“Is that what you want?” He asks me.
“No. Maybe. I don’t know.” I shake my head sharply. Forgetting feels like a lie. “If I think about having her and losing her or not having her at all, I’d still want to have her.”
When I close my eyes, the blood in my body rushes up to the surface of my skin.
Cold water poured in over my flailing arms onto my lap and flowed down the path of my legs. The coppery taste of blood coated my tongue. I sputtered, blinked against the terrible, burbling darkness and the tears. “J-Jilly?” A flash of pain sliced through me from my neck to my shoulder and I screamed—almost choking on the sound of my own fear.
“I promised her that I wouldn’t leave and then I left anyway,” I say gingerly. “I’ve asked myself so many times if I knew… Well, whether or not I knew that she was still breathing. I’ve tried to think back. Did I see her chest moving? If I had known, would I have still left her there? I don’t—Was I just trying to save myself?”
“Maybe you only could save yourself.”
The temperature plunges as memories of the accident—fighting to breathe against the pressure pinning my chest to the seat, the harsh jolt of the impact, the creeping inky water—batter me painfully and swirl behind my eyelids like a galaxy of hazy stars. I squeeze my hands into fists, clear my throat and try to think back. Back to before the grinding of metal on metal, and the faint, metallic smell of blood and salt.
My ear was pressed against the rough fabric of the seat. I burned hot and cold all at once. My legs felt heavy, like they had been weighted down with cement blocks at my ankles. I tried to turn my head but my hair was caught on something. It took me a second to realize that it was the seatbelt. Fumbling, I reached down and dug around for the metal clasp. My stiff fingers clawed at the button, working desperately until one of my nails caught, pulled away from the skin and snapped in one motion.
Jilly? My head swam. I tasted blood in my mouth.
Where was I?
The car.
The water.
The angry groan of metal compressing assaulted my ears. I wrenched my neck forward and pushed through a blinding heat that stabbed at my head when a clump of hair ripped from my scalp.
I needed to take stock. The water was already at the bottom of my ribcage. Sucking in a fast breath, I brought my hands to my face to clear my eyes and I twisted to my left. “Jilly?”
The air moves around me as I struggle to sift through the images.
“Just relax,” Cole whispers from beside me. “I’m right here.”
The whirring in my head slows down and I relax my fingers. The images sink in around me, taking me to a place where I want to be.
Now, I can see Jillian smiling like it would go on forever. I remember her diving into the pool in the middle of a rainstorm—all knees and elbows and freckles. Sitting with me under the slide—rough dirt sticking to our thighs while she showed me how I should take a drag off a cigarette. Dancing around her bedroom sophomore year in her favorite purple bra and underwear set. Rolling her eyes at one of Katie McLaughlin’s stupid cheerleading stories. Laughing. She was always laughing.
Blues and blacks shift behind my eyelids and a picture of her the way that she was on that final night rises. Her coppery hair was down around her face and she was wearing ripped jean shorts and worn-in sneakers with no socks.
“We almost didn’t go to the party,” I say tightly. “That afternoon Jillian heard from one of our friends that this guy that she used to see might make an appearance at the party. She didn’t want to deal with him because he’d started to get pushy. He was leaving voicemails, driving by her house at random times… stuff like that. Jillian didn’t want to encourage him.”
“Come on, Aimee! Pretty please…” Jillian stuck out her bottom lip. “We’ll watch a cheesy movie and eat ice cream straight out of the container.”
I wrinkled my nose. “How many times do you think you can fool me with that pout?”
I pause to get my bearings. “I couldn’t even tell you why I wanted to go out so badly, but I did, and I convinced her to go with me.” As the words move off my tongue, the band wound snuggly around my chest loosens. It feels good to speak out loud. “I think it was the first time that I ever had to talk Jillian into going out. It was always the other way around with us.”
Cole is still holding me. I can feel the steady rise and fall of his chest against my back.
“To be honest, I don’t remember much about the actual party. I know that you don’t want to hear this part, but I was on and off with Brian at the time.” I feel Cole’s body harden, but he stays quiet and lets me continue. He knows that this is my story to tell. “We were never serious or anything like that, but we were in one of our ‘on’ phases so I stuck with him and I just… I lost track of Jillian. How shitty is that?”