—
Instead of sleeping, I draw diagrams, calculate axes and velocity, research car models and their various braking systems. My scientific calculator goes warm from overuse. On the Internet, I find experts on car collisions and delve deep into forensic message boards. Learn about head injuries, broken chest cavities, punctured hearts. I pull up the pictures I took of the accident site and blow up on my thirty-inch monitor the one Kit sent me of her dad’s car. A Volvo smooshed up like an accordion on the right side. I zoom in with my new camera software. Examine the blood on the passenger-side dashboard. Stencil the splatter pattern. I read the newspaper accounts of the crash, which has a photo of the other car, a navy-blue Ford Explorer with a shattered windshield, half-folded in on itself. A car reimagined as a paper airplane. In the background, there’s a Mini pulled over to the side that has minimal damage: just two broken headlamps, a big dent in its hood. The article doesn’t mention its involvement, but based on my own analysis, I assume it was behind the Volvo. Another car changes things. Adds a layer of complexity. I wish Kit had mentioned it before.
I line my three pictures up next to each other, as if they form a comic strip, though this is not at all funny.
No matter how many times I check my work—and I do, over and over again, maybe as many times as I have relived kissing Kit—the math does not make sense. By my calculations, the only calculations, Kit’s dad shouldn’t be dead.
—
“What’s wrong?” Miney asks when she comes into my room on Saturday morning and finds me at my desk in the same clothes as last night. I’m flapping. “Didn’t go well last night? I so thought that leather jacket would seal the deal.”
“What deal?” I ask. My head feels heavy. It is nine a.m. and I haven’t slept at all. I rub my face, attempt to wipe away the fatigue, which is a wasteful expenditure of energy at just the time I should be conserving. Fatigue is not something that can be wiped away like a smudge. I am not thinking clearly. “The party was great. Perfect, actually. Well, not the party part—parties are horrible, I don’t know why people go to them—but the rest of it, the Kit of it was great. Amazing.”
“Really? Then why do you look like someone ran over your dog?”
“We don’t have a dog.”
“Focus, Little D.”
“What?”
“Tell me what’s wrong.” Miney’s wearing pajamas, though it’s a clean pair I don’t recognize. Her eyes are less bloodshot. Whatever mysterious illness she was afflicted with seems to have resolved itself. “You do not look like someone who has had an ‘amazing’ night. Did you kiss her?”
“Yup. Well, actually she kissed me.”
“She kissed you?”
“Yup.”
“And?”
“And I’m in love.”
“That’s great. Though maybe you should slow down a bit. It’s a little early to be throwing the L-word around.” She plops down backward on my rotating chair, like she is a football coach in a movie about to deliver one of those huddle up speeches.
“It doesn’t matter. None of it matters,” I say, and shiver because I already feel the loss before it’s even happened. I will never kiss Kit again. The whole thing is over no more than twelve hours after it began. Weirdly, this realization doesn’t just reset me back to my pre-Kit life, Me 1.0, when kissing her had seemed as impossible as crossing the space-time continuum. When I was resigned to a lifetime of solitude. Now it is so much worse. I can’t imagine going back to that empty lunch table on Monday morning. Being again that guy everyone used to call shithead. The longing for Kit feels physical. Like my heart is blinking.
Alfred Lord Tennyson was an idiot. He was wrong. It is not better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all. If I had never loved at all, I wouldn’t be here flapping. I’d be downstairs, after a restful night’s sleep, reading the DSM and eating Saturday morning pancakes. I wouldn’t know what it’s like for everyone else. What it means to not be alone. Just how far and how long I’ve lived away from planet Normal.
“The Accident Project. I can’t figure it out,” I say.
“Please speak English,” Miney says.
“Kit asked me to do one thing, to help her figure out how her dad died—well, not how, exactly, but the when, the moment of braking, so the larger ‘how,’ I guess, and the math doesn’t work. The math always works. It’s the only thing I know how to do, and I can’t do it.”
“Little D, calm down.” She reaches to pat my back, but I jerk away from her hand. I don’t want to be touched. My body is flaring. “You have so much more to offer than math. That’s not why Kit kissed you. You realize that, right?”
“He’s not supposed to be dead. Dentist is not supposed to be dead.”
“Who’s Dentist? Kit’s dad? Of course he shouldn’t be dead. It’s a tragedy—”
“No, you don’t understand. The math doesn’t work.”
“So?”
“It’s not a tragedy. It’s a lie.”
My first thought when I wake up on Saturday morning is I want to die. Because if I die, then the nausea will stop, the room will still, and I won’t have to face the shitshow that has become my life. In bed I stare at the white ceiling and think about my mother’s confession. She got drunk and made a mistake. Alcohol clouds your judgment, she said. Makes you listen to the wrong voice in your head.
Just because you are forty-five doesn’t mean you don’t sometimes feel and act sixteen, she claimed, which is probably the most depressing thing I’ve ever heard in my life, because you want to know my big secret plan right now? The only freaking thing I have in my back pocket? The idea that eventually I’ll age out of this horrible life stage and never, ever look back.
I wonder what David is thinking about this morning. Based on his amazing kissing skills, it’s entirely possible he has a secret life. After last night, I realize I know nothing about the real him. I realize how silly—how naive—it is to assume you know anyone at all. Look at my mother and me. We are made of smoke and mirrors.
I check my phone and find a bunch of texts.
Mom: You okay? Left a glass of water and two Advil by your bed. You looked rough last night.
Under other, more normal circumstances, I would expect a lecture, though somehow I doubt my mom has the nerve to criticize today. I am sixteen acting sixteen. She’s in no position to judge.
But I don’t remember seeing my mom last night, and that part, the not remembering—which was one of the reasons for drinking in the first place—makes me feel worst of all.
Me: Hanging in there.
Mom: I’ll check on you in a little bit, okay?
I pause for a second before texting back. I am sick and tired and weak. As pathetic as it sounds, I want my mommy. I’m too hungover, too broken for anger. This feels like it must be the bottom.
Me: Okay.
—
I open a group message with Annie and Violet.
Annie: OMG. OMG. OMG. KL +DD! Wld b LMAO if I wasn’t so hungs.