Volition (3 page)

I never met my father’s parents because they were overseas, so I only knew my mother’s. I couldn’t understand why my grandparents hated my father so much, but they did. My grandmother always acted like there was something wrong with him, but I was too young to understand why.

Denny wasn’t born a blue blood like my mother. He had been a poor, wild Irish farm boy who had come to the U.S. for work. He’d met Maggie at the grocery store. She’d invited him over for dinner, and that was it. They had been inseparable after that.

My grandmother couldn’t stand him because he wasn’t the man she had dreamed up for her daughter. In her mind, he’d only used my mother for a visa, but I knew that couldn’t be true. They loved each other too much.

When she’d said I took after him, I had known it was because I wasn’t prim and proper like Cece. There was turbulence in me, just like him, and like I thought there was in my mother. But Lara hadn’t seen it until Denny was in the picture.

It was raining on that awful night.

After that, I hated the rain. I hated the sound, I hated being wet, and I hated how it clouded everything. You couldn’t see through the rain because it filled the air. Rain made me feel like I was drowning. There was no room to breathe with all that water falling from the sky.

I still remembered the sound of the windshield wipers.

My mother spoke in a low voice, “Denny, should we pull over?”

“No, it’ll let up soon.” He was trying to be convincing, but his voice was laced with worry. He squeezed her hand and looked over at her.

I was sitting silently in the backseat, watching them and then looking outside at the rain. I was always a watcher. I watched everything and then pretended that I hadn’t.

I traced raindrops that had fallen on my window, watching them race each other down the glass. I would pick a drop and root for it to win over all the others, but then there were too many drops to keep track of.

Soon, it was foggy, and I couldn’t see anything. I stopped looking outside and simply looked forward at my parents.

Later, I would learn that the road had washed away.

At the time, I remembered my father slamming on the brakes and my mother looking at him like she was glad he was the last thing she would ever see in this world.

That night changed me.

I survived, unlike my parents. I hadn’t drowned even though I should have.

I resented death because death had rejected me. It hadn’t taken me with them. It hadn’t wanted me. It’d sunk its claws deep into me and turned me black inside, and this was who I became.

Now

HAYDEN ROCKEFELLER SITS beside me until we land. Our shoulders are barely touching because we’re both leaning inward, but we don’t say anything else. We don’t have to.

It’s a strange moment of companionship, and I marvel at the human condition. I don’t know him, but we’re sharing space together like we have an unspoken agreement.

The flight attendant comes by to take my empty glass, now held by Hayden.

She raises an eyebrow at me, and I shrug. I don’t have to explain myself to her. There’s a Rockefeller sitting next to me.

Actually, I don’t know if he’s one of
the
Rockefellers, but I’m going to let myself believe that for the next fifteen minutes. If that’s not a symbol for New York success, I don’t know what is.

New York success is what I need to thrive.

New York is not Charleston, and Hayden is not Jesse.

We land, and I rub my temples.

I think about dropping my business card in Hayden’s lap or telling him my phone number, but that would be too easy.

It would be cheating fate.

Instead, I pull a postcard that Catherine sent me a long time ago out of my purse and hold it in my hand, out of his sight, until the doors are open, and we’re allowed to deplane.

He looks at me expectantly.

I stand up and walk past him without meeting his gaze. If I didn’t splurge and buy first class, I wouldn’t be able to do this without climbing over him. Hell, if I didn’t buy first class, I never would have met him anyway.

I drop the postcard on his lap, and the picture of the Empire State Building lands face up. I give him a smirk, and I walk off the plane.

I practically run to baggage claim and then get a taxi, looking over my shoulder at every turn to make sure he isn’t following me.

He’s not.

Then

I WOKE UP in the hospital alone.

No one was there for me.

No one was holding my hand.

I pretended I didn’t remember what had happened that night, but I did.

I remembered too much.

I remembered my parents clinging together, even afterward.

I remembered trying to keep my head above water.

I remembered thinking it might not be so bad to just stop breathing.

I remembered that it was impossible to drown myself.

I remembered thinking that it might not be so bad to just let it sweep me away, but it hadn’t.

It’d forced me to live.

Jesse was my best friend—until he wasn’t.

He was smarter than everyone else and was allowed to come do certain subjects with my class so that he could keep learning. I relished the time we had together because I would otherwise be alone. We were drawn together like magnets, but we didn’t understand why we were so important to each other.

He was my only real friend in school because I didn’t make them easily. I wasn’t like other people, even more so after the accident. I had stared death squarely in the face, and not many other people our age could say that.

Jesse could.

I didn’t know the details, but I knew his parents had died when he was younger. He lived not too far from me with his aunt and uncle. They were old and couldn’t work, and I knew from his tattered too-small clothes that he was in trouble.

I didn’t want to leave him and go to a new school. He was all I had.

The week after the accident, I finally went back to school until Lara could secure my place at the secondary boarding academy she had picked out for me so that I could become someone else’s problem.

At recess, Elizabeth Martinson started whispering about me. I hated her because she would pull my hair and tell me I was ugly. She’d been torturing me in various ways since we were five. She was always mean to Jesse, too, since he was so smart. She would even throw rocks at his head. I was sick of his ears being bloody because of her. I was afraid that she’d hit him in the eye, or do worse one day.

Now, she was telling everyone that I was crazy. It didn’t matter so much, but I was a loose cannon. I was different than before the accident. My dark side that Lara hated was amplified. Bit by bit, she was taking Jesse away from me as he retreated further into himself from her taunts. So I decided I was going to take something away from her.

For show-and-tell that day, she’d brought her pet rabbit. It was white and fluffy, and as she showed it to the class, I wrinkled my nose because it stank of perfume.

“I have to go to the restroom,” I told my teacher.

“Okay, Tate. I’m calling recess soon, so we’ll meet you back in the classroom.”

Jesse watched me go, and I knew he would ask a different teacher if he could go, too, so he wouldn’t raise suspicion. I didn’t look back though because I didn’t want him involved in what I was going to do.

Instead, he took full blame for what happened.

When Elizabeth’s shrill cries alerted the teacher to her missing rabbit, he raised his hand and said he did it even though there were blood spots on my dress that said otherwise. If anyone had taken the time to examine my scraped-up knees and hands, they would have known that I had fallen while running out to the side field to set it free.

Jesse was the one who wasn’t allowed to have recess for the rest of the year.

Jesse was the one who was forced to go to counseling instead of learning with our class.

I didn’t get to see him before I got transferred to my new school.

My time with Jesse was over all because of some water, some death, and some blood.

Now

CATHERINE TOLD ME it would be no big deal to fly into Newark in New Jersey instead of into LaGuardia because my flight was purchased so last minute. What she didn’t warn me about was that the taxi line would be two hours long.

At this point, I’m having some sort of exhaustion-induced coma from the stress of the flight and the fact that I haven’t slept since who knows when. I stand there in the New Jersey humidity, hanging on to my bag for dear life, while I watch the taxi stand counter add more time by the second. I am never going to get to Manhattan.

I’m contemplating walking there when a man dressed all in black with black sunglasses approaches me.

“Hey, kid. Where you headed?”

He has the thickest Staten Island accent I’ve ever heard in my life apart from a show like MTV’s
True Life: I Live on Staten Island
or perhaps on
Cake Boss
when they get angry and mess up a cake, which is pretty much every episode.

I tell him Catherine’s address on Fifth Avenue.

Okay, great job, Tate. Way to just tell him the exact address where he can kill you. He might as well.

“Where the hell is that, kid?”

“Manhattan.” I don’t know what he wants from me at this point or why he’s calling me a kid when I’m far from it.

He mulls it around for a moment.

“All right, I’ll tell you what. Sixty bucks, and you got a deal.”

I don’t care if he asks me for my firstborn child at this point because I’m not having one. I just want to get to my best friend because the anxiety is starting to kick in, and I’m pretty sure I don’t want the New Jersey airport as my final resting place.

“Okay.”

I’m horrified at my complacency as I watch this random man place my Calvin Klein suitcase into the back of his huge black sedan. People die in these. People get kidnapped. The tinting on the windows is so dark that I can’t see inside, even in bright sunlight.

So, here I am—standing on the curb, looking between this car and the taxi stand, and reevaluating my life choices. The man walks away, and I don’t notice because the severity of what I’ve done kicks in.