I power up my laptop, happy enough to forgive Lilly now that I know I’ll be seeing Isaac later. Brooke calls first. She’s wearing a sports bra and has her hair up in a wet ponytail.
“Are you going to put a shirt on?”
“Why?” She looks mystified as she bites into a pizza pocket. “Oh, there’s Lilly.”
Our friend pops up on the other side of the screen. She’s got on a hoodie from last year’s band camp and too much concealer around her eyes. I personally think the mea culpa would go over better if she went ahead and let me see she’s been crying, but whatever. Isaac texted me again to say he’d be over in about an hour, so she’s got plenty of time to apologize.
“Hey, Sasha,” Lilly says cautiously. “How’s it going?”
“Fine,” I tell her. “I came home and practiced a ton. Charity’s only keeping the seat warm for me.”
“Damn straight,” Brooke says, some pepperoni falling out of her mouth to land in her bra. She fishes it out and pops it back in her mouth.
“Oh my God, Brooke,” Lilly says, ignoring my jab at her cousin. “You’re so gross.”
“Whatever, dude. I was looking for some pumpkin recipes for foods class last week and typed pump king instead. Skewed my results. Now that’s gross.”
“I don’t want to know,” Lilly says, but I think maybe she does.
“Seriously, Sasha, you doing okay?”
Brooke asks this while holding her pizza pocket up into the air and examining the remaining contents as if they might be more interesting than my answer.
“I’m fine. Really, guys.” I look at Lilly, but she only nods. Apparently I’m going to have to dig for this admission of wrongdoing the way I fish for compliments from Heath.
“So did you know?”
Lilly doesn’t feign innocence or pretend she doesn’t know what I’m talking about. I’ll give her that.
“Yeah.” She drops her eyes, and Brooke pops the rest of her dinner into her mouth.
“And you didn’t tell me Charity was going to challenge?”
“Sasha . . .”
I’m so tired of hearing an ellipsis after my name, as if everyone is trying to be delicate with me. Isaac certainly isn’t, and I’m so distracted by the idea of him being here soon that I have to mentally review what Lilly says next before I realize she’s not following the script for making up with me.
“Charity’s trying to get into Ashland. Her GPA isn’t that great but if she takes first chair it might help.”
“You mean usurps,” I correct her. “Usurps first chair.”
“It’s not yours,” Lilly shoots back. “She beat you in the challenge, fair and square. You couldn’t have landed a spot in a church choir with that performance.”
My heart clenches in surprise, a surge of rage is injected into my veins along with blood. “And you can’t land Cole,” I tell her.
“Hey, whoa, ladies,” Brooke says, the conversation clearly taking a turn from what she expected as well.
“Screw you, Sasha,” Lilly yells, tears sending her makeup into a discolored flood. “Why do you have to be so damn mean?”
Next to the laptop, my phone lights up with a text from Isaac.
here
He’s early. It’s barely dark enough for us to slip out into the trees without being seen, and if he thinks he’s coming inside to meet my parents he has grossly misjudged the situation.
“Lilly, where did you learn those words? Certainly not from me,” Brooke says, trying hard to alleviate a situation that has gone all the way off the rails.
“Screw you too, Brooke,” Lilly says, tears that match her skin now dripping onto her shirt. “If you won’t tell Sasha what you really think of her, then you’re a shitty friend too.”
“Dude,” Brooke’s eyebrows have shot up to her wet hairline, mouth that typically has a retort ready to fire stuck in an open O.
here
Isaac’s second text doesn’t sit well with me, the inference that I’m supposed to leap at his call combined with Lilly’s suggestion that perhaps Brooke has said some not-so-perfect things about me behind my back makes me take a pic of my middle finger as a reply.
THERE, I type.
“Who are you texting?” Brooke asks.
“Not your business.” I put my phone in my lap so she can’t see it. “But anything you said about me to Lilly is mine.”
“You think everything is yours,” Lilly says, before Brooke can even open her mouth.
“Were backbones on sale at Walmart or something?” I ask.
“Fuck you, Sasha.” Lilly’s face is melting along with her clean vocabulary, streams of concealer now slipping into the sides of her mouth and coating her tongue when she speaks.
“Guys, I think we should—”
“No,” I cut Brooke off. “I think you should tell me exactly what you think of me. Right now. To my face. Anything you can say to Lilly you can say to me.”
Kinda what I had in mind but need you down here for that . . .
Isaac’s text lights up in my lap, in response to my middle finger pic.
“Tell her, Brooke,” Lilly says.
“Sasha . . .” Brooke’s voice is unsure, watery, something I’ve never heard from her. “It’s just that . . .”
“Say it,” Lilly pushes. “Everyone thinks it anyway.”
Brooke straightens and looks right at me, regal as hell even with a smear of pizza grease across her chest and a pimple in the middle of her forehead.
“You’re a bitch,” she says, just as my phone vibrates, tumbling from my lap.
Gotta go
I hear the low purr of a motorcycle as he fires up the engine, the noise sending my heart into a patter to match, black spots careening across everything I see as I push back from my desk, chair rolling across my phone and crunching the screen.
“A total bitch,” Lilly agrees, her face briefly visible between flashes of black as I run to the window, my heart leading the way. It’s pushing, beating frantically in a voiceless scream to tell him to come back, to stay, to lay with me in the moonlight and mold me into what I want to be.
The fastest way between two points is a straight line. Shanna knows this because I know this, and her heart feeds my brain, blood pulsing up and coming back down, knowledge and need combining to create the perfect storm as our body hits the window.
My head hits first, skull shattering the glass and making way for hands that search for purchase, feet kicking as if the air may suddenly coalesce. It doesn’t, and I fall, branches tearing at my limbs, blood and blackness in my vision and two girls’ voices from above calling . . .
Sasha?
Sasha?
Sasha?
I hit the ground and all the air is knocked out of me, a perpetual exhale that won’t let me pull anything back in, my lungs flattened by the impact. I try but get only a hissing sound and the coppery taste of blood as I suck in streams of warmth running down both sides of my face. I try again to breathe, and this time it’s a gurgle as blood surges up from inside as well, rising to meet what I’m swallowing.
I’ve managed a third breath when Mom and Dad come running, the side door slamming behind them. Mom’s hands are on me, touching, pulling, pushing, grabbing, but they come back slick with blood so dark it’s as black as the sky, fragments of glass sparkling with their own constellations on her palms.
“Don’t touch her,” Dad is yelling. “They said don’t try to move her.”
He’s got one hand on his cell and the other on Mom’s shoulder, but it’s too late. She’s already done everything she can think of: propped my head, wiped my face, told me it’s going to be okay. All the things that got me through fevers and colds, chicken pox and strep throat. But I didn’t have a tree branch stuck in my side then, or a flap of my scalp hanging to one side.
I move my hands, for what I don’t know. I don’t have the strength to raise my arms, so I dig into the ground, making ten tiny holes on either side of my body as I try to find something to root myself to. Mom is hurting more than helping, Dad keeps saying our address over and over, even though surely emergency services has got it by now, and still I can hear my friends through what’s left of my window, vaguely calling for me.
What I don’t hear is Isaac coming back.
I clench my teeth as Mom reaches for my face, trying to find some way to put my head back together. Maybe something she picked up in one of her crafting classes will finally be useful.
“Don’t touch her,” Dad says again, leaning over us both. “You’ll make it worse.”
“Jesus Christ, Mark,” Mom says. “How? Look at her!”
“They’ll be here,” Dad says, repeating it as if it will make the ambulance come faster. “They’ll be here. They’re on their way.”
“They’re on the way.” Mom puts her face right down to mine and says it a third time, in case I hadn’t picked up on that fact.
The sirens can be heard from miles away. Dad leaves Mom and me under the tree to wave them down, just in case GPS fails them, I suppose. Mom puts her cheek next to mine, coating her own in blood and accidentally inhaling some of my hair, which hurts like hell when she finally pulls back and part of my scalp follows.
“Sasha,” she whispers. “What have you done?”
My fingers dig deeper into the dirt, the cold solidness of it giving me more comfort than she can. I’ve done nothing, and I know it. It was Shanna who made this leap, her heart leading the way though our body shared the fall. Spasmodic light fills the yard, the branches of the tree we lie under dancing across the side of the house.
“Ma’am, we need you to move aside,” a woman says, replacing my panicking mother with something I can relate to. She’s all calculation, her eyes skimming over me in a moment, decisions being made immediately.
I like her.
Her partner hovers on the other side of me, his gloved fingers barely touching me as a cool assessment is made. They have their own language in glances and unspoken words, but the ones they do speak I must refute so that they will understand. Blood pressure. Heart rate.
“It’s not mine,” I say. These are my first words after falling, and they are tinged with copper. Still, the truth tastes good.
“Yes, it’s going to be fine,” the female medic says.
“No.” I let go of a fistful of earth, grimy blood-streaked hand capturing her wrist so that she is forced to hear me. “My heart is not mine.”
“Whoever’s it is, it needs blood,” she says matter-of-factly. “You don’t have much left.”
The pulsing light fades, the shadow branches taking over the dance being performed on the side of the house as black explodes across my vision. Dad is swearing, Mom is crying, but I . . .
. . . I feel just fine.
Because I didn’t do anything wrong.