Bruised

by Sarah Skilton

His sneakers are old and tattered. I don’t know why I notice this. He’s looking at the display case, where the damn Spectator newspaper article is, but when he sees me in the reflection, he turns around.

  I don’t meet his gaze, though, because I don’t meet anyone’s gaze these days.

  “Don’t you recognize me?” says Ricky after a moment.

  Confused, I force myself to look up from the floor, up his legs and along his body, until I’m looking him in the eyes.

  I hear gunshots, the cashier crying, and police sirens, but I don’t look away.

  He’s my friend from under the table.

  “Are you okay?” we ask each other in unison.

  “I guess,” he says.

  “Not really,” I go.

  He sort of laughs and exhales and looks away for a second. “Yeah. Me neither. That was some fucked-up shit.”

  It doesn’t sound obscene coming from his lips. It sounds accurate.

  I’m acutely aware of my breathing, which has sped up.

  “I was worried I made you up,” I blurt out, which is probably the cheesiest thing he’s ever heard.

  But he just says, “I know. I kept wondering what happened to you. They couldn’t separate us fast enough, right?”

  “Yeah, I know.” I’m nodding like crazy, so relieved we found each other. I jerk my chin toward Simmons’s office. “D’you know what this is about?”

  “I have a couple ideas.”

  Some acne scars dot his cheeks and forehead, but they just make him more beautiful, because he’s real, he’s so wonderfully real, and he’s the only one who’ll ever understand. I’ll be under that table, on some level, for the rest of my life, but so will he.

  “Did you get any of your clothes back?” I ask.

  He shakes his head. “They bagged it all for evidence. This is gonna sound dumb, but I was so pissed about my shoes. It’s not like I’d be able to wear them, or even want to now, but they were—”

  “Brand-new,” I say.

  He stares at me. “Yeah.”

  “I remember how white they were.”

  “Yeah. Were. I saved two months for those sneakers.” He points to the dirty ones he’s wearing now. “I had to get these back from the church rummage sale. I was planning on throwing them out, but my abuelita—my grandma—made me pack them up for the church, and then I ended up having to pay five dollars to get them back.”

  This is the longest conversation I’ve had with a boy who isn’t Hunter or mandated by a teacher to talk to me because of a group project.

  “Sucks,” I say.

  “No doubt.” He pauses, lowers his voice. “You had it worse, though.”

  “I don’t know …” I shrug him off. The thing inside my chest that’s not my heart thuds to a halt, causing poison to back up into my bloodstream.

  “I mean, it looked pretty bad,” he says.

  “No, yeah, I mean …” I cannot, cannot think about this.

  There are gaps in my memory I don’t wish to fill. I’m under the table, looking into Ricky’s eyes … and then there’s blood everywhere, on me, on my clothes, on my face … But there’s something else first. Under the table … Ricky’s eyes … and blood. What happened before the blood? Why was I covered in it? What am I missing? The school hallway twists into a funnel, and I suck in huge gulps of air, but it’s not enough, not enough, not enough to clean me out …

  “Sorry,” he says quickly. “Sorry. You probably—”

  The door opens and Mrs. Hamilton walks out. “Ricky, Imogen.” She tilts her head, regarding me. “Are you okay?”

  I nod. Her interruption has provided enough of a jolt that my train of thought has derailed. Oxygen floods my veins at last and I calm down.

  “Thanks for waiting. If you’ll follow me, please.”

  Mrs. Hamilton is the part-time school counselor, the one Mom mentioned to me. She must be the person who broadcast our invitation to this little reunion. At this moment I love Mrs. Hamilton.

  “What’s your name again?” Ricky asks, falling into step beside me.

  “Imogen.”

  “Imagine?”

  “No, uh, ‘im’ as in ‘him,’ and ‘oh,’ and ‘gin.’”

  He’s quiet for a second, as if committing the pronunciation to memory. “Got it.”

  “Hunter’s sister,” I add, kind of rolling my eyes, because even though I hate it, it’s the easiest way for people to place me.

  “Don’t know him,” Ricky says, which makes me want to throw my arms around him. “Ricky,” he adds, holding out his hand.

  “I know,” I say. “I heard it on the loudspeaker.” And from Mrs. Hamilton.

  “Right.”

  Mrs. Hamilton has us sit down in her office, which is covered in framed diplomas proving her qualifications to treat us. It reminds me of how my room used to look.

  Her hair’s cut in a bob and streaked with unapologetic gray stripes, which I totally respect. It reminds me of my mom’s. Several wide, colorful bracelets on her wrists clank against each other when she moves her arms.

  She explains that the school wants to offer us on-campus counseling for the rest of the semester during study hall. We can decide if we want to speak with her separately or together. It’s up to us. I know which one I’d prefer.

  “Water?” Mrs. Hamilton offers, moving toward the cooler in the hall.

  “Sure,” I say.

  When she’s out of earshot, Ricky and I immediately scoot our chairs closer.

  “It’s Monday,” I sputter. “It took them ten days to decide we need counseling.”

  “More than a week!”

  “I bet they formed a committee to decide if we were crazy enough.”

  “And a budget meeting to decide if they could afford it,” Ricky adds, laughing.

  “It’s a good plan, because if it only takes a month for us to get over this, we’ll know something’s seriously wrong with us.”

  We’re both howling now.

  “What if we’d been totally fucked up already?” he cries. “We might have been off the deep end already.”

  I giggle. “Did they hope if they waited ten days we might forget what happened and not need counseling after all?”

  Ricky snorts and wipes his eyes. We’re basically in hysterics, but we force ourselves to curb it when Mrs. Hamilton returns, three paper cups in her hands. She looks at our chairs and how close we’ve moved them; perhaps she wonders if she should disapprove.

  “What about Gretchen?” I ask, just to say something.

  “Gretchen’s parents were offered the same courtesy, but they’ve made other plans.”

  In other words, Gretchen’s parents can afford a fancy private therapist. Suddenly, Mrs. Hamilton’s cool gray hair seems haggard and her bracelets look cheap.

  On the plus side, Ricky and I are getting along so well it’s like I’ve known him my whole life. I’d like to think we would have found each other eventually, but maybe not. Maybe we needed the events of last Friday or we never would have met. He’d have graduated and left Glenview without knowing I existed. He doesn’t even know Hunter! We could have lived here and gone to school and passed each other in the halls for months and never connected.

  The other thing that’s strange to think about is that if Friday hadn’t happened we would both be completely different people right now, and maybe the person I used to be and the person Ricky used to be would have nothing to say to each other.

  We decide on co-counseling, and Mrs. Hamilton excuses us, but we’re obviously not racing to get back to class and she’s obviously not racing to start “healing” us. She probably has to dust off her textbooks from the ’70s and bone up on posttraumatic stress disorder first.

  Outside her office, Ricky points to my Spectator photo in the display case. “Is this you?” he asks curiously, eyebrows raised.

  My stomach tightens and I can’t breathe. My imposter heart swells in my chest, threatening to rupture between my lungs.

  Not him. Pl
ease not him.

  “It’s you,” he answers himself. “Nice kick.”

  I can’t breathe.

  Anyone but him.

  “Wait, you’re a black belt?” he says. “Really?”

  And then he laughs.

  Both of us were laughing a few minutes ago; we were laughing our faces red, and it felt so good, but now he’s laughing at me.

  I punch Ricky so fast and so hard in the face that his nose bursts and he slams backward, cracking the display case right down the middle.

  THE FIRST STUPID THING WAS THAT IT SHOULD’VE BEEN Daryl who got punched. The second stupid thing was getting into a fight right outside Principal Simmons’s office.

  Faculty members gather around just in time to witness me screaming at Ricky, “You didn’t do anything either. You didn’t do anything either.” I have to say everything twice, because no one listens to me, no one hears me. I want to get down on the ground and pummel him, but not him—the gunman, the way I couldn’t ten days ago.

  Freaking Grant would have been a better target for my fist. So I guess there were two people I wanted to beat up, and Ricky wasn’t even one of them, so how he got on the floor is kind of a mystery.

  “Get up,” I scream. He’s not supposed to be on the floor, looking startled and bloody, broken capillaries spilling waste under his skin. My voice is hoarse. “Get up!”

  “You broke my face,” he moans, gingerly tracing his now-bulbous nose with his fingertips. Then he mutters, “Psycho bitch.”

  “Please get up,” I beg, my hand trembling. I’m a black belt in Tae Kwon Do, but I’ve never punched anyone in the face. I’ve only mimed it all these years. We don’t hit people in the face. Ever. “Get up, get up.”

  Principal Simmons calls my parents to come pick me up. I’ve been accused of “acting out,” aggressive behavior, and damaging school property. But Mom’s working and can’t leave, and she took the minivan this morning ’cause she had to transport the flowers from Hunter’s lacrosse float back to the nursery, and that means Dad can’t get me either because he can’t drive without the wheelchair lift. I’m a ward of the state or something.

  “Spit it out,” I say, when Simmons hems and haws over this unexpected snafu.

  His face purples. “You listen to me, young lady. This is not a humorous situation. You are suspended until, until—Thursday.”

  You can tell he pulled that day out of his ass; it’s totally meaningless. I don’t know where I get the nerve to say, “What about my counseling sessions?”

  “They’ll be rescheduled,” he says. “And, well, probably extended.”

  Get it? Because I’m CRAZY with a K.

  “And they’ll be conducted alone,” he adds, which is when I finally realize how badly I’ve screwed up.

  Despite the fact that I flat-out knuckle-blasted Ricky in the face, I thought maybe we’d still be in counseling together, helping each other through everything. My hand throbs, but to be honest I’m having trouble believing I punched him. It feels like I can still take it back, that he and I can still be friends. But of course not. I’m like a menace now. He’ll probably get a restraining order against me, and I won’t have anyone to really talk to about the diner ever again.

  They want me off school property ASAP, so Hunter’s summoned from gym class. He’s in his dinky basketball shorts, complete with striped socks.

  “What did you do?” he asks, pulling me by the wrist and leading me toward the front doors. I yank free, turning back to see Ricky staring at himself in the cracked glass of the display case, holding an ice pack against the bad meat that used to be his face.

  Using my shoulder, I plow through the double doors.

  “I punched Ricky Alvarez.” The only one who might’ve been able to help me.

  “Ricky Alvarez … Ricky …” Hunter mulls the name over and comes up blank. “Is he the guy who always orders root beer floats?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe you don’t know him. He doesn’t know you. Gasp, someone at this school has never heard of you. The mind boggles.”

  He lets my sarcasm slide. “Why’d you punch him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did he try something with you?”

  “No.”

  “Then what?”

  “I don’t know!”

  “There must be a reason.”

  “He laughed at me, okay? I know I was useless during the robbery, but … I mean, believe me, I know.”

  “You protected yourself,” Hunter says firmly. “That’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

  How many times do I have to have this conversation? “You don’t understand,” I mutter.

  “Why? Because I don’t have honor or something?”

  I don’t reply.

  “I wish I had been there with you,” he says. “At the diner.”

  “Why? Because you would’ve stopped him?”

  “No. So you wouldn’t have been alone.”

  But I wasn’t alone, I want to tell him. I’m only alone now.

  We reach his car and I toss my backpack in but don’t get inside. “I’ll walk.” I slam the door shut. Hunter tries to, like, manhandle me again. As if.

  “I’m supposed to drive you straight home, and Dad’s supposed to call the school and tell them you arrived.”

  “Let. Go.” I shove his chest, hard, with both hands.

  I know we’re still on school property, and I’m probably being watched, but what does it matter at this point?

  “What do you want me to do?” he cries, frustrated.

  “Fight back,” I reply.

  “Go to sparring class if you want to fight someone.”

  “Sparring class isn’t real!”

  “I’m not gonna fight you,” he says.

  “You don’t think I can knock you out?”

  “I know you can; I’d rather not experience it, okay?” He rests his hands lightly on my shoulders. “What’s gotten into you?”

  I set off walking. He gets in the car and follows me, leaning out the window to try to talk.

  “I know you hate me,” he says, sounding tired. “I just don’t know why.”

  “That’s kind of the problem,” I tell him. “That you don’t know why.”

  “Is this about your birthday? Are you still mad about your birthday?”

  Once upon a time I had a whole bunch of friends, until my brother picked them off one by one. Hunter’s cupid doesn’t bother with a bow and arrow, though. He sabotages the water supply and returns later to collect the bodies.

  Whenever I had a group of girls over for pizza and a movie, Hunter would peek his head in the living room and tease everyone, asking what we were up to: “Gossiping about boys?”

  I’d say, “Not you,” hoping for once it would be true.

  Next thing you knew, Hunter had a new girlfriend, and for a hideous month the Chosen One would show up at the house, no longer as my friend but as Hunter’s toy, and breeze by me like she had more important people to see and I was the annoying kid sister in the way of The Relationship.

  Within a few weeks Hunter would grow bored and dump her, except that didn’t mean he’d actually dump her. That meant he’d stop calling her, and ask me to talk to her; so then she’d blame me or else try to use me as a reason to keep coming by the house and catch his interest again. This happened about eight times, no lie. By sophomore year, my real friends had been whittled down to precisely three.

  Still, I just sort of accepted everyone’s behavior until a month ago, my sixteenth birthday. The day after my demo at school.

  A girl’s sixteenth birthday is supposed to be special for two reasons—being kissed and being able to drive—but both were sore points with me: I was sweet sixteen and had never been kissed, and I was sixteen without a license or even a permit. Mom didn’t have time to help me practice driving, or at least she didn’t want to after work because it was too dark out and she got nervous about visibility, and I didn’t really want to learn in the minivan with D
ad, so I’d blown off the whole thing.

  As for having “never been kissed,” I’d dodged a feeble attempt during a triple date with Hannah and DJ over the summer. When Monsieur Tool leaned in, I totally gave him the cheek because we hadn’t connected on any level the whole night; it was a pathetic joke that I’d all of a sudden want to kiss him. DJ and Hannah, of course, thought I was too picky; they figured you had to get it over with sometime, and if you waited for it to be perfect, it wouldn’t happen at all, but I wasn’t feeling it. DJ said that was so like a Virgo: too fussy and narrow-minded. (Yes, even my astrology sign has it out for me: Virgo, the virgin. Hunter’s one year and one month older, which makes him a Leo, born lucky.)

  So anyway, despite those two setbacks guaranteeing I’d die alone, I decided to throw a slumber party for my birthday, as a retro throwback and a way to kick-start the new school year. We talked about it all week. Should we do makeovers? Watch DVDs from the ’00s? Play “Light as a feather, stiff as a board”? Truth or dare? Paint our nails, braid our hair, and read horoscopes all night?

  I told Hunter to make himself scarce, but he said he’d already requested the night off from work, and Mom and Dad said they needed his help cleaning the basement and setting up streamers and stuff. As long as he was there in a service capacity only, I decided it was okay. Fatal mistake.

  Around midnight, Shelly Eppes headed upstairs to get my camera from my bedroom. I made note of this but forgot, because Hannah and I found the old sprinkler system, and she and DJ and I were having a blast running through it like we were kids again. The moon was bright, and it was still warm out, and we were being profoundly screechy, to the annoyance of the Mastersons, our next-door neighbors.

  Later I realized Hunter wouldn’t have missed the chance for wet T-shirts in a million years—unless he’d been in the midst of something better. I went inside and upstairs to grab towels and find my camera. Hunter’s door was partially open and there were noises coming from his bedroom. I rolled my eyes and went to investigate, nudging the door all the way open. Shelly and Hunter were having sex, Hunter’s naked butt bobbing up and down.

  Shelly’s thin, coltish, dancer legs were under his, but I didn’t see her face. I sputtered in horror and slammed the door shut.