I should have known that I was painting a target on our backs. Making everything infinitely worse than it had to be.
But I took care of it. I did what I had to do. And you can think I’m evil, the worst kind of person, but I dare you to put yourself in my shoes.
The truth? I didn’t think I’d make it.
I didn’t want to. But I’ve been saved twice now, and I’d be a terrible liar if I told you I wasn’t down to my bones grateful. For life. For things turning out nothing like they were supposed to.
“What did you just do?” Donovan shouted when I pushed Everlee from the car. But the door was already wrenched closed and his foot was still on the gas pedal. Surprise? Disbelief? Maybe he couldn’t grasp what I had done. It didn’t really matter. I ignored him and threw myself over the back of the seat to grab for the wheel.
Hands and arms. Fingers clawing. He hit my face. I tasted the sharp, salty tang of his damp skin in my mouth, my teeth grazing the bones of his thick wrist. But he was still accelerating, and when I finally held that steering wheel in my hands, there was nothing he could do. We swerved, jerked left so hard I lost my footing and slammed against the headrest.
The car flipped.
For one jagged breath I rose above it all, a spectator as the world fell away. I could see the breeze dance warm and indifferent through perfect rows of corn. The sharp glint of sunshine off the hood of Donovan’s car. And then, for just a second, Everlee as she rolled down into the ditch far behind us. Of course I couldn’t really see her, but in my mind’s eye she was caught in the soft embrace of prairie grass and a sea of summer dandelions so bright they rivaled the sun. The perfect place to land. To rise. To be reborn. She’ll be okay, I thought, and for just a moment it made my soul float light, lifting from a body I had already dismissed.
But then: impact. The windshield shattered into a million tiny pieces and showered down, a hailstorm of light. Hissing, popping, a metal scream, eerie and final as an unholy requiem.
What is death supposed to feel like? A sigh, a shriek, a letting go? Nothingness, I thought, until I realized that it hurt and that my heart still raced in tandem with the drip-drip-drip of something that I could hear but would not identify.
I wasn’t dead.
I was wedged on the floor of the back seat, hip caught at an excruciating angle beneath the bench frame and the floor, legs bent unnaturally, left arm broken. It had to be, for it dangled into the empty space below me, swaying from the momentum of the crash like a pendulum that would forever keep splintered time. From where I was suspended, trapped upside down on the floor of the car that had crumpled like a tin can, I could see Donovan. Or the impression of him. My mind skittered away from recognition and reduced him to fragments. Shirt. Seat belt. Arm raised high. Torn. I didn’t have to touch him to know that he was gone.
Will you hate me if I said I loved him once? That I could have wept for what I had done? All I had lost? Hope is a tenacious thing, everlasting and stubborn, refusing to give up, to let go. To stop.
And I know him better than you do. I held his face in my hands and looked so deep into those big brown eyes I thought I could see to the very bottom of who he was. I once loved to trace the scars on his back, the places where the skin was puckered and pink, exactly the size of the burning tip of a cigarette. His mother didn’t love him the way that she should have, but isn’t that always just a little bit true? I thought I could make up for all that pain, read those scars like a constellation and find the star that pointed home. But there were other hurts, too, wounds that dug deeper than skin. Scars aren’t always visible. But I still wish I could have kissed each mark and made it new. For him. For Everlee. For me. But some hurts never quite heal.
I have a deep affection for broken things.
When the world stopped spinning like the needle of a smashed compass, I crawled out the back window of the car. It was still intact but warped and crisscrossed with cracks like a wilting spiderweb. I didn’t even have to kick at it, not really. I just put both my feet against the glass and pushed. It sagged at my weight, bubbling out, and I pressed until it gave.
My own sort of rebirth.
Here is what I know: I should have died. I think I wanted to. But something threw me to the floor when that car hit the field driveway and decided to spread its wings and fly. Maybe it was a coincidence. Something that could be explained away by a crash test dummy and the quick flip of a car in some factory. I don’t know. But I do know that I have now stood in an empty field twice and grasped that my life would never be the same.
And twice, I found salvation.
The first time the grass stains were on my jeans, the back of my favorite shirt. Jack Sr. wiped his hands on a handkerchief that he took out of his pocket, and then he touched his mouth real careful, dabbing the spot where I bit his lip. “Nobody will believe you,” he told me. “Not a girl like you.”
And he was right.
Who would believe me?
I left the dance to hook up with JJ. We’d danced that night, so close I could have flicked out my tongue and tasted the sweat in the hollow beneath his ear. I knew he was in a serious, here-comes-the-bride relationship, but what does that matter to a girl like me?
The truth? My heart ached at the thought that I was second best, that JJ’s arms holding me tight were bold with whiskey and lust, nothing more. But sometimes second best is better than nothing.
JJ didn’t show up at the spot we agreed on.
Jack Sr. did.
It was a practical joke. Mr. Sanford was confused at first, irritated that JJ had called for a ride (too drunk to drive) and that the only sign of life in the dark grove beside the cornfield was me. Dirty little Tiffany Barnes. Slut. Skank. White trash, cheap, easy, I’ve heard it all. And in the second before he realized the opportunity before him, Jack Sr. was quick to dismiss me. I could see it written all over his face: bitch. Because that’s what men like him call women like me.
Who am I kidding? I was no woman; I wasn’t even twenty years old. I was a girl.
Is it rape if you don’t cry out? If you lie back and take what’s coming to you?
I blame myself. I don’t need your sympathy or that look in your eyes that tells me you don’t just feel sorry for me, you thank God every day that you’re not like me. I’d rather be despised than pitied, thank you very much.
What good is compassion if a chance at redemption is on the table?