If I Fix You

by Abigail Johnson

  I knelt there for at least a solid minute running through a list of possible scenarios that ended up with me successfully getting Daniel inside his house.

  The list was pathetically short.

  I focused on Daniel. Drunk was not a good look on him. He never opened his eyes for more than a second or two, but I could see that they were puffy and bloodshot. He didn’t look anything like the guy from the night before in the pool; not even like the guy from after the pool.

  I didn’t ask him why. I thought that was pretty obvious, but another thought quickly chased that one away: I didn’t know him well enough to make that call. We’d spent the past couple weeks together caught up in our own perfect little bubble, for the most part, isolated from people who would point out all the many reasons why our little bubble needed to pop.

  Maybe drinking was what he did. I couldn’t blame him, but the possibility made me less unsure about pulling away the night before.

  Daniel made a noise, a groan, as he tried to sit up, and I became aware that the gravel beneath my knees was long past stinging. I stood and brushed off the pebbles, looking at Daniel’s front door some thirty feet away, then at Daniel who was actually swaying where he sat. It might as well have been a mile. Daniel outweighed me by at least fifty pounds and “drunk off his ass” meant he was dead weight.

  I winced when I dragged Daniel’s arm over my shoulders and pulled him to his feet. He was every bit as heavy as I’d feared, and unsteady. The friction of his skin against my sunburn was brutal as we shuffled along.

  But I wasn’t letting go.

  When we got to the door we were both sweating. I propped him against the side of his house with my hip and my palm. “Don’t fall, okay?” Daniel would end up face-first in a cactus if he went down.

  I was relieved when the door opened. I had not been looking forward to playing find the house keys with the drunk guy.

  Daniel’s knees buckled once after we got inside and I made a grab for the back waist of his jeans and gave a vicious yank. That sobered him up and I stopped worrying he was going to puke down my neck at any moment. Mostly.

  He pushed away from me when we reached the kitchen and almost went down again before he caught himself against the wall.

  I reached out to help him and he jerked away.

  “I’m fine.” His words were slurred.

  The first two intelligible words he’d spoken to me, and they were a complete dismissal. When Daniel first fell out of the car, I’d gone from panic, thinking he was hurt, before shifting to pragmatic mode to get him inside. I’d completely bypassed anything else. But I was hot and sweaty and the sunburn along my shoulders was screaming from supporting his weight. And I was so confused by my own feelings that anger seemed like the only safe one.

  “You’re fine? You sure about that? ’Cause I just had to drag you inside from where your buddy—who’s super by the way—ditched you on the side of the road.”

  Daniel’s answer was to throw up all over the place.

  I cleaned up the floor while Daniel slumped against the wall. I’d been out of the puke zone, but Daniel hadn’t been so lucky. I found him a mostly clean T-shirt in the laundry room and turned away when he changed. I didn’t need to see his scars again. I couldn’t imagine the harsh lights in his kitchen making them look any better. But just the reminder of them was enough to douse my burst of anger.

  I stood still and held my breath. Daniel was leaning back on the counter, discarded fast-food bags littered on either side of him. I felt something twist inside me, looking at him. He was worse than alone. The only “friend” he had—that I knew of—had just dumped him in the street. He truly had no one.

  He didn’t meet my eye when I took the balled-up dirty shirt from him and rinsed it in the sink. When I turned back, Daniel had a bottle of whiskey pressed to his lips.

  “Stop.” I moved slowly, reaching my hand up to take it. “Seriously. You need to stop.”

  He didn’t. He eyed me and tipped the bottle back farther, his throat working with each swallow, before setting it down a little too hard. “Had to get the taste out of my mouth.”

  I caught a whiff of the liquor and didn’t know which must have tasted worse. I said nothing, but I filled a glass of water and held it out to him.

  Daniel drained the water in one long swallow; then, using the wall for balance, he made his way to the couch in the living room.

  “Why?” I wasn’t going to ask him outside, but he finally seemed alert enough to answer, and I needed to know how responsible to feel, since I’d been the one who forced him to relive the nightmare he was trying to leave behind. “And that guy?”

  Daniel kept staring at the empty glass.

  I followed him to the living room and wrapped my hand around the glass. He didn’t let go when I tugged. “Do you want more? You have to let go first.”

  “John, his name is John...or Jake.” Daniel relinquished the glass, letting me refill it at the sink. “I met him a couple times playing pool. He was doing me a favor. He could’ve let me drive.”

  “Yeah, he’s obviously a great guy.” I offered Daniel the water, but he ignored it, so I set it on the floor. “Hey, maybe next time he can just slow down and push you out of his car. Save him the time of having to fully stop.”

  Daniel leaned back into the couch and flung his arm over his face. “Don’t give me a hard time, okay?”

  “Hard time? I just spent the whole day defending you to my best friend. I carried you in here and I just cleaned up your puke. What kind of time should I be giving you?”

  “I don’t know, Jill. Just leave me alone, okay? I’m sure it’s way past your bedtime.”

  I stood for a second nodding at him. The past week had done a number on me. I stopped thinking clearly on multiple levels. I’d been starting to forget all the very legitimate reasons to keep my distance from Daniel. The facts hadn’t changed. He was too old. I was too young. Only very bad things were promised to us. He may have stopped caring for those few moments last night, but I couldn’t, no matter how bad I felt for him.

  And maybe that was all I felt for him. Pity. It was certainly the only emotion I could muster up in that moment. Or at least, it was the only useful one.

  My skin hurt, my heart hurt, and I could still smell the acidic hint of vomit in the air underneath the cleaner I had used.

  I had zero—zero—reason to stay there.

  “I’ll see you around, Daniel.”

  I hadn’t taken a step when I felt his hand wrap around my arm.

  CHAPTER 23

  “Jill. Wait.”

  Daniel’s grip wasn’t hard. It wasn’t even so much that he grabbed my arm as placed his hand on me. I could have pulled away and left. He couldn’t have followed me in his condition.

  “I didn’t mean that.” Daniel’s stare was making me mildly uncomfortable and I got the sense that he wasn’t talking to me when he said, “Why are you only sixteen?”

  I drew closer to the couch so that he had to look up at me. He still held my arm and I felt each one of his fingers. “What am I supposed to say to that? This—” I gestured between the two of us “—wasn’t my fault. I wish you’d stop treating me like it was.”

  His hand pulled me a step closer. Then two. I could smell cigarette smoke clinging to him, but underneath it was the familiar bite of citrus from whatever he wore. The mix was souring my already uneasy stomach.

  “Sometimes I think about what it might be like if you were older. I move here, meet you, and you’re twenty-one. Even eighteen. We could just get in a car and drive.” Then his eyes lost their focus for a moment. “I don’t know how much longer I can stay,” he said. “But if I go, she’ll go back. And she’ll wait, and wait, and wait however long it takes.” Daniel’s breathing was slow and steady and for a moment it was like he wasn’t
drunk at all.

  “The first time he hit her really hard.” Daniel dragged his hand up to his temple, tracing along smooth skin. “She stopped being able to see the color green. He knocked it right out of her head.” Daniel’s hand lowered. “She can’t see me anymore. I try and talk to her and she screams like the sound of my voice hurts her. How? How did I get here? What did I do that was so much worse than him?” He tried to draw me closer, pulling on my arms.

  “Daniel?” I said his name because the lucid moment had passed. And tears for him were already filling my eyes. “It’s not your fault. You know that.” Except he didn’t look like he knew anything. “You protected her. You’re still protecting her and she’s—” my voice cracked but I pushed out the rest of the words that we both needed to hear “—supposed to love you.”

  Daniel had said his dad beat them for years, long enough to permanently damage his mom on some level. I wanted that knowledge to soften me toward her, but it didn’t, not when Daniel was the one still suffering. When he finally focused on me, I could tell he hadn’t heard me in the way I wanted. The words meant nothing to him because he didn’t believe them.

  He took a deep breath and pushed his hair back from his face. “I don’t want to do this anymore. Any of it.” His eyes found mine. “Except you.” Both hands caught my arms and I didn’t know if he was trying to draw me in or if he needed someone to pull him up, anyone.

  I never knew the answer to that question with Daniel.

  “Let’s get out of here. Anywhere. We can drive to the Grand Canyon or Mexico.”

  His grip was inexorable. There was a desperate pleading note so naked in his voice that I couldn’t move away even though I was so suddenly, painfully, convinced that I needed to. “Daniel, I can’t,” I said. “I’m sorry, but you know I can’t.” I didn’t need to list all the reasons why. I could see them hit him one by one until his eyes went dim again and he dropped his hands before leaning back in the couch.

  “Hey.” His eyes wobbled a bit in their sockets before steadying. “I’m sorry I puked on you. And what I said.”

  He was pale and he had a slight sheen to his skin. His hair had picked up some of the dirt and gravel from the yard. The T-shirt I had found for him was much too small. And I couldn’t forget what it concealed.

  I sat down and plucked a pebble from his hair and dropped it into his hand. “You need better friends.”

  “Like you? Do I have you, Jill?” It was like part of him had completely shut down. Gone was the broken boy struggling to understand his mother’s animosity. He’d boxed all that up and what was left seemed unsteady and uncomfortably intense.

  “I did get you inside and—” I glanced at his shirt. “I’m still here.”

  “You fixed my Jeep.”

  “And I fixed your Jeep.”

  Daniel leaned into me, or maybe he fell into me. “And you smell nice.”

  I pushed him back. He was heavy. And didn’t smell so nice. “I smell like chlorine from the water park, and I smell a little like puke because of you.”

  Daniel ran his eyes down to my legs and then back to my face. “You are sort of pink.”

  I was a lot pink. I was gonna hurt so bad tomorrow. I explained about Sunsplash, but Daniel didn’t seem to be listening all that well.

  “Does it sting?” He slid his hand up my forearm.

  Not when he did that it didn’t. “It mostly feels tight. But you shouldn’t be touching me.”

  Daniel moved his hand up to my shoulder and rubbed his thumb back and forth. “It’s redder here.”

  Did he even know what he was doing? I looked into his face, noticing the heavy-lidded, glazed look in his eyes. I doubted I was more than a blurry pink shape in front of him. He was probably a minute away from passing out. If that. My eyes started to sting and I squeezed them shut.

  It wasn’t fair what he was doing to me. Making me realize things that I really didn’t want to. He was so messed up. His parents had done that to him and neither one cared that they’d damaged something so fragile. And Daniel was fragile.

  He’d told me before that I was the only one he knew out here—I refused to count Jake/John—and at the time that knowledge was heady. It made me feel special to think that I was all he needed. But it wasn’t true, not in the way I thought. His world had shrunk to include only his mom and me, and he’d latched onto me because he needed someone. Maybe anyone. I had people, love. Daniel didn’t. All he had was me and the impossible relationship we were navigating. I knew that if his life had been different, a hair less awful, he’d have been able to stay away from me. He’d have known what I was finally forcing myself to accept. Sooner or later—and I was guessing sooner—we were going to crash. I’d already begun to brace for impact.

  I dropped my shoulder and Daniel took the hint and stopped touching me. “Sorry.”

  I shook my head. “It’s okay. It doesn’t hurt that much.” Other things hurt though. Other things were just beginning to throb with pain that promised to be so much worse than physical.

  Daniel was muttering something and then he was touching my hair, running his fingers through the strands that weren’t all the way dry yet. He was half leaning, half falling toward me again.

  I leaned back but he kept coming.

  I hadn’t thought my first kiss would be from some drunk guy pressing me back against a lumpy couch and smashing his mouth against mine with enough force to bang our teeth together. I hadn’t thought he would stink of cigarettes and taste like puke.

  One of his hands tangled in my hair and the other slid up to grip my shoulder tightly, too tightly on my sunburned skin.

  This wasn’t a kiss in Sean’s old tree house during a rainstorm, or at a bonfire, or any of the ways I wanted my first kiss to be. Daniel wasn’t telling me he cared about me in that crazy intense way I craved. He wasn’t telling me anything. He wasn’t even looking at me.

  Last night, for the first time, I dreamed about being kissed in a pool with a sky of twinkling stars watching. For the first time, I dreamed about a guy with dark hair instead of blond.

  But I had never dreamed of this.

  I wedged a hand between our bodies and shoved. “Get off!”

  He did. He drew back all the way, freeing me to squirm out from under him. “Jill—” Daniel sank back into his corner of the couch, flung his head back and swore. “I didn’t mean to do that.”

  I was breathing like I’d just run ten miles with Claire. Hot tears pricked my eyes. I opened my mouth. Then shut it.

  Daniel’s eyes were closed. His breathing, unlike mine, was even.

  Beer and vomit. I could still taste him on my lips, smell him on my clothes when I left him passed out on his couch.

  CHAPTER 24

  Showering the next morning was an exercise in self-torture. The water spit like buckshot onto my skin, which had bloomed overnight into an angry blotchy red. The tightness had constricted so that every movement felt like my skin was going to split open.

  Inside hurt too, for reasons that had nothing to do with sunburn.

  I stayed in the shower until the water started spraying out frozen needles, until it was hard to focus on anything else. In my closet I found my lightest, thinnest summer dress and hissed when I slipped it on, before hurrying outside.

  Leaving Dad’s truck in the driveway last night instead of pulling into the garage had been a mistake, one I paid for by burning both my hand and my hip on the molten hot seat-belt buckle. I said something I really shouldn’t have, especially not while heading to church. The steering wheel felt sticky when I gripped it, almost like it had started to melt along with the rest of the truck.

  And then I cried like such a little girl when the AC refused to turn on.

  I hit the stupid sticky steering wheel with my palms until they hurt worse than the rest of me.


  I was a two-year-old having a temper tantrum and I couldn’t stand the sight I caught of myself in the rearview mirror. I whacked it away and jerked into Reverse.

  Down the driveway.

  Onto the street.

  Into the car pulling up to the curb.

  I didn’t swear when I heard the crunch of metal. Not out loud. Out loud I was focused on one tiny word: “No. No no. No-no-no-no-no-no.”

  I had never been in a car accident. Not even a fender bender. Dad had been teaching me defensive driving skills when other parents were trying to get their kids to ride a bike.

  I’d hit a car.

  My hands fumbled over the still lava-hot buckle as I hopped down from the truck and went to survey the damage and face the woman standing next to the vehicle I’d hit.

  I heard myself saying the same asinine excuses that people told us when they brought their smashed cars in. What else could I say? I absolutely saw your car but I decided to back into it anyway? I think I gave her a card and I mentioned that I was a mechanic and could fix the—thankfully—minor damage, but I hadn’t yet gotten past the fact that I’d just zipped down my driveway and plowed right into the car parking in front of Daniel’s house.

  I broke off midthought and stared.

  The woman looked to be in her mid-to late-forties, slim and several inches shorter than me, with dark hair pulled back into a tight bun revealing a scar along her temple that disappeared into her hairline. The same eyes. The same coloring.

  “You’re Daniel’s mom.”

  I’d been picturing a different woman, hollow but imposing. Ugly in a way that fit the kind of mother she was. The way my mom should have looked but didn’t. Daniel’s mom was all wrong too. She was slight, with delicate features and skin that might have been beautiful underneath all the heavy makeup she wore. I thought of Daniel’s scars; Daniel who was big enough to avoid getting hit in the face, and the petite woman in front of me.

  My insides cramped with the emotions pulling at me. I had noticed how stiffly she was moving, the bulky shape to her clothes, like she might be wearing a brace underneath. And all that heavy, concealing makeup.