Page 59 of What You Left Me
I lie down on the fifty-yard line. Right in the middle. The grass is cold and dewy. It leaks in through my hoodie, the cotton flirting with the dampness, making my back feel prickly and warm all the same, like it’s a towel wrapped around me after a long swim. The sky is an impossible distance away from where I am. There is space for entire life spans between us. So much spare room for every ugly thing tumbling around inside of me. Masquerades with Martin and Ryan. Collided. Colliding. My mind tangling the two of them up in a battle for my attention.
For a while, I convinced myself that I loved Ryan. The idea of him at least. The way his presence broke up my routine. How everyone’s eyes opened wider on me, wondering how love would change me, watching close as I pretended to care more about another person than I did about myself. It’s a rite of passage to have your heart broken in high school, and I wanted that award like I wanted all the rest. But it didn’t work out quite right. Just like the rest. It was the wrong guy at the wrong time. The wrong intentions steering me down the wrong course, ending with his right hand over my mouth. His left between my legs. Up too high. Fingers moving. Pressing. Fighting. Too much. Too soon. The flesh of his palm clamped around my teeth.
I thought I knew, but I knew nothing.
I’m sick, Mom. I can’t go to my final today.
The voicemail he left me the night before graduation. “I’m back in town. Just let me talk to you.”
His calls streaming in between my parents and my sisters: an insistent, steady pest, always buzzing right outside my ear, never swatted away.
I wasn’t ready to talk a year ago. I’m still not ready now. I don’t know if I’ll ever be.
He doesn’t have a right to be here, written into the pain on my face, holding on to the tear falling down my cheek, resting as a hulking anchor at the pit of my stomach, but he is all the same.
A part of me wants to tear into him with my every spiteful word. Break his spine through the sheer force of my verbal tirade.
Another part of me wants to bleach every trace of his existence.
Beneath my skin and all my organs, in the place where instinct lives, a core that has no place in medical books, no identifiable source, I feel this conflict with such immensity that it goes into territory that can never be mapped. There is so much, too much, power in the unknown.
It is boundaries crossed. Apologies unsaid. Explanations not given.
It is night. It is secrets.
It is Martin and me singing songs in this very spot. Nudging elbows. Stealing laughs. Hammering into the well of possibility with the first hesitant clinks, unsure of how much there is to mine from such a new, delicate source. All I haven’t gotten the chance to know about him infects my bloodstream. He could be someone to me.
The complete, devastating, tantalizing unknown.
But someone is dead because of that car crash. Some man whose life story never before intersected with mine. Someone who had dreams and nightmares and fears and joys. A full person with a full world I’ll never know. It doesn’t seem right or fair, yet I cannot blink it away. It is not my nightmare. It’s my reality.
Maybe fairness is nothing but an idea we’ve made up. Maybe we’ve all tricked ourselves into believing kindness equals fairness, when really kindness masks the truth of things, and fairness doesn’t have a moral compass. Why didn’t I tell my friends what Ryan did? I thought,That’s not fair to put that on them, but no, it was kindness, a courtesy. Don’t wear this burden with me. Go on thinking that we’re all fine. We must keep soldiering on. We must survive high school.
And they did. They made it to the top of the mountain, as Cameron says. But I got lost last year, and I never recovered. Now I’m tumbling back down, falling farther away from the peak I was supposed to reach on Friday afternoon, slamming into every rock I sidestepped on the way up. Ryan Hales is still in my head, continuing to distract me from the things I should be doing.
My last chance at this final is hours away. One more shard of the glass he shattered inside of me, waiting to be swept up. And I don’t know if I can. Because of him. Again.
And Martin.
He keeps asking me to help him. This I want to do—it’s all I’ve been doing the past few days—but I’m not a doctor. I’m not a psychic. I am just a girl who dreams so big that other people can climb inside and take refuge. I don’t know why it’s me, but I know it matters. Maybe it started as a way to avoid my problems, but it’s so much bigger now. It is the size of the space between the sky and me.
I cannot fight fairness. I cannot fight death. The only thing I can fight is myself. Stop my fears from clouding my dreams. Steal the last remnants of Ryan’s power over me and use it to give Martin a moment like the one I’m in now, my back on the wet grass of the fifty-yard line, small stars peeking through the blackness like secrets the night reveals only for me. Not running from or falling into anything. Not right now, at least. Tomorrow. Always tomorrow. But not now. In this moment, in the dark of the complete unknown, nothing can hurt me.
I breathe in. I breathe out.
At least I am alive.
31
The masquerade has been restored to its original state: opulent and joyous. Petra places herself back into the action. Her dress is now simpler. A sleek silhouette, black and fitted, seams tickling the edge of the parquet. Her long hair flows loose. The ringlets turn inward to frame her face. She wears no mask.
Martin, she thinks over and over, his name her only internal monologue. She wants Martin here. He appears in a well-tailored tuxedo with hair to match the part, slicked down and to the side. No mask either.
“What happened?” he asks as Petra pulls herself into him. The two begin to dance to an internal beat. Their slow, close rhythm does not match the cotton candy dancers around them, so Petra wishes them away. Her living room becomes the empty football field cloaked by star-speckled night.
“I’m sorry,” she says, “I keep letting fear win.”
The two step side to side, forward and backward, always in harmony.
