JULY 17
Dara
I haven’t climbed down the rose trellis since the accident, and I’m worried my wrist won’t hold. It got pulverized in the crash; for a month, I couldn’t even hold a fork. I have to drop the last few feet, and my ankles let me know it. Still, I’ve made it down in one piece. I guess all that PT is good for something.
No way do I want to see Nick. Not after what she said.
I’m nothing like her.
Perfect Nicki. The Good Child.
I’m nothing like her.
As if we didn’t spend practically our whole lives sneaking into each other’s rooms to sleep in the same bed, whisper about our crushes, watch moon patterns on the ceiling and try to pick out different shapes. As if we didn’t once cut our fingers and let them bleed together so we’d be bonded forever, so we’d be made not just of the same genes but of each other. As if we didn’t always swear that we’d live together even after college, the Two Musketeers, the Dynamic Duo, Light and Dark, two sides of the same cookie.
But now Perfect Nick has started to show some cracks.
The woods run up against another yard, neatly mowed, and a house staring at me through the trees. Turning left will bring me past the Duponts’ house to Parker’s, and the hidden break in the fence that Nick, Parker, and I engineered when we were kids so we’d be able to sneak back and forth more easily. I turn right instead and get spat out at the end of Old Hickory Lane, across the street from the bandstand in Upper Reaches Park. There’s a four-person band onstage, of a combined age of about one thousand, dressed in old-fashioned straw hats and candy-striped jackets, playing an unfamiliar song. For a moment, standing in the middle of the road, watching them, I feel completely lost—as if I’ve stumbled into someone else’s body, into someone else’s life.
There was one good thing about the accident—and in case you’re wondering, it wasn’t the broken kneecaps or shattered pelvis, the shattered wrist and fractured tibia and dislocated jaw and scars where my head went through the passenger window, or getting to lie around in a hospital bed for four weeks and sip milkshakes through a straw.
The good thing was: I got to cut school for two and a half months.
It’s not that I mind going to school. At least, I didn’t used to mind it. The classes suck, sure, but the rest of it—seeing friends, skipping out between classes to sneak cigarettes behind the science lab, flirting with the seniors so they’ll buy you lunch off campus—is just fine.
School is only hard when you care about doing well. And when you’re the stupid one in the family, no one expects you to do well.
But I didn’t want to see anyone. I didn’t want to watch everyone feel bad for me while I limped across the cafeteria, when I couldn’t sit down without wincing, like an old man. I didn’t want to give anyone an excuse to pity me, or pretend to pity me while feeling secretly satisfied that I’m not pretty anymore.
A car blares its horn, and I move quickly out of the road, stumbling a little on the grass, but grateful for the sense of strength returning: this is practically the first time I’ve left the house in months.
Instead of passing, the car slows, and time slows, and I feel a hard fist of dread squeeze in my chest. A beat-up white Volvo, its bumper attached to the undercarriage with thick ropes of duct tape.
Parker.
“Holy shit.”
That’s what he says when he sees me. Not Oh my God, Dara. It’s so good to see you. Not I’m so sorry. I’ve been thinking of you every day.
Not I was afraid to call, so that’s why I didn’t.
Just: Holy shit.
“Pretty much,” I say, since it’s the only response I can think of. At that moment, the band decides to stop playing. Funny how silence can be the loudest sound of all.
“I’m . . . wow.” He shifts in the car but makes no move to get out and hug me. His dark hair has grown long and hangs practically to his jaw now. He’s tan—he must be working outside, maybe mowing lawns again, like he did last summer. His eyes are still the same in-between color, not quite blue or green but something closer to gray, like the fifteen minutes just before the sun rises. And looking at him still makes me want to puke and cry and kiss him all at once. “I really didn’t expect to see you.”
“I live around the corner, in case you forgot,” I say. My voice sounds harder, angrier, than I’d meant it to, and I’m grateful when the band strikes up again.
“I thought you were gone,” he says. He keeps both hands on the steering wheel, squeezing tightly, like he does when he’s trying not to fidget. Parker always used to joke he was like a shark—if he ever stopped moving, he would die.
“Not gone,” I say. “Just not seeing anyone.”
“Yeah.” He’s watching me so intensely I have to turn away, squinting into the sun. This way, he can’t see the scars, still angry and raw-red, flattened across my cheek and temple. “I figured—I figured you didn’t want to see me. After what happened . . .”
“You figured right,” I say quickly, because otherwise I might say what I really feel, which is: not true.
He flinches and looks away, returning his attention to the road. Another car passes, and has to pull out into the oncoming traffic to avoid Parker’s car. He doesn’t seem to notice, even when the passenger, an old man, rolls down his window and yells something rude. The sun is warm and sweat moves down my neck. I remember, then, lying between Parker and Nick last summer in Upper Reaches Park on the day after school ended, while Parker read out loud all the weirdest news he could find from around the country—interspecies relationships; bizarre deaths; unexplained agricultural patterns that could only, Parker insisted, be caused by aliens—inhaling the smell of charcoal and new grass and thinking, I could stay here forever. What the hell changed?
Nick. My parents. The accident.
Everything.
I suddenly feel like crying. Instead I wrap my arms around my waist and squeeze.
“Listen.” He rakes a hand through his hair, which immediately swings back into place. “You need a ride somewhere or something?”
“No.” I don’t want to tell him that I have nowhere to go. I’m not heading anywhere except away. I can’t even go back for my car keys or I risk seeing Nick, who no doubt is finding reasons to complain about the fact that I wasn’t there to cheerlead her arrival.
He makes a face like he’s accidentally swallowed his gum. “It’s good to see you,” he says. But he doesn’t look at me. “Really good. I’ve been thinking about you . . . all the time, basically.”
“I’m doing just fine,” I say.
Good thing lying comes naturally to me.