Casey
A sudden impact jolts me awake. But I can’t move. It’s dark, save for colored tiny lights that blur my vision. A sharp, throbbing sensation rips through my skull. And then I’m freezing. Water rises up my legs. I struggle against my restraints, screaming, thrashing, only succeeding in tightening the force holding me in place. The water gushes inside the car, climbing my torso, while I yank on the door latch.
Suddenly it gives way, pulled from my grasp.
Fenn finds me in the glow of the dashboard lights.
I’m relieved to see him as he reaches across my body to unhook my seat belt. But when I try to pry myself free of the car, I find the straps still firm across my body. I reach for him, desperate. But he shoves my hands away, gripping the belt across my chest and cinching it tighter.
His dead stare is impervious to my frightened pleas for help.
“Fenn!” I scream.
I claw at him. Fighting even as he again forces the door closed with me inside. The water rushes up my neck, overcoming my mouth and nose. I take one last gulp of air and watch Fenn rise to the surface, leaving me trapped inside the car descending deeper into pure darkness.
Then I’m floating free in the endless black void. Released from the car but inescapably pulled deeper, my limbs exhausted and too heavy to swim for the surface. The silver light of the moon is an unreachable point, growing smaller, far above my head. I stare up at it as I sink, aware of every second of my journey toward death.
I don’t know what finally tears my eyes open. I wake screaming with the blankets tangled tight around my legs, encased and thrashing inside the cocoon of knotted sheets.
It’s seconds before I notice the sun pouring into my room and take several gasping breaths. I feel my phone under my pillow and my first instinct is to text Fenn. The person I’ve turned to when the nightmares leave me shaken and licking the taste of blood from my mouth.
Only this time, he’s the reason I’m drenched in sweat and my chest is on fire.
“Is that what it felt like when you knew you weren’t coming back up?” I whisper to Mom.
I don’t get an answer before Dad bursts into the room looking pale. He’s tailed by the dogs, who jump onto the mattress to investigate the commotion.
“Are you all right?” He sits on the edge of my bed as I push up against my headboard. “What happened? Another nightmare?”
“I’m fine,” I mutter, ducking away from his attempt to wipe my hair from my face. Then I shove Bo’s snout away when he tries to lick my cheek. All this hovering is too much. “You know you don’t have to come charging in here every time like I’m being eaten by the monster under my bed.”
“If you’d heard you scream,” he says, somewhat offended.
“I’m fine.”
“Maybe it’s time to talk to someone again, sweetheart.”
Why do people always say “someone” like they can hide the pill in a rolled-up piece of bologna?
“You mean another shrink?” I scoff. “Pass.”
“I’m not sure it was a good idea to stop seeing the therapist,” he tells me.
“I tried it. It didn’t help. I haven’t remembered anything new about the accident at all.”
“That wasn’t the sole reason for going to therapy, Case. We can’t just ignore your diagnosis and hope it goes away on its own.”
My diagnosis can fuck right off. I have PTSD, I get it. But talking about it hasn’t alleviated any of the symptoms. I still get the flashbacks. The nightmares. The sheer panic that grips me at random moments of the day. My psychiatrist, Dr. Anthony, prescribed medication to try to help me, but I didn’t feel like myself when I was on the meds, so she took me off them. It’s ironic—they pumped me full of pills to ease the post-trauma symptoms, those bouts of crippling, emotional numbness, and the pills just made me even more emotionally numb.
“I’m not going back on meds,” I say flatly.
“That’s not what I’m suggesting. I just think you need to keep talking about the trauma,” he presses with the look he gets when he’s trying to psychically change my mind. “Ignoring PTSD symptoms can lead to other issues. Depression. Substance abuse. Eating dis—”
“Disorders,” I finish. “Yes, I remember.” I throw the blanket off and climb out of bed. “I’m fine, Dad. I’m not depressed. And I’m not doing drugs or starving myself. So please, drop it. I need to get ready for school.”
At breakfast, Sloane sneaks worried peeks my way as I force myself to eat the omelet Dad prepared. It tastes fine, but it’s a struggle to finish it. Not because I’m succumbing to an eating disorder as he fears, but because my appetite is nonexistent. My stomach is too unsettled, twisted into knots after the shock I received last night.
Fenn has been lying to me for months.
Months.
He’s held my hand and hugged me and let me cry in his arms. He let me go on and on about how devastating the accident was. How it ruined my life. I lost my friends. My school. My reputation.
Yes, I get that Fenn wasn’t responsible for the accident itself—Sloane said the security video made it clear he wasn’t the driver. But that doesn’t change the fact that he lied. And I could have died while I was lying there on the bank of the lake, unconscious, bleeding from a head wound.
I could have died.
I feel Sloane watching me again and shove the last bite of omelet into my mouth. I need this breakfast to be over. I can’t deal with any of this right now. The vicious cycle of overprotection and aggressive mothering that engages every time Dad tells my sister I’m off my rocker again.
She waits until Dad leaves for work to finally bring up what’s weighing on her mind. “So RJ talked to Fenn.”
The legs of my chair scrape the hardwood floor as I abruptly push back from the table and walk over to dump my plate in the sink. The dogs follow me, hoping and praying that some breakfast scraps fall to the floor and into their eager mouths.
“I’ll be in the car,” I mutter before stalking out of the room.
For months, my life hasn’t been my own. Everyone feels entitled to, or responsible for, some piece of it. All of them muscling their way toward the center. And none of them hear me. They assume anything I say is a riddle to decipher, when really, sometimes I simply want to be left alone.
But on the drive to school, Sloane can’t help herself.
“I know you don’t want to talk about it,” she starts.
“So, you’re going to anyway.” I keep my gaze out the windshield.
“Have you spoken to Fenn?”
Please don’t leave me.
My heart shrieks with agony as his tortured plea whispers through my mind.
God. I can’t erase the torrent of pain in his blue eyes when he’d asked me not to leave him, and yet at the same time it sparks a jolt of fury. How dare he look at me like that? Like I was the one in the wrong. Like I was committing some atrocious act by walking away from his sorry ass.
“I know you mean well, but I have one request,” I say, still staring straight ahead. “Never mention Fenn’s name to me again.” It stings in my teeth. Turns my tongue sour.
“Okay…” Sloane slides a brief glance at me.
I know she wants to ask for details, and I hope my demeanor is projecting that she does so at her own risk.
“But we have to figure out what to do about the security video,” she reminds me. “It’s probably evidence tampering or something if we don’t give it to the cops. And there might be a chance they can use it to figure out who was driving—”
“I don’t care,” I mumble to myself. I’m restless and exhausted. Sorry I didn’t feign sick and stay in bed.
This day hasn’t even started yet, and I can’t wait for it to end.
“What’d you say?”
“I said I don’t care,” I repeat, louder. “I don’t care who was driving. I don’t care about any of it anymore. Delete the video for all I care. I’m done with all of this. I want to move on and forget about it.”
“Case.”
In disbelief, Sloane watches the side of my face while I turn to look out the window at the parking lot and into another day of whispers and innuendo. The butt of every joke. A one-dimensional person reduced to a single event.
“I’m serious,” I tell my sister. “I don’t care about the accident or the tape. It’s over.”
I hop out of the car and slam the door behind me, not giving Sloane a chance to argue or dive into another long and involved conversation about my emotional state. My state is fed up. Thoroughly bored with myself. Tired of this rut and knowing every day when I walk into school, I’m the girl who got fished out of the lake at prom.
“God, Casey. You look terrible.” Ainsley spots me walking to my locker. She catches up, flanking me with Bree. “Rough night?”
Sloane would have some witty comeback. A biting remark that would cut Ainsley off at the knees and devastate her so completely, her grandkids would have bruises.
But I hate confrontation. What’s the point? As much as I like to imagine a different version of myself, I’m not the girl who likes to fill the hallway with her voice, to make everyone stop and look. Instead, I put my head down and keep walking, quick enough that they’d feel silly following, until finally I’m around the corner and out of sight.
As I grab my textbook for first period, I catch a glimpse of someone watching me a few lockers down. Jazmine something or other. She’s in half my classes. I said hi to her on the first day of school, and she’d merely shrugged and muttered, “Yeah, okay.”
As far as I can tell, she keeps to herself, same as me. Except in her case, it seems to be self-imposed. She’s pretty enough that she could easily hang out with girls like Ainsley and Bree, yet she prefers to sit alone in the dining hall, focused on her phone. Me, I’d give anything to have someone to sit with at lunch. An ally who isn’t my older sister.
Jazmine smirks when our eyes meet. I don’t know what she finds so amusing, but I avert my gaze and walk away.