by Lily White
Delilah cherished her brother, and I believed he cherished her, too. That’s why I hated it when Jack or the other players on the team suggested he was a freak who abused her. None of them had enough integrity to stick up for the female members of their family. None of them cared much about the lives and hearts of any of the girls they knew. Who were they to judge?
“No, Jack. I don’t have thing for Holden,” I lied. Playing the part was important, especially now as Jack’s foot was heavier on the gas pedal. The car’s engine grew louder, the curves coming up dangerous at the speed we were traveling. Ice glistened on the road, small patches that could catch a tire and cause Jack to lose control. “Please slow down,” I murmured.
He sped up instead, his eyes darting between the road and me. “Just be honest, Michaela. Tell me the truth that you want to get boned by a freak.”
Anger filtered through me, muted by fear as he took the curves without concern for the weather. I had to calm him down before he caused an accident. “Holden is gross, Jack. You know that, so please calm down. He’s a disgusting freak who deserved to get expelled from school. Just look at what he did to your nose.”
I’d inwardly cheered when Holden took that last shot at Jack in the cafeteria, but I wouldn’t let a single soul know it.
As we took another curve, a dark mass was visible in the distance. Once Jack’s headlights reached to illuminate the mass, I realized it was a broken down car. A person climbed out of the driver’s seat, kicked the tires a few times before lifting the hood to release the smoke from its engine. Both Jack and I recognized who the person was at the same time. Jack smiled and my heart sank into my stomach.
“Speaking of freaks,” Jack murmured, his fingers tightening over the steering wheel as his foot sank heavier on the gas pedal.
“Slow down, Jack. I mean it!”
Laughter poured over his lips, his eyes locked to Holden where he stood staring down at the engine of his car. “I’m just going to scare him. The freak deserves it after breaking my nose.”
“Jack! Slow down!” My fingers tightened over the handle of the door, my heart thumping painfully beneath my ribs as the engine roared. “Please slow down!”
“I’m just going to kick up some sludge and snow as we pass him. Shut up and let me drive.”
“Jack!”
My scream tore through the still night air, the ice that caught Jack’s tire spinning the car until the crunch of metal and sharp tinkle of breaking glass were the only sounds I could hear. My body was jostled around the interior of Jack’s car, pain shooting down my neck and spine, my eyes closing as we continued sliding over ice and snow.
When we stopped, I didn’t want to open my eyes again, but I forced them apart regardless, to see that Holden’s car had been shoved further along the shoulder, to see Holden’s legs hanging limp from beneath the hood of his car.
I couldn’t sit up, couldn’t move beneath the seatbelt to get a better look at Holden. The only thing I could do was turn my head to see Jack’s body leaning forward against the steering wheel, his skin split from the glass that shattered, his eyes closed from where he was knocked out by the impact of his head against the wheel.
A scream tore from my throat, never ending until sirens cut through the night, the flash of emergency lights brightening the scene around us to reveal that Holden was still pinned between the vehicles, his upper body lost beneath the twisted hood of his car.
CHAPTER FOUR
DELILAH
When people throw out words like black and white, angry or sad, large or small, I’m not sure I envision the same meaning as the majority of society.
Not with all of the words, at least. Not after the meanings he taught me.
Perhaps if I hadn’t been raised with a unique soul like my brother, I would have seen things the same way, believed the same way, idolized and coveted the same way as every poor person that came before me. But it’s impossible to see the world the same when you’ve been shown how reality and circumstances always come down to a person’s perspective.
Black isn’t black when it comes in shades. Angry isn’t angry when it can grow into fury or rage. Large and small don’t simply mean the physical size of a person or object, they also describe the magnitude of what’s inside them.
My freshman year of high school was the worst for me, the feeling of being lost, of being insignificant, of not being seen by my classmates and peers because I didn’t have what they had, or very much of anything to offer them. I had me. I had my friendship. I had a listening ear and a friendly smile. I had the small things in life, the forgettable, the cheap or free. Eventually, I made a few friends, girls who only gave me a chance because they felt sorry for me, but it was like a domino effect. Once they spoke to me, somebody else did, and before too long, I wasn’t an outcast anymore, a girl forced to be alone because she wasn’t worth it.
The original friends - those girls who did something nice because they felt sorry for me - they didn’t like my tenuous popularity. They turned on me, and they were vicious.
Within a week, I was a pariah at Tranquil Falls High, an untouchable to anyone who didn’t want to be cast out themselves. I don’t know what those girls said about me because no one would tell me, and I broke down as soon as I got home, my tears a lazy river of pain that would never stop flowing.
Holden - my brother, my protector, my rock - he was the one who fixed me.
He appeared in my doorway with his standard dark presence, the black hair and black clothes hiding the light that existed inside. It drove me nuts to see him purposely exclude himself, it angered me to see him take the potential of being a big man on campus and so carelessly crush it beneath his boot. He had no concern for anything or anybody.
Anybody, except me.
As soon as he saw the tears, the corners of his mouth tipped down, his eyes softening with genuine sympathy. He cared when nobody else did, and I repaid him for that steadfast devotion by screaming at him and calling him a freak. By calling him crazy.
Yes, even me. His own sister.
Rejecting Holden ensured you were accepted in school because people love to join forces in hate, as if having the biggest team somehow validates your ugly opinion. I’d refused to reject him before that moment, but I was so desperate to fit in that the pressure of it all broke me.
Holden had every right to hate me, and I didn’t miss the sharp slice of pain cutting through him, the flash of betrayal behind his blue eyes. Walking toward me instead, Holden took me in his arms, rested his chin on the top of my head and held me while I cried and raged. My fists beat on his chest, my feet kicked at his shins, but he held on.
It’s okay, Deli. I already knew this would happen. I knew this was coming.
Having experienced high school already, Holden knew the kids would judge me, he knew they would hurt me because they’d already tried to hurt him. Sitting me down on the side of my bed, he knelt in front of me and talked about being large and small. At first I didn’t understand, but that’s how it was with Holden. He didn’t think like everybody else.
“Stop being small, Del. You’re letting them crush you by taking away your size, they’re making you small like them. Just chipping away until there’s nothing left of you.”
My brows had pulled together, my mind trying to digest what he was saying to me. I was a petite girl, five foot two and didn’t weigh a hundred pounds soaking wet. “I don’t know what you’re saying. I can’t grow bigger.”
He laughed. Holden always had the best laugh. It surrounded you and hugged you. Comforted you if you felt alone.
“I don’t mean large like that. These wealthy kids think they’re large. They think they’re more valuable, more worthy, and more entitled. But the truth is that most of those kids are small. They’re empty. They’ve had it so easy that there aren’t enough memories and tragedies and victories inside them to fill them and make them bigger. They see you walk by and you shine. You have so many victories that you are large. You’
re genuine so you overshadow them. They don’t have what it takes to get large, so to win against you, they have to steal your size, make you small like they are. But they’ll never roar as loud as you can, their lives aren’t as magnificent, large and loud.”
His speech helped me get through that day, but there was something I knew that he didn’t:
Holden was the one who was large. He was the good person. The strong person. Holden didn’t have to make other people small so he could be larger than them.
But he wasn’t large now. Not in a hospital bed with a net of small tubes running everywhere, with a thick one running down his throat, with his head shaved and bandaged, his eyes closed, his life silent. This wasn’t right, wasn’t real. Holden should have been roaring instead of quiet because Holden was never small - he was large.
“Where are the doctors? I want to know what’s wrong with my son. Is there anybody here who can help me?”
Tears burst from my eyes as my dad paced and complained at the end of the bed. My crying made my mom cry harder, her hands fluttering over Holden’s face too afraid to touch anything. Taking his hand, I was careful not to touch the IV. His fingers were limp and lifeless.
“Can I please talk to someone who can tell me about my son?”
Dad was angry, every festering drop of it directed at himself. He blamed the fight on Holden’s accident, believed that if he hadn’t kicked Holden out, we wouldn’t be here now. He was right. But that didn’t make the accident, itself, his fault.
Deep down, in a place I didn’t want to admit was there, I blamed my parents for this, too. I blamed my dad for hurting Holden. I blamed my mom for stopping me when I tried to chase him and bring him back inside. I’d broken free of her and reached the door by the time his taillights were blazing red down the road. “Holden, come back!”
He kept going.
The phone was ringing and a police officer was knocking on the door an hour later.
The hospital was twenty minutes outside of Tranquil Falls in a larger town that was more of a city. When we arrived, I wanted to run to my brother, to feel his warm hands in mine, to see him wink to tell me he would always be all right. But he wasn’t, not this time. I didn’t know that for four long hours. He was in surgery when we’d arrived. He was in a coma. There was swelling on his brain and they didn’t know when, or if, he would wake up.
How do you look at a person who had always been your superhero and not shatter to see them broken?
So while my father raged at himself, at the hospital staff, at anything or anyone because the anger and guilt were too powerful to hold inside, Holden lay quietly. Tranquil Falls had stolen his size. They couldn’t be as large as him, so in their hate, they’d made him small like them.
I understood it now, saw it so clearly it might as well have been one of Holden’s beautiful paintings staring me in the face. The naked, raw truth revealing the way Holden looked at life, the way we would all look at life, if we weren’t so damn small.
All three of us had stayed in his room that night, my mom and I taking turns talking to him, hopeful that our voices would bring him back to us, would show him that it was safe, that nobody could hurt him while we became the superheroes.
Holden didn’t wake up at first, he stayed in his dark space for over a week. I was there every day. I missed my last week of school before winter break because I fought tooth and nail to convince my parents I needed to be by his side when he first woke up again.
Sitting beside him, day after day, hour after hour, I didn’t care about what was occurring outside the room, didn’t want to hear the details of the accident, didn’t care that my father lost his job because it had been his employer’s son that almost ruined my brother. My father had demanded the medical bills be paid by the Thorne family, and they were, but my father would never be allowed to return to work again.
I didn’t care what happened to Jack, didn’t care that Michaela felt so bad that she’d begged to be allowed to see Holden at the hospital when she was here visiting Jack.
She was small. Holden was right about that, and beside his bed I wouldn’t let a single small person come into the room for fear they would scrape away what was left of him so that they could win.
I became large so I could protect him.
Nine days after the accident, nine long days that made me feel like life would end, Holden opened his eyes. I’d jumped up to see him staring at the ceiling. I’d whispered his name. I’d squeezed his hand. I’d danced inside myself to discover that Tranquil Falls hadn’t destroyed him.
But he wasn’t the same.
The doctors said it would take time. It would take rehab and a bunch of testing to determine the extent of permanent damage. But I didn’t care if he wasn’t exactly who he’d been before the accident. I didn’t care if it would take years before he was whole again. Because that’s the other truth about people who are large. No matter what happens, no matter how much you whittle them down, they will grow large again.
Holden wouldn’t be contained by prognosis or diagnosis. He wouldn’t be relegated to some box where strangers told him if he would succeed. I knew my brother well enough to know that the light inside him was so warm and pure, it would cure all the damage inside him.
Confusion held him firmly in the first days he was awake, but eventually he was smiling again, laughing and making jokes. My parents had spoken to him and cried, my father apologizing for every mean word he’d said, and Holden had forgiven him.
That’s what large people do. They’re so big and so deep and so wonderful that grudges and resentment and anything deemed ugly are crushed beneath the weight of their virtue.
Three weeks out, and my brother was my brother again. Until that night. The last night. The night after we had been told that Holden would recover fully.
We were eating dinner at the kitchen table, the winter wind outside howling its discontent, when the phone rang from where it hung on the kitchen wall, a corded device Holden and I both had called ancient.
Normally, Mom would ignore the call if we were eating dinner, but with Holden at the hospital still, she’d jumped up, her fingers had tightened over the receiver, the color draining from her face in response to what she was hearing.
Holden had a seizure. A full one, the nurse had said. He’d stopped breathing, he’d bitten his tongue, he hadn’t needed resuscitation, but the event was scary enough that the hospital felt the need to call.
They’d told us to wait.
They’d said there was no rush.
But when it comes to family, when it comes to someone you love being in pain, there is always the need to drop what you’re doing and run to be beside them.
History has a screwed up way of repeating itself. Just like fear has a way of reviving intuition while panic sweeps in to prevent you from hearing what intuition has to say.
Maybe we should have sat back down to finish our meal. Maybe we should have waited an hour, a minute, five seconds before grabbing our coats and racing out the door. Maybe we shouldn’t have left our plates full of food sitting on the table for when we returned.
We would never return.
Not the same.
Not as the people we had been before tragedy struck.
Maybe is a word every person can regret for the rest of their natural life. It’s a heavy word filled with vacillation and indecision, of what could have been and what will never be. It’s another word I’m sure Holden would have given a new definition if circumstances had been different.
But maybe was what we were left with after jumping in the car to rush to my brother.
Maybe.
And I love you.
I’m sorry.
And goodbye.
CHAPTER FIVE
HOLDEN
Being sick was a lesson in patience. Not sick, I guess, but injured. The swelling on my brain had caused a small amount of damage, the pressure of the blood killing off a few brain cells I guess I didn’t need that much because I didn
’t feel different.
The doctors had explained to me what injuries the accident caused, the bruises and bumps on my body that were nothing compared to my head. They’d said I was lucky for surviving an accident as bad as the one Jack caused. Anger had filtered through me to know it was his car that came careening at full speed in my direction despite the inclement threat of weather.
Regardless, I was the same. I was healing and getting better. But then everything went black. I don’t remember the seizure. I just knew that in one minute I was sitting on my bed wondering when they would finally release me, and in the next I was surrounded by nurses in colorful scrubs and concerned doctors in white coats.
It’s fortunate how the brain protects you from remembering the pain of your body when everything threatens to shut down.
I wish it would have protected me from remembering what came next.
Dr. Lucas Silva was a good guy, not too old for being a neurologist, with just a tinge of silver peppering the brown hair at his temples. He had a wife and three daughters, all of which were older than me, two of whom were becoming doctors like him, while the third wanted to be a stay at home mom. We’d spent a lot of time talking to each other over the weeks that I’d been stuck in bed, several weeks that made him believe he should be the person to tell me.
When he walked into my room, I didn’t even realize it had been twelve hours since I’d had the seizure, and I hadn’t seen or heard from my family. Seizures can do that to you, leave you confused and struggling with the concept of time. Dr. Silva told me the confusion was normal. It was everything else he told me that wasn’t.
“Hey, Holden. How are you feeling?”
Wrestling my way out from under the covers, the tubes and hoses and monitors, I smiled as the good doctor grabbed a seat and dragged it to sit beside my bed. Normally, he wore a smile, was always ready with a corny dad joke or some other ridiculous comment that would make me grin. However, this moment was anything but normal.
