My Beating Teenage Heart

by C. K. Kelly Martin

  “It can’t have been that long,” Curtis said. “You haven’t changed at all.”

  They stood by the flowers talking for so long that it was obvious they should go for coffee and catch up, which they promptly did, my father extracting my mother’s number so that they could meet up again soon.

  “But not at the hospital,” my mom warned. “Hospitals are bad luck.”

  “I think this hospital brought me good luck today,” my dad told her, an earnest smile lighting up his face. “But I’ll meet you anywhere you want to go.” Kind of a cheesy line but I guess Curtis’s babe status glossed over the cheese because they met for coffee twice within the next ten days. On the third date they graduated to dinner and my dad drove over to the apartment my mom was sharing with her sister to pick her up.

  This is the part my parents never owned up to—how my mom asked my aunt Sandra to leave them alone so that when my father showed up it was just the two of them. On their first real date that wasn’t just coffee Cynthia invited Curtis in and they started locking lips and mauling each other right on my mom’s cream-colored couch. I don’t know exactly how far things went because that’s the point at which I decide to stop watching and close the door on them, so to speak, but my best guess would be that Curtis and Cynthia didn’t get around to heading out for dinner that night.

  There are certain things about your parents you should just never, ever see—even in dreams or hallucinations. And it’s just as well that I’ve stopped there because Breckon Cody has gotten out of bed and, like he promised his mother, is reheating himself something to eat. I check the kitchen clock and notice that it’s nineteen minutes to three and no one else seems to be around. His parents must still be out at lunch, and it looks like Lily went to the health-food store and wherever else on her own.

  Breckon’s food, which I think is some kind of linguini, spins in the microwave as he leans against the kitchen counter, waiting. He’s put on jeans and a wool sweater, and seeing him up walking around and back in day wear gives me the impression that he’s feeling a little better. The more I remember about myself and the more I learn about Breckon the weirder I feel about observing him, but I can’t shake the feeling that it’s what I’m supposed to be doing.

  The microwave dings and Breckon takes his pasta out, sets it on the counter and stares at it. He hasn’t eaten a thing all day and maybe he won’t go through with it now either but he really should. Even if he doesn’t feel like it, he really should eat something. I can Shin9;t go x2019;t help saying it in my head, kind of like when you shout advice at a movie character, although you know they can’t hear you.

  Go on, I urge silently. Just a little. It looks good.

  Breckon retrieves a fork from the cutlery drawer and lowers it reluctantly into his noodles. He doesn’t bother pulling up a chair; he just leans against the counter and chews mechanically. Good boy, I tell him. He manages to finish off about half of the linguini that way, eating joylessly, but at least he’s eating.

  Then he stops. Drops the container and fork abruptly on the counter and stalks over to the sink with the same look that filled his eyes when he rushed up to the shower yesterday morning. I brace myself for his tears, not sure where to point my gaze.

  “Okay,” he says aloud. It’s the tone of a person trying to convince himself of something and I watch as he switches the tap on, guides it over to hot and then hotter. Steam begins to rise from the water as it cascades from the tap. Breckon peers at it, transfixed. I still don’t understand where this is going but I’ve decided I don’t like it.

  Without an awareness of my body, dread doesn’t feel the way it should. I miss the beat of my heart. It should be racing—galloping—instead I only feel the weight of fears lying heavy on my soul. It’s not just Breckon I’m afraid for, it’s me. There are reasons for my prebirth memories that I’m not ready to face, the very same reasons that Breckon Cody’s life is being revealed to me in such elaborate, painful detail.

  My fifteen-year-old brain didn’t invent him for its own amusement. What’s happening in front of my eyes is much bigger than that.

  He’s nothing but a dream creation, I insist, battling back against the terrifying revelation rocketing up inside me. Just a puzzle to solve. Busy work to keep my mind well-oiled.

  You know that’s not true, the more knowing side of myself proclaims. You understand what’s going on here, Ashlyn. No one remembers moments from before her birth, not unless …

  And when Breckon pushes his left hand under the scalding-hot water and marshals his willpower to keep it there, I howl like the moment I was born.

  six

  breckon

  Instinct kicks in. I should be able to take the pain—worse things happen to people every day—but I can’t. I stumble back, losing my footing as my vision starts to close in on me. Then Moose sprints into the room, barking like a maniac. He runs in panicked figure eights as I fall smack down onto the kitchen floor.

  “Shut up!” I shout from the tile. “Shut the hell up!”

  &gn="justify">Moose whimpers, the speed of his figure eights unchanged. My left hand hurts so much that my lungs have forgotten how to suck in oxygen. I fight for air, my head propped against the washing machine and my left ankle shaking like an epileptic’s.

  Moose barrels out of the kitchen, his high-pitched barking making my heart beat even faster. “Moose!” I roar after him. What the fuck does he think he’s doing anyway? And when has rushing around in the shape of a figure eight ever helped anyone?

  The pain crowds out everything else. I can hardly think. I breathe in and out but the air doesn’t feel like it’s catching in my lungs.

  The second Moose is sure there’s no one to alert he scrambles back into the kitchen with me, panting hard. A steam cloud’s wafting up from the sink where the hot water’s still flowing and I force myself onto my feet and whack the tap with my right hand, shutting it off.

  I flop to the floor again, my head slipping back to its previous position against the washing machine.

  “Sit,” I command before Moose can start his barking routine again. If I have to watch him careen around in figure eights again I’ll end up banging my head against the goddamn tiles.

  Moose does what I say, but not in the way I want. He drops down so that his left side snuggles against my thigh. “I’m okay,” I tell him. “Relax.” As long as he stays quiet, I don’t mind him next to me. I’m in too much pain to care.

  My ankle’s stopped quaking but my left hand feels like it’s being eaten away by battery acid. I train my eyes on the furious red skin, and seeing the evidence makes it hurt worse. I’ve never done anything like this before; never even thought about it. I can’t believe I really did it.

  The physical pain’s so intense that it’s taken me over. I’m 17 percent Breckon and 83 percent burnt skin. It’s a relief, ten times better than just being me. As much as my hand hurts, part of me wishes it would never stop. It blocks out almost everything else, or at least shoves it to the back of my mind.

  God, it burns. I pinch the fingers of my right hand around my trembling left forearm to hold it still. Running my hand under cold water might help but I don’t. I decide to let it sear for as long as I can handle. Moose keeps me company. I’ve thought it a hundred times before but here it is again—if Moose was in the house last Friday night to howl up a storm when it happened, Skylar might be alive now.

  I sit there on the floor with the dog, just feeling myself breathe and burn, for what must be something like ten minutes before I think I hear a car pull into the drive. The noise plugs me back into reality and gets me standing. My mom keeps a bottle of Advil on the shelf over the fridge. I reach for it, pour two capsules onto the counter and then toss them into my mouth, chasing them down with a swig of fruit juice from the fridge.

  Nobody comes through the front door. The car must’ve passed.

  I set the leftover linguini on the floor for Moose. Way too much gar [ to.

  “I know,” I tell
him. “It sucks.”

  I lob the linguini into the trash and go upstairs to do something with the burn. The red spans from my wrist down to my knuckles. I should’ve thought that over beforehand. If you’re going to fuck yourself up and want to keep it a secret I guess you better know how to hide it.

  I dig out the first-aid kit from under the sink and pull out a gauze pad and antibiotic ointment. Squeezing the ointment onto my skin stings so bad that my molars bite down on my tongue. I lay the gauze pad gently on top of my left hand and that hurts too. Then I wrap a bandage around the pad, finishing it off with a ton of tape to keep the bandage in place.

  My shitty bandaging job probably makes the injury look worse than it is. I’m already beginning to regret what I did to myself. Nothing’s changed except now my singed skin won’t quit screaming at me and I’ve turned into one of those screwed-up people who hurt themselves.

  Just once, I tell myself. It could’ve as easily been an accident. You won’t do it again. And then I realize, for the thousandth time, that my sister’s dead and it doesn’t matter what I do or don’t do because nothing will ever change that.

  I hear my cell ringing from my bedroom as I’m putting the first-aid kit back. I don’t want to answer it but that’s life, doing thing after thing that doesn’t matter and won’t change anything. My feet start moving in the direction of my room and next thing I know I have the phone in my hand and am answering it.

  “Hey, it’s Ty,” the voice on the other end of the phone says. “Jules said she was over there this morning and that things were pretty quiet. I was wondering if you wanted to get out for a while, or something.… ” Ty’s voice trails off. He sounds kind of like the first time he came to visit me after my bike accident a year and a half ago, as though he’s not sure what to say because he doesn’t know whether I’m going to be okay.

  But that accident was a walk in the park compared to this. A car rear-ended me when I was riding home from Ty’s, throwing me off my bike. I never saw who did it—he or she didn’t stick around to see if I was breathing. My dad still starts tremoring like a volcano about to blow when the hit-and-run comes up. “What kind of person can knock a kid off his bike and then speed off without calling for help!” he rants. “I can’t believe this sicko’s still driving around.”

  It was a fifty-something-year-old woman on a Vespa who found me and called for an ambulance. I’d fractured my C1 vertebra and spent thirteen weeks in a Miami J cervical collar. No more contact sports for me. The doctor even nixed things like snowboarding and mountain biking. The downside was my parents forced me to give up soccer without even getting a second opinion, the upside is that their fear I’d get hit on my bike again convinced them that buying me a car would be worth the dent in their bank account. They gave me a barely used secondhand Hyundai just two days after I go [ys t bt my full license a few months ago.

  “You can’t put a price on safety,” I overheard my father say to my mom one night, but it turns out lightning doesn’t strike twice in the same way. I never used to believe in fate but now my head keeps tripping back to the idea that maybe it was supposed to be me instead of Skylar. If it had to be one of us, it should’ve been me. Skylar was so young. She barely had a chance to get started.

  I remember the last time my parents took her and her best friend Kevin to the museum in February. When they got back Skylar was clutching a kids’ book on hieroglyphics and couldn’t stop talking about mummies. She said when she was older she was going to become an archaeologist and visit the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt. Months before that she went around telling as many people as would listen that when she grew up she wanted to go into space and see the earth from so far away that it looked like a marble.

  “Wouldn’t you be homesick?” I asked her after hearing that for something like the fourth or fifth time. “With the earth being this tiny little circle so far away?”

  Skylar paused and thought about it. “No, because I’d be in radio and video contact with everyone and that would make it seem not so far away.”

  But what if you never got back? I remember thinking that if it was me I’d be scared something would go wrong and that I’d never set foot on the earth again. I’d go because if I had the chance I’d want to have a look at what was out there but I’d worry about it too. I didn’t say anything about not getting back to my sister, though, and I guess it didn’t occur to her. I wonder if that’s because seven isn’t old enough to worry about something like never seeing the planet again or whether Skylar herself was just more fearless than I am.

  There are so many things … so many things she’ll never do. And I’ll never know what the older Skylar would’ve been like. How can that be possible?

  Pain drags me under again. It stretches out in all directions like the destruction caused by an atom bomb.

  “Breckon?” Ty prompts. “What about it?”

  I press my thumb against my bandage until I wince at that different kind of hurt. But it works—it brings me back.

  “I hurt my hand,” I say with a groan. “Fucking scalded it. There must be something wrong with our kitchen tap.” Not the tap but the water heater, probably. My grandmother said something about the water temperature to Lily when she was washing dishes yesterday and then they both probably forgot all about it.

  I didn’t.

  Ty and I ruminate on my latest injury for a second. He and our friend Rory (also known as Big Red) still play for the school soccer team. For a long time after the accident I was pissed with my parents for making me stop, but when I got over it I realized that I didn’t miss soccer as much as I thought I would. I wondered if maybe I’d never actually liked soccer as much as Ty and Rory. Th [ anss en I started sketching, which is something I used to do when I was younger, and picked up a guitar. At first my parents paid for the lessons but then Jules and I got to know each other and for a while most of my time went to us—even if I wasn’t with her I’d be thinking about her. She isn’t my first girlfriend but she’s the first one I’ve felt like that about.

  When it happened it was like the opposite of discovering I didn’t miss soccer. I thought the sex I’d had with my last girlfriend, Nadine, was pretty good at the time, but Jules and the way our bodies were always in sync blew my mind. And it wasn’t just the sex that was amazing; it was every single thing you could think of. Jules and I could have a conversation about the simplest thing, like what we had for breakfast, and it felt engrossing or funny or made me happy in a way that it wouldn’t if I was talking to someone else. That’s how I got sidetracked from guitar—the feeling that Jules was the best thing to do with my time.

  The feeling didn’t change, but somewhere along the way we both gradually realized that our relationship didn’t hinge on spending every second together. You miss too much if you just do one thing all the time, even if it happens to be your favorite thing. So I started playing guitar more often again, teaching myself this time.

  Ty, Rory and I still hang out too. Big Red’s father is a recovering borderline psycho soccer dad who used to freak out whenever Rory screwed up and didn’t play exactly like the next Ronaldo or Messi. Ty’s parents are the kind who are happy as long as he’s happy, which is pretty close to what my parents were like for the last seven years, until this past Friday.

  “You know Mr. Cirelli asked me about you when I saw him in the parking lot this morning,” Ty says.

  “What did you tell him?” I don’t want people asking about me or trying to talk to me about Skylar. It’s pointless. None of that is going to bring her back.

  My door swings open as Ty starts to answer. If there was a knock, I didn’t hear it, and my dad eyeballs me on the phone and points, in surprise, to my hand. “The kitchen tap’s busted,” I tell him. “The water temperature—boiling-hot water started gushing out of it.”

  “You okay?” Dad asks with a concerned look.

  “Yeah, yeah, it messed up my hand a little but I’m all right.” Ty’s stopped talking and is waiting for me t
o finish with Dad. “You should get it checked out before somebody burns their arm off.” I say it like I’m annoyed by the ordeal, the way I figure I would feel if I hadn’t done this to myself. “Is it okay if I go out with Ty for a while?” I tack on.

  I don’t want my mom or Lily making a fuss about my hand. Besides, I think I need to get out. I’m almost as pathetic as Moose, wandering aimlessly from room to room.

  “Sure,” Dad tells me. “Are you positive you’re okay?”

  “I’m okay.” I switch my attention to Ty. “I’m coming to pick you up [o pght=, all right?”

  I move into the hall, staying on the phone with him as protection against my mom and aunt wanting to examine my hand. I don’t run into either of them on my way out—maybe Lily’s not home yet—and when I hang up and climb into my car reality shifts sideways.

  It’s like stepping into a cocoon. The outside world disappears. I didn’t need to burn my hand to overthrow reality, all I had to do was get into my car.

  I know the feeling won’t last, that there’ll be another BAM right around the corner, but I’ll take what I can get. The Advil’s dulled the pain in my hand but not killed it. I loosen my left hand’s grip on the steering wheel and curse myself for being an idiot. A few scattered raindrops tap my windshield as I drive. One of the neighbors from down the road is out cycling with his son who’s a couple years older than Skylar. They’re pedaling fast, probably trying to get home before the sky really opens up.

  Ty’s house is only about a mile away so I’m there in no time and text him from outside. If I go to the door his parents will only crowd around asking how I am in sad voices. While I’m waiting on him, I text Jules too and tell her I’m with Ty. Then I turn off the phone so no one will bother me.

  A minute later Ty trudges out the front door with the same expression on his face that he had at Skylar’s funeral. It makes me wish I’d driven past his place and kept right on going.