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EDY LOVES KEVIN
Which caused me to scream at the top of my lungs and throw the stick of
white at her, which missed, of course, and shattered into a million tiny slivers
that were from then on useless, which was all right because white was always
boring anyway. And then I said, “Mara, you should really marry Caelin. Then
we’d be sisters and that would be so awesome!”
“Yeah, I guess.” She frowned. “But I think Kevin’s cuter.”
“He is not. Besides, Kevin isn’t my brother, so if you married him, we
wouldn’t be sisters.”
“You’re just saying that so you can marry Kevin.”
“Well, I can’t marry my own brother—that would be disgusting!”
“Oh yeah,” she realized, as if those two were our only options in the entire
world. Our world was small—way too small—even for twelve-year-olds.
“So, you marry my brother and I’ll marry Kevin and then we’ll be sisters
and Kev and Cae will be brothers. It makes sense because everyone already
thinks they’re brothers anyway.”
She considered this for a moment, then said, “Yeah, okay.”
Now that we had our lives all figured out, I asked, “You wanna ride bikes?”
“Yeah, okay.”
We tried not to let our feet touch the molten pavement as we ran inside
the house to throw on our shorts and flip-flops. Mara’s dad finally left for
good that summer. There was a lot of fighting going on at home. So she spent
most days at my house even though she was the one with the swimming pool.
She agreed to almost anything as long as it kept her out of her house and away
from her parents. So, when I said marry my brother, she said okay. When I
said let’s ride bikes, she said okay. And when I said let’s ride our bikes as fast
as we can down the big scary steep hill at the end of my street so that we could
see if there was a train going by on the railroad tracks at the bottom, she said
okay.
It was not one of my brightest ideas, I’ll admit. The last thing I remember
hearing before plummeting to my near-death was the sound of Mara
screaming. The last thing I saw was the rotted gray wood of the railroad ties,
flying toward my face at an enormous speed. My skull clunked against the
steel rail with a dull thud. And then everything went dark.
When my eyes opened, I was staring up at an impossibly bright sky and
my legs were tangled in my bike. My glasses were gone. And I felt water
dripping down my face. I raised the arm that was still capable of moving. It
was covered in dirt and hundreds of tiny cuts. I touched my head. Red water.
Lots of red water. And then I heard my name being called from far, far away. I
closed my eyes again.
“What the hell were you two doing?” It was Kevin’s voice, loud, close.
“We wanted to see a train go by.” Mara, innocent.
“Edy, can you hear me?” Kevin, his hands on my face.
“Uh . . .” was all I could moan. I opened my eyes long enough to see him
take his T-shirt off and press it against my head. I felt his hands on one of my
legs. Which one, I couldn’t even tell.
“Edy, Edy, try to move your leg, okay? If you can move it, it’s not broken.
Try,” he demanded.
“Is it? Is it moving?” I think I asked out loud. I didn’t hear an answer.
And then I was weightless. He carried me up the hill and then he laid me
down on the grass. He called 911, even.
I decided that night with Mara, I was definitely marrying him. The
damage: a fractured left wrist, a sprained ankle, a thousand scrapes and
bruises, a broken pinkie, fifteen stitches in my forehead, and one utterly
demolished ten-speed bike. And, of course, a severe delusion about the kind
of person Kevin truly was.
You were very lucky and very, very stupid
, I was
told over and over and over that day.
“You’re lucky there wasn’t a train coming!” Josh’s voice says, pulling me back
into the present. My eyes refocus on his bedroom ceiling. He’s still laughing. I
had stopped.
“Am I?” I accidentally say out loud. If there had been a train coming, then
I would have been killed or at least seriously and irreparably injured. And 542
days later I would have been lying in either a grave or a hospital somewhere,
rotting away or hooked up to machines and not in my bed with Kevin in the
next room and me thinking he was the greatest person in the entire world,
incapable of hurting me in any way, because, after all, he had saved the day.
Maybe if that day never happened, maybe I wouldn’t have become so smitten,
so pathetically infatuated. Maybe I wouldn’t have flirted with him over a
game of Monopoly earlier that night. And maybe I would’ve screamed when I
found him in my bed at 2:48 in the morning, instead of doing nothing at all.
And maybe it was essentially all my fault for acting like I liked him, for
actually liking him.
“Of course you are,” I hear a dim voice say through the fog in my mind.
But now his face has changed to serious. I can’t remember the last thing either
of us said.
“I am what?” I ask.
“Lucky!” he says impatiently.
“Oh, right. Yeah, I know.”
“Then why would you even say that? That’s not funny.”
“I know.”
“It’s really not. I hate when you say stuff like that.”
“Okay, I know!” I snap at him.
He doesn’t say anything, but I can tell he’s mad. Mad because I’m always
getting upset with him for no reason, saying fucked-up things, or just being
generally weird. He doesn’t say anything else. He just rolls away and lies there
next to me. Now he’s the one staring at the ceiling and I’m the one on my
side, facing him, wanting him to look at me. I put my head on his chest, try to
pretend things are okay still, pretend I’m not a freak. Reluctantly, he puts his
arm around me. But I can’t take the silence, can’t take the thought of him
being mad.
So I whisper, “Tell me another secret.”
But he’s quiet.
After a while, a very painfully silent while, I think maybe he has fallen
asleep, so I pretend to be sleeping too. But then I feel him press his face into
my hair and breathe. Quietly, almost inaudibly, he whispers, “I love you.” His
big secret. I squeeze my eyes shut as tight as I can and pretend not to hear—
pretend not to care.
After I’m sure he’s really fallen asleep, I sneak out as quietly as possible.
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