Aftershocks (19 page)

“What’s that?”

I reached into my tote bag and puled out the footbal he had given me. “We can’t be here and not pay homage to the game itself.”

He jumped to his feet and held out his hand to help me up. I stood up next to him and told him to go long. He laughed, then turned around and trotted down the field to the thirty yard line. He turned around to face me and put his hands up. I threw the bal to him.

For the next thirty minutes we played catch, ran fake plays and ‘scored’ in the end zone. He chased me back down the field to our blanket, but caught me right before we reached it, tickling me until I fel to the ground. When he stopped, I roled over onto my back, and he colapsed next to me as we laughed and tried to catch our breath. Next to me, I felt Connor move his hand so it was touching the back of mine. He then took my hand and laced our fingers together. The gesture was confusing but welcome.

“How come you lied to me when we first met?” I asked, wanting to get the question out that had been bugging me.

With al the things we’d shared with each other in our daily sharing game, he’d never once told me why that dark look had come over his face when I’d asked him if he played footbal. A similar look had flashed to his face for the briefest of seconds when we’d first walked onto the field earlier that night, so it was fresh on my mind.

“What do you mean?” Connor asked, turning his head to face me. I kept my gaze on the sky.

“I asked you if you played footbal, and you said you didn’t, but I’ve seen how good you can throw. You obviously didn’t pick that up by throwing the bal around with Jordan. Why did you lie to me?”

Connor let out a long, slow breath. “I didn’t lie,” he said, and I turned to face him, my skepticism clear. “I just omitted facts.”

“Same difference,” I said, and Connor let go of my hand and sat up. I was suddenly afraid I’d upset him off until he puled his colar to the side to reveal several smal scars on his shoulder.

“I tore up my shoulder two years ago,” he said. “So, I don’t play anymore, and no, I’m not happy about it, and yes, I had dreams to play in colege, so being here is sort of bittersweet for me.”

He then told me the story of how he’d been having the season of his life as the quarterback at his old school. His team was undefeated, they were unstoppable, and were headed for state. Then one of his offensive linemen got the flu and missed the last regular season game.

The guy who was subbing in wasn’t as good, and didn’t have the strength or stamina, so by the middle of the fourth quarter, he was tired.

He missed a key tackle and a guy on the other team laid Connor out.

He said it was something about the way he was tackled, but he dislocated his shoulder and tore al the ligaments. He had surgery and went through rehab but was told he couldn’t play anymore. His range of motion had decreased, but more importantly, the risk of reinjuring his shoulder and causing more permanent damage was too great. The doctor’s wouldn’t release him to play.

As he talked, I stared at his shoulder, picturing the scars he’d just shown me and imagining how it must have felt to be told you could no longer do something you loved. I laid my hand to rest on his shoulder and looked up at him. He placed his hand on top of mine and met my gaze.

“I was realy depressed for a long time,” he said, looking at our hands for a glance and then back up at me. “Footbal had been my life since I was five, and I was realy good at it. I wasn’t sure who I’d be without it, you know?” I nodded. “Then something happened that made me realize that life’s too short to be concerned about something like footbal.”

“What happened?”

“My girlfriend died,” he said, and it was like the world stopped spinning for a moment and everything around us went silent. I felt his hand squeeze mine and looked up to see that his eyes were wet. He didn’t say anything else, and I wondered if it was because he didn’t want to talk about it or if he couldn’t.

“God, Connor. I’m so sorry,” I said, almost knowing how that felt.

Connor shook his head. “It was so unexpected, you know? She was there one day, and then she wasn’t. I didn’t know what do to.”

“What happened?”

Connor looked down the ground for a beat and then back up at me. “She had an enlarged heart that the doctors never knew about.

She was running track and sort of colapsed. By the time the paramedics arrived, she was gone.”

He was fighting back tears as he looked at me, so I took his hands in mine and squeezed them tight in an effort to keep him grounded.

“You’re never prepared for that,” he said, shaking his head. “You never think something like that wil happen. I was sixteen. I didn’t think I’d lose someone close to me, let alone Calie. She was so tough, you know?”

He reached up to wipe away a tear, and I could see he’d lost the battle he’d been fighting with himself. I reached out and puled him into my arms, just like I’d done with Jack a year earlier as we’d waited to hear that Wyatt would be okay. I could relate to Connor’s situation just a little too wel.

Connor didn’t respond to my embrace. He just let me hold him, the tears faling silently down his cheeks as he remembered the girl he’d lost. When he finaly puled away, he wouldn’t look at me. He just hugged his knees and looked down at the blanket beneath us, tapping his right foot almost in agitation.

“After that, I sort of got a new outlook on life,” he said, when he finaly looked up at me. “On one hand, I was devastated, but on the other, I found myself feeling so grateful that my injury hadn’t been fatal. So what if I couldn’t play footbal anymore. I was alive. After that, I decided I would live every day to its fulest – if not for me, for her.”

“That’s why you don’t complain about your parents and having to help raise Jordan,” I said, more thinking aloud than anything else.

He nodded. “I’m happy to help out my family – as dysfunctional as my parents can be, they’re my family. They’ve both made some mistakes, but I’m glad they’re stil in my life. Even if we’re fighting, at the end of the day, we stil love each other.”

I swalowed hard, not sure if I’d be able to get the words out, but something told me it would help Connor if I did. So, I said, “I almost lost Wyatt last year.”

Connor looked up at me in surprise. “I didn’t know that,” he said, and I could tel he felt like that was something I should have told him.

He knew how close Wyatt and I were.

“I don’t talk about it,” I said firmly which was true. Aside from those moments when Wyatt would get sentimental, and until that night with Jack, I hadn’t talked to anyone else about it.

“It was actualy a year ago tonight, so I’m realy surprised I’m holding it together as wel as I am.” I realized my voice was a little shaky as I said that.

A worried look came over Connor’s face. “A year ago tonight?”

I nodded.

“And you came to my party?”

I nodded again.

“And you’re here planning impromptu picnics to cheer me up?” More nodding. Connor ran his hand through his hair, a distressed look on his face. “Shit, Abby. Why didn’t you say something?”

I shrugged. “It’s your birthday. Besides, saying something would require me to talk about, and I don’t do that.”

“Wil you tel me the story?” he asked, so sweet and caring and concerned that I suddenly wanted to share. I wanted him to know what I’d been through.

I started talking, and I couldn’t stop myself. I’d told him about the night Wyatt came out to me, when he was barely seventeen and terrified that there was something wrong with him. I told him how I was the only person who knew because Wyatt was afraid to tel anyone else. His family couldn’t know, his friends couldn’t know. I was the only one.

I told him how I’d watched my friend spiral out of control that summer as he went through the stages of being okay with who he was to wanting to be someone else to being disgusted with himself to downright hating himself. Then I told him about the night that Wyatt had had enough and tried to end his life. I strategicaly left out the role that Alexis had played, figuring it wasn’t the right time to bring it up, but I shared every other detail.

Alexis had been suspicious that Wyatt wasn’t as into being her boyfriend as he played out to be. She thought he was cheating on her because he didn’t seem to want to touch her anymore. She was hurt and told me so one night when we were stil sort of friends and they were stil dating. A few days later Wyatt ended things with her and started ‘dating’ me. What I didn’t know was that Alexis was pissed and had already formulated a plan to take him down.

The next thing I knew she had started to tel the people in our inner circle that Wyatt was gay. Little did she know, she was spot on with her revelation – she just didn’t know it.

She told people she had found text messages in his phone in which he’d been talking graphicaly with another guy and there was gay porn on his computer. Neither of these things was true since Wyatt was so fearful of anyone finding out about him that he would never have left such compromising evidence out for his family or friends to find.

Nevertheless, word spread quickly around school, and Wyatt then endured three weeks of being shunned by his friends, ridiculed and mocked by people who didn’t even know him. Someone had even spray-painted ‘FAG’ on his locker. The day he saw that, I watched him punch the word with his fist as hard as he could before emotion took over and he tore away from me. I ran after him, folowing him home where he screamed and threw things and raged against what he couldn’t change.

It was the most violent I’d ever seen him, and it terrified me. I finaly threw my arms around him and he crumbled, puling me to the floor with him where he cried harder than I’d ever seen him. We ended up lying together on his bed as I forced him to watch countless ‘It Gets Better’ videos on YouTube in an attempt to show him there was light at the end of high school and the pain he was feeling.

Two days later his parents found out what had been happening to their son while they were out to dinner with friends. Instead of seeing the hurt Wyatt felt and the support he needed, his dad came home in a rage. He charged into Wyatt’s room demanding answers, and when Wyatt confirmed what they most feared, his father had slapped him as hard as he could. He told his son he was an abomination, and they couldn’t have been more ashamed of him.

Wyatt had pled with his father to understand, to see that he was the same person he’d always been, but it was no use. His father coldly told him he was no longer welcome in their house, or their lives, and that he needed to be gone by morning. Wyatt had looked to his mother, pleading for her to intervene, but she’d just stood there weeping silently and shaking her head. When his father left the room, Wyatt’s mother folowed him, giving her only child one last glance before she closed the door to his bedroom.

That was when the phone cals to me started, but I wasn’t answering my phone. I was fighting with Alexis, having been cornered outside a party Wyatt was supposed to be meeting me at. Alexis started screaming at me that I had stolen her boyfriend. She was the only one at that point who didn’t think Wyatt was actualy gay since she had been under the impression she was just spreading rumors about him.

For close to thirty minutes, Alexis and I went round and round and my phone continued to vibrate in my pocket. It wasn’t until I stormed away from the party, yanked my phone from my pocket and saw that I had seven missed cals and as many messages that I started to think something was wrong. They were al from Wyatt, and there was no way he had caled seven times to let me know he was running late.

His messages started off short, asking me to cal him, please. Then he became more desperate, teling me how much he needed to talk to me. In the sixth message, he was screaming and I could hear the terror in his voice as he asked where I was and why I wasn’t caling him back. The seventh message was truly the worst because I could hear the water filing the tub in the background. At the time I didn’t know what it was. Al I could focus on was Wyatt’s voice, quiet, strained by tears and completely defeated as he told me I needed to cal him back soon if I wanted to talk to him.

My phone buzzed again in my hand before I could dial his number, and I answered it in a panic. I knew nothing of what had happened that night with his parents. Al Wyatt said was that he’d had enough. He couldn’t do it anymore, and he was saying goodbye. He told me he loved me, and that was al I needed to hear. My blood ran cold as the realization of what he was about to do hit me.

I puled in ragged breath as I finished teling Connor my story, feeling utterly drained from reliving the horror of that night. Sometimes it felt like the aftershocks of that night were worse than the actual experience I’d lived through. When I had been functioning off adrenaline and fear, I didn’t feel the emotions as a colective – they came and went in short spurts – but when I was remembering each detail in perfect clarity, the barrage of emotions was sometimes more than I could endure.

“That’s why you made me turn off that song by The Decembrists,” Connor said suddenly, and I watched him swalow as he heard the lyrics in his head that hit way too close to home.

I nodded. “The paramedics had puled Wyatt out of the water to work on him, but they hadn’t drained the bathtub. I couldn’t leave it there. The water was so red. There were streaks of his blood on the sides and the razor he’d used was just sitting there. I couldn’t handle it. Jack was caling for me to go to the hospital with him, but I couldn’t leave the bathroom that way. It was a sick reminder of exactly how desperate Wyatt had been in that moment. The last thing I remember was the streaks of red snaking down the drain, leaving behind them trails of blood and water. It’s one of the images I’l never forget. It was like watching Wyatt’s life flow down the drain.”

“Oh, Abby. I’m so sorry,” Connor said, and suddenly his arms were around me, holding me tight, just as I had done for him.

I realized in that moment that the reason we fit together so wel, and why we had become so close so fast, was that he knew. He knew deep down what it was like to feel real loss and to be struck with something so serious at such a young age. Other than Jack, he was the only person I knew who understood how I felt every day.