“Brad?”
I certainly can’t talk to Celine. She looks so pretty fresh out of the shower with no makeup on, those fine folds in her eyelids like silk, the texture of her skin—
Bradley Thomas Graeme, I am begging you to get a grip right now.
I start to rush down the path, which is hardly my finest moment, but one thing I’m rarely accused of is maturity. Celine must round the corner fast enough to see me, though, because she calls my name again, and this time it sounds so…ragged, like I just ripped part of her open, like I’m hurting her exactly the way she just hurt me.
And it turns out I can’t ignore her after all.
I spin around. Fast. Too fast. Frost slides under my heel, chips of stone spray out in an ominous arc, and then the world lurches to the left. I see an angled slice of Celine’s wide eyes before the air is sucked out of my stomach and gravity wins. My right side cracks hard against frozen ground, then bounces somehow and keeps on going.
Yep. I fall right down the goddamn hill.
Somewhere in the back of my mind, my OCD whispers, Told you so.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
BRAD
You know those artsy war films where they let dirt splatter across the camera and roll around a lot, so the shots make you feel dizzy? Turns out falling down a hill is a lot like that, but faster and way more painful. I land at the very bottom, kind of like a ragdoll in that my body flops around with no input from me, but also not like a rag doll at all because I have bones and they are NOT HAPPY.
“Brad!” Celine sounds very upset, so I give myself a solid two seconds to splinter into a thousand pieces of physical agony, then try lifting my head. Lucky me, it works. It also triggers a splitting headache that turns my vision white, but I’m not going to think about that because the moment I do—
Oh my God. We’re going to die. We’ve gone blind. We’re already dead. Is everything still working? ARE WE GHOSTS?
Ah. Right on cue.
A few blinks, and I can see again, even if it’s painful. Oh, crap, where are my glasses? They were so cute. And so expensive. Mum’s gonna kill me.
Shit. I fell down a hill. Mum’s gonna kill me.
Wait. Focus. What were we doing again? Oh yes. I look up very, very slowly, and squint at the blurry shape of Celine, who is carefully edging her way down the same treacherous hill that attempted to take my life. “STOP,” I tell her, but something’s clearly wrong with me because my voice is faint and raspy and my body hurts like someone stabbed me in the ribs. I feel sick. This is the worst pain I’ve ever felt. I make a mental note of the sensation in case I need to use it in a book; my hero is definitely the type to get stabbed every so often.
Meanwhile, Celine shouts “NO,” back at me and continues to court death like an idiot. Now I have to observe every single step she takes or else she might fall and die while I’m not looking. I hope she’s happy.
I remember with a lurch that I’m not happy because she doesn’t want what I want, and now I hurt on the inside and on the outside. What a thrilling adventure life is, and by “thrilling adventure,” I mean it’s shit.
“Brad?” This time it’s not Celine who calls my name, but someone who sounds alarmingly like Holly, if Holly was less than utterly monotonous for once. I can’t tell for sure who it is because they’re on my right side, and Celine is on my left, and I can’t look away from Celine. She could fall if I’m not looking. So I will look.
“Brad, can you hear me?” not-Holly demands.
I mumble, “Yeah?”
“Can you turn your head?”
“Yeah.”
There’s a pause. “Well, do it, then,” probably-Holly says. Her voice is more familiar when she’s annoyed.
“No,” I say. “I’m busy.”
More footsteps, and I sense another body beside me. “What happened?” Rebecca asks.
“He fell!” Celine calls.
“Can he move his head? Brad, can you move your head for me?”
“In a minute.”
“Can you sit up?”
Well, duh. Except when I do, it’s less sitting and more dragging. My body suddenly weighs a ton compared to my arms, which feel limp and noodley. My lungs hurt. Or…something hurts? I can’t tell what hurts, maybe everything. Am I’m dying? What if I’ve cracked my ribs and stabbed myself in the lung and I’m literally drowning in my own blood right now and after I die my parents are gonna receive my uni acceptance letters in the summer and forever remember me as a sneaky liar—
Whatever I’ve done to myself, the pain is an excellent mindfulness tool, because I notice the too-rapid pace of my breathing by how much it hurts. I must not fear, I remind myself. Fear is the little death that…that brings…I can’t remember the rest. My head is too busy spinning.
“Brad,” Celine says, her voice shaking. She’s finally done clambering down that cliff. She’s next to me.
“Hey,” I say, because talking seems like an excellent distraction from my brain’s current attempts to eat itself. “Are you sure you want to break up? I really don’t think we should.”
“Oh, Brad.” Crap. She’s crying.
Someone punches me in the ribs with a brick fist. “Ow,” I snap. My side burns. And aches. And burns.
“Call an ambulance,” Zion says.
“What? No.” Now I turn my head. Like I thought, Holly and Rebecca are there, with Zion just arriving (yet already making terrible suggestions?) and a load of campers milling behind them at a distance. I can see Raj raking his hands through his hair way too hard. He’s lucky he has so much of it, or he’d be at risk of going bald. Sometimes I worry about going bald, but Dad still has hair so I’m probably safe. Of course, his hairline is slightly questionable, not that anyone notices since he keeps it so short. Maybe that’s what I’ll do. But I think Celine likes my hair long. I turn to her. “Do you like my hair?”
She bites her lip as she answers. “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m—”
“Hey,” I say, raising a hand to her mouth. “You’ll hurt yourself.”
“Ambulance service, please,” Zion says, reminding me that he’s doing something silly.
He is unusually grim-faced as he talks into the phone but that’s okay because I’m going to stop him. “No. Noooo. Have to finish the expedition.” I need the scholarship. If I share a bathroom with a Mason-alike, I’ll probably end up killing him. But for some reason I can’t figure out how to explain all that, so instead I choke out, “I’m…going to be a writer.”
“Brad,” Holly says, “shut up.”
The ambulance arrives I-don’t-know-how-long later. At this point I’m feeling much better (physically) and this is all beyond embarrassing. A nice paramedic prods me in various places before declaring me Still Alive. Celine wrings her hands over me like a war widow and it’s starting to piss me off because every so often my brain tries to say, See, she cares about you! but then I remember she cares about me up to a point. That, while I thought we were closer than ever, she was…done with me? I don’t even know, but it hurts worse than the ache in my ribs.
Then someone helps me hobble over to the ambulance and it turns out, nope, I was wrong—everything definitely still hurts.
“I should go with him,” Celine’s saying, not like she’s asking but like it’s common sense, really, so Holly and Rebecca better step aside before she makes them.
Except for once, her never-ending confidence doesn’t work, because Zion says, “Only one person can go in the ambulance with him—”
“Yes,” Celine grits out. “Me.”
“And it’s going to be me,” Zion says, “because I’m the responsible adult here.”
Celine laughs in his face. “Listen. I’m going with him one way or another. I don’t know what else to tell you.”
And I don’t know what she’s playing at, but at this rate she’s going to lose all her BEP matrix points and—
Wait.
“Can you manage, mate?” the paramedic asks as she helps me into the ambulance.
I don’t answer. I’m too busy thinking—Celine wants to leave? With me? Right now? She must have forgotten. “Celine,” I call, loud enough to hurt my own head. I can’t see her; she’s behind me and I’m not looking around because moving my eyes is not a lot of fun right now, but there’s a pause in her argument with our supervisors. “Don’t come with me,” I say. She can’t quit now. She’s almost halfway through this expedition. She has to get the scholarship. If I can’t get it, she has to. I think I tell her that. “Celine,” I repeat when she doesn’t respond, “don’t—”
“Okay,” she says, her voice rough. “Fine. Okay.”
* * *