His mother still cried sometimes. Especially after an unsuccessful day of trying to get Jonas to show some interest in something other than watching the Star Wars movies over and over again (and wishing that there was some way he could get his hands on a robotic leg of a quality à la the hand that Luke Skywalker got after having his own chopped off by a lightsaber) or playing video games on the PlayStation his parents had gotten him after The Accident, mindlessly defeating enemies until his head emptied of all the worries about what his first year of college would bring. I don’t understand! I just want to help him and I don’t know how! he’d heard his mom cry to his father one night when he’d snuck down the hall for a drink, a phantom on crutches in the darkness. (He’d gone back to his room without the drink, and with guilt squeezing his insides again.)
He pulled the Bus to a jerky stop at the stoplight. This was it. The last thing between him and the main road.
The light turned green and he shakily accelerated, turning rather ungracefully but managing to stay in his lane, which was a plus. Jonas mentally added another point to his first-time-driving-again score.
After several turns, he was about ready to convince himself that this really was okay after all. His muscle memory was starting to kick in, and his braking and acceleration weren’t so shaky and halting. (Plus, his hands weren’t as sweaty.)
In hindsight, maybe he’d spoken—or thought—too soon.
At that moment, a semitruck passed in the left lane. Jonas held his breath. His vision wobbled a bit, sparking in and out of static, like a radio with a bad signal. He imagined that the truck was coming into his lane and ended up swerving dizzily, only to find that the truck was firmly where it belonged, and it was just the spinning of his head that was warping things. It was flashes—a semitruck; the shocked face of a man named Paul Whitford; Rhys crying and saying Jonas’s name over and over again, like the more times he said it, the more likely he’d be to get a response.
Was he dying? Or just having a panic attack? The horizon line was wonky, and Jonas desperately pleaded with himself not to pass out. He was so busy holding his breath and vise gripping the steering wheel as he watched the truck, trying not to give in to a flashback to the moment when everything had gone black, that he didn’t notice the red light in front of him.
When Jonas did notice the light, he panicked. Everything went from slow motion to 2x speed—he went for the brake with his right foot, which seemed abnormally sluggish for the speed at which everything was happening, while his left foot, the one belonging to the unwieldy prosthetic leg, somehow got stuck under the pedal. Shouldn’t have done this. Shouldn’t have done this, was all he could think, over and over as he slammed down the brake, pressing it as far as it would go with his shoelace caught around it and his prosthetic foot jammed up under it. His thoughts switched from Shouldn’t have done this to I’m going to die now; this is it to What if I lose my other leg? No-legs Jonas?
The van came to a stop, but not before bumping into the car in front of him, jolting it slightly.
And everything stopped but the ringing in his ears. Shouldn’t have done this.
2
brennan
Brennan hadn’t felt like going to work today.
Not that she felt like going to work any day. Her last summer before college was speeding by, the days blurring together, too slippery for her to grasp hold of the time and hold on.
Brennan would have spent the entire summer holed up in her room, writing. Instead, she was spending the summer working, trying to save money for college expenses. She glanced at the pennant she’d pinned to the wall above her desk in hopes of rousing some excitement—some sort of spark—for school. For college. SIUE. Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. Brennan felt a little sick thinking about making it her new home. It was a nice school—really nice; on visits, she’d almost felt like she could belong. Back at home, though, the feelings faded in the wake of anxiety.
Brennan pulled her hair up into its usual knot on top of her head. She could almost hear her mother. I wish you’d actually put some effort into your hair, for work at the very least. Brennan, the disappointment. If she saw herself that way, would her parents see her that way too? Sometimes she wondered. She stared at the stubborn flyaways around her ears that refused to be tamed. It wasn’t that she didn’t care at all about the way she looked. She did care, somewhat. It was just that she had come to the conclusion, at the start of high school, that people weren’t worth her putting extra effort into dressing herself up and hiding who she really was. Her black leggings and T-shirts were easy to grab even on an anxious morning; they didn’t take thought. Thoughts were something that tended to cause trouble for Brennan. What if I look silly in this shirt? Is this skirt too short? Will people notice that my sweater has creases where it was folded?
Letting the thoughts lead her around by a leash hadn’t helped when she’d been a freshman, after all. After her family moved when she was in middle school, Brennan had left behind her school and the friends she had made. Instead, she was homeschooled. It was sort of a relief—Brennan had always found it hard to make friends, and after having all the effort she’d put into it at her old school wiped away, she was perfectly fine with being at home.
That was when her love of writing had started. She’d had so much time to write what she wanted and how she wanted. Her mind was filled with stories—with fantasy worlds, half-formed. Without a laptop, she wrote by hand, her handwriting growing more sloppy and slanted the faster she wrote, as she tried to keep up with her racing mind.
Then she’d been a freshman, they’d moved back, and her parents wanted her to go to “actual school,” as her then-best friend had called it. She was reenrolled at her previous school.
Brennan had been excited. She’d gotten new clothes, new binders, and new notebooks. She’d daydreamed for days about being able to see all her old friends. Then she’d shown up on the first day of class only to find that everything was different. Her friends had gone on with their lives without her, because of course they had. What had she expected? It wasn’t as if they’d just stop time in their sixth-grade year and everything would be the same now that Brennan was back.
Her best friend from the homeschool group her mom was a part of had enrolled in school as well. Brennan took comfort in this; at least she’d have a person. But when they showed up on the first day of school, her friend met someone new and they hit it off, immediately leaving Brennan the awkward plus one. You know, the one who had to walk ahead or behind when the sidewalk wasn’t wide enough for three people.
That year had been when the anxiety had started. The first time Brennan had had what she later discovered through some Googling must have been an anxiety attack, she had thought she was having a heart attack. She’d stood in the bathroom stall, back against the cold metal door, her breath coming quick and shallow, her hand on her chest in an effort to press away the deep ache and keep from falling apart. Can fourteen-year-olds have heart attacks? she wondered. And then I can’t get a breath. I can’t breathe. Eventually, it had settled in long term as a knot in her stomach, where it liked to make her feel like she was about to throw up. It gnawed at her stomach every day, for seemingly no reason. She was sick, she told her mom. You’re fine, her mom would say, after pitying Brennan initially. Brennan didn’t blame her; she had to be tough; had to force Brennan out of her comfort zone lest she become a total recluse. And so Brennan was grateful to her mom, at least somewhat—even when her mom forced her out of the house and into a job the last summer before her first year at college.