“You can’t die,” I said, my voice broken. “Okay? You’re the only person who gets me. You have to get better.”
She closed her eyes then, and rolled her head away so she didn’t have to look at me anymore. “You should go,” she said, but I didn’t listen. I just sat back down and tried to get a handle on my emotions.
“I’m not going anywhere,” I said, still sniffling, but with defiance. “You can’t make me.”
At this, she finally laughed, a dry, cackling sound. “What are you, six? Don’t be such a baby. I’ll be fine, okay? I’ll get better.”
“You promise?”
She turned to look at me again. “Yes. No. I think so.” She sighed. “I don’t know. I’m too fucking tired to decide right now.”
“I’ll make you a deal,” I said, suddenly struck with an idea.
“What kind of deal?” she asked, her voice full of suspicion.
“If you do what your doctors tell you to—the whole group therapy thing, talking with the psychologist, trying to eat—everything, I’ll take you to prom. I’ll wear a tux, rent a limo, the whole thing.”
“Well, now. This just got interesting,” she said, raising her right eyebrow. Her breathing was labored as she spoke; the doctor had told her parents that Amber’s heart was still in distress after the heart attack she’d had the night I found her on the floor. With her extreme weight loss, the muscles of her heart, just like the rest of her body, had weakened and wasted away. She’d missed so much school since the beginning of the year due to her health—her parents had taken her to multiple doctors and a few different counselors, desperate for help, to find a way to get her to eat—that it looked like she would need to repeat her entire sophomore year, which would mean she wouldn’t graduate until she was nineteen and, because of her late September birthday, wouldn’t start college until she turned twenty. “You haven’t ever been to a dance. You said they’re only for idiot jocks and cheerleaders.”
“I know. Which should tell you just how serious I am about you doing whatever it takes to get well.” She was right; I tended to think that school dances were just for the more popular kids, not guys like me who would much rather spend a Friday night watching a documentary on the Learning Channel than in some dark, sweaty gym, pretending to have a good time. Amber, on the other hand, loved to dance. And if I had to go to my senior prom, there was no other girl I’d rather be with. I held out my hand. “Do we have a deal?”
She stared at my hand for a minute, a small flicker of light having returned to her eyes, then gave a short bob of her head. She reached her bony hand out to shake mine. “Deal. But you actually have to dance when we’re there. No standing by the wall bullshit, watching everyone else.”
I agreed, and when she began to get better physically, her mood started to follow suit. She’d entered the hospital in early January, and wasn’t released until late March, because at one point early in her treatment, despite the bargain we’d struck, she’d pulled out her feeding tube, and more than once, she was caught throwing up the nurse-supervised meal she’d just eaten. It was far from an easy process, and she only put back on twelve pounds while she was there, but when she got home, she continued to see a therapist and attend a support group for people who suffered from eating disorders. By the time prom came around, she was still thin, but she almost looked like herself again, like the Amber I knew and loved.
As I lay in my bed now, my thoughts returned to prom night itself—what Amber had said to me—and suddenly, that jittering, electric feeling I’d had in my truck on the drive home from the station took me over again. I forced myself to think instead about Whitney, who was likely upstairs in her apartment. I remembered what it felt like to be inside her, to have her young, firm flesh pressed against mine. And though my entire body burned with exhaustion, I turned off the TV, grabbed my cell phone, and tapped out a quick text, inviting her to join me. “I can’t stop thinking about you,” I wrote. “Come over.” Not a request, a demand, knowing that, however I worded it, she would comply.
“I’m not even out of bed yet,” she answered just a few seconds later.
“Perfect,” I replied. “Neither am I.” I added a winking smiling face, and then waited a moment. When she didn’t text back right away, I typed more. “Come on. You know you want to.” I couldn’t ignore the barbed, erratic pounding in my head—the tightness in my chest, making it difficult to breathe.
I needed to do something. I needed relief.
“OK,” came Whitney’s reply, and my body instantly began to relax, knowing that sex would do for the moment, quieting the torturous discomfort that I suspected would only be cured by one thing.
Amber
We are driving south on I-5 for a full twenty minutes before Tyler speaks again. “Amber, please,” he says. “Don’t do this.”
“Don’t do what?” I squeeze the butt of the gun tighter, the weight of it uncomfortable and unfamiliar in my lap. My dad taught me to shoot when I was sixteen, strictly for self-defense, but I’d never had cause to pick up a weapon before. Not until tonight. Not until it seemed like my only option.
“Whatever you’re thinking about doing,” Tyler says, throwing me a quick sidelong glance, his green eyes dropping to the weapon I’m holding.
“Just drive,” I say, staring out at the long, straight stretch of the freeway in front of us. I was alone in the house the night I snuck the key for my father’s safe from his desk. I stood in his office, feeling the cold steel of the gun in my hands, telling myself that when I used it to confront Tyler, it would help me stay strong—it would remind me that, unlike the night when he raped me, I was the one in control. I wanted to scare him. To make his body shudder in terror, the same way he’d terrified me back in July. I wanted him to freeze up, feel sick, and hope that, whatever I might do to him, it would be over quickly. It was a stupid idea, really, because there was no way he could feel what I had that night. There was no way for me to strip from him what he had taken from me.