Scars Like Wings

by Erin Stewart

  And when I woke, other voices took her place. Cora with her bedside vigil. Glenn with his soft-spoken reassurances.

  Dr. Sharp. Too many nurses to count. Dr. Layne, leaning now against the front of her car, waiting on me like she always has.

  She’s right: I’ve never been alone.

  Except maybe once.

  When I threw myself out that window. The choice I made then—the first of a million choices to live—that one I made alone.

  But after, someone was always there.

  In my path.

  Helping me fight.

  Linda with her unwavering tough love, yanking me out of bed to walk. Even Terry with his torture devices, making sure I could bend my elbows to dress myself.

  Tony pulling me onto the stage. Asad making me believe someone could ever love this face again. Piper making the nightmare less lonely.

  Piper.

  Flipping off the universe to the beat of her fire music.

  How did I not see she was waging her own war against the darkness?

  More important, who’s helping her fight now?

  Who’s helping her choose to live?

  A wind shakes the leaves of the maple tree, and I picture myself running to Dad as he gets out of his car. He tosses me high into the air, then wraps me in his arms as I fall.

  I laugh and scream, “Again!” I have no fear—no doubt.

  Someone will be there.

  I stand and brush the ash from my pants. “We need to go!” I yell to Dr. Layne.

  “Take as long as you—”

  “The house is gone. I get it.” I look once more at the place I called home. “But my best friend is still here, and right now, she needs someone to catch her.”

  44

  Dr. Layne and I stop by the school on our way to the hospital. She helps me comb through the grass for the gold phoenix.

  “I was such a jerk,” I mumble, pushing aside a clump of newly mowed remnants. “I should have been there for her.”

  “Well, you can be there now. Is this it?” She holds up the phoenix, whose right wing has been clipped, probably by the steel blade of a lawn mower.

  I run my finger along the jagged, broken wing. “What if she hates me?”

  Dr. Layne stands up and reaches down to help me to my feet. “Be there anyway.”

  * * *

  Piper’s parents huddle with a white coat when I walk into the third-floor hospital hallway. Her mom cuts off the doctor and rushes to hug me. She tells me they’ve moved Piper out of intensive care but still have her on fluids and surveillance. She winces when she says these last words, like the thought of her daughter needing to be watched round the clock physically pains her.

  “Can I see her?”

  Her mom nods. “But, Ava, she’s heavily sedated right now and very tired, so I’m not sure she’ll even know you’re there.”

  I pull back the curtain to the room, which is dead quiet except for the beeping of the machine in time with Piper’s heart. Behind the curtain, Piper is small and young and impossibly fragile. The massive bed swallows her up, and I feel like I’m seeing her for the first time.

  I pull up a chair and lay my hand on hers. It’s bruised beneath the surface of the skin, where some nurse with no skills tried to insert her IV.

  I’m not sure what to say. I’m used to being the one in the bed. When Cora and Glenn visited me in the burn unit, I watched from my immobile perch as they suited up in booties and scrubs and hairnets so they wouldn’t bring the infectious dangers of the outside world into my little reality. I’d lie there like a caged zoo animal.

  Now I’m the one tapping on the glass.

  “Piper?”

  A small sound escapes her lips, but her eyes only flicker slightly.

  “You don’t have to talk. I just want to say I’m sorry. I wasn’t there when you needed me.” I choke down the lump in my throat.

  Beeping fills the otherwise silent space.

  Then I feed her all the same battle language people used to give me. I hated it then, and I hate myself for saying it now, but it’s all I have—the hope that my words will reach her.

  “I need you to fight. I need you to wake up so I can tell you something amazing. I found my new normal.” I flip her hand over and lay the gold phoenix in her limp palm. “It’s you. You and Cora and Glenn, and I almost missed it, searching for someone I used to be. I couldn’t see the beauty all around me.”

  I close her fingers over the bird.

  “But I see it now, Pipe. I see you. You’re not In. Valid. Not to me. So you have to get better so I can tell you that I’m sorry. I should have been there. But I’m here now, and I’m not going anywhere. You’re part of my story, and I’m part of yours.”

  The antiseptic smell and beeping transports me back to the unit. I used to think Cora had a martyrdom complex, the way she’d stay through the night curled up on the chair, surviving off cafeteria Jell-O.

  Did Cora feel the way I do holding Piper’s hand? Like there’s nowhere else in the world I’d rather be.

  Then I do the one thing I know how to do: I sing softly, words about dreams and bluebirds and troubles melting like lemon drops.

  Before I leave, I scribble a note on a cafeteria napkin.

  You've got lots of flying left to do on this side of the rainbow.

  PS If you try to die on me again, I'll kill you myself.

  Piper’s dad stops me on my way out to offer a supremely awkward apology for when I saw him in all his drunken splendor at his house.

  “I haven’t always been like that,” he says, as if I’ve asked for an explanation. “Sometimes it feels like the accident happened to all of us. You know?”

  I nod like I get it, but I don’t: The accident didn’t happen to him. It happened to Piper, and then she happened to everyone else. It’s a feeling I know well, and as I walk away from Piper’s bed, I wonder if that’s the burden she felt so acutely last night when a bottle of pills looked a lot like relief.

  Her dad takes my spot by the bed. A nurse closes the curtains again, and Piper’s mom walks with me down the hall, talking in circles the whole way.

  “Did Piper tell you anything? About what was wrong? Or that she was thinking about doing something…like this?”

  Her eyes dart across my face, searching for an answer I don’t have.

  “I thought she was doing okay. She was walking with that walker thing a little. And helping with the volleyball team,” I say.

  Her mom’s face twists in confusion. “What volleyball team?”

  “You know, being an assistant on the team again.”

  She shakes her head. “No, she wasn’t.”

  I start to argue, but realize I have no evidence. I never actually saw her working with the team. She was always “skipping” practice to come hang out at drama, or didn’t have to go because the team was on the road. Did she ever even talk to the coach?

  I look back toward Piper’s room.

  Maybe Asad was right; I’ve been so busy looking down that I didn’t see the pain in the person right beside me. Just like Asad in his lighting booth and me behind my curtains, Piper’s been hiding this whole time.

  * * *

  At home, Cora and Glenn walk on eggshells, watching me out of the corners of their eyes until it’s time for bed. I don’t blame them—in the last thirty-six hours, I had an epic meltdown, took a harrowing trip down memory lane, and visited my suicidal friend in the hospital. No wonder they look at me like I’m a bomb about to detonate.

  Cora lotions me up in silence, and when I’m rezipped in my second skin, she sits on the edge of the bed. Glenn comes in, too, but stops and leans against the wall to take off his boots. Cora smiles.

  “Can’t take the cowboy out of that man,” she says, half laughing. Then, softer, “N
ot that I’d ever want to.”

  Debooted, Glenn bends down to kiss Cora on the part in her hair. She leans into him.

  “How is she?” he says.

  My voice comes out gravelly with emotion.

  “She wasn’t really awake when I saw her.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “I don’t know.” My voice vibrates, tightening right at the spot above my star scar. “It was so weird to see her lying there, so small. And all I could think was how I can’t lose someone again. My heart can’t take it.”

  Glenn picks up the charred handbell off my dresser and transfers it between his hands.

  “It’s hard watching someone you love in pain. You’d take their hurt in a heartbeat, but you can’t. It’s their pain.”

  “How did you guys do it? I mean with me. Sara was gone. I was…me. How did you stand it?”

  Cora takes the bell from Glenn and rubs her fingers across the blackened surface.

  “We had to,” she says quietly.

  “Because I needed you?”

  “Because we needed you.”

  “You needed me?”

  Cora swallows hard, reaching up to hold Glenn’s hand. “I was a mother without a child. You were the one thing that kept the weight of that from crushing me. I needed you, Ava.”

  Cora pauses like she’s waiting for more breath.

  “I still need you,” she says. “If anything ever happened to you—”

  I put my hand on her arm.

  “I’m not going anywhere.”

  Cora smiles and slides her thumb along the scarred ridges of my fingers.

  “Do you remember each time you would get a new graft? How we knew it was going to take?”

  I think back to the white patches of skin sewn into my body. How the nurses would change the dressings, day after day, always checking to see if my body was going to accept or reject this new piece of me.

  And then, one day, little pink pinhead dots would appear.

  “When the buds appeared, we knew.”

  Cora nods. “Once it connected to the heart, it had a chance.” Her small, manicured fingers envelop my hand, toe and flipper and all. “You’re grafted into our hearts now. Permanently stitched together.”

  Cora hugs me and Glenn kisses me on the top of my head. He stops at my door to flick off the lights like he always does, his profile silhouetted against the light.

  In the dark, my mind whirs with thoughts of Piper. How am I going to help her? How can I make up for the terrible things I said? And how can I face the hallways—let alone the stage—without her?

  I put on my headphones, hit the Fire Mix and play Piper’s self-proclaimed anthem.

  She’s a phoenix in a flame—

  a hellfire raging from within,

  her story written on her skin.

  Once broken, now she flies—

  soaring above everything.

  She conquered her demons,

  and wore her scars like wings.

  An hour later, I still can’t sleep. I listen to Mom’s deodorant voice mail, but when it’s over, I think about Piper, and the darkness creeps in again. I write in my therapy journal, but the dark won’t go. Rather than fight it alone, I grab the Wizard of Oz DVD and knock on the door across the hall.

  When Cora tells me to come in, I find Glenn lying propped up on a pile of pillows with Cora leaning against him, watching some TV documentary.

  “You okay, honey?” she says.

  Glenn mutes the TV. They both wait for me to say something—anything. But the words get stuck.

  I want to tell them I’m scared. I want to tell them about the darkness and that I don’t want to stop fighting.

  I want to tell them thank you for being there when I woke up.

  That I’m a child without a mother.

  That I need them, too.

  “You guys up for a musical?” I hold up the DVD.

  Cora scoots over quickly in the bed, nudging Glenn to make room.

  “Of course!” she says. She throws up the covers on her side and pats the bed while Glenn puts in the disc. She fluffs a pillow next to her. “Jump in!”

  I slide into the sheets, still toasty from her body heat. Under the covers, Cora’s hand finds mine, and when it does, the darkness lifts slightly.

  I barely make it to Oz before I drift off.

  All I know is it feels good to be there, sharing the same space.

  May 10

  I don't remember much.

  My dad's face

  through flame.

  Heat crashed down on me.

  Dad

  disappeared.

  An open window

  beckoned.

  I remember

  a thought:

  If I jump, I live.

  If I stay, I die.

  I jumped.

  45

  Cora and I go by the hospital before school the next morning, but Piper’s mom says she’s not up for visitors.

  “Visitors? Or me?” I want to know as we leave.

  When Cora drops me off at school, a major wave of déjà vu from my first day grips me. I walked in alone then, too.

  I wave goodbye to Cora and turn, bracing myself to see the empty spot by the door where Piper would normally sit, zebra-striped and ready for the worst the hallways can throw at us. Today, when I turn, no wheelchair waits. But also not the nothing I expect.

  Asad stands in Piper’s place. He rocks back and forth on his heels when I approach.

  “Ava.”

  “Asad.”

  Once we establish who we are, we run out of ideas. The memory of our last conversation—the one where I made a total fool of myself—replays in my head.

  “I see the wig has returned,” he says after what is undoubtedly the longest any two people in the history of earth have gone without speaking.

  I instinctively tug at the bobbed strands I donned this morning.

  “I wanted to do something for Piper.”

  “How is she?”

  “Okay. I think.”

  Asad’s face is tight.

  “Kenzie says you guys had a fight,” he says. “Was it because of me—because of what happened with us?”

  Us.

  I look up at him, which I was trying desperately hard not to do because those deep, black eyes gut me.

  “Oh, you mean the time where I thought you liked me but then, oh, no, wait, you’re in love with my best friend?”

  Asad’s face blushes red, but he smiles back at me.

  “Yeah, that time.” He bites his lower lip. “Is this my fault?”

  “No.” I leave out the part where if anyone is to blame for the fact that our friend is under suicide watch on the third floor of a hospital, it’s me.

  Asad nods, studying his feet, then flicks his eyes to me through his thick eyelashes.

  “Are we okay?”

  We.

  Another stab.

  “We will be.”

  He exhales like he’s been storing up oxygen for a month and opens the door for us to walk through together.

  Inside, a staring resurgence has swept Crossroads High. I’d all but forgotten the feel of all eyes on me in these narrow corridors. Except this time it’s not about me; it’s about Piper.

  Some brave souls have the courage to actually ask me how she’s doing. Did they ever bother to ask her?

  They want to know when she’s coming back. What happened, exactly.

  I give them all the same answer.

  “She’s fine.”

  Others talk behind cupped hands, spinning rumor webs I can practically see threading from mouth to ear, spiraling down the hall, looping back and forth until the whole school is talking about the Girl W
ho Took the Pills.

  Asad walks with me all day in the hallways, which become more unbearable by the minute. When people aren’t whispering about Piper, they’re making some asinine comment about how worried they are about her. Like they’ve been up all night pacing about the girl they didn’t give the time of day to a week ago.

  A boy I’ve never even seen before stops me in the hall to tell me Piper was always really nice.

  “Is,” I correct him. “Piper is nice.” He gives me the universal symbol for sympathy, cocking his head to the side and tucking his lips into a half frown. He nods like we’re having a soul-to-soul moment and then walks away, still watching me like I’m made of glass.

  A girl in my math class even quotes some psych stats.

  “My dad says burn victims are way more likely to have depression,” she tells me.

  “Survivors,” I say.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You said victims. We are burn survivors. We didn’t die.”

  The worst part is when I walk past Piper’s locker, a makeshift shrine that looks like a Hallmark card threw up on it. Posters and pictures and sentiments ripped straight from cheesy Internet memes crowd the front of locker 681.

  KEEP FIGHTING!

  IT GETS BETTER!

  WE’RE ALL HERE FOR YOU.

  I think of the box of similar empty sentiments sitting in my room. I know everyone means well, but it bothers me anyway. Why couldn’t they have meant well a month ago? When Piper was just the girl in a wheelchair.

  “Quite the outpouring of support,” Mr. Lynch says, stopping next to me in the middle of the hall as I stare at the locker grief vomit.

  I nod. “Yeah. Suddenly, Piper has a hundred best friends she never knew existed.”

  Mr. Lynch steps between me and the locker, meeting my eyes, just like he did on my first day here.

  “If you ever need anything. Anything. My door is always open,” he says, and I know he means it. Of all the phonies at this school, at least I’ve always known where I stood with him. “I should have seen what was happening with Piper. I should have seen the signs, but I missed it somehow.”