My mind merely turns down the volume, it doesn’t shut off. Happy thoughts should include thinking of Will, what our faces will look like to each other when we see each other for the first time since the crash, how I can lie in his bed again with the sheets pulled over our heads, how I can wrap my hands around his smooth back and let him warm me like a space heater, how our love story won’t have an end.
I will have to tell him about Ringo and about Harrison. Eventually I’ll need to ask him about the ChatterJaw thread too.
It turns out that turning the voices in my head to a lower volume helps. There’s room for happiness and it’s seeping in like the rising tide as I work. The last thing I do is build a wall of sand around my completed castle, as tall and as sturdy as I can make it, so that the water won’t sink my work into oblivion.
ChatterJaw and Ringo and Harrison and the absence of Penny and the relationship between Will’s mom and Tessa—these are all things that we can deal with later, together, which is the way that we’ve dealt with everything for the past four years.
I sit back onto my towel and pull Penny’s journal into my lap. I open it up. The sight of her handwriting hits me with a fresh wave of pain, the deep-down throbbing kind—but I’d expected it, more or less, and so I turn to the back half where I’d left off and I begin reading, like she’s talking to me one last time.
I don’t know how long I’ve been reading against the backdrop of the sea, which is becoming choppier and noisier, and the flecks of salt gathering more thickly on my neck and lips—thirty minutes? forty-five?—when I cross a line that I have to reread: I’m a mosaic made from sharp edges and broken things, I read.
The page begins to quiver between my fingers. I wrench my eyes onto the next line, and the next:
I’m a mosaic made from sharp edges and broken things
As long as no one looks too closely—not even me—none of the ugly bits show through
Those parts that want to smash love and tear holes in hearts
But I’m still made up of the broken things
Even if nobody knows
I still feel them
Ripping into my soul
Thud-thud-thud goes my heart, thud-thud-thud.
I lose count of the number of times I read through the page. There’s no attribution. Nothing but Penny. Thud-thud-thud.
Make it stop. Because I know the lines. I know the words. I know where I’ve seen them before.
What had Harrison said to me the first moment that he told me about the ChatterJaw thread? I know. He’d said he was pretty sure the two writers had gone private. That my Will had gone private. And now I know who with.
I watch Penny and Will walk away until they disappear through the hospital-wing doors. The slaps of their flip-flops stop and I’m left alone again amid the sound of heart monitors and IV drips.
Maybe it’s my own fault. After all, they’d asked if I wanted company. I could have spoken up then. But the problem is, I didn’t want them to ask. I didn’t want to be the one to tell them not to go without me. I wanted them not to be able to fathom going without me.
But of course they could. It was spring break. Their choices were (a) a water park trip we’d been planning for a month, or (b) sit in a hospital waiting room for six hours with nothing to do.
And yet I still find myself with this gnawing feeling that I wished they’d chosen to stay. I take a sip from the milk shake they brought me as a consolation prize, but it doesn’t even taste good now, which is saying a lot, since I’ve been munching on food from the hospital cafeteria for the entire week of spring break so far.
Five whole days while Penny and Will have been out enjoying the time that we should have all enjoyed together. I scuff my shoe against the white tile floor, letting myself wallow for another few moments in my great, big helping of bitter pie.
“Lake?” Mom pops her head out of one of the rooms while a nurse in pink scrubs is slipping out. “What’s taking so long?”
I slouch toward the door and slink in past her. “I don’t know why I have to be here anyway,” I mumble.
Mom goes rigid. She abruptly closes the door. She snatches my elbow and pulls me in the way she used to when I was five years old and in trouble. “Your brother is in pain, young lady,” she hisses, as if trying to prevent Matt from hearing. “This is the least you can do.”
Spittle lands on my cheek. She’s right. I’m ashamed at my attitude. But instead of erasing all the other nasty feelings that are swimming inside me, I just add shame to the internal cesspool of emotions already there.
“Sorry,” I say quietly.
Her fingers release the fleshy part of my arm and I rub at the spots dramatically, like she’s really hurt me.
She runs her hands over the front of her jeans and stands up straighter. When was the last time she went home? Two days ago? Before even then? I can’t remember.
I follow her into the room, where my dad is snoring in a chair and Matt’s lying in the same spot he’s been for the past five days. In a hospital bed.
His breathing is labored. An infection rages in his lungs. His face is red and feverish. His pupils move slowly to focus on me. “Oh,” he rasps. “It’s you.”
I shrink back a step. See, I want to scream, he doesn’t even want me here!
“Didn’t mean to break up social hour,” he says with a snarl.
“You didn’t. They just wanted to stop by to see how you were.” Lies.
“Did you tell them my back’s still broken? Did they want to help change my bedpan? Or how about my underwear?”
I hug my elbows. “No.”
“Oh, shut up, Lake. Stop acting like I’m the freaking big bad wolf and you’re scared of me. Nobody feels sorry for you, you pathetic, petty excuse for a human being.”
My mouth drops open. It’s the meanest thing he has ever said to me. His words have the exact opposite effect from what he intended, because I feel sorrier for myself than ever. I sniff in quick breaths, trying to stave off the tears that have begun to bubble up on the rims of my eyelids.
This time when Mom touches me, it’s gentle. “He’s in pain.”
“Of course you’re pandering to her.” Matt stares up at the ceiling now. His breath is coming in seething fits. It’s strange to see his body lying completely limp. A normal person would be writhing in pain. Clenching their fists. Kicking their legs. But not Matt. He has to marinate in the hurt and I guess that’s why he tries to spoon some of it onto me. “I swear. If you weren’t good for a resurrection…” he says.
And I can feel the hatred in those few words as clearly as if they were a spike shot through my back. The tears won’t stop now. I don’t understand why he hates me. I don’t understand what I did to deserve this. I tried. So many times I tried to reach out to him. He forgets: he was the one who rejected me.
All I know is that being here is making me miss out on the last spring break I have with the people that actually do care about me—Will and Penny—and so I can’t help it. I hate him right back.
I decide on a plan. Or at least the beginnings of one. I try not to feel bad that I’m actually going to need Matt’s help.