WHERE ARE MY GLASSES? Where are my legs?
I’m on fire from the waist down. Not literally. I don’t think. But I might as well be. There’s no way my legs could hurt this bad without them being either wrapped in flames or gone completely. Even if I could see them without my glasses, without the stinging smoke obscuring everything, I’m too afraid to look. Whatever it was that hit my knee, it snapped my leg apart like a dry twig. The pain filled me up so completely that I was sure I’d never feel anything else again. Just the agony, flowing through me, becoming me. Constant. Total.
Now, I’m just floating around inside a black cloud. My legs are still full of that white-hot ache, but I feel it somewhere beneath the rest of my senses. Background noise, like the feedback from my stepdad’s Fender when he plays his shitty folk-rock songs.
Speaking of my stepdad, where is he right now? Shouldn’t he be home already? Actually … where am I?
I’m so hot, my shirt is pasted to my body like a strip of sweaty papier-mâché. I can barely catch my breath. Every small, labored hitch that I manage to pull in brings very little oxygen with it. The gray world that surrounds me gets darker by the second.
I think I’m going into shock.
“Charlie?”
Is that Sonya?
“Charlie, if you can hear me, don’t move!”
Why is she yelling?
“I’m coming to you!”
We never hang out at my place. Mostly because my stepdad is a disgusting prick who likes to ask Sonya and Kimberly how many days are left until their eighteenth birthdays. But since Chet clearly isn’t here, maybe she decided to stop by. Maybe …
Then there’s the grass brushing against the back of my neck. Embers tickling my cheeks and arms with scalding fingers. Crackling flames pushing nauseating heat across the clearing. There are metal sounds—clanking, rattling, groaning. Somewhere way above it all, thunder smacks its hands together. It’s like being inside a car engine just before someone shuts it off. Hot and loud and dangerous.
I feel one raindrop smack into my forehead. Another one hits the back of my hand. Here it comes, I think, remembering the curtains of rain that fell over Windale just before the plane crashed.
Plane crash? Is that really what happened?
My body is still shaken from the shock waves of the explosion. My ears are still ringing, my head still thumping. Yeah, that’s really what happened.
The rain starts as a whisper, then builds into the hollering crowd at a Phillies game. It shushes through the trees, and the sound is so soothing that for a moment I don’t even realize I’m being drowned. Fat drops are pummeling my face, soaking my already soaked clothes, pooling in my open mouth until I’m practically gargling rainwater.
Finally, I manage to roll over, sputtering and choking. At least it’s not on smoke this time. The cool water feels good on my face. It clears my senses a little bit, allows me to refocus. To remember. I think of Gabe and Kimberly and Sonya. My friends. My home.
Speaking of Sonya—where is she? Wasn’t she coming? I thought I heard her moving. I squint past my shitty vision and the relentless rain and the smoke that’s only just breaking apart from the downpour. There are so many stuttering fires and bulky shapes of ruined plane parts. I can’t make anything out. There’s a lump of something on the ground a few feet away that might be Sonya. But it’s not moving. She’s not moving.
“Sonya,” I say. “Sonya!”
I reach for her, but each time I twitch a muscle, my leg sings me a song of torture and misery. I bite down against the pain, try to drag myself across the grass. The ground under me is softening; I feel like I’m sinking. And my body is giving up.
In the distance, past the thing that might be Sonya, amid crooked, towering hunks of the plane, I see a dark, narrow line moving through the mess. A person? Gabe, maybe? Kimberly? I don’t know.
“Hey!” I scream, mustering the last of my strength. I break out into a coughing fit, my throat burning all the way down into my lungs. When I try to scream again, I sound like a broken kazoo. “Hey. We’re here. Please. Help us.”
The stringy shadow stops. Maybe it turns to look at me. Maybe it doesn’t. Did it hear me? It had to. It responded to my voice. They, I mean. Whoever they are.
But then the shadow resumes its stroll through the crash site, heading toward the northern edge of the clearing, away from the wreck, away from Whisper Trail leading back to the lookout and Gabe’s car.
I can still see the four of us a couple of days ago, crammed into that olive-green monstrosity, listening to “Batdance,” the most ridiculous and hilarious song ever, on the radio. We almost didn’t come up here today. Gabe was talking about driving to Pittsburgh. He almost turned down King Street instead of Main, almost drove us right out of town in the opposite direction of Dagger Hill. We almost let him. But Kimberly said no; she didn’t want to be in the car for that long, just to have to turn back and come home right away. We settled on the Hill then, like we always do when we can’t agree on where to go or what to do, which is pretty much all the time.
What did it matter, though? We had the car, we had food, we had music, we had each other. It didn’t have to be Pittsburgh. It could have been Philly or New York or Atlantic City. It could have been an open road with no destination at all. The only thing we had to do was drive. But we didn’t.
And now we’re here.
“Sone…,” I say, trying again, pleading. My voice is gravel and nails. “Sonya. Gabe. Kimberly. Anybody.” I’m talking through dribbling rainwater to no one. The firehouse siren is crying out through all the chaos.
Someone will come for us, I think. Yeah. Someone will come.
I shut my eyes and put my head down on the grass. It’s cool and wet, and I think I might just lie here forever.