Page 40 of The Way I Used to Be
“Oh no.”
“Well, I guess at some point I kind of flipped over my handlebars and rolled the rest of the way down the hill, that’s what Mara said, anyway. I don’t really remember, think I blacked out. My face smashing into the tracks broke my fall, though.”
“That’s terrible!” he says, even though he’s laughing really hard.
“No, it’s stupid. You should laugh at me. I’m the reason the town had to put up fences at the end of all the streets in my neighborhood.”
That makes him laugh even harder. Me too.
Then I start thinking about everything that came after.
That was the day I fell in love with Kevin—or what I thought was love, with the person I thought he was. And he knew it too. And he used it to get to me. This was the day I wish I could go back to—the day I need to undo to stop it all from happening. It was so hot, and the air so thick, it felt like my lungs couldn’t even breathe it in. Mara and I were just two twelve-year-olds in our pathetic two-piece bathing suits, which revealed nothing because we basically had nothing, drawing with sidewalk chalk in my driveway, ice-cream-sandwich ice cream dripping down our arms and legs.
We were drawing suns with smiley faces and rainbows and trees and hideous, artless flowers. We played tic-tac-toe a few times, but it was boring because no one ever won. We made a hopscotch court, but the cement was on fire, too hot to hop on. I wrote in big bubbly pink letters, across the driveway:
MARA LUVS CAELIN
I only did it to embarrass her. So then Mara swung her two long braids over her shoulders and hunkered down with a fat lump of pastel blue. In huge block letters she wrote:
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.
