If my voice was something you could hold in your hands, it would be shattered porcelain. Broken and all sharp edges. “I’m not going anywhere with you.”
Jason frowns, hands on his hips. “What are you going to do, walk?”
“Does it matter to you what I do?” I spit.
He sighs. “I thought we would be mature about this.”
“Did you?” I say, and I’m both ashamed of the mocking tone in my voice and unable to help it. “Why did you think we would be mature about this, when you had never discussed it with me?”
I speak louder as I walk away from him. “Maybe in future when you make decisions that affect us both, you’ll remember to check with me.”
“Zad,” Jason says tiredly. “I’m sorry, okay? I didn’t see it going like this either. I thought we’d be forever.”
It’s like taking my heart to a shredder.
“Why can’t we be?” I’m practically pleading. “We’re so good together. We’re the best together. I just don’t get it.”
“Please let me take you home. I’ll explain on the drive,” Jason says, pushing his fist into his left eye.
Is he crying? Can he be…is it possible that he’s really as upset about this as I am?
The fact is that I don’t want him to explain on the drive home; I want him to take it back. To say it was all a mistake, a slip of thetongue, a misunderstanding on my part. Maybe he was blackmailed by someone into breaking up with me. A million wild scenarios run through my head, and I’m willing to accept any of them so long as it undoes everything that just happened.
It’s that hope that makes me not book the rideshare.
It’s that hope that makes me hug my purse to my chest as I sink into the passenger seat of his SUV.
Jason starts the car.
“So?” I say after a few seconds when the air conditioner has just been whistling in its tone-deaf way.Please take it all back, I plead inwardly.
Jason breathes out through his nose. “It’s so hard to explain.”
He’s really doing this. He’s really breaking up with me during the first month of what was supposed to be the ideal senior year.
“Oh my God.”
Bile rises in my throat. I think I’m going to be sick. I open my purse and start rummaging around for a cough drop or random Tums, anything to calm the upheaval in my stomach. I check under the last book Dad and I buddy-read for our Father-Daughter Book Club, bookmarked and on its third reread.
We’re stopped at a red light when Jason scrubs a hand over his face.
The light turns green, and he lifts his foot from the pedal, and we start to roll forward. “Okay, so it’s like this…” he says, at the very same moment I whisper his name and then puke the dinner I barely touched into my purse.
“Jesus, Zadie!” Jason shouts, horrified. “Not in my c—”
But before he can finish his sentence—before he can freak outabout his car’s leather interior or give me an explanation for why he would break up with me after one incredible romance-filled year—before he can say anything at all, there is the smashing of metal. A burst of light. Three panicked car horns. And the loudest explosion I’ve ever heard.
Two
When I wake up in Sterlingwood General, in a room that smells of hospital, the first thing I feel is grateful. The difference between living and dying is so tiny, the space between heartbeats, but somehow I’m here.
“Oh my God, she’s awake!” someone—I’m pretty sure it’s Amber—shouts. “You’re awake!”
“My head,” I groan, as Amber hurries over and kisses me repeatedly on the cheek.
“How are you, honey?” My mother hovers over me too. I can hear the relief in her voice, though she’s wearing a prominent frown. “I thought the doctor said she didn’t have a concussion. Why does she have a headache?”
“It might just be the stress,” Monique offers. Missing every social cue, Mo starts to explain that headaches can have many causes, from dehydration to anxiety. “Since they said she passed out on the way to the hospital, it was likely the shock—”
