I collect my books from upstairs, then find an empty classroom and set up camp for the afternoon. No one bothers me, but then again there’s hardly anyone here. Outside the window, the teachers who are left put the finishing touches on the school for the evening’s festivities. They set out lanterns and procession torches, and every now and then I watch one draped in fairy lights disappear out of sight.
Without the other students, an eerie silence takes over. At first, I find a certain degree of comfort in the isolation, like I did after I got out of the hospital, but after about an hour, the panic starts to set in. I didn’t just lose it in front of one of my classes—I lost it in front of the whole school.
I distract myself with homework. I start with an English essay, then my math homework, then biology, then French and German grammar exercises. I’ve finished all of it by the time I hear the buses pull up, and quickly turn off the lights in the classroom at the sound of the engines. The sun has long set, but the flames from torches wedged into the ground around the courtyard light up the school and beam into the room. I stand at the edge of the window, out of sight, and watch everyone disembark.
Three figures stand out from the crowd. Ren, Hector, and Fred walk together toward the front doors. The action feels natural—an insight into what life was like before I arrived—and I can’t help but think I’ve royally screwed this one up. Hector and Ren must have seen my outburst and realized Fred was right all this time—I can just imagine them making up over me losing it, Fred forgiving them for their mistake.
I’m hit by how different my life is now from what it was a year ago. I would never have been alone like this. I took for granted how easy I had it then—it was the beginning of a new school year and I had my best friends around me. G, Poppy, Lennon, and I did everything together: every party, every lunch, every…everything.
We had even created our own code over the summer. It was Poppy and G’s idea; they called it the PG Pocket Dictionary. There was something so exclusive about the whole thing: the four of us were the only people who knew the language, and that was exactly how we wanted it. The rule was we were allowed to add one word each a week. I remember that first week of the semester when Lennon added the word tennis to the lexicon. We were at Poppy’s house, pretending to do homework around her kitchen table while her mum made us brownies. The PG Pocket Dictionary was open on the table in front of us, disguised by the surrounding textbooks, and she wrote:
tennis—noun
To play tennis: to flirt outrageously.
“So, Poppy,” Lennon asked nonchalantly. “Did you play tennis with Ben after lunch like you said you were going to?”
Her mum looked between us all, confused, which was one of the reasons we loved the dictionary so much. “Tennis?” she said. “You can’t play tennis at school, can you?”
“Oh, you can, Mom,” Poppy said. “And I’ve actually gotten quite good. These girls need a bit of practice, so it’s lucky I’m on hand to help out when needed.”
“So kind of you,” G said.
“My pleasure.”
G raised her eyebrows. “So how was the tennis? Do you think you’ll play again?”
“I actually didn’t play today,” Poppy said. “We played golf instead.”
She pulled the dictionary toward her and wrote:
golf—noun
To play golf: to make out, with tongue.
G suddenly seemed to find the textbook she was pretending to read more interesting than ever; Lennon had put her hand in her mouth to stop herself from giggling; I was trying to choke down a large gulp of water. It was like we were all holding our breath, not daring to be the first to break.
“Oh, now you’re just showing off, Poppy,” her mum said, beginning to sound annoyed. “You’ve never played golf in your life.”
“Of course I have!” Poppy said indignantly. “I play golf all the time!”
I don’t remember who lost it first, but we laughed—God, we laughed. Until our sides burned, and we were bent over, gasping for air with tears streaming down our faces. Until her mum completely lost her temper and demanded we explain what was so funny.
We didn’t have a care in the world. We were young, unstoppable, so used to everything going our way—with no knowledge whatsoever of everything yet to come.
An hour later, when my whole body is stiff from sitting on the hard wooden floor, my mind is made up. Everyone will be at dinner, and it finally feels safe to go upstairs and start packing. I stop in the front hall, drawn toward the lights outside the open double doors. It’s freezing—too cold to not be wearing a coat. Even so, I push myself onto the sleek, snow-coated cobbles outside. The surrounding mountains are faded and gray, with just a faint hiss of wind coloring the silence, and for a split second I wish I could stay here.
“There you are,” says a familiar drawl. A figure hurries down the steps toward me. “California, it’s bloody freezing out here. Get inside, you maniac.”
“Go back to dinner,” I say. I didn’t want to run into anyone, particularly Hector. I’ll have to explain myself, and it’s not worth it. If I am going to get my mother to pull me out of here, I don’t want anything that could be difficult to leave behind.
“Dinner just finished,” he says, getting closer by the second. “I’ve come to take you to the performance.”
“How did you find me?”
“I have my sources. Come on—let’s just slip into the auditorium. No one will notice.”
“After what happened this afternoon, everybody will notice.”
“Okay, fine, they’ll notice. But you’ll have to face everyone eventually, so you might as well do it with me.”
I push my hair back from my face and hold it there, suspended in the air. He makes everything sound easy; he makes me want to do what he says. I tear my eyes from his. “I can’t stay here, Hector. Going to the performance isn’t going to make everything better.”
“Listen, Cara, what happened this afternoon—”
“This afternoon gave you a real taste of who I am,” I cut in. “I’m not the girl who hops on a bus to go ice-skating or who goes to a bar on a Wednesday night with her friends. I don’t deserve to have any friends at all.”
“That’s a ridiculous thing to say.”
“Look, Hector, I’m grateful to you for trying to make me feel normal, but I haven’t been normal for a while now, and nothing you do is going to change that.”
“Why are you doing this?”
“Doing what?”
“Making life so difficult for yourself. It doesn’t have to be this hard.”
“It should be…after what I did.”
“And what exactly did you do?”
I pause. I can’t bring myself to tell him.
“The way I see it,” he continues, “you haven’t done anything except be unfortunate enough to be involved in a nasty car accident.”
“What do you know about that?” I snap as a cold wave washes through me. My muscles turn to stone, weighty anchors rooting me to the spot.
“I know everything about that.”
My self-preservation instinct kicks in. “Who told you?”
“No one told me.”
“Don’t mess with me, Hector.”
“I’m not lying, Cara. No one told me. I read about it in your application file.”
“You shouldn’t have seen that—who showed it to you?”
“Does it matter?”
“Of course it matters,” I say, although I don’t know why. If he knows about the crash, he knows some of the worst parts of me. For some reason, he’s still here.
“Look, Mrs. King told me that you might like to see a friendly face, so I came to find you. I might have just taken a trip via the registrar’s office to see what I was up against first.”
I am filled with an empty sort of dread. “You shouldn’t have done that.”
“Well, it’s too late, Cara. I know about your accident. Get over it.”
I want to scream at him. How can he say something like that? I turn my back, facing out into the blackness. “I don’t expect you to understand anything from just reading the file.”
“So explain it,” he says softly, and I feel myself flinch from him. “You were driving back from a New Year’s Eve party with your best friend. It was after midnight, but you hadn’t been drinking. A truck took the slip road wrong, and you were in his blind spot. Your car flipped.”
“She died,” I say, because above everything I want to make him stop. The words are hollow, too simple to convey something that means so much. As I say them, grief rips through me. There is nothing emotional about this pain; it is purely physical and makes me feel—as close as is possible for a living, breathing person to feel—like I am dying.
I watch him wince. “But you lived, Cara.”
I feel my anger flare up again. “You’re saying that she died so I could live? A life for a life? Well, when she died, my life ended too.”
“No, it didn’t,” he says in a very quiet voice. “Maybe a part of you wishes that were true. When Georgina died, your life changed course, that’s all.”
“Don’t say her name,” I say harshly. “You didn’t know her.”
“But I know you.”
I press my face into my hands. Trying to block it all out. Trying to forget. “I’m not who you think I am,” I say at last.
He stares intently back at me. “I’ve got a good idea of who you are.”
I wait for him to take the words back, to walk away from me and never come back.
“You don’t know the full story.”
“So tell me,” he says, hooking an arm around my shoulders, turning me to face the front doors. “But tell me inside.”
“I can’t,” I say, pulling myself out from under his arm. I don’t actually know whether it would be possible for me to articulate what happened out loud.
“Try me,” he says seriously. “What’s the worst that’s going to happen? If you regret it afterward, we never have to see each other again. You can leave here, like you want, and it will all be forgotten. It’s not like we’ll run into each other again.”
He ushers me inside, but the cold doesn’t leave me.
“You don’t need to know,” I eventually say. “Really, Hector, you don’t.”
“But I do, Cara.” He stares at me without pity. “You know I do.”
I’m struck by a sense of inevitability. All I know is that if I was going to tell anyone, it was always going to be him.