by JJ Strong
I realized it probably didn’t matter if I ever climbed back up the hill or not. If I had landed wrong and snapped my neck . . . if I’d hit my head just the right way . . . if I disappeared completely, would anyone even notice?
I closed my eyes and tried to detach myself from the world—from the cold and wetness and pain. And to my complete astonishment, this time, for the first time ever . . . it worked.
Suddenly, I wasn’t where I was or who I was. I left my body behind, and the pain too. It felt like I’d peeled off some outer layer of myself that I didn’t need anymore, like a molting snake. I saw water—clear, cold water through which some form of me was sinking. And there was a voice. A strange echo telling me to sink. To sink to the bottom and through the bottom and through the bottom of the bottom. The voice told me things. It said that if there was no God, then there was no joy or love or hope. That the world as it had been presented to me was a lie. That the only difference between life and death was pain. That life hurt—too much—and that death didn’t hurt—not even a little. Death was the best way. The easiest path. I listened and sank into a bottomless darkness, but I wasn’t scared. I loved the voice and knew who it was and, like in one of those dreams where the one big thing you’ve always wanted is suddenly yours and you wonder why you could never figure out how to get a grip on this thing that’s all of a sudden so easy to latch on to in the dream, I promised myself that I’d hold on to the voice when I stopped sinking. It was mine now. He had spoken to me.
Then the voice went quiet and something ripped me through the water by the ankles. I screamed and gasped for air, losing my hold on the voice, and I came back into the real world.
It was dark. Not night, just darker than it had been before I’d tumbled down the hill. And it was raining. I was cold.
There was a voice.
“Yo.”
I blinked raindrops from my eyes and squinted through the darkness at a person. A man. No, a boy. A student. I clicked off key details: shirt, tie, official St. John of the Cross navy blue blazer, mud on the cuffs of his khakis. He must have seen me through the trees and walked up from the parking lot.
“You okay?” he asked. He looked at me the way parents look at a baby who’s trying to tell them something without words.
I nodded. The rain fell hard, and I saw that I was resting in a puddle of mud. He gave me his hand and pulled me up.
“Got a name?”
“Ray,” I said.
He wiped rain from above his eyes and grinned at me.
“Freshman?”
Again I nodded.
“I’m Cullen.”
“Cullen Hickson,” I said.
“Heard of me?” He smiled a little, proud of this fact.
I pointed to the cast on his arm. “My sister was in the car.”
His eyes twitched in recognition.
“She said you jumped in front of the car.”
“She said that?”
“Yeah.”
“Why would anyone jump in front of a moving car?”
“Beats me,” I said. “Maybe you thought it’d be fun.”
I blinked rain from my eyes. Cullen didn’t say anything for a while. His eyes passed over the cuts on my arms and legs, and then he glanced up the hill toward the soccer field. He looked like he was about to say one thing, but then thought better of it and said something else.
“Better hit those showers, Ray O’Dell.” He glanced at his watch. “Late bell in three minutes.”
He patted me once on the shoulder and then took off, leaping downhill through the woods toward the lot, kicking up mud with his big boots as he went.
Cullen
A STUNTMAN’S HANDBOOK, available for loan at the Rosewood Public Library, was written by Jimmy Marvel, a man who proclaims himself to be the “Godfather of Hollywood Stuntmen.” Chapter 12, titled “How to Get Hit by a Car,” is brief and to the point. The whole of it takes up one and a half pages and amounts to four principles: (1) Ensure the car is going less than twenty-five miles per hour. (2) Jump in the air at the moment of collision. (3) Aim first for the hood, then the windshield. (4) At all costs, and in any way possible, protect your head.
I’d trailed the girls home often enough to know that, in order to make the turn at the corner, Meghan slowed the car to between twenty-three and twenty-eight miles per hour in front of my house. All that was left after that was to pick the day. There was no practicing for a thing like this. I just had to leap and hope for the best.
Jimmy also uses that brief section to insist that his readers not romanticize the life of a stuntman. The best guarantee of safety, he implores, is to not be so shortsighted as to get struck by a moving car in the first place. Plenty of people, after all, lead long, satisfactory lives without ever being hit by a car or jumping off a building or being lit on fire. It takes a special sort of devotee to chaos and disorder to want to perform such feats. The Godfather also predicts at least three broken bones on the first crash attempt. I suffered a broken wrist and, though the leather jacket safeguarded my arms and upper body, some seriously excruciating road rash across my legs and face.
So, by the Godfather’s standards, I was already ahead of the curve.
Brielle
AN AMBULANCE took me to the hospital as a precaution. A rainstorm was gushing between my ears, while around me sat my mother, father, and Cullen, his broken wrist wrapped in a splint. The scene after the accident was chaos: the porch, my parents, Meghan’s parents, every EMT in town, neighbors—all recounting what they’d seen. Cullen talked to me relentlessly for the first half of the ride. I don’t remember much of what he said, but I remember the vibration of his voice hammering against the back of my eyelids. At one point I told him, “Please. Shut up. Please.”
My mother held my hand, and every time I closed my eyes Dad would tug on my earlobe and whisper, “Stay awake, Beaker.”
That was a Wednesday. I missed the next two days of school with a concussion.
In both fifth and sixth grades, I won the Perfect Attendance Award, even though in sixth grade I had to share it with Leigh Stambler and at the time was dismayed that a student couldn’t have more than perfect attendance. But at least back then if I did miss school, they sent homework home for me. In high school, missing class meant that when I returned, I’d be scrambling to catch up to everyone else. I hated being behind. I wasn’t a genius or anything. I knew I’d lose points here and there that a handful of smarter girls wouldn’t lose. The one thing I could control, though, was to never, ever miss a single assignment.
When I wasn’t vomiting during this unwelcome two-day hiatus, I spent a lot of time sinking into my bed, watching muted black-and-white movies (sound was too much, colors too much) and generally feeling as though my brain had been pureed. On Sunday morning, Mom crept into my room.
“Are you up, Bri?”
I was awake, but the morning was gray, and I had no plans to get out of bed anytime soon.
“There’s someone here for you,” she said.
I blinked at her, computing. She scratched at her hair, which was a beautiful deep red shade that neither Ray nor I had inherited.
“That boy from the ambulance. The one with the mustache.” Mom put a finger to her upper lip and grinned.
I pulled myself into the folds of sheets, a pouting princess in exile. “My head hurts.”
“He’s brought flowers.” Mom kept grinning. Apparently she thought it all very sweet. Mom had mostly dismal days, but sometimes there were good ones—days when maybe her pills were working better or when her cloud lifted away for the briefest period of time. Most days, her depression brought the whole house down. It soaked into our clothes and made us all a little slower, a little dimmer. But some days she’d brighten, and on those days it was difficult not to want to please her. Not to do anything she asked of you if you thought it would keep her lit up in
that rare way for just a little while longer. So, amid the abating drizzle that swished about in my head, I fixed myself up until I was presentable and ready to receive my visitor, with the intention of saying hello, thanking him for stopping by, and sending him on his way.
His intention, conversely, was that the two of us go for a walk. He said he thought I was one of those girls who liked Jane Austen, and that the girls in those books were always walking everywhere. I thought maybe he was making fun of me and assured him the living room would be fine. Under normal circumstances, I might have been nervous. Or afraid. Here was this boy, wearing brick-like black boots and ripped jeans—through which poked his bowling-ball knees—reeking of cigarettes and gasoline, pushing slimy black hair out of his eyes with the cast on his left hand and holding a bouquet of lilies in his right. It was like he’d stepped out of a movie and was either wholly ignorant or refused to acknowledge that he didn’t fit in with everyone else—the way they dressed and spoke and behaved. Under normal circumstances, I might have been intimidated. I might have realized I’d forgotten to put on deodorant, or thought to wear long pants. As it was, I was lost beneath the hum of a fading concussion, working up a nice funk under my arms, and wearing a short khaki skirt on the first of November.
“Have you read Pride and Prejudice?” I asked him.
“It is a truth universally acknowledged,” he quoted, “that a single man in possession of good fortune must be in want of a wife.”
He laughed and rolled his eyes at himself, wiping sweat from his forehead. It was hard to tell if he was actually nervous or if it was simply part of the performance.
“You like it, though?” he said. “The book, I mean?”
“I do.”
“See?” he said. “I knew it.”
“How could you tell?”
“It’s a good thing, though. It’s better than, like, Harry Potter.”
“I like Harry Potter too.”
“Right,” he said. “That’s cool. Bad example. But anyway . . .” He offered the nervous laugh again and didn’t finish his thought. I noticed the flowers in his hands were shaking in their plastic wrapping.
“Look,” he said. “I live just on the other side of the woods. Walk me halfway. Then you come back and I’ll keep going. Half a walk. That’s all I’m asking.”
I shut my eyes as a wave of pain rippled through my head. When I opened them, he was still looking at me.
“Did you read the whole book?” I asked. “Or just memorize the first line?”
He smirked and didn’t say anything.
“Let me get a jacket,” I told him.
We walked through the woods that stretched for a mile or so beside two puddled baseball fields where the summery bustle had recently fallen quiet to the onset of autumn. The air was crisp but not so cold that my absentminded choice of a skirt posed a problem, though the path was so wet that my ankles were soon dripping with mud.
Cullen talked and talked. He recounted the entire plot of Pride and Prejudice, maybe hoping to convince me that he had read it but more likely, I suspected, because he could sense I was in poor shape to sustain a conversation. I followed little as he recited the story, but his voice sounded fine—deep and rhythmic, like one of those stand-up jazz basses—and it soothed the lingering ache in my head.
We stopped at a short bridge that stretched over a stagnant, oil-puddled brook. Through the thinning trees we could spy the clearing of the town’s dump and the white cinder-block patches of a utility garage. Farther on, behind the dump and beyond the garages where we couldn’t see, was a police firing range, and without a word about it, Cullen stopped talking to hear the pop and reverb of policemen firing their pistols at imaginary bad guys.
“My brother used to play in this brook,” I told him. “One day my dad marched back here and dragged him home. Now I see why. It’s disgusting.”
“You have a brother?”
“Ray.”
“Ray O’Dell!” he said.
“You know him?”
“Our paths have crossed.” He grinned slightly, then spit absently into the muck below. “Anyway, it’s not so bad. Just rearranged.”
I was curious, but the pain had lazied my brain substantially, so I didn’t ask. Cullen continued as though I had asked. This was one thing I liked about him.
“There are only ninety-two natural elements in the world. Everything you see, touch, smell, you know, whatever, it’s all made of these same ninety-two elements. And probably even fewer, because, really, how many things do you know that have, like, fucking polonium in them, right? Anyway, it’s all the same stuff, but rearranged. So like a flower, or your hair, or this cigarette, or the mud on your sneakers—it’s all the same ingredients. This brook, it’s got nothing in it that’s not part of the same ninety-two elements.”
Above us, November’s trees knocked in the wind—a dark, brambly web of branches. “You can make a lot of things with ninety-two things,” I said.
Cullen watched the sludge below, knocking his cast against the railing.
“Does it hurt?” I asked.
“The wrist? Not anymore.”
“What were you doing out there? In the middle of the road?”
“Me? I was one step from the curb. What were you two doing swerving toward me?”
“No . . .”
“Yeah! I don’t know how that girl’s so good at field hockey. You ask me, her hand-eye coordination is for shit.”
I inspected his eyes. “I don’t like missing school.”
“I went out to get some air,” he said. “Took one step off the curb. Bam.”
“One step?”
“One little step.”
“Okay then.”
“Don’t believe me?”
“I’m not sure yet,” I said. “But I have another question.”
“Okay.”
“What about today?”
“What about it?”
“Why are you here, Cullen?”
He picked at a splinter in the bridge’s railing. The wood was damp and growing blue-white fungi.
“You crashed into me. I felt indebted to you.”
“Like you owe me?” I said. “For crashing into you?”
“Not owe. More like . . . I’m tied to you. You can’t just walk away from something like that. The universe has linked us together.”
“What about Meghan Ngyuen? You’re not linked to her?”
“She’s not as pretty as you.”
“She’s your own age. And she’s beautiful!”
“Brielle,” he said. “You’re not listening to me. Forget about Meghan.”
He had his eyes fixed on mine. I didn’t look away. I wanted to, but I didn’t. His forehead sloped over his eyes so that they sunk deep into his face, but way back there, hidden in the shadows of his brow, the eyes shone a serious, brilliant blue. Aside from my parents and grandparents, nobody had ever called me pretty. I was a sophomore in high school and had kissed four boys in my life. When Cullen’s mouth, glinting with a moist sparkle, tilted toward mine, I wet my lips quickly, and we kissed.
In the distance, a flurry of police guns cracked and echoed.
Cullen
I SAW RAY in the library one morning before first bell. He was wearing headphones, bent over a computer screen. Funny-looking kid. Not ugly or anything like that, more like . . . he reminded me of the mouse from An American Tail. Fievel Mousekewitz. Brownish-blond—almost gray—hair, big eyes, and a short, upturned nose that, even if he weren’t skinny as hell and even if his face weren’t as smooth as a twelve-year-old girl’s, would make him look forever like a little kid. He’d pulled his seat absurdly close to the computer screen, shoulders hunched like he didn’t want anyone to see what he was doing. When I walked over, I saw why.
He was watching videos of people jumping out of the
burning towers on September 11.
At first I didn’t say anything. He didn’t seem to know I was there, so I stood behind him and watched. Last year, from Mrs. Montagna’s classroom on the third floor of the school, which stood on the side of a green hill in South Orange, I’d watched the towers come down. We saw it happen before we turned on the news. It only took one of us staring out the window at the right moment—easy enough considering there was nothing to do but stare out the damn window and wonder what was going on in that wild city out there across the river. Peter Grimaldi pointed out the smoke. Mrs. Montagna tried to keep her lesson going, but when she saw what we saw, she quit talking and stared with the rest of us. We put the news on the classroom TV. While they were showing the first tower blow smoke like some rusty tailpipe, the second plane glided into the other tower and exploded. Until that point, we’d been in a confused daze, trying to figure out what the hell was going on. But when the news showed a fireball blast out of the second tower, the room erupted into chaos. There was a lot of shouting and swearing. The kids who had cell phones pulled them out. Others raced to the pay phones. Mrs. Montagna couldn’t stop them—some guys had parents in those buildings. I kept glancing out the window and back to the TV and back out the window.
And then they fell. First one tower. Then the next.
I remembered later that week and throughout the following months seeing a video on the news of a guy jumping out of one of the towers, but nothing like what Ray was watching in the library. He watched one clip after another of people falling. Dozens of jumpers. Maybe hundreds.
“Fuck,” I said aloud.
Ray spun his chair around to see me. His eyes were red, but not from crying. He looked more tired than sad.
The video kept playing. People crawled out of the building like bees from a honeycomb. And they fell fast. It wasn’t like they floated down like wayward leaves. The bodies looked heavy and dropped through the air like bullets.
