So Totally

by Gwen Hayes

  Cue tears. Both girls.

  “Please don’t be mad. I’m so sorry. It will never happen again. I swear to God.” Heather, bless her melodramatic heart, got on her knees, pleading for forgiveness.

  Sissy just shook her head. “I’ll never forgive you for this, Heather. You’re pathetic.” She turned heel and stalked through the sand toward the parking area.

  I immediately joined my sobbing mother. She cried in my arms and I did my best to comfort her. “There, there. We need to get you cleaned up and into bed. We’ll fix it all tomorrow, you’ll see.”

  Joy added, “We should get some ice on that cheek. Who knew Sarah Abrams packed such a whollop?”

  “Who is Sarah Abrams?” I’ll never forget that last second of peaceful unawareness. It was fleeting, though, as my brain processed the repercussions. “Sissy’s real name is Sarah?” Seconds stood still while my blood iced over in my veins and the roots of my hair pricked my scalp like pins.

  I extracted myself from Heather, pushing myself out of her arms. “Nate, we have to stop her.”

  “Stop who? Why? Carrington, wait!” he called out to me, but I was already tearing through the sand. My mother’s voice, her grown-up voice, chanted in my head… If only, if only, if only…

  Sissy was already so far away, almost to her car. I’d never make it in time, especially running in the sand in those goddamned jelly shoes.

  If only Sarah hadn’t gotten into her car that night… How could I have spent all these weeks here and not realized she couldn’t have made up that faraway look in her eye whenever she remembered her best friend’s death? Why didn’t I try to figure out who she was sooner? What if I couldn’t stop her?

  Nate caught up to me and tried to grab my arm, but I shrugged him off. “We have to stop Sarah from getting in that car.”

  No matter how hard I ran, I knew it was pointless. Jake leaned against her car, but the driver’s side door was open. They were arguing, hopefully buying me time.

  She shoved him away, got in, slamming the door, and peeled out in reverse. I kept running until I reached the road, her car in the distance. I stood, hoping and praying, willing time to give me another chance. As Heather, Joy, and Nate joined me on the side of the two lane-highway, time finally slowed down. So I could watch in slow-motion as Sarah’s car missed a curve in the road ahead and collided with a tree.

  I DON’T have anything but the fuzziest recollection of the next few hours. Nate and Joy stopped Heather and me from running to Sissy’s car. They bundled us up and took us back to Nate’s, where they sobered Heather with strong coffee and time. At some point we must have gone home, but I don’t remember how. I woke up on and off through the next day, momentarily pleased that I could smell Nate because I wore his shirt…until I remembered why.

  Grandma checked on us periodically. There was a lot of tsking and there-thereing.

  I didn’t want to wake up. My blissfully dreamless sleep was the only solace I could find. It wasn’t until Sunday evening that I made myself shake off the unconsciousness like a too-warm blanket. Heather needed me.

  Sarah needed you too, I reminded myself. The guilt bunched up in my gut. I’d just have to pay better attention from now on. No more repeats of bad history, no more regretted non-action. I’d never forgive myself for letting Sarah die when I could have stopped it if I weren’t so self-obsessed. Even though I didn’t know Sissy was really Sarah, I should have remembered to be on the lookout. I could have saved somebody’s life. And saved my mom a lot of heartache.

  “Are you awake?” Heather asked.

  “Yeah.”

  In a small voice, one I didn’t recognize, she asked, “Do you hate me?”

  “Of course not. Why would I?” I didn’t tell her it should hate me instead. I could have—should have—saved Sissy.

  “It’s my fault she’s dead,” she whispered.

  “No! It’s not your fault.” The guilt belonged to me.

  “Of course it is. I killed her. If I hadn’t…”

  “You couldn’t know. Heather, you made a mistake. You had too much to drink, but you didn’t make her get in that car.”

  “She died hating me, Carrington. Her best friend. I betrayed her, and she died because of it.”

  I couldn’t get her to talk after that. Not for another whole day.

  I found Grandma in the kitchen making cookies (she still does that in times of crisis).

  “I’m glad you’re here, Carrington. You’ve been a good friend to Heather. She loves you, we all do. She’ll need a sensible girl like you to get her through the next few weeks.”

  I nodded, pleased by the affection in her voice. Her gaze remained warm, and with no warning, I dissolved into tears. She had me in her arms before I knew she was across the room. It felt so good to be comforted. I cried for Sissy, who died; for Heather, whose guilt was eating her up; and for myself.

  Because I was scared, and because my guilt was eating me up too. And because I was tired of being strong, forever on my toes, and responsible for keeping secrets and lies. I still needed my family and adults who knew more than I did, even when I acted like they didn’t.

  When there were no more tears, my grandma poured me milk and served me cookies. Never underestimate the power of the chocolate chip.

  Nobody had the heart to make Heather face Monday, so Nate picked me up for school, which we skipped.

  Instead, we went to the Falls. The sunny late-spring day felt wrong. Shouldn’t it have been cloudy and gray? Shouldn’t it be raining inconsolable tears from the sky?

  “Thanks for taking care of, well, everything the other night,” I told him when we had settled on our rock.

  “You look like shit,” was his answer.

  “Thanks a lot.”

  He hugged me into his chest. “Did you sleep at all last night?”

  “No.”

  “I heard my grandparents talking about sending Heather away for a while, to my great-uncle’s farm in Eastern Washington. It will probably be good for her, but I don’t know what I’ll do if she goes.”

  “We’ll figure something out,” he answered.

  Life loomed impossibly large over me all of the sudden. A lot of things I wasn’t equipped to handle on my own were popping out with a ceaseless energy that scared me.

  I’d always prided myself on my independent nature. I tried to remind myself that in a year and a half, I would have been old enough to strike out on my own anyway. But dammit, I wanted that year and a half now. I wanted to be a kid again. Arguing with my mother about getting a license was a hell of a lot better than arguing with her about whether or not she killed her best friend.

  “Nate, do you believe in fate?”

  “Yes.” His grip tightened.

  “Do you think that means that no matter what we do, we are destined to a certain fate?”

  “No.” He spoke slowly, carefully. “I think life is made up of a combination of fate, choice, and maybe chance. But I don’t think we get to know which is which.”

  “I feel like life handed me this great ‘do-over’ card and I still screwed it up.”

  “I don’t think you should take on responsibility for situations you had no part in. If she died the same way twenty-five years before you were born, who’s to say it wasn’t her destiny?”

  We talked a while longer, and then Nate hit me with a doozy.

  “What if I drew you back?”

  I wriggled out of his arms. “What?”

  “We’ve looked at so many reasons and ways for you to have gotten here. Wormholes, trajectories, that maybe we are all a part of your crazy dream after too much Mexican food. The only avenue we haven’t really explored is the one where I drew you into this timeline. Maybe all this is me and not you.”

  “So you want to send me back?” Where was that shrewy hag voice coming from? Oh yeah, me.

  “No, I don’t want to. But maybe I’m supposed to.”

  “Really? And where did this sudden desire to get rid of me co
me from?”

  “Are you going to calm down?”

  “No.”

  “Fine. It was just an idea.”

  We didn’t speak for seven years.

  Okay, more like two minutes, but it felt like a lot longer. I had paced my way to the other side of the pool and sat on the edge staring at the water. I wondered if I stared long enough a water nymph or something would flit across my vision. Because those are the kinds of things you think about when visiting enchanted falls and you don’t want to think about the fact that your boyfriend might have the power to send you back and forth through time. I really hoped he didn’t have that kind of power. The last thing I needed was for him to draw me in a cave with Fred Flintstone someday because he was mad or something.

  Because frankly, we all know I can piss him off pretty easily.

  He sat down next to me. “What are you thinking about?”

  “The Flintstones,” I answered.

  “Okay, that was random.” He brushed his hand along my cheek. “Carrington, I wasn’t lying the other morning. I do love you. And it’s probably too soon to feel that, but knowing what we know about how uncertain life is, I don’t think it’s strange that we grabbed on to love so quickly.”

  “And here it comes. ‘But…’”

  “But what if it is my fault? What if you aren’t even supposed to be here?”

  “What if you are taking responsibility for a situation you had no part in?” I used his own words against him. Take that.

  “I think we both know I had a part in it. If we don’t explore this now, it will hang over our heads for the rest of our lives.” He paused and glanced at the messenger bag on the rock. “I brought my sketch pad.”

  The bottom of my stomach dropped like I was on an elevator. I had deluded myself into thinking I had this great support group around me, but I really was alone, wasn’t I? My mother had retreated so far into Lalaville that I couldn’t burden her with my problems; my grandparents needed all their resources to care for her, not some nice girl she brought home like a stray dog; and now my boyfriend brought along a sketch pad to draw me out of his life on a date that was supposed to comfort me when I needed him most. Adrift at sea, and every life preserver had disappeared.

  “Here I thought you’d brought a picnic.” I willed my heart to put up a shield or it would never survive. Life was too precarious to care this much. “So what happens next? Do you want me to model for you so you can get every detail just right? How should I pose?”

  “Carrington, I’m doing this for you.”

  “For me? Really.”

  “You’re beating yourself up about things that are out of your hands. You didn’t ask to travel through time; you shouldn’t be responsible for saving people just because you know their future. It’s not fair.”

  Tears clogged my throat. “Do you think if I go back, everything is just going to be magically fine?”

  “You won’t have to take care of your mom anymore.”

  “Shows what you know. My mom is a mess in any decade, it turns out.”

  “It might not work. But then we’ll know.”

  I pulled further away from him without physically moving. I couldn’t afford to look to anyone else for my comfort anymore. Whatever life held for me was surely full of more surprises than most people have to deal with. It was best if I started hardening up now.

  “Fine. But I’m not going to watch you do this.” I got up, brushing my pants off. “I’ll be in the car.” And then I added, “Maybe.”

  He set his jaw, staring into the distance, pulling away from me without physically moving when he realized I didn’t intend to say a long, sorrowful goodbye.

  I choked back the useless tears. “If this works, never draw me again.”

  He closed his eyes and nodded.

  I sat in his rusty Pinto for an hour. Keep in mind that time travels differently for me than most people, but still, it was a really long hour.

  I didn’t think to ask him where or how he intended to draw me, so I had no idea what to expect. Would I pass out again? Where would I wake up? Back in the bathroom?

  He appeared at the trailhead, a little wild-eyed and slightly deranged. My heart, the one I’d been imagining into the size of a raisin, swelled rebelliously in my chest at the first glance of him. In turn, when he saw me in the passenger seat, he relaxed a little, but by the time he reached the car I noticed that his eyes were swollen and pink.

  Sliding into his seat, he laid his head on the steering wheel and gulped in large breaths of air. “That was the hardest thing I have ever had to do.” His voice croaked and I realized he’d been crying. “Do you want to see it?”

  “No.”

  While we were both relieved that I hadn’t disappeared into a wormhole, it went unspoken that we didn’t understand the logistics. Maybe it took an hour or something.

  We may have left the woods, but we weren’t out of them yet.

  THE memorial service was Wednesday.

  Serendipity Falls, the whole of the town, reeled at the senseless death of one of its youngest inhabitants. (Though they tended to ignore the unexplainable deaths—just sayin’.) So Sarah’s service took place in the high school gym. Sarah wouldn’t actually attend the service. Her body would remain at the funeral home until the burial later that day.

  Heather managed to emerge from her catatonic condition Monday evening, but I worried about her attending the service. She seemed fragile, far too fragile to face the entire town mourning her best friend.

  Everyone would be there, including Jake. The entire school knew about the illicit kiss between Heather and Jake, and they knew how the five-second mistake was the catalyst that caused Sarah to drive her car like a bat out of hell away from Heather and into a tree.

  What they didn’t know was how it ripped the seam of my mother’s heart open. How she internalized the accident so much that even twenty-plus years later, it still factored into her nightmares and the way she raised her daughter. That instead of staying away from binge drinking, she instead would choose to drown the edges of her emotion in wine. That guilt would steer her toward a lifetime of never feeling worthy. That whenever she would try to improve herself, she would sabotage her progress as penance.

  I tried to keep her away from that service. But in her mind, she deserved the whispers, the furtive glances. The ugly rumors that continued to spin out of control.

  Nate stoically stood by me, though I built a wall between us for my own self-preservation. I needed to get Heather through the next few weeks and then I steeled myself to leave. School would be out soon, so I figured I could shoot for a GED over the summer and disappear. Even though his sketch hadn’t sent me back, I realized how precariously at time’s whim I still was.

  I knew Nate was hurting and that hurt me more than I can say, but I orchestrated enough distractions to keep us from spending any time alone. I wintered my heart best I could, but I cried silent tears onto my pillow every night.

  During the memorial, though, I let him hold my hand and I memorized the way his fingers felt tangled with mine. I imprinted the scent of his Irish Spring soap into my head, the way his presence numbed my pain like Mom’s wine numbed hers. I vowed, while listening to the pastor try to explain why God wanted Sarah more than we did, to never fall in love again.

  The squeezing in my chest echoed the reasons why.

  I didn’t realize that it was over until Heather shook my shoulder. “You coming home with us?” she asked.

  Nate answered for me. “I’ll bring her home.”

  Everyone filtered out of the gym, all the black clothes making them look like shadows. Which was how we all felt, I think. Shadows of who we were last week. Mothers, fathers, kids, plumbers, policemen—nobody felt whole that day. Shadows of who we were and who we might have been if we had never been touched by such a senseless sadness.

  Nate and I stayed on the bleachers. Still holding hands, still separated by the wall I’d erected.

  He broke t
he silence. “I wish I’d never drawn that picture at the Falls. I wouldn’t have done it if I’d have known you were planning on leaving me while you still sat next to me.”

  “What do you want me to say, Nate? We have to get used to the idea of goodbye. It’s not like that will get easier via denial.”

  “What happened to Carpe dieming?”

  “Carpe diem is dumb.”

  “It must be nice to be able to turn off your feelings so easily.”

  I looked down at our hands, the ones we were still holding on to for dear life. “This isn’t easy. Nothing is easy. My life is the Big Uneasy.” Once I started talking, I couldn’t stop. “I’m not ready to be on my own, but I don’t have a choice. Because I am on my own. I need my family—but they don’t even know who I am. But because I need to be near them so much, I have most likely ruined all chances that I’ll ever be born.” The gym, sweltering a few minutes ago from all the bodies packed in, now felt like a meat locker. “I totally don’t want to die on my twenty-fifth birthday just because I can’t be born. But if I do go home, I’ll have to leave you. And I don’t want to leave you, but I have to. I don’t want to love you, but I do. And I can’t stop it and I’m so tired of trying to be brave. I’m not brave. Not at all.”

  “Did you breathe even once during that entire speech?” He watched my face for the smile he knew I couldn’t deny him. “I think you’re brave.” He squeezed my hands. “Mostly I think that carpe diem isn’t dumb. I want to live for today, not tomorrow. Tomorrow is what’s dumb. I’m not really interested in a future that doesn’t include you.”

  “You’re ripping my heart into pieces.”

  “Good thing I excel at puzzles. Let’s get out of here,” he offered.

  I nodded. I guess I could just wait and suffer later, right? No reason to spend whatever time we had left trying to sever the bonds—it’s not like it made it hurt less.

  On our way out, I caught sight of my reflection in the glass door. I had makeup all over my face. “Pit stop.”

  I veered into the ladies’ room for a quick splash of water.