If You Wrong Us (8 page)

Becca puts her hand on my thigh, trying to calm me down. There’s a soft thumping sound in the distance. And soon, a lighter pattering noise. It closes in on us and I hold my breath. Until I hear a whiny meow.

Jesus Christ.
Just a fucking cat out by the garbage.

Becca pops back up. “It was only a cat. Come on, let’s finish this.”

I pull out the wrench, and once her light is shining on the battery connector, I try again. It doesn’t work, my hand is shaking too bad and I’m fumbling all over the damn place.

“Here.” Becca holds out her hand. “Let me.”

“Just give me a minute,” I say, feeling like a tool. I can’t let her take on everything all the time. I’m starting to lose what little sense of male pride I have left.

“Let me handle it,” she says. Just like she did the first time I met her.

10

B
ECCA

W
e waited in the special room for five hours, with Nurse Julie checking in every now and then. Dad continued to watch TV and Mom stood at the window drinking coffee. She had the pot gone in the first sixty minutes. I made her another pot and then drank juice boxes and played solitaire on my phone.

My head raced and I went over every possible scenario of what could’ve gone wrong. Or was it just an accident? Possible; not likely. I thought about phoning him, but decided against it. It was too risky.

Mom and Dad released frequent sighs and odd moans, but otherwise, it was silent. We were scared to talk, to move. It was becoming unbearable, trapped in this small room with my parents.

Just when we thought we couldn’t last another minute, Julie came in with the news that Brit was out of surgery. She lead us to her room; my family practically tiptoeing the entire way. We moved slow, cautious, none of us really wanting to see what was going to happen next.

In a small, white, and far-too-bright room, my sister was on the hospital bed propped on a pillow, tubes taking over the upper half of her body. It was difficult to comprehend. Brit’s head was bandaged, and from the looks of it, most of her hair had been shaved off. Her head was tiny wrapped up that way, like the end of a Q-tip.

We moved around her bed and just stared. Tears fell from my parent’s eyes, dotting Brit’s sheet in wet, misshapen spots. My sister—my vibrant, loud, crazy sister—was so quiet. So still. The scents of antiseptic and death filled the air, and I just wanted to leave.

The surgeon told us the surgery went as well as could be expected, but there were no guarantees. Her injuries were severe and we wouldn’t know how badly her brain was damaged until the swelling went down and she woke up. If she woke up.

That’s when I started saying my goodbyes.

I had to say them each day over the next month.

Despite what my parents wanted to believe, Brit was gone. She wasn’t coming back to us. And all I could think was someone had to take the blame.

Travis Kent.

Gamer geek Travis Kent.

Brutally intense Travis Kent.

Possessive and dangerous Travis Kent.

My secret boyfriend Travis Kent.

Sister-hater Travis Kent.

I met Travis at the end-of-year Skip Day. I never went to these things, but Brit needed a ride home and I’d already taken all my finals so my schedule was pretty open. Plus, my summer tutoring gig was a few weeks out and frankly, I had nothing better to do.

That year, Skip Day was at a park. People were playing Frisbee, lying out in the sun, dancing, and getting high. Typical. Brit had decided to do the latter. Usually she stuck to alcohol, so I’m not sure why she had the sudden urge. I also didn’t really care.

The smell of pot gave me headaches and stoned people made me irritable, so I declined to go along with it. Trouble was, not a soul from my ASP group was in attendance—nobody I even knew casually. I was on my own.

I grabbed a book from my summer reading list, aka
ten books every college freshman should read
. I’d have mine read before junior year even started. I found a comfortable spot under a tree, opened Wallace’s
Consider the Lobster
, and began to read the collections of essays that would supposedly help me become a more accomplished critical thinker.

I hadn’t finished the first page before Travis showed up. He was always quick to make a move. Though I had no idea why he’d chosen me that day.

Travis Kent was hard to explain. He was a geek, a gamer, and a bad boy all rolled in one. He had a few friends, but mostly kept to himself. I knew his name because we’d had a class together the year before. I’d watched him even then. Most girls did. While he was still considered a bottom-feeder, he made good eye candy. He always looked nice. He wore the standard dark jeans and T-shirts—except his were pressed, with no holes and rips. Built of lean muscle, he seemed taller than he was. He had what Dad would call a
presence
. He wore his hair long and secured it in a low tail, showing off his deep blue eyes. Yet, with all of that, he still couldn’t climb the social ladder. He was like one of those creatures in the wild that keep the animals at bay with a built-in defense mechanism. I never found out why that was.

“Are you actually reading on Skip Day?” he said, taking a seat next to me.

“It would appear so.” I answered his stupid question without looking up from my book.

“Isn’t that defeating the purpose of this event?”

“Not sure that I care. I’m only here to give my sister a ride, anyway.”

He was either bored or looking for someone to bother, and I was not going to be his afternoon entertainment, so I continued to ignore him as he chattered on.

“And you’re not interested in partaking in the festivities over there?” he asked, motioning to my sister and her friends surrounded by a plume of smoke.

“Not my thing.” I finally looked over at him, and when I did, I no longer seemed to mind the interruption.

“Hmm.” He scratched his invisible chin-stubble. “What
is
your thing?”

That’s when I got it. He was into me. Maybe. Possibly. It was the very first time a boy had taken interest in me without the promise of Brit Waters’s attention. It felt … unreal. Nice. Wonderful. Which is precisely why I shouldn’t have trusted it.

Still, I allowed it to go on. I let him flirt, and sit under my tree, and feed me treats from his not-so-picnic picnic basket. I let him in.

Thankfully, he left before Brit came back all pie-eyed—though not before making plans for the next day. Those plans lasted most of the summer.

Though he was the one to approach me, Travis was just as secretive about our relationship as I was. It made me feel safe. Special. Plus, I was thrilled to have something that was mine and mine alone. Travis’s little brother would occasionally see me come and go, but we were never introduced. I never met his dad; we never went out with his friends; and we never talked in school.

It was our secret.

11

J
OHNNY

I
t’s morbid, but I used to hang out at the accident site all the time. It’s a fairly normal part of the grieving process for some people, I guess. That’s what I read anyway.

Cassie came with me the first time. But after that, she said it was unhealthy. “There’s a fine line between grieving and obsession, Johnny,” she said. “So don’t go freaking out on me.”

After that little lecture, I didn’t tell her that I continued to make frequent visits. It was an easy bus ride from our house. And I only had to make one transfer, so it was cheap enough to come out whenever I felt the need.

Still, the location was somewhat remote for being so close to downtown. Our favorite pizza place wasn’t in this area, so Mom must have driven out of the way. She must’ve taken this route to avoid traffic—all to please her inconsiderate son. I never even gave it a second thought. Never really appreciated what she did for me. Every damn day.

On the side of the street where it happened, there were dead flowers, dirty ribbons, and a deflated silvery balloon. I think some of Cassie’s friends put up this makeshift memorial. The road winds down from the top of a hill, and kids love to race down it after weekend parties. It’s amazing there aren’t more mini-tombstones in the area. Flanked with dead trees on one side and an abandoned office building and parking lot on the other, it’s a place that looks like death.

That particular day, I sat on the cold ground staring at the street—trying to piece together the accident. Soon it’d be covered in snow and everything would look different, so I soaked it all in.

I looked down the road and imagined Mom driving up the hill. It was just approaching dusk—dim, but still light enough to see. Brit Waters was coming down the hill. Neither of them speeding. Or on the phone. Or texting. According to the report, anyway.

Still, they hit each other. Head on.

At fifty miles per hour, it was enough to kill them both. They said Mom died
instantly
. That’s the only thing that got me through it, I think. They only thing that’s held me together. Knowing she didn’t suffer.

But why did they hit each other? What was it that made them overcorrect and sail across the middle line? That’s something the investigators couldn’t explain. They said,
there are some pieces of that night that we’ll never know.

Contemplating all of it, I didn’t hear her approach.

At first, I thought she was a ghost. Brit coming to talk to me from beyond the grave with a message from my mom or some shit. I was in rough shape back then.

“What are you doing here?” she asked me.

“What are
you
doing here?” I repeated, getting slightly spooked at that point.

Once she came farther into view, it hit me. Brit’s twin—Becca Waters. She was pale and skinny, holding a coffee cup in her long fingers.

I didn’t really know either one of the Waters twins. I knew who they were, of course; they were the fantasy of most of the baseball team. Hot twins. It doesn’t get much better than that. But I don’t think I’d ever said a word to Brit. Definitely not to Becca—she was the shy one, and somewhat of a loner. Seeing her at the site, though, made me want to get to know her.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” I told her after some brief small talk.

“Thank you,” she answered.

I hoped we could somehow commiserate together, thought it would be nice to talk to someone about the accident for a change. Dad and Cassie couldn’t talk about it. Or wouldn’t. They were going through the motions—they’d grieved the appropriate amount of time and were starting to get their lives back on track, just as they were supposed to. Textbook, really. But I knew it would only take a few words from me—questioning the accident, talking about my nightmares, bringing up Mom—to cause them to fall, desperate, back into the hole of despair.

So I tried to talk about the crash with Becca, but had no luck. At first, anyway.

All she did was pull out her tape measure and notebook and start measuring things and writing down various numbers and graphs. She got low and stared at the road from every possible angle.

I watched, curious. “What are you doing?” I asked.

“Investigating,” she said without looking up.

“The accident?”

“Yes,” she said, scratching in her notebook.

“Why?”

“Because I don’t think it was an accident.”

She then talked about the impact of the crash, the way the cars were mangled, the injuries, the fuck all of it. My stomach dropped right out from me. And my lunch came up with such force, it not only splattered on my hands when I leaned over to relieve myself but made its way out my nose as well.

None of it fazed Becca.

She just grabbed some tissues from her bag and handed them to me.

“What? It hasn’t crossed your mind?” she asked.

I shrugged, pushing a finger to each nostril to blow out any leftover chunks of vomit stuck in my nasal passage—almost gagging again as the putrid taste of puke went back down my throat. I could still taste it in the back of my mouth.

“Don’t you think the circumstances surrounding the accident are odd?” she continued.

“What do you mean by odd?” I asked, not wanting to give away my theories.

“Suspect?”

“What are you saying?” I said, getting irritated that she wouldn’t spit it out.

“I’m saying it wasn’t an accident, as I mentioned when you first started grilling me.” She went back to her measurements.

“And what, exactly, could your genius mind tell you that the investigators missed?”

“Quite a lot, actually,” she said.

Of course I wanted to know. I wanted to know it all. “Well, then. Do you need some help?”

“Just let me handle it,” she said, continuing to take measurements. “I’ll let you know when I have enough evidence to prove it.”