by A. M. Henry
“Are you okay?” she asks, hurrying into the room when she sees me on the floor.
She sits down near my head and puts a cold hand on my forehead.
“I’m fine,” I shake her away.
“Sam’s sister said you beat up Ryan Reagan.”
“He deserved it.”
“Oh my GOD!” Casey exclaims. “Seriously? Like legit?”
“Legit.”
Casey stays silent for a moment, looking around the room.
“They beat up that guy, Derek, didn’t they?” she asks.
I say nothing. Everyone knows Ryan and his buddies beat up Derek, and yet no one does anything about it. Even Derek won’t press charges. I shut my eyes to try and shut it all out.
“Did you hurt your knee again?”
I nod once. She looks scared.
“I’ll be fine,” I tell her. “They said it would hurt a lot, remember? Nerve damage. I’ve just got to get used to it.”
The corner of Casey’s mouth turns down and she bites the inside of her cheek. She worries about me more than anyone else. She used to hate me, and then after the Accident, my bratty, high-maintenance little sister got replaced with a quiet, selfless, concerned sister. It still catches me off guard. My first instinct is always to fight her, to hate her. I have to consider everything before I say it. I’m getting better with time.
“Let me see your leg,” Casey demands.
She goes to roll up the leg of my sweatpants and I manage to get up into a sitting position in half a second. Something pops in my hip.
“Well, you can still move fast enough,” Casey says with a sideways smile.
I scowl at her and roll the sweatpants up past my knee, trying to not to actually touch my leg. The scar begins halfway down my calf and reaches up almost to the hip, huge and shiny and whitish-pink, and just hideous in general.
“It looks swollen,” Casey examines my knee.
She’s an expert on my knee. She knows all about how they stapled my kneecap back together and reconstructed the anterior cruciate ligament, and she knows what exercises I should do, and how often. I didn’t want to know then, and I don’t want to know now—I’ve always been squeamish with medical stuff. After the surgery, for example: I could deal with the pain, but I passed out when they showed me the x-rays.
“Will you get me an ice pack?” I ask.
I hate asking for help.
“Okay,” she replies, and gets up. “You want me to help you onto the bed, or something?”
“No, I like the floor better,” I tell her. “It reminds me of my place in the world.”
She sighs and mumbles “drama queen” as she leaves the room.
The ice pack and four Motrin help and by dinnertime, I can hobble around without too much pain. We haven’t eaten dinner as a family for years, so I munch on a bag of Chips Ahoy that I have hidden under the bed and watch TV from the floor.
3.
My family said that I never came home that Friday night and never called. They expected the worst by Saturday night, when I still hadn’t come home and the police showed up at the house. We did a lot of heroin that Saturday.
I woke up on Monday, each sense coming to me out of a fog—the room faded in from deep black, the smell of vomit and Lysol came in waves. Beeps and footsteps and voices all started out as a low hum before growing louder, and then each sound got more distinct. Slowly, I could feel each part of my body—a tingling in the fingers and toes, a dull ache at my temples, the itchy feeling on my stomach from the hospital gown. And then the pain hit me. It was so severe, I couldn’t even tell which body part hurt.
My heart rate must have sky-rocketed because one of the machines next to my bed started beeping frantically, and a nurse ran in.
“Angela, are you alright?” She checked the machines, checked my eyes, checked my pulse.
I felt sick. I felt freezing cold, too, shivering and goosebumpy. Every muscle in my body hurt, and my left leg felt like someone had really gone to town on it with a sledge hammer. I didn’t have time to warn the nurse before I vomited over the side of the bed.
Nurses got me sedated and cleaned up, and my mother and the doctor—Dr. Forrester, who brought me into the world—came to see me.
Mom walked in first, her whole body stiff, shoulders back, mouth set in a thin line, giant blue eyes about to pop out of her head, her golden-brown curly hair frizzing around her head looking diabolical in the harsh fluorescent light. Dr. Forrester looked tired and older than I remembered him, with a lot more grey in his thinning brown hair. He offered Mom the chair next to my bed, but she stuck her chin higher in the air by way of refusal. I wanted to ask why Dad wasn’t there, but I couldn’t find my voice.
“How are you feeling, Angela?” Dr. Forrester asked in his kind, quiet tone. He took the chair since Mom wouldn’t.
I couldn’t answer. I didn’t want to open my mouth in case I threw up again. The nausea had gotten worse.
“You’ve been in an accident,” Dr. Forrester told me. “Out on 17M. Do you remember?”
I shook my head—I couldn’t remember anything. My heart sped up—I saw something in his eyes, and I knew it was bad.
“Your leg is fractured in three places, and you dislocated your hip.” He motioned to my left leg, encased in plaster. “You also broke your kneecap and tore a ligament, but the surgery went very well. With physical therapy, you should be back to normal in about three to six months.” He looked like he wanted to say more, but he patted my hand and stood up instead. “I’ll come back in a little while to check on you again.”
And he left me alone with my mother.
Even in that state, I recognized the steely look on her face—rage. She sat in the chair and stayed silent for what felt like a long time, the muscles in her jaw twitching like crazy.
“Drugs?!” she finally spat, and I jumped. She shook her head—that slow, eyes-downward shaking of the head that only parents seem able to do. “Heroin. Of all the stupid things…” She looked up then, and looked me in the eye. “Marijuana, alcohol—those maybe I could understand, but heroin? Where do you even get heroin around here?” She paused, staring at me without blinking. “You hit another car. You’re lucky no one was seriously injured.”
The information hit me like another sledge hammer to the leg. But she’s leaving someone out, I thought, and I started shaking all over.
“Jason,” I whispered. “Where’s Jason?”
My mother fixed her cold, blue eyes on mine and said, without a shred of emotion, “He’s dead.”
She got up and left then, just like that. Left me shaking and colder than I’ve ever felt, the pain dulled, numb and icy. The cold spread through my whole body and I hugged myself to tightly my knuckles hurt and I felt like I couldn’t breathe. I wanted to scream and cry, but I felt too frozen to do anything. This was dying, I thought, this was what it felt like to die.
Only Dad visited me after that, once to bring me clothes and a toothbrush, and then again the day before they let me go home. The accident made it into all the local papers, grossly exaggerated of course—an innocent family almost killed by a pair of derelicts, drug addicts who got high and then got behind the wheel. Since the real villain, the driver—my Jason—died in the crash, the survivor took the blame.
*
I can’t sleep.
The doctors told me that withdrawal could result in insomnia, along with a nice long list of other pleasant side effects, and that those side effects could last for a long time. I thought that after eight months, some of them might have gone away. No such luck. I still get aches and pains all over. I still get random waves of nausea. I still get the chills. I still live in a perpetual mental fog. And I still can’t sleep.
I sit up and watch infomercials for cheap jewelry and the Bowflex and Sham Wow until it starts to get light outside, and then I drag myself off the floor to see if I can walk.
My knee feels stiff and swollen, but I can manage. I dig the knee brace out of my closet
and put it on without passing out, and then hobble downstairs, grab the box of Cocoa Puffs from the kitchen, and go sit outside on the deck.
I like dawn better than any other time of day, the world still pale and quiet—and now that autumn is in full force, frost covers the grass and the shingles on the roof, and mist hangs in the air beneath the trees. No cars have come out yet, and no people. No one to point or stare or blame, just the birds singing and the frosty air biting at my skin.
4.
The first day back to school in September, I expected the worst. My former classmates—now seniors, me still a junior—did not disappoint.
Most seniors went out for lunch, but the first day back they spent their lunch period re-establishing their cliques to decide who would have lunch with whom for the rest of the year. Nearly all juniors and seniors had sixth period lunch. I had tried to get my guidance counselor to switch me into fifth period with the freshman and sophomores, but she refused.
I shuffled to the very back of the cafeteria and found an empty table in the darkest corner. I went unnoticed as everyone else claimed their tables, and I almost started to relax.
Lauren Hart, captain of Harrowmill High’s sad excuse of a cheerleading team and queen bee in general (and my long-time nemesis), walked past my table heading to the garbage bins. Then she stopped and did a slow turn towards me.
God damnit.
She took the chair opposite from me. “Angela, how are you?” She asked in the fakest pleasant tone she could manage. She threw her shiny brown hair over one shoulder to disguise a wave to her friends, and five seconds later Harper, Katie, and two of their football player groupies came to sit down at my table.
“So we totally want to score something,” Harper said when they sat down. “Can you hook us up?”
“We heard you’re willing to, you know…” One of the football players made an obscene movement against his chair, “instead of money.”
I stared at them without blinking until they started to look visibly uncomfortable. When all of them except Lauren pointedly looked anywhere but at me, I said, “Do you seriously have nothing better to do?”
I can only guess what they said to a teacher, because just before last period, I got called to the office and Vice Principal Van Holst searched my locker.
The next morning, I found my locker decorated with badly-drawn hypodermic needles.
Great.
I started avoiding the cafeteria and my locker. I avoided them until everyone more or less forgot about the whore junkie who was in the accident that injured a bunch of innocent people. Mostly it works.
*
Word of my fight with Ryan Reagan has of course spread through the entire school, but no one actually talks about it. I get more stares and whispers than usual as I head to English first period, but I’m well used to it by now.
Derek still hasn’t come back to school.
I sit in the back corner of all my classes, and if the room has enough chairs I have empty desks beside me on all sides. Mr. Sweeney talks about In Cold Blood and themes and the American Dream, and I only half pay attention. This and history are the only classes I have with the seniors—the kids who used to be in my grade.
We crashed the car on an icy Saturday at the end of February, and I didn’t go back to school. I should graduate in June, go off to college, have a bright future, but instead I get to repeat junior year.
I discovered something in September, when I started school again: I have no friends. I hadn’t realized it before, but I suppose I hadn’t needed them. I spent more and more time with Jason, less and less time with people I’d been friends with since grade school until they drifted away and there was only Jason. We had only needed each other.
I try to shake him from my thoughts, block him out. Build a wall around that bleeding black hole so I forget it’s there. So I don’t feel it.
“Angela, do you have a minute?”
Mr. Sweeney catches me off guard as I start to leave his classroom in my usual living-dead stupor. I give him a blank stare for a moment before I remember that yes, I am Angela, and yes, I can communicate verbally if you’ll just give me a second.
“Sure,” I say, and wander over to his desk.
His desk looks how my room used to look—you can’t actually see the surface, just a mess of books, papers, magazines, framed photos, a framed picture of David Bowie, and a My Little Pony that someone painted and stuck pins in so it looks like Pinhead from Hellraiser.
“I know you must be struggling this year.” He gestures to his whiteboard and the scribbled notes on In Cold Blood, but I get the feeling that he means something else. “I have something for you.” He rummages through the pile of tests waiting to get graded and pulls out a small, battered paperback, which he hands to me.
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, by Ludwig Wittgenstein, says the cover.
“He was a philosopher,” Mr. Sweeney explains.
I frown, leaning heavily on my right leg. My bad knee feels sore and stiff under the brace.
“Uhh… Thanks,” I say.
“It’ll make you think,” he says. “Keep your mind occupied.”
“Oh.” I can’t think of anything better to say. My brain still struggles out of zombie mode. “Thanks.”
The bell rings for second period and Mr. Sweeney takes a book of hall passes out of the drawer where he hides his stash of peanut butter cups.
“It might be a bit heavy for a high school student,” he says, “but give it a try.”
He scribbles something illegible on the hall pass and hands it to me, and I trudge out of the room. I’m already late, so I take my time heading downstairs for chemistry.
*
I sit in the back of the room for chemistry, too, at my own lab table, though I should probably try a little harder in this class since I almost failed it last year. I sit alone in the back in U.S. History II, Spanish III, and Algebra I. Aside from Lauren Hart and her lackeys, the other students never look at me or acknowledge me. Even a lot of the teachers give me the cold shoulder.
For gym, I get to do pretty much whatever I want since I officially can never participate in gym ever again. I might have appreciated the Get Out of Gym Free card if it was under different circumstances.
Ms. Russell, the frumpy art teacher doesn’t mind that I spend three periods every day in her classroom—gym, lunch, and art. I sit on the window ledge and start reading the book Mr. Sweeney gave me. By the third page, my brain has turned to sludge.
Wittgenstein more or less wrote a long list of his philosophical facts. I get the Preface, but I read, re-read, and re-re-read the first few pages of the list and don’t get it at all.
“The world is the totality of facts, not of things.”
I underline that sentence (in pencil, since it’s not my book) when I get home. The world really is the sum of all facts rather than of all things. I erased things from my room when I came home from the hospital. All my photos, posters, movies, even clothes that reminded me of him, but he’s still there. I transformed the room into an empty white cell, but the fact of Jason remains. The fact that he’s dead—gone forever—remains. Blank walls and absence of things don’t change a thing. I write this down in my English notebook.
“Angela!”
Dad’s booming voice echoing up the stairs startles me out of the Tractatus.
“Yeah?” I shout back, heart hammering in my chest.
I feel like he only speaks to me if he’s about to tell me what I just did wrong.
“Can I see you downstairs for a minute?” He doesn’t sound angry, but he has fooled me before.
“Okay,” I reply, and take my time heading downstairs.
He retreated into his office, hidden away in the far corner of the house. When I go in, he already sits back at his desk, glasses on so he can read his computer screen.
“Sit.” He points to the brown leather couch that doesn’t match any of the other furniture in the house, so Mom banished it here.
I sit. His expression stays blank, eyes staring at the spot just above my head.
“Your mother and me have been talking,” he begins, and I struggle not to correct his grammar. “We think maybe we haven’t handled this… all of this in the best way.”
I raise an eyebrow and press my lips together to keep from shouting at him; to keep from leaping across the desk and choking him.
He struggles with something—I can tell from the frantic look in his eyes, the way his gaze won’t settle on anything for more than a second or two.
“We think,” he says, “that you should go see a therapist. You know, someone to talk to about everything. Sort out all of your emotions.”
After the dust settled in the wake of The Accident, they didn’t want me to feel. I’m pretty sure they used the phrase “Blessing in disguise” more than once. Yes, a very horrible thing happened, but I had gotten out of the worst of it and was no longer a drug addict. And that boy, that worthless junkie whose name they refused to say aloud, was dead and so he could no longer influence me. Couldn’t drag me down. Of course I shouldn’t feel upset about it; I was free, right? He wouldn’t have gone anywhere in life. He was just a junkie. I had no right to cry over him, to mourn the loss of my Jason when a whole family had suffered terribly in the accident because of it.
“Therapy,” I say, trying to keep the ice out of my voice.
“Yes, well…,” Dad stutters, eyes darting around the room like he’s searching for an escape route. “I think we were unfair to you.” He takes a breath. His shoulders relax. “We didn’t let you grieve properly. I don’t want you to end up worse than you were before the accident because we made you squash out all of your feelings.”
I get it now—this was his idea. Mom would never go for this. She doesn’t believe in feelings.
“And you think some shrink can make me all better again.” I feel furious, the anger boiling up in my gut in sudden, red-hot waves. This never occurred to them before now? Did they honestly think that putting me on indefinite house arrest would make everything all better again?