Not exactly my happiest Valentine’s Day.
I’d been rescued from the wreck of my parents’ car, pulled from the ice and filth of Bowditch River, and medevaced to NYU’s ICU. Where my first back operation had been followed by emergency neurosurgery four days later, after my blood pressure had mysteriously plummeted and CT scans revealed that my frontal lobe was red-imaged with brain bleeds from what they’d first thought to be a minor concussion. I’d been on the ventilator for a week and a half and at NYU for five more weeks before transferring to Addington in April.
Where I’d spent the past eight months relearning how to use myself.
I’d been repaired by the very best that science could do for me. Tonight, I was home for roast chicken. I was as good as new. Except that I was too cold, and my head was thumping, and my stomach had knotted up with a harsh, inexplicable fear, as if only hours ago I’d been dragged up from that winter water like a ghoul. With a taste of blood and brine in my mouth, and a heart pumping wild for all that I’d lost and couldn’t even begin to remember.
4
Survivor’s Guilt
“Whaddaya call a deer with no eyes?” I watched Rachel slip her messenger bag over her chair arm and then let her body fall into a yoga butterfly pose, knees pitched over the edge of her seat.
“I give up. What?” I dropped my lunch tray of grilled cheese, salad, Sprite—and braced for her bad joke.
“No eye deer.” Rachel scrutinized me. “Sooo? How was your very first morning back to the grind? Would you rather be doing arm curls and therapy at Addington? Or did you miss Mr. Altoona playing air guitar in the courtyard?”
“Ha.” Mr. Altoona was our school’s manic IT guy. I cracked the soda tab. It wasn’t until I’d sat down that I could feel my muscles ease. Like I’d gone a few rounds in a boxing ring, instead of just shown up six weeks late for my first day of senior year. “I’ll be playing a lot of catch-up. I’m just patting myself on the back that I got through it.”
“What’s your schedule?”
I ticked it off. “Concepts in Math, AP English, Theory of Knowledge, and a meeting for yearbook staff.”
“And? So far, tolerable?”
“My adrenaline’s on overdrive, my brain’s fried, and I probably could use a couple of Advil. But otherwise, yeah.” I nodded. “I’ll survive.”
“Truth is, I always knew where you were today,” said Rachel, “by the trail of Oh my God there’s Embers.”
I smiled. “Everyone’s been amazing.” I’d been pretty embarrassed by it. I’d walked in to find my locker festooned with foil balloons. There was a fruit-and-cookie basket for me at the yearbook meeting, and a box of chocolates personally delivered to me by Mr. Singh, our school principal. I’d been bombarded with hugs from kids I hardly knew. It had been a veritable outpouring.
What I didn’t trust myself to tell Rachel was how it had all seemed…off. Lafayette was a huge high school, nearly thirteen hundred kids strong, and in my time here I hadn’t exactly distinguished myself with my unique brand of fabulous. I’d been a good dancer, I knew I was cute, I had friends—but I wasn’t some physics genius or Vogue beauty or star athlete or the Campus-Hot-Guy’s girlfriend.
Even my standout identifying feature—my long, coppery hair—was gone. Mermaid hair, Holden had called it, though I’d usually kept it pinned up in a heavy dancer’s bun. After the accident they’d cut it short, and now it was chin length, with my bangs shaggy to hide my scar and with short, raggedy patches behind each ear where squares had been shaved for all my EEG scans.
My hair hadn’t made me famous. But my accident had.
Crazy as it was, it was kind of like I really had died last February. All day, I’d been treated almost as if I were a hologram. All day I’d had this jittery sense that kids were waiting for my Tales from the Other Side. I’d wanted to find Rachel, to cling to her a little, to explain my fear of being this spectacle—a freak-show apparition at my own homecoming.
Instead I’d hid in a bathroom stall, letting the panic rip through my body in short jagged breaths. It was too much. It was too much to rejoin this slipstream of kids and classes and after-school pep rallies, caught in a dazed half-smiling, half-pretend state that just because I hadn’t died, I was all the way here.
Maybe Mom was right. Maybe I wasn’t ready to handle it just yet.
Emotion was a rush and roar, and I let it sweep over me. Splashed water on my face. Pulled the Shetland lock of bangs over my scar. Made it to the cafeteria in a basic state of okay.
But Rachel had her eyes on me. She always did. “You’re amazing,” she told me now. “Go, Embie! You are strong like bull.” Another old joke, because I was a Taurus, a sign that I’d never felt kinship with. Rachel was always trying to make it better for me, probably acting on her instinct as a fair, justice-seeking Libra.
Soon enough, like clockwork, like I’d never been gone, the roundtable began to gather with all my best school friends. Kids I’d been sharing lunch with since middle school. It stunned me to see them. My eyes and cheeks were hot. Junior year seemed like both a week and a decade ago.
Sadie Anderson, Perrin Seymour, Tom Haas, and Keiji Takana. We were eight in all, including Claude McKechnie and his new Italian girlfriend, Lucia, an exchange student who even made sentences like “pass the salt” sound cranked-up sexy.
Lucia kept stealing covert glances at me. Sadie, Keiji, and Perrin were hyper-smiley, but whenever Tom met my eyes, his were careful with concern. Nobody was sure how to act.
“I’m a phone call away, Ember,” Mom had advised last night, slipping into my room with a mug of tea. “If you need me tomorrow, for any reason. Any reason at all.” Her good-night kiss was deeply familiar as always, but there’d been something strange in her tone. Something that kept me up, tossing in bed for another hour. She hadn’t said anything strange. Not really. But there was something hidden in the cracks, the weight of what she’d left unspoken, that worried me.
And now here it was again. That squiggle of a question mark. That itchiness just outside my reach.
I sipped my Sprite and attempted to listen to the lunch conversations zipping past. Everyone seemed to be talking so fast, with an overspill of energy. I felt like no matter how hard I tried, I was a couple of beats behind real time. Seniors had the second-shift lunch—I was glad the school day was essentially over. Afternoon was one study session, and then I’d be heading downtown for physical therapy.