I roll my eyes. “He was in a car accident and almost died, you’d probably be a little Two-Face after that too.”
He snorts, like it’s funny. “Wasn’t he drinking?”
“He was hit by a drunk driver,” I snap. “The driver’s side window cut up his face and his leg got smashed. If the other guy had been like five feet to the left, Ash would have died.”
The only reason I know all this is because I went through itall with Alissa. I was at her house when they got the call that Ash was at the hospital, I rode with them there, holding Alissa’s hand in the back seat because she needed to hold on to something. She looked sick and kept sucking in air. The doctors didn’t take too long to tell us that Ash was going to be fine, despite a lacerated face and a shattered right leg.
“Will he be able to play soccer again?” Alissa had asked through her tears. “He loves soccer.”
“Eventually,” said the doctor. “But not this season.”
And so the school had lost its star soccer player in his senior year. Ash had only just started to walk normally again before Alissa died.
Aiden fully laughs now. “Why are you getting so mad about it? I was just asking a question.”
The same tunnel-visioned rage I felt at the church service fills me again. It comes up so hot and fast I can’t do anything to stop it.
Haley leans in before I can act. “Maybe if your questions weren’t so stupid, Evie wouldn’t get so mad.”
Aiden rolls his eyes, says, “Wow, good one,” but goes back to his food. It takes a few minutes for me to calm down, and even when I do, I feel like I could get angry again for the smallest reason. The conversation turns to the upcoming track meet this weekend.
Before, in my head, I was fully prepared to participate in the meet. There was no question about it. A track meet was comingup, I ran track, I would run in the track meet, just like I always had. Now I wondered what could possibly convince me to go, because that track meet would mean time I wasn’t on CoH, and I cared about CoH way more than I cared about a track meet. The game felt so much bigger and more important. I was so good at it. I was good at track too, but never the best. Maybe I could get a college scholarship, but how long would I run after that? What was I really working toward?
The talk around me suddenly seems very distant. It’s nice that they’re sitting with me, trying to include me, but they don’t understand where I am. They might miss Alissa, but they don’t miss the piece of themselves that went with her. Nothing unrecoverable was taken from them.
“Are you going to be at practice tomorrow?” Haley asks me, drawing me back.
“Uh, I don’t know. Why?”
“My mom ordered black armbands for us. We’re going to wear them at the meet on Saturday, but I was going to pass them out tomorrow.”
“Black armbands.”
“For Alissa.”
“Oh.”
“You don’t have to wear one if you don’t want to,” she says. “No pressure.”
The whole table waits for my answer. If I don’t go to the meet,it won’t matter. If I do, I’ll have to wear one. It’ll look strange if I don’t. It’s just a black armband. I doubt I’ll even notice it’s there.
“Sure,” I say, and they all leave me alone after that.
For the rest of the day, I feel sick inside, twisted up. I don’t know what’s caused it. Luckily, no one tries to talk to me again; nothing I said back to them would be nice.
We don’t have practice today, so there’s nothing to skip. When I pull into my driveway, I remember what Ash said about checking out his computer. The Whitakers live in walking distance, so I drop my bag inside and lock up before cutting across my backyard.
The day has gone cloudy again, and cold enough that the neighbors aren’t out. I feel like I’m alone in the world. I notice birds flitting between the trees, squirrels dashing across the ground, a windsock fluttering in an adjacent yard, a neighbor’s dog watching me through the fence. I walk lightly, making almost no noise.
I read something once that people with autism and ADHD and anxiety and other mental issues would have been the hunters in a hunter-gatherer society. They weren’t issues then—they were assets. Our brains are wired for awareness, pattern recognition, routine. We can pursue goals with single-minded ferocity. As society changed, these traits became less and less necessary. Hindrances, in fact, in a world where you have to sit at a desk for seven or eight or nine hours a day and be productive productiveproductive. My brain starts screaming and the only way to get it to stop is to find an escape. We were made for survival, but now the thing we have to survive is ourselves.
As I walk, I pretend I am that hunter. I have noself, only instinct. The cold heightens my senses. I pull my hair out of its ponytail, letting it blow across my face. Energy builds in my legs, arms, core, urging me to run. I hold back. I’m almost to the Whitakers’, and I don’t want Ash to see me come out of the trees at a dead sprint, like something’s wrong.
I cross a deserted street and approach the Whitakers’ front door. They have a big white two-story house with black shutters. Alissa and I used to sit and listen to music on the porch swing. We climbed the elm tree in the front yard. The window above and to the right of the front door is her room; when we were younger, we’d sit up there and tell scary stories about the people in the cars who passed by late at night. As we got older, our conversations turned to our classmates and our futures.
We were going to go to Ball State. Be roommates. Explore what it was like to live outside the shadow of our younger selves—be new people. That could have been exactly what Alissa needed. Escape. To be someone else in the real world, not just in a game. She could have become anyone. A famous journalist. A jet-setting adventurer. A game developer making her own CoH Online. She could have left this town and everyone we knew behind.
I guess, technically, she did.
