Crash Read online

  And the thing is—that helpless, empty thing that makes me want to curl up in the corner and bawl my eyes out—it’s that I know I can’t make it happen. There’s no way I can convince Sawyer or anybody that this crash will take place, and that nine people, including him, are going to die. And I think part of it is because I don’t quite believe it myself. But if I don’t believe this vision is destined to happen, then I have to believe I’m crazy.

  This feels so much bigger than me, bigger than anything I can do, and I’m swallowed by it. Just thinking about facing Sawyer again, knowing he won’t ever believe me, knowing if he mentions my weirdness to anyone it will ruin any reputation I have left, knowing that his family could so easily do something drastic that will make my father crack, just like my grandfather did, and knowing we could lose everything, scares the hell out of me.

  I don’t know what to do.

  And for the first time, I think about real depression, the disease, and what that must feel like. I mean, my grandfather killed himself—he had a wife and kids and grandkids, and a business that he loved, and he just ended it all. Those good things in his life weren’t enough for him. They couldn’t stop his disease. To him, things seemed to crumble when Fortuno Angotti flourished. Only they didn’t fall apart, they just stayed the same. And I guess that felt like failure to my grandfather. His insides, his brain, couldn’t take it.

  I heard my aunt Mary say once that my grandfather was a selfish person, hurting people like that, and I thought she was right. I’ve thought that about my dad, too. Lots of times.

  But I don’t know about that anymore. Everything about this, about mental illness, is so complicated. I just don’t know.

  • • •

  The rest of the week, I am a zombie. I do what I need to do to get through the day. Talk if I have to. Get my homework done, not really caring if I do it right, seeing crash after crash after crash like I’m stuck in one minute that keeps repeating. On slow nights I send Rowan upstairs and work alone, keeping my mind occupied as best I can. Because I don’t want to think about anything. I try to ignore the vision like I’d ignore a bug splat on the windshield. And I fail. It buzzes between my ears and crawls under my skin and coats the insides of my eyelids. The days blur together and soon it’s another weekend. I ignore Trey’s quizzical glances and Rowan’s concerned looks and questions. I know I need to do something.

  Maybe my grandfather knew that too. But he couldn’t.

  My father can’t.

  And I can’t.

  • • •

  One morning I wake up to Rowan’s alarm and stare at the wall. And it all becomes real. Nine real, human people, people with families and friends and jobs to do, will all die. And I am helpless, and I will never be the same again, and it doesn’t matter that I actually told Sawyer what to expect, because if he doesn’t believe me I’ll still feel like it’s my fault. The weight of this responsibility is so heavy, so crushing, I can’t move.

  “I’m sick,” I tell Rowan when she stumbles out of bed. “Tell Trey he needs to get you to school today.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  I just close my eyes and moan. “Everything.”

  “You need me to get Mom?”

  “No, don’t wake her up. I’m okay, just sick.”

  I hear Rowan hesitating at the door. “I’ll leave her a note to call in to school for you.”

  “Thanks,” I say.

  She closes the door.

  Trey comes in a few minutes later. “Hey,” he whispers.

  I pretend to be asleep. There’s a rattle of keys sliding off my dresser, and then he’s gone.

  Later, when my mom peeks her head in, I ignore her, too. Soon I hear Dad lumbering down the hallway, which means he actually got out of bed today.

  I’ve taken his sickness from him. What a thing to pass down to the next generation.

  • • •

  All day, the wall is my only friend. If I don’t look at the window, it’s a day with few visions.

  Still, the scene rolls through my brain regularly, and I can’t make it go away—the more I try, the more often the vision appears. I don’t want to tell anyone—not a soul—but I admit to myself that I will need a doctor soon. And on the off chance that I’m not already insane, this vision will push me there. I think about what it’ll be like to be in a hospital for people like that . . . people like me, I guess I should say. A hot tear slides from the corner of my eye into my hair. The thought of a crazy roommate scares me, like, a lot. The thought of having to take drugs that make me feel weird, of strange doctors asking me questions about the vision, of my mother with her overly cheerful face coming by to see me and pretending everything’s just fine . . . I can’t take it, I really can’t.

  • • •

  Back when I was in first grade, when my father went crazy with the hoarding and the depression, he was in the hospital for a few days. I visited him—only once, though. I can still remember the smell of that place. His roommate was a scary man with white hair and a red-splotched face. His eyes bulged, and the scariest thing to me was that he didn’t have any teeth. He walked up and down the hallway muttering to himself, and I was so afraid of his gummy maw coming after me that I slammed the door to my dad’s room when he was coming in, and screamed when my mom tried to take me out of there, past him. Trey was with us, and Aunt Mary, too. We must have closed the restaurant . . . I don’t remember. It doesn’t really matter.

  I wonder what goes through my father’s mind every day. If it’s anything like this, well, I guess I feel sorry for him.

  • • •

  Around two in the afternoon, I hear a soft knock on the door. I want to ignore it, but for some reason I say, “Come in.”

  It’s my father. I turn over in bed, hoping I look as sick on the outside as I feel on the inside. “Hi,” I say.

  He looks scruffy and tired, but he’s wearing his chef jacket. He puts a plate of toast, complete with parsley garnish, on my bedside table and sets a glass of clear carbonated liquid next to it. “I thought you might be getting hungry,” he says, his normally booming voice softened. “Did I wake you up?”

  I shake my head and sit up. “Thanks.”

  He puts the back of his hand on my forehead like Mom always does, and holds it there for a few seconds. Then he pulls it away and says nothing.

  “It’s more of a stomach thing,” I say.

  He nods, and we both know I’m lying.

  “Well,” he says. He fidgets with his hands, his big thumbs bumbling around each other, and I realize I hardly even know him at all. I’ve lived with this man for almost seventeen years and all I know about him is that he’s an embarrassment to me. It kind of leaves a gigantic hole in my heart.

  I wonder what he thinks about. If he ever thinks about killing himself. He turns to go, and I almost call out after him to wait. I almost whisper, “Do you ever see visions?” But I don’t say anything.

  The reason I don’t is that even if his answer is no, I can guess that he, out of anyone in the world, will know why I’m asking—because I must be experiencing them. Which would lead to my parents putting me Someplace Else. And right now, today, a partly cloudy February day just outside of Chicago, I cannot risk leaving this bed for anything. Not for any doctor, not for any vision.

  Not for any boy.

  Twenty

  When Trey sneaks upstairs after the dinner rush, around nine, he doesn’t ask for permission to come in. He sits on the bed and looks at me.

  “So. What are you sick of?”

  I smirk. “You.”

  He rolls his eyes. “Are you going to live, or what?”

  And that question, that joke, makes me hesitate. It burns through me. Am I? I look up at him, and my chest feels so much fear it squeezes my heart, makes it throb faster and faster.

  “It’s not a difficult question,” he says with a smile, but I can see him searching me, trying to get inside my brain. He’s been giving me a lot of looks like that lately.
He knows me too well.

  “Yes,” I decide, thinking of body bags in the snow. “I’ll live.”

  He rests his elbows on his knees, thumbs on his forehead, holding it up, massaging it, maybe. He closes his eyes, like he needs to think. And then he takes an audible breath and says, “I’m just gonna say this: You’re not pregnant, are you?”

  I almost laugh. And then my eyes get wide, because he’s not laughing. “No, of course not. Is that what Dad thinks?”

  “Yeah.”

  I let my head fall back on the pillow. “Jeez. I haven’t even kissed anybody yet. I’m, like, the poster child for purity. I still have my freaking . . . my freaking . . .”

  “Cherry?”

  “No—”

  “Hymen intact?”

  I slug him. “Oh my God, shut up.”

  “Virginity?”

  “Ugh! No! Well, yes, but—dammit, I can’t think of the term. What’s that thing girls used to wear in the olden days to keep the—just, never mind.”

  “Chastity belt?”

  “Yeah. That. Sheesh. Joke gone horrendously wrong.” I laugh, and it feels weird, like I haven’t laughed in days.

  Trey still holds a deadpan look. “So, to confirm: You’re not having an alien Antichrist baby from the seed of Angotti.”

  “Ah, no. Correct, I mean. Gross terminology threw me off.”

  “I will deliver the news thusly.”

  I stare at him. “Did he send you up here to ask me that?”

  “No,” Trey says, shifting his weight and relaxing on the bed. “I just read it in the worry lines on his forehead and figured I’d find out sooner rather than later, because I was wondering too.”

  “You?” I say, incredulous. “I am completely befuzzled by that. Don’t you think I’d tell you if I managed to get close enough to Hottie Angotti to get pregnant?”

  He shrugs and picks my cell phone up off the dresser. “You don’t seem to tell me much at all lately,” he says. He starts playing with it, pushing things on the screen.

  I narrow my eyes and he turns so I can’t see. “What are you doing? Searching my contacts or something?” I reach for the phone and he pulls it away. “Hey!”

  “Calm it down, Demarco. I’m just playing Angry Bunnies.”

  “Oh.” I struggle to sit up. I can feel my hair is all matted on one side. “Really? Or are you just saying that?”

  “Yes, really. So what’s going on with you?” he says, his eyes on the game, but I don’t think he’s actually playing it. “You’re acting extremely weird these days.”

  At his words, memories of the vision pop into my mind again. I let my head bump against the wall, and I close my eyes. Like a rain cloud, all the dread, the helplessness, the fear, rush over me again, a waterfall of hurt, and I start to drown in it. A sigh escapes me, and then another, and another, until the sighs admit they are sobs and the bed starts to quiver.

  “Aw, dang it, Jules,” Trey says. “Come ’ere, then.” Trey tugs on my arm; I bury my face in his shoulder and the tears come pouring out, a flood of them, and I can’t stop it.

  This is what I tell him through the sobs:

  I am afraid of my life.

  I am afraid of turning into Dad.

  And, sometimes, I see things that aren’t there.

  • • •

  He doesn’t freak out, thankfully. But he’s seriously concerned.

  “What kind of things?”

  “I don’t know . . . .”

  “Well, like giant spiders, or clowns, or imaginary friends, or ghosts, or what?”

  I suck in a breath and let it out, beginning to regret the last five minutes with all my heart. I shouldn’t have told him. “Like . . . a crash.”

  “You see car crashes that don’t actually happen?” He sits up straight, forehead wrinkled in alarm. “What, so you’re crossing the street, and boom, there’s a crash, metal crunching, people getting mangled and all of that, right in front of you?”

  “No, not an actual crash. Just, like, a movie version of it. It’s not physically happening in the street, I just see . . . pictures. Like a film. Like, everywhere.”

  “And you’re aware . . . I mean—” He stares hard at my phone now, and I know what he’s asking.

  “Yes,” I say, my voice turning clinical. “I’m cognizant of the fact that this is not normal, yet I can’t stop it.”

  He blinks. “I don’t get it.”

  “Me neither.”

  Trey stares at me for a long moment and puts my phone on my bedside table. “Kiddo, I know you don’t want to hear this, but I really—”

  “No.”

  “Jules, I mean it—”

  “No, Trey,” I say again, firmer this time.

  “I think,” he says even more firmly, “we should tell Mom.”

  “No!” I say. “No! Please—I trusted you. And we can’t tell her. No way. She’ll . . .” I imagine all the things she’ll do, unable to decide which is the worst. Freak out. Pretend everything is fanfreakingtastic. Or worst of all, tell Dad. “Ugh,” I say, sliding down in the bed, turning to face the wall, and pulling the covers over my head. And then I say softly, “She’ll put me in the hospital, Trey. Like Dad.”

  At first, I can’t tell if he hears me. He doesn’t deny it. He doesn’t answer at all. And then, once time begins again, he sighs deeply, and I feel his hand squeeze my shoulder. “Okay,” he says. “We’ll think about it. Talk it through, figure out what to do. All right? Let me know if it gets worse.”

  I close my eyes and let out a breath of relief. “Yeah.”

  Twenty-One

  All night I dream about it—the crash, the explosion, the nine body bags in the snow, the fire. Sawyer’s dead face. But in my dreams the events happen in random order. At the end, the body bags stand up and dance around in the snowy, fiery night, as if they are ghosts trying to get out of their containments. Sawyer’s eyes fly open and he cries out to me for help, but I just walk away, going into a hospital that magically appears next door. Doctors take me by the hands and I begin to shrink. As I get smaller they swing me like a little kid down the hallway, and then they let go and I soar into a jail-like cell with bars on the doors. The doors clank shut. I hear someone muttering and cackling, and when I look up, a toothless, red-faced scary guy is locked in my cell with me.

  I wake up kicking and sweating. Rowan is standing next to my bed saying my name.

  I stare at her. It takes me a second to remember where I am. “Oh,” I say, breathing hard. “Hey.”

  “Are you okay?”

  I swallow, my throat totally dry, and then nod. “Yeah. Bad dream.”

  “Oh,” she says. “Well, you were kind of moaning, or crying or something.” She goes back to her bed and sits on the edge of it, facing me.

  “I was?” My brain is a cotton ball.

  She nods in the dark. “You kept saying, ‘Listen to me!’”

  I unwind my leg from the bedsheet. “Huh.” The nightmare is already starting to fade and the jagged pieces of it aren’t fitting together anymore. “Did I say anything else?”

  “Nothing that I could figure out. Are you still sick?”

  I continue to untangle myself from my blankets and ponder the question. When I think about going to school, about seeing Sawyer, about the vision everywhere, my stomach churns and I feel like throwing up. “Yeah,” I decide. “I’m still sick.”

  • • •

  It’s light in the room when I wake again, and I feel refreshed, like I’ve slept a hundred years. Rowan is gone, the house is quiet, and the first doughy smells of the day are wafting up from below. I sit up and check the clock. It’s almost eleven, and I’m starving. My head feels . . . I don’t know. Less heavy or something. I can’t really identify the feeling, but it’s a kind of restlessness. Like my feet are tired of being in this bed. My legs won’t stay still.

  I get up and stretch, testing my muscles, and tentatively think about the vision, bracing myself for that overwhelming fear to take
over, but it doesn’t. The fear is still there, all right, but it’s . . . I don’t know. More manageable. Softer, maybe. The vision appears on the window, as it has been doing lately, but today it is less in-your-face. It stays in the background, and I can actually think around it. I don’t even know if that makes sense, but that’s how it feels.

  I pad softly to the kitchen and toast a bagel in the quiet. It’s so strange to be the only one up here. So nice. I take my breakfast to the chair in the living room and tuck my toes up under my nightgown. I sit there and soak in the sounds of the street below—a garbage truck, an occasional honk of a horn, an exuberant Italian greeting a friend now and then.

  I think about the snowplow again and close my eyes to ward off the panic, but the panic doesn’t come, only a controllable fear, one that I can handle. I marvel at myself, wondering where the calm came from. Maybe it was the twelve hours of sleep, or crying it out with Trey last night, or the nightmare working something out for me in my subconscious, like Mr. Polselli talked about once in a section on dreams. But as I sit here, I think maybe it’s something else. Maybe it’s coming from the same source that brought me this vision in the first place. Maybe it’s telling me that it’s not quite as futile as it seems, and it’s trying to give me directions now and then if I would only listen.

  I think about that for a long time.

  • • •

  Later, I take a rare long shower. With one bathroom for five people, there’s hardly ever enough time or hot water for something so luxurious. But today I stand here, eyes closed, letting the water beat down and the steam float over my skin and into my lungs. I wash my body, scrub the grease out of my hair, and smooth conditioner through it. At one point, thinking about the conversation yesterday with Trey, about how he and Dad thought I was pregnant, I just shake my head and almost laugh.

  But then my mind wanders to Sawyer. To sixth grade, and to my Sawyer pillow, and my dreams of kissing him. The water burrows down on my lips, my neck. My collarbone. I turn my hips slowly side to side, and suddenly I can feel every thread of water moving over my skin, making it come alive.