Damaged (2 page)

I eat outside behind the gym, even though it's humid and pushing ninety already, even though the mosquitoes have come early and the news has been warning that the Midwest is on track to have the hottest summer on record this year. “Global warming!” my mother always wails when it's hot. That's when almost anyone else around here would mutter “Damn hippie” under their breath. This is the part of the country where science is called liberal propaganda.

But I'll take the company of the mosquitoes over the cafeteria any day. At least I can breathe. At least I don't have a couple hundred people looking at me and whispering, waiting for me to cry.

I'm the only one out here except for the burnouts under the bleachers. I can see their heads bobbing through the slats, the cloud of smoke hovering in the heavy, wet air. If I was someone else, I might want to join them. I might want to deal with Camille's death by getting lost in that cloud of smoke, by simply trading in this world for another.

But that is not my way. I am not weak like them. I will stay in this world and I will follow my plan no matter what. I am stronger than sadness and loss and tragedy. You have to be if you want to succeed. At the end of the day, that's what matters: Strength. Endurance. Perseverance. Moving on in spite of everything.

* * *

One more day, done. Just five more school days until the end of high school forever.

The bus is loud on the ride home. Everyone is giddy with their upcoming escape. I stare out the window and try to tune them out as I watch the world go by. We drive through town before heading onto the rural roads. A few tourists wander the sidewalk like zombies, looking for things to buy. People vacation here for the lake and the dunes, but they always end up in town at least once. When they realize there's nothing for them but a grocery store, a couple of crappy antiques shops, and a working-class town trying to survive, they head back to their vacation homes. I think they're shocked that real people actually live here, that we're not all on vacation like them, that most of us can't even afford most of the stuff they do here. Except for maybe Hunter Collins's family and their ­Midwestern empire of crappy chain diners called ­Kountry Kitchens.

And now, as if the thought conjured him out of thin air, there he is: Hunter. Camille's boyfriend. On the sidewalk. Riding his skateboard with a paper bag in his hand. It's the first time I've seen him since the accident. I'd heard rumors that he'd gone off the deep end, stopped going to school, started drinking a lot. The bag in his hand is crumpled around the shape of a bottle.

He has the blue eyes, tan skin, and chiseled cheekbones of an all-American boy, the star quarterback, the home­coming king. There's a sense that he could have been any of these things if it weren't for the slouch in his posture; the permanent scowl; the greasy, chin-length hair hanging in front of his eyes, so greasy I can't tell if it's brown or wet blond; the cloud in his eyes, the mix of sadness and anger. It's like he's a good design that somehow got mangled; somewhere on the assembly line, a piece of him went missing.

Camille always accused me of secretly looking down on her for being popular, for being homecoming queen, for loving horses, for genuinely liking her family and her life. But the truth is I was in awe that anyone could be that happy; her capacity for joy was superhuman. There's no wondering what Hunter saw in her. Everyone loved Camille. She was beautiful, yes, but that's too obvious. She was one of those rare popular girls who was also incredibly kind. Not
nice
—that's different than kind; that's just acting. Camille was a genuinely good person, and genuinely cared about pretty much everyone and everything she met. She cared about me. For some mysterious reason, she loved me best out of everyone who loved her.

I look at Hunter now and everything about him is the opposite of that girl I remember, the darkness to her light. What did she see in him? Was he something for her to fix? To shine and make pretty? Something to make her feel serious, to give her depth? Or was her desire something as shallow as the good girl wanting to take a spin with the bad boy, senior year, a few months before college, slumming it before growing up?

But she said she loved him. She didn't tell me much, but she said that. She only ever said that. And maybe that's the reason she didn't tell me anything else, because when she looked me in the eye and said, “Kinsey, I think I'm in love with Hunter Collins,” with the most serious, earnest look I'd ever seen in our fourteen years of friendship, I laughed in her face. Because the first thing I said was, “You can't be serious. Not that loser.”

Looking at him now, at this brooding, half-drunk boy across the street, I still have no idea what she could have loved. Something inside me squeezes tight, pushes the air out of my lungs. My heart caves in, stops beating, at the realization that there are things I didn't know about Camille, huge expanses of her insides that she never showed me, a secret life where she was capable of loving this feral creature on the sidewalk, where her love of him meant she must have loved me less. And I hate him for it.

I close my eyes to make him go away. I count to ten. This is the closest I've ever gotten to remembering Camille since she died.
Really
remembering her. She is suddenly more than a name, more than a timeline and empty facts. I have gone beneath the surface, something I promised myself I wouldn't do. I let this feeling get too far; I didn't stop it soon enough. It takes all my concentration to push it away, to clean my mind, to empty myself of these useless feelings.

But when I open my eyes, Hunter seems suddenly closer.

His eyes meet mine like magnets.

I am colder than I've ever been.

I can't look away.

The world falls away and there is only us.

He is standing on the sidewalk with his skateboard in his hand, with the same look on his face I must have on mine, one of surprised terror. The cloud in his eyes is gone. It has been replaced by something even sharper than fear.

Something has shifted, started, some kind of ticking, a timer; where there once was stillness there is now vibration, tiny unravelings. I have become a time bomb. Something inevitable is going to happen. The bus starts moving and our heads turn, synchronized, our eyes holding on to each other. He starts walking, then running as the bus picks up speed, but he can't keep up. He jumps on his skateboard but it is too late. The bus turns the corner and he is gone, as easy as I conjured him.

When he is out of sight, I can breathe again. My body goes back to normal. I have no idea what that feeling was, but it's over now. Hunter is gone, out of my life. There will be no more surprise rushes of feeling, no more losing control.

I look up to find a sea of beady eyes staring at me. He was not my apparition. They all saw him too. They saw me see him. They saw him running after the bus. There will be talk, people will speculate about what this means, but I don't care. These people, this world, will be out of my life soon. They can go on thinking whatever they like while I move on and leave them behind.

Everyone for miles around knows the story of the accident. Most probably assume we're some kind of unit now—Kinsey Cole and Hunter Collins, the best friend and the boyfriend. The survivors. But the truth is, that night was the first and only time I ever met Hunter Collins. Being present at the same death did not turn us into friends, did not automatically create a connection where there was none to begin with. It was simply an unfortunate coincidence that we crossed paths at that particular moment. Then our paths went in different directions. End of story. Until now, I suppose. But that was a fluke, never to be repeated.

It shocks people to discover that Hunter and I are not in touch, that we haven't latched onto each other for comfort, that we haven't established some sort of support group where we relive the accident over and over and cry in each other's arms about how much we miss Camille. Until now, I haven't seen him since that night and I don't plan to. Why would either of us make the effort to connect when all it would do is remind us about the one tragic thing we have in common? The logical thing for both of us is to move on and try to forget.

But I can't help remembering the night they met. I can't help thinking I could have done something to stop it. It started out a party like every other party Camille dragged me to so I could be more “social.” She had dressed me up in some of her clothes, none of which looked right. She had been complaining about how sick she was of the boys at our school, how she had known them all since kindergarten, how boring they all were, how shallow. I was trying to be useful, telling her to wait for college. But she was never good at waiting.

I remember the moment she saw Hunter across the room. I saw the look in her eyes that said she had just made up her mind about something. I looked where she was looking, saw the long-haired, heavy-lidded guy with the beer in his hand leaning against the wall, looking both cooler and more dangerous than any of the guys at school. We both knew who he was. Word gets around when someone new and mysterious shows up. I knew as much about him as she did: recent relocation from Chicago, senior at the high school the next town over, rich, rumors of drug selling, a possible criminal record, a drinking problem, maybe even a violent streak.

All I did was say, “Camille, no.” But she started walking in his direction. I did not follow, did not grab her arm, did not make up some excuse for why we had to leave. As soon as I saw her plastic cup greet his in its muted cheers, I turned around, left the party, and walked the three miles home.

But I don't want to think about that. I don't want to think about Hunter. I don't want to think about Camille, but no matter how hard I resist, she keeps trying to come back, even after I took all the pictures of her down from my wall, even after I put away all the things she ever gave me or let me borrow, even after I stopped doing all the things we used to do together, even after I stopped returning her mom's phone calls. It should be easier to forget. It should be easier to wipe my mind clean. I've been able to handle it until now, until Hunter showed up and made his messy appearance in my tidy life. I've always been able to fight off the memories before they solidified, but now it feels like a barrier's been broken, a wall has come crumbling down, and I am suddenly exposed, vulnerable. How could seeing someone I barely know for a few seconds do this? Maybe I'm tired. Or maybe the memories are getting stronger than me.

The bus drives out of town and into the cornfields. I try to forget how much Camille changed in the three short months they were dating, how she waited so long to introduce us, how suddenly she had secrets. I try to forget how little Hunter tried to win me over the night we finally officially met, how he didn't seem to care what I thought of him at all. Everyone talked about how he wasn't at the funeral, just like they talked about how I didn't cry. I shove all of this out of my mind as the bus pulls up in front of Grandma's house and I get off. As I walk the quarter mile to my house, I ready myself for another game of avoidance.

There's a rental car parked in front of the
PEACE DOVE ­POTTERY
sign (I can tell it's a rental because no one actually drives white midsize sedans by choice). Mom has customers. I practice a smile in preparation.

The bells on the door jingle as I open it and for a moment I feel like a visitor in my own house. I have to act different when there are customers around—friendly—and, quite frankly, I don't have the energy right now. I want to run through the showroom to the kitchen, shove my face full of cereal, and peacefully study for my last round of tests before it's time to leave for work.

As I enter, I am attacked by something fast, white, furry, and yapping. I feel a sting in my ankle as the creature latches onto my pant leg, so I do the only thing any sane person would do in this situation—I kick. The thing goes flying across the room and lands at the feet of a severely obese woman standing next to an equally obese man.

“Kinsey!” my mom yells.

“Snowflake!” the fat woman cries.

I pull up my pant leg to see two small beads of blood, like the bite of a baby vampire.

The woman lifts the dog off the floor and starts babbling at it in a baby voice. Mom glares at me, like it's my fault I was attacked.

“Sorry,” I say. “Is it okay?”

“Snowflake is not an
it
,” the woman says. “Snowflake is a
she
. Aren't you, baby?” She nuzzles her chubby face into the evil puffball's neck.

“Sorry,” I say again.

Mom smiles her winning smile and pats the woman's shoulder. Only I know how much she really hates these ­people. “It's all right,” she coos. “I think everyone just got a little startled. Isn't that right, Snowflake?” Snowflake doesn't answer. “Kinsey, why don't you go in the back and do your homework, okay? I'll start wrapping these up. The berry bowl and the two mugs, right?”

The woman narrows her eyes like she's being tricked. “Yes,” the man finally says, pulling out his wallet, no doubt wanting to get this over with as quickly as possible.

The door to the kitchen is behind the counter where they're all standing, so I have to maneuver awkwardly around them. Mom taps away at her calculator, even though she knows this equation by heart. These are her two best sellers: fifty dollars for a bowl with holes in the bottom; twenty dollars each for coffee mugs with her cheesy dove logo on the side. ­Hippies love it because it's the sign of peace. Conservatives love it because it supposedly has something to do with Jesus. Mom loves it because it's an easy twenty dollars for something that takes her no time to make.

I grab a bowl of cereal and pour some soy milk on top, then plop down on the couch in the big open space that is our combination kitchen/dining room/living room. Mom declared our household vegan two years ago, very much against my will. “But I'm an athlete!” I protested. “I'm a growing teenager. I need protein.” Beans and tofu have protein, she said. Tempeh. Seitan. So I supplement my diet of whole grains and organic vegetables with milk shakes and chili cheese dogs at work. Sometimes I eat up to four hot dogs a night. It's disgusting.