Chosen (8 page)

Smiling, I leaned back into my seat and stared out the window at the cars and trucks whizzing by on the highway.

“She's right here,” I asserted.

Now I wanted that envelope to come more than ever.

I
♥
wknds! So xcited 2 hang w Tay 2nite!
5:18 p.m
.

Once I updated my Chatter status, I put my phone on my desk. Taylor and I
were going to the movies and then out to grab a slice of pizza. His dad would be here to
pick me up at seven. I needed something distracting—seven seemed
so
far away!

I picked up my baby blue leather messenger bag, letting out an
ooof!
as I set it on the bed. It
was so full, it barely closed, and I was sure the straps were going to break. I pulled
out the books I needed for the weekend's homework. Each book was bigger than the
one before.

Math.

Science with workbook.

French II textbook.

English textbook and
Animal Farm
.

Art history.

American history.

And those were just the books I needed to read from. The rest of the
weekend's homework was posted on Yates's Web site. To top it off, at some
point I needed to log in and post a discussion question for creative writing
and
offer replies to at least
four other students' questions.

In general, weekends definitely weren't work-free in the
Towers's household. Becca had started her homework early this morning, so she was
already out with her bestie, Casey. I'd decided to ease into the day. I slept in,
watched a little TV, then spent some time on IM chatting with Ana and Brielle.

I stacked my books in a neat pile on my desk and decided to dive into the
art history that would be due on Tuesday. But for me, homework was a finely tuned ritual
and I could not even write one word until I had my go-to homework drink. Brielle's
was Diet Coke. Ana loved cappuccinos with sugar. Lots and
lots
of sugar. I'd
actually
gagged
when I'd
accidentally taken a tiny sip from her cup once. That was a mistake I'd never make
again for fear of going into a sugar coma.

I headed downstairs to the kitchen. I could tell by the
shiny marble tiles that Ellen had been here this morning. I looked around the
house. Everything was sparkly clean, exactly the way I liked it. I reached into the
light wooden cabinet above the stove and took out last year's Christmas present
from Aunt Cathy—a stainless steel Krups teapot with a black rubber handle. I
filled the pot with water from our Brita filter and turned the gas stove on high until
the tips of the mostly blue flames licked the outer circumference of the teapot.

Next, I opened another cabinet door and took out a wicker basket that had
been painted bronze. I carried the basket to the breakfast nook and sat at the small
round table, peering into my basket. I treated the basket as if it contained diamonds,
but what was really inside was tea. Tea, tea, and more tea. I had boxes and bags of
every imaginable kind—herbal, black, green, red, white.

I'd started drinking tea back when we lived in Brooklyn—mostly
because our house was a three-floor brownstone with just one tiny radiator to heat the
entire place. It had always been so freezing that the entire family started drinking
tea, just to have a warm cup clasped between their palms at all times.

Tea, Dad always told me, kept you warm from the inside out. Back then,
Becca and I were too young and,
therefore, banned from caffeinated
tea. So Mom always had a box of our favorite flavors of caffeine-free Celestial
Seasonings on the center of the kitchen table. Becca's was Gingerbread Spice. And
mine was Sugar Cookie Sleigh Ride—it tasted best with actual sugar in it.

Now, even though our house was warm, tea had become a total obsession. All
of my friends and family knew to get me tea whenever they saw a unique flavor. It was
like a game for them to find a kind I hadn't tried. I even kept a tea journal and
recorded each kind I tasted, and I rated them from +
to
. Sometimes tea was
so bad it needed a negative star. In my bedroom on my bookcase, I had books about tea,
and I'd learned interesting facts about it—like the history of the leaves,
how to make a perfect cup, and where to find the most exotic teas.

I had tea for all occasions: pulling all-nighters (Vanilla Black
Twinings), calming down before bed (chamomile Bigelow), rainy days (Perfectly Pear White
Celestial Seasonings), cold weather (Winter Spice Twinings), bad days (Sugar Cookie
Sleigh Ride Celestial Seasonings—it was still my favorite), and sick days
(Peppermint Celestial Seasonings).

It was Saturday night, so I wanted something spiked with caffeine and
cooling since it was warm out.

I moved boxes of Tazo, Celestial Seasonings, Twinings,
and Harney & Sons until I found what I wanted—Organic Green Tea With Mint.

Très
parfait
. Caffeinated and cooling. Ooh la la!

I took the pyramid-shaped tea bag out of the larger zipped bag and got up
when the teapot started to whistle. Ana and Brielle loved to tease me about my tea
habit. They thought it was weird that I had to use a stove-top teakettle for tea and
called me a snob—pushing the tips of their noses in the air and lifting their
chins when I wouldn't use a microwave to heat water just because it was faster. I
had tried to explain that there was something about the ritual of boiling the water on
the stove that I liked, but they only rolled their eyes.

I picked out my favorite homework teacup—a powder blue one with a
small, delicate daisy painted on it. It had a matching saucer and tiny stirring spoon. I
took my cup of steaming tea upstairs and placed it on my bedside table, beside the
magazines I was reading before I went to bed. I had a mix of everything—fashion,
gossip, and horses.

I opened the double doors to my closet and flipped up the light switch. My
closet was the most embarrassing example of my inner neat freak. My clothes were
arranged by color, even down to shades within the same color
category. I'd always
loved
clothes, but most of my shopping had been limited to online
purchases that Dad and I quickly added to various carts while I traveled on an insanely
busy show circuit. Back then, I'd had practically zero time to go to actual
stores. But in Brooklyn, Mom and I could never resist the local boutiques or making
special trips to the bigger stores in Manhattan like Bloomingdale's, Bergdorf,
or—on a very special occasion—Barneys.

Now that I'd taken a break from showing, I'd spent a lot of
time doing things I'd never had time for when I was younger—even simple
things like exploring my neighborhood, shopping with my friends in actual stores, where
I could actually try on clothes, and going to free concerts in the park.

I took in each section. The black and white sections, which were adjacent
to each other, I thought of as my “Audrey Hepburn sections” because she wore
a lot of those two simple colors and made them look stunning. The section I thought of
as the “sister section” was all shades of purple (Becca's favorite
color) and blue (my favorite color). I selected an outfit for tonight while my tea
cooled. I took my time, running my fingers over all of the different fabrics and cuts,
each item hanging from a silk ivory hanger adorned by a tiny ribbon-bow where the base
of the hook was.

I started at the Audrey Hepburn section and plucked a
black, summery A-line skirt covered with dozens of
fleur-de-lis
designs that were
stitched on with fine, silver thread. I stayed in the same section to select a delicate
scoop-neck tissue tee in soft white.

I grabbed a cardigan sweater from the sister section—a grape-y
purple button-down with sparkly rhinestone buttons that Becca convinced me to purchase
from J.Crew just last weekend. I felt the thin microfiber material between my thumb and
index fingers, grateful to be holding a sweater my sister had picked out, that I'd
tried on and realized ran small and swapped it for a size up, one that we bought in the
store together and that I assumed she wanted me to get because it was her favorite color
and she'd borrow it before I even got to wear it once.

A sweater that surprised me because, here I was, cutting off the tags to
wear it out on a date with Tay, my boyfriend—not some guy I met and competed
against in the arena. Just a boy I liked hanging out with—an athlete, like me, who
got why I had to take a break after my fall, who got why I only drank tea with kettle
water, and why spending a whole night just watching a movie and going out for a slice of
pizza felt like a luxury. A boy Lauren Towers a year and a half ago wouldn't even
have time to text.

An ambulance siren wailed, making me feel queasy.
I'd been dreading today for a while—it was the grand opening of a new
hospital a few blocks away. It had been all over the news that today had been Union
County Hospital's ribbon-cutting ceremony. I hated the h-word, and just hearing
the far-off siren brought back memories I didn't want to think about.

I sat down on the closet floor, squeezing my eyes shut as I leaned my back
against the shoe wall. Memories of a time before sweater shopping and movie dates and
getting to know more about a boy than how many blue ribbons he'd snagged wanted to
invade! Memories about a girl before she fell, before it was splashed across the news in
slow-motion on every channel. A busy, thrilling, whirlwind competitive time and the way
it all halted so fast. The sound of a shocked, worried crowd, those memories—the
darkest, scariest ones—I'd tried to stop thinking about were coming
back.

The ambulance siren I'd just heard sounded just like the ones
I'd heard when I'd been on the ground. Everyone around me had looked so
worried.

“I'm fine,” I assured them.

Mr. Wells asked me to wiggle my fingers and toes, which I did without a
problem.

“Everything feels fine,” I said again. But
something wasn't right. I felt . . . fear.

But this had been my first serious spill. There hadn't been any
warning at all. One second, I was galloping toward a jump—the final jump. My body
had already gotten comfortable, and in my head I was excited about finishing.

The next thing I knew, I was lying on the ground, aching all over.

All of a sudden, the world was moving again. All I wanted was
stillness.

Two paramedics—or maybe three?—placed a brace around my neck
and loaded me carefully onto a stretcher.

What people would remember most was the way I protested. This was
unnecessary, I insisted. The last thing I wanted was to go to the hospital where
strangers could keep staring. I really just wanted to curl up under every blanket on my
bed and sleep away what had happened.