She lied. The pill wasn’t for me. It wasn’t to help me sleep. It was to help them sleep. To keep them from worrying whether I was going to slip out in the middle of the night and wreak havoc. Because I, only child of Joanne and Ron, miraculous survivor of the accident at Falcon Lake, was Not to Be Trusted.
When I heard her door securely latch across the hall, I spit the pill into my hand. Then I went to the bathroom, brushed my teeth, washed my face, and flushed the medicine down the drain. I deceived my parents. I became the source of their fear. I was not to be trusted.
It took me a long time to fall asleep. I kept hearing the familiar sounds of my house, but they felt a little off. I heard the heat click on, but then wondered if it always clicked twice before the whoosh of air came shooting out the vents. Had it always been twice? I thought it was once. And the rattling of my window. It jiggled at the bottom when the wind blew, like something was loose. I didn’t remember that happening before. And did the planets always spin counterclockwise around the sun on my mobile? Seems like I would’ve remembered that.
It felt like everything had changed. Everything was different. Like I was in some other place entirely.
I pulled my comforter up to my chin and felt around for the frayed corner, clutching it tightly. I held it close to my face and finally, finally, fell asleep.
Chapter 6
I studied all Saturday morning, trying to cram two weeks of material into my damaged brain. I was translating a passage from French to English, a small headache brewing in the back of my skull, when Decker called around noon. “Let’s go out for lunch,” he said.
“Can’t. I’m studying for French.”
“Seriously? French over food?” Decker didn’t take French (Spanish was more useful, he said). I held the receiver between my shoulder and chin and didn’t stop writing.
“Call Monday after the precalc final.”
“You can’t take a thirty-minute break?”
“I have three words for you, Decker: four point oh.”
“Yeah, well, I have three letters for you: C. P. R. Next time, find someone else to pound on your sternum.”
“Touché.” My French was useful after all.
The phone rang again an hour later, after I’d moved on from French to math. “Delaney?” The voice was familiar, but I couldn’t place it right away.
“Yeah?”
“It’s Janna. I was just wondering if you need . . . do you want to study for precalc together?”
I looked down at the half-completed problems on my paper and the dismal state of my pencil’s eraser. “Yeah, Janna, I do.”
“I’m on my way to the library. Meet me there?”
“I’m leaving now,” I said, packing up my backpack while still on the phone.
Dad dropped me off in front of the single-room library that sometimes doubled as town hall. He gave me money for the pay phone since my cell phone did not share my luck of surviving the eleven minutes submerged in ice water.
I breathed in deeply, feeling immediately at ease. I loved the smell of books. I kept breathing in until I felt too light, like I was inhaling all the knowledge from the books and there was no place for the information to go. I practically floated to the back of the room.
Janna was already hard at work. Her textbook, notebook, and calculator were spread across the surface of one of the two tables pressed against the back wall of the library. There was a guy at the other table with his back to Janna, tapping his pencil on a giant reference book. He looked about our age, but he probably wasn’t because I didn’t know him and I knew everyone our age in town.
“Over here!” she called, much too loudly for a library.
“Thanks for doing this, Janna.”
She blushed a little. “If I missed school because I was in a coma, you’d do the same for me.”
Maybe. I smiled at her anyway.
“So, I think you missed all of logarithms,” she said, pointing to her open book.
She spent the next hour tutoring me. She was a good teacher and I was a quick learner, so we made a lot of progress. When we finished, I closed my calculator and put it in my backpack.
The guy at the next table stretched his arms over his head and put his pencil down. It didn’t look like he’d made any progress in his book. He used the back of his chair to stretch side to side, facing us as he twisted. He had thick brown hair that fell into his ice-blue eyes. Which were jarring given the shade of his skin, a tanned olive.
“I know you,” he said, pointer finger aimed at my chest. He stopped stretching and slid one leg across the seat so he was straddling his chair backward. I really looked at him. He was thick where Decker was lean, muscles for hauling and not for agility. He smiled at me, and his teeth were crooked, like they were packed together too tightly, but in an endearing way. Despite what he claimed, I didn’t know him. I was sure I would’ve remembered him. I kept staring. He wasn’t Carsonlevel cute or anything, but he definitely wasn’t ugly. I kept staring, mostly because I couldn’t quite decide what he was.
He nodded to himself and continued, “Yeah, you’re Delaney Maxwell.”
Janna spun around to face him. She smiled a crooked smile, like she wanted to be annoyed at the intrusion but wasn’t really because she couldn’t stop staring at him either. “And who are you?” she asked.
He cut his eyes to her and said, “Troy, but I wasn’t talking to you.”
Janna did a double take. So did I. Nobody talked to Janna Levine that way. Nobody who knew Carson anyway. “Listen, Troy, we’re kinda in the middle of something,” she said.
Troy looked over the table. “Finals, huh? I’m studying, too.” He gestured toward the books on his table. “Night classes at the community college.”
“That’s nice, real nice. Delaney, you know this guy?”
I shook my head.
“Not yet, anyway,” he said, smiling. “I meant that I know who you are. There was a write-up in the paper last week. You’re the girl who fell in the lake, right?” I fidgeted with the zipper on my backpack. This is what Decker would call unfriendly, but really I didn’t have anything to say. I wasn’t good at small talk. “And you were in a coma.”
“And now she’s not,” Janna said.
Troy didn’t even bother cutting his eyes to her this time. “No, now you’re not. So, you’re all back to normal then? Everything okay?”
“She’s great.” Janna’s words were curt. “Perfect. Delaney, come on, let’s go work somewhere else.” Janna was protective, which was kind of sweet. But I got bossed around enough at home.
So I said, “You go. I’m good here.”
Janna packed up her stuff and walked out front, but not before slowly shaking her head at me.
“She’s fun,” Troy said. “So anyway, how about it? You’re okay? Normal and all?” He tilted his head to the side and quickly scanned me from head to toe.
I folded my arms across my chest. “I’m fine.”
“Because, if you’re not, you can talk to me about it. I’m taking courses, see?” He held up the medical reference book for me to see. “Trying to get certified.”
I looked at the blue cover and back at Troy. “You’re studying to be a nurse?” I smiled. It was funny. I was being stereotypical and judgmental and all those things I wasn’t supposed to be, but there it was. Big guy. Studying to be a nurse. Funny.
He pursed his lips. “Not exactly. More like an aide.”
“An aide to what?”
“A nurse.” He smiled again, but it seemed forced, and this time the crooked teeth looked menacing. Then the tension drained from his mouth and his smile was genuine again. “I work at the assisted living facility in town. They’re letting me work there while I get certified at night. But my point is, I know about this stuff.”
“You know about comas?”