Before, Alice and I’d talked about EC like a grand adventure we would conquer together. Now, watching all the other students walk to their classes with purpose, it feels like I’m here on my own. A sly, bitter voice appears from a dark corner: Maybe that’s how it should be. One less memory of Before-Bree to live up to. I swallow against the quiet, raw satisfaction that surfaces, but it doesn’t go away. Right now, alone feels… good.
My phone buzzes in my pocket. A text from a number I don’t recognize.
Hi, Briana! This is Nick Davis. Dean McKinnon gave me your number so we could get started today. Want to meet up after classes?
The babysitter already. I swipe it away. Then my phone buzzes again. A call. The name on the screen makes my throat go tight, but I answer it anyway.
“Hey, Dad.”
“There’s my college kid.” My father’s voice is warm and familiar, but my pulse quickens. Did the dean call him already?
“It’s not real college, Dad.” I sit on the stone veranda behind one of the library’s massive columns, tucking myself away from the eyes of passersby.
“It’s a real college campus,” he retorts. “They take my real college money.”
Damn. No comeback there. What I said to Norris was true: I did earn a merit award. My parents weren’t rich, but they’d been good about saving. Even still, the small pot of money they’d saved for my college tuition wouldn’t be enough to pay for a four-year bachelor’s degree without loans. The only reason Dad could afford the two years of EC was because that partial academic award cut the price in half. He doesn’t say as much, but I know he’s gambling that the investment in EC now will help me get into colleges later, and maybe earn scholarships, too. I wince, still smarting from Alice’s comment about my class choices. “S’pose that’s right,” I mumble.
“Mm-hmm.” He chuckles. “How was your first night in a real college dorm?”
My dad doesn’t traffic in subtext. With him, what you see and hear is what you get. If he’d gotten a call from the dean, he’d have let me know by now. Loud and clear. I release a quiet sigh.
“First night here? Quiet,” I lie. It doesn’t feel great, but I don’t feel great right now.
I expect the next question, and it’s right on time. “Met any Black kids yet?”
The only other Black kids in my high school had been a year older than me. A quiet boy named Eric Rollins and a girl named Stephanie Henderson. Whenever we spent time together, the white kids got nervous or, like, weirdly excited? All the other Black folks I know are relatives or from our church two towns over. Carolina’s got a larger Black population than Bentonville High does, that I know for sure. It’s one of the reasons I applied.
“Not yet. I haven’t even gone to my first class.”
“Well, you need a community. When’s your first class?”
“Ten a.m.”
“Had breakfast yet?”
“Not hungry.” I realize I haven’t eaten since before the Quarry.
Dad makes an mmph sound. I imagine his expression as he does it: mouth curled downward, bushy dark brows furrowed, all the lines in his deep brown face frowning at me all at once. “Appetite still comin’ and goin’?” I don’t reply, not ready to lie again just yet. He sighs. His voice is slow, careful, and his Richmond drawl drops away. “The book says that not feeling hungry, not eating, is a physical symptom of grief.”
I knew he’d bring up that book. I can see the title now: Letting Go: Bereavement, Love, and Loss. I squeeze my eyes shut and scramble around for my wall. “I eat. I’m just not hungry right now.”
“Kiddo, while you’re away, I need you to take care of yourself. Meals, rest, grades, make some new friends. If you shut down, you come home. That was the deal, right?” I make my own mmph sound, and his voice gets sharp around the edges. “Excuse me? I’m not sure I heard you. That was the deal. Correct?”
“Correct,” I murmur. That had been the deal. He knew I was miserable at home, and so he let me go, but he’d had reservations. “Dad, I appreciate you asking. I really do. I’m okay, though. Being here is…” Scary. Lonely. Messy. “Good for me.”
“Baby…” The tiniest tremor in my father’s voice makes my chest go tight. “You keep saying you’re okay, but this thing that’s happening to us… I feel it too. I know it feels real bad.”
“I’m good, Dad,” I grit out. I stare at the veranda beneath my feet, and my vision tunnels, goes sharp, then blurry.
“Okay,” he says with a sigh. “Well, try and get some food in your stomach before your class, okay, kiddo?”
“Will do.”
A pause. “Where do we begin?”
I clench my phone tight at my ear. It’s what we say when one of us is overwhelmed. “At the beginning.”
“That’s my smart girl. Talk to you later.”
When we hang up, I’m shaking. My breath comes in short pants; heat climbs around my collar. I dig my elbows into my knees and press the heels of my hands into my eyes. This is why I left. I love my father, but his words puncture every single layer of my wall until it may as well not exist. His grief makes my own emotions break across my skin like an earthquake, opening me up to—
“No,” I whisper into my palms. “No, no, no.” But it’s too late; the memories swell and take me.
The sharp smell of hospital disinfectant. Raw bile in the back of my throat. Cheap, soft wood in the cranny beneath my fingernails as I dig them into the armrest.
Details from that night spin like a hurricane, blocking out the world in layers. The flashback pulls me from the now and into the past, one sense at a time, until I’m in both places, both times at once—
A blue jay jeering and whistling overhead in a tree.
The piercing beep from a life support monitor down the hall.
The campus Bell Tower chimes nine a.m.
The police officer’s deep, even voice… “Route 70 around eight… a hit-and-run.”
Familiar, horrifying, all-consuming—once it starts, this memory is a ride I can’t escape. The only thing to do is let it run its course—
The nurse leaves. The officer watches her go. He sighs. “I’m sorry for your loss…”
Almost over.
Next, we’ll stand, he’ll shake my father’s hand, and we’ll go home without her. I whimper and rock and wait for that awful night to let me go—
But it doesn’t.
I gasp as a new image dislodges itself with a violent crack, like an iceberg in an ocean.
A silver badge on a breast pocket flashing. A body, shimmering. The officer’s blue eyes holding my gaze, then my father’s. His thin, drawn mouth muttering words I can’t hear. Words flowing into the room. A cold wind sweeping through my mind…
Just as quickly, the memory ends.
“That’s not what happened—” As soon as the words leave my mouth, I know they aren’t right.
For the second time in twenty-four hours, my brain wrestles with two conflicting memories of the exact same moment.
I squeeze my eyes shut. The memory of the isel at the Quarry is still there, opaque under a silver smoke blanket of false images. The truth under Selwyn’s lie.