The nurse discharges me an hour later. “You’re free to go and check on your boyfriend,” she says, giving me a final squeeze on the arm.
I have just enough presence of mind to thinkex-boyfriend, a heaviness sticking to the pit of my stomach.
Amber offers to give me a ride home after we check on Jason, leaving my mother free to follow the nurse out of the room and pepper her with questions. Monique pouts about having to leave because her grandparents don’t like her to stay out this late. Together, Ambs and I take the elevator to level three.
“If something had happened to you, I would have gone to jail for what I would do to the driver who caused the crash,” Amber tells me. I manage a weak smile and decide not to point out that she is a generous five two and has not a violent bone in her body.
“What would you do? Overfeed him to death?” I tease, even though I still feel awful.
My body aches with dull, unspecific waves of pain. Like when you have the flu and can’t really say what is hurting. And then there’s my heart, still smarting from Jason’s words.
“Well, there’s a reason they call it death by chocolate,” Amber says. She gets more serious suddenly, squeezing my hand in her small one. “I hope you get that you’re, like, crucial to us. Nobody else knows Mo is terrified of grasshoppers or remembers my fifteen stupid allergies.” She lowers her voice. “Or knows that my parentsare basically just roommates, and I never, ever want to be like them.”
Amber’s sweet words form a lump in my throat, but I say, “Maybe I plan to blackmail you all.”
She ignores me. “Who else keeps a list of everyone’s birthday in our grade?”
“It’s called data.”
“Data that somehow always makes it into the morning announcements.”
I don’t bring up the point Jason made a couple of weeks ago—that more people hate getting called out on their birthday than appreciate when someone remembers. That, for being only vice president of Sterlingwood High, I take on too much.
I change the subject. “So who was the driver? What even happened?” I ask Amber as we approach the ICU.
“There was a four-car pileup. Apparently, some cargo truck driver was following too close.” She rolls her eyes. “He’s totally fine, of course. But they’re saying Jason braked out of nowhere.”
Was it because of my puking?
I tell Amber what I can remember about the accident itself, leaving out everything beforehand. No one I know saw me falling apart. If I never acknowledge it, my humiliating public meltdown might as well not have happened.
One of my earliest memories is of being at the Yellow Mart in Sterlingwood before my parents’ divorce. I’m five, and right before I die of complete boredom, listening to my parents argue over cereal brands, Dad steals me away for the most fun game of hide-and-seek-and-chase. One of the funk songs Dad likes is playingloud on the store’s speakers. We’re grinning so hard that our faces feel like rubber, and everything is wonderful until I hear an earth-shattering crash. A gigantic pyramid of baked beans has crumbled right at Dad’s feet. We are both laughing as we get to work rebuilding the tower. Mishaps like this seem to follow Dad, but today when I look up from the mess, for the first time ever, I am aware of them. The woman who grabs her son’s arm and marches off, like he might catch something contagious just from being near us. The elderly man who curses under his breath and mutters about “people these days.”
Other shoppers around us meander, stealing glances at our chaos. For a second, I see the two of us from their perspective: loud and Black andmessy.
Maybe Dad notices me freeze up, because he sends me to Mom while he gets a staff member and finishes cleaning up. I find Mom in the freezer aisle, where a woman in a mustard yellow sweater is hugging her, congratulating my mother on being elected to city council. The woman’s eyes are admiring, pleasant, calm. My mother is beautiful, admirable, with her slicked-back bun, subtle brown lipstick, and impeccable posture.
I never tell Mom about the tower crash, but the next time we go to the store, I stay with her.
Softer eyes and kinder smiles and fewer whispers. Every time.
And it becomes my unspoken motto.
That memory passes, an inconvenient ghost flittering through my mind. When I come back to myself, Amber is whispering as we walk, “So what was the surprise? What was he trying to ask you?”
My voice is pitched unnaturally high. “Jay?”
I had everyone believing he was going to practically propose to me. That he was going to promise me forever. My lipstick from this evening is all rubbed off by now, and with it, every trace of certainty I had in anything.
“Did he ask?” Amber’s eyes are round as saucers.
I try to think of how to break it to her.No, he didn’t ask. He said it was over.
The shame feels so heavy.
I suddenly see it in my head, my superlative: Zadie Cartwright, Most Likely to Lose Everything.
How do I tell Amber about the breakup without making it sound like it was me, like it was aZadieproblem? After all, I don’t know for sure that it was.
