My Beating Teenage Heart (7 page)

Nobody comes through the front door. The car must’ve passed.

I set the leftover linguini on the floor for Moose. Way too much gar [ to.

“I know,” I tell him. “It sucks.”

I lob the linguini into the trash and go upstairs to do something with the burn. The red spans from my wrist down to my knuckles. I should’ve thought that over beforehand. If you’re going to fuck yourself up and want to keep it a secret I guess you better know how to hide it.

I dig out the first-aid kit from under the sink and pull out a gauze pad and antibiotic ointment. Squeezing the ointment onto my skin stings so bad that my molars bite down on my tongue. I lay the gauze pad gently on top of my left hand and that hurts too. Then I wrap a bandage around the pad, finishing it off with a ton of tape to keep the bandage in place.

My shitty bandaging job probably makes the injury look worse than it is. I’m already beginning to regret what I did to myself. Nothing’s changed except now my singed skin won’t quit screaming at me and I’ve turned into one of those screwed-up people who hurt themselves.

Just once, I tell myself. It could’ve as easily been an accident. You won’t do it again. And then I realize, for the thousandth time, that my sister’s dead and it doesn’t matter what I do or don’t do because nothing will ever change that.

I hear my cell ringing from my bedroom as I’m putting the first-aid kit back. I don’t want to answer it but that’s life, doing thing after thing that doesn’t matter and won’t change anything. My feet start moving in the direction of my room and next thing I know I have the phone in my hand and am answering it.

“Hey, it’s Ty,” the voice on the other end of the phone says. “Jules said she was over there this morning and that things were pretty quiet. I was wondering if you wanted to get out for a while, or something.… ” Ty’s voice trails off. He sounds kind of like the first time he came to visit me after my bike accident a year and a half ago, as though he’s not sure what to say because he doesn’t know whether I’m going to be okay.

But that accident was a walk in the park compared to this. A car rear-ended me when I was riding home from Ty’s, throwing me off my bike. I never saw who did it—he or she didn’t stick around to see if I was breathing. My dad still starts tremoring like a volcano about to blow when the hit-and-run comes up. “What kind of person can knock a kid off his bike and then speed off without calling for help!” he rants. “I can’t believe this sicko’s still driving around.”

It was a fifty-something-year-old woman on a Vespa who found me and called for an ambulance. I’d fractured my C1 vertebra and spent thirteen weeks in a Miami J cervical collar. No more contact sports for me. The doctor even nixed things like snowboarding and mountain biking. The downside was my parents forced me to give up soccer without even getting a second opinion, the upside is that their fear I’d get hit on my bike again convinced them that buying me a car would be worth the dent in their bank account. They gave me a barely used secondhand Hyundai just two days after I go [ys t bt my full license a few months ago.

“You can’t put a price on safety,” I overheard my father say to my mom one night, but it turns out lightning doesn’t strike twice in the same way. I never used to believe in fate but now my head keeps tripping back to the idea that maybe it was supposed to be me instead of Skylar. If it had to be one of us, it should’ve been me. Skylar was so young. She barely had a chance to get started.

I remember the last time my parents took her and her best friend Kevin to the museum in February. When they got back Skylar was clutching a kids’ book on hieroglyphics and couldn’t stop talking about mummies. She said when she was older she was going to become an archaeologist and visit the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt. Months before that she went around telling as many people as would listen that when she grew up she wanted to go into space and see the earth from so far away that it looked like a marble.

“Wouldn’t you be homesick?” I asked her after hearing that for something like the fourth or fifth time. “With the earth being this tiny little circle so far away?”

Skylar paused and thought about it. “No, because I’d be in radio and video contact with everyone and that would make it seem not so far away.”

But what if you never got back?
I remember thinking that if it was me I’d be scared something would go wrong and that I’d never set foot on the earth again. I’d
go
because if I had the chance I’d want to have a look at what was out there but I’d worry about it too. I didn’t say anything about not getting back to my sister, though, and I guess it didn’t occur to her. I wonder if that’s because seven isn’t old enough to worry about something like never seeing the planet again or whether Skylar herself was just more fearless than I am.

There are so many things … so many things she’ll never do. And I’ll never know what the older Skylar would’ve been like. How can that be possible?

Pain drags me under again. It stretches out in all directions like the destruction caused by an atom bomb.

“Breckon?” Ty prompts. “What about it?”

I press my thumb against my bandage until I wince at that different kind of hurt. But it works—it brings me back.

“I hurt my hand,” I say with a groan. “Fucking scalded it. There must be something wrong with our kitchen tap.” Not the tap but the water heater, probably. My grandmother said something about the water temperature to Lily when she was washing dishes yesterday and then they both probably forgot all about it.

I didn’t.

Ty and I ruminate on my latest injury for a second. He and our friend Rory (also known as Big Red) still play for the school soccer team. For a long time after the accident I was pissed with my parents for making me stop, but when I got over it I realized that I didn’t miss soccer as much as I thought I would. I wondered if maybe I’d never actually liked soccer as much as Ty and Rory. Th [ anss en I started sketching, which is something I used to do when I was younger, and picked up a guitar. At first my parents paid for the lessons but then Jules and I got to know each other and for a while most of my time went to us—even if I wasn’t with her I’d be
thinking
about her. She isn’t my first girlfriend but she’s the first one I’ve felt like that about.

When it happened it was like the opposite of discovering I didn’t miss soccer. I thought the sex I’d had with my last girlfriend, Nadine, was pretty good at the time, but Jules and the way our bodies were always in sync blew my mind. And it wasn’t just the sex that was amazing; it was every single thing you could think of. Jules and I could have a conversation about the simplest thing, like what we had for breakfast, and it felt engrossing or funny or made me happy in a way that it wouldn’t if I was talking to someone else. That’s how I got sidetracked from guitar—the feeling that Jules was the best thing to do with my time.

The feeling didn’t change, but somewhere along the way we both gradually realized that our relationship didn’t hinge on spending every second together. You miss too much if you just do one thing all the time, even if it happens to be your favorite thing. So I started playing guitar more often again, teaching myself this time.

Ty, Rory and I still hang out too. Big Red’s father is a recovering borderline psycho soccer dad who used to freak out whenever Rory screwed up and didn’t play exactly like the next Ronaldo or Messi. Ty’s parents are the kind who are happy as long as he’s happy, which is pretty close to what my parents were like for the last seven years, until this past Friday.

“You know Mr. Cirelli asked me about you when I saw him in the parking lot this morning,” Ty says.

“What did you tell him?” I don’t want people asking about me or trying to talk to me about Skylar. It’s pointless. None of that is going to bring her back.

My door swings open as Ty starts to answer. If there was a knock, I didn’t hear it, and my dad eyeballs me on the phone and points, in surprise, to my hand. “The kitchen tap’s busted,” I tell him. “The water temperature—boiling-hot water started gushing out of it.”

“You okay?” Dad asks with a concerned look.

“Yeah, yeah, it messed up my hand a little but I’m all right.” Ty’s stopped talking and is waiting for me to finish with Dad. “You should get it checked out before somebody burns their arm off.” I say it like I’m annoyed by the ordeal, the way I figure I would feel if I hadn’t done this to myself. “Is it okay if I go out with Ty for a while?” I tack on.

I don’t want my mom or Lily making a fuss about my hand. Besides, I think I need to get out. I’m almost as pathetic as Moose, wandering aimlessly from room to room.

“Sure,” Dad tells me. “Are you positive you’re okay?”

“I’m okay.” I switch my attention to Ty. “I’m coming to pick you up [o pght=, all right?”

I move into the hall, staying on the phone with him as protection against my mom and aunt wanting to examine my hand. I don’t run into either of them on my way out—maybe Lily’s not home yet—and when I hang up and climb into my car reality shifts sideways.

It’s like stepping into a cocoon. The outside world disappears. I didn’t need to burn my hand to overthrow reality, all I had to do was get into my car.

I know the feeling won’t last, that there’ll be another BAM right around the corner, but I’ll take what I can get. The Advil’s dulled the pain in my hand but not killed it. I loosen my left hand’s grip on the steering wheel and curse myself for being an idiot. A few scattered raindrops tap my windshield as I drive. One of the neighbors from down the road is out cycling with his son who’s a couple years older than Skylar. They’re pedaling fast, probably trying to get home before the sky really opens up.

Ty’s house is only about a mile away so I’m there in no time and text him from outside. If I go to the door his parents will only crowd around asking how I am in sad voices. While I’m waiting on him, I text Jules too and tell her I’m with Ty. Then I turn off the phone so no one will bother me.

A minute later Ty trudges out the front door with the same expression on his face that he had at Skylar’s funeral. It makes me wish I’d driven past his place and kept right on going.

“If you don’t quit looking at me like that I’m going home,” I tell him as he gets in.

Ty’s frown sinks deeper into his skin but he shakes his head to snap out of it. “Sorry, man. I suck at this. But hey, look, don’t go home. We’ll do something … I don’t know …” He stares out the passenger window and racks his brain. “Maybe … drive to that place with the awesome peppercorn burgers we found on the way to the Red Wings game. Remember that?” His eyes shoot over to my bandaged hand. “Can you drive like that?”

“Yeah—with my right hand,” I joke. “And a morphine drip for the pain.”

I didn’t think I was hungry but my stomach grumbles at the memory of that spicy-hot peppercorn burger, hands down the best hamburger I’ve ever tasted. Over a year ago Ty’s dad scored free Red Wings tickets through a friend and we stopped in London halfway to Detroit and discovered this place called QT-Burgoire. The bizarre decorating scheme uses only primary colors—it looks like it was inspired by Play-Doh—but I don’t think anyone cares what it looks like once they’ve tried the burgers.

“So are you up for this thing?” Ty rubs his hands enthusiastically together. “We’ve been talking about going back for so long that it’s in danger of becoming one of
those things
people bring up all the time but never bother their asses trying to make actually happen.” Ty’s right—every couple months we mention it and then don’t do anything about it.

“I hat [ mee
those things
,” I tell him and I know we’re both faking that the burgers actually matter, but that pretense is better than the look Ty was wearing when he stepped outside his front door.

“Me too.” Ty takes another look at my amateur bandaging job. “I can take the wheel if you want, man. It sounds like your hand is
crisp
.”

An hour ago I wanted my hand to hurt and now I just want it to stop. I’m happy to let Ty take the wheel. I change places with him and he drives us all the way from Strathedine to the QT-Burgoire in London two hours away. The city’s a snow trap in winter, and being the end of April the place is freshly naked, the recent thaw exposing scabby patches of grass and pieces of garbage—cigarette butts and crushed pop cans that’ll be in a Dumpster somewhere in a couple more weeks. I wolf down my QT-Burgoire burger and every last sweet potato fry that comes with it. The whole time we don’t say a word about Skylar. Ty fills me in on the highlights of the Toronto FC versus Seattle Sounders game and any school drama I’ve missed, which isn’t something we usually talk about much but I know he’s trying to carry the conversation, fill up all the spare air.

Afterwards we walk around downtown until my hand starts to ache worse and we have to find an open Shoppers Drug Mart to buy more Advil. “Why didn’t you ask the pharmacist about that Valium drip?” Ty kids once we’re back on the street.

“Morphine drip,” I correct. But a Valium drip would be better. What I need is a Valium drip permanently attached to my arm.

We both get quiet when we’re back in the car and I realize that the closer we get to Strathedine the heavier I feel. If I could get away with never going home again, I think I’d do it. Just keep driving until, for all intents and purposes, I disappear. If I was someplace else—somewhere far away—I could almost pretend to myself that Skylar was back at home in Strathedine, waiting to grow up enough to be an astronaut.

She wasn’t worried about not getting back and now she won’t. It feels like a sign—a sign that I missed.

When we reach Ty’s house maybe he can see the weight back on my shoulders because he says, “So what’s up with tomorrow? Are you …” He waits for me to jump in.

“Don’t know.” I shrug. “Maybe if I wake up on time I’ll hit class.”

Ty nods patiently. “Right.” He reaches between us and claps one hand on my shoulder for a second before throwing the door open. I watch him get out of the car, my signal to climb back behind the wheel and drive home.

It’s started to rain again and that makes the night look darker than usual, but someone’s left the porch light on for me. Between that and the light seeping through the family room curtains, the house looks normal, complete. I dig my thumb into my hand as I walk up the driveway, feeling my world collapse a little with every step. Inside my father, mother and Lily are huddled together in front of the TV the same way they’ve been off and on for days. My stomach flips over at the sight of them, and my mom, with her bottomless p [ bonormal, coupils, is the first to look in my direction and mumble hello. Moose bounds across the room and jumps up on me like I’m back from World War II.