Soulstruck

by Natasha Sinel

  He laughs.

  “That’s exactly what you looked like. Anything I can help with?”

  I try to decide whether he’s being suggestive—like he could help me blow off some steam in another way. Probably not. I hope not, anyway.

  I shake my head no.

  “You sure I can’t give you a ride home?”

  I consider that for a moment. I don’t really have a plan for getting home.

  “I’m heading over to your neighborhood anyway,” he continues. “Erickson’s. You could come with me. If you want. Just a few people. Not a party or anything, just a low-key thing.”

  “Ha ha.” He has to be joking.

  He turns down the music in his car.

  “Sorry,” he says. “That’s too weird?”

  He scratches the back of his head, and when he stops, his hair juts out at odd angles.

  “I’ll drop you at home then?” Sawyer asks.

  Now that I’ve stopped walking, the exhaustion kicks in and I want nothing more than to be driven to the door of my house.

  “Okay,” I say. As I open the passenger car door, he leans over, shoving a few things off the seat and onto the floor.

  His car smells like vanilla. Last summer, he’d given Serena and me a ride home from a beach party, and it had smelled like bonfire and stale beer.

  He starts to drive and a football bobbles back and forth over my feet.

  “You can just toss that into the back seat.”

  The leather is bumpy. It’s not like I’ve never held a football; school, beach, whatever—there were always balls around. But most of them are Nerf or squishy or kid-sized. I’m not sure I’ve actually held a game-size football in my hands. I picture Sawyer, his fingertips pressing into the stitches as he backs up, looking for a teammate to pass to. I try to hold the football up with one hand like he does in games. But it’s too big. It slips out of my hand, bounces on my lap. Sawyer smiles as he reaches over and grabs it. He holds it up in his right hand, palm down, and it’s like he put crazy glue on his hand just before. He drops it behind him and it lands on the back seat.

  He glances at me before turning his eyes back to the road, and I’m sure I blush.

  “When we get to your house, we can have a quick toss, if you want.”

  I hear the smile in his voice, that question mark, like am I making an innuendo? I could be, if you want me to be. But if not, then I’m definitely not. You choose. He’s flexible that way. A few weeks ago, I might have chosen innuendo. But now, I’d just go with straight-up. Sawyer is cute as hell but he isn’t who I want.

  He slows down before Tim Erickson’s house. It’s just a quarter of a mile down the road from mine. There are four cars in his driveway.

  “You sure you don’t want to come?” Sawyer asks. “It’s early. No one’s really here yet. Just a few of the guys—” He notices my sneer. “The good ones, I mean. Not the dickheads who were giving you shit.”

  I almost challenge him on that one—aren’t they all dickheads? But I’d be wrong. Not all of them are. Sawyer isn’t, and neither are the guys he hangs out with most—Jeff, Brad, Erickson.

  “Come have a beer out on the deck. It’s been proven that just one beer consumed in fresh air can ease a great deal of stress.”

  He does his cute little persuasive smile then—the same one he probably uses to get anything he wants. I won’t fall for that, but at the moment, he’s making it sound pretty refreshing. And it’s a nice night. And I need a distraction from my confrontation with Rafe, which hasn’t solved anything and has only left me with more questions.

  “Okay, one beer.”

  “Cool,” he says. “I’ll drive you home whenever you want.”

  I roll my eyes because my house is totally walkable from Erickson’s—I won’t need a ride home. And he knows that.

  Sawyer opens the hatch of his car and hands me a bottle of vodka to carry and then pulls out a case of beer. When we get inside the house, I realize that the four cars outside were misleading. There are at least 15 people, maybe 20. I scowl at Sawyer, but he doesn’t seem to notice. I follow him into the kitchen and put the vodka on the counter. I say hi to Erickson and Jeff as Sawyer drops the beer cans two by two into a cooler filled with ice. While he tells them how he’d found me lurking around town, I assess the scene. Mostly guys. A couple of girls I know from classes. And then I see Serena. A tight, low-cut shirt, stretch jeans, tall boots. She doesn’t see me because she’s walking toward the hallway at the opposite end of the house.

  “This was a mistake,” I say under my breath. Erickson and Jeff have disappeared, so it’s just Sawyer and me again.

  “Too late,” he says. “You’re here. Ready for your deck beer now?”

  He digs to the bottom of the cooler and hands me a cold can.

  I follow him out to the deck.

  THIRTY-TWO

  It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.

  —Ralph Waldo Emerson (writer)

  Sawyer was right. Having a drink outside is nice. The beer is cold and the bubbles pop on my tongue as the cool air tickles the skin on my neck in a pleasing way.

  Just below the deck is a long winding path down to a small pond. Erickson’s house isn’t on the bay side of the road like ours. It’s right on Clover Pond. And it’s one of just a handful of houses with rights to the private pond. I’ve only seen it from the road and always thought it was just a nondescript tiny pond, but from up here on the deck, I can see, even after the sun has set, that it looks like a three-leaf clover and the water is so clean, the shadow of the moon makes it look silver.

  I hear shouting and laughing down at the water. I barely make out shadows of people wobbling around on a floating dock in the middle of the pond.

  “People are swimming?” I ask.

  “Yeah, stupid fucks,” Sawyer says. And he’s right. It’s too cold to swim.

  I sit on a plastic chair that’s meant to look like one of those heavy wooden Adirondack chairs. Two girls are nearby, whispering in hushed tones.

  I hear a few words: “Amherst, Boston U.”

  “You going away to college?” Sawyer asks, perching in front of me on an overturned plant pot.

  I shake my head and finish my beer.

  He reaches into his jacket pocket and pulls out another for me.

  “Thanks.”

  “So you’ll stick around here?” he asks.

  “I don’t know. We moved around so much before we came here, I kind of want to stay put for a while.”

  It’s funny how conversations are so different in the summer than during the school year. No one here talks about school or college during the summer.

  “Home is good,” he says.

  “Yeah.” I think about the garage, my future home. “Home is good.”

  “I want to go to Colorado,” he says.

  “That’s far.”

  “Skiing, snowboarding, beers outside, that’s what I want. And to get out of this small-town, townie-tourist shit.”

  “Seems like you’d be going from one tourist town to another,” I say.

  He looks at me, surprised. “I never thought of it that way.”

  “I didn’t mean to make you rethink your life plan,” I say, and he laughs.

  “Nah,” he says. “Denver’s a city.”

  I nod.

  “I’m out,” he says, holding his beer upside down. “You want another?”

  I shake my head no.

  “Be right back.” He goes inside.

  I listen to the echoing sounds of splashing and laughing and yelling from the pond below.

  And then I hear Jeff’s voice in the kitchen. “You’re so playing with fire bringing Rachel here, dude. Lindsay’s gonna mutilate you.”

  “Shut up,” Sawyer says. “She’s just a friend.”

  “You don’t have to convince me, dude. I don’t care. Linds, though? She might need convincing. Rylin and her are on their way here now. Might want to do
some advance damage control.”

  Sawyer swears.

  And that’s my cue to leave.

  Just as I stand, someone pushes me from the side. Hard. It’s dark and it happens so fast, it takes me a minute to understand that a guy has pushed past me yelling. He’d come from the path below. He’s in underwear and is dripping wet, his feet making slapping sounds on the deck as he makes for the door.

  “Call 9-1-1! Where’s a phone? Someone call 9-1-1!”

  There’s commotion in the house. People move in all directions—going outside to see what’s going on, heading out to leave before the cops come.

  The guy gets to the phone before anyone else and makes the call.

  “Hit his head,” he says. “A lot of blood.” He shouts Erickson’s address.

  “We need towels for Brad,” the guy says. “Lots of towels to stop the bleeding.”

  He looks at me because I’m closest to him. So, I move into action. I run to a hallway where I assume the bedrooms are and find a linen closet. I grab a stack of white towels and run back outside to the deck.

  Sawyer is there now, too. Two guys carry Brad up the path. It’s dark, so I can’t see well, but I can tell that Brad’s head is bleeding heavily.

  The two girls who were talking about college cry, saying “oh my god” under their breath.

  The guys lay Brad down on the deck.

  “Brad!” A girl yells from inside, then runs and gets on her knees next to him.

  I try to reach around her to get a towel under Brad’s head.

  “Katie, move out of the way!” Sawyer says, and she scoots away, sobbing.

  Brad is unconscious and the blood from his head immediately turns the white towel red.

  “Fuck,” I say. My hands are shaking.

  Sawyer takes another towel from me and holds it up against the gash in Brad’s head. His hands are shaking, too.

  “I don’t know what I’m doing,” he murmurs. “When are they getting here? Fuck. Hurry up, you fuckers.”

  I look behind me and see Lindsay has arrived and is at the sliding door, her hands in her hair, her ponytail messed up.

  The guys who carried Brad stand shivering in their underwear, dripping with freezing pond water.

  “Where’s Erickson?” Sawyer shouts. “Someone go find Erickson.”

  Sawyer must see Lindsay standing there but he doesn’t say anything.

  The wet guys go inside.

  I notice Brad is kind of poking out of his underwear, so I throw a towel over his middle.

  Sawyer looks at me.

  “Can you help me put more pressure on?” he says quietly.

  I crouch down and hold my hand over his, pushing the towel tighter to Brad’s head. I wonder why Lindsay isn’t helping. She’s a lifeguard in the summer. She must know what to do. I know nothing.

  “Holy shit!” Tim shouts as he runs outside, shirtless and his pants unbuttoned. Serena follows right behind him looking more disheveled than when I’d seen her walking down that hallway. Serena used to joke about Tim Erickson and his skinny, pale, stoner vibe. Her eyes widen when she sees the whole scene, including me.

  Then there’s commotion from inside and the EMS team pushes through the small crowd gathered at the sliders. The third EMT is Jay. Of course it’s Jay. He works the overnight shift every other Saturday.

  Jay does a quick double-take when he sees me. I don’t even want to imagine what must be going through his head seeing me with my hand on Sawyer Baskin’s, even if we are just trying to save a life.

  One of the EMTs nods at Jay as if to tell him this case is all his, and Jay goes to work.

  “Give me some room, guys,” Jay says gruffly as he looks at Brad’s head and starts pulling things out of the bag he carries, including a flashlight. Sawyer and I stand and move back a couple of feet. I watch Jay’s hands work as he puts gloves on, un-velcroes a blood pressure monitor, rips a bandage open. I have a good view of his face as he works, and even though I know he’s seventeen, he has such an intense look, he could easily be ten years older.

  Sawyer, standing behind me, puts his hand on my shoulder. I flinch slightly since Sawyer and I aren’t friends who touch. And I wonder whether he has blood on his hands and whether it’s on my sweater now. I look at my own hands. In the dark, I see a couple of faint reddish smudges.

  Jay opens a smelling salt under Brad’s nose, and Brad starts to wake up.

  “What happened?” Jay asks. He looks right at me, and then at Sawyer’s hand on my shoulder, and his eyebrows scrunch up.

  I take a step forward, releasing myself from Sawyer’s grip.

  “He fell—” I start to say.

  “Jay?” Brad says.

  “You were unconscious,” Jay says. “You’ll be okay, but you need to stay awake.”

  Lindsay has moved to Sawyer’s side and has her hand on his arm.

  “Do you know what happened?” Jay asks. “What did you hit your head on?”

  Brad mumbles, “I don’t know.”

  “What did he hit his head on?” Jay asks the crowd.

  Nobody answers. It’s quiet while he works for a few more seconds.

  “Somebody answer me. Who saw what happened? What did he hit his head on?”

  Yeah, he definitely seems older. I can’t tell if people aren’t talking because they’re kind of afraid of him or just in shock by the situation.

  “I think it was a rock,” one of the guys in wet underwear finally says. “It was dark, he slipped when he was getting out of the water. It was either a rock or a tree root.”

  Brad reaches up to touch the wound on his head.

  “Don’t touch it,” Jay says to him. “It’s gonna be fine. Here, just tell me what you were doing before you got hurt. You were swimming? What else? What did you do today?”

  The other two EMTs—a man who’s about Mom’s age and a girl who seems to be only a few years older than us—push the stretcher forward, and the three of them roll Brad onto it.

  Afterward, the man nods at Jay, which I can tell means Jay did a good job handling the situation.

  “My mom is going to kill me,” Brad groans. “I’m supposed to be at a movie.”

  Jay stands to take hold of his side of the stretcher. He’s so big. He almost looks like he’s a different species altogether—like everything about him is fifty percent bigger than the rest of humanity. Tall. Thick. Dense. And he’s calm the entire time. All business.

  Then he turns and looks at me. His face is all hard planes, no hint of his dimple. I want to say something but I’m mute.

  And then the three of them carry the stretcher with Brad on it out to the ambulance.

  Tim has his shirt back on and is reassuring the police officer who’d come along with the EMS team that everything is under control, and he promises to have everyone out within fifteen minutes.

  Serena is right next to me now. She leans toward me, her mouth near my ear. “He’s just a rent-a-cop. Erickson knows him, but come on, let’s go.”

  She pulls me by the elbow and leads me in a fast walk down the deck steps and around the back of the house, feeling our way through pine trees in the dark until we get to the road. The silent blue and red flashing of the police car and the ambulance at the Ericksons’ house are behind us.

  We stand in the dark road, both of us out of breath.

  “What the fuck happened?” she asks. Her eyes glitter in the dark.

  Then she scrunches up her nose and leans toward me, like a dog sniffing.

  “Ew, you smell like a brewery,” she says.

  I back away from her.

  “Ew, you hooked up with Tim Erickson,” I say.

  She straightens and for a minute I think she’s going to push me or punch me or something. But then she throws back her head and laughs. Her laugh has always been contagious, so then I’m laughing, too.

  Even as I’m laughing, I’m also praying that this moment will never end.

  But of course the moment has to end. Serena’s phon
e buzzes, and after she checks it, her smile fades.

  “It’s all clear now,” she says.

  I nod.

  “You good?” she asks, and I see in her eyes that she maybe doesn’t hate me.

  I shrug. “You?” I hope she can see that I don’t hate her either. That I would forgive her for leaving me in a millisecond.

  She shrugs, too.

  She’s so familiar, such a part of me. I never wanted to let go of her. I want her back.

  “Maybe we could talk at some point,” I say quietly.

  She nods slowly.

  “Yeah,” she says. “Yeah, okay.”

  She turns and walks back toward the Ericksons’ house, and I walk the other way to my house.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Mothers are all slightly insane.

  —J. D. Salinger (writer)

  After Serena leaves me in the road, I rush home. I need to wash my hands. I know Mom and them are taking the weekend off from planning, so I’m expecting Mom to be in bed or reading on the couch, but as soon as I slide the front door open, she jumps up from a chair at the kitchen table, her hair falling into her eyes.

  “God, Rachel,” she says, a cross between relief and anger in her voice.

  “What? I’m not late,” I say. I don’t really have a curfew, but I never come home after midnight anyway.

  She follows me to the kitchen sink. I start pumping soap onto my hands.

  That’s when she notices the blood.

  “Oh my god! Are you bleeding?”

  “It’s not my blood. I was at Tim Erickson’s and a kid fell and hit his head. I was helping.”

  I start scrubbing my hands, but the water isn’t warm enough yet to get out the dried blood.

  “What? Jesus. Is he okay?”

  “I think so,” I say. “He went to the hospital.”

  Mom sighs loudly. “Okay. I was so worried.”

  “Why? It’s only ten-thirty.”

  “Let’s talk,” Mom says. “I’ve been calling you.”

  “Sorry,” I say. “I guess my ringer’s off. I saw Sawyer in town and I went to Tim’s with him.”

  My hands are pretty clean now, so I turn off the water and grab a dishtowel to dry them.

  “Rafe called,” she says.