The Window

by Amelia Brunskill

  Charlie’s eyes flickered between me and Mona, like he was trying to assess how to turn this around. It was too late, though, because I saw it like a mirage forming in the air between us: Charlie carrying Mona onto the football field, her head swung back, her eyes at half-mast. His words to Brian played themselves back to me: I barely saw you when you guys were together. You’re better off without her.

  I felt sick, a sharp nausea building inside me, and my fingers loosened on the flasks.

  Mona looked away from Charlie and turned to me. Her body was shaking but her voice remained steady.

  “Come on, Jess,” she said. “Let’s go. We’ll tell everyone everything—everything he did to Anna, everything he did to me. If it’s all out there, then the police will have to do something this time. They’ll have to test his flasks, find the drugs. There’s two of us who know now, and we have proof. We can do this together.”

  Something deep inside me unknotted when she said that. I didn’t trust myself to respond out loud, so I nodded and took a step toward her.

  It was then that Charlie lunged at me, grasping at the flasks.

  He was fast, and I was slow to react, only twisting to the side at the last minute. He collided with the left side of my body, knocking me to the asphalt so hard it forced a gasp from the back of my throat.

  I managed to keep one of the flasks held tight against my chest, but the other one, the one with the red dot, the one he stored deep under the seat of his car, escaped from my grasp. I watch it bounce and then spin away.

  At first, it looked like the cap had held tight, but then a puddle began to form underneath it.

  Charlie reached over me to grab it, so I pulled back and elbowed him in the mouth. He reared away, clutching his mouth and screaming in pain, and I stretched and grabbed hold of the flask.

  Mona was yelling, and I could see her pulling at Charlie. He was much bigger than her, though, and I knew she wouldn’t be able to hold him for long. We won’t be able to prove it, I thought in a panic. They won’t have to listen. Not if there’s nothing for them to test, not if he gets to the flask and dumps it all out. He’ll lie, and he’ll get away with it. That’s what he does.

  I had to save it.

  So as he began to reach forward again, I kicked out at him to buy myself a few more seconds, to get him to rear back for just enough time.

  Just enough time for me to tilt back my head, swing the flask back, and down every last drop.

  Just enough time to make my body the proof, my body the vessel.

  Lily texted me just now. The plans have changed—Charlie is insisting that he and Brian have a drink with us, but she’ll drop me off at Nick’s after. That’s not what I want, but I can hold out a little longer—a short delay shouldn’t change anything.

  SOMETIMES TIME MOVES LIKE A movie, a continuous shot. Other times, it moves like a slideshow, a series of distinct separate moments.

  And after I drank from the flask, each moment was a freeze-frame, something I was watching from outside myself, sharper and more real than reality had ever been before.

  Charlie, his face contorted and purple with rage, his foot raised to kick me in the ribs.

  Mona’s mouth open in a scream as she punched out at Charlie.

  Charlie shoving her away.

  The blow from Charlie’s foot that connected with my face, the blood rushing into my mouth.

  I watched it all, tasted the blood, felt the impact. It felt so very far away. Like it was receding into the distance, like it would all soon disappear. Like I would soon disappear. And I closed my eyes and curled up tight, readying myself to go.

  It was okay, I thought, even as I began to slip away.

  I’d been so tired, and maybe now I’d have a chance to rest.

  And the last thing I registered, before everything went still, was that in the far distance there was a sound not unlike sirens.

  I’m starting to get nervous. Or maybe I’m excited. I’m not sure.

  All I really know is that in the morning, I’ll be another person again. Even if it doesn’t work out with Nick, the photo will be gone and I’ll be different again. I’ll be out of the well.

  In the morning, it will all be in the past.

  WE’RE LYING TOGETHER ON THE bottom bunk. Her hair is in my face, but I don’t mind. Her hair is the same as mine, after all. The exact same.

  “The apples were red this time,” I tell her. “Red with flecks of yellow and green.”

  “And what were you reading?”

  I like how she always asks, always acts like these details interest her. So little varies, there’s not much to report otherwise.

  I close my eyes, try to think back. It’s a blank. “I don’t remember. You were reading Shakespeare, though.”

  “Which play?”

  I close my eyes again. This I can see. Her sitting across from me, the cover of what she was reading—a girl on a balcony, a boy waiting for her below. “Romeo and Juliet.”

  “Next time you should make it a happier one, a comedy.”

  I smile and shake my head, my cheek pressing against the warm pillow. “I can’t control it. If I could, then I’d dream something more interesting to begin with.”

  “Maybe you could control the details, though. If you tried. If you tried hard enough.”

  She sounds sad. I don’t understand why.

  “I’ll try,” I say, because I don’t want her to sound sad anymore. “It may not work, but I’ll try.”

  “Okay.” She pauses. “Did you really have to drink all of it?”

  I don’t know what she means. “I didn’t drink anything. It was just apples. Just books and apples and us all in the living room. Same as always.”

  “Jess.”

  “Same as always. I promise.” I try to laugh, try to show her that it’s okay. That she doesn’t need to be sad anymore. The laugh doesn’t come out right. It sounds more like a sob.

  “Jess.”

  I shake my head. The pillow feels colder this time. “Come on, tell me about your dreams. They’ll be better than mine.”

  “I can’t. I’m sorry.”

  “Please,” I say.

  “No, I have to get up now.” And she begins to sit up, to move away.

  “I’ll come with you.” I start to move, to follow her, but she shakes her head.

  “No. You have to stay.”

  “I don’t want to stay here by myself. I want to come with you.”

  “I’m so sorry, Jess,” she tells me, her voice so quiet that I have to hold my breath to hear her. “But I can’t let you do that.”

  I know you probably won’t have heard any of this. That you’re probably fast asleep.

  That’s okay.

  In the morning, I’ll tell you everything.

  EVEN WITHOUT OPENING MY EYES, I knew it was light outside. I must have overslept, I thought with a jolt. I must have slept through my alarm. I struggled to wake up fully, to get moving, but I found it surprisingly hard to surface. Things were off, somehow.

  I tried to concentrate, to pinpoint what was different. The first thing I noticed was the throbbing pain in my hand. The second thing I noticed was that I had my arm wrapped around something large and warm. This was confusing, so without opening my eyes, I used my undamaged hand to poke it.

  The thing jerked away. “Ow,” it said. “That hurt.”

  I opened my eyes. “Sarah?”

  “The one and only,” she said. She sat up and stretched. “Oh, yes. God, it feels good to move. You were latched on like a damn spider monkey.”

  “Why are you sleeping in my bed?” I asked her. My voice came out rough and gravelly.

  “We’re not in your bed, Jess.”

  This made no sense, so I raised myself up on my elbows as best I could and glanced around.

 
Huh. She was right. This was most definitely not my bed, or even my bedroom.

  “Where am I?”

  “You’re in the hospital. You’ve been coming in and out of consciousness for a while now. You talked to your parents an hour or two ago—well, mumbled to them a little. They went to get some coffee, now that you’re out of the woods, but they’ll be back soon.”

  “Okay,” I said. I don’t remember that, talking to them, but I believe her.

  She tilted her head. “Do you remember anything? About what happened?”

  I closed my eyes. There was a lot of gray, and my thoughts had a hard time coming together. I remembered asphalt and pain and…“Charlie? The flask?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “That’s right.”

  More started to come back, yet…I stared at her. “I thought it was Mona there, not you.”

  “It was. She called me from the ambulance—had me call your parents. We all thought you were still in your room.” She paused. “Migraine, my ass.”

  “I needed to check something,” I said. “It was important.” I paused. “Do you know if they tested me? Did they find the drugs?”

  “Yeah, they did. Although from what I heard, they barely needed to—they’d never seen someone that far under before. They had to pump your stomach.”

  I considered this. Now that she mentioned it, my stomach and my throat both hurt as well. A lot.

  “What about Charlie? Do they believe him?”

  “Jess, half of the people attending the game came out to the parking lot after Mona started yelling—they all saw Charlie beating the crap out of you. His credibility is pretty shot right now.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Okay.” I paused. “Is Mona here?”

  “No, she was for a while, but she needed to go home. Also…”

  She stopped.

  “What?”

  “She came here in the ambulance with you. She told me that you were talking for a while on the way here. Do you remember that?”

  I shook my head. It was all gray. Sarah was watching me closely. Too closely.

  “What? What did I say?” I asked.

  For a second Sarah paused, her face twisting a little. Then she shook her head.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Mona said she couldn’t make out the words.”

  BEFORE SARAH LEFT, I ASKED her for a favor. I wasn’t sure she’d be able to make it happen, yet two hours later there he was. Brian.

  He stood in the doorway. His eyes went over me slowly, cataloging all my bruises, the lump that had formed on the side of my head. When his gaze settled on my arm, wrapped in gauze, only then did I shake my head.

  “My arm is from when I smashed his window,” I said.

  “Everything else, though?”

  “Everything else was him,” I said. “And there’s a lot more under the gown.”

  He looked surprised, and not in a good way.

  “I wasn’t offering to show you,” I clarified. “I just wanted you to know.”

  He nodded. He took one last long look at me before he stepped into the room, pulled a chair up to the bed.

  After he sat, he looked down at his hands. They were big hands, with long, calloused fingers and blunt fingernails. They were not in any way special, yet we both gazed at them for quite some time.

  Then I took a deep breath.

  “Did Nick know?” I asked. “About any of it?”

  Brian shook his head. “No. I knew he liked her, though. And when Charlie told me about that photo Anna had sent him, laughed about how much she regretted it…I don’t know. It didn’t feel right. He’d told me the password for his phone once, so I thought it would be easy enough to get it away from him for a while and delete the photo. I thought if I did that, and paired off Anna and Nick, then Charlie would back off—that he wouldn’t mess with her if she was with someone else on the team. That maybe he’d be pissed for a while, but he’d get over it and then everyone could just be cool again. It seemed like a good plan.”

  A good plan. In theory, perhaps it had been.

  “Why didn’t you stop it? When it started to go off the rails? When you saw that she was drugged?”

  “I thought she’d taken the drugs herself,” he said. “I was annoyed about that at the time, that she’d do that, when I was trying to do her a favor. Honestly, it didn’t even occur to me that Charlie had anything to do with it. I mean, we practically grew up together. I thought…I knew he was an asshole, but I thought I knew what that meant.”

  “Why didn’t you call the police, though? When she fell?”

  Brian looked away. “I should’ve. I know that. I was in shock, I think, and so was Lily, but Charlie—he was so calm. He said we should take her back home, put her under her window. He said he’d call his dad, explain what happened. That his dad would take the investigation over as soon as he got back to town—make sure none of it came back to us.”

  “So you laid her out in our yard and then went to the party?” I did not work hard to keep the incredulity and anger out of my voice.

  “That’s where people expected us to be,” he said. “Charlie said that’s what we needed to do. So we went.” He paused and shook his head. “I know how it all sounds. It sounds crazy. It was crazy. But in a way, that made it easier—it felt so surreal, what had happened, what we’d done, that it was easy to start pretending that it had happened just the way everyone thought it had—her falling out her window.”

  Nick’s description of Brian wandering around at the bottom of the quarry came back to me. How Charlie hadn’t had Lily’s phone number because he’d had to get a new phone. “You tossed his phone into the water at the quarry,” I said.

  He blinked, surprised. Then he nodded. “I pocketed it while we were on the way to Nick’s house. But it turned out he’d changed the password. And when he began to freak out about where it was, I pretended to search for it. Figured water would destroy it.”

  The phone, yes. The photo, no. Not that it mattered. Not anymore. It was just another thing that hadn’t worked out the way it was supposed to. And I couldn’t let myself go down that path—the path of how things should have happened. There were too many branches, too many ways to think about how things could have gone, how Anna could have been saved. It was a labyrinth.

  I leaned back against the pillow and closed my eyes.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said quietly. There was a long break, and then his voice got even quieter. “And Mona…I heard that he…”

  I nodded without opening my eyes.

  What he said next, he said in less than a whisper. “I asked him to give her a ride home. Before I left the party, after our fight. I wanted to make sure she had a ride.”

  Then he began to sob, the sounds reverberating through his chest like they were going to tear him apart.

  Someone else might have tried to comfort him, but I kept my eyes closed. I didn’t have any room in me to try to take on his sorrow, his rage. He had kept the truth—the part he knew—hidden. Hadn’t told me or anyone what had happened. He didn’t deserve anything from me right now.

  But I did believe him.

  Believed that he was sorry.

  Believed that he’d thought he’d known his best friend.

  IN THE END, I TOLD my parents the truth.

  Most of it.

  I told them about Anna and Charlie. About how both Lily and Charlie had, in their own way, been angry with her, and how Charlie had drugged her. Told her to fly.

  I told them about Nick too. That she was going to see him, that his house was where it happened. That he knew nothing about it, though, and I wanted it to stay that way if possible. Because I didn’t know what you could do with that, knowing that someone died trying to get to you. Some things only hurt to learn about, and they don’t change anything.

  I didn’t te
ll them about the bar, the birth control, or the photo. She wouldn’t have wanted them to know any of that—and they didn’t need to have what happened between her and Charlie spelled out in bold type or to know exactly how lost and trapped she’d felt. I didn’t think it was like the box, hiding stuff they had a right to see, hiding it because I wanted to keep it for my own. This was different. This was something I was doing for them. And for Anna.

  * * *

  —

  I’D THOUGHT FINDING OUT WHO Anna was going to see that night, finding out what happened, would give me a way to understand what had happened between the two of us—how a chasm had opened without my realizing it. Instead, what I found was Charlie and Nick. Charlie, who only saw her as someone to control—and Nick, who’d wanted to know her but never really had the chance.

  She’d put on the dress, put on the perfume, for Nick. The birth control had been for Charlie. And her poem…I didn’t know. Maybe she’d thought she loved Charlie at one point, or maybe it had simply been a poem about no one in particular—just some pretty words on a page.

  All I knew for certain was that there should’ve been a different ending to that night. And now I knew how it actually should’ve gone.

  I could imagine it; I could see it clearly:

  Anna in her purple dress, all the buttons attached, getting out of the car—arriving exactly when Nick was expecting Brian to show up. She is clear-eyed and calm. She stands outside Nick’s house and looks up, up to his window. She finds a stone and throws it gently. And then she waits. Waits beneath his window, sure that soon he’ll open it and smile down at her, surprised but happy. That he’ll mouth for her to wait right there, that he’ll be right down.

  That was how I pictured it. That was how it would have been.

  AT SCHOOL, MANY DIFFERENT STORIES circulated. Some of the ones about what happened in the parking lot were so far off they were almost funny—like the one where Charlie pulled a gun on me and Mona swooped in like an avenging angel and karate-chopped him on the neck. The ones about what happened the night Anna died tended to be more somber and murky. Most of them centered on Charlie, although I did hear one that mentioned Lily’s role in it all, including how she’d finally broken down when the police called and confirmed everything.