by Emery Lord
My dad had swept in, helped my mom and me communicate, and then ducked back out. As much as I loved my own alone time, I imagined him returning to his empty apartment with sadness.
“Mom?” I asked, voice softer now. “Am I the reason he hasn’t moved back in?”
She tilted her head, just a degree or two, like the question surprised her.
“No, honey,” she said. “I’m the reason he hasn’t.”
I fiddled with the ends of my hair, longer now than it had ever been. “So, it’s not because I took a while to get on board?”
My mom brushed back the wide-barrel waves I wished I’d inherited. “No. I have to think about boundaries—yours and Cameron’s, of course. But mine, too.”
“Well, I’d understand if you wanted him here more often, you know? Now that he’s teaching.” I wanted him here more. I wanted to see them both as much as I could before college. But I couldn’t be a factor in their cohabitation. If it blew up, I’d blame myself.
She twisted my Grammy’s wedding ring, a simple gold band she’d taken to wearing on her right hand. “I’m trying to do the right thing for everyone.”
“I know,” I said. Then, nodding to the ring, I added, “I miss her.”
“Me too.” She glanced up, a half smile lifting one cheek. “She’d have told me to let you go on the trip.”
“Yeah. The whole ‘live your life’ thing.”
“No!” She laughed, incredulous. “Because she knew from experience that if you say no too often, your teen daughter will lash out in rebellion.”
My mom didn’t have a sister, but surely she didn’t mean … “You?”
“I have to save some stories for when you’re older.” She turned away, leaving me with that cliff-hanger.
“Hey, Mom?” I said, before she’d left the room. “Thanks for saying yes.”
Once out the door, she called back, “I said tentative yes.”
I stood from my bed and danced around in a circle, arms raised.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
I worked the Saturday late shift, my mom’s least favorite of my work obligations. Movies started until eleven p.m., so I wasn’t walking out to the parking lot with Hunter until well after midnight.
“Good luck at your fall baseball game on Monday!” I called to him.
He laughed. “You can just call it fall ball! But thanks, Hancock.”
Oakhurst was quiet this time of night, only a few bars open now. By day, the intersection outside the theater swarmed—clogged with cars, backed up from the next light near the highway. Now, though, no one. I cruised to a stop at the red light. Put on my indicator and used that moment to click on the radio. When the light changed, blazing green against the black sky, I eased onto the gas and made my turn … only to be pushed from somewhere, so hard that I wrenched back with a gasping oof.
A crunching noise echoed in my ears and, oh God, it was my car. Skidding, skidding. Had I braked on instinct? Had I run into something?
The base of my skull sang against the headrest. I was grasping the steering wheel, then my own chest, my throat, my thighs. I’m here, I’m here. Was I dead? Would I know if I was?
I stared out the windshield, where a signpost of some sort bent over the hood of my car. But I wouldn’t have just randomly hit it. My rearview showed a black truck I didn’t recognize, sideways across the lanes behind me.
“Paige!” A voice roared it. Familiar. Once, again.
I blinked up at the window. Hunter’s face appeared, ashen in watery streetlight.
“Oh God. Okay. You okay?” He pulled the door open and crouched down to me.
Hunter. Oh, good. Hunter. Nice. Safe. And talking to me, so probably I was alive.
“I … think so?” My voice sounded strange, as if I were hearing it underwater. “Did that truck hit me?”
“Yeah. Piece of shit ran the red—I saw it. Does anything hurt?”
My limbs felt cold, but okay. I wiggled my toes.
“No,” I said. My thighs ached, for some reason, and my chest hurt from how hard my heart was beating. I glanced around. Someone was hurrying toward us—a middle-aged lady who had pulled her car over. Cell phone to her ear.
“Let me help you get out, okay?” Hunter said. “We should get to the sidewalk.”
Suddenly, nothing in the world seemed more important than exiting the car. My mind played action movie sequences of cars blowing up, glorious and terrible. I tried to unbuckle myself, struggling with my visibly shaking hands. Hunter undid the seat belt, and I let him help me out.
“I’ve gotcha. Good. Nothing hurting still?”
I shook my head, though my legs felt gelatinous. He braced his arm around my waist, guiding me.
The woman reached us and asked if I was okay. I heard my voice say yes. She’d already called the cops. Cops. Huh.
I could hear a voice nearby repeating, “Oh my God, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.” The voice kept cracking, obviously crying. Was I hurt?
“Could you please be sorry by shutting the fuck up?” Hunter called. I peered at Hunter’s wrathful face. He’s yelling at the person who hit me. Someone hit me.
Hunter eased me down to the curb, and only then did I have a full view of the car.
My car. My dad’s car. The one he used to pick me up from school in. Before I was old enough to sit in the front seat, let alone drive it. The steering wheel I gripped as I got my learner’s permit.
Crumpled, the back smashed.
I had been in there.
I lurched forward a bit, thinking I’d vomit, but all that came out was a choked gasp, then another. Tears dribbled out as I tried to slow my breathing. I could so easily be dead—until right now, I’d thought I might be.
“I’ve got ya,” Hunter said. “I’ve got ya.”
His arm, wrapped around me tightly, kept me earthbound. Two minutes ago, I lived in a different world. Now, I was someone who had been in an accident, I did not have a functional car anymore, and the fact that I was alive did not feel like a given. My mind couldn’t grip those facts, so it tried to float away, above the scene like a loose balloon. When the cop crouched down to ask some questions, Hunter fielded the logistical ones, his voice calm while my ears rang like a bell’s chime, sustained on and on and on. I longed to touch the metal, to make the reverberation stop.
“Miss?” the cop was saying. Her hair was parted down the center, combed back neatly. “Have you texted a parent or guardian?”
I blinked up at her. “Not yet.”
“The other party has insurance. He’s admitted fault. Those are good things.”
Choppy film reel: pulling my phone from my tux pocket, staring down at the screen. Hunter gently suggesting I start by saying, “I’m fine.” Dialing my dad, whose apartment was closer than home. I spoke to him calmly, downplayed it as a fender bender, and, all the while, felt separated from my trembling body. While we waited, I shivered against the cold—smooth-talking autumn passing the nights on to winter. Hunter got a blanket from the back of his car, thick cotton with his baseball number stitched in the corner.
I studied the asphalt of the road, the cracks and gravel bits unnoticeable except up close.
“Are you okay?” Hunter asked. “Honestly, Hancock. You can say no.”
“I’m shaken up,” I said. “But I think that’s all.”
The ambulance pulled up, its siren woop-wooping, and all I wanted was my bed and my parents. I wanted to go to sleep. I wanted this to be a bad dream. My dad arrived in flannel pajama pants and his navy gym sneakers, frazzled and hurrying. What a surrealist scene. Regular objects—and time—gone slippery, half melted like in a Dalí painting. Hunter Chen beside me. The EMT, who cleared me but insisted my dad watch for concussion symptoms. Near a stoplight we’d driven through a thousand times. I could have died right here. In my goddamn tux. How ridiculous. How incredibly stupid and ridiculous.
“Dad,” I said, touching his arm. He looked ready to cry. The cop had said something to him about a tow
truck, and I wanted to go home more than I had ever wanted anything. “I’m really fine.”
“Oh, I know, kid.” He smoothed my hair, staring at me like I’d disappear if he blinked.
“Did you tell Mom?”
“I did, yes.” It was a testament to him, really, that she hadn’t already showed up, frantic. “I’m gonna take you home to her now. We’ve gotta keep you awake for a bit, watch for vomiting, confusion. That kind of thing.”
He thanked Hunter, who looked stricken, reluctant to part ways.
“Text me tomorrow, Hancock. Swear?”
“I will.”
My dad wrapped an arm around me, like a bodyguard hurrying a celebrity through paparazzi swarms. I buckled myself into the passenger’s seat, hands shaking. I’d seen it now, the way the metal could scrunch in like a wad of paper. I closed my eyes, pretending I was anywhere else, and my dad said, “Eyes open, kid. I’ve gotta know that you’re awake.”
At home, my mom kept stroking my cheek and murmuring that it would be okay. After being her daughter for seventeen years, I knew she was repeating this mantra to soothe herself as much as me. When they finally let me fall asleep, I drifted off to her voice: I’m just gonna grab another blanket from the hallway closet. I’ll get you a glass of water in case you feel thirsty. Is it warm enough? Let’s check the thermostat. Everything’s going to be fine.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
For the next week, I felt achy and detached. An accident that happened in four seconds was taking days to sink in. I stayed quiet, mostly, as my dad handled the car fiasco—unsalvageable, with meager insurance money for its supposed worth. My mom handled the hovering, offering me food constantly and inexplicably taking my temperature. Her fretful energy was matched only by Max, who all but searched me for dents. When his eyes met mine, I suspected him of checking my pupils for dilation—a doctor’s son to his core.
“You still feel okay? No headaches?” Max asked the next weekend, stretched out on the couch. He brushed my bangs aside.
“No headaches,” I promised. “I’m fine.”
Physically, anyway.
After Aaron died, I spent months—and a year of therapy—trying to tend my scars. Not until last year did I finally internalize that not every good thing gets ripped away. But somewhere in that healing, I’d forgotten what it felt like when you’ve seen the truth: everything can be over in an instant.
In my waking hours, I helplessly played out imaginings of my loved ones gone, the phone calls to tell me, the sink-to-my-knees aftermath. But at night, for the first time in months, I dreamed of drowning. It began with my feet planted on the bottom of a pool. I looked up at sunlight breaking through at the water’s surface—all I had to do was push off the concrete floor and propel myself upward. But when I tried to flex my feet, they didn’t move, two hinges rusted shut. I was stuck, and then thrashing, and awake. Clammy and panting from terror, from relief.
My body protected me by resisting sleep. I imagined slumber like a black sky, polka-dotted with stars. On a rare good night, I could tip my mind backward into that space and float. But more and more often, I chased slumber, pounding on every door in the corridor. I stopped drinking caffeine in the afternoon, I counted backward, I downloaded a meditation app.
I used my post-midnight time to work. I decided two of my portfolio pieces were done, and I finally banged out a draft of my Biggest Challenge essay. My brain is a little house, humble but beloved. The dwelling of my memories (flashes of my grandmother before her hair went gray), my knowledge (the quadratic formula and every Greek god from Achelous to Zeus), and my language function (perspicacious, in my opinion). But my brain has a panic button, and I don’t seem to be in charge of when it is triggered. That has been—since my earliest memories, to the best of my knowledge, and in the simplest terms I know—my biggest challenge.
“Look at you, all decisive,” Maeve said, bottom lip out in an impressed pout. “I like it. But how will you end it?”
“Hmm. I guess by saying that it’s not all bad? When I can harness the anxiety, I’m exceptionally efficient? And constant worry helps me anticipate problems. Makes me empathetic, I think?”
“No, not a pro column,” she said. “A conclusion. What’s the end of the narrative arc?”
Ha. Well. Backsliding into nightmares and even daymares, horrible sights flashing before my eyes out of nowhere, in class, at work. “I’ll think about that.”
“Good.” She spun around, lying on her stomach with socked feet swaying. “I’m almost done with USC’s writing supplement. But to actually press send … it’s feeling real.”
I nodded. God, I was so ready to have this all over with. To enjoy my senior year the way it was meant to be—late nights, small mistakes. Leaving it all on the field, as Hunter would say. It felt like I’d been old for half my life, and I was running out of time to try being young.
“Max’s applications going okay?” she asked.
“Yeah, but it’s a lot. Like, ten schools.”
“Anywhere near us?” Maeve was applying to a few other Cali schools, but she didn’t really acknowledge options beyond our top three.
“Uh, yeah. Reach schools. But yeah.” I fought the embarrassment, the worry that I sounded like a lovestruck ballad on lite radio.
“He better not distract you from writing,” she said, intending to joke, I knew. “You’re going to be very busy taking over the cinematic world with me.”
Before that stupid driver decided to text his way through a red light, I’d experienced my application deadline like a large countdown clock pointed directly at me. I could feel the seconds ticking down. Now, I wanted the weightlessness of sending it, gone, done. If that driver had hit me at a slightly different angle or a little faster, would I have died thinking Oh no, my last pass on that character sketch? No way. I wanted to rip up the HOMEWORK card, and SCHOOL and COLLEGE APPLICATIONS and WORK, too, while I was at it. I wanted sleep and Max and my friends.
During the week, Tessa drove me to school and dropped me off at Cin 12 after; Hunter drove me home, with my parents or Max occasionally picking me up. I felt like a child and also happy to be ferried around, safe. Safer, anyway. But on Sunday, my dad offered his car for my afternoon shift.
“Are you sure?” I’d already changed into my tux, already grabbed my purse.
“Yeah,” he said. “Your mom and I are taking her car to the antique mall. As long as you feel okay being behind the wheel?”
“Yeah,” I said, with no idea if that was true.
But driving again felt surprisingly comfortable. I’d somehow pushed past the anxiety and into a type of who cares anyway confidence. If I could be plowed over at any point, might as well enjoy my life—enjoy driving, even.
At work, Donna let me leave early, which I would have otherwise declined. But some spare time, during which parents would not expect me home … that, I couldn’t turn down.
The most direct path to Max’s house was, of course, through the theater’s big intersection. I idled, waiting for the light to turn as it had that night, and the accident played out like celluloid film. Heat slithered up my spine, panic giving me tunnel vision. But with no cars behind me, I could back up, away from the intersection. I licked my lips, which had gone dry, and I took the back way, heart galumphing.
Max answered the door in a washed-to-gray fandom T-shirt, his preferred weekend wear. “Aw, where’s the tux?”
I made a face at him, grateful to my last-week self for stuffing a change of clothes in my work locker. “What are you up to?”
“I was … doing something productive. Definitely not playing video games.”
“Can I play, too?”
He waited for the punch line. After months of demurring to almost every activity that wasn’t on the List or part of schoolwork, I couldn’t blame him for his surprise. “Oh my God, yes. Definitely yes.”
“Are there any games where I can have a sword?” I asked, and he laughed. We holed up in the basement, where it beca
me clear I had no hidden talent for virtual-weapon-wielding. But it felt good to try, to swing and jab and not really hurt anything.
“Yes!” Max said as I successfully hit a combo of buttons he’d coached me on. “You got him.”
The screen danced with some kind of digital victory, then transitioned to stats for the next level.
“Hey,” I said. I was sitting on the floor beside him, our backs leaned against the couch. Late last night, when I’d been imagining my untimely death, I thought back over the past months with Max. I’d held my hands at my sides to keep myself from texting him at two a.m. “I love you, you know that?”
Max peered at me, puzzled by my drop into seriousness. “Yeah, I love you, too.”
I turned back to the screen, but Max tugged my sleeve. “How’re you feeling about college stuff?”
“Um, pretty good, actually! For once.” My college choice wasn’t life or death—not even close. And with that anxiety static quieted, I could finally feel excitement again, and the privilege of having a choice at all. “I’ve gone from IU as a safe choice to one I’d be really happy about, I think. I’m glad I went back with Morgan, because something connected. How ’bout you?”
“You know. Fine.” He rubbed a spot over his eyebrow.
“Oh no,” I said, sitting up a little. Was my worry contagious, passed to Max right as I got a reprieve from it? “I thought your Northwestern visit went well.”
Maybe this was it: the moment we revisited the whole Columbia and Caltech thing. In light of the car accident, it just didn’t seem to matter. Max could apply wherever he wanted, and we’d see what happened.
“It did,” he said. “But my mom and I got to talking about my dad, obviously.”
His dad? I shook my head, as that did not seem obvious to me at all. I knew nothing about Max’s dad, and certainly hadn’t expected him to come up right now. He and Max’s mom were college sweethearts when she got pregnant with Max; that was the only information I had.
“He lives in Chicago,” Max said.
“Oh. Okay. Did you … see him?”
