In the Wild Light

by Jeff Zentner

  Then Alex is beside me.

  “Hey, bro, how you doing?” he asks, kneeling, hovering protectively.

  “How’d you know?”

  “Word travels fast in a building.”

  “Cracked my head on the wall. I feel sick.” I breathe through another wave of nausea.

  “A bad friend would say you’re lucky it was your head and not something you use. But I’m not a bad friend.”

  I laugh weakly.

  Paramedics arrive and load me on a stretcher.

  “I’m coming with,” Alex says.

  “You family?” the paramedic asks.

  “I’m his twin brother,” Alex says.

  “Let’s go,” the paramedic says.

  En route to the hospital, I try to tell Alex what happened. I’m not sure how much sense I’m making.

  First I had my inaugural plane ride, to see Papaw die. Now I’m on my first ambulance ride, going to the hospital with a cracked skull.

  What a year.

  * * *

  More time passes at the hospital. A doctor comes to see me. She thinks I have a concussion. Because I’m showing signs of disorientation and confusion (I keep asking the same questions over and over), she’s keeping me for the next twenty-four hours for observation.

  I have a CT scan, another inauspicious first. It’s to rule out an epidural hematoma, so I can sleep, which I want to do more than anything.

  But first, Alex helps me videochat with Mamaw. She’s already up—the school called her. She’s understandably upset to see her grandson in the hospital, talking nonsense following a head injury, six weeks after losing her husband. Alex texts Delaney, but she must be asleep already because she doesn’t answer.

  Middleford sends an associate dean of students to be at the hospital with me while I’m being examined. I don’t remember her name. She tells me she’ll be back in the morning. They bring in a cot for Alex to stay the night.

  As I’m plunging into the abyss of dreamless sleep, I murmur to Alex, “Least I tagged him once.”

  Alex grins. “I noticed. I’d hate to be on the receiving end of that right hook. He’s gonna feel that.”

  “Did I do the right thing?”

  Alex reaches over and pats my forearm a couple of times, then gives it a little squeeze. “Hell yes, bro.”

  I sense the presence of people. I open my eyes groggily, and Vi, Delaney, and Alex come into focus.

  “I think he’s awake,” Vi says to Delaney and Alex. “Cash?”

  “Mm-hmm,” I say.

  “How are you?”

  “Um.” I pause, taking inventory. “Awesome.”

  “Liar,” Delaney says, and they laugh.

  “Alex told us what you did,” Vi says softly. She leans over me, her hair falling into my face, and gives me a long kiss on the cheek. Even though my crush on Vi has receded, it still feels great.

  As she steps back to let one of the others have a moment with me, I say, drunkenly, “All y’all, pucker up and get in line.”

  They laugh again.

  Delaney steps forward. I can’t quite interpret her expression—proud, loving, scared, all at once. And then there’s something I haven’t seen on her before. “You look like shit,” she says.

  “Hallmark, hire this woman,” I say.

  “You have two big black eyes from the blood draining into the tissue surrounding them.”

  “Thanks, doc. Now shut up and come here,” I say, extending my arms.

  Delaney wraps me in a hug so tight it hurts my neck. Then she pulls back and presses her lips to my forehead. “Pep would be proud of you,” she whispers.

  I haven’t been able to feel much in the way of emotion—being more preoccupied with my physical state—but hearing this makes me glow inside.

  “Okay, dude,” I say to Alex. “Where’s my sugar?”

  Without hesitation, he comes over, grabs my face, and gives me a loud kiss on each cheek. We bust up.

  They all stand there for a second without speaking, giving me such looks of fondness and love, it’s almost unbearable.

  This is when I realize I’m not alone.

  This is when I realize I don’t have to leave them. I don’t have to walk away from some of the greatest richness my life has ever held.

  I can choose them. I can choose to stay.

  Then something else occurs to me. Staying might not be my choice anymore. If the school believes Tripp that I attacked him—and they will—they’ll boot me. Middleford has a zero-tolerance policy toward violence. I’ll be right back to where I was on Friday night, with my hand resting on the doorknob of my room.

  You always want what you can’t have, don’t you?

  It’s not actually funny, but I start laughing anyway. At some point, the extent to which I can’t catch a fucking break almost becomes comedic.

  Delaney, Vi, and Alex eye me with justifiable concern. Seeing your friend who recently suffered an ER-worthy head trauma suddenly start busting a gut out of nowhere must be troubling.

  Probably the only thing more unsettling would be if that laughing dissolved into sobbing, which is exactly what happens.

  They stay with me all day. We watch TV and talk. The doctor says I seem to be doing well, so they’ll release me at eight that night, a few hours before the twenty-four-hour observation period is up.

  At around four, they leave to go get burgers. They promise to bring me one. I wonder if it’ll be the last time we eat dinner together.

  They’ve only been gone for a few minutes when a nurse enters. “Cash? You have a visitor.”

  “Okay.” I sit up a little straighter. Part of me hopes it’s Dr. Adkins, even though we’ve already texted and she’s in New Hampshire, helping Desiree cater an event.

  Dr. Archampong enters. I don’t think he and I have ever been in the same room aside from morning assembly. He’s taller and more imposing in person.

  “Sir.” I sit up straighter still.

  “Mr. Pruitt,” he says, pulling up a chair. “They’ve treated you well, I hope?”

  “Yes, sir. Very well.” My breath is tight in my chest.

  “How are you feeling? I’m told you suffered a severe concussion.”

  “Yessir.” My heart thrums in my still-aching head. “I’m feeling a little better.”

  “That’s good to hear. I have some news that I needed to deliver personally.”

  “Okay,” I say faintly.

  I wanted to leave Middleford, yes. But on my own terms. Not by getting kicked out so Tripp and his shitty goons can laugh about me mowing lawns back home, all while still preying on people.

  “As I’m sure you are aware, Middleford Academy has a zero-tolerance policy toward violence,” Dr. Archampong says.

  “I know, sir.” My voice cracks.

  “However, there is an exception to that policy for acts of self-defense…”

  And Tripp was merely defending himself against your attack. Which is why you’re being expelled and he isn’t. My breath leaves me.

  “And defense of another,” Dr. Archampong continues. “We have convened an emergency session of the Disciplinary Council, and we have determined your altercation with Patrick McGrath to be both an act of self-defense and an act of defense of a fellow student.”

  “I’m not sure what—”

  “It means that Mr. McGrath has been expelled from Middleford Academy, along with Palmer De Vries and Vance Barr.”

  I wish I could trust my own ears and mental processing. But in my current state, I can’t. “Sir, I’m not getting kicked out?”

  Dr. Archampong shakes his head. “No. Witnesses at the scene corroborated your account of the events as you related them. We heard Mr. McGrath’s, Mr. De Vries’s, and Mr. Barr’s versions. However, several members of the lacrosse team came
forward to report that they had seen Mr. De Vries and Mr. Barr carrying Ms. Byrne from your and Mr. McGrath’s room, which corroborated your statements. We viewed security video from the residence hall’s internal and external cameras, and saw Mr. De Vries and Mr. Barr carrying Ms. Byrne outside, where we found her lying on a bench, clothed in a manner not commensurate with the weather conditions, and which suggested she had not arrived there of her own accord. Ms. Byrne, unfortunately, has no recollection of the incident. But when confronted with this proof, Mr. De Vries and Mr. Barr confessed that Mr. McGrath had asked them to remove Ms. Byrne from the room.

  “So, no, Mr. Pruitt. You are not being dismissed from Middleford, nor are you subject to any disciplinary action. You showed courage and heroism by intervening on your fellow student’s behalf. You are a credit to our school. We are honored to have you among our number.”

  I’m speechless. “I was just trying to do the right thing,” I say finally.

  “I don’t know if you are aware of this, but before you were admitted to Middleford, Delaney Doyle wrote us a letter on your behalf. She recommended you as someone of bravery and substance, who would fight for people who needed a champion. She said that you had overcome many difficult circumstances and survived them with your integrity intact. So, that you were willing to do the right thing at great personal cost to yourself comes as no surprise. Our school needs people like you, Mr. Pruitt. If we teach our students nothing else, let it be to do what is right, even when it is difficult and dangerous.” Dr. Archampong pats my knee paternally and stands. “Now, please excuse me. There are many issues demanding my attention. My assistant will be in contact with you to schedule a meeting on Monday. We have a few matters yet to discuss. For now, though, focus on recuperation.” He starts to leave.

  “Sir? One quick thing.” It’s humiliating, but I need to mention it while he’s here. My face burns, and I stumble over the words. “I don’t know if—the hospital? My family doesn’t have a lot of money. And the bill. I’m not sure—My grandfather just died and we had to pay for a lot of stuff and I don’t know if—”

  He gently raises a hand to cut me off. “Middleford has a fund for such contingencies. We will handle everything. Rest and give it no thought.”

  He leaves and I sit with the stillness. I think about what it’ll take to stay at Middleford. Things won’t magically be good. I’ll still live with the persistent anguish of grief. I’ll still have moments when I feel alone and like I don’t belong.

  I’ll still have holes in my life.

  But I’m ready to try to patch the holes in my life with courage.

  I’m lying in bed, watching TV, as early evening comes. But I’m only half watching, thinking about the last time I was in a hospital.

  Delaney enters my room with a Wendy’s bag in hand. I’d smelled her approaching. The fresh hot-oil fragrance reminds me of going to pick her up from work at Dairy Queen, waiting in one of the booths for her to finish her shift.

  “You’re back,” I say.

  She sets the bag in my lap. It’s warm and it feels good. She sits on the side of my bed. “Hope you like it. It was the only place in walking distance.”

  “Whatever you got me is better than hospital food. Thanks.”

  Delaney and I meet each other’s eyes and smile.

  “Where’s Alex and Vi?” I ask.

  Delaney hesitates. “They had to take care of something. It’s just me. That cool?”

  “Of course. Dr. Archampong was here a little while ago, by the way.”

  Delaney’s mind is obviously where mine was, because she pales. “And?”

  “And…I get to stay at Middleford. Tripp got the boot, along with Palmer and Vance.”

  Delaney collapses into herself, visibly trembling. She exhales from the deepest reaches of her lungs. “I worried about you getting expelled. Holy shit, I’m glad that didn’t happen.”

  Maybe I won’t tell her how close I came to expelling myself before all this went down.

  I open the bag, grab a few french fries, and eat them. “Man. These are as good as your DQ’s fries.”

  “Because I asked them to fry them twice, the way I always used to do for you.”

  “That’s not how DQ fries normally are?”

  “Nope. Always did it special for you. You get more of the Maillard reaction, named after Louis-Camille Maillard. That’s a chemical reaction between glucose and amino acids that happens with heat and causes browning. I knew you liked the Maillard reaction in fries.”

  “Huge fan,” I murmur. “Guess I have a favorite scientist now too.”

  “Thought I was your favorite scientist.”

  “Okay, it goes you and then Maillard.” I offer Delaney some of my fries.

  “I’m good.” She smiles, but a melancholy cloud hangs over her.

  We’re quiet for a while. Finally, I say, “You all right?”

  She takes a deep breath and starts to nod but catches herself. She turns her face to the window for several beats. Then she turns back to me. “Yeah, I’m fine. I was—” She stops. There’s a catch in her voice. She tries to talk again but dissolves and starts weeping into her hands.

  “Hey. Hey, Red. Hey.” I pull her to my chest and hold her and whisper into her hair.

  She cries for a while and then draws a shuddering breath and wipes her eyes with her ring fingers. “Wow. Very cool.”

  “What’s up?”

  “I wasn’t ready to see you in a hospital bed, looking all banged up. And to see it after everything with Pep. It made me realize…” She pauses. I’ve seen what it looks like when Delaney is armoring herself, and she does it now.

  She draws a deep breath and her words rush out. “I need to tell you something because you never know if it’s going to be too late. Like what if you’d had an intracranial hemorrhage and died? I’d have had to just carry this around. So this sucks to have to say, especially right now. And I don’t expect or, like, want anything from you. But I need you to know that I’ve been in love with you for basically as long as I’ve known you. I thought it would pass. But it didn’t. It hasn’t.”

  “Red—”

  “Don’t interrupt. I have to say this. It’s why I had to get you to Middleford with me. I couldn’t be without you. And I don’t want a thing like with Pep, where I didn’t know if he heard me tell him I love him. I love you more than I’ve loved any other person in my whole life. Lots of days it was the only thing that got me out of bed, the only thing I had to hang on to. That time we kissed and we sorta decided we probably shouldn’t anymore? I know I went along with it, but I didn’t really want to. I loved you. I love you. And I wish more than anything that I could only love you in the way I’m allowed to. But—”

  “Wait, I thought you—”

  Delaney puts her hand over my mouth, the raggedness of her thumb scratchy on my lip. “I’m talking. Shhh. This is hard enough. I think about you constantly. And it really fuckin’ sucks because then I have to watch you fall in love with Vi and pretend I’m okay, so I—”

  Because I have nothing to say, because she wouldn’t let me even if I did, I pull her to me and kiss her—it’s long, deep, hungry, delirious, and somehow both heavy and light with every hour we’ve spent together looking at stars or the lights of our town, every moment we’ve spent drifting quietly downriver together, every time we’ve gone to sleep knowing the other was there somewhere for us. This is so much more than the first time we kissed. We are so much more.

  There are secret fires you wall off because you fear what they’ll burn if you loose them. Because you choose caution over possibility. But at the first crack in the wall, you feel their warmth and decide you’ll gladly risk the burning.

  * * *

  After we’ve made up for years of not kissing—at one point I think I heard a nurse come in and back slowly out—we hold each other quie
tly as dusk falls softly outside. The hum of the hospital around us is lost in the sound of our breathing.

  We explore our new lands. I trace my thumb along her eyebrow and to the hollow behind her ear.

  She strokes my lips gently with her fingertips. “Always wanted to do that,” she murmurs.

  “We’d already kissed even before today.” I push a lock of hair back from her eyes.

  “You can’t do that just because you’ve kissed someone,” she says, and we laugh. “So, telling you all that turned out better than I thought it would.”

  “Looks like we’re both having more fun than the last time we were in a hospital together.”

  “True.”

  “Good thing Vi and Alex didn’t come back with you.”

  “I kinda didn’t give them a choice,” Delaney says. We laugh again. “I almost told you over Christmas, when we were on the river, but I chickened out.”

  Several moments pass without our speaking. She rests her head on my chest. She can probably hear my heart pounding as I summon my bravery one more time. With two fingers under her chin, I gently lift her face back up to mine, to meet my bruised eyes. “I love you, Delaney Doyle.”

  She pauses, but only like she wants to inhabit the moment longer. “I love you too, Cash Pruitt. But I’m not telling you anything you don’t know.”

  Skin

  I wish it weren’t true

  that all our skin cells

  regenerate every few weeks,

  like you once told me they did.

  I don’t want a new skin.

  I want a skin with a memory

  longer than the dust’s,

  which you said also forgets,

  only it takes longer.

  I want to live in a skin that remembers

  you, a skin you’ve marked.

  I take it easy on Sunday, mostly enjoying the solitude of my newly Tripp-free room while Delaney studies and works in the lab. When I’m awake, I spend most of my time writing something I’ve needed to write for a long time. Call it an exorcism.