The First True Thing

by Claire Needell

  At school, there has been a lot of talk about Chuck, how he tried to kill Hannah and then ran to the Center to make it seem like an under-the-influence accident. I believe his story, but not everyone does. What no one really considers is that she almost killed him, too. The papers call her an overdose victim, as though the coke came to her and hunted her down. They call her the victim of neglect, of criminal endangerment. There’s been a lot in the news about drug rings in the suburbs, and how kids aren’t as safe as they seem. There aren’t a lot of details, though, about Senna and Chuck, since they’re juveniles. But the webcam site and Alex and his partners have all been written about, like the lowlifes they are. The local paper says Hannah was lured by Alex, by “the promise of drugs.” I don’t know about that, exactly. Hannah might have been lured, but it was something in her, too, something smoldering, that maybe needed to burn itself out.

  Andy and I walk into the hospital room together. The room is filled with flowers. There are no shades on the window and it is very bright. Outside, there’s a construction site across from a busy intersection. Even with the window closed, we can hear the jackhammers. We’re in the wing of the hospital for people with brain injuries. It is very quiet inside and very noisy outside. I think how silent our minds actually are, even when our thoughts are disturbing, or actually terrifying.

  There’s a single bed in the room, a high hospital bed with very white sheets. My immediate thought is we have the wrong room, and I can tell Andy thinks this too. In the high, narrow metal bed is a very still child. The child is neither male nor female in appearance. The child’s face is very white. There are plastic tubes coming out of its nose. Its arms are connected by tubes to the metal IV stand next to the bed. The child’s head is wrapped in white bandages. I gasp, because the child is so pale and beautiful.

  Of course, this is Hannah.

  The nose is long and straight. The mouth is hers—full lips, with a long upper lip that presses against the hollow cheeks and is punctuated by deep, somewhat uneven dimples. It is the resting mouth that should awaken into her crooked, too-wide, manic grin. But it doesn’t move.

  The eyes are somewhat sunken, but even closed you can see the shape is slightly square and large for the narrow face. These are Hannah’s features, but stone-like and luminous. There is a beauty in her stillness that is not hers, not a part of Hannah’s captivating grace. It is the simple beauty of something living at rest. The beauty of pumped blood and cell reproduction. I half expect the eyes to flash open and for the real Hannah to fill the room with her vibrancy. But this is the real Hannah.

  I reach for Andy’s hand.

  We walk to her bedside together and sit in the two mauve-colored chairs. Her eyelids flutter. You can see the purplish veins just beneath the skin. There is a humming sound that comes from some unseen machine.

  Hannah is no longer in a coma. Today is the first day we’ve been allowed to see her. All she does is sleep. We’ve been warned she may not recognize us. We’ve been told not to try too hard to get her to understand who we are and why we’re there. She is confused. Her confusion makes her emotional. She’s been given drugs to keep her calm, to help her cope with her memory loss. She, we are told, knows her mother, her own name, her address, and that she loves to sing. She has asked for her mom to play her favorite album by Bella Johnson, My Life Cycles. It’s the music we used to listen to in her room, when we were alone, without the guys. Sometimes, we’d get stoned and she’d sing to it. There’s a line I remember from a song called “Birth.” I can’t always remember who you want me to be. I just keep guessing, and guessing taught me to believe.

  I don’t know what Hannah will remember about our friendship or about Senna or Chuck, or about her thirst for more and more of whatever it was that got her off. I do hope she remembers every lonely hour until she was found by the shed off the trail in the woods up by the reservoir. I hope she remembers every hour of her near-death, when everyone in town was petrified. I remember the hours, the minutes, and the seconds. I remember not being able to wash time away with beer and vodka, and how still it stood, and how hard it was to push through. I can’t help but feel in a strange way like Hannah is getting a sort of storybook ending. Who else gets to die and come back to life with all her crimes erased? Everyone loves second chances. I got mine, but through hard work and humiliation. Hannah has the drama of being the miracle girl. The miraculousness of her being alive seems to make everyone forget the crucial fact that Hannah was not anyone else’s pure victim. She almost died, like I almost died, from something that at one time felt like a party.

  Maybe Hannah’s life will always be dramatic. Maybe she will become the star she wants to be—the great pop star, the next Bella Johnson. I don’t doubt it. But I know, even if no one else does, the great case of the Missing Girl, the Mysterious Disappearance of Hannah Scott, is a sham. Like me, Hannah threw her life away with two hands. Hers swung like a boomerang back at her. It’s not because she deserves it. She doesn’t. But I don’t think any of us deserves to be here in the first place, not until we do something decent with our lives, even if that one decent thing is accepting who we are. I don’t need to be the most beautiful girl in school, or to have a guy like Chuck worship me. I’m okay now that it’s just me and Andy.

  Now here Hannah is—quiet, pale, like a sleeping baby, her skin almost pearl-like. It’s as though she is about to emerge from some strange, mammalian chrysalis. But I know I shouldn’t glamorize. This isn’t really rebirth, not a real miracle—it’s survival. Everybody does it.

  Andy holds my hand, and after we sit by her bed for half an hour we lose hope that she’ll wake up this time, and decide to leave.

  Outside, the wind is fierce. We have to catch the subway downtown, head across town, and catch the Metro-North train back home. There’s a little Spanish restaurant on the corner with pastries in the window and one of those neon-lit coffee cups with a cloud of electric white steam coming out of it. I nudge Andy when I see it, and we go in.

  It’s almost empty, and we sit at the counter on light blue vinyl stools. Andy picks up an old laminated menu, and the guy speaks to him in Spanish. This happens a lot to Andy even though he’s Indian, Chinese, white, and zero Hispanic. But he takes Spanish in school and orders us both cafe con leche and points to the cheese Danishes on the shelf behind the counter.

  The coffee is hot and the milk is slightly sour, like it’s been on the stove a few hours. The Danish isn’t fresh either. It’s the kind they mass-produce in some plant somewhere, with heavy dough and a too-sweet, crumbly filling. But it’s the first thing I’ve eaten in about five hours and I have to restrain myself to keep from devouring it in a few bites.

  “It’s actually not bad,” I say between mouthfuls, and Andy nods.

  “How you feeling?” I ask him.

  “You mean about her?” he asks.

  “Yeah,” I say. “About Hannah.”

  “I think she’s pretty lucky,” he says. “Or pretty fucking unlucky, depending on how you look at it.” I laugh.

  “You could say that about any of us,” I say. Andy looks at me. His eyes are so dark I sometimes can’t see their expression, just my own reflection. I’m not sure he agrees with me. His brother, Jonas, is the only one of our group who’s actually being prosecuted. He could go to jail for five years depending on the deal the prosecutor offers, and how much Jonas knows and is willing to spill about where all the coke was coming from, and who Alex’s connections are. Andy’s dad moved out for a while, but came back after a couple weeks on his own. Andy says his dad blames his mom for not raising them right. He says they still fight about how it was his mom who let Jonas go to his first high school party.

  “I wonder who she’s going to be when she wakes up,” I say. “I mean when she really recovers.”

  Andy shrugs. “No idea. She’ll have an army of people around her, I guess. Mega-support.”

  “I guess that’ll be good for her,” I say. My new therapist, Angie, tells me not t
o worry too much about Hannah, even though it’s natural to feel bad, even guilty about where she is and what happened to her. But that wasn’t what I felt sitting by her bed. Watching Hannah sleep, looking so small and frail, I wanted her to know where she was and who we were. I wanted her to know how long we’ve been waiting for her. Angie says it’s normal to resent someone who is sick. I guess I can’t tell how I’ll really feel about Hannah until she starts talking again. Hannah has always seemed like an actress to me, acting in her own life, in her own daily drama. Her life never seemed as real as mine or as hard, because I worshipped her, put her above myself and everyone else I knew. I don’t anymore. I guess I want her to wake up and know that I’ve moved on.

  “Do you think she’ll come back to Waverly?” Andy asks. “Or do you think she’ll go somewhere like Chuck?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t know what’s better—having a second chance where everyone knows your story, or getting to start all over.” Andy is quiet for a minute.

  “Same story either way,” he says.

  Andy and I take the train back home and I fall asleep for most of the ride. My head is on his shoulder and I can feel a little drool in the corner of my mouth when I wake up, but he doesn’t seem to notice.

  Our bikes are locked up at the train station and I ask Andy to ride with me over to feed Michiko’s cat. The bird died a week ago. Michiko says he was almost twenty years old. She buried him in the backyard in a shoebox. I was there and helped her dig the hole. She seemed pretty upset about it, actually. She even put on lipstick and a wide-brimmed black hat for the burial. Marco weaved between her legs as she lowered the box into the ground.

  I was the one who found him dead in his cage. I called Michiko to tell her, and I could tell she was crying a little as she asked me to put him in a ziplock bag in the freezer. I was terrified to touch him, so I asked Andy to come over and help me out. Andy brought two pairs of knit gloves so we could lift him out of the cage together and slip him into the bag. “Remind me not to get old and weird,” I said to Andy after I put the bird on the freezer shelf next to a package of organic chicken.

  “It might be better than getting old and not-weird,” Andy said. “Anyway, you probably don’t have that much choice. You’re pretty weird now, so . . .” I hit him with my glove, but then the hitting turned into kissing.

  We ride through town and up over the hill near Senna’s. We have a choice then—take the Death Wish down or go the long way around in the blustery wind.

  When we reach the opening down to the path, we say nothing, just look. It’s late afternoon and the sun will set in less than an hour. Even with the daylight and being sober, it’s a challenging ride. I have a new bike, though, a real mountain bike my parents bought me for getting around town. They realized that since they’ve only just let me start to practice driving again, I’m not getting my license anytime soon, and my road bike is too fragile for the pot-holed side streets in our town.

  Down the path, you can see the rocks, roots, and worst of all, the wet leaves that make the path a slick obstacle course. It’s funny how it’s actually scarier when you can see everything in front of you. It’s not a question, though. We both know we’re going down it. With the wind kicking up and the clouds rolling in, it could be the last day before the path is covered in ice and snow. I inch up to the edge of the first steep drop. Somehow, both Andy and I know it’s my day to lead.

  Author’s Note

  A GREAT DEAL of scientific research has been done in the last several years that is having an impact on how disordered drinking is addressed in both young people and adults. Scientists do not use the words “alcoholism” or “alcoholic,” but instead use the term “alcohol use disorder.” It is recognized that this is a spectrum disorder, and that not all people who misuse alcohol must abstain from alcohol permanently. Most people have heard about abstinence-only programs, which is the kind of program depicted in The First True Thing. However, there are many options that, unfortunately, most parents and young people are unaware of.

  Below is a list of podcasts, articles, books, and websites I recommend for readers who are interested in learning about a range of options for the treatment of drug and alcohol dependency:

  “Blame It on the Alcohol,” On the Media, National Public Radio, February 9, 2018

  “The Fix,” Radiolab, National Public Radio, December 18, 2015

  “A Different Path to Fighting Addiction” by Gabrielle Glaser, New York Times, July 3, 2014

  Beyond Addiction: How Science and Kindness Help People Change by Jeffrey Foote, Carrie Wilkens, Nicole Kosanke, and Stephanie Higgs, Scribner, 2014

  Inside Rehab: The Surprising Truth About Addiction Treatment—and How to Get Help That Works by Anne M. Fletcher, Viking Penguin, 2013

  The Center for Motivation and Change, www.motivationandchange.com

  Acknowledgments

  I WOULD LIKE to express my thanks to my agent, Alice Tasman, and to my editors, Rosemary Brosnan and Jessica MacLeish, for their support, excellent suggestions throughout the writing process, and their keen attention to detail. I am also grateful to Bill Arkin for his expert and timely input, and to my daughters, as always, for their enthusiasm for a story (no matter how dark) and their always fearless feedback.

  About the Author

  PHOTO BY SANDRA WONG GEROUX

  CLAIRE NEEDELL is the author of The Word for Yes and Nothing Real, Volumes 1–3, as well as a former middle school teacher. She lives in Westchester, NY.

  Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.

  Books by Claire Needell

  Nothing Real, Volume 1

  Nothing Real, Volume 2

  Nothing Real, Volume 3

  The Word for Yes

  The First True Thing

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  THE FIRST TRUE THING. Copyright © 2019 by Claire Needell. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

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  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018954197

  Digital Edition APRIL 2019 ISBN: 978-0-06-236054-0

  Print ISBN: 978-0-06-236052-6

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