—
Over the course of the three-block walk, I think of and abandon at least five different excuses to turn around. I never really meant it seriously, I tell myself. I never had any intention of embarking on what David has named the Accident Project. For David, obviously, this is nothing more than some sort of equation, or a puzzle to be solved. Another one of his open loops to close. He can’t tell that I’m sweating, even though it’s freezing out, or that I feel dizzy with fear.
And then I see the intersection of Plum and First. This corner is on the way to the grocery store, to the ballet classes I took until third grade, to Violet’s house, to Star of Punjab, to a million other landmarks of my childhood. The playground where Kenny Kibelwitz kissed me on the lips as part of a dare when we were ten. The park where, on many Sunday mornings when I was little, my dad and I would set up a picnic blanket and have a tea party with my teddy bears while my mom slept in and caught up on her “beauty rest.” Here it is, this intersection, looking as innocuous as always. No shattered glass. No flowers to mark the spot.
My phone dings, a text message, and I assume it’s from my mother. I don’t want to think about her, because thinking about her leads me to this inescapable fact: My dad did not die peaceful or happy with his place in the world. My dad died betrayed. Minutes away from a freaking divorce filing.
Right over there, right over there, right over there.
X marks the spot with a circle and a dot.
I pull my phone out of my pocket with the hand not holding David’s. A text will buy me some time. Thinking about my mom having sex with Jack is preferable to thinking about the fact that my dad was mutilated by a navy-blue Ford Explorer. Pain, it turns out, has a hierarchy.
Not my mother after all. It’s a text from Violet instead, in all caps, three exclamation points. Weird. Annie’s the text screamer among us. The one who deploys excessive punctuation for no reason. I’M HUNGRY!!!! she’ll write. Or MY SHOES ARE KILLING ME!!!!!! AHHHHH! Violet prefers all lowercase, her texts as dainty as her clothes.
Violet: omg, kit!!! have you seen this?!?!
There’s a link to someone’s Tumblr: “The Retard’s Guide to Mapleview.” Whatever. I don’t need to read another one of my classmate’s dumb offensive blogs. Last year someone anonymously posted a “How to Get the Ladies to Sex You” guide, which was as disgusting as it sounds. I decide not to click. Whatever.
“The snow makes this more complicated,” David says, and drops my hand to reach into his backpack. He pulls out measuring tape. There’s something about the gesture—the fact that he brought measuring tape to school—that brings more tears to my eyes. I wonder what else is hiding in his bag. I picture a compass and maybe a scientific calculator. I imagine he’s fully prepared for the zombie apocalypse, just like my dad. “I don’t think it’s falling that fast, so we can just measure its density once, and take that into account.”
I have no idea what it is we’re actually doing. What are we measuring? I think about the word density and suddenly don’t remember what it means.
“The report said your dad died at six-fifty-two p.m. Do you know if he died on impact? Because if he did, that can be the time we work back from.” David’s voice is flat, dimensionless.
“I’m not sure this a good idea.” I say it out loud, that which has been repeating in my head. Not a good idea. Not a good idea. Not a good idea. And also this: Run, run. run. “Let’s not do this.”
David turns and looks me up and down. I’m trembling from head to toe.
“This is hard for you,” he says matter-of-factly. As if it is just occurring to him.
“Yes,” I say.
“It’s just a place. If you want, I can pull up our coordinates. That way it’s not even a place,” he says, and then he does it. He gives me our location based on latitudinal and longitudinal measurements. If my ears weren’t whooshing, if my stomach wasn’t pulled tight into my throat, I’d laugh. “If you don’t want to do this, we don’t have to. But I don’t like that you aren’t sleeping. We need sleep for our bodies to function efficiently.”
“He died afterward. Not in the car. At the hospital,” I answer, and match his tone. Clinical detachment. Maybe I can do this and not shatter like the Volvo’s windshield. And if I don’t break, I like to think I have a chance of getting better. Or at least closing my eyes at night and not opening them again until morning. Maybe there is a good reason we are doing this. Answers. I could use some answers.
“Let’s not work by time, then. Let’s figure out where the car had to have stopped before there would have been a collision. Would that be okay with you?”
I don’t answer. We are now at the corner, staring at the middle of the intersection. There are no cars around. If I wanted to, I could walk right into the center of the road.
There’s nothing here. Just some trash dancing in the wind.
“We’re missing a bunch of variables, but I think we can make reasonable estimations.”
I am going to throw up. Because it’s replaying right in front of me, as if I were watching it live. The screeching of tires. An explosion of blue. Everything turning black. The smell. Oh God, the smell.
“I’m sorry, I can’t,” I say, and turn around and put my hand over my mouth. I bite back the bile. No, I do not want to throw up in front of David. I will not display my digested burger on the pristine snow. Still, the trembling is getting worse, and the nausea curdles into vertigo. The world starts to spin and the ground begins to undulate, like I’ve stepped into a three-dimensional fun house mirror. I need to get out of here. Now.
“If you want I can do the math without you,” he says, but to my back, because I’m already running, slipping on the wet ground, hurling myself as fast as I can to get away.
After Kit ran away from me, I spent another fifty-five minutes outside in the snow by myself, measuring velocity and rate of acceleration and doing calculations in my head and on my phone, since I didn’t have my notebook to write them down.
Now that I’m home, I need to readjust after all that time alone, after all those words and numbers tumbled and boomeranged in my brain. After watching Kit’s departing back, and wondering why she left me there without so much as a goodbye. I know that if I were someone else, I’d get that elusive subtext that everyone else seems to come preprogrammed with and understand why she suddenly, without warning, found me so disgusting. That’s the only word I can use to describe the look on her face: disgust. Did she know I wanted to kiss her?