Breaking Nova (30 page)

Then I click open the file, and with a faltering breath I hit Play. Seconds later the video clicks on and then everything becomes silent.

The song plays in the background, the one he had playing when I found him that day. The camera is angled crookedly, so his honey-brown eyes look like shadows; his inky black hair hangs over his forehead and only conceals his eyes more. I can barely note the pain in them, but it’s there and it’s radiating in his voice, more than I’ve ever heard.

The moonlight trickles through the window in the background, his skin hauntingly white, but in the most amazing way. He’s beautiful sitting in front of the screen, like he sketched it himself, his final portrait. The heart-wrenching lyrics playing through the speakers only amplify the finality in the scene.

I hold my breath as I wait for him to say or do something, speak, or move, but he’s still as a statue, staring at the screen, like he’s trying to decipher me instead of me deciphering him. He’s eerily calm, like he’s sedated, and maybe he is. It’s to dark to see if his eyes are bloodshot, and I’m not there to smell him. I wish I was, though. God, I wish I was.

Finally, he takes a breath. “I’m not sure who will watch this… whether anyone will or if it will be put away with the rest of my things… boxed up… shuffled away… forgotten.” He shifts his weight in the chair, crossing his arms on the desk. “I’m not sure if I actually want anyone to watch it, either. I’m conflicted, like I am with everything else in my life.” He pauses, and I can hear him breathing. I almost expect him to cry with how much repressed sadness is flowing out of him, but his eyes look like the stay dry. “I really did try. I promise I did… but I just couldn’t do it anymore. The days… they just became too hard… waking up became too hard… I couldn’t even numb the heaviness in me anymore… Not even with drugs…” He rakes his fingers through his hair, his breath trembling. “Life’s just too heavy. Walking around, breathing, functioning, when I can’t even find a point of doing it.” He drops his hand on the desk. “There’s just no point.”

He drags his hand down his face, glancing around at his room, then he reaches over and turns the music down, but I can still hear it quietly haunting the background. “It feels like I’m living in this hole… this dark hole in the ground, and all I can do is stare at the same damn dirt walls every single day. And there’s no point to it, but I have to do it because there’s nothing else I can do.” He inhales and then stridently exhales. “And then there’s all this pain inside of me and I can’t figure out how to turn it off. I keep waiting for it to turn off, but it just keeps getting worse… Everything does… God, I can’t even remember the last time I fucking smiled for real.” He shakes his head, muttering under his breath. “And Mom, if you do watch this, I know what you’re thinking. You’re blaming yourself because that’s the kind of person that you are, but it’s not your fault. My head is just seriously fucked up.”

He taps his fingers nervously on the desk, studying the screen. “I really don’t want to be here. I think about it every single day, the idea that maybe something will happen and I won’t wake up and have to deal with the same goddamn weighted routine of my life, but it just never happens and I just keep walking around, lost. All the fucking time. There’s nothing there inside me. And I just feel like I’m dragging everything—everyone—down around me, because I can’t get past it. I can’t find the will to smile and walk through life, pretending to be content with the heaviness on my shoulder, living in the same dark, goddamn hole forever.”

He sucks in a deep breath and his voice drops to a soft, barely audible whisper. “Nova… beautiful, amazingly… wonderful… Nova. The one thing that was good in my life.… I know you’re going to watch this eventually, because that’s the kind of person you are. You’re strong… your dad died and you moved on, and me… I haven’t even gone through anything that tragic and I’ve barely been hanging on for years.” He pauses his voice dropping even softer. “I love you. I really fucking do, even though I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to drag you into this mess, but I wasn’t strong enough to stay away from you… I got too caught up in your smile, your kindness, the sound of your voice and your passion about life. Everything you did…” A small, distorted smile fleetingly reveals at his lips. “From playing the drums to knowing who you are… knowing what you want… It was amazing to watch everything you did with some freedom.… You just did stuff and never overthought it. There’s so much good in you… and it was the one thing that made living life just a little bit easier…”

He trails off and stares at the camera for the longest time. The song ends and then starts up again, playing on Repeat, and I can feel it in my heart, the moment where he’s going to say his final words and then click off the camera. Leaving. Going. Dying. Giving up. He takes a deep breath and another, then reaches for the screen.

“Please just forgive me,” he says. “I know you can… stay strong… move on… Please, please, forgive me.”

Then the screen goes black.

July 31, Day 73 of Summer Break

I’m not even sure how long I cry for. It feels like forever, but when I finally close my eyes, it’s still dark outside. I surprisingly don’t dream, at least nothing that I can remember, and I wake up in the morning with a splitting headache, puffy eyes, and swollen cheeks. But strangely the weight on my chest, the one I’ve been carrying since Landon left me, feels a tiny bit lighter. His last words echo my head.
Please forgive me.
I hadn’t even thought about it before. Not in those terms. Forgiving him. And how can I? How can I forgive him for leaving me? I’m not sure, but the Nova he described in the video sounded like she would. The good one, the one that smiled and was able to hang on even after her dad died. But this one, the Nova I am right now, can’t hang on to anything.

An overwhelming homesick feeling wells up in the pit of my stomach, not just for my mom but also for my dad. He’d be so disappointed if he saw me now, and honestly, I feel kind of ashamed of myself. And so would Landon. Nothing about this place is making me happy, not even the music playing outside or the people I came here with.

I slept alone in the tent last night and I was angry, because Quinton just left me and I haven’t seen him since. But I’m also relieved, because it allowed me time to cry alone. Not just over Landon, or the video, but over what I’ve become. I’ve been so afraid of everything. Afraid of living life without Landon. Afraid of moving on. Afraid to lose control, ever since that night, that I’ve made my whole life about controlling things and counting, yet I never had control, just an illusion of it. I’d used numbers and order to cover up everything in life, give myself a fake sense of stability, and not fully accept that Landon is gone and I’m going to have to move on without him. And not admitting the real problems out loud has broken me into fragments of a person that once use to be a good person, but now she’s scattered all over the place. I’m sitting in a place that I don’t understand and I don’t think I ever really wanted to be here. I just fell into it and it only took me 73 days, 1,752 hours, 105,120 minutes to get here.

I smell like a Dumpster, my clothes are still muddy and stiff, and I shower dry dirt to the floor every time I shift my weight. I need a shower. I need a good meal. I need everything that this place can’t offer.

I climb out of the sleeping bag, slip on a clean red tank top, a pair of shorts, and pull up my hair into a messy bun. I rub some black stuff off my arm, and then douse myself with perfume before I exit the tent.

The sun seems really vivid today and stings at my eyes and my thoughts. There’s a guy playing his guitar solo, his melodious voice carrying across the field, and the sound of it brings me a little bit of peace. But the people who surround me look rough and broken, muddy, wearing very little clothing; some have cuts and bruises on them like they got into a fight.
This isn’t where I want to be.

I open the cooler and take out a bottle of water. I twist the cap off and devour half of it in one gulp, letting out a sigh as I put the cap on. The chairs in front of the tent are empty, and when I tap my fingers on Dylan’s and Delilah’s tent no one responds.

I’m not really sure what my plans are. Who I should be. How I should move forward. Where I should go. But it seems like I should be doing anything else but standing in this exact spot. With the bottle of water in my hand, I start wandering around the outskirts of the field, zigzagging around the tents, searching for a familiar face but wondering if it’s even possible to find one. I keep replaying what happened in the pond and the memory that’s opened up inside me, even though I fought so hard to keep it hidden for the last year. I’d always been so afraid of the memory, fearing my reaction when I finally remembered that awful night. I feared almost everything about that night because I lost so much and I didn’t want to accept it. But after watching the video, hearing his last words, the blunt truth is I’ll have to finally accept that Landon is gone. He left this world forever. And now I need to find away to forgive him and figure out my place in this world. Somehow. Do I want what’s around me? The fake silence? Do I want to keep aimlessly searching for where to go next or finally figure it out?

The people around me are smoking and drinking, laughing and talking. They make it look so easy. Like just one drink or hit will take it all away. And it does. For a moment. But what about after? Then what?

I’m considering backtracking to the tent when I round the tailgate of a truck and there they all are. Quinton, Dylan, and Tristan all have their backs to me and on the other side of them are three guys; two that look really tall and one that looks shorter than me and has a bald head like Dylan, only his has tattoos all over it. Delilah’s standing in the middle of them and she has her T-shirt knotted at the bottom so her stomach is showing and her shorts rolled up so high her ass is pretty much hanging out.

She’s chatting to one of the taller guys who has dark brown hair, oily skin, and yellow-stained teeth, along with a goatee that stretches to his chest. She keeps laughing and smiling, throwing back her head in a flirty way, and I keep waiting for Dylan to get pissed and intervene, but he never does. Then she hands him something, a plastic bag, and the dots connect inside my head. They’re dealing. I’m about to back away, when the shorter, rounder of the three guys notice me. His gaze sweeps across me, and anger masks his sore-covered face.

“Who the fuck is she?” he asks with a nod of his chin as he cracks his knuckles.

Suddenly they’re all looking at me and I start to step back, wondering if I should walk or run away when Quinton’s honey-brown eyes lock on me and I think of what he said to me at the pond. It’s almost like he can see the old me, the part of me that I lost. I wonder how, though? How can he see the good?

I’m backing away, running away, when I stop in my tracks near the corner of the tent. I stare at the pain in his eyes, the dazed look that lets me know he’s not himself, and the pure and utter torture that I still don’t truly understand and I wonder if I ever will.
Did I ever really know him? Did he ever really know me? Will we ever really know each other? I’m not sure, but I think I need to find myself first.

My feet long to go to him, but my mind has the upper hand this time, because it’s as clear as the sky and suddenly I understand. At this moment in my life I can’t help him, even though I want to so badly that it consumes my body and mind. I want to take his pain away, save him like I couldn’t save Landon, but I’m not strong enough right now. I’m not the strong girl Landon talked about in the video. I wish I was, but I can barely hang on myself, let alone hold someone up with me. I’m understanding this now. I’m suddenly understanding a lot of things. It hurts to realize it and makes it hard to breathe, like my lungs are shrinking or maybe they’re expanding and there’s no more room left in my rib cage. Either way, I’m hyperventilating. I massage my hand over my chest, my heart aching as he stares at me, mystified. I look at the blue sky above us, the dirt below our feet, and a sea of people walking around, a sea we could easy get swept away into.

I’m sorry,
I mouth.

He stares at me for a moment longer and I can’t tell if he gets what I mean or not, but he nods once before turning away, and I think that maybe, just maybe, he knows what I mean.

“Hey, Nova,” Tristan says, taking a step toward me. He nods his head to the side, indicating for me to walk away. “You should go.”

I gladly turn around and walk off toward the tent.
One… two… three…

“Nova, wait,” Tristan says and moments later he grabs my arm, jerking me to a stop.

I slowly turn around to face him. He looks a little different, his pupils larger, his hair disheveled, and there are bags underneath his eyes. “I’m sorry,” I say, wiggling my arm out of his grip. “I didn’t know you guys were busy.”

He shakes his head and then rakes his fingers through his blond locks. “You don’t need to be sorry… it’s just… it’s just better if you weren’t around… that.” His voice sounds subdued and it seems like he’s really struggling to move his lips.

“It’s fine,” I say. But it’s not. Nothing is fine.
I don’t want to be here anymore.

“Yeah…” He bites on his lip, glancing over his shoulder, and then he ushers me forward, motioning his hands at me. “Look, I remember you in high school and you weren’t… you weren’t like us…”

Us.
Like we’re two different breeds. But we’re not. We’re all just living a different path and seeing life differently—I’m seeing life differently. “I know, but it doesn’t mean I was sheltered. I saw stuff.” I turn my shoulder inward to squeeze through a truck and a tent. “I saw stuff all the time.”
Where do I go from here?

“Yeah, I know,” he says, kicking a cooler out of his path and spilling a beer that was on top of it. “You were always hanging out with that guy that… died.”

He did die. A while ago. But he’s gone now. “His name was Landon,” I say, pressing my hand to my chest. “Landon Evans.” The world starts to spin, but it’s a good spin. A natural spin and I let it be.
Please, forgive me.