even having to say anything. This was it. The moment that would change everything between us. I’d always thought there was something off about why he wanted to be friends with me.

  “What’s going on, Coen.” I spat out the words. He ripped his hands through his hair so violently that I thought he was going to pull it out. It was dark, except for the glow of the car’s headlights and the occasional passing vehicle. It was probably dangerous to leave the car like that and be out here in the middle of the night, but I didn’t care. We were doing this. Right now.

  He leaned over, putting his hands on his knees, as if he was going to be sick. But then he let out a sound that I could tell was something akin to a sob. He was crying. I took a few steps toward him and touched his shoulder.

  Finally, he looked up at me.

  “I came here for you. It wasn’t an accident.” I didn’t know what he was saying. The words were just jumbles of letters without meaning.

  “What?” He swallowed hard before he continued.

  “I came here for you. I knew who you were before that first time we met. I knew your name and what you looked like and when your birthday was and so many other things.” Now I was the one who was feeling sick. I just couldn’t understand what he was saying.

  “How? Why?” The second question was the most important. Why? Was he some kind of stalker? I took a step back from him and wished that I had been the one who’d driven because then I would have the keys and the ability to leave if I had to.

  “What’s going on, Coen?�
� My voice sounded weak and I wished that I felt stronger. More confident.

  “I’m not going to hurt you. I came here because… because I had to. I had to see you. I had to make sure that you were okay. Or help you if you weren’t. Or, I don’t know. But I had to do something.” He still wasn’t making any sense.

  “But why? Why me? How did you find me?”

  He met my eyes and said the words that changed everything.

  “Because of him. Because of the man that killed your family.”

  “What about him,” I said, my vision going spotty.

  “He’s my father.”

  This was it. I couldn’t put it off any longer. It wasn’t fair to her. It hadn’t been fair this whole time. I knew that now. My altruistic plan of being some kind of savior or something was beyond naïve. I had no excuse for it. But I’d done it and now I was going to have to deal with the fallout.

  Ingrid didn’t say a word. She just stared at me. The sound of the highway and the wind in the trees behind me dimmed and I could only focus on her. Nothing but her.

  I watched her take in my words. My entire life had somehow led me to this moment, with this girl.

  I was able to keep myself from breaking down and crying, but just barely.

  She was so quiet. I’d thought she would cry, or yell, or tell me I was crazy. Anything other than this absolute stillness.

  Finally, I caved.

  “Please say something,” I croaked.

  “I don’t know what to say. What is there to say, Coen? What could I possibly say to that?” Her voice was monotone, robotic.