Unravelling
Normally I’d be driving myself and getting to school early but I’m not allowed to drive. Once you have a seizure, even if it’s just one, you’re marked as a possible epileptic. Not that I don’t get it, I do. I’m just not a fan of this rule when it applies to me.
This means I’ve missed two days of school. Thursday Struz took me to see a specialist. She ran some tests, and hopefully she’ll clear me to drive when the results come back. And it’s not like anything ever happens on the first day of school anyway.
I missed an AP diagnostic and listening to the teacher read the syllabus? Oh, too bad. Friday my mother couldn’t stop throwing up, and even though I think she’s been taking all her meds, on days when her body has a physical manifestation of her depression, someone needs to keep an eye on her. And it’s not like my dad can do it.
“So, Bread Bites for lunch?” Nick asks when we’re standing outside my homeroom.
“I can’t,” I say, thankful for a legit excuse. It’s not that I don’t want to hang out with him—I do. I just hate that suddenly because I was injured he’s gone from goofy, immature, half-brained Nick to this skittish, hovering, insecure woodland creature who wants to attach himself to me at all times.
But Nick just looks at me, and he doesn’t jump to the obvious conclusion.
“Juniors don’t get off-campus lunches.”
A smile sweeps over his face, and he nods. “I can get you off campus for lunch. Or we can order delivery.”
And with that, the irritable, bitchy edge I’ve been walking around with the past few days melts away. Staying on campus for lunch as a senior is social suicide, and he’s risking it for me?
“It was awesome of you to bring Jared pizza, but you don’t need to worry about me like that.” Not that Nick’s popularity is going to suffer, but he never struck me as the kind of guy who’d forgo bullshitting with the boys to hang out with a girl. And I don’t need him to do that for me.
“Don’t look so surprised.” He laughs as he leans in and kisses the skin just beneath my ear.
Feeling his lips against my skin, I’m a little short of breath, and the smile on his face when he pulls back is almost enough to turn me into most girls.
Until I see Reid Suitor walk past us with his head down as he ducks into our homeroom. I don’t know exactly what I plan to say to him. But I know he was there when I died. He must know something.
“Gotta go,” I say to Nick before following Reid. He and I have been in Dockery’s homeroom since freshman year, and just like every other year, her walls are covered with old history posters—facts about US presidents, magazine collages about momentous dates or events. The only thing worse would be, of course, if the walls peeking out from behind the posters were painted something like a stifling bright orange. Oh wait, they are.
Per usual, Dockery’s animated face shines through her pile of platinum-blond hair, and she’s lost in a story about something embarrassing that happened to her while she was driving— seriously, her license should be revoked, not mine—but I wait, watching Reid, who’s perfectly in my line of sight.
He’s found the other two stoners in our homeroom, and the three of them are huddled together in the back corner as far away from Dockery as they can get.
I’ve never for the life of me understood Reid Suitor. Outwardly he doesn’t look like he’d have anything in common with Ben. His jeans seem like they fit, and he’s wearing a blue collared shirt and a gray V-neck sweater, which would look nerdy on most guys, but somehow it manages to look alternative on him. He’s always been cute—Kate’s probably still a little in love with him—and he’s got these bright blue eyes, eyelashes that extend for days, and sandy brown hair. Really, he could probably be some kind of Calvin Klein model.
But more than that, I know there’s a brain behind that pretty face. I had to proofread one of his essays in Honors Humanities last year—luck of the draw—and not only was his paper done, but it was actually good. Good enough that I had to struggle to edit it, which doesn’t happen to me often.
“Oh, Janelle!” Dockery says, handing me my schedule. “We missed you last week. I was so sorry to hear about your accident. I’m glad you’re okay!”
“Thanks,” I say before glaring at Alex, who’s already sitting at our usual table.
He just shrugs, like he can’t understand why I wouldn’t want Dockery—and thus the entire school—to know I got hit by a truck and came back from the dead. For someone so anti-drama, he’s clueless about how it starts.
With a sigh, I drop my bag next to him and flop into my chair before glancing down at my schedule. Once I look at it, I’m tempted to tear it into pieces.
It’s all wrong. Which is a nightmare. Because Miss Florentine, my guidance counselor, is overworked, and schedule changes are never guaranteed.
I look at my schedule again.
Earth science, American Literature, algebra, and chorus. So I’m supposed to take science for stoners, basic English, and freshman math. I wouldn’t mind chorus, but I don’t sing.
“Don’t be overdramatic. It’s not that bad,” Alex says. “Just follow my schedule. I’m sure we can get you bumped into my classes.”
Last resort, I could get my dad to call and complain, since that’s how things actually get done around here. I cannot get through junior year in classes with freshmen and stoners. “How full are your classes?” I ask as the bell rings.
“You should be fine for Spanish, but APEL . . . ,” Alex says, and I can’t stifle a groan. He wrinkles his nose. “Poblete had thirty-five of us on Thursday and forty-one on Friday.”
Thirty-two is supposed to be the cap on the AP English Language class. I’m doomed.
The majority of first period passes like this:
Alex goes to physics, and I head to the counseling office. The secretary says Florentine can’t possibly see me right now. I reword my request until she changes her mind.
Florentine says my schedule can be changed, but the classes I want are full.
I reword, and she sends me to Mr. Elksen, the VP in charge of scheduling, who can apparently override the rules.
Elksen’s secretary says I’ll have to come back later.
I try to reword, but she actually has a backbone.
I head to Principal Mauro’s office instead to see if she’ll override my schedule for me.
Her secretary says she’s busy, and I’ll have to come back later.
Mauro herself comes out to see what’s going on.
She says I have to fill out a schedule change request form and speak to Elksen like everyone else.
It’s amazing anything ever happens in this school.
I’m about to try to press my luck when the hallway double doors swing open, and Mauro stops listening and turns to see who else is interrupting her game of solitaire.
But it’s security.
And Ben Michaels.
His hood is pulled over his head, shading his hair and his eyes, the white earbuds of his iPod barely visible. He has no backpack, and as if he isn’t being escorted by two campus security guards, he just shuffles his ripped Chuck Taylors as he walks, with an ease that screams, I don’t care.
He’s just another one of those guys I can’t stand here, DGAFing their way through life.
“Miss Tenner?”
Ben’s head tips up at the sound of my name, and from underneath his hood, I can see his eyes widen in surprise for a second, before his whole body shifts, tension rolling through it.
I feel giddy with excitement, because he’s right here with the answers I need. My heart beats too fast—for a second—and then I remember we’re not alone.
I wish I could freeze everyone else and demand he clear up the muddiness in my brain and explain what happened at Torrey Pines.
But since I’m not magical . . . that isn’t possible.
I turn back to Principal Mauro. “I just really need to get my schedule fixed.”
“And as I said, you’ll need to go through the proper channels,” she answers automatically. “There are plenty of other students with scheduling needs as well.”
I want to shout at her. But I don’t.
I shift, adjusting the weight of my bag on my shoulder, and turn to leave.
And almost run right into Ben. I come within centimeters of touching him, and my eyes lock onto his. Then the scent of mint, soap, and gasoline hits me, and it’s like I’m on my back on the 101 looking up at him all over again. But he turns away, and we narrowly avoid any physical contact. I watch his back for a few seconds, but he doesn’t turn around.
It doesn’t matter. Every nerve ending in my whole body feels as if it’s on fire.
The inefficiency makes me want to throw up.
And for all Nick’s flirting this morning, and all those sweet thoughts that turned me into a melty pile of mush, turns out he’s still a douche bag. Sure, I told him to go to lunch without me, but he said he wouldn’t.
sry babe get u off tmrw
Based on that grammatical monstrosity of a text, I know he’s already off campus with Kevin, headed to Bread Bites, so I wander into the quad for lunch.
I’m walking toward the grassy area in front of the L building when some girl lets out one of those bloodcurdling screams— the scary-movie kind. My body tenses, and I swear I can see headlights in front of me, and I have this crazy desire to throw my hand up and cover my face.
But as I whirl toward the sound, the girl—Roxy Indigo, who I only know because she got a 6 percent in our ceramics class freshman year—has dissolved into hysterical laughter, while she tries, halfheartedly, to pull her denim skirt—currently bunched up around her waist, revealing a black thong—back down over her hips. After homecoming last year, word around campus was she got so drunk at the after-party that she passed out and peed herself in the back of her date’s SUV.
Which reminds me that I don’t have any friends here, because I’ve never really wanted any.
Except . . .
Ben Michaels is staring at me. Lounging in the shade of the theater overhang with a couple of his stoner buddies, he’s only a few feet from Roxy, and once she gets her skirt readjusted, she’s headed back over there.
He doesn’t turn his head to look at her, even though it’s obvious she’s talking to him. He just watches me. And normally, this is the point where I’d roll my eyes at the creeptasticness of it all. I mean, hello, stalker much? But he’s not leering at me. And the look on his face isn’t this possessive, he-wants-to-devour-me kind of look. It’s different. Almost as if he’s daring me to go over there.
So I do. And as I walk toward him, I stare right back at him, letting every ounce of frustration—at my schedule, at this day, at this life I managed to create for myself—swell in my chest. Tension curls itself through my muscles, ready to unleash in his direction if he isn’t straight with me.
Only then I’m standing in front of him, and I realize I haven’t the slightest idea what I’m going to say.
It isn’t that easy to walk up to a guy in front of his friends and say, I’m pretty sure I died the other day and you brought me back to life. What do you have to say about that?
Instead I look at Ben and say, “Can I talk to you for a minute?”
He shrugs.
Fabulous. “Like, somewhere else?”
Someone snickers, and I glance to the right where Reid Suitor is sitting with four other guys whose names I don’t know. Reid and another guy are—no lie—chewing on pieces of grass.
“You lost, baby? Or are you looking to rebel against Daddy?”
“Wow, that’s original. What eighties movie did you steal that line from?” I say, turning left to the speaker. Elijah Palma. Great. This is already going worse than I had expected. Maybe I should just tell myself Alex was right—near-death experience triggered the firing of random nerve endings in my brain, and I imagined those visions. Maybe it was a sign there really is a hell and I’m going to end up there.
Elijah shrugs. His washed-out blue eyes are so bloodshot, he looks half-dead. “Hey, I’m willing to take one for the team.”
Someone punches Elijah in the shoulder and says, “Knock it off, asshole.” I know without looking that it’s Ben. His voice is already familiar to me, even though I’ve barely heard him say two words.
“Take one for the team?” I know I shouldn’t be egging him on, but I can’t help it. I still haven’t figured out what the hell I’m going to say to Ben, so I might as well burn my frustration by picking a fight with his friend. “What team are you even on, anyway?”
And no, I have no idea how to properly trade witty insults. But no one notices, because I’ve just implied Elijah’s gay, and it doesn’t matter that it wasn’t particularly clever.
“I don’t screw uptight virgins,” he sneers, and my face floods with heat.
Reid laughs, apparently in agreement.
I want to say something back, but my voice is frozen. Elijah, Reid, Roxy, Ben—they’re gone, no longer in front of me. Instead I’m fifteen again, waking up at 2:13 a.m. after I just lost my best friend, in a car parked outside Chad Brandel’s house with my jeans undone and my underwear ripped.
Doubled over in hysterics, Roxy leans into Elijah, and he wraps an arm around her. They’re perfect for each other.
“I said shut the fuck up, dude.” Again, it’s Ben.
But Elijah keeps going. “You think you’re the first prude to get in some kind of accident and realize you’re wasting your life away? You can’t just come over here for a pity fuck and an adrenaline rush. You—”
A fist crashes into his cheekbone, and the force rocks him backward, knocking Roxy to the side. A couple other guys laugh.
And then Ben is standing in front of me, holding on to his hand and rubbing his knuckles. He jerks his head toward the L building, and we both start walking that way.
It hasn’t escaped my notice that he stuck up for me. That he just punched one of his friends—a kid notorious for getting suspended at least once every few months for kicking the shit out of someone—because I’d been insulted.
The notion is a little barbaric, but I’m too flattered to care.
Ben opens the door to the first classroom and holds it for me. The lights are on, and about ten kids are eating at a table in the far corner of the room, but I don’t see the teacher. There’s only a note on her whiteboard that reads Do NOT leave a mess in the microwave. Please ☺.
“Hey, Ben,” one of the girls at the back table says. “Everything okay?” Only, as she stands up, I realize she isn’t a student at all. Miss Poblete is five foot nothing and probably in her late twenties, but she could easily pass for a student.
Ben nods. “Yeah, we just needed a quiet place to go over a few things.” As Ben lowers himself into a sitting position on one of the tables, I wonder why he seems so comfortable here.
Poblete smiles at me and sits back down.
“Book club,” Ben says.
“What?”
He nods toward Poblete and the others. “She has book club meetings every Monday. If we’re quiet, they won’t listen.”
My cheeks warm again as I turn to look at him. There’s no easy way to say any of this. “You were there, at Torrey Pines, the day I got hit by that truck,” I whisper.
It’s not a question, but he nods anyway. So much for Alex’s theory that Ben doesn’t go to the beach.
“What did you do to me?”
He looks down at his feet, dangling a few inches above the floor. He swings them lightly, nervously. “Nothing.”
I shake my head even though he isn’t looking at me. “No, I remember you. I remember seeing your face when I opened my eyes.”
He shrugs and doesn’t take his eyes off his shoes. “I checked to see if you were okay.”
I don’t know him at all, but I know he’s lying. “But I wasn’t okay.”
“You—”
“Don’t—” Lie to me, I want to say as I step closer to him. Instead I say nothing and glance toward the back of the room. No one’s looking at us.
When I turn back to Ben, he’s staring at me. His jaw sets into a hard line. “I’m not sure what you want me to say.”
“You did something to me, something I can’t explain.” I pause, trying to find the right words. But I’m not sure they exist. “I . . . I died.” I rush on before he can tell me I’m crazy. “I mean, I felt it. I felt myself die—my heart stopped, there was nothingness, then there was this lightness—” I stop because I’m not making any sense. “But then suddenly I was back and you were leaning over me. I couldn’t move, but you did something to my back so I could, and the doctors who looked at my X-ray said my back had been broken and healed again.”
I’m close enough to him now that he can’t swing his legs without them hitting me.
“So, Ben Michaels, what did you do to me?”
He looks up when I say his name, and his eyes connect to mine—they’re as black as an oil well. And I remember the way they looked at me before. “Does it matter?”
“Yes. Yes, it does.”
“Why?”
“Because I need to know,” I say, my voice rising uncontrollably. I take a deep breath and try to maintain my composure. Then I whisper, “Something happened to me, and I need to understand what it was.”
“No, you don’t,” he says with a small laugh.
And even though he doesn’t sound condescending, it makes me feel like he thinks I’m just a silly girl. Irrational and crazy. My fists clench at my sides, and I bite the inside of my cheek.
“You’re alive now, focus on that, right?” he says.
He waits for a response, but I don’t give him one. Sophomore year I tried to be a peer mediator, and they told us the best way to get people to keep talking was just to be silent. When you don’t say anything, the other person is tempted to fill that silence, and you can get more out of them. I didn’t make it as a peer mediator because I kept injecting my own opinions and judgments—shocking, I know—but I held on to that advice. It actually works.
And it works on Ben. He sighs and runs a hand through his hair, tugging on the ends. “If you keep focusing on what happened, when you actually die, you’ll still be thinking you haven’t really done anything.”
I pull back, and a hushed gasp escapes my mouth, because it’s like he was there with me when I was dying.
Is that what happened? I don’t even know.
“I didn’t mean that,” he says, sliding off the table. “That didn’t come out the way I wanted it to, I mean.” He pauses to chew on the corner of his bottom lip. “Look, I saw it happen. I came over to check on you, then when other people came over too, I backed away and gave them room.”
“But—”
He shakes his head. “No, I’m serious. You had a traumatic experience. I was the first person you saw when you opened your eyes.”
I nod, because Alex has already said as much, and, well, it does make sense. The problem is that deep inside my chest, that explanation feels wooden—hollow. And even Ben’s speech sounds rehearsed. I don’t hear any conviction behind his words.
“Why were you at the beach?”
He smirks. “What, I can’t go to the beach? It was summer.”
He starts to walk away, like our conversation is over.
“I don’t believe that,” I say. It comes out quietly, but I know he hears me because he stops. Keeping his back to me, he just waits, and I get the impression from his posture that he’s holding his breath. I believe he brought me back. I don’t know how yet, but I will. I do know that right now, I believe I’m here—I’m alive—because of him. The sense of gratitude makes me dizzy and light-headed, like I need to take a deep breath.
And apparently all rational thought leaves my head and my body takes on a life of its own, because I take a step toward him, reaching out, until the tips of two of my fingers brush against his. I don’t know what I’m doing, it’s been forever since I just held hands with anyone, and my hand seems to tingle with the touch.
“I don’t know what you want me to say,” Ben says. His voice is quiet and cracks slightly at the end, as if he feels helpless, as if he wishes he had some kind of answer. And that is almost enough to make me back off and leave Ben Michaels and whatever freaky shit he’s into alone. Only I’m tired of being hollow inside.
You’ll still be thinking you haven’t really done anything.
I want to feel something. I want to feel . . . alive.
And whatever he says, Ben Michaels is the reason I have the chance.
“I just . . . Thank you.” And as I say it, I squeeze his hand, the level of pressure directly correlating to the depth of emotion I’m feeling—that is to say, it had to feel a little like his bones might start cracking. “Thank you.”
I let go and leave him standing there. No matter how much I want to look back, I don’t.
This happens sometimes, which almost makes everything worse. “Almost” because nothing beats the smell of warm bread.
“J-baby!” she calls when I open the door. “In here!”
“Here” is the kitchen. She’s showered and is wearing a bright green velour jumpsuit and more eyeliner than she needs. And she’s surrounded by possibly eight hundred muffins— blueberry, banana nut, bran, cornbread, chocolate chip—they’re everywhere. Literally. They cover every surface in our kitchen. As does flour.
My flip-flops stick to the linoleum floor. Egg, vanilla extract, butter—I’m not sure what I’m sticking to, but I know I’m annoyed. We’ll be eating muffins for every meal until we have to throw them out, and I’ll be the one cleaning this up.
“How was school, baby?” she asks, turning to give me a smile and a banana nut muffin. “Here, have one, they’re fabulous. I used your great-grandmother’s recipe, and I got it just right. They couldn’t be more perfect!”
“School’s fine,” I mutter as I take a bite. She’s right. She did get Nana’s recipe perfect, which is saying something. My dad’s grandmother owned a bakery.
“Jared said your schedule was all wrong. He told me they gave you classes that were easier than his and that you’d need to get it changed. Do you have any classes with Kate? Oh, here—try this one too. I’m not sure why it isn’t quite right, but they just didn’t rise as well as the first batch. They taste fine, though.” She hands me a flat cornbread muffin. She’s forgotten that I don’t like cornbread. Just like she’s forgotten that Kate and I aren’t friends anymore.
“I’m getting my schedule fixed,” I say, taking a bite of it anyway. “I filed paperwork with Elksen and now I’m just waiting for him to get around to it.”
“How is it?” she asks, nodding to the flat muffin. “I’m just not sure why they didn’t rise. I could throw them out, I guess, but that would be so wasteful. I just don’t know what happened. All the other batches look great.”
What happened is she messed up the baking soda or baking powder, but I’m not about to point that out. “It tastes great, Mom.”
She beams, and her dimples—the same as Jared’s—peek out of her cheeks. Even her nose scrunches up with her smile. She looks ten years younger than she did a few days ago. I can’t think of the last time she smiled like that.