Breaking Nova (3 page)

I stare at my reflection in the stainless-steel microwave. It’s not the clearest. In fact, my face looks a little distorted and warped, like I’m looking into a funhouse mirror, my own face nearly a stranger. But if I tilt sideways just a little, I almost look normal, like my old self. “I’m fine,” I repeat, observing how blank my expression looks when I say it. “Memories are just memories.” Really, it doesn’t matter what they are, because I can’t see the parts that I know will rip my heart back open: the last few steps leading up to Landon’s finality and the soundless moments afterward, before I cracked apart. I worked hard to stitch my heart back up after it was torn open, even if I hadn’t done it neatly.

“Nova.” She sighs as she starts mixing the cookie batter. “You can’t just try to forget without dealing with it first. It’s unhealthy.”

“Forgetting
is
dealing with it.” I grab an apple from a basket on the table, no longer wanting to talk about it because it’s in the past, where it belongs.

“Nova, honey,” she says sadly. She’s always tried to get me to talk about that day. But what she doesn’t get is that I can’t remember, even if I really tried, which I never will. It’s like my brain’s developed it’s own brain and it won’t allow those thoughts out, because once they’re out, they’re real. And I don’t want them to be real—I don’t want to remember
him
like that. Or me.

I push up from the chair, cutting her off. “I think I’m going to hang out next to the pool today, and Delilah will probably be over in a bit.”

“If that’s what you want.” My mom smiles halfheartedly at me, wanting to say more, but fearing what it’ll do to me. I don’t blame her, either. She’s the one who found me on the bathroom floor, but she thinks it’s more than it was. I was just trying to find out what he felt like—what was going on inside of him when he decided to go through with it.

I nod, grab a can of soda out of the fridge, and give her a hug before I head for the sliding glass door. “That’s what I want.”

She swallows hard, looking like she might cry because she thinks she’s lost her daughter. “Well, if you need me, I’m here.” She turns back to her bowl.

She’s been saying that to me since I was thirteen, ever since I watched my dad die. I’ve never taken her up on the offer, even though we’ve always had a good relationship. Talking about death with her—at all—doesn’t work for me. At this point in my life, I couldn’t talk to her about it even if I wanted to. I have my silence now, which is my healing, my escape, my sanctuary. Without it, I’d hear the noises of that morning, see the bleeding images, and feel the crushing pain connected to them. If I saw them, then I’d finally have to accept that Landon’s gone.

*    *    *

I don’t like unknown places. They make me anxious and I have trouble thinking—breathing. One of the therapists I first saw diagnosed me with obsessive-compulsive disorder. I’m not sure if he was right, though, because he moved out of town not too long after. I was left with a therapist in training, so to speak, and he decided that I was just depressed and had anxiety, hence the antianxiety medication for the last year and three months.

The unfamiliarity of the backyard disrupts my counting, and it takes me forever to get to the pool. By the time I arrive at the lawn chair, I know how many steps it took me to get here, how many seconds it took me to sit down, and how many more seconds it took for Delilah to arrive and then take a seat beside me. I know how many rocks are on the path leading to the porch—twenty-two—how many branches are on the tree shielding the sunlight from us—seventy-eight. The only thing I don’t know is how many seconds, hours, years, decades, it will take before I can let go of the goddamn self-induced numbness. Until then I’ll count, focus on numbers instead of the feelings always floating inside me, the ones linked to images immersed just beneath the surface.

Delilah and I lie in lawn chairs in the middle of my backyard with the pool behind us and the sun bearing down on us as we tan in our swimsuits. She’s been my best friend for the past year or so. Our sudden friendship was strange, because we’d gone to high school together but never really talked. She and I were in different social circles and I had Landon. But after it happened… after he died… I had no one, and the last few weeks of high school were torture. Then I met her, and she was nice and she didn’t look at me like I was about to shatter. We hit it off, and honestly, I have no idea what I’d do without her now. She’s been there for me, she shows me how to have fun, and she reminds me that life still exists in the world, even if it’s brief.

“Good God, has it always been this hot here?” Delilah fans her face with her hand as she yawns. “I remember it being colder.”

“I think so.” I pick up a cup of iced tea on the table between us and prop up on my elbow to take a sip. “We could go in,” I suggest, setting my glass down. I turn it in a circle until it’s perfectly in place on the condensation ring it left behind, and then I wipe the moisture from my lips with the back of my hand and rest my head back against the chair. “We do have air-conditioning.”

Delilah laughs sardonically as she reaches for the sparkly pink flask in her bag. “Yeah, right. Are you kidding me?” She pauses, examining her fiery red nails, then unscrews the lid off the flask. “No offense. I didn’t mean for that to sound rude, but your mom and dad are a little overwhelming.” She takes a swig from the flask and holds it out in my direction.

“Stepdad,” I correct absentmindedly. I wrap my lips around the top of the flask and take a tiny swallow, then hand it back to her and close my eyes. “And they’re just lonely. I’m the only child and I’ve been gone for almost a year.”

She laughs again, but it’s breezier than before. “They’re seriously the most overbearing parents I know. They call you every day at school and text you a thousand times.” She puts the flask back into her bag.

“They just worry about me.” They didn’t use to. My mom was really carefree before my dad died, and then she got concerned about how his death and seeing it affected me. Then Landon died, and now all she does is constantly worry.

“
I
worry about you, too,” Delilah mumbles. She waits for me to say something, but I don’t—I can’t. Delilah knows about what happened with Landon, but we never
really
talk about what I saw. And that’s one of the things I like about her—that she doesn’t ask questions.

One… two… three… four… five… breathe… six… seven… eight… breathe…
Balling my hands into fists, I fight to calm myself down, but the darkness is ascending inside me, and it will take me over if I let it and drag me down into the memory I won’t remember; my last memory of Landon.

“I have a brilliant idea,” she interrupts my counting. “We could go check out Dylan and Tristan’s new place.”

My eyes open and I slant my head to the side. My hands are on my stomach, and I can feel my pulse beating through my fingertips, inconsistent. Tracking the beats is difficult, but I try anyway. “You want to go see your ex-boyfriend’s place.
Seriously?
”

Swinging her legs over the edge of the chair, Delilah sits up and slips her sunglasses up to the top of her head. “What? I’m totally curious what he ended up like.” She presses her fingertips to the corners of her eyes, plucking out gobs of kohl eyeliner.

“Yeah, but isn’t it kind of weird to show up randomly after not talking to him in like forever, especially after how bad your guys’ breakup was,” I say. “I mean, if Tristan hadn’t stepped in, you would have probably hit Dylan.”

“Yeah, probably, but that’s all in the past.” She chews on her thumbnail and gives me a guilt-ridden look as she smears the tanning-spray grease off her bare stomach. “Besides that’s not technically accurate. We kind of talked yesterday.”

Frowning, I sit up and refasten the elastic around my long, wavy brown hair, securing it in a ponytail. “Are you serious?” I ask, and when she doesn’t respond, I add, “Nine months ago, when he cheated on you, you swore up and down that you’d never talk to that”—I make air quotes—“ ‘fucking, lying, cheating bastard’ again. In fact, if I remember right, it was the main reason you decided to go to college with me—because you needed a break.”

“Did I say that really?” She feigns forgetfulness as she taps her finger on her chin. “Well, like everything else in my life, I’ve decided to have a change of heart.” She reaches for the tanning spray on the table between us. “And besides, I did need a break, not just from him, but from my mom and this town, but now we’re back and I figure I might as well have some fun while I’m here. College wore me out.”

Delilah is the most indecisive person I’ve ever met. During our freshman year, she changed majors three times, dyed her hair from red, to black, then back to red again, and went through about a half a dozen boyfriends. I secretly love it, despite how much I pretend that I don’t. It was what kind of drew me to her; her uncaring, nonchalant attitude, and the way she could forget things in the snap of a finger. I wish I could be the same way sometimes, and if I hang around her a lot, there are a few moments when I can get my mind on the same carefree level as hers.

“What have you two been talking about?” I wonder, plucking a piece of grass off my leg. “And please don’t tell me it’s getting back together, because I don’t want to see you get crushed like that again.”

Her smile shines as she tucks strands of her red hair behind her heavily studded ears, then she removes the lid from the tanning spray. “What is with you and Dylan? He’s always put you on edge.”

“Because he’s sketchy.
And
he cheated on you.”

“He’s not sketchy… he’s mysterious. And he was drunk when he cheated.”

“Delilah, you deserve better than that.”

She narrows her eyes at me as she spritzes her legs with tanning spray. “I’m not better than him, Nova. I’ve done supercrappy things, hurt people. I’ve made mistakes—we all have.”

I stab my nails into the palms of my hands, thinking of all the mistakes I made and their consequences. “Yes, you are better. All he’s ever done is cheat on you and deal drugs.”

She slaps her hand on her knee. “Hey, he doesn’t deal anymore. He stopped dealing a year ago.” She clicks the cap back onto the tanning spray and tosses it into her bag.

I sigh, push my sunglasses up over my head, and massage my temples. “So what has he been up to for a year?” I lower my hands and blink against the sunlight.

She shrugs, and then her lips expand to a grin as she grabs my hand and stands, tugging me to my feet. “How about we go change out of our swimsuits, head over to his place, and find out?” When I open my mouth to protest, she adds, “It’d be a good distraction for the day.”

“I’m not really looking for a distraction, though.”

“Well, then you could go over and see Tristan.” She bites back an amused smirk. “Maybe reheat things.”

I glare at her. “We hooked up one time and that’s because I was drunk and…”
Vulnerable.
I’d actually been really drunk, and my thoughts had been all over the place because of an unexpected visit from Landon’s parents that morning. They’d wanted to give me some of his sketchings, which they’d found in a trunk upstairs—sketchings of me. I’d barely been able to take them without crying, and then I’d run off, looking to get drunk and forget about the drawings, Landon, and the pain of him leaving. Tristan, Dylan’s best friend—and roommate—was the first guy I came across after way, way too many Coronas and shots. I started making out with him without even saying hello.

He was the first guy I’d made out with since Landon, and I spent the entire night afterward crying and rocking on the bathroom floor, counting the cracks in the tile and trying to get myself to calm down and stop feeling guilty for kissing someone else, because Landon was gone and he took a part of me with him—at least that was what it feels like. What’s left of me is a hollow shell full of denial and tangled with confusion. I have no idea who I am anymore. I really don’t. And I’m not sure if I want to know or not.

“Oh come on, Nova.” She releases my hand and claps her hands in front of her. “Please, can we just go and try to have some fun?”

I sigh, defeated, and nod, knowing that the true feelings of why I don’t want to go over there lie more in the fact that I hate new places than anything else. Unfamiliar situations put me on edge, because I hate the unknown. It reminds me just how much the unknown controls everything, and my counting can sometimes get a little out of hand. But I don’t want to argue anymore with Delilah, either, because then my anxiety will get me worked up and the counting will, too. Either way, I know I’m going to have a head full of numbers. At least if I go with Delilah, then I can keep an eye on her and maybe she’ll end up happy. And really, that’s all I can ask for. For everyone to be happy. But as I all too painfully know, you can’t force someone to be happy, no matter how much you wish you could.

I ask myself the same question every day:
Why me? Why did I survive?
And every day I get the same response:
I don’t know.
Deep down, I know there really isn’t an answer, yet I keep asking the same question, hoping that maybe one day someone will give me a hand and give me a clear answer. But my head is always foggy, and answers always come to me in harsh, jagged responses: regardless of why I survived, it was my fault, and I should be the one buried under the ground, locked in a box, below a marked stone. Two people died because of me that day. Two people I cared about. And even though the guy I barely know miraculously lived, he could have very easily died, and his death would have been my fault, too.

All my fault.

“Thanks for letting me stay here, man,” I say for the thousandth time. I can tell my cousin Tristan is getting a little irritated by how many times I’ve said it, but I can’t seem to stop. I’m sure it wasn’t easy for him to help out the most hated member of our family. The one who destroyed lives and split apart a family. But I needed to leave, despite how much I didn’t want to; something that became clear when my dad finally spoke to me after over a year of near silence.