Heal Me (A Touched Trilogy Book 2) (15 page)

The room slowly filled and just before the first bell rang Chloe walked in with Micah right behind her. He was laughing at something she’d said. I frowned at how easily they joked around together. It wasn’t the first time I’d noticed it, but with Micah’s question about if she and Andrew were still dating hovering in the back of my mind, it was the first time my heart dropped to the pit of my stomach.

“Can I borrow a pencil?” Chloe asked and I turned to hand one to her, but she wasn’t talking to me. She was asking Micah, and without waiting for his response, she swiped his pencil with a sexy smile I could never dream of doing.

“Hey, now what am I supposed to do?” Micah asked, smiling right back at her.

They were flirting. I felt sliced open with my heart exposed.

“Good afternoon, class,” Ms. Garcia stepped up to the front of the class. “I want to start off our study of character with an exercise on description and truly understanding the characters we study and what better way to begin than with the characters around you. In this classroom, in your lives, in your family.” She held up a the cowgirl hat and gave it a shake. “I’m going to pass around my hat and inside you will find a category from which you will select two people you know and use a Venn diagram to do a compare and contrast of their character.”

Oh, how my day was just getting better and better. The only thing that kept me from groaning was that she hadn’t made us do it in partners.

As the hat passed from Chloe to Micah, they shared their papers. Micah had picked ‘Sisters’ while Chloe had ‘Teachers’.

The hat came to me and I pulled out my card. My luck in English was at an end.

The Dead.

I seriously hated Ms. Garcia’s class. I crumbled the paper in my hand and would have walked out right then if my legs had had the strength to carry me away.

“What did you get?” Micah asked. I just shook my head. I didn’t even want to say it out loud.

“Class, you have ten minutes to write as many descriptors you can of your real life characters.”

I stared at my blank sheet of paper. Dead people. I didn’t have a lot of options. The only two dead people I knew were my mom and Dylan.

Chloe and Micah, along with the rest of the class, were frantically scribbling down ideas. I stared straight ahead. Ms. Garcia caught my eye and made a gesture that implied I should get started. I picked up my pencil and drew two overlapping circles. Mom went at the top of the first and then Dylan’s name above the second.

My hand trembled as I considered what to write.

I didn’t know my mom. What I sensed of her was filled with such horrific pain that sometimes even just thinking about it made me ill.

I didn’t want to think about Dylan. I knew him. Everything about him. How do you describe a person who for four years was everything to you? I had breathed him and I was supposed to write that down in a few short minutes? Today was his birthday. He would have been eighteen. But he wasn’t. He was dead. He’d wanted to be an astronaut. He was dead. He had been everything perfect to me, just as I had been to him. And he was dead.

They both were dead and nothing else mattered.

“Thirty seconds,” Ms. Garcia announced.

I touched the tip of my pencil to the paper, and wrote three words. My pencil snapped and I stared at the scrawl it left across the page.

“All right, time is up. Now it’s time to share. Let’s start with Ms. Matlin.”

My head lifted, but she was looking to Chloe. Chloe made her way up to the front of the room and slid her paper under the document camera, projecting her Venn diagram onto the board for all to see. She had done a funny comparison between Mr. Arnold and Ms. Garcia, which had most of the class laughing. Around the class it went, most of the students using lighthearted, funny, or positive descriptors, until Micah and I were the only ones left. She called Micah and I realized she was leaving me for last because she must have figured out which paper I had pulled. Of course, she could just be having sympathy for my fear of public speaking.

“I’d rather not share,” Micah said as she waited on him to go up.

“Mr. Davidson, this is a graded assignment. You’re welcome to take a zero on it, but I would suggest a careful consideration of your refusal to present.”

Micah rose, looking faintly ill and placed his diagram under the document camera. With his hopes for scholarships, he couldn’t take a zero on anything.

It was hard to make out his writing apart from the names of the people he’d chosen. Lily and Chloe.

“Go ahead and read it for us.” Ms. Garcia squinted, trying to make out his words.

“So I had sisters and chose Lily and Chloe. Ways to describe both,” he read. “Kind, female, gifted. Not a whole lot they have in common.”

The class laughed and I cowered in my desk, Micah’s feelings of guilt and nausea burned through me. Phoebe was right. This was not going to end well.

“Chloe. Tall, brunette, funny, outgoing, lively, gregarious.”

“Oh, nice vocabulary,” Ms. Garcia broke in.

“Beautiful, friendly, and very cool,” he continued.

Chloe blushed. Chloe never blushed.

“Lily.” He shifted uncomfortably and glanced at me before quickly looking away. His words came hesitantly as if he didn’t want to speak them. “Redhead, small, quiet, organized, introvert, faithful, scared, fragile, lonely, weak, compulsive, and...easy.”

My body frozen in horror at the words he’d used to describe me. Weak. Fragile. Scared. Easy. That was his truth about me. The way he saw me. How everyone saw me? They all stared at me, including Micah. Their truth. Not Dylan’s. He’d never seen me that way. But he was dead and that was all that mattered. They were all waiting for some reaction, but I had none. The numbness that had faded with my relationship with Micah returned and consumed me.

“Wow. Thank you, Micah. That was a very...interesting character analysis,” Ms. Garcia finally said. She was looking a little sick herself. Apparently, she hadn’t considered that someone would write their honest views. She cleared her throat and looked down at her list of names. She knew I was next. I was the only one left. “Lily, you’re the last one.”

I rose and walked to the document camera at the front of the room, avoiding Micah’s eyes, shrugging away the brush of his hand on my arm as we passed each other. His touch pulled at the numbness, cracking it to let in some piercingly clear air. Air that was quickly tainted by the flood of pity coming from the rest of the class. My paper trembled as I held it and I stared at it for a long moment. Someone cough and another began tapping their pencil on their desk. The sounds of every movement they made seemed amplified, echoing through me.

“Lily, we’re almost out of time. Maybe you can share another time.” Ms. Garcia moved toward me.

The numbness took over again and I heard nothing, felt nothing. I placed the paper under the camera.

“Dead people.” My voice cracked and the bell rang. No one moved. They just sat there staring at the words I’d managed to write in the overlapping oval.

They are nothing
.

Mechanically, I went back to my desk and packed up my things. Still no one had moved.

“Please read chapter five of your anthology and be ready to discuss it tomorrow,” Ms. Garcia said and spurred the students into action.

“Lily,” Micah said, rising from his seat.

“Don’t,” I whispered, struggling to hold myself in. His fingers lightly resting on my arm. I brushed his touch off. “Don’t. I don’t want to feel you right now. I don’t want to feel anything.”

I dumped the rest of my stuff into my backpack and sprinted from the room toward to restroom.

Phoebe was right.

I stared at my face in the restroom mirror. I was paler than usual and my eyes looked completely dead. I felt dead, except if I were I’d truly feel nothing. Water rushed over my hands, and I rubbed them together for longer than necessary then put them under the air dryer. The push of air was so strong I could barely keep my hands up under the force as it ripped the water away, causing the skin covering my fingers to ripple like white waves. The sound was deafening and for those few moments, the echo of his words was drowned out.

“Are you okay?” Chloe asked. “Lily, you’re really scaring me. Why didn’t you tell me what you got? I would have switched.”

The dryer clicked off and I stared at my empty hands suspended in front of me. There should be something there.

“My backpack is gone,” I said, letting my arms fall.

Chloe held something up and it took me a moment to recognize my bag. I took it from her and the weight of it yanked my arm down, causing the bag to hit the floor. The strap nearly slipped from my grasp and it took a herculean effort to keep my fingers clenched around it.

“You dropped it outside the restroom door. Come on, I’ll drive you home.”

We walked into the hallway together, but rather than follow her out to her car, I headed for my next class.

“Lily, come on.” She grasped my arm and tried to steer me toward the door leading to the student parking lot.

“I have to go to class.” I slipped loose and headed the way I needed to go. Chemistry or calculus? I didn’t need to know, my feet led me automatically.

“No, you don’t, you need to go home and... I don’t know, cry or something.” She looked like she was going to cry.

“I don’t need to cry.” Crying would make people worry, make them uncomfortable knowing that they have absolutely no clue how to help you or what to say.

“You should probably talk to Micah. He was really upset. He thinks that you’re mad about what he wrote. You know he was just being silly. He’s like that.”

He’s like that? Micah could be biting, sarcastic, and even funny when he tried. In the months of being friends with him, weeks of being slightly more, I’d only ever seen him be silly with Hannah. How had Chloe seen that side of him?

“He is,” I said, whether in agreement or question I didn’t know.

“I mean, really, who would ever think you’re easy, Lils? You never even did it with Dylan and you guys dated for years. He was just trying to show Ms. Garcia how lame the assignment was. He definitely didn’t know she was gonna force us to read them in front of everyone.” She pulled the strap of my bag over my shoulder. “I know this is a tough day for you. And Ms. Garcia is a total bitch for not realizing you could get that one. I mean, seriously. Dead people? What the hell was she thinking? Anyways, I tried to tell Micah you were probably just upset from thinking about Dylan and Mom. But he feels really shitty about it.”

“I have to go.” History. I had history.

The afternoon passed and I could barely recall it. There was one moment in history class when Micah attempted to talk to me, but I wasn’t sure if I replied. I walked home after school and started on my homework. When Dad came in after work, he looked concerned and I knew Chloe must have called to warn him about what had happened.

“Where did you park the car, Lily?” he asked, puttering around the kitchen while I stared at my finished homework.

I tried to remember seeing it. This morning I’d driven to school. I walked home.

“It’s at school.”

He gave me a strange look and went into the living room. My eyes traced his path and then stayed on the kitchen door as he purposefully closed it behind him. I heard him talking to Chloe and Phoebe. They were talking about me. They thought I was breaking, that I was weak and fragile. It didn’t matter. I was together and as long as I held it, I would be fine.

I looked over my homework then put it in my bag and went to my room. I didn’t bother turning the lights on, I just got into bed and stared up at Dylan’s plastic glowing stars.

My eyes traced the now familiar constellations I had spent months learning in order to see in the maze of stars. Dylan would always groan and laugh when I got it wrong. Eventually I’d done it on purpose just to hear his deep chuckles. There was a star missing from one of the constellations. How long had it been gone? How long had it been since I’d looked at them with Dylan’s eyes and really seen them?

Someone, maybe Dad, knocked on my door and called to me. I took a deep breath and sank further into the cushion of my bed. Whoever it was came in, talking to me, breaking my constellation concentration with their worry clenched in my hands. I rolled the opposite direction and feigned sleep. They left and I was blessedly empty again.

Dad drove me to school the next morning. He wanted to speak to the principal. I sat beside him, followed him, nodded when he spoke to me. We went into Mr. Stone’s office and I sat. The walls were white, with framed documents scattered around. Dad spoke and I nodded. Then Ms. Garcia was there. I nodded and they spoke. Words filtered through. Insensitive. Damage. Thoughtless. Death.

I cried inside, but for them I nodded. Things would happen and I would continue.

Dad took me home and I slept. Phoebe was sitting at the end of my bed when I woke up. I rolled over and pushed into a sitting position, pulling my legs up to my chest.

“You want to say it?” I asked softly. She glanced at me, raising one brow in that frustratingly mocking way she had.

“I don’t want to. I wish I hadn’t been right.”