“A woman was definitely driving. I can tell by the positioning of the seat that the driver couldn’t have been more than sixty-five inches tall, most likely sixty-four. Unless he was having an affair with a very short man.”
“My dad wasn’t having an affair!” she shouts, and just like that, everything changes. Kit is so loud the other people in the restaurant look over. “And my dad wasn’t gay, you dumbass!”
“I’m sorry,” I say again, and hold up my hands much like she did earlier, when it looked like she thought I might hit her. I don’t understand what’s going on. We went from kissing to yelling in fewer than three minutes. I suspected she’d be mad, that I could be ruining things by telling the truth, because that seems to be my downfall—my genetic predilection toward honesty and disclosure. Still, I didn’t think it would be like this. I thought Kit was different from the other kids. That she didn’t hurl hurtful words—dumbass, idiot, retard—at me just because she could.
I was wrong, like usual.
But unlike usual, this feels devastating. Like recovering from this moment is impossible.
“I’m sorry,” I say for a third time. I don’t know what I’m apologizing for, other than being too much myself. Kit drops her head onto the table and starts to sob. Her crying is gulpy and wet and unpleasant. I go to pet her hair—because even after all this, even after the dumbass, I still can’t help but want to touch her, but then I decide against it. She hates me, and maybe I hate her too.
My mind races. We will never eat sandwiches across a table from each other again. And when I think about that—the seventy-three school days left in which I will now be sitting by myself, how my world will now be Kit-less—my hands start to flap. I cover one with the other and feel relieved Kit’s face is down. I can’t let her see this version of me.
I recite pi silently so the balloon in my head doesn’t go loose again. I stare at the back of Kit’s neck. Study the curve of her hairline. Imagine drawing it in my mind. Imagine tracing it with my fingertip.
And I wait.
This table smells like french fries and my cheek feels sticky with someone else’s leftover ketchup or maybe jam. Better not to know. I lift my head, take a paper napkin from the dispenser, and dry my drenched face with the little dignity I can still muster. Who knew you could hit bottom twice in one day?
“I’m sorry,” I whisper, because it’s hard to find my voice. I don’t want to be the girl who spent the morning sitting in her own vomit and the afternoon crying in public with recycled condiments on my cheek. I want to be better than this. “I shouldn’t have yelled at you.”
On the way over to McCormick’s, I resolved to be brave and honest. I realize I can’t keep going, not like this. My mom wanted us to build and then live in a glass house of lies. But it’s time to start throwing rocks. Let it shatter and rain down and cut us all up.
I will say these words out loud, the truth: I was driving the car. It was me.
No. I cannot say anything. My mouth has gone dry.
David stares at my shoulder. His fists are clenched tightly in his lap. He probably wants to throttle my neck. I don’t blame him. My mother was wrong to try to bury the truth like it was a physical thing. As if keeping my name out of the newspaper meant it never happened in the first place. My mom’s job is to spin things, and so she did what she does best. Ten minutes after a doctor told us my dad had died, she was in action, like the covert superhero I always knew she could be—Mandip Lowell to the rescue!—spinning what had happened into something more easily digestible.
We all know this was an accident, she said to the reporter, a grizzly older man with an unruly white mustache who looked annoyed that our family tragedy had interrupted his dinner plans. Why ruin a sixteen-year-old girl’s life? As if my life hadn’t already been ruined, as if reality turned on what people read over breakfast the next morning with their coffee.
Let’s just leave her out of this, she said, and I stood next to her, totally numb, it never once occurring to me to speak up and object. I’m not asking you to lie, she said. I’d never to do that. Just keep it vague enough to let people come to their own conclusions. The next morning, a picture of the accident scene graced the front page of the Daily Courier, and the reporter did exactly as my mother suggested. No mention was made of a second passenger; anyone who read the article came to the natural conclusion that my father was driving. My mother and I did nothing to correct this wrong impression. One more verbal sleight of hand.
Poof, just like that, I was never in the car, my involvement almost completely erased. There was no follow-up, no additional questioning, just my name on an accident report buried in the bowels of the police station. Apparently people die in car accidents all the time.
My mom said, Dad would have wanted to protect you. I believed her because I wanted to.
But we should have started clean. When the whole thing is not sugarcoated with euphemisms like accident, when my mom doesn’t pat my back and say It wasn’t your fault, when she doesn’t spin the truth. There are words for what I did: vehicular manslaughter.
“I don’t understand what’s happening here,” David says.
“I knew he wasn’t driving.” I stop, because the tears are getting in the way. I want to do this right, but I am not naive. Words are not things that can be handed over, simply passed from person to person and let go. They are a string. You’re still left holding one end in your hands. “There’s something I didn’t tell you—”
David can be trusted. He can keep my secrets. He’ll help make it better. Hold up the other end.
Maybe this is what I wanted all along when I started the Accident Project—for David to find out the truth, for me to finally be exposed and honest. For me to spectacularly self-sabotage and start over.
When I was little, my dad used to sing “You Are My Sunshine” to me before bed, even that sad second verse no one else seems to know or remember: The other night, dear, while I lay sleeping, I dreamt I held you in my arms. When I awoke, dear, I was mistaken, so I held my head down and cried.
The song echoes in my head, in his voice, and it makes me think about David’s theory of consciousness. Maybe my dad lives on in something as intangible as song lyrics. Maybe my dad can be with me when I need him.
When I awoke, dear, I was mistaken, so I held my head down and cried. Can I sing that as my confession to David? Those are simpler words. Easier to say than: I was driving. It was me.
“I get it,” David says, before I have a chance to explain myself. “Of course. How could I have missed it? I am a dumbass. You were driving.” The words come out with enthusiasm, like he’s just aced the SATs, emphasis cheerily on the you. He is smiling and his volume is too loud.