I brush my hand over Jonah’s knuckles on my jaw.
The world lights up like a flare.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
I HAVE SECONDS TO feel it
before the world goes gray
Two more
Three
and
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
I WANT TO TELL everyone to stop touching me, stop touching me, my skin hurts, everything hurts.
I’m so thirsty.
I’m on fire.
Stop touching me, stop talking to me.
I try to talk but I can’t. I’m just being jostled everywhere and how am I supposed to focus through this?
I say, “No no,” and that’s about all I can manage.
There are hands on my torso and my legs and people are being so loud.
So loud.
I think: Where is Jonah?
I think: I will never fucking forgive you
I think: STOP TOUCHING ME
I stop thinking.
When I do wake up, for real, it is to fluorescents and an IV in my arm.
There is a persistent beeping beside me and there are thin sheets over me and I feel like I can breathe.
I blink up at the ceiling, at the sterile flicker of the lights, and close my eyes again, listening to the shuffle of feet and the murmured conversations and . . . and what that means is that I am in a hospital.
I am . . . I am off the mountain.
And I am in a hospital.
Oh my god.
Oh my god.
My heart rate spikes and quick fear clutches at my chest. “Where’s Jonah?” I say.
There’s a gasp at my bedside, and my mother falls on top of me.
She’s hugging me so hard and she’s crying, sobbing in a way I’ve never seen her do.
“Hallie?” My dad’s voice is low and strained. He’s never been less than totally composed and controlled, but when he says my name, I hear only the raw.
He lets out one monstrous sob and catches it, then kneels by my bedside, his head touching the edge of the bed, touching my side.
“Oh my god,” he says.
And then I’m crying because it’s over. It’s over and I’m alive and it is remarkable how quickly it all starts to feel like a dream.
I wait. I wait for what feels like forever but what is probably not more than sixty seconds, then I say: “Where is Jonah?”
My dad tenses just the slightest bit beside me; it’s instinct, I guess. A tiny piece of me is mad, but I just don’t have the room in my body for that feeling. I don’t have the energy.
My mom says, “Jonah’s okay.”
I nod and clench my jaw.
And then I cry.
My cousins come visit me, too. Everyone does. I haven’t gotten to see Jonah yet, but it’s okay; I guess it’s okay. Because I am dying to see everyone else. They saved us. They risked their lives to save us. Because we are family. Of course, we were complete morons for leaving like that, but Jaxon is so quiet and gentle about all of it, like I’ll break.
Now that we are out of crisis, everyone can release their emotions in a flood.
Jolie vacillates between desperately relieved, crying and hugging me, and furious. She’s not worried about the storm and her leg and our lives and now, so she’s just letting everything go.
She’s so mad that she had to process me dying.
That they all had to deal with the likelihood that we were gone forever.
I get it.
I get it.
But we weep into each other’s shoulders at the end of everything because she saved us. They saved us. Despite everything. We’re okay.
It’s all normal.
It feels . . . normal?
It all feels . . . wrong.
It feels good to wake up in a bed, to be hydrated, to get shitty hospital food that tastes like it was made by a Michelin-starred chef.
To have my family again.
It feels good.
It also just feels . . . off. Strange. Maybe to be separated from Jonah by people and walls and wires and normalcy.
It feels off and I feel so far removed from all of it— almost numb. Like it never happened, like it isn’t real, but also like it’s the only real thing that’s ever happened in my life, and this has got to be what’s fake. Hasn’t it?
I think about these things when I am granted a few moments of quiet.
When I am alone, I consider the depth of apathy about everything and the deep dark of the mountain sky and the questions of what the hell happened to me. For minutes at a time.
I am not disappointed to be off the mountain. I am breathlessly relieved.
But I also know that I have no idea how to be here.
I have no idea how to talk and function normally and wake up and brush my teeth and order food and . . . I have no idea.
I have no idea what comes next.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
WEEKS PASS.
They pass strangely; compared to the few days on the mountain, everything moves too quickly. Twenty-four hours feel like twelve. Ten. At first, everything moves on fast forward. There are too many voices and too many visitors and too much talk about what happened to me.
But then it’s like it stops altogether.
Everyone begins to slide back into normalcy. We take turns sitting with Zayde and bringing food to him and staying the night. I start classes at school and everyone has heard about what happened over break to the new girl, but no one knows me, and so every time someone asks me if it’s okay, it doesn’t feel like concern; it feels like voyeurism.
No one slows down to rubberneck when they pass a big accident on the highway because they’re concerned. They do it because they’re curious.
I hang out with Jolie, mostly, and she and the arts crowd protect me from assholes dying for a little drama that can’t affect them.
It’s normal, anyway.
I’m back to the daily grind.
And so is everyone else.
Little by little, hour by hour, we all start to forget.
At first, my parents were extra attentive, coming into my room to check on me all the time, going out of their way to bring me stuff, even being super cool with Uncle Reuben and all of them.
But now, well. Well, it’s been a couple weeks and no one is afraid that I’m going to disappear in the snow, a body to be found years later, frozen at seventeen in the headlines.
I sit at the kitchen table, scrolling through my phone, and find myself on Jonah’s Instagram. He hardly ever updates it so I’m just mindlessly thumbing through the same old stuff I do every morning.
Every evening.
The pattern, I guess, is comforting.
Or something.
I don’t know, but I know that when my mom says, “No phones at the table, Hallie,” the urge to snap at her is instant and overwhelming.
I clench my teeth.
But I put my phone away.
Mom says, “How was school?”
I normally just let it slide at Fine because I don’t want to go into shit with them. I don’t want to go into it at all, and I honestly don’t know if it’s because now I’m super depressed or if it’s because I always felt like this.
This is how it is now, since the mountain.
Everything feels wrong, and I am eight thousand percent uncertain.
I fucking—I fucking hate uncertainty.
God, I’ve never been uncertain in my life.
And now here I am, unable to remember what my policy on school details has always been, and when my mom says, “Did you want broccoli or carrots or both?” I reply, “I don’t know.”