1
MY SISTER, MADDIE, IS crying, her pretty face damp and frightened. One of my legs is heavier than the other and I don’t understand and I want to ask her why, but I can’t form words, because there’s an ocean inside me, warm and sweet, and I’m bobbing along the waves, just like the ones that carried me and Joey all those years ago in San Diego, when everything was perfect or as close to it as we could get. That was a nice time, when I was twelve and Joey was thirteen, letting the waves carry us, Maddie stretched out on the beach in her purple bikini and floppy-brimmed hat. Far away from Mill Haven, we were in a different world, where no one knew who we were.
I try to ask Maddie where Joey is, but she can’t understand me. She thinks I’m saying something else, because she leans forward and says, “Do you need more? Do you need me to press the button?”
And her finger presses a button on the side of the bed and the largest wave I’ve ever known billows over me, like the parachute game we played in the gymnasium in kindergarten, all of us laughing as the fabric gently overtook us and blocked out the world.
—
My mother’s voice is trembling. “This is not normal. This is not something that happens to people like us.”
My father sounds weary. He has been weary for years now. Joey makes people weary.
He says, “There is no normal, Abigail. Nothing has ever been normal. Why can’t you see that? He has a problem.”
My finger stretches out for the button to make the waves come again. My parents make me tired, years and years of fighting about Joey.
My mother’s hand touches my head. Like a kitten, I respond, leaning into it. I can’t remember the last time she touched me, stroked my hair. Everything has always been about Joey.
“There was heroin in his system, Abigail. How did we miss that?”
The word floats in the air before me, something eerie and frightening.
There was vomit spattered on his hoodie at the party. When we found him in the bedroom. He was woozy and floppy and strange and made no sense and I thought…
I thought he was just drunk. Stoned, maybe.
“I will fix this,” she says to my father. “He’ll go to rehab, he’ll get better, he’ll come home.”
She says rehab in a clipped way, like it hurts to have the word in her mouth.
“That’s not a magic wand you can wave and make it all go away, Abigail. He could have died. Emory could have died. A girl did die.”
The ocean inside me, the one that was warm and wavy, freezes.
“What did you say?” I whisper. My voice feels thick. Can they understand me? I speak louder. “What did you just say?”
“Emory,” my father says. “Oh, Emory.”
My mother’s eyes are wet blue pools. She curls her fingers in my hair.
“You’re alive,” she tells me. “I’m so grateful you’re alive.”
Her face is blurry from the waves carrying me. I’m struggling inside them, struggling to understand.
“But she just had a headache,” I say. “Candy just had a headache. She can’t be dead.”
My father frowns. “You aren’t making any sense, Emmy.”
She had a headache. That’s why she was in the car. She had a headache at the party, and she wanted a ride home and it can’t be right that a person has a headache and gets in a car and dies and everyone else lives. It can’t be right.
“Joey,” I say, crying now, the tears warm and salty on my face. “I want Joey. Please, get me Joey.”
2
WHEN I OPEN MY eyes, he’s there.
I’ve seen my brother cry only once before, the afternoon he and Luther Leonard decided to dive from the roof of our house into the pool. Luther made it; Joey didn’t, and the sound of his sobs as he writhed on the brick patio echoed in my head for days.
But his crying is quieter now.
“I’m so sorry,” he says. His voice is croaky, and he looks sick, pale and shaky. There are stitches above his left eye. His right arm is in a sling.
“I thought you were drunk,” I say. “I thought you were just drunk.”
Joey’s dark eyes search my face.
“I messed up. I messed up so bad, Emmy.”
Girls swoon over those dark eyes. Or they did. Before he became trouble.
Joey Ward used to be cool, a girl said in the bathroom at Heywood High last year. She didn’t know I was in the stall. Sometimes I stayed in there longer than I needed to, just for some peace. It’s hard all the time. Pretending.
Not anymore, another girl answered. Just another druggie loser.
I cried in the stall, because I knew Joey was more than that. Joey was the one who taught me to ride a bike, because our parents worked all the time. Joey was the one who let me read aloud to him for hours in a bedsheet fort in my father’s den, long after he probably should have been ignoring me in favor of his friends, like most older siblings do. He taught me how to make scrambled eggs and let me stay with him in his attic bedroom while he drew.
Until he didn’t. Until the day I knocked and he told me to go away.
He stands up, wiping his face with his good hand. His beautiful dark hair is in tangles, hanging over his eyes.
“I have to go,” he says. “Mom’s waiting.”
Rehab. It floats back to me from when Mom said it. Was that yesterday? Or this morning? It’s hard to tell. I don’t know how long I’ve been here. Things are bleeding together.
“Joey, why did you do…it?”
I wish I could get out of this bed. I wish my leg wasn’t hanging from some damn pulley in the air and that my body wasn’t heavy with the ocean of drugs inside me.
At the door to my hospital room, Joey turns back, but he doesn’t look at me. He looks at the floor.
“I love you, Emmy, but you have no idea what it’s like to be me.”
And then he’s gone.
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