“Guys, I think we should—”
“No,” I cut Brooke off. “I think you should tell me exactly what you think of me. Right now. To my face. Anything you can say to Lilly you can say to me.”
Kinda what I had in mind but need you down here for that . . .
Isaac’s text lights up in my lap, in response to my middle finger pic.
“Tell her, Brooke,” Lilly says.
“Sasha . . .” Brooke’s voice is unsure, watery, something I’ve never heard from her. “It’s just that . . .”
“Say it,” Lilly pushes. “Everyone thinks it anyway.”
Brooke straightens and looks right at me, regal as hell even with a smear of pizza grease across her chest and a pimple in the middle of her forehead.
“You’re a bitch,” she says, just as my phone vibrates, tumbling from my lap.
Gotta go
I hear the low purr of a motorcycle as he fires up the engine, the noise sending my heart into a patter to match, black spots careening across everything I see as I push back from my desk, chair rolling across my phone and crunching the screen.
“A total bitch,” Lilly agrees, her face briefly visible between flashes of black as I run to the window, my heart leading the way. It’s pushing, beating frantically in a voiceless scream to tell him to come back, to stay, to lay with me in the moonlight and mold me into what I want to be.
The fastest way between two points is a straight line. Shanna knows this because I know this, and her heart feeds my brain, blood pulsing up and coming back down, knowledge and need combining to create the perfect storm as our body hits the window.
My head hits first, skull shattering the glass and making way for hands that search for purchase, feet kicking as if the air may suddenly coalesce. It doesn’t, and I fall, branches tearing at my limbs, blood and blackness in my vision and two girls’ voices from above calling . . .
Sasha?
Sasha?
Sasha?
I hit the ground and all the air is knocked out of me, a perpetual exhale that won’t let me pull anything back in, my lungs flattened by the impact. I try but get only a hissing sound and the coppery taste of blood as I suck in streams of warmth running down both sides of my face. I try again to breathe, and this time it’s a gurgle as blood surges up from inside as well, rising to meet what I’m swallowing.
I’ve managed a third breath when Mom and Dad come running, the side door slamming behind them. Mom’s hands are on me, touching, pulling, pushing, grabbing, but they come back slick with blood so dark it’s as black as the sky, fragments of glass sparkling with their own constellations on her palms.
“Don’t touch her,” Dad is yelling. “They said don’t try to move her.”
He’s got one hand on his cell and the other on Mom’s shoulder, but it’s too late. She’s already done everything she can think of: propped my head, wiped my face, told me it’s going to be okay. All the things that got me through fevers and colds, chicken pox and strep throat. But I didn’t have a tree branch stuck in my side then, or a flap of my scalp hanging to one side.
I move my hands, for what I don’t know. I don’t have the strength to raise my arms, so I dig into the ground, making ten tiny holes on either side of my body as I try to find something to root myself to. Mom is hurting more than helping, Dad keeps saying our address over and over, even though surely emergency services has got it by now, and still I can hear my friends through what’s left of my window, vaguely calling for me.
What I don’t hear is Isaac coming back.
I clench my teeth as Mom reaches for my face, trying to find some way to put my head back together. Maybe something she picked up in one of her crafting classes will finally be useful.
“Don’t touch her,” Dad says again, leaning over us both. “You’ll make it worse.”
“Jesus Christ, Mark,” Mom says. “How? Look at her!”
“They’ll be here,” Dad says, repeating it as if it will make the ambulance come faster. “They’ll be here. They’re on their way.”
“They’re on the way.” Mom puts her face right down to mine and says it a third time, in case I hadn’t picked up on that fact.
The sirens can be heard from miles away. Dad leaves Mom and me under the tree to wave them down, just in case GPS fails them, I suppose. Mom puts her cheek next to mine, coating her own in blood and accidentally inhaling some of my hair, which hurts like hell when she finally pulls back and part of my scalp follows.
“Sasha,” she whispers. “What have you done?”
My fingers dig deeper into the dirt, the cold solidness of it giving me more comfort than she can. I’ve done nothing, and I know it. It was Shanna who made this leap, her heart leading the way though our body shared the fall. Spasmodic light fills the yard, the branches of the tree we lie under dancing across the side of the house.
“Ma’am, we need you to move aside,” a woman says, replacing my panicking mother with something I can relate to. She’s all calculation, her eyes skimming over me in a moment, decisions being made immediately.
I like her.
Her partner hovers on the other side of me, his gloved fingers barely touching me as a cool assessment is made. They have their own language in glances and unspoken words, but the ones they do speak I must refute so that they will understand. Blood pressure. Heart rate.
“It’s not mine,” I say. These are my first words after falling, and they are tinged with copper. Still, the truth tastes good.
“Yes, it’s going to be fine,” the female medic says.
“No.” I let go of a fistful of earth, grimy blood-streaked hand capturing her wrist so that she is forced to hear me. “My heart is not mine.”
“Whoever’s it is, it needs blood,” she says matter-of-factly. “You don’t have much left.”
The pulsing light fades, the shadow branches taking over the dance being performed on the side of the house as black explodes across my vision. Dad is swearing, Mom is crying, but I . . .
. . . I feel just fine.
Because I didn’t do anything wrong.
seventeen
The music my body makes is not appealing.
I’m in the back of the ambulance listening to a concert of beeps and buzzes, all of them discordant, my body the only blamable orchestra. I have so many extra things inside of me: a needle in my arm, tubes in my nose, a tree branch sticking from my side. I felt my sister curling up as the medics worked, retreating into the fetal position with each foreign object that is introduced.
I’m only able to stare straight above me because of the brace they put around my neck, the sterile ceiling of the ambulance the only thing I can see except for the medics’ chests when they reach across me in response to some new wave of off-key noise. Their lanyards hang from their necks, one of them resting on my nose for a maddening instant, creating an itch I can’t scratch.
“This is not how I sound,” I tell the female, whose ID says her last name is JONES in all caps, an assertion of herself.