The Safest Lies (2 page)

The evening routine: call my mom, grab a soda, drive straight home.

“On my way,” I said when she picked up.

“See you soon,” she said. Her voice was like music. A homing device. I heard dishes in the background and knew she had already started dinner. This was her routine, too.

I hung up, and Leo was gone. The librarian was gone. The halls were silent and empty, except for the hum of the vending machines tucked into the corner. I slid a crisp dollar from my wallet, fed it to the machine. The gears churned, and in the emptiness, I started imagining all the things I could not see.

I felt myself taking note of the exits, an old habit: the front double doors through the lobby, the fire exits at the end of each hall, the windows off any classroom that had been left unlocked….

I shook the thought, grabbed the soda, and jogged out the double front doors, my steps echoing, my keys jangling in my purse. I kept jogging until I made it to the ring of light around my car in the nearly empty lot.

It was twilight, and there was a breeze kicking in through the mountains, and the shadows of the surrounding trees within the overhead lights looked a lot like the shadows of the black metal gates at home, when they were lit up in a thunderstorm.

I ran through the morning routine again, in reverse: check the backseat, start the engine, let it warm up. My phone in my bag, my bag beside me, nothing but gnats and mist caught in the headlights.

This was a good day. This was a normal day. A blur in a string of others, passing in typical fashion.

The reflectors on the double yellow line caught my headlights on the drive with a predictable regularity, almost hypnotic.

October came with a chill at night, and I wished I’d brought my coat. I leaned forward, turned the dial to hot, pressed the on button, and listened to the rush of air surging toward the vents as I leaned back in my seat.

—

A burst of heat.

A flash of light.

The world in motion.

—

I didn’t know the air could scream.

D
on’t be afraid.

The voice sounded far away, like it had to travel through water, or glass, before it reached me. And then there was that static—a radio? White noise, crackling like electricity, singeing my nerves.

You’re okay.

Warm fingers at my neck, and the voice, getting sharper. My limbs were too heavy, like I’d fallen asleep with an arm and a leg hanging off the edge of my bed, and now everything tingled with pins and needles—sluggish and removed—as I tried to shift positions. My eyelids fluttered as I searched for the muted walls of my room.

“Can you hear me?” A voice that was not mine, not my mother’s, not Jan’s—but familiar nonetheless. A guy’s voice.
Not my bedroom.

I opened my eyes, and nothing made sense—not the feeling of blood rushing in the wrong direction, or the lack of gravity where it should’ve been, or my dark hair, falling in a cascade across my face. Not the sound of my own breathing echoing inside my head, or the scent of burning rubber, or the dull thudding behind my eyelids, which I’d opted to close again.

But.

Don’t be afraid. You’re okay.

Okay.

“Hey, I’m going to get you out of here. Everything’s fine.”

Everything’s fine.
I repeated it to myself, like my mother would do. But even as I let the words roll through my mind, like soft blankets tucked up to my chin, I felt the fear starting up, creeping slowly inside.

“Where am I?” I asked. There was a pressure in my head, a stiffness through my neck and shoulders, a subtle throbbing in my joints as my limbs were coming back to life.

“Thank God.” The voice was coming from behind me somewhere. Vaguely familiar. But before I could latch on to it, something mechanical and high-pitched started whirring in the distance. The static—sharper now, and clearer.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“You’re okay. Don’t panic.”

Which meant that (a) I probably was not okay, and (b) I probably had reason to panic.

I attempted to twist around, but a strap cut across my lap and my chest, and metal pressed painfully up against my side, and when I attempted to push my hair out of my face, I could only see white billowing in front of my face, like a sheet. I was trapped.

Not okay.

Reason to panic.

Out. Get out.

I pushed against the metal for leverage as my breath started coming too fast.

The other person sucked in a breath, wrapped an arm around the seat to still me. “Also,” he said, “don’t move.”

His arm was shaking.
I
was shaking.

There were other voices now, farther away, and the humming of the equipment grew louder. “Coming down,” someone called.

“Okay,” the voice called back. And then to me, “Listen, you’re okay, you’ve been in an accident, but we’re going to get you out now. It’ll be a little loud is all.”

I was in an accident?
The bend of the road and the reflectors in the double yellow line. Headlights, and I cut the wheel, and the sound of metal—

Oh God, how long had I been here? Had my mom tried to call? Was she panicking already, unable to reach me? I pushed my hair aside again, tucking it into my collar. I moved my arms around, feeling for my bag. Best I could tell, I was hanging—kind of diagonally and forward, and my purse had been on the seat beside me. So that would mean…

I reached my arms over my head, but the metal was too close, warped and bent, and I couldn’t feel any bag. “Really,” he said. “Don’t. Move.”

“I need my purse. I need my phone. I need to call my mom.” My breath hitched. He didn’t understand. I had to tell her I was okay.
You’re okay.

“We’ll call her in a few minutes. But you need to keep still for now. What’s your name?”

“Kelsey,” I said.

A pause, and then, “Kelsey Thomas?”

“Yes.” Someone who knew me, then. Must be someone from school. Or the Lodge, or the neighborhood, maybe. I strained to look in the rearview mirror, which was closer to me than it should’ve been. The world appeared disjointed.

The mirror was cracked and askew—I could see branches, the rock making up the wall in the side of the mountain, but not my rescuer’s face. “Ryan,” he said, as if he understood I was grasping for something. “Baker,” he added.

“Ryan from my math class?” I asked, which was only one of the many things I could’ve said, but it was the first in my head, and the first out of my mouth.

A slow, steady breath. “Yeah. Ryan from your math class.”

I was surrounded by metal and white pillows, and I was presumably upside down, but I could wiggle my toes, and I could breathe, and I could think, and I was having a conversation with Ryan Baker from my math class, so I tallied off the things I was not: paralyzed; suffocating; unconscious; dead. My mother said it made her feel better to list the things she
was
—always starting with
safe
—but I preferred to carve out my safety with a process of elimination.

“The other car?” I asked.

He sucked in a breath. “Kelsey, I’m going to cut you out of your seat belt, but not until they remove the back panel. It’ll just take a minute.”

A minute. The air bags were in my face, and I felt the first pinprick of panic—that I would suffocate here, or that the car would explode between this moment and the next. I grasped for the reassurance of Ryan’s words—
you’re okay
—but it was too late. The thought had already planted itself in my head. An explosion. A fire. All the ways I could die, flipping through my mind in rapid succession.

“Cut me out
now.
”

“No, that’s not a good idea.”

Illogical fears,
that’s what my mother’s therapist, Jan, would say. Not something that would actually happen. Remember the difference. I could move the air bags aside and I’d be fine. Ryan from my math class would cut my seat belt and I’d be out, and then I’d find my phone and call my mother and she’d list off the things that were okay before she got to the fact that I’d ruined the car.

I pressed down on the inflated air bags, pushing them lower, away from my face, to prove it to myself.

“Wait, Kelsey. Don’t.”

But his words were too late—I’d already gotten a glimpse of precisely what he didn’t want me seeing, and all the air drained from my body.

There was absolutely nothing
fine
about it.

The windshield was gone. And there was nothing below me. No pavement, no rocks, no grass or tilted view down the road. There was
nothing.
I was hanging toward air. Air and distant rock and fog—

“Oh my God,” I said. And suddenly, I was perfectly, completely oriented.

Behind me were rocks. To my side, I could just make out the rough thick bark of a branch. There was a leaf resting on the air bag, the tips browned and starting to curl with the changing weather. I heard something creak.

“Are we over the cliff? We are, aren’t we? We’re in a tree over the goddamn cliff!” My shaking hands fumbled for the buckle as the pinpoint of panic crossed over into full-out hyperventilation.

“I told you not to panic!”

“Get me out!”

His hands gripped my arms from behind. He was pressed up against the seat, and I heard his voice through the fabric in a low plea. “Please stop moving.
Please.
Do not do
anything
to move the car.”

And if I wasn’t panicking before—I certainly was
now.

I let the hair fall over my face again, and I closed my eyes, and I gritted my teeth, and I tried to think of anything,
anything,
other than the fact that I was hanging, suspended from a branch, over the edge of a cliff.

Jan would call this a legitimate fear. Not like a meteor crashing into our house, or getting trapped inside the freezer in the basement, or being forced to talk to Cole—all of which were so unlikely as to never happen, and were therefore irrational. But
this,
this was a legitimate fear: a thing that might happen. I was hanging upside down from a car stuck in the branches of a tree hanging over the edge of a cliff. The only thing holding me in was the thin strip of cloth from a seat belt.

“How do I get out?” I shouted over the whirring behind us. “How the hell am I getting out of here?”

“They’re cutting out the back windshield. Then I’ll cut the seat belt and take you with me. I have a harness.”

A harness. Oh God, we needed a harness.

“It’s just you?” I asked.

“It’s the safest plan,” he mumbled.

Ryan from my math class was possibly the last person in the world I’d want in charge of this plan. Ryan Baker, who could not remember the difference between sine and cosine. Who tattooed meaningless, intricate patterns on the inside of his forearm with pen instead of taking notes each class. My future was in the hands of someone who didn’t understand basic trigonometry. What if he got the angle wrong? Misjudged the timing? How could I trust someone who didn’t understand the geometry of a right triangle?

This seat belt was strapped across my chest at a right angle. The branches and the car and the cliff—all angles. This was a goddamn real-world application.

Fear: I might die today. I might die a minute from now.

Worse: if I moved, I’d also potentially kill Ryan Baker.

“What the hell are you doing here?” I asked.

“I’m a volunteer firefighter.”

“I want a real one,” I said, my voice high and tight.

“I
am
a real one.”

“A different one!”

“Trust me, I would not object. But I’m the lightest one. Least chance of making the car fall out of the tree.”

And there it was: the car could fall. They knew it, too. They had to make a
plan
for it. Falling, dying, was a real thing that could really happen, right now.

“You’re not even that
light,
” I said. He was decidedly taller than me, broad-shouldered, more lean-muscled than bulky—but definitely not
light.
I felt tears forming at the corners of my eyes, and I tried to pray.
Please please please.
But the branch still creaked below us.

“We’re going to be fine,” he said. But he sounded like he was trying to convince himself, too.

I settled on the deep breathing that Jan taught my mom, and my mom taught me.

The car lurched, and I braced my hands on the steering wheel, my stomach settling as the car stilled, and then lurching again as it tilted, dangling precipitously.

I heard Ryan’s breath catch through the fabric of the seat.

“I think maybe this would be a good time to quit,” I said.

If he responded, I couldn’t tell, because the saw or whatever they were using was cutting through the panel, and the contact of machine on metal shook my insides, vibrated my back molars. Ryan grabbed my arms—either to comfort me or to keep me still, I wasn’t sure.

I’m not paralyzed; I’m not unconscious; I’m not bleeding out; I’m not drowning.

And then the noise stopped, and Ryan’s arm draped over my shoulder, holding out a belt with a clip. “Put this around your waist. Carefully.” Our hands were both shaking, and I laughed as I grabbed the strap, bordering on delirium. Everything about this moment was ridiculous: from Ryan to the strap that would supposedly save me to the goddamn leaf curling on the air bag, parts of it still soft and green—like it didn’t realize it was already dead.