Wrecked Page 2

  “Saturday’s my night for the car,” I reminded him.

  “I know.” He looked at the phone in his hand. “But.”

  “Anna!” we heard my dad yell up the stairs. “Jack!” He had that edge to his voice. It meant he’d be screaming for five minutes once we got down to the dinner table.

  I stood there trying to think over the noise of my dad. I should let Jack have the car. It was a date. It was Cameron Polk. Obviously I should. It was just that I’d promised to drive to Jake Lowell’s party so that Ellen could drink, and I didn’t want Ellen to be mad….

  “Forget it,” Jack said, and he had that expression I hate. That one where it’s obvious he thinks I’m a disgusting human being. “Get out of my room.”

  “Anna!” my father shouted. “Jack!”

  “Get. Out.” When I didn’t move, he stabbed a key on his keyboard, stood up, and brushed by me into the hallway.

  “All right,” I said to his back. “Fine. You can have the car on Saturday.”

  “Jack!”

  “You know what?” my brother said, stopping at the top of the stairs. “Sometimes you are so small.”

  So now I get it. “Is that how you know who I am?” I ask Sleev-eth. He’s holding out the whiskey, and I take it.

  “Are you really going to drink tonight?” Ellen asks me.

  I ignore her and keep talking to Seth. “Because you know who Jack is because everyone knows who Cameron is?” Then I take a huge, and I mean huge, swallow. And nearly choke to death. Jason kindly pounds me on the back for a while.

  Ellen says, “Take a smaller swallow and go slower.”

  While I do, Seth goes, “No. I’m always seeing your hair in the hall.” Thrum, thrum.

  I have copper-colored corkscrew hair. No joke. Coils and coils of the stuff. It would be bad enough to have just the color. And bad enough to have the corkscrews. Having both is the worst. Ellen and my mother say it’s “adorable” and “striking.” Right. Try freakish.

  “I’ve been dying to pull it all year,” Seth says. Then he reaches out, grabs a curl, stretches it down straight, lets it go, and watches it bounce right back.

  “Supreme,” he says.

  “If we were in third grade,” I inform him, “you’d so be in the corner right now.”

  “If we were in the third grade,” Seth informs me, “I’d so be kicked out of school right now.” He reaches out and pulls another curl.

  “I hated that in the third grade,” I warn him.

  “She loves it now,” Lisa says with a smirk. As if she even knows me.

  I hold out the bottle to Ellen. She takes it and drinks.

  “We’re co-opting your liquor,” I tell Sleev-eth. I’m having fun.

  Here’s when I first noticed Jack trying with me, after a lot of years of not. It was this past summer, the first Friday of our annual two-week beach vacation at Commons End. We’d just arrived at that year’s rental house after a five-hour drive. Which should have been three hours, but the shortcut my father thought would shave off ten minutes ended up getting us lost. So whatever.

  “Anna,” Jack called up to me. I was on the elevated deck, hauling my suitcase and my mother’s. It was dusk but still hot from the sun of the day. I could feel my skin prickle from sweat and aggravation.

  “What?” I asked him.

  “You want me to unpack so you can go check out the water?”

  “Huh?”

  It’s always Jack and me who have to take everything out of the car and indoors. My father usually insists on packing the trunk before we leave, which involves a lot of impatience and yelling because he’s sure that not everything will fit. Then, on the arrival end, he never helps unload. And with her bad back, my mom can’t do much either.

  “I’ll unpack,” Jack said. “You want to go see the ocean before it’s dark, right?”

  It was something we usually raced each other for. Who would get their half finished the quickest, jog the two blocks, scramble up the narrow dune path, and reach the peak first. Who would get to throw off shoes, slip-slide down, pad across the warm sand, and wade into the undertow, looking out onto the choppy green water, before the other one even showed up. It was usually too late to actually swim. But most years getting that first piece of the beach on the day we arrived was a part of starting things off.

  “You mean, you’ll unpack the whole car?” I asked Jack.

  “Yeah.” I watched his face, trying to figure out the trick.

  “Okay,” I said finally.

  When I got back, we ate dinner, and after that Jack wandered through my door, listening to his iPod. My room had twin beds with ugly flowered curtains that matched the bedspreads, and a fake bamboo chair. I was on my cell phone, lying on the floor with my feet up on one bed. Jack did the same next to me. Not knowing what else to do, I said to Ellen, who was planning to come down three days later, “So, this is weird. Jack just came into my room and, like, made himself comfortable. He doesn’t even have his laptop with him or anything.”

  He didn’t so much as blink, and with his music on I couldn’t even be sure he’d heard me. When I hung up with Ellen a few minutes later, Jack said, “Do you like Straw Man Proposal?”

  I rolled my eyes. “You know I’ve never heard of them.”

  “Listen to this,” he said instead of telling me what a moron I was. And he leaned over to plug his earphones into my ears.

  I listened. It wasn’t bad.

  2

  SOMEHOW ME AND ELLEN AND SETH AND LISA AND JASON AND these two other guys and this one other girl wearing a hot pink jean jacket end up in Wayne’s basement playing pool. Which is fun, especially since I’m sort of good at it, and Sleev-eth and I are on the same team, and he’s good too. Three swigs of the Jack got me way drunk for a few hours, but now I think I’m sobered up. For a while there I thought I was going to puke, but Ellen walked me twice around the entire house, even all around the second floor.

  “Walking off too much alcohol doesn’t exactly count as partying,” she said when we passed some of those red-markered signs.

  “Yeah, but we’re not supposed to be here,” I moaned. “The second floor! Wayne will be soooo mad.”

  “Wayne is soooo stoned right now he wouldn’t be able to tell the second floor from the fifteenth,” Ellen told me. “Now, keep walking.”

  “Do you think I’m going to pass out?” I was sort of hopeful. I’d never passed out before.

  “Nah,” she said. “If I thought you were that far gone, I’d throw you in the shower.” That probably got me sober faster than anything.

  “You’re the best, El,” I told her.

  “Ugh,” she said. “You are not a cute drunk.”

  But now I’m fine, and Ellen is having a hard time holding her pool cue. She had four beers on top of three shots of Jack Daniel’s, all in the last hour and a half And right as I’m realizing that I also realize our curfews are way over.

  “Oh my God,” I say, scratching my shot.

  “What’s wrong?” Sleev-eth asks. He’s finishing another peppermint patty. I think I’ve seen him eat four tonight. And he’s not even a little bit fat.

  “Ellen, we have to go.” I stand up and hand off my pool cue to Jason. “I’m in such deep shit.”

  “About time,” Ellen says to Jason and the others. “She never does Anna-thing wrong.” It’s hard to believe she can do her word thing so drunk. Then again, Anna-thing is an old one.

  “You have to go now?” Seth sounds bummed, which is nice.

  “Just stay,” Lisa goes. “You’re already late anyway.”

  “You don’t know my dad,” I tell her.

  “You’re not driving,” Jason warns Ellen.

  “I am,” I say, pulling the keys out of my back pocket. My key ring is a teeny, tiny glow-in-the-dark planet Earth. If you sit in the pitch black with it, it’s got all the greens and blues and whites and the shapes of the continents and everything. Ellen gave it to me the day I got my learner’s permit. “Now y
ou’ve got the world at your fingertips,” she’d said.

  “Bye,” I tell everybody. Seth pulls one of my curls.

  “See ya,” they say.

  “Bye.” Ellen flaps her hands at them and stumbles.

  “Come on,” I go, and I lead her from the pool table, up the stairs and out the front door, down the street, to the Honda.

  “Eech,” Ellen goes on Ocean Road.

  “You want me to pull over and walk you around a little?”

  “Eech,” she says again. Then she leans over and against her seat belt to crank up the radio. It’s that old U2 song. That ancient one: “Hoow loong to sing this soong? Hooow looong, hooooow loooong, hoow loong …” Ellen cranks it loud, and then she turns to me and she goes, “Do you think—”

  And then there’s this deafening smacking sound and the smell of new plastic, and Ellen in my lap, dripping with blood, and there’s pieces of something falling and all this dust everywhere and chips flying up from the floor, and Ellen bloody with her head pressed hard against my collarbone, and the sharp brush of her ponytail sticking my right eye. “Hooow looong, hoow loong, hoow loong … ,” and the sound of somebody screaming and screaming and screaming, and then somehow my door opens and I fall out with bloody Ellen half on top of me and her ponytail still sticking me in my eye, and I think, How could she be in my lap and how could we fall out with our seat belts on? And I keep hearing that screaming and screaming and screaming and screaming, and then I hear the screaming stop, and instantly I vomit all over myself and all over Ellen’s head. “To sing this sooong?” And a man’s voice says, “Three seven oh one,” and there’s a siren and somebody’s holding a blanket, and another man’s voice says, “Can you talk?” and I say, “My friend is bleeding,” and then Ellen slides away, and her ponytail slides away with her, and the music stops, and then there’s three policemen standing over me, and one of them wears Harry Potter glasses, and one of them is licking his lips, and the other one is saying something, only I can’t make out the words, and I go, “I can’t hear you,” and I see the glow-in-the-dark earth dangling from somewhere really high up, and I’m looking at it and telling the cop, “I was going to do it tomorrow. I swear. I was going to do it tomorrow,” and he stops talking to me, and he looks at the other two, and the Harry Potter one pulls off his glasses and turns away, and the one who was licking his lips turns with him, and I’m watching the earth swing gently back and forth, and that last cop leans down to me and tries again, and this time I hear him, and he’s saying in this really friendly voice, “Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay”

  3

  I WANT TO VOMIT, AND MY RIGHT EYE THROBS. I GO TO TOUCH IT, when I hear someone say, “Don’t do that.” I open my eyes, except only the left one seems to be working. A nurse calls out to someone behind her, “She’s waking up.”

  I feel panic spreading through my blood, like ink in water.

  “Anna?” It’s my mother.

  “What are you wearing?” I go. Even with one eye I can see her long raincoat over pajamas.

  “Anna,” she says again. Blue-and-white-checked cotton. A raincoat over pajamas? Something is very wrong. I reach up again to my eye, but Mom grabs my hand.

  “Don’t,” she says. “You have a shield on it. Leave it.”

  “Is Dad mad?” I say, and she starts to cry. Seeing that is so strange it makes me remember everything. Scattering the leaves in one fell swoop, and Ellen bloody in my lap. And screaming, stopped.

  “Ellen.” The panic is seeping everywhere. “Is Ellen okay?”

  “She has a collapsed lung,” my mom tells me. “And some broken bones.” She blows her nose. The nurse fiddles with something above me, and I notice I’ve got a needle sticking in my arm. An IV.

  “A collapsed lung?” I go. “That’s bad, right?”

  My mother nods.

  “Is it days later?” I ask. I think it is. I think the accident must have happened at least a week ago.

  “No, Anna,” my mom says. She picks up my hand and squeezes it. “It’s the same night. It’s five thirty in the morning.”

  “What bones did Ellen break?” My eye is killing me. The throb fills up my entire head.

  “Some ribs and her leg.”

  “Did I break anything?” I ask. Because it’s hard to tell.

  “No,” my mom says. “You just injured your eye.”

  “My body hurts.”

  “Where?” Mom asks.

  “Everywhere.”

  “We’ll get the doctor. He’ll want to talk to you.”

  “Where is Ellen?” My mom’s chin starts to work a little again, and I feel the ink oozing into my chest.

  “Intensive care,” my mom finally says.

  Maybe it’s going to be Ellen who will wake up days later.

  “Is she in a coma?” I don’t know why I ask that exactly. Maybe because that’s what usually happens on TV. My mother shakes her head and lets go of my hand to stroke my left arm. The one without the IV. Sometimes people don’t wake up from comas. Sometimes people just stay vegetables. Ellen. A vegetable. I can hear her say it: veg-Ellen-table.

  “Is she going to die?” I ask.

  “No,” my mother says. “She’s not in a coma, and she’s not going to die.” Suddenly i’m really tired.

  “She better not,” I say. It’s hard to get the words out. To speak.

  “She won’t,” my mother says. It doesn’t sound like she’s lying, but a collapsed lung is bad. I’m pretty sure that’s bad. And there’s something else going on, something to do with the panic. I can’t relax.

  She’s still stroking my left arm.

  “Mom,” I say, why are you petting me? But I don’t have enough energy. “Mom” is all I say.

  Later I still feel sore all over, and my eye throbs along with my whole skull. There’s a sideways sliding tray set up in front of me. Scrambled eggs, toast, a small cup of purple jelly, and orange juice are sitting on it. I have to pee. Badly. I shove the tray out of my way and realize there’s no needle in my arm anymore.

  “Hello?” I go. The door to my little room is open, and with my left eye I can see nurses and people walking back and forth. “Hello?”

  My mother rushes in. Now she’s wearing regular clothes. Her light leather jacket, jeans, and clogs.

  “Anna?” she says.

  “I have to go to the bathroom.”

  She helps me. It’s strange to stand up. It makes my entire head pulse, for one thing, and my legs feel wobbly and splayed, like a newborn foal’s. I have to lean on my mother to walk the five steps to the toilet. Which is strange too.

  There’s a mirror above the bathroom sink. My mom hustles me through washing my hands, but I see myself long enough to get nauseous again. My hair is a mass of orange snakes. The thing on my eye looks like a miniature spaghetti strainer. Silver-colored metal, pricked with little holes. Around the sticky, white-tab edges of it my skin is swollen and blue. I try not to imagine what’s underneath.

  “Is it Sunday?” I ask after I’m safe back in bed. My mother sits in a chair next to me. For some reason I still feel like I must have blacked out, and for much longer than she’s saying.

  “Yes.”

  “Last night was the accident?” I ask, just to be sure. She nods. “Where’s Dad and Jack?”

  My mother looks awful. Huge gray circles under her eyes, white lips, stringy hair. Like she hasn’t slept all night. Which, now that I think about it, she probably hasn’t. “Mom?” I say again. “Where are they?”

  “Anna,” she says, taking my hand again.

  “What?” I won’t let her hold it. Something’s not right. That ink seeps through me. I can’t relax. “Dad’s really, really mad, right?” I say, but some part of me knows that’s not it.

  “Do you remember what happened last night?” she asks.

  “Yes,” I say. “What does that have to do with Dad not being here?” The aching in my eye and head drops straight to my throat. My body starts to tremble. My whole body. It just st
arts to shake.

  “Do you realize that there was another car involved?” my mother goes.

  There was screaming. Screaming and screaming and screaming. It wasn’t Ellen, and it wasn’t me. “Hoooow looong, hooow loooong …” And then the screaming stopped. It stopped because the life stopped. Somehow I knew it then. I know it now. I don’t need anybody to tell me. I heard the life stop.

  I feel the ache come out of both my eyes in tears, and I try not to cry, but it’s hard not to cry, and it makes me shake more. My mom sees it. The shaking. My teeth are chattering. She climbs onto the bed. She spoons behind and wraps her arms around me tightly to try to keep me still. But I can’t stop shaking.

  “Anna, listen to me,” she says. Her breath is warm on my neck and in my ear. “The driver of the other car died.”

  “I know,” I try to tell her, but my jaw and mouth are chattering so much, I can’t make the words.

  “Anna,” my mother says. She pulls her arms even tighter, and I’m glad because I think I might shake myself right off the bed onto the floor if she weren’t here, holding me together. “It was Cameron Polk,” she says. Cameron Polk. “Do you understand?” Cameron Polk. Cameron Polk. I make myself understand.

  “Yes,” I say, shaking.

  “Do you understand?” she says again.

  “Yes,” I say.

  4

  THE NURSE IS EXPLAINING ABOUT MY EYE. ONE DROP A DAY TO help the pain, and another drop of something else to keep my pupil dilated so that there won’t be rebleeding. Somehow I register the word rebleeding, and I wonder, vaguely, what that means. The nurse might be trying to tell me what it means, but I can’t really understand what she’s saying. I see her mouth moving, and I see my mother’s listening face, and I even hear words, but it’s like I’m underwater on Mars. Everything is blurry and foreign and floating.

  Things get slightly more clear and still and in focus after my mother leaves me to call my dad and check on what’s happening with him and Jack. I wobble out into the hallway and ask another nurse where intensive care is, and she tells me, even though I think she won’t. While she’s saying I should go back to my room and wait for my mom to come get me, I get myself into the elevator and hold on to the metal bar on the way up to the fifth floor. Right as the elevator door opens I see the Gersons rushing down the hall in the opposite direction from me, so I make my way to the end of the hall where they were coming from, and I check a few doors, and the third door is where I find Ellen.