As I turn off the ignition, a Volvo pulls in a few spots over. I glance over without even meaning to: the white of the car’s paint catches the sun, and it’s like I can’t help looking.
And there she is.
My ex, Rosaline.
I usually time this better. I usually get us here early, because I know Rosa, and if there’s one thing you can count on with her, it’s that she’s always, always late. But that stupid word on our stupid garage door threw me off schedule this morning, and now we’re stuck.
Gwenie opens her door and then looks back over at me, because I’m sitting here, immobile. She must spot Rosa through my window, because she sucks in a breath.
“Shit. Zach…” She trails off.
“I know.” I squeeze my eyes shut and count to ten to steady myself, like the school counselor told me to do last time I was in his office, after another nasty note was left in my locker and a teacher found me slumped against the door.
“What are we going to do?” She sounds scared.
“I don’t know.” I glance back through the window at Rosa’s car and find myself looking directly into her eyes. She looks as surprised as I feel, and for a split second I think I see something cross her face that doesn’t look like the normal revulsion she directs toward me and my family, but then it’s gone, replaced by the mask of anger and contempt she’s worn nonstop since last fall.
Unlike my sister and me, she doesn’t hesitate to get out of her car. As I watch, unable to tear my eyes away, she pulls off her seat belt and throws open her car door in one oddly elegant motion.
My heart is ripping in two inside my chest. Gwenie and I are trapped like rodents in the car, and I don’t know where to direct my eyes. I’m sweating; my shirt’s gonna be a mess. And we haven’t even gotten out of the car yet. This is a fucked-up way to start the new semester, but fucked-up is pretty much par for the course these past few months, thanks to our lovely mother.
I glance in the rearview mirror and see Rosa, her back rigid, walking quickly away. A small hand slips into mine, and only then do I realize that I’m trembling something fierce.
Gwen and I sit there silently in my car, trapped, waiting for the coast to clear.
I’m fucking sore.
And tired.
Tired and sore. Biking home from the lawyer’s house took way too long last night.
And now I’m driving to school. For the first time in almost a year.
Not Carter, of course. They closed that building down a few months after, because the air inside was full of ghosts. Bad ghosts. Pained ghosts. My brother’s ghost.
No, I’m driving to some other high school in the Valley—a school we used to play in sports occasionally, I think. I never knew anyone who went there. It was too far away, and Los Angeles traffic is beyond shitty. This morning it’s taken me over forty minutes to get here, and it’s less than ten miles away. Quincy Adams High School. It sounds so bougie. So fucking lame. Lucy says it’s been weird—all the Carter kids keep to themselves, and the QA kids let them. She says it feels like they’re afraid of us. Like we’re infected by what happened. Apparently, last semester the administration tried to force interaction by doing stupid assemblies where they would do team-building exercises and shit. That went over about as well as you’d expect.
Last year, for a few months right after the shooting, they tried to keep us at Carter, which was an extremely stupid idea if you ask me. Toward the end of the semester, things got so bad, with breakdowns and fights and people dropping out left and right, too afraid to go back to that place, and they finally decided a fresh start was better for everyone.
Hence, their decision to transfer half of the leftover kids from Carter here at the beginning of the new school year and half to Miller, the next closest high school in the Valley. This is where I ended up when my parents and Dr. McMillen decided homeschooling wasn’t working out. Wasn’t working out…so sue me if I couldn’t take that whimpering homeschool teacher seriously as she sat in front of me, clutching my textbooks in her aging hands, barely able to hold them up. Couldn’t take her seriously as we both sat there ignoring the ever-present ghost of my brother, which draped itself over everything in the house, over furniture like ill-fitting slipcovers, over conversations like a heavy fog, over every fucking interaction like an anchor pulling us down, down, down to the bottom of the ocean.
Last fall, the Executive Decision (vom) was made that it would be better for my mental health (again, vom) if I was around people. Not homeschooled, since my parents couldn’t (read: wouldn’t) be there with me to make sure I was, you know, actually doing stuff and not just ignoring the teacher they’d brought in, who had failed at her “job” pretty miserably.
Principal Rose-Brady somehow convinced the school board to let me back in, even though I’m pretty sure she had to field several angry phone calls after that decision from parents of kids who I may or may not have punched in the face at some point in the past. Honestly, though, how could those parents fight my reenrollment? The fact is: I’m a SURVIVOR.
I’m the leftover.
The lucky one.
The only one in that room who lived.
And now I’m back in school.
It sucks.
* * *
—
I don’t know where to park, so I spend far too long trying to maneuver through the stupid maze of a lot, one hand on the wheel and the other clutching the hand-drawn map Lucy gave me last night to try to alleviate my anxiety.
I’m so exhausted that the lines of her drawing keep twisting together like ropes, crossing in imaginary places. I didn’t get home until almost two a.m.; I stayed on that driveway for almost an hour, lying there with that stupid cat, just breathing. Feeling like the sky was pressing down on my head, like the stars were going to pop like old lightbulbs any second, leaving the world black.
I finally find my space and turn the car into it with enough force that for a second I’m afraid the brakes will fail and I’ll go slamming into the car across the way. I’m used to Jordan sitting next to me, reminding me to slow down. Even toward the end, when we weren’t talking much, when our silences could swallow entire car rides, his hand on my arm could calm me. Now there’s an empty seat next to me: a reminder that I’m alone.
Once I’m parked, I head across the sidewalk to the main building.
When I reach the front door, I remember what I forgot.
The sight of the metal detectors slams me in the stomach. They look like something out of a sci-fi movie, something that I should see in a place that is dangerous and frightening, not in a school building, but of course now they are one and the same, the frightening places and the daily places, and my mouth tugs downward and my stomach plummets through the asphalt into the center of the earth.