Authors: Mandy Hubbard
“Logan!” I scream it at him, letting go of the handle to shove him hard, in an act of desperation, and he blinks, looks up at me with a look of utter confusion and shock.
He turns abruptly to look out the windshield and then he downshifts, hits the brakes. But it’s too late. We’re going too fast to regain control. The mountain’s too steep here, the rocks and holes too big. The Jeep’s tires lock up and we skid, Adam’s Samurai looming close.
Logan tries to maneuver around a big rock, but it’s impossible because he’s going this fast. The right wheel and bumper catch on the edge of the rock and the momentum twists the Jeep until we’re skidding down the trail sideways.
I scream and grab a hold of the handle, closing my eyes in paralyzing fear of what’s to come next. I just know that when we hit another big hole, we’re going to tip over, and we’re going to roll.
The engine revs, tires spin.
Then we slam into something and the Jeep stops. The engine sputters, then dies, and there’s nothing but silence. Waves of pain travel down my shoulder, like an echo of the hard hit we just took.
I’m afraid to open my eyes—if I do, I might see that I’m upside down somewhere or perched precariously at the edge
of something. So I just breathe deeply and squeeze my eyes more tightly shut.
“What the hell!” Adam’s voice rings out. I open my eyes just as my door opens and Adam’s leaning in, his face etched with concern. “Are you okay?” he asks, his voice lower.
There’s no part of me that’s not shaking. We just came within a breath of rolling down the hill, tumbling end over end. I blink, take an unsteady breath. I want to tell Adam I’m okay, but it’s all I can do just to breathe.
“What the fuck was that?” Adam asks, turning to Logan.
“I don’t know, I just lost control—”
“Because you flew down the fucking mountain!” Adam screams, and then snaps his mouth shut for a moment, his chest heaving. He lowers his voice. “If you were trying to prove something, you shouldn’t have let her ride with you.” He turns to me. “Get out of the car, Harper. You’re riding back with me.”
I want to listen but I’m still trying to get my heartbeat under control.
“I don’t think you have to—” Logan starts.
“If I hadn’t stopped right there and
let you
ram into me, you would have hit that hole sideways and flipped. She’s riding with me and that’s final.” Adam leans over me, unbuckles my belt, and all but lifts me from Logan’s seat. I just stare back at Logan as I let go of the door and it swings shut on its own weight.
I nearly fall to the muddy ground once outside, but Adam grips my waist tighter. Now that I’m standing outside the
door, I see how sideways the Jeep really is. It’s banked at such a drastic angle that if Logan tries to open his door, it probably won’t open more than halfway before hitting the dirt.
I start to digest what just happened—or at least the tail end of it—Adam intentionally stopped his rig to let us land against him. To keep us from flipping into the hole and tumbling down the mountain end over end.
By the time I get to Adam’s Samurai, Allie’s climbed into the back to make room for me. I slide into the front seat and buckle my belt with shaky hands. I stare straight out the dirty windshield, down the rest of the mountain, trying to imagine what it would have been like to roll down it like that. The Jeep has a roll cage but I don’t know if it would have been enough.
“Stay put for a second,” Adam says, outside. He’s talking to Logan. “I’m going to get the girls to the bottom, then I’ll come back and guide you out. Don’t move until I get back.”
“Got it,” Logan says, his voice resigned. I wonder if he’s looking at me through the rear window of the Samurai but I don’t turn around.
Adam slides back into his seat, but doesn’t immediately start the engine.
“You really okay?” Allie says, her voice low. “That was really scary.”
I swallow and just nod, not quite ready to speak. Adam turns back to the steering wheel and I stare in a daze, immobile as he navigates the rest of the hill. We were only halfway down. The stumps and rocks and holes could have killed us
if we’d rolled sideways like that. The Jeep would have been totaled.
At the bottom, Adam pulls to the side and parks under a maple tree. He climbs out of the Samurai, goes to the bottom of the trail, and starts climbing up on foot. A russet-colored leaf drifts silently down, lands on the hood of the car.
I sit in silence for a long moment, staring at the leaf, waiting for my heartbeat to go back to normal. It’s only then that I realize the rain stopped, that the windshield is basically dry. “What happened?” Allie asks, quietly. She touches my shoulder.
I swallow, but don’t look at her. The fear is only just ebbing. “I don’t know. We were at the top and I thought he was going to wait—” My voice cracks. “But he just gunned it. I was screaming at him and he just kept going.”
“Adam was freaking out. He saw you guys in the rearview and knew right away it was all wrong.”
I nod. Up the hill, I can just barely hear Adam shouting orders at Logan, hear his engine revving, gears grinding. Long moments pass, and the sounds quiet and a set of headlights reflect in the side mirrors. He made it to the bottom.
Adam climbs into the Samurai without a word and we head down the gravel, Logan’s headlights following.
No one suggests I get back into the car with him.
“I
don’t know what to say to him,” I say, leaning against my white wooden headboard.
“Do you
want
to talk to him about it?” Allie asks, glancing up at me from where she sits on my bed, leaned over my toes, a nail polish brush in hand.
“Well yeah,” I say, trying not to move and mess up her polish job. “He’s my boyfriend. I just don’t know what the hell was wrong with him. I’ve never even gone four-by-fouring and I knew what he was doing was wrong. If Adam hadn’t been there…”
“Yeah, it was scary to watch.” Allie reaches over to dip the brush into the bottle of nail polish on my windowsill. “This is a nice color on you,” she says under her breath, slathering a pristine layer of baby blue polish on my right big toe.
“Thanks. What would you say to him if you were me? I’ve been avoiding his calls for the last twenty-four hours, but we have school tomorrow.”
Allie moves to grab the bottle from its spot on the window ledge, then pauses as she catches sight of something outside. “I don’t know, but you’d better figure it out quick, because he just pulled in.”
I shift my weight, leaning forward on my elbows to look out the window, where Logan’s Jeep has just come to a stop. The brake lights flicker and then turn off.
“I’m done with your nails anyway. Do you want me to stay or go?” Allie asks, capping the nail polish.
“Um, I guess you can go. I’ll text you later,” I say, standing and waddling to the door so I won’t ruin the fresh polish on my right foot. “Thanks for coming over. I didn’t really feel like being alone.”
She twists the top on the nail polish, setting it down on my nightstand. “Yeah, of course.”
We go down the steps and reach the back door just as Logan’s about to knock.
Allie turns to me. “Okay, well, see you tomorrow in school then?”
When she leans in to hug me, she whispers, “Good luck” under her breath before pulling away. She opens the door and slips behind Logan without a word to him.
He doesn’t move, just stands there, looking like a lost puppy. He clears his throat. “Can I come in?”
I nod and shrug, like I can’t decide between the two.
He steps in, and I see something in his hands—leather-bound and thick. A chill sweeps down my spine as I think of the album Daemon showed me, but then I shake it away. This
one is blue, clearly newer.
He stands three feet away, just inside the door, under the fluorescent lights of the kitchen. It’s an awkward distance given the closeness between us. “I’m so sorry about what happened at Evans Creek. It would kill me if something had happened to you. If I had somehow hurt you.”
I just stand there, one hand gripping the Formica countertop. I don’t know what to say.
“I’ve been beating myself up all day about it.”
I shrug.
“It’s not okay, Harper. You could have been hurt.”
I throw my hands up in the air. “Then why didn’t you listen to me? I told you you were going too fast. I told you to slow down.”
Logan nods. “I know. Once I stared down the hill, it was like…I was somewhere else.” He swallows.
“What are you talking about, Logan? Where else could you have possibly been?”
He stares down at the linoleum floor, his eyes shuttered from view. “It was like I was in my mom’s car. Plunging down the mountain.”
It’s like a rug being yanked out from under me. A wave of sorrow and surprise swoops through me, hollows out my stomach. I knew his mother died in a car accident, I just didn’t put it together in my head. Maybe that’s why Logan
gets
all my weird fears. Because his mom’s death has given him at least one fear of his own, even if he doesn’t admit it to himself. “
Oh.
”
He closes the distance between us, setting the photo album
down on the counter and touching my chin softly with one finger so that I have to look up to see into his eyes. “I don’t know what I was doing. It was like my body went into autopilot and my head was back there, at the accident. I wasn’t thinking. At all.”
Abruptly, he pulls away, goes to the window. He leans his forehead against it and goes silent. “Look, I know you’re the one with the list of fears, but I have them too. There’s only one that haunts me.”
I wait in silence.
“It’s being alone. I lost my parents, and Daemon…well, he may as well be dead to me. You’re all I have.”
I look down at the photo album, noticing that a picture has been inserted into the cover. “Is that your mom?”
Logan turns away from the window, walks to the counter. “Yeah. At our first middle school soccer game.”
“You played soccer?” I ask. Now his stick shift makes more sense. He actually is—or was—into sports. It feels weird that I didn’t know that already. I feel like we’ve been together so long, but I met him less than two months ago.
He doesn’t speak, simply slides the album closer to me, and we move to sit at the island counter, on side-by-side wooden stools. I look down at the cover, and a woman in her thirties stares back at me, smiling with a flawless smile just like Logan’s. He and his brother stand on either side of their mom, in Kelly-green-and-white uniforms, each of them holding a soccer ball. Where Logan’s hair is long, floppy as ever, his brother’s hair looks shorter, more like a buzz cut.
“You had braces,” I say, studying his metal-filled grin.
“Yeah. We both did,” Logan replies. His voice is filled with nostalgic longing.
“He looks so much like you,” I say, and then feel stupid. Of course he does. They’re identical twins.
“Yeah. Still does.” Logan raises his eyebrows.
“
Right…
” Daemon does look like Logan. So much so that I didn’t even realize he wasn’t my boyfriend when we met.
“Look,” Logan continues. “I know I’m not an easy person to be with right now.” His eyes are earnest. They beg my forgiveness. “I’ve gone through a lot. Daemon used to be different, you know? He had his issues, but he was never this messed up.”
He looks down at the photo. “I lost them both, I just didn’t know it until much later. I don’t know if it was losing my mom, or his head injury, but he’s not the same. And it’s taken me a long time to realize it, but I have to live my own life. Separate myself from him and move on.”
“Why is he so weird?” I ask, flipping the album open. It’s Logan and Daemon as five- or six-year-olds, riding bikes side by side, smiles from ear to ear.
“My dad was tough on both of us, but he favored me. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure it out. Daemon did everything he could to impress my dad, and it was never enough.”
I flip to a page and see Logan holding a trophy.
“That was the last year we both did soccer. They split me and Daemon up onto different teams, and in the final game, we ended up playing against each other.” Logan looks up and our eyes meet. “My dad cheered for me, Harper. Only me.”
He looks back down and flips the page, and it’s a birthday party, an enormous cake sitting between Daemon and Logan. “Our sixteenth birthday was three weeks later. My dad got us the same gifts, but afterward, he gave me a watch his father had given him. He said he only had one, and that it would have to be our secret.”
“But it wasn’t…”
He shakes his head. “Daemon found it a month later in my room. That was the final straw for him. He got into a screaming match with my dad, and they almost lost it. I thought they’d throw punches for sure.”
“They didn’t make up after that?”