Crash (16 page)

“You must allow us entry and there will be no pain.”

Again they prod at my thoughts. I panic, not knowing what emotion to choose, what will be strong enough, all consuming enough to confuse the Committee. I need to buy myself time to think. “Fine. Then give me a chance to prepare,” I blurt.

They're silent for several seconds, each dragging like an hour, the elapsed time sending my pulse racing. They don't believe me. They don't trust me. They're going to push their way—

“Tell us when we may begin.”

“Right. Okay. I will.” I think of all the people I love. Those I hold dear, those I've lost, those who I may lose at any moment. But love isn't a single emotion; it's a million tiny nuances of laughter and joy and heartbreak, memories and trust . . . so many pieces of a complicated puzzle. And right now, the love I feel is tainted by sadness and worry, for Dad, for Carly.

Lizzie said to pick an emotion—
one
—and let it consume me.

Indecision sends me spinning. I've spent the last two years in the gray fog of depression, my emotions muted and choked. How am I supposed to connect with a single emotion? How—

Of course.

The fog. The misery.

That's what I'll focus on. That's what I'll let in. The all-consuming despair that was my full-time companion for so long. I've worked so hard to chase it away and the idea of allowing it to regain even a tiny foothold is terrifying because I don't think the depression will ever be gone for good. I think it's an ongoing process of keeping it at bay, just like Dad said about drinking and how the craving will never leave him.

If I open the door even a little, if I let the misery take me down to the bottom of the dark well, will I be able to claw my way back out?

I'm afraid, but I'm more afraid of letting the Committee read my thoughts and find out secrets that could destroy not only me, but a whole bunch of other people I care about. Carly, if they found out Lizzie's team saved her, that she knows about the Drau even if she doesn't realize that she does. My team, if the Committee sees something in my thoughts they disapprove of. Lizzie, who's kind of growing on me. Jackson, who acts like he doesn't care because he cares so much.

Nothing in life is free. Nothing in the game is free. I don't get to just defy the Committee and not pay some sort of price.

But maybe they'll pay it right along with me. If I have to share anything with them, there's a certain vindictive satisfaction in imagining the Committee trying to navigate the bleak landscape of my darkest thoughts.

I
will
chase the gray fog out again because I'm not the
girl I was. I'm not the girl who will be afraid of the weight of my despondency ever again. I've learned so much about how to fight it, how to ride it when I can't make it go away, how to let people help me when I need them.

Depression is something I fight off. But in this moment, I intend to welcome it.

Happiness is something I fight for. I will fight for it again as I have for the past two years, and I will win.

They don't understand human emotion? Well, they're about to get a doozy of an introductory course.

The Committee grows impatient; I feel them poking at the edges of my thoughts. I'm out of time.

I visualize the events leading up to the very first time I got pulled, standing apart from my friends at the far end of the field, when I felt like the depression was a solid wall between me and them, between me and any healthy emotion. I remember wishing I could feel things the way they did, feel the same anticipation and excitement when they talked about the dance. I focus on that memory and the all-encompassing gray. I let it in. I sink into the depth of its icy embrace and I let every bit of that pain fill me to the brim, a miasma of hopelessness belching sulfurous fumes. I crash to the bottom of the endless, black pit.

And then I say, “Ready.”

I hold my focus, hold the feeling, and I am sinking, drowning.

They didn't lie. It doesn't hurt. It's like my mind is made
of butter and they slide in like a warm knife.

Lizzie said not to focus on one image, so I don't. I let all the images, all the soul-sucking moments, run by like a slide show in my mind: Gram dying. Sofu in his casket, dressed in a suit, six coins in his hands for the River of Three Crossings.

Mom, skeletal and bleak, broken by the cancer, dragging in her last breath.

Mourners dressed in unrelieved black.

The sound of dirt hitting a coffin.

The moment when I imagine she's still alive, trapped in that box, the damp earth covering her,
thud, thud, thud
, trapping her, burying her alive.

The crippling sadness in that instant when I figure out Richelle didn't respawn with the rest of us, that dying in the game means dying for real.

The moment I respawned in the pizza place and realized Jackson hadn't made it back.

A thousand thoughts and memories twine foul, smoky tendrils together to weave a fog as thick as pea soup.

I feel them inside me, the Committee, fingers reaching, clawing, scrabbling at my thoughts and memories, the needles trying to grab hold of something, anything.

It all slips through their grasp. They can't connect with my emotions. They can't understand how I feel. It is impossible for them to move past the wall.

The sensation of their withdrawal is disgusting. Like
leeches pried from oozing skin.

My bones liquefy. I collapse, shivering, stomach heaving.

The fog holds me prisoner, sucking at my soul.

My teeth chatter. My body shakes.

Strong arms close around me, and it takes a Herculean effort to raise my head and find Jackson staring down at me.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

I SPRAWL ON THE COLD HOSPITAL TILE BESIDE DAD'S BED, THE bottom of the privacy curtain brushing my shoes. On the far side of the bed is the massive sliding glass door between this room and the rest of the ICU. A nurse walks past. Someone moans—a patient, or maybe a family member who's just had tragic news. The sound punctures me, connecting with the unuttered moans and cries that batter my soul. I'm crumbling inside under the unbearable pressure of my sadness.

Expression grim, Jackson reaches back and yanks the privacy curtain over a couple of feet, just enough to shield me from prying eyes.

“Can you stand?” he asks, low.

I don't answer him; words are too hard. Standing takes
too much effort. Lying here takes too much effort. I just want to hide, sink into the choking fog inside me and hide.

Somehow, Jackson senses the change in me, the darkness. He hunkers down and cups my face, brushes his thumbs along my brows. “Miki? I need you to come back to me now.”

I can't. I'm so far down at the bottom of the pit, I have no hope of clawing my way out.

I almost give in to it, almost let the sadness take me, but almost only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades. Mom always said that came from a movie. Dad said it was a quote about baseball. Every time they used that saying, they'd bicker back and forth, ending up laughing and bumping shoulders and, finally, hugging.

I can hear Mom's laugh somewhere, far, far away. It reminds me that I don't want to let her go, don't want to let the beautiful memories go, and that means fighting the gray fog, beating it.

The first step is getting up off the floor.

I focus on Jackson. “I can stand.”

He cups my elbows and helps me to my feet, and I stand there swaying, my heart a shriveled, desiccated thing in my chest.

“You aren't alone, Miki,” he says. “I'm here.”

I stare at him, uncomprehending, ashamed that he is seeing me like this, the fog so thick I can barely breathe. I remind myself what Dr. Andrews told me, that there's nothing to be ashamed of, that I should be proud of my
strength in battling this pain.

The Committee did this to me—maybe not directly, but by threatening to steal my thoughts, to climb inside my head without my permission, they forced me to choose to go back to this place of endless gray where I drown in the miasma of my despair. They forced me into a position where I gave up all the ground I had fought so hard to gain, just to bar them entry.

I shouldn't have had to make that choice.

Anger sparks along the borders of my despair. The wretched depths of my mood are familiar. I could stay here. I could float in the dark, cold sea. I could sink and drown, let the depression flow like a frigid ocean through my veins.

Or I can fight. Fight for my happiness.

“Fight. You can do this,” Jackson murmurs, believing in me, always believing in me.

Reminding me that I believe in myself.

Reminding me that the sadness does not own me, that I chose to wield it as a weapon against the Committee, to keep them out of my head. I did that knowing how hard the path back would be, knowing, too, that I
could
travel that path.

I struggle to wrench control back into my hands. I open my heart and choose to let a million good memories flow through me. Mom, waiting for me every day after school. Dad, showing me how to put a worm on a hook. Sofu, believing in me, the only girl in a dojo full of boys.
Late nights at Nick Tahoo's with Carly and Kelley and Dee. Sitting in the tree behind Jackson's house, watching him through his mom's sewing room window, feeling the swell of joy to just know he was alive.

The feel of his lips on mine, his arms around me.

I think of my accomplishments. I think of hope. Of Dad coming home and Carly putting green streaks in her hair, or maybe blue or red. That's the thing about depression, it's the antithesis of hope.

I use the positive self-talk my therapist taught me, beating back the self-loathing I feel.

I think of all those things, pushing the fog back toward its cave. I don't manage to get it all the way there. To expect that would be unrealistic; it's going to take time to make up the ground I forfeited. But I make enough headway that I know I can function and I can continue the fight until the misery's back where it belongs, locked away.

So many things in my life are outside my control, but my thoughts belong to me and I beat the Committee to keep it that way. That victory buoys me.

“You with me?” Jackson asks, dipping his head to look at me over the rims of his glasses.

“Yeah.” I pause. “You know what really pisses me off?”

“What?”

“How quickly I can pull the sad card, but how damn long it takes to get rid of it.” I reach up to push my hair back off my face, then freeze.

“What?” Jackson asks.

“I was just on the floor, palms plastered against it. That floor is disgusting.”

He strides to the wall and squirts some hand sanitizer into his palm, then stalks back to me and scrubs my hands between his until the sanitizer evaporates. The look on his face is enough to make the corners of my lips twitch. The way he's trying to make like hand sanitizer is macho makes them twitch a little more.

“You okay?” he asks.

Okay is a stretch. Functional is more like it. “Getting there. Just a little woozy.” I take a step toward Dad's bed and have to grab hold of the metal side bar to catch my balance. “A lot woozy.” I study Dad's face, pale and wan. “Why hasn't he woken up? How long was I gone?”

“You know the answer to that.”

I do. I was gone for an eternity but I wasn't gone at all. The Committee dropped me back here at the exact second I left.

“You want to sit?” Jackson nudges the chair toward me with the toe of his boot.

“I'm okay.”

“You're not. Have you eaten today?”

Have I? I shoot him a look. He holds his hands up in front of him, palms forward in a don't-shoot-the-messenger kind of gesture.

“So what did they want?” His tone vibrates tension. He doesn't like that I was pulled alone, without him. He doesn't like that he's out of the loop. But mostly, he doesn't like that
he wasn't there, beside me, protecting me from whatever brought me back to him looking like this. He doesn't know the details, but he knows something's wrong.

Where to start? I have a heck of a lot to explain. But my tongue feels thick, my head full of cotton, and I don't trust the safety of saying anything out loud because I don't know if they're listening.

“You need to eat,” Jackson says. “Something sugary will help.”

I know that tone. It's the one he uses when his opinion is non-negotiable. “I can't leave Dad. What if he wakes up?”

Jackson circles me so we're face to face, his back to the door. He tips his glasses up to his forehead so I can see his eyes.

“If he wakes up and needs something, he'll ring for the nurse. You not being here for half an hour isn't going to make him backslide. We are going to go down to the cafeteria and getting you some chocolate—”