After Hello (13 page)

“I know what you’re thinking, but we weren’t drunk. We weren’t high. We weren’t anything—just sixteen and stupid.”

The skin around the scrape on my knee had turned a dark pink, striated with faint white lines; the wound oozed a few more sluggish drops of blood. The thin scratch on my ankle itched with fire.

“My car couldn’t hold all five of us—it was just an old VW bug—but we all crammed inside anyway. Alice sat in the front with me. Jeremy sat behind her, then Todd in the middle, then Chris behind me.”

His voice adopted a flat tone, cool and professional, as though he was recounting details he had told many times before. He peeled the backing from a salmon-pink Band-Aid and positioned it over my ankle.

“Having Alice near me made Todd jealous. The trip was his idea to begin with, so why did I get to sit next to the pretty girl?”

He opened a packet of gauze pads, withdrew one, and covered the wound on my knee with it, pressing lightly along the edges to make sure it was secure.

“Todd kept leaning between us, trying to talk to Alice, make her pay attention to him, make her like him. When she started laughing at his jokes . . . that made
me
jealous.”

He covered the square of gauze with a larger bandage, smoothing the sticky wings with the edge of his thumb. I could feel the small, rough calluses as they brushed against my knee.

“But then Alice touched my arm, she said my name, and I didn’t care what Todd did or said or thought. I just . . . kept driving.”

He moved closer to me, his knees on either side of my leg. When he leaned over to reach for my hands, the silver dog tags landed gently against my newly placed bandage.

“I remember driving through the intersection where the back road crossed the main road, and I remember turning to her and saying her name, and then . . .”

He held my hands with one of his and poured a small measure of water into my cupped palms with his other.

“He came out of nowhere.”

His hand beneath mine began to tremble, a faint fluttering like a bird not quite ready to take flight.

“One minute, she was turning toward me, her hair backlit against the oncoming headlights. I knew her mouth was open, but . . .”

Reaching for the cloth, he used a clean corner to wipe the palm of first one hand, then the other.

“It happened so fast—she didn’t even have time to scream.”

Chapter 20

Sam

Sam’s heart was on fire.

His skin had turned to paper. His bones had turned to glass.

He felt strangely disconnected from himself. Like there was no body around him anymore—just a heart, charred and blackened, beating in space.

It had been a long time since he had said anything at all about the accident, let alone said Alice’s name out loud.

He drew in a long, deep breath, inhaling the scent of Sara’s hair, trying to remember that this girl who sat before him smelled like sunshine and spring.

Focusing on the task before him—cleaning Sara’s wounds—he kept his hands moving.
Gotta keep moving; can’t stop; stagnation kills.

“The front of the pickup truck looked like it had been crumpled by a giant fist. There were pieces of metal and broken glass everywhere. I heard a sound like screaming in my head. It wasn’t from Alice—she never made a sound—and it wasn’t from anyone else. Todd and Chris were pinned in the back, moaning, but not screaming. Jeremy was strangely quiet; he had been sitting behind Alice, and . . . I don’t know—maybe I was the one making the noise.”

Sara’s fingers shivered delicately in his. He had told this part of the story so many times. So why did it still feel like it had happened to someone else?

“Do you still hear it?” she asked, low and careful.

Sam looked at her. Her eyes were
green.
Alice had had blue eyes. As long as he stayed focused on the green, he wouldn’t confuse Sara for Alice again. “Sometimes,” he admitted after a long minute.

Her shiver turned into a tremble.

She licked her lips, biting down on the bottom one. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered, her eyes never leaving his.

“I felt like my whole body had been scratched up and torn. I couldn’t move my hand. Blood filled my eyes.”

He unconsciously touched the spot where a neat row of stitches had once closed up the gap between his forehead and his hairline.

“But I could still see enough to dial 911. After calling for help, I blacked out. When I came to, the police and the paramedics had arrived. They had to cut my car apart to get to everyone. Chris had broken his arm in two places. Todd had a broken arm too, plus lacerations all over his face and neck and hands—like me. Most of the paramedics were working on Jeremy. When they wouldn’t tell me what was wrong with him, I knew it was bad.”

He folded and refolded the blood-spotted cloth into ever-smaller squares.

“I remember looking at my friends, battered and bleeding, and at the single white sheet covering a gurney off to the side, and . . . and then the police officer pulled me aside and asked me a few questions about the accident. About Alice. He told me that the four of us were lucky to be alive. He said that the other driver had admitted to hitting my car and was already in custody.” His voice cracked. “The police said it wasn’t the guy’s first drunk driving charge.”

“What happened to him?” she whispered.

Sam looked away. “We should probably get you off the ground and someplace more comfortable. Do you think you could make it to that bench?” he asked, nodding to a spot across the way.

Sara’s eyebrows came together, her frown clearly communicating her displeasure at his deflection. That small dimple appeared again. “I think so. You’ll have to help me, though.”

Standing up, he reached for Sara’s forearms, careful to avoid her scraped-up hands, and pulled her to her feet. Helping her to the bench, he quickly returned to the side of the path, gathered up the scattered bits of the first-aid kit, and shoved everything into his bag.

He wished he could gather up his scattered thoughts and hide them away as easily. He had always believed in moving forward, but sometimes he wished he could go back. Back to before he had called Sara by the wrong name and all those words had spilled out of him like sand from a punctured bag.

As much as he wished that, though, there was another part of him that didn’t mind being rid of the weight of those words.

He wondered if the fact that Sara’s green, green eyes had never blinked, never wavered, while he had told her the story that had burdened—and burned—his heart for the past eighteen months meant that he could tell her the rest of what had happened.

Was he strong enough? Was she?

Lots of people knew pieces of the puzzle—both at home and here in New York—but only Sam knew the entire story, top to bottom, inside and out.

Not even Paul knew all the details. All he knew was that Sam had graduated early and Mom and Dad had sent Sam to live with him “for a change of pace.” Sam didn’t offer; Paul didn’t pry.

Paul had allowed Sam to help him with his job, and Sam had started finding things for people. He had started keeping his eyes open, always on the lookout for those small but special things that would fill the hole in someone’s life, always looking for that elusive item that would fill the hole in his.

He sat down next to Sara, who wiped at her eyes with swift fingers. The high color in her cheeks was a dusky, dark rose, hinting at a deeper, sadder emotion.

“What happened to Jeremy?” she asked.

“He slipped into a coma. He woke up a few months later, but the doctors said his head injury was bad enough that he’d be in rehab for a long time.”

“And the others? Todd and Chris?” She touched the torn and frayed edge of her jeans where it ended above her knee, straightening the threads into neat lines.

“Chris was in rehab for a while too, for his broken arm, but his injury was bad enough that he couldn’t play on the tennis team anymore. Todd did better—his injuries weren’t as bad as the others—but he had a hard time with the scars.”

She stretched out her wounded leg, wincing, and propped up her ankle with the toe of her other shoe. “You seem to have made it through okay. That’s good, right?”

“I guess.” Sam reached for his bag, pulling it closer to him on the bench. “After Alice’s funeral, her parents wanted to celebrate the good things about her life. They opened up their house to the whole neighborhood. Everyone came.” He closed his eyes, remembering the lights, the crowd, the sounds. “Her parents thanked me for calling 911. They said they understood that it was too late for Alice, but that they didn’t blame me, and that they were glad I had been able to do something to help everyone else.”

“It was good that you could help your friends. It sounds like it was a really hard time for you.” She leaned against his shoulder.

Sam’s burning heart cracked open with heat and guilt and shame. The blood drained from his face.

What would happen if he told Sara the secret that lay beneath the smoldering coal of his heart? What would she do with the information? He feared he already knew. He had only met her today, but he wasn’t sure he was ready to lose her just yet.

He wanted to shift Sara off his shoulder, turn her so he could see her eyes. If he did tell her, then he wanted to be able to see the exact moment if things changed. That way, in that split-second flash of time, he could decide what to do next. To brace himself—or to bolt.

Sam’s muscles along his shoulders, his arms, braced for action, and his legs trembled with the tension of holding still for so long. Time to choose. Time to move? Or time to stay?

The remaining words coated his tongue like ash, choking him.

“There’s more,” he managed.

Sara shifted, sitting up a little straighter and turning to face him.

A slight breeze passed over them. Sam heard the sounds of the park as static through a tunnel: the whisking zip of a kid passing by on skates, the chattering laughter of children, the hurried click-clack of a dog on the run.

“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,” Sara said, her voice barely louder than the breeze.

“I know I don’t.” He leaned back against the bench. “But I want to.”

He realized suddenly that those four small words were the truth. He had been circling around the truth for some time now. Avoiding it, but knowing that it was time to take hold of it and see if it still hurt. And how much.

And who better to tell than Sara? A girl he’d never seen until today; a girl he might never see again. In this one moment, he was free.

The words wouldn’t come, though. No matter how many times he framed them in his mind and held them in his mouth, he couldn’t make himself say what he had never said to another soul.

She must have sensed his struggle to find the words he needed, because she bit her lip again and said, “I’ll trade you for it. A story for a story—wasn’t that the deal?”

Sam shook his head. “You don’t have a story like this. It wouldn’t be fair.”

After the moment of silence had dragged on into minutes, Sara shifted on the bench. “It’s okay. You don’t have to tell me. Or you can tell me later.” She touched the dog tags resting on his chest. “Tell me about these.”

He lifted the tags in his hand and fanned the three silver ovals across his palm. “I had them made once I came to New York.”

Sara touched each tag with the pad of her finger, reading the names out loud one by one. “Todd Saunders. Chris Allred. Jeremy Davis.” She swallowed. “You wear them as a way to honor your friends?”

Sam shook his head. “I wear them as penance.”

She looked at him silently, confusion written across her face.

He wrapped his hand around the tags, grateful for the sharp bite of the metal. He looked directly into Sara’s green eyes and saw what he needed to see. He let the pent-up words tumble out of his mouth.

“That night. The night of the accident. When Todd was flirting with Alice. I knew I couldn’t let Todd win. I knew I had to raise the stakes. So before we reached the main road . . .” He cleared his throat, trying to draw in enough air to breathe. “I . . . I turned off the headlights. It was just for a minute—a second. It was a dark night, and I thought it would make me seem cool and dangerous. I wanted Alice to be impressed by what I thought was bravery. But she wasn’t. She grabbed my arm and screamed my name. She begged me to stop.”

Noise filled Sam’s ears, a whirring whine that might have been a distant siren, or the moment before a worried whimper broke into a shout.

“Everyone yelled at me to turn the lights back on. Everyone said I was crazy. But I kept driving. I kept saying, ‘Don’t worry. I can handle it. Trust me.’” He let go of the dog tags and his hands fell, empty, into his lap. “That was the last thing I said before the truck hit us.”

He stopped speaking, breathing heavily through his nose, his lips suddenly as cold and heavy as lead. He had taken his locked-away memories and traded them for something else. Something that, to his surprise, felt like a kind of freedom. He hadn’t known that letting part of yourself go like that could be so liberating.

He hadn’t known this kind of inside quiet existed.

“It was my fault,” he said simply, finally—gratefully. “All of it was my fault.”

Chapter 21

Sara

“But I thought you said the other driver was drunk?” I asked. I was having a hard time processing everything Sam had told me, but I could sense that telling me the whole story had made him feel better.

“He was.”

“I don’t understand. How could it have been all your fault, then?”

The lines around Sam’s eyes tightened a little, and I wished I’d kept my mouth shut. He had just busted through some heavy emotional walls. I didn’t want to give him a reason to put them up again.

“Because if I had kept the lights on, he might have seen us. He might have had time to swerve, or maybe even stop. Things might have been different.”

Before I could say anything else—what did you say to something like that?—Sam’s phone rang, a utilitarian chime of three repeating notes. I had a lot of questions about what Sam had told me, but it didn’t seem like I was going to have a chance to ask any of them.