EIGHTEEN

MOM WOKE ME UP AT 6:50. “Sleep through your alarm?” she asked.

I squinted. It was still dark in my room. “I’m fine,” I said.

“You sure?”

“Yeah,” I said, and pulled myself out of bed.

I was at school just thirty-two minutes later. I didn’t look my best, but I’d long ago given up trying to impress the student body of White River High School.

Daisy was sitting alone on the front steps. “You look sleepy,” she said as I walked up. It was cloudy, the kind of day where the sun is a supposition.

“Long night. How are you?”

“Great, except I haven’t seen nearly enough of my best friend lately. You want to hang out later? Applebee’s?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Also, my mom had to borrow my car, so can we just go together?”

—

I made it through lunch, through the standard post-lunch encounter with Mom worrying over my “tired eyes,” through history and statistics. In each room the soul-sucking fluorescent light coated everything in a film of sickness, and the day droned on until the final bell released me at last. I made it to Harold, sat down in the driver’s seat, and waited for Daisy.

I hadn’t been sleeping much. Hadn’t been thinking straight. That sanitizer is basically pure alcohol; you can’t keep drinking that. Should probably call Dr. Singh, but then you’ll have to talk to her answering service and tell a stranger that you’re crazy. Can’t bear the thought of Dr. Singh calling back, voice tinged with sympathy, asking whether I’m taking the medication every day. Doesn’t work anyway. Nothing does. Three different medications and five years of cognitive behavioral therapy later, and here we are.

—

I startled awake at the sound of Daisy opening the passenger door. “You okay?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said. I turned the car on. Felt my spine straightening. I reversed out of the parking spot and then waited in line to leave campus. “You barely even changed my name,” I said. My voice felt squeaky, but I was finding it.

“Huh?”

“Ayala, Aza. Beginning of the alphabet to the end and back. Gave her compulsions. Gave her my personality. Anyone reading it would know how you really feel about me. Mychal. Davis. Everyone at school, probably.”

“Aza,” Daisy said. My real name sounded wrong in her voice. “You’re not—”

“Oh, fuck off.”

“I’ve been writing them since I was eleven, and you’ve never read a single one.”

“You never asked.”

“First, I did ask. A bunch of times. And then I got tired of you saying you’d read them and never doing it. And second, I shouldn’t have to ask. You could take three seconds away from your nonstop fucking contemplation of yourself to think about other people’s interests. Look, I came up with Ayala in like seventh grade. And it was a dick move, but she’s her own character now. She’s not you, okay?” We were still inching our way through the student parking lot. “I mean, I love you, and it’s not your fault, but your anxiety does kind of invite disasters.”

At last I pulled off campus and headed north up Meridian toward the highway. She kept talking, of course. She always did. “I’m sorry, okay? I should’ve let Ayala die years ago. But yeah, you’re right, it is kind of a way of coping with—I mean, Holmesy, you’re exhausting.”

“Yeah, all our friendship has gotten you in the last couple months is fifty thousand dollars and a boyfriend. You’re right, I’m a terrible person. What’d you call me in that story? Useless. I’m useless.”

“Aza, she’s not you. But you are . . . extremely self-centered. Like, I know you have the mental problems and whatever, but they do make you . . . you know.”

“I don’t know, actually. They make me what?”

“Mychal said once that you’re like mustard. Great in small quantities, but then a lot of you is . . . a lot.”

I didn’t say anything.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t’ve said that.”

We were stopped at a red light, and when it turned green I was somewhat ungentle with Harold’s accelerator. I could feel the heat in my cheeks, but couldn’t tell if I was about to start crying or screaming. Daisy kept going. “But you know what I mean. Like, what are my parents’ names?”

I didn’t answer. I didn’t know the answer. I just took a long breath, trying to push my heartbeat down into my chest. I didn’t need Daisy to point out what a shitshow I was. I knew.

“What are their jobs? When was the last time you were at my apartment—five years ago? We’re supposed to be best friends, Holmesy, and you don’t even know if I have any fucking pets. You have no idea what it’s like for me, and you’re so, like, pathologically uncurious that you don’t even know what you don’t know.”

“You have a cat,” I whispered.

“You just have no fucking clue. It’s all so fucking easy for you. I mean, you think you and your mom are poor or whatever, but you got braces. You got a car and a laptop and all that shit, and you think it’s natural. You think it’s just normal to have a house with your own room and a mom who helps you with your homework. You don’t think you’re privileged, but you have everything. You don’t know what it’s like for me, and you don’t ask. I share a room with my annoying eight-year-old sister whose name you don’t know and then you judge me for buying a car instead of saving it all for college, but you don’t know. You want me to be some selfless, proper heroine who’s too good for money, but that’s bullshit, Holmesy. Being poor doesn’t purify you or whatever the fuck. It just sucks. You don’t know my life. You haven’t taken the time to find out, and you don’t get to judge me.”

“Her name is Elena,” I said quietly.

“You think it’s hard for you and I’m sure it is from inside your head, but . . . you can’t get it, because your privileges are just oxygen to you. I thought the money, I thought it would make us the same. I’ve always been trying to keep up with you, trying to type as fast on my phone as you can on your laptop, and I thought it would make us closer, but it just made me feel . . . like you’re spoiled, kinda. Like, you’ve had this all along, and you can’t even know how much easier it makes everything, because you don’t ever think about anybody else’s life.”

I felt like I might throw up. We merged onto the highway. My head was careening—I hated myself, hated her, thought she was right and wrong, thought I deserved it and didn’t.

“You think it’s easy for me?”

“I don’t mean—”

I turned to her. “STOP TALKING. Jesus Christ, you haven’t shut up in ten years. I’m sorry it’s not fun hanging out with me because I’m stuck in my head so much, but imagine being actually stuck inside my head with no way out, with no way to ever take a break from it, because that’s my life. To use Mychal’s clever little analogy, imagine eating NOTHING BUT mustard, being stuck with mustard ALL THE TIME and if you hate me so much then stop asking me to—”

“HOLMESY!” she shouted, but too late. I looked up only in time to see that I’d kept accelerating while the traffic had slowed. I couldn’t even get my foot to the brake before we slammed into the SUV in front of us. A moment later, something slammed into us from behind. Tires screeching. Honking. Another crash, this one smaller. Then silence.

I was trying to catch my breath, but I couldn’t, because every breath hurt.

I swore, but it just came out as ahhhhggg. I reached for the door only to realize my seat belt was still on. I looked over at Daisy, who was looking back at me. “Are you okay!” she shouted. I realized I was groaning with each exhalation. My ears were ringing. “Yeah,” I said. “You?” The pain made me feel dizzy. Darkness encroached at the edge of my vision. “I think so,” she said. The world narrowed into a tunnel as I struggled for breath. “Stay in the car, Holmesy. You’re hurt. Do you have your phone? We gotta call 911.”

The phone. I unbuckled my seat belt and pushed my door open. I tried to stand, but the pain brought me back into Harold’s seat. Fuck. Harold. A woman wearing a business suit knelt down to my eye level. She told me not to move, but I had to. I lifted myself up, and the pain blinded me for a minute, but then the black dots scattered so I could see the damage.

Harold’s trunk was as crumpled as his hood—he looked like a seismograph reading, except for the passenger compartment, which was perfectly intact. He never failed me, not even when I failed him.

I leaned on Harold’s side as I staggered back to the trunk. I tried to lift the trunk gate, but it was crushed. I started pounding on the trunk with my hands, screaming with every breath, “Fuck oh God, oh God, oh God. He’s totaled. He’s totaled.”

“You’re kidding me,” Daisy said as she walked to the back of Harold. “You’re upset about the goddamned car? It’s a car, Holmesy. We almost died, and you’re worried about your car?”

I pounded on the trunk again, until Harold’s license plate slid off, but I couldn’t get it open.

“Are you crying about the car?”

I could see the latch; I just couldn’t get it pried open, and whenever I tried to lift, the pain in my ribs made my vision cloud up, but I finally wrested the trunk open enough to reach my arm inside. I fumbled around until I found my dad’s phone. The screen was shattered.

I held the power button to turn it on, but beneath the branches of broken glass, the screen only glowed a cloudy gray. I pulled myself back to the driver’s-side door and slumped into Harold’s seat, my forehead on the steering wheel.

I knew the pictures were backed up, that nothing had really been lost. But it was his phone, you know? He’d held it, talked into it. Taken my picture with it.

I ran my thumb across the shattered glass and cried until I felt a hand on my shoulder. “My name’s Franklin. You’ve been in a car accident. I’m a firefighter. Try not to move. An ambulance is on its way. What’s your name?”

“Aza. I’m not hurt.”

“Just hang tight for me, Aza. Do you know what day it is?”

“It’s my dad’s phone,” I said. “This is his phone, and . . .”

“Is this his car? Are you worried he’ll be upset? Aza, I’ve been doing this for a long time, and I can promise, your dad’s not mad at you. He’s relieved you’re okay.”

I felt like I was getting ripped apart from the inside, the supernova of my selves simultaneously exploding and collapsing. It hurt to cry, but I hadn’t cried in so long, and I didn’t really want to stop. “Where are you having pain?” he asked.

I pointed toward the right side of my rib cage. A woman approached, and they began a conversation about whether I’d need a backboard. I tried to say that I felt dizzy and then felt myself falling, even though there was really nowhere to fall.

—

I woke up staring at the ceiling of an ambulance, strapped to a backboard, a man holding an oxygen mask over my face, the sirens distant, my ears still ringing. Then falling again, down and down, and then on a hospital bed in a hallway, Mom over me, makeup dripping from her red eyes. “My baby, oh Lord. Baby, are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” I said. “I think I just cracked a rib or something. Dad’s phone is broken.”

“It’s okay. We have everything backed up. They called me and told me you were hurt but they didn’t tell me if you were . . .” she said, and then started crying. She sort of collapsed into Daisy, which is when I noticed Daisy was there, a red welt on her collarbone.

I turned away from them and looked up at the bright fluorescent light above my bed, feeling the hot tears on my face, and finally my mom said, “I can’t lose you, too.”

A woman came in and took me away to get a CT scan, and I was sort of relieved to be away from both my mom and Daisy for a while, not to feel the swirl of fear and guilt over being such a failure as a daughter and a friend.

“Car accident?” the woman asked as she pushed me past the word kindness painted in calligraphy on the wall.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Those seat belts will hurt ya while saving your life,” she said.

“Yeah. Am I gonna need antibiotics?”

“I’m not your doctor. She’ll be in after we get the test.”

They put something in my IV that made me feel like I was pissing my pants, then ran me through the cylinder of the CT machine, and eventually returned me to the shivering nerves of my mother. I couldn’t shake the crack in her voice when she said she couldn’t lose me, too. I felt her nerves as she paced around the room, texting with my aunt and uncle in Texas, pressing long breaths through pursed lips, dabbing at her eye makeup with a tissue.

Daisy didn’t say much, for once. “It’s okay if you want to go home,” I said to her at one point.

“Do you want me to go home?” she asked.

“Up to you,” I said. “Seriously.”

“I’ll stay,” she answered, and sat quietly, her eyes glancing from me to my mom and back again.