My Beating Teenage Heart (12 page)

After a moment’s pause Dad tells me not to be too late. I say I won’t and then jump in the car, thinking about how I’ve screwed myself over this week and about all the things I won’t tell Eva Kannan. When I get to Jules’s house I notice her friend Renee’s car in the driveway next to her mom’s Acura and almost change my mind about stopping by. Maybe I’d have better luck at Ty’s or Rory’s. There are aspects of me that they don’t know as well as Jules does but they expect less. They don’t need to feel like they’re tapped into my soul to consider us friends.

I used to like that Jul {liked into es and I could talk about anything. But now I don’t know if I want to talk. My brain’s so knotted and foggy that I don’t know what I want. But this is the first place I thought of when I wanted to get away. That has to mean something.

So I park next to the curb in front of Jules’s house and ring the doorbell before I can change my mind. Jules opens the door in the same punk kilt dress she was wearing at school earlier. She had thick black tights on under it then but now her legs are bare, which makes the dress look shorter and sexier and I know if she opened the door looking like that a few weeks ago—and no one was around—that I’d start running my hands over her the second the door was closed behind us.

Jules gets as horny as I used to, maybe more, and the sight of all that skin flashes me back to the first time she asked me to work my fingers inside her. Being naked with Jules, two of my fingers moving slowly inside her, seemed as intimate as sex, but now the memory feels like it must belong to someone else. I can’t imagine wanting to touch her like that.

“Hey,” Jules says, jumping forward to hug me. “I’m so glad you’re here.”

“I saw Renee’s car,” I tell her, giving her a squeeze before I stand back.

“She and Cameron are hanging out.” She swivels to look at the staircase, which I guess signals that they’re up in her room. Renee’s a senior but she and Jules know each other from doing school plays together. A month ago both Jules and Renee were in
The Importance of Being Earnest
. Because I helped Jules practice her lines for the audition I still have phrases like, “I hope, Cecily, you are not inattentive,” swimming around in my head.

“But they won’t be here long,” Jules adds. “They have to pick their mom up at the hospital.” It’s not that she’s sick—that’s just where Renee and Cameron’s mother works. Usually brothers and sisters don’t hang out together as friends much but Renee and Cameron are step-siblings and so close that some people at school used to make incest jokes about them when they first moved here.

I hardly knew Cameron before I got together with Jules but now I count him as a friend. Sometimes, when he’s not with Renee, he hangs out with my other friends, which is one of the reasons the jokes stopped. So many people have his back now that making a shitty joke isn’t worth the trouble it could cause.

I go upstairs with Jules and say hi to Cameron and Renee, who are sitting on the floor listening to music that I don’t know how to categorize. It’s like classical violin, jazz-rock fusion, folk and pop all rolled into one.

“This is pretty cool,” I say. “Who is it?”

Cameron hands over a CD. “Doctor Draw. We saw him at a jazz-blues festival the other night, playing electric violin with a backing band. He tore up the crowd. I thought I was going to get trampled in the line to buy his CD afterwards.”

Meanwhile Renee’s painting her nails orange and she stops and points one of her orange-tipped fingers at me. “W {me.align=e can’t wait to see you at Boleyn’s. Do you know when you’re playing yet?”

Boleyn’s is a café in Bourneville, a bigger town bordering Strathedine to the west. They let anyone who puts their name down on the night play music, do spoken word or read regular poetry. I was planning on having a few songs ready by the time school lets out near the end of June. I’m not a natural and wanted to get a lot of practice hours in first—the only people who’ve even see me play are Jules and Skylar.

I shrug and say I haven’t been thinking about it much lately. The truth is, I have no intention of playing at Boleyn’s but I don’t want to get into that now.

Jules is standing behind me and she grabs my hand and guides me over to the bed to sit down next to her. “Are your folks on their date night?” I ask. I haven’t seen or heard any sign of them since I got here and I know Mr. and Mrs. Pacquette try to have a date night once a week. That sounds like something a person like Eva Kannan would suggest if your marriage was in trouble but Mr. and Mrs. Pacquette just do it because they like to hang out together.

“They went to a new Thai restaurant near city hall,” Jules tells me. “My dad’s been there for a couple work lunches and can’t stop talking about their curry duck.”

“How can anyone eat duck?” Renee asks, grimacing as she seals up the nail polish. “We
feed
ducks in the park. They’re way too cute to eat.”

“Once they’re cooked they’re charred birds just like chickens,” Cameron quips, tilting his wrist so he can glance at his watch. “We should go. Mom’s shift’s going to be over in a couple minutes.”

The three of us exchange goodbyes and Jules follows Cameron and Renee out of the room to walk them down to the front door. The second before they left there wasn’t a bad intention in my head but in a flash I realize there’s an opportunity at hand and I’m up slinking soundlessly towards the Pacquettes’ bedroom and then their en suite bathroom, throwing their medicine cabinet open and scoping out Mr. Pacquette’s sleeping pills. He has a practically full bottle—he won’t notice a few more missing, and now I won’t have to ask Jules or worry about dipping into whatever my parents are taking, which, for all I know, might not do the trick.

My heart pounds as I open the bottle and stuff a fistful of pills down one of my front pockets. I race back into the hallway and have nearly made it to the safety of Jules’s room when she appears at the top of the stairs. Her eyes whip over to me and freeze me to the spot underneath my feet. Air sticks in my throat. I can’t stop blinking.

“What’s going on?” Jules demands.

I shake my head, and during that pause my brain kicks back to life. “I felt dizzy,” I murmur. “I was going to the bathroom for water.” The second upstairs bathroom is only a few feet away and I motion to it behind me. “But then everything started going black.” I slump down on the floor and duck my head like I’m fighting to stay conscious. “So I th {x20en eveought I better lie down and turned around to go back.”

Jules’s expression morphs from confusion into worry. “Put your head between your knees,” she commands, dropping down next to me.

I nod a little, my head still between my knees. I didn’t know I could be such a good liar; I’ve nearly sold myself on the idea that I was about to pass out.

Jules watches over me for a couple more minutes before slipping into the bathroom for water. She hands me the blue ceramic cup from her bathroom and I drink. “You really had me scared for a minute there,” she tells me. “But I think you’re beginning to look a little better.”

“I don’t know what happened. Everything just started to fade.” I finish off the rest of the water. “But I’m feeling okay now. I think whatever it was is passing.”

“Sit here a bit longer,” Jules advises, her hand on my leg. “To be on the safe side.” Then she adds, “Are you sleeping lately?”

“Sleeping, eating, all of it. I guess it was just one of those weird things out of nowhere.”

Jules stares skeptically into my eyes. “Maybe it’s stress.”

“You sound like you’ve been talking to my parents.”

Jules’s fingers fall into her lap. Sitting down on the floor like we are, her kilt dress is riding up, giving me a peek at her green panties that makes me want to tell her to cover herself.

“They say I should see someone,” I continue. “They think I can’t handle what happened with Skylar.”

“It’s not about
handling
it,” Jules says quickly. “I mean, if it was me, I think I’d need to talk to someone. Maybe it’s not such a bad idea.”

“Just because I missed a couple classes doesn’t mean I need to see a shrink, Jules.” It doesn’t feel good to say that from the floor outside the bathroom with a bunch of Mr. Pacquette’s pills in my pocket, and I shoot up and stomp towards her room.

Jules follows me in so that we’re both sitting on her bed again. She’s quiet the way I need her to be and I add, “I just need space. And time. And for everyone to understand that.”

“Breckon.” Her little finger locks around mine. “I only want whatever will be good for you.” Her finger wriggles against mine. The first time we held hands it was actually holding little fingers, just like this, on the ferry from Battery Park to Liberty Island. We’d been hanging out a lot on that trip but I didn’t know for sure anything was happening between us until I felt her finger stroke mine.

“I know,” I tell her. I wonder if she has any idea how badly I want to let myself fall to pieces when I’m with her. I could crawl under the covers, drag her under with me and stay t {me I want to here forever. But it still wouldn’t be enough. Nothing would. I feel like we’re thousands of miles apart, even though she’s right here next to me, clasping my little finger with hers.

I’m relieved that Eva Kannan’s a middle-aged woman with deep crow’s-feet and laugh lines. The closer she is to my age, the weirder this would seem. Her office is above a European bakery and I think about Barbara and Sean’s anorexic daughter having to walk by there and face the smell of freshly baked cakes, tarts and cookies before each therapy session. From upstairs, I can’t smell them anymore but I should’ve bought something to munch on so I’d have something to do with my hands.

When I first get inside I call the therapist Mrs. Kannan, but she says I can call her Eva instead, if I like. “Okay,” I tell her. Once upon a time I might have wanted to make a stupid joke about feeling free to call me Breckon too but now I don’t bother.

Eva Kannan’s office looks more like a university professor’s than a therapist’s. All the leather-bound hardcovers I can see are novels instead of psychology books—classic fiction but newer books too. “It’s a hobby of mine,” Eva says in a clipped accent when she notices me studying her shelves. Eva looks South Asian but she sounds like she grew up in England. “I like to collect books—preferably signed.”

“Why signed?” I bet people are always trying to out-shrink the shrink and I remind myself that’s a bad strategy. She’s the one with the degree—outwitting an amateur would be a cakewalk. I just need to get out of here without revealing too much about myself—give her the impression that I’ll keep my head above water without any kind of intervention from her or my parents.

“They’re rarer,” Eva says thoughtfully. “But I suppose they also seem more personal.”

I nod like that makes sense about the signatures and press my thumbs together on my lap. My bandaged left hand seems like a declaration of guilt. A regular person would ask what happened to me and wince when I explained but here I feel like a deep-sea diver being circled by a shark.

“I spoke to your mother on the phone,” Eva tells me. “She seems very concerned about you.”

“I know.” I nod again. The next forty-eight minutes will be lots of nodding and
I know
s. I want to sound reasonable but the room feels so wrong. She’s tried to decorate it sort of like a living room but you know that no one ever hangs out here for fun. There’s a small wooden desk pushed against one of the walls—an office chair in front of it—but Eva and I are sitting in high-backed leather armchairs with a coffee table separating us. I could’ve sat on the couch, which looks more comfortable, but that’s marginally closer to her and I want to keep my distance. My eyes land on the globe in front of the bookshelves. If it was nearer I could have a look at it without making it seem as if I’m avoiding the subject.

“I’m very sorry to hear about your sister,” Eva continues.

“Everyone says that.”
Damn
. Two {mn

“Would you rather they didn’t?” Eva asks.

“It doesn’t matter what they say or don’t say.” Is she going to dissect every sentence that comes out of my mouth and throw it back at me in the form of a question?

Eva gazes at me, expecting me to explain my answer, but I only stare back, focusing on her dangling earrings. “I realize that it wasn’t your idea to see me.” Eva leans back in her chair. “But this time really is for you. Not for your parents or anyone else. I want you to think of it like that if you can—you can say whatever you want here.”

I fold my arms in front of my stomach and grip firmly. “Did my mother tell you what happened?” I ask.

Eva nods, her eyes calm but not unsympathetic. “She told me you were the one to find your sister.”

If I hold any tighter I’ll crush internal organs. “I was the only one home.” The vacant expression on Skylar’s face is burned into my brain forever. The moment’s never far from my thoughts, but this is worse because we’re shining a spotlight on it.

“You were the one who called emergency services,” Eva says, and I don’t know if it’s a question or not.

“It was too late.” My eyes burn. Pressure builds in my ears and forehead, making them ache. The tears sting as they well up from that place inside me that never stops screaming Skylar’s name.

But when I made the call, the world seemed infinitely quiet. Like time had stopped. The house was soaked in silence. I couldn’t turn up my voice. The woman on the other end of the 911 line kept making me repeat myself and saying she was having trouble hearing me. But inside I was wailing.

Even when the ambulance arrived with its siren blaring, I couldn’t hear it in the same way that I would’ve before. It seemed muted the way everything does now—everyone I know and everything I do. And I kept thinking, even as I was screaming inside, even when my parents showed up and an investigator from the medical examiner’s office came to look at my sister and said that they’d be taking her to the morgue, that I could somehow change what had happened.

The cops came next. They asked my parents questions, but mostly me. An investigator took pictures of the scene. The police made me describe what I’d witnessed, and the male cop looked away when I lost it and broke down. It didn’t take long for the medical examiner to rule accidental death.