“Penny!” I shriek. But she jerks the wrong way and the other car charges toward us like a bull.
We’re going to hit it. The thought is so obvious and sharp in my mind, it’s as if someone has said it out loud. I feel Will jolt to attention behind me.
The moment stretches. I never knew how long a single moment could be even as it occurs to me that if it were any amount of time at all this situation—this problem—could be fixed.
A horn wails. The sound of screeching tires fills the perfectly warm blue-blue sky and I know that this is going to hurt with a certainty that drills down into my still-intact bones. The space between the two pairs of headlights vanishes.
When the hoods make contact, my head slams forward. Glass splinters. Screams ring through the roar of crunching hardware. We spin to the side and I’m reminded of the teacup rides at the fair. There’s a violent lurch. On my end of the car, the wheels jump off the pavement and the Jeep flips onto its side. I throw my hands over my head.
Pain shoots through my wrist and elbow as we flip upside down. Something clamps over my chest. Hard, jagged edges rake the top of my scalp. My vision goes blurry. At last, the movement stops, but the melody of tinkling glass lingers even as the last sliver of conscious thought is wiped from my mind and I sink down into nothing.
This is not the end, I tell myself as I struggle for the surface, kicking and fighting against an invisible weight. If I were dead, there’d be no pain, I figure.
So I hold tight to the deep, throbbing ache in my arm and the soreness that encases my whole body like a straitjacket.
If I were dead, there’d be no beeping. I listen to the electronic chirp of a machine and, once convinced, I open my eyes to find that I’ve guessed right and that, yes, I’m alive.
And as my eyes adjust to the light, I spot the lump of my legs underneath a thin blue sheet. Baby blue. I always thought hospital sheets were white. Across the room there’s a sink and a biohazards waste dispenser fastened to the wall below an illustrated poster of a nurse washing her hands.
Seafoam-green curtains hang from a single window. The ceilings are speckled white tile. A clear tube snakes out of my arm. I cling to each of these details as evidence that the room I’m in is real, that I’m real. I’m pleased at how quickly I recognize where I am. I take this as a good sign. My brain works.
It takes another second to realize that this also means the accident was real.
My mind keeps going fuzzy and in and out of focus like a camera lens. I feel very light on the mattress. The only image I can conjure from the last day is of glass glittering off the asphalt.
It hurts when I swallow. It also hurts to sit.
I stare at my toes and tell them to wiggle. When they do, I breathe a sigh of relief that scrapes at my raw throat.
The whir of a wheelchair sounds like a robotic bee approaching. I think I must be too doped up to startle. My brother puffs into the contraption to guide his chair since he doesn’t have the use of his arms or legs. The whole apparatus spins to face me, and for a second my heart no longer feels like it’s being choked out and I’m a little sister again with someone there to protect me.
“Hi,” I say, weakly.
“Don’t worry,” he says, and the feeling of security vanishes so that it’s like I’m being dropped flat and hard onto a cold surface as I remember who it is the two of us have become. “You haven’t turned out like me.”
I peer back down at my toes. “I wasn’t—” I begin to protest, but Matt rolls his eyes, his favorite—okay, one of his only—expressions.
“Please. I still go for the toe wiggle myself.” He peers down his nose. “Nope, nothing. Ah, well, there’s always tomorrow, right?” His left cheek dimples with a sly, cruel smile that I should be used to by now. He’s wearing a heather-gray sweatshirt that’s baggy around the chest and arms. The blond in his hair disappeared a long time ago, as though someone had colored over it with a darker crayon, and now only his eyelashes, pale against even paler skin, are leftover reminders of a boy who spent summers on the beach and autumns out on his dinghy collecting crab traps.
“Where are Mom and Dad anyway?” I ask, staring straight ahead at the empty wall in front of me.
“They went downstairs for coffee. They’re going to piss their pants when they find out they missed you waking up.”
I attempt to scratch my nose and discover that a plaster cast covers my left arm from my knuckles to an inch above my elbow. That explains some of the throbbing.
“How long have I been out?” I ask, ignoring the piss statement. I tend to keep things formal when it comes to my brother. Conventional wisdom says we’re supposed to be extra nice to people with disabilities, which means that when it comes to Matt, I should be a saint. He’s a C-2 complete quadriplegic, practically the king of disabilities.
“Eight hours or so,” Matt says. “Gave me a real scare, Lakey Loo.” He uses the nickname he gave to me when I was a kid. I mask a wince. It sounds mocking when he says it now. “Don’t forget. Without you, there’s no resurrection for me. You’re my golden ticket, Willy Wonka.”
I let my head fall to the side and glare at him. “You’ll get your resurrection, but thanks a lot for the concern.” He knows I hate to be reminded of the deal he made with my parents. If he lived until my eighteenth birthday, they would help him die so that I could use my resurrection choice on him and he could return able-bodied thanks to the restorative work of vitalis. After he’d attempted to self-destruct by driving his wheelchair off a flight of stairs more than once, they agreed. I wasn’t asked my opinion.
He stares back, his expression unreadable. Matt has a way of going blank when he wants to, as though his face were paralyzed along with the rest of him. It’s infuriating.
I go back to looking at the wall since that at least seems preferable. It turns out this day totally sucks. If Penny’s mom was going to kill her for getting a ticket, she’s going to freak when she finds out Penny flipped the Jeep.
The Jeep. I drum the fingers of my good hand against the plastic rail of the hospital bed. RIP.
I groan at our misfortune. Our parents will look at us and say, It could have been so much worse.
I hate that. It could always be worse. We could be starving kids in Africa. That doesn’t change the fact that we made a lot of great memories in that car and now it’s going to be junkyard food. We won’t even get to give it a proper sendoff.
Tears well up in my eyes. Stupid, I tell myself. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Penny is going to be so upset. I bite down on my tongue until I can taste blood like nickels in my mouth, and the tears vanish before they can spill over onto my cheeks.