Stone Cold (22 page)

“Get with the times mom. You can’t stop it. Just go with it.”

Hannah read the text as she walked into the house.

The message stopped her dead in her tracks for a moment before she ran upstairs to her room.

She went straight to her desk and turned on her computer. While waiting for it to boot up, she read the text message again out loud.

“Hey Hannah, this is Conall. Sorry I got to the ferry landing late today but thanks for leaving me the note. I sent you an email. Can’t wait to hear back from you.
”

Hannah couldn’t believer her luck. She wasn’t sure at the time
, but leaving the note with her contact information had been a good idea after all.

The computer couldn’t boot up
fast enough. She went straight to her email and there it was staring back at her - a message from Conall.

She opened it immediately and started reading.

“Dear Hannah,

I’m so happy that we’re finally able to talk to each other and exchange last names, addresses, and phone numbers.

I was beginning to think we were never going to make this happen.

I really want to meet you in person as soon as possible. It isn’t necessary to wait another whole year so I can come to you if that’s easier.

My last name is
Johnson by the way. I’m not on facebook but we can do texts and emails for now.

Hope to hear back from you soon.

Conall”

Hannah was over the moon.

“Oh wow
! I can’t believe it! We’re finally going to meet! This is the best thing that has happened to me since the day I met him.”

She danced around her room for a few minutes, then with her composure regained, sat down to write a response.

“Dear Conall,

I can’t believe we’re finally going to meet. I wasn’t sure you’d get the note I left for you today but now I’m so glad I left it. At first I was afraid to because you weren’t there and I was thinking that guy Jack from last year was going to show up again and take it but he wasn’t there thankfully.

I would love to meet you as soon as possible but instead of you coming to me we can meet in a more central location
. Until we meet in person I won’t be able to give you my street address or my last name – it’s a thing I promised my mom a long time ago.

Anyway, I’m going to be in
Philadelphia for a field trip to the Smithsonian Institute next Friday and we can meet then.

We can talk on the phone between now and then too if you’d like.

Let me know what you think.

Hannah”

As soon as she hit the send button she called Gina.

“You’re never going to believe what just happened!”

Gina interrupted her. “Did you and Conall meet today? What happened?”

“What? No, we didn’t get to meet but I left him a note with my email address and phone number taped to a bench and he came late and found the note and he texted me and sent me an email!” She barely took a breath she was talking so fast.

“His last name is Johnson and he wants to meet as soon as possible. I told him I’d be in
Philadelphia next week and now I’m waiting for him to email me back.”

Hannah waited for Gina to respond.

“I really want to be happy for you Hannah but what about Josh? And how do you know this is really Conall texting and emailing you? Did you actually see him take the letter? What if some stranger took it instead and is playing games with you?”

Gina had a point. Hannah had been so excited about getting the text and email that she’d never stopped to consider it could be some
one who was pretending to be Conall. She’d put his name on the envelope and in the note along with her first name and contact information. Her stomach started churning and a wave of nausea followed.

“Gina, what if it’s that guy who was there last year? What if it’s Jack? How could I have been so stupid?”

“You’re not stupid Hannah, you’re in love.”

“I thought I’d been careful. I
looked around several times and there was no one there that looked like Jack. I remember exactly what he looks like and he wasn’t there. No one was even paying any attention to me and what I was doing. They were all waiting for the ferries.”

“
It’s a really big place though Hannah. He could’ve been there and you didn’t see him. Did you put your home address in the note?”

“No, and I haven’t given him my last name yet either.”

“But he has your phone number.”

“
Yes and my email and I told him I was going to be in Philly at the Smithsonian for a field trip next Friday, ugh!”

Just then, Hannah received another text message
.

“Omg Gina, he just texted me again. What should I do?”

“Okay, don’t panic just yet. Read it and call me back.”

Hannah hung up the phone and retrieved the text.

“I’m out of the country until then so I won’t be able to call or text you but I can meet you at the Smithsonian in Philly next Friday for sure. It’s a date. Can’t wait to see you Hannah.”

The elated feeling she’d felt fifteen minutes ago had vanished. Her intuition had kicked in and everything he was saying to her felt wrong.

She called Gina again.

“He said he’
s going to be out of the country until next Friday but he’ll meet me that day at the Smithsonian.”

Gina thought for a moment and said, “Message him back and tell him you forgot the fieldtrip was changed to the following Friday. Then you can get a new phone number and email address and he can’t bother you anymore.”

“That’s a great idea Gina. It should work. Okay I’m going to do it right now.”

“Let me know what happens. I’ll talk to you later.”

When Hannah hung up the phone, she was ready to send the text to whoever this person was just like she and Gina had discussed but somewhere along the line she changed her mind.

“What if this really is Conall? How can I risk it after all this time and effort?”

After going back and forth for the longest time, Hannah decided to answer his text with a confirmation text of her own.

“Hey Conall,
next Friday. It’s a date.”

She hit the send button and now all she had to do was wait. If worse came to worse and it was Jack or someone els
e, she’d be safe with the number of people that would be around that day including her friends.

“He wouldn’t be able to do anything to me in front of all of those people and if it turns out to be Conall then it was all worth it.”

She decided to do one more thing to try and confirm whether it was or wasn’t Conall. She’d send him another email with a comment about something that only she and he would know about from when they first met. If his response was correct, she’d know it was really him. No one else including Jack, would be able to give the correct answer.

She wasted no time in composing the email.

“Dear Conall,

Can you remember to bring the umbrella I left with you the day we met? It belongs to my mother and she’d like to have it back if at all possible.

Let me know before you come so I can tell her one way or the other.

Thanks and see you Friday.

Hannah

Satisfied that the response to this would tell her if the person she was corresponding with
was Conall, she sent the email. She was certain he’d remember that she’d never given him an umbrella.

*****

A week went by and Hannah hadn’t received a response back to the email she sent about the umbrella. She tried to remain positive as she justified the most likely reason.

“He said he was going to be ou
t of the country and wouldn’t be able to call or text and I’m sure that included emails as well.”

Still her heart was telling her what her intuition had told her a week ago
. Either way, this was the day when she was going to find out the truth.

The buses left her school for the Smithsonian around 8
:00 A.M. Hannah, Gina, and a group of their friends were looking forward to a day outside of the classroom.

They’d arrived around 9:00 A.M.
and it would be several hours before she was to meet Conall. He would text her when he got there and everything would progress from there.

Sure enough, around 3:00 P.M.,
Hannah received a text. It was him asking her to meet him outside at the front of the building near the sidewalk. He said he didn’t have an admission ticket and they wouldn’t let him in without one.

She agreed and told Gina she was going to the restroom.

“Okay I’ll wait for you here. Don’t be too long because the group is about ready to move on to the next exhibit.”

“I won’t be long, trust me.”

Gina watched Hannah walk toward the restroom and instead of going in, she saw her take off toward the stairs that led down to the main level.

She whispered to herself, “Where are you going Hannah? What are you up to?”

With her suspicion raised, Gina grabbed two of the girls from the group and asked the others to wait for them to come back as she followed Hannah down the stairs with the girls in tow.

She was right behind Hannah as she went out the front door and proceeded to walk toward the sidewalk.

Without warning, a man wearing a black trench coat approached Hannah from the side and put his arm squarely around her shoulders.

Hannah tried to resist but the man kept his grip on her and forced her to move toward the street.

Panic started to rise in Gina.

“Think Gina think!” she prodded herself.

She could see a large man waiting next to a car parked directly in front of Hannah. He’d opened the rear passenger door and stood there looking at Hannah and who she thought must be Jack. The driver also looked like a large man and Gina guessed these must be the body guards Hannah had talked about.

“Jack!” she yelled.

Instinctively, he turned around to look and Hannah turned with him.

Gina went into action. With choreographed precision, she stamped down hard on the arch of his foot with her boot and raised her knee with equal force to find his crotch.

She wasn’t done.

When he bent over in agony to nurse his
manhood, she punched him with a hard jab to the side of his ribs and finished him off with a two fisted karate chop to the back of his neck and a knee to his nose.

It had all happened so fast. The two body guards were both standing next to the car, in utter disbelief, unable to move.

Not to be useless, the two friends Gina had enlisted to accompany her sprayed perfume in Jack’s eyes when he was bent over holding his crotch.

The knee to the groin had made him
release his grip on Hannah and she moved to the other side of Gina, ready to either run or defend her friend.

All four girls gathered t
hemselves and ran back inside the Smithsonian before anything more could happen.

Not until they were safely behind the doors did they look back to admire their handiwork. The two body guards had scraped Jack off of the sidewalk, carried him to the car, and drove off before anyone had noticed.

It took a few minutes before everyone had caught their breath enough to be able to speak.

“Before you say anything Gina, I just want to say that I’m so sorry. I tried to send him the text you told me to but my hope that it could be Conall won out.”

Gina was still unable to speak.

“I thought that even if it wasn’t Conall I would be safe because there would be so many people around. It wa
s a really really dumb idea.”

Gina made a smirk at Hannah.

“So, I take it that was the infamous Jack?”

Hannah nodded. 

“Good thing I’ve been taking self defense classes. Did you see the look on his face when I crushed his balls?”

After a good laugh at Gina’s comment, t
he four girls stood there reminiscing about their victory, thankful the outcome had been in their favor.

By this time, their entire group of friends had started to gather after witnessing Gina’s heroic effort.

“You were awesome Gina! Yeah, remind me never to get on your bad side!” The comments kept coming and they couldn’t stop laughing at how such a small girl had defeated a grown man, with body guards no less.

Hannah was still shaken from the ordeal.

“I just want to finish looking at the exhibits and go home.”

She couldn’t help feeling crushed once more knowing she was going to have to wait n
early a year to try and meet Conall again.

For months after the field trip
and for most of the next school year, after word got out about how she’d rescued Hannah from being kidnapped, Gina became known as the ‘karate kid’.

She was a good sport about it and
never let it be known that Hannah had had a connection to the alleged kidnapper, not even to her mother. Things started to die down around the end of March and into the beginning of April.

It was 2001 and she’d had anothe
r birthday, her seventeenth. It was her junior year and she’d started playing on the travelling volleyball team in January as planned. She was still dating Josh even though he was in his first year of college. They saw each other on weekends and he was still crazy in love with her.

She wished she could say the same about her feelings towards him but
nothing had changed in that area of her life as far as Hannah was concerned.

Another year had gone by and she was supposed to meet Conall in a week at the ferry landing
but her spirits were down.

She already knew it wasn’t going to happen. Her volleyball team was going to be on the road. It was a weekend long tournament about three hours north of
her hometown of Wilmington, Delaware and she wasn’t going to be able to make it back in time to make the trip with her mom this time.

It made her sad that this would be the first time
since she was born that she’d miss her visit with Aunt Grace.

She thought about asking Gina to go in her place
and meet Conall for her but she was going to be on vacation in Cancun with her family.

She also thought about simply
not going to the tournament but as the star of the team, they were counting on her to be there.

It was a no win situation and short of a natural disaster
or the tournament getting cancelled, Hannah was going to have to wait until the following year to meet the guy she believed to be her one and only.

Chapter 18

The doctor’s words echoed around in Conall’s head for weeks.

“You’ll never be able to play football or wrestle again without risk of paralysis.”

If he’d only left for school earlier that day, he’d have been on time and wouldn’t have been behind the truck carrying the logs. He’d still be playing football and wrestling, and he’d still have his scholarships to play in college.

Conall had kicked himself repeatedly ever since he’d regained consciousness in the hospital and learned his fate. Everyone said he was lucky to be alive and he should be thankful.

It wasn’t that. Of course he was thankful to be alive, but how could he not be disappointed.

He had finally reached his senior year of high school and had been looking forward to it. He wanted to be able to do all of the things most teenagers get to do like pep rallies, dances, and prom but the chances of that happening weren’t good.

Until he woke up from his coma, the doctors had no way of knowing if Conall’s brain had sustained any damage. It didn’t take long for them to realize his speech, short term memory, and motor skills had been affected
. He’d suffered what the doctor’s called a Traumatic Brain Injury, or TBI for short.

For the rest of his life, he would have to avoid anything that could re
-injure his brain because the long term effects could be very serious. They’d try to help him regain as much of what he’d lost as was possible.

His injuries caused him to have to be in speech and physical therapy sessions for at least six months which began alm
ost immediately. He had to learn how to talk and walk all over again. The sessions were grueling and painful at times but Conall’s athletic training helped with the discipline he needed to persevere.

His hard
work paid off. In a month’s time, he’d improved so much that he was able to be discharged from the hospital to complete his recovery at home.

With continued progress, his therapists were o
ptimistic that he’d be able to lead a normal life and would complete his senior year on time.

The most important
thing that had kept him going and working hard was the hope that he was going to see Hannah in the spring. At the same time, his biggest fear was that she wouldn’t want him anymore because of the changes he’d undergone due to his TBI.

Physically, Conall was in perfect shape. His motor skills had bounced back and no one could tell from watching him that
a few months ago, he’d had to learn to walk again.

The doctors
had encouraged him to continue to stay in good condition by lifting weights and running which he was more than happy to do.

By September,
Conall’s speech was nearly back to normal and he’d progressed enough to return to school. Even so, his memory for certain things was still a problem and might never be the same. Some words were hard for him to retrieve at times which made it necessary for others to help him finish his thoughts.

A month later,
the football season was well underway. Although he was still on the team, it was so hard to sit and watch from the bench. To cheer him up, Max and Carter helped Conall celebrate his 18
th
birthday. They’d visited him every day in the hospital and they were always together playing or watching sports or hanging out at each other’s houses. His brain injury didn’t seem to bother them at all so maybe he was worrying about nothing over what Hannah might think.

They no longer had girlfriends
so the three of them were single and weren’t in any hurry to get involved with anyone at this time in their lives. Dating yes, girlfriends no.

“Breakups are messy. Let’s make a pact to stay single
and enjoy the rest of our senior year without any drama,” suggested Carter.

“I’m in,” Max replied.

“Me too.” Conall agreed for the moment, but he knew as soon as he met Hannah all pacts were off.

There was no way he was going to let her slip away for some other guy to have.
Of that, he was certain.

*****

Months passed and the seasons changed. Conall had completed therapy and was looking forward to graduation. He was still going to go to college but it wouldn’t be to Ohio State or Clarion. He wanted to stay within a few hours of NYC so he chose a university in south eastern PA and planned to major in Finance. It would be more difficult for him now because of his memory issues but he was determined to get a degree as if nothing had happened.

Before he knew it,
April 16, 2001 was just around the corner. Eden and he would be making the journey to NYC again and he couldn’t wait.

She’d be done her sophomore year of college by then and he was looking forward to seeing her.
It seemed the older she got, the less she came home and he figured by the next school year she probably wouldn’t come home at all.

There was a good
reason for her ever increasing absence though. For the past year, Eden had been dating a guy she’d met at college. She’d confided in Conall a few months ago but begged him to keep this fact a secret from their parent’s. His name was David Hargrove and he was majoring in fine arts.

That in
and of itself would’ve been enough for Evelyn and Darin to discourage her from dating him.

Conall
distinctly remembered what his dad had said when Eden had wanted to major in the same thing.

“What kind of a major is fine arts? What kind of a ‘real job’ are you going to find with a degree in fine arts? That’s something independently wealthy people do on weekends. It certainly won’t pay the bills!”

Aside from the degree issue, the real nail in Eden’s coffin would be that their parents would never approve of any of their children living with a boyfriend or girlfriend before marriage.

Knowing this information about
Eden had certainly worked to his advantage. Injury or not, sibling rivalry was still alive and well in the Stone household.

When he initially asked her to take him to NYC again she’d told him no. She claimed she had some sort of a job tha
t wouldn’t allow her to take time off.

Conall had been about to give up on her taking him there when she let it slip that David was
going to be helping her move into his place on that day and they needed the car.

She’d tried to cover it up by saying she
meant she was moving in with some girl friends but he could always tell when she was lying.

He’d promised not to say anything to their parents about David if she would do this favor for him and
repeat the trip that they’d made two years before.