by Cat Patrick
Maybe it is my fault.
It’s not my fault!
“It’s not my fault!!!” I shouted into the wind.
I wondered if anyone heard me.
chapter 20
Fact: The damage path of a tornado can be more than one mile wide.
TESS WAS SOBBING, folded over, face in a throw pillow on the couch. I couldn’t remember the last time Tess had cried like that; I stared at her with my mouth open for a few seconds. I felt like my head was disconnected from my body. I looked down at my muddy feet and struggled out of my boots, getting them to actually come off when I stepped on the heels, thinking that my mom wouldn’t want me to track stuff inside. It was a weird thing to be thinking about, but I was in a daze.
I knew Colette must be hurt—or worse. Then I thought of the only time I’d ever seen her hurt before.
It was last year, and we’d walked all the way down the beach to the rocky cove one Sunday afternoon. In some ways, the cove is the best place on the beach because it’s sheltered from the wind—so it’s nice year-round. Steep black rocks with a forest on top jut up to form a wall that wraps around the sand. Smaller, sharp rocks with barnacles stuck to every surface are either right at the edge of the water, or swimming in it, depending on the tide. The way that the cove was formed, the waves come in from two directions at once, fighting with each other, angry and beautiful. Huge spray kicks up when the fighting waves clash, seagulls watching and snacking on the barnacles like Cheerios.
“My parents keep getting in fights,” Colette said, looking out toward the waves. Her red hair was pulled back in a high ponytail and she had on a blue plaid shirt I’d always liked. “I’m afraid they’re going to get divorced.”
“That sucks,” I said, not knowing what else to say.
“Yeah. My mom wants to move.”
“No!” I shouted. “You can’t!” I thought of how I’d be alone if Colette moved. How I’d have no one to come to the cove with. I thought of myself.
“I know,” Colette said. “I’d die.”
I started up a pile of barnacle-covered rocks. They weren’t steep, but they were jagged. Colette followed me in her flip-flops. When we were at the top, we watched the ocean fight without saying anything.
“Maybe you can live here with us if your parents move,” I told her. “You’re twelve, you should be able to have a say in where you live.”
“My parents don’t think so,” Colette said.
“You can’t leave,” I said, feeling desperate.
We’d both been so distracted by the topic that neither of us was paying attention to the water, and soon we were on a tiny island for two. The tide had risen to the point where, if we were to jump off right then, we’d be in water up to our chests—and would potentially be sucked out to sea or battered against the rocks.
“Crap!” Colette shouted, instantly panicking. “We’re going to be stuck out here and drown!”
“Calm down,” I said, rational. “We just have to wait for the waves to flow out again and jump down. Our feet might get a little wet, but we’ll be fine.”
She started crying, which shocked me.
I felt brave and ready to handle the situation, which sort of shocked me and sort of didn’t. That happens to me sometimes. Sometimes I’m invincible.
“It’s going to be okay,” I said to her, edging to the side of the rocks. “See? Look, it’s already starting to pull back.” The water was quickly retreating. “Get ready to jump down to the sand.”
“I’m scared,” Colette said. I looked around to see if there were any adults just in case we needed help. Two fishermen were on another cluster of rocks. I waved at them, one waved back, and I hoped that reassured Colette that they’d probably help if we called out.
“Come on, jump now!” I jumped, my heels digging deep into the sand when I landed. Colette froze, then a few seconds later took two steps toward the edge. Except one of her flip-flops snagged on the rock. She fell more than jumped off, landing on her hands and knees in the sand and lurching forward so her head hit the next boulder over. Barnacle-covered boulders are sharp.
I reached down and grabbed her hand to help her up. With only one flip-flop and a bleeding forehead, she managed to run behind me to dry sand, chased by the surf the whole way.
When we were safe, we looked at each other and exploded into laughter. One of the fishermen had been keeping an eye on us. He shook his head and turned back toward the water.
“That was awesome,” I said.
“No, it wasn’t!” Colette said, but she was smiling, so I thought she thought it was awesome, too. People don’t always say what they mean.
My mom’s voice brought me back to the present. “Frankie?” she asked. “Are you listening?”
The policewoman from earlier was back.
“Is Colette dead?” I asked loudly.
“She’s hurt but she’s alive,” Mom said quickly. She rushed over and put her arm around me. I let her keep it there for a few seconds, then stepped away.
“She’s not okay, is she?” I asked, looking at the officer, then at my mom.
“Frankie, I said she’s alive,” Mom answered. “That’s a good thing. She’s hurt, yes, but she’s alive, thank goodness. I’m going to call her parents and see what they need.”
“It’s probably best to give them a few hours—” the officer started to say to my mom before I interrupted.
“Where was she?” I asked.
“About a mile from the lighthouse,” the officer answered.
Just a mile—a mile is nothing . . . unless it’s the width of a tornado. But a mile on a bike is easy.
“Did she finish the dare?” I asked, my voice sounding higher than normal, eyes bouncing back and forth between my mom and the officer.
“Frankie, I hardly think that’s relevant right now when—” Mom began.
“Did she finish the dare or not?” I shouted, balling my fists at my side. Just tell me if she finished the dare or not! I screamed in my brain. Tell me if she finished, because if she did, she would have been riding on the more dangerous side of the road—the side with the drop-off into a ravine. She’d be in worse condition if she had finished! I thought I was screaming out loud, so they’d all understand that I was talking about Colette’s health, not some dumb game. But my heart was racing, and my thoughts were spinning. I felt like a human tornado. Some words came out, but some stayed in my head. “Tell me if she finished! Just tell me!”
Tess rose from her place on the couch and wiped her eyes. She looked at me, confused.
“Frankie, the game doesn’t matter anymore,” she said, probably trying to help. It didn’t.
“I don’t care about the game!” I shouted.
“Then why do you keep asking if she finished the dare?” Mom asked.
“Ugh!” I shouted at her before stomping my feet several times. Right then, Charles and Pirate came in. Charles looked around the room.
“I saw the police car when we came back from our walk,” he said, his face twisted in concern. “What’s going on?”
I was still stomping.
“I’ll tell you in a minute,” Mom said to Charles. “We have a situation here.” Then, to me, “Stop that!”
She looked flushed and embarrassed. I desperately wanted to suck it all back in, inside my skin, all the anger and miscommunication and tears. I wanted to vacuum it back up into the sky, like when a tornado changes its mind and returns to the funnel cloud. But it’d already touched down.
“Frankie—” the woman officer began.
I cut her off. “TELL ME IF COLETTE FINISHED THE DARE!” I screamed at the top of my lungs. “THAT’S ALL I’M ASKING!”
“Whoa,” Charles said, holding up his palms. “We need to—”
“Go to your room!” my mom shouted back at me. “You are not allowed to
scream at a police officer!”
“But she’s allowed to treat me like a baby and not tell me what happened?” I shouted, backing toward the door.
Everyone was standing up now. I thought that the policewoman should have been angry, but instead, she looked like she pitied me, which made it worse.
“Frankie, maybe you just need a second to breathe,” Charles said. His eyes had tears in them. “Maybe—”
“Maybe if the police knew how to do their jobs, then Colette wouldn’t be hurt right now!” I yelled. “Maybe if they’d found her faster, everything would be okay!”
This made the officer purse her lips, but she didn’t say anything.
“I’m so sorry,” my mom said. “She tends to get emotion—”
That’s all I heard before I slammed the door, leaving without bothering to step back into my boots. I screamed the loudest I could outside, a high-pitched horrible scream that felt like it would break my own eardrums. There was a family walking by and all four of them looked at me, startled.
“Stop looking at me!” I yelled.
The mom took hold of the youngest kid’s hand and they all rushed away. I was acting like the type of person who scared little kids, and I couldn’t begin to control it.
The wet pebbles and puddles under my socks prevented me from stomping as much as I wanted to, so I screamed again, then leaned over and picked up a rock, throwing it in the direction of the water. It landed with a thud in the tall beach grass. The release of the rock had felt good: it’d felt productive. I picked up another rock, this one the size of a golf ball. I cocked my arm back and threw it hard. It thudded louder to the earth. I threw five more rocks of about the same size, each throw more forceful than the last. My shoulder felt like it was going to rip out of the socket, but I was starting to feel a little better.
I saw a spectacular rock near the entryway to the inn: a polished gray rock the size of a large potato. It was much heavier when I picked it up and I knew it’d make the best thud yet. I stepped back so I was close to the building: I would need a running start. My socks were completely soaked, slapping the ground as I walked. I pulled my arm back over my right shoulder, rock in hand, ready to hurl it and all my anger away. But I guess I was too close to the building. I was too close, specifically, to the huge pane of glass that my mom calls a “picture window” and that looks to the west from the lobby.
The tip of the rock hit the glass when I pulled my arm back.
The world stood still for a few seconds. Then I heard what sounded like ice popping when lukewarm soda is poured over it. The first shards broke free and huge sheets of glass followed, crashing to the ground around me. Before I knew it, I was an island in a sea of broken glass.
“Mom!” I screamed in a different way, a terrified way. “Help me!” I held my arms close to my body and didn’t move. There were tiny pieces of glass all over my pajamas and my socks. “Help, come quick!”
The door to the cottage flew open and my mom came running out with Tess, Charles, and the police officers behind her. When my mom saw the glass, she paused and gasped. I knew she was going to be madder than she’d ever been: I’d probably be grounded for a year. But at first, she didn’t look mad: she looked terrified.
She started running again, stopping at the edge of the scene.
“Are you hurt?” she asked. She looked at my shoeless feet, then her eyes moved up to inspect me.
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“Don’t move,” she said to me, looking around for something. “I need . . .”
I held still as stone.
“Let me get her,” the policewoman said. “I’ll carry her over the—”
“I’ve got it,” Charles said, taking a step onto the glass. I think he was going to try to pick me up.
“No,” my mom said, grabbing his arm. “She can’t . . . you know she doesn’t like being touched . . . you’ll just make it worse.”
Charles winced, probably knowing she was right. It’s true that I’d never hugged him and that I shied away from the kind of play fighting he did with Tess, but not because I don’t love him or anything. I thought he knew that, but it sure didn’t look like he did right then. He looked crushed.
Mom glanced around again, then seemed to decide. She took a step onto the pile of glass herself, and it crunched like tortilla chips under her shoe. She took another step, and another, and another. Then she was in front of me. “Get on my back.”
I couldn’t jump up for fear I’d miss and slide back down onto a nest of broken glass. My mom bent low and, not wanting it to cut her, I gently shook as much of the glass as I could from my clothes before wrapping my arms tightly around her neck. I practically strangled her when she stood up again with me holding on. I wrapped my legs around her hips and she crunched us both out of the glass.
I started shaking right after she set me down. Now, apparently, I was a person who vandalized businesses. I started crying again, because I didn’t want to be that person. I cried because I was confused by who I was.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered to my mom. She’d moved away. She was standing over by the glass debris again in the rain, her hands on her head, staring at the hole that’d been a window. When she looked back at me, covering her mouth, she had tears streaming down her cheeks.
She hadn’t heard me apologize.
chapter 21
Fact: The severity of comas is classified on a number scale, just like tornadoes.
“DID YOU KNOW that according to the Glasgow Coma Scale, a person with a score of only three or four after twenty-four hours will most likely die?” I asked.
“No, I didn’t know that,” Gabe said. “Thanks for telling me.”
It was Monday, the day after the police had found Colette. Other kids were in school, but Mom hadn’t made me or Tess go—except she had made me come to see Gabe. Gabe and I were in his office over the business that’s a tanning salon, a knitting shop, and a coffeehouse in one. I was sitting in the comfy red chair that Gabe usually sat in, but I didn’t like it very much. Gabe wouldn’t let me sit in my normal spot on the couch—either he wanted to mix things up to see if I’d freak out about the changes or he just felt like sitting on the couch. Instead of being mad about it, I tried to focus on my newfound knowledge about comas.
“A person with a score of more than eleven will most likely live,” I said. “I don’t know what Colette’s score is.”
I was drawing tornadoes on a notepad, not making eye contact with Gabe.
“You seem to know a lot about comas,” Gabe observed.
“Uh-huh,” I answered. “A person somewhere in the middle has about a fifty-fifty chance of recov—”
“Frankie,” Gabe interrupted.
“What?” I looked at him. He pushed up his black-framed glasses, which weren’t as good as his other ones.
“We’re running out of time today, and I want to be sure that we’re able to talk about you—not just comas,” Gabe said. I really didn’t like that he’d switched glasses.
“I don’t want to talk about me,” I said. “I’m fine.” I waited a second, biting my tongue, trying not to say what I was thinking. But with everything that’d happened, I couldn’t hold things back very well. “I don’t like those glasses: they look too . . . blocky. Your blue glasses are better.”
“Hmm,” Gabe said, leaning forward to take a sip of tea. I liked that he always made me tea and didn’t care if I doodled while we talked. “How does Colette being in the hospital make you feel?”
“That’s a stupid question,” I said, making a big X through the last tornado I’d drawn. I glanced up at Gabe to see if his neutral expression had changed when I’d said stupid.
“I’m sorry you feel that way,” Gabe said, twisting his wedding ring, face still neutral. “Hey, will you make me a deal?”
“Maybe,” I said.
“I know you don’t want to start taking medication again,” Gabe began. I grunted. “But I don’t think you’re being honest about how you’re feeling—and if you’re not being honest, then it’s harder for me to figure out how to help you.”
“Is that a threat?” I asked, my pen scratching around and around on the page.
“Wow, Frankie,” Gabe said. “No, it’s absolutely not a threat. I’m saying that I understand that you want to make the choice not to take medication—and if that’s your choice, then I’m here to help you. But you need to do some work, too. I want you to agree to come here twice a week and do a worksheet in between. You can’t blow off our appointments anymore. And you need to try to talk to me about what’s happened with Colette. Do you think you can do that?” I shrugged, my eyes on the paper. “Frankie, will you please look at me?”
I looked up at him. Behind the awful glasses, his dark eyes were kind, as usual. Gabe is hard to be mad at or disagree with. Do you know adults who aren’t like other adults, who just get you more than normal grown-ups? Gabe is one of those.
“What?” I asked.
“Colette’s Glasgow Coma Scale score is a five,” he said.
“How do you know?”
“Because I know her doctor,” he said.
“You’re probably not supposed to tell me that,” I said. I scratched my head: it itched even though I’d taken a shower that morning.
“Definitely not,” Gabe said, “but I know you do better with facts. I know surprises are very challenging for you. This,” he said, “is not a surprise you need to have.”
“So you’re saying she’s going to die.” I swallowed hard and looked back down at the paper filled with tiny, medium, and huge tornadoes. There were more tornadoes than white space.
The wind blew through the open window and rustled some papers on Gabe’s desk. We sat in silence for seventeen ticks of the noisy clock. I pushed my bangs out of my eyes: they were too long.
