Читать книгу Unravelling - Elizabeth Norris, Elizabeth Norris - Страница 20

follow my messed-up schedule for the rest of the day, and each class I walk into, the teacher just looks at my name and gives me a sad look of apology. They let me sit in the back of the room and don’t even give me the books. It’s painful that they know I don’t belong in their classes, yet here I am.

The inefficiency makes me want to throw up.

And for all Nick’s flirting this morning, and all those sweet thoughts that turned me into a melty pile of mush, turns out he’s still a douche bag. Sure, I told him to go to lunch without me, but he said he wouldn’t.

sry babe get u off tmrw

Based on that grammatical monstrosity of a text, I know he’s already off campus with Kevin, headed to Bread Bites, so I wander into the quad for lunch.

I’m walking toward the grassy area in front of the L building when some girl lets out one of those bloodcurdling screams— the scary-movie kind. My body tenses, and I swear I can see headlights in front of me, and I have this crazy desire to throw my hand up and cover my face.

But as I whirl toward the sound, the girl—Roxy Indigo, who I only know because she got a 6 percent in our ceramics class freshman year—has dissolved into hysterical laughter, while she tries, halfheartedly, to pull her denim skirt—currently bunched up around her waist, revealing a black thong—back down over her hips. After homecoming last year, word around campus was she got so drunk at the after-party that she passed out and peed herself in the back of her date’s SUV.

Which reminds me that I don’t have any friends here, because I’ve never really wanted any.

Except . . .

Ben Michaels is staring at me. Lounging in the shade of the theater overhang with a couple of his stoner buddies, he’s only a few feet from Roxy, and once she gets her skirt readjusted, she’s headed back over there.

He doesn’t turn his head to look at her, even though it’s obvious she’s talking to him. He just watches me. And normally, this is the point where I’d roll my eyes at the creeptasticness of it all. I mean, hello, stalker much? But he’s not leering at me. And the look on his face isn’t this possessive, he-wants-to-devour-me kind of look. It’s different. Almost as if he’s daring me to go over there.

So I do. And as I walk toward him, I stare right back at him, letting every ounce of frustration—at my schedule, at this day, at this life I managed to create for myself—swell in my chest. Tension curls itself through my muscles, ready to unleash in his direction if he isn’t straight with me.

Only then I’m standing in front of him, and I realize I haven’t the slightest idea what I’m going to say.

It isn’t that easy to walk up to a guy in front of his friends and say, I’m pretty sure I died the other day and you brought me back to life. What do you have to say about that?

Instead I look at Ben and say, “Can I talk to you for a minute?”

He shrugs.

Fabulous. “Like, somewhere else?”

Someone snickers, and I glance to the right where Reid Suitor is sitting with four other guys whose names I don’t know. Reid and another guy are—no lie—chewing on pieces of grass.

“You lost, baby? Or are you looking to rebel against Daddy?”

“Wow, that’s original. What eighties movie did you steal that line from?” I say, turning left to the speaker. Elijah Palma. Great. This is already going worse than I had expected. Maybe I should just tell myself Alex was right—near-death experience triggered the firing of random nerve endings in my brain, and I imagined those visions. Maybe it was a sign there really is a hell and I’m going to end up there.

Elijah shrugs. His washed-out blue eyes are so bloodshot, he looks half-dead. “Hey, I’m willing to take one for the team.”

Someone punches Elijah in the shoulder and says, “Knock it off, asshole.” I know without looking that it’s Ben. His voice is already familiar to me, even though I’ve barely heard him say two words.

“Take one for the team?” I know I shouldn’t be egging him on, but I can’t help it. I still haven’t figured out what the hell I’m going to say to Ben, so I might as well burn my frustration by picking a fight with his friend. “What team are you even on, anyway?”

And no, I have no idea how to properly trade witty insults. But no one notices, because I’ve just implied Elijah’s gay, and it doesn’t matter that it wasn’t particularly clever.

“I don’t screw uptight virgins,” he sneers, and my face floods with heat.

Reid laughs, apparently in agreement.

I want to say something back, but my voice is frozen. Elijah, Reid, Roxy, Ben—they’re gone, no longer in front of me. Instead I’m fifteen again, waking up at 2:13 a.m. after I just lost my best friend, in a car parked outside Chad Brandel’s house with my jeans undone and my underwear ripped.

Doubled over in hysterics, Roxy leans into Elijah, and he wraps an arm around her. They’re perfect for each other.

“I said shut the fuck up, dude.” Again, it’s Ben.

But Elijah keeps going. “You think you’re the first prude to get in some kind of accident and realize you’re wasting your life away? You can’t just come over here for a pity fuck and an adrenaline rush. You—”

A fist crashes into his cheekbone, and the force rocks him backward, knocking Roxy to the side. A couple other guys laugh.

And then Ben is standing in front of me, holding on to his hand and rubbing his knuckles. He jerks his head toward the L building, and we both start walking that way.

It hasn’t escaped my notice that he stuck up for me. That he just punched one of his friends—a kid notorious for getting suspended at least once every few months for kicking the shit out of someone—because I’d been insulted.

The notion is a little barbaric, but I’m too flattered to care.

Ben opens the door to the first classroom and holds it for me. The lights are on, and about ten kids are eating at a table in the far corner of the room, but I don’t see the teacher. There’s only a note on her whiteboard that reads Do NOT leave a mess in the microwave. Please ☺.

“Hey, Ben,” one of the girls at the back table says. “Everything okay?” Only, as she stands up, I realize she isn’t a student at all. Miss Poblete is five foot nothing and probably in her late twenties, but she could easily pass for a student.

Ben nods. “Yeah, we just needed a quiet place to go over a few things.” As Ben lowers himself into a sitting position on one of the tables, I wonder why he seems so comfortable here.

Poblete smiles at me and sits back down.

“Book club,” Ben says.

“What?”

He nods toward Poblete and the others. “She has book club meetings every Monday. If we’re quiet, they won’t listen.”

My cheeks warm again as I turn to look at him. There’s no easy way to say any of this. “You were there, at Torrey Pines, the day I got hit by that truck,” I whisper.

It’s not a question, but he nods anyway. So much for Alex’s theory that Ben doesn’t go to the beach.

“What did you do to me?”

He looks down at his feet, dangling a few inches above the floor. He swings them lightly, nervously. “Nothing.”

I shake my head even though he isn’t looking at me. “No, I remember you. I remember seeing your face when I opened my eyes.”

He shrugs and doesn’t take his eyes off his shoes. “I checked to see if you were okay.”

I don’t know him at all, but I know he’s lying. “But I wasn’t okay.”

“You—”

“Don’t—” Lie to me, I want to say as I step closer to him. Instead I say nothing and glance toward the back of the room. No one’s looking at us.

When I turn back to Ben, he’s staring at me. His jaw sets into a hard line. “I’m not sure what you want me to say.”

“You did something to me, something I can’t explain.” I pause, trying to find the right words. But I’m not sure they exist. “I . . . I died.” I rush on before he can tell me I’m crazy. “I mean, I felt it. I felt myself die—my heart stopped, there was nothingness, then there was this lightness—” I stop because I’m not making any sense. “But then suddenly I was back and you were leaning over me. I couldn’t move, but you did something to my back so I could, and the doctors who looked at my X-ray said my back had been broken and healed again.”

I’m close enough to him now that he can’t swing his legs without them hitting me.

“So, Ben Michaels, what did you do to me?”

He looks up when I say his name, and his eyes connect to mine—they’re as black as an oil well. And I remember the way they looked at me before. “Does it matter?”

“Yes. Yes, it does.”

“Why?”

“Because I need to know,” I say, my voice rising uncontrollably. I take a deep breath and try to maintain my composure. Then I whisper, “Something happened to me, and I need to understand what it was.”

“No, you don’t,” he says with a small laugh.

And even though he doesn’t sound condescending, it makes me feel like he thinks I’m just a silly girl. Irrational and crazy. My fists clench at my sides, and I bite the inside of my cheek.

“You’re alive now, focus on that, right?” he says.

He waits for a response, but I don’t give him one. Sophomore year I tried to be a peer mediator, and they told us the best way to get people to keep talking was just to be silent. When you don’t say anything, the other person is tempted to fill that silence, and you can get more out of them. I didn’t make it as a peer mediator because I kept injecting my own opinions and judgments—shocking, I know—but I held on to that advice. It actually works.

And it works on Ben. He sighs and runs a hand through his hair, tugging on the ends. “If you keep focusing on what happened, when you actually die, you’ll still be thinking you haven’t really done anything.”

I pull back, and a hushed gasp escapes my mouth, because it’s like he was there with me when I was dying.

Is that what happened? I don’t even know.

“I didn’t mean that,” he says, sliding off the table. “That didn’t come out the way I wanted it to, I mean.” He pauses to chew on the corner of his bottom lip. “Look, I saw it happen. I came over to check on you, then when other people came over too, I backed away and gave them room.”

“But—”

He shakes his head. “No, I’m serious. You had a traumatic experience. I was the first person you saw when you opened your eyes.”

I nod, because Alex has already said as much, and, well, it does make sense. The problem is that deep inside my chest, that explanation feels wooden—hollow. And even Ben’s speech sounds rehearsed. I don’t hear any conviction behind his words.

“Why were you at the beach?”

He smirks. “What, I can’t go to the beach? It was summer.”

He starts to walk away, like our conversation is over.

“I don’t believe that,” I say. It comes out quietly, but I know he hears me because he stops. Keeping his back to me, he just waits, and I get the impression from his posture that he’s holding his breath. I believe he brought me back. I don’t know how yet, but I will. I do know that right now, I believe I’m here—I’m alive—because of him. The sense of gratitude makes me dizzy and light-headed, like I need to take a deep breath.

And apparently all rational thought leaves my head and my body takes on a life of its own, because I take a step toward him, reaching out, until the tips of two of my fingers brush against his. I don’t know what I’m doing, it’s been forever since I just held hands with anyone, and my hand seems to tingle with the touch.

“I don’t know what you want me to say,” Ben says. His voice is quiet and cracks slightly at the end, as if he feels helpless, as if he wishes he had some kind of answer. And that is almost enough to make me back off and leave Ben Michaels and whatever freaky shit he’s into alone. Only I’m tired of being hollow inside.

You’ll still be thinking you haven’t really done anything.

I want to feel something. I want to feel . . . alive.

And whatever he says, Ben Michaels is the reason I have the chance.

“I just . . . Thank you.” And as I say it, I squeeze his hand, the level of pressure directly correlating to the depth of emotion I’m feeling—that is to say, it had to feel a little like his bones might start cracking. “Thank you.”

I let go and leave him standing there. No matter how much I want to look back, I don’t.