Wrecked Read online

  “Wow,” Ellen goes, looking around. She’s way pale. There’s a scab on her cheek where that bandage used to be, and her hair seems longer.

  “You lost weight,” I tell her. She’s pretty thin to begin with.

  “Yeah. Hospitals are great for that.” She eyes my shield.

  “You like it?” I ask her.

  “You look like C-3P0.” It could be worse.

  “I brought homework and movies and ingredients for chocolate-chip cookies, or we could call Jason and those guys, and they said they would come over.”

  Ellen closes her eyes for longer than a blink and then opens them. “Actually,” she says, “I’m pretty tired.”

  “Oh,” I go, feeling stupid.

  She wheels herself over to the bed. “I kind of want to take a nap.”

  “All right.”

  “Um,” she goes. “Fm sick of my mom. Could you help me?” She shows me how to help lift her from her chair onto the bed. Her leg is heavy and clumsy. We have to sit her on the edge of the bed first and sort of lean her back. Then I have to lift her cast up after the rest of her. She winces and her face grits itself in pain.

  “Aagh.” I think it’s her ribs more than her leg, but Fm not sure, and I don’t know what to do. Ellen does, though. She lies still for a bunch of seconds, and then her face relaxes. “Thanks for remembering Whitey.” She picks up her polar bear. She’s had him on her pillow since she was born. He’s all worn out and gray looking now. She rubs him across her chin. “Thanks,” she says again, yawning and then immediately wincing. About a minute later she’s asleep.

  I wake up to my own voice. I’m making this moaning, calling sound. It’s still coming out of my mouth as my light snaps on, and then my father and Jack are standing at the foot of my bed.

  “Stop it, Anna,” my father’s saying. “Stop it now.”

  My blankets are all over the place. The back of my tank top is sticking to my skin. I’m shaking. The eye shield is falling off My mother rushes in.

  “Anna?” She sits on the edge of my bed and puts her hand to my forehead.

  “She had a nightmare,” Jack says.

  “You’re all right,” my father tells me.

  “She’s trembling,” my mother says.

  “She’s fine.” His gray hair is in complete bed head. He touches my sweaty shoulder. “You’re fine,” he says again.

  “I’m fine,” I say. My father leaves, and Jack snaps off the light. You can still see, though, from the light in the hallway.

  I’m in my room, not on Ocean Road. I’m in my room, not in the street with Ellen in my lap and a ponytail, sharp as glass, in my eye. I’m in my room, not out in the middle of the road, huddling near Jack, who’s huge as a giant, tree trunk legs planted wide and firm, tree limb arms and branched hands raised up and out. I’m in my room, not in the darkness with policemen and screaming, stopped. I’m in my room, I’m in my room, I’m in my room.

  “I need water,” I say. Jack gets it for me. I wait, the shaking slowing down while my mom sits close.

  “Thanks,” I tell Jack after I take a swallow.

  “You’re welcome,” he says.

  There was this one night, back when we got along. That year’s beach house was called Porpoise Swim. I had run into my room to pull on jeans and a sweatshirt, even though it was so hot out. I hate bug spray and won’t use it. I could hear my family’s voices clear as anything as they trooped down the stairs from the upper deck, under the house, and out to the driveway.

  “And then they cut to something else,” I heard Jack saying, “and then they slice up her eyeball, only it’s a special effect, so it’s not really her eyeball.”

  “That’s disgusting,” I heard my mom go as I pulled the hood of my sweatshirt up. Mosquitoes will get your ears if they can’t get anything else.

  “Really, it was a cow’s eye, except you couldn’t do that today because of animal rights and all,” Jack explained. It sounded as if they had reached the bottom of the stairs. “You never heard of it?”

  “No,” my mother said.

  “But it’s famous,” Jack told her. “They’re showing it at the museum next Saturday. Could we go home a day early so I can see it?” I walked down the hall toward the great room.

  “You know we don’t leave until Sunday,” I heard my dad say. Then he went, “Is that dripping?” He meant the outdoor shower underneath the house, where we were supposed to rinse the sand off before we came upstairs and inside. It was always dripping. “Damn it,” my father said. “It is.”

  “Yeah, but it would just mean leaving one day early, and you can’t rent it.” It sounded like they were almost at our driveway. I stepped out onto the deck through the sliding glass doors.

  “We’re not leaving one day early so you can see Anderson’s Dog,’ my father said. I could see the flashlight beams bouncing around out near the street. “Anna!” my dad called as I stepped onto the top stair.

  “It’s Andalusian,” I heard Jack say. “Not Anderson’s.”

  “Turn the shower all the way off when you come down!”

  My father had been standing right there looking at it. Why couldn’t he have turned it off?

  “Whatever it’s called,” my father told Jack, “we’re not driving back a day early for it.”

  They were all the way out of our driveway and down the street by the time I got to the dripping shower. I could see them stepping in and out of one another’s shadows. I reached for the little blue on-off wheel, bent down, and twisted it to the right. And in that exact moment there was this flash of light and something hit me hard, and then I was on my back on the sandy ground at the edge of where the driveway began and the underneath of the house ended. A crash of thunder. More lightning streaking the sky. Another bang. And then driving rain.

  By the time Jack and my parents were back under the house with me, I was sitting up, moving each arm and leg one by one to make sure I wasn’t half dead, or something. My heart was pounding. I couldn’t believe that a second ago I had been leaning under the dripping shower, and now I was sitting all the way over here. I couldn’t believe how fast it had happened. How I hadn’t even had time to scream.

  “I think I just got hit by lightning,” I told them. They were soaked.

  “What?” My father was frowning at the exposed stairs, probably trying to figure out how to get up them without getting more drenched.

  “I mean,” I said, “I didn’t get hit exactly, but my hand was on the metal thing for the shower. Maybe lightning hit the house and it went into the metal, and since my hand was on it—”

  “Anna, I’m dripping wet,” my father said. “What are you talking about?”

  “Mom,” I said. I thought I was okay. Nothing hurt exactly. “I think I got electrocuted or something.”

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” I told her. “It was really weird.”

  “Can you move everything?” my father asked. He’d finally looked at me.

  “I think so,” I said.

  “Are you burned anywhere?” He walked over and touched my head, my arms, my back. My mother looked too, over his shoulder.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. He stepped away and began squinting at the rain and the stairs again. “But it knocked me all the way over here.”

  “Anna, it couldn’t have knocked you that far. Come on, now. Don’t exaggerate.”

  “I’m not,” I told him. “It really—”

  “I’m making a run for it,” my father interrupted. My mom glanced at me and followed him up. Jack stayed where he was.

  “Did you really get electrocuted?” he asked.

  “I swear,” I said. Why didn’t they believe me? I don’t make up stuff like that.

  “What did it feel like?”

  “Like you tackled me.”

  “Really? Let me see your hand.” We both looked at my hand. Maybe it would be black. But it wasn’t. “You were just touching this?” Jack asked, and he po
inted to the blue on-off wheel.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Right when that first big lightning happened.”

  “Cool.”

  “It kind of scared me.” As soon as I said that, I started to cry, which was embarrassing.

  Jack looked away while I pulled my fist across my eyes. He waited awhile before he said anything. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah.” I sniffed.

  He watched me finish sniffing. “Maybe you’ll end up with special powers.”

  “You mean like a superhero?” I asked.

  “Yeah.” He walked to the space underneath the deck, where there was more height. “Like that. See if you can fly.”

  “I can’t fly.” I followed him.

  “Just see.” He made a scoop out of his hands, lacing them together, palms up, and locking them. “I’ll give you a boost.” So I backed up to him and stepped my right foot into his scoop.

  “One,” Jack said. “Two. Three!” He threw me upward, and I leaped and fell right back to the ground.

  “Nope,” I said.

  “Nope,” he said back. “It’s still cool.”

  “Do you think I’m okay?”

  “Yeah. You’re fine.”

  “What’s Andalusian?” I asked him. He thought about it.

  “I forget,” he said. “Either that, or I never looked it up in the first place.”

  After they leave, and it’s dark in my room again, and I’m sipping from the water Jack brought, I think about all that. I don’t know why exactly. But I remember how it felt like I’d been hit by a truck, and I remember how scared I was when my parents didn’t get it. And how Jack didn’t mind that I cried, and then made that step for me out of his hands to see if I could fly, even though we were both too old to really believe I would. I don’t know exactly why I’m thinking about all this, except it has something to do with how Jack brought me the water just now. He filled it three-quarters full so it would be enough, but not so much that I’d spill, and he waited to let go of his grip on the glass until he was sure I had it firm in my shaking hands. He was the one in the nightmare trying to stop something terrible from happening, and he was the one in real life double-checking that my hand wasn’t blackened, burned to a crisp, and letting me feel scared without minding.

  11

  JASON AND SETH HND LISA AND I TAKE TURNS MAKING SURE Ellen gets to and from classes okay. She’ll be in her chair for at least another two weeks, and she moves really, really slow. When we’re just sitting around, Jason massages Ellen’s earlobes.

  “That feels so completely amazing,” Ellen goes every time he starts. You can see just how amazing in her face, and I don’t think it’s only because she has such a thing for him. Her eyes and her cheeks and her whole face and neck relax.

  Sometimes, out of the blue, she’ll wince, as if someone’s hit her, and then she’ll hold really still for a few seconds.

  “It’s not my leg so much as the ribs,” she tells me the third time it happens. “And especially by my boob, where that goddamn chest tube went in.”

  Technically I’m supposed to be wearing my strainer in school, but I’m not following that particular rule anymore. Yesterday at Dr. Pluto’s I had a gonioscopy. He put some sort of special contact lens in my eye and then vised my face and used the slit lamp to look at things. The blood was totally gone, he told me, and the tear was tiny and basically healed. I have to take atropine—that’s the drops to keep my eyes dilated—for a few more days, and then I’m done.

  “I’ll see you in a week,” Dr. Pluto said, palming my head.

  Now Ellen and I are making our pathetic way through the humanities hallway. The only problem is, the armful of helium balloons Lisa tied to Ellen’s chair keep popping and startling us, which is a pain in the ass, plus if Ellen jumps, her face grits itself in pain and she has to hold still for a while before she can move or talk or not look like she’s dying.

  “Lisa’s not around, right?” Ellen asks.

  I take a quick glance up and down the hallway, which is pretty crowded. “Yeah,” I say. “I think she turned left for Spanish.”

  “Okay, stop,” Ellen says. We stop. “Let’s just pop the rest of these.” There’s three left. She pulls at one of the strings so she can reach a balloon. I pull at the other two.

  “Got a pen?” she asks. I hand her a pencil. She stabs a few times, but the pencil is dull, the latex is tough, and Ellen’s stabs are weak, I guess because of her ribs.

  “What about a nail file?” I dig one out of my backpack side pocket. “Here.” I stab at a red one, and it pops. A couple of kids jump.

  “Excellent,” Ellen goes. “I mean, no offense to Lisa. But do another one.” So I pop another one. Some other kids yelp. Ellen starts gnawing on the strings.

  “Wait, wait,” I go. “Let me untie them.” So she lets them go, and I start to untie. I’m good at that, actually. Any time somebody’s chain gets knotted, they ask me for help.

  “It’s freezing,” Ellen says.

  “You’re always cold,” I tell her.

  She yawns this huge, loud yawn and then winces. “Ow.”

  “You okay?” I ask.

  “I’m just really tired. And then it hurts to yawn.”

  “It’s your first day back,” I remind her.

  “I know,” she says. “I just didn’t think I’d be so tired.”

  She doesn’t sound good. “Do you want to go home?” I ask. It’s not like anybody’s going to stop her. The teachers are being pretty nice to both of us. I can’t remember the last homework I completed. And I’ve failed two tests and a quiz already—that biology quiz, actually—and everybody’s let me take them over.

  “Mostly it’s that I keep thinking about Cameron,” Ellen tells me. “You know?”

  “Yeah,” I answer. Only, I can’t stand to think about it, so I say, “Can I pop the last balloon?”

  “Go ahead.”

  I pop the last balloon. A few kids jump, and this one girl screams a very loud, very long scream, and the second she stops, I make this gasping sound, and then I think I’m going to vomit, only I don’t, and I’m shaking so hard I drop my backpack, and Ellen’s asking what’s the matter, and I can’t get my mouth to work, and Ellen’s grabbing my hand and asking why it’s all sweaty, and my heart is pounding and I think, Oh, my God, I’m having a heart attack, but sixteen-year-olds don’t have heart attacks, and Ellen’s telling me to stand up already, just stand up, and our biology teacher walks by and she’s going, “Girls? Are you all right? Girls?” and she stays with us while I get my breath back and get my heart to slow and while Ellen sinks lower and lower into her chair with her eyes closed and these tears just sliding out of the corners and down her cheeks, and then Ms. Riffing checks with the junior-class vice principal and then calls Ellen’s mom, who says we’re like soldiers battling shell shock and we should both go right to bed, and drives me home.

  Instead of getting into bed, I’m sitting at my desk, staring at the cover of my history book. I hear Jack’s step, walking into the kitchen from the mudroom and then on the stairs, and he stops at my door. He takes the earphones out of his ears. I can hear squawking coming from them. I swear he’s going to be deaf before he’s twenty-one.

  “Your friend Jason told me you and Ellen freaked out in the hall today before sixth period,” he says. He needs a haircut, and he has this line between his eyes I’ve never noticed before, and the whites are sort of bloodshot.

  “Did people see?” I ask. But I don’t really care.

  “I guess,” he says. “Jason seemed pretty worried. That guy Seth was with him. They both went out of their way to find me.”

  “Oh,” I say.

  “They seem pretty cool, those two,” Jack tells me.

  “Oh,” I say again.

  “Do you want to go to Top Hats?”

  “With you?” The idea of going anywhere with Jack is so strange I can hardly picture it.

  “Yeah,” he says. “I’m sick of being cooped up in this hou
se.” Even though he just got home.

  “How would we get there?” I ask.

  “I heard Mom drive in when I was walking upstairs,” he says. We still have only one car. The Audi. “We could tell her we’ll pick up Dad from work.” They’re going to buy another Honda. They’re not sure if insurance will cover it, and my dad’s been yelling at a bunch of people over the phone about it.

  “I’m really behind on my homework,” I tell Jack.

  “Bring it,” he says. “I’ll bring my laptop. We can hang out there until dinner.”

  In the garage he hesitates on the third step from the mudroom. “Who’s driving?” he asks.

  ‘You,” I tell him.

  Dr. Pluto warned me that outside during the day without the shield my eye may be sensitive to the sun. This is the first time I’m trying it, and he’s right. As soon as we’re out of the garage, I have to cover the eye with my hand. I haven’t dug up my sunglasses yet. So I have to keep my hand there until we’re inside the diner.

  I order onion rings and a Coke. Jack orders fish sticks and a Diet Coke.

  “Gross,” I say about the Diet Coke. It’s not like he’s got a weight problem. “How can you drink that?”

  He shrugs. “I like the taste.”

  The waitress comes over to refill our water glasses, even though they’re still about half full. “Where’s your friend?” She remembers Ellen and me from when we used to come here all the time.

  “She broke her leg,” I say.

  “Same time you broke your eye?” the waitress asks.

  “Yeah,” I say, and I guess something about my face makes her stop asking me about it. Instead she goes, “This your boyfriend?” Jack snorts Diet Coke out his nose. Nice.

  “My brother,” I say. Jack’s wiping himself off.

  “Should have guessed,” the waitress says as she walks away. “You two look alike.”

  It reminds me of when Cameron said that, and I wonder if it reminds Jack, too, when he sticks his earphones back into his ears and taps his iPod and won’t look at me. Which makes me start to shake again. My wrists mostly, stuttering on the edge of the table.

  “Jack,” I say.