“Aw, shit,” he said. I stepped out of the way so he could try the handle. The car was locked.
“Do you have a spare set?” I asked.
Cole rested his forehead on the roof of the car. I felt for him. It had to be embarrassing. “I do. They’re at home.”
“I can take you there to get them,” I said, pulling my mom’s key fob out of my backpack.
“You have a car?”
“It’s my mom’s,” I said, pointing the fob at the car in the middle of the lot to unlock it. “Come on.”
Cole and I settled into my mom’s Subaru and I drove us out of the lot. He still seemed really embarrassed so I tried to make light of it. “At least you didn’t try to take me out on a skateboard,” I said.
“A skateboard,” he repeated. “What does that even mean?”
“My ex,” I told him. “He first asked me out on his skateboard.”
Cole snorted. “What were you, eight?”
“Fourteen,” I told him.
He laughed. “Okay, but you still said yes, right?”
“I did,” I admitted. “I was dumber back then.”
“Why’d you guys split up?”
I shrugged. “Oh, you know, girl meets boy, girl dates boy for two years before boy dumps girl for girl’s best friend.”
Cole stared at me. “He hooked up with your best friend?”
I stared straight ahead. “Yep.” Thinking of Sophie and Tanner brought a fresh stab of pain, which I was trying hard to brush off. I didn’t want Cole to see that I was still hurt.
“That had to suck,” he said.
“It did.”
He was silent for a minute, then said, “Want me to beat him up?”
I smirked. “I don’t know. He’s a pretty big guy.”
Cole made a show of flexing both his arms. “I could take him.”
I laughed. “You know, you probably could. Tanner was pretty lame when it came down to it.”
“So why’d you go out with him for two whole years?”
“That’s a good question,” I said. Why had I gone out with him? The past few days I’d been reflecting on Tanner with clearer eyes. It was like the minute I met Cole I subconsciously began comparing the two, and I kept finding Tanner more and more pathetic. Or maybe I was finally able to see him for who really was—an insecure guy with a huge ego who’d never really cared about me. “Anyway,” I said, shrugging it off, “he’s Sophie’s problem now.”
“That your best friend?” Cole asked.
“Former best friend,” I corrected.
Cole eyed me critically. “I’ll never understand women,” he said. “I mean, we bros don’t ever cross that line. There’s a code.”
“Bros before hos?” I said, quoting the familiar, yet incredibly insulting, phrase.
“Not that,” he said, with a roll of his eyes. “It’s the bro code. You just don’t hook up with one of your bro’s girlfriends. And if you break the code, no other bro will trust you. You’re voted off the island if you pull that shit.”
I sighed wistfully. Wouldn’t it have been easier if I could’ve voted Sophie off the island? Instead, all of my former friends had rallied around her, which I figured was probably because Tanner was super-popular and nobody wanted to get on his bad side, but still. It hurt.
We were silent for another moment or two when I turned a corner and pulled to a stop, putting the car into park. “We’re here,” I said, turning to Cole.
He looked at me incredulously, then at the house I’d parked next to, then back at me.
“Lily,” he whispered. “How the hell did you know where my grandmother lives?”
“What?” I said. And then I realized we’d been so engrossed in our conversation that I’d driven the entire way to this house without him once giving me any direction. And yet the house we were parked in front of felt like someplace I’d been to a thousand times before.
But then I took in the surrounding neighborhood and I didn’t recognize where we were. Nothing except the house we were sitting in front of was familiar. I wasn’t even sure what street we were on.
“Ohmigod,” I said, gripping the steering wheel tightly as my heart started to race. I felt the oncoming panic attack take hold and knew I’d be powerless to stop it. My breathing was labored and my chest felt like it was filling with hot lava. “I…I…don’t…how did I…?”
“Hey,” Cole said. I felt his hand on my arm. “Lily, are you okay?”
I shook my head. Tears formed in my eyes, and I couldn’t catch my breath. The car felt claustrophobic. Like a coffin. I clawed at the door handle. It took several tries, but I finally managed to pull it up and get the door to open.
Stumbling out of the car, I sucked in great lungfuls of air, but no matter how much I tried to take in, it fell far short of what I needed to breathe. I tried to make up for it with the next breath, but that fell even shorter.
I bent over and wobbled unsteadily to the curb. Maybe if I could get down on the ground I could breathe. Firm hands gripped me by the arms to steady me, and guide me over to the grass.
When I sat down, I pulled at the collar on my shirt. This was something entirely different from my other panic attacks—a whole new level of agony and fear. I tugged again at my collar. Why did my clothing feel so restrictive? Why couldn’t I get any oxygen into my system when all I was doing was heaving in lungfuls of air? My heart sped up even more and pounded so hard against my chest it hurt. Blood throbbed out the frantic beat of my pulse in my ears, and then I started to see stars in my peripheral vision. I could hear Cole talking to me, but I couldn’t make out any of his words, and I avoided looking at him at all costs, because on top of everything else, what was happening to me was so humiliating.
In desperation I reached into my back pocket for my phone and thrust it at him.
“Ma…Ma…Mom!” I gasped. She was a doctor. She’d know what to do. If only she could get to me in time.
And then I sank forward onto the grass, too weak and frightened to do anything more.
I FOUND SPENCE LYING IN the grass in the center of the field adjacent to the track. I nearly cried out when I saw him. His left eye was swollen shut, and he had a fat lip that was still bleeding. Sinking down next to him, I reached out to lace my fingers through his, my heart hammering for him. I hated seeing him like this.
“You okay?” I asked gently.
For a long time he didn’t reply. He simply squeezed my hand and lay there, his one good eye staring up at the late afternoon sky and a tear or two leaking down the side of his face every now and again. He made no noise, and I could only imagine what tumbled thoughts he might be having.
I wanted so much to wrap my arms around him, cover him with love, and protect him from any further harm, but in the year and a half that we’d been together, I’d learned to give Spence his space after one of these fights. So I sat there and leaked a few tears of my own until, finally, he cleared his throat and that one good eye focused on me.
“How’d you know?” he asked.
“Your sister called, looking for you.”
Spence’s gaze moved back to the sky. “And you guessed I’d be here?”
I looked around at the large circle of trampled grass where Spence and I would go sometimes to be alone with each other. This little circle was ours, close enough to the school to get back quickly, but hidden from just about everyone by the field it was centered in.
At the beginning of junior year, we’d been lucky enough to be assigned the same study hall, and it was easy to sneak out here on occasion, twenty minutes before the bell rang when Mrs. Rutledge slipped out for her smoke break. If she knew we also snuck out, she never marked us as absent, and none of the other kids ever told on us.
“I had a feeling,” I said, pulling his hand to my stomach. I’d had a bad feeling all day, and then at three, when his sister called, I knew why. This was the first place I’d thought of when I came looking for him.
“Where’s your car?”
I asked him. Spence lived a good three miles from the school. I’d already checked the parking lot, and there was no sign of his beat-up old Mustang.
“At home. I felt like walking.”
After a lengthy pause I said, “What happened this time?”
Spence shook his head. “The usual. He found out I got that D on that chemistry quiz, and he wouldn’t let go of it. He kept telling me it was proof I wasn’t cut out for college. No college was gonna give a D student a football scholarship. I mean, God, Amber, it was one quiz!”
“I know,” I said, gritting my teeth against the anger I held in my heart for Mr. Spencer. Spence had been working late the night before the pop quiz—which barely counted toward his overall grade. Spence was a decent student. I had no doubt that, with his skills on the football field, he’d get a scholarship somewhere.
“Anyway,” Spence continued, “Mom tried to intervene. He raised his fist, I got between them….It got bad….”
I breathed deeply and tried to hold my emotions in check. It was hard. Spence’s home life was so unfair because he was such a good guy: he got decent grades and worked weekends and after football practice to bring home a little extra money. He was also kind and protective of his little sister, and he was a rising football star. It infuriated me that his parents could be so completely horrible and abusive to him in the face of all of that.
About three months earlier I’d told my parents what was going on within the Spencer home, how his father drank and became violent and often struck Spence. They’d been far more alarmed than I’d been prepared for, and they’d very nearly gone to the police.
I’d managed to stop them only after telling them that Spence’s family was barely getting by, and they couldn’t manage without Mr. Spencer’s income. I knew that for a fact because that was the reason Spence always gave me when I asked him why his mom didn’t throw his dad out. I’d been tempted to call the police once or twice myself, actually, but Spence had always talked me out of it.
This time, however, I didn’t know how I could hold back. “Isn’t it time?” I asked him.
He exhaled loudly, like he knew exactly what I was about to say next. “Amber,” he said gently, “please don’t.”
“Don’t what, Spence?” I said as my temper flared. I couldn’t take it anymore. “Don’t do anything while your father uses your face like a punching bag? Don’t say anything when I know what’s happening at home is killing you? When would you like me to say something? At your funeral?”
Spence sat up abruptly and wrapped me in his arms, pulling me to the ground on top of him to hold me there against him. “It looks worse than it is,” he said.
I pushed at his chest. “Well, that’s fantastic,” I snapped. “Because you look like Rocky Balboa at the end of twelve rounds with that Russian.”
Spence actually laughed. “I look that good, huh?”
“It’s not funny.”
He seemed to sober. “You’re right. It’s not.” Sitting up with me still cradled against him, he said, “But there’s nothing I can do to make it better.”
“You could call the police,” I said. He began to shake his head and I reached up and held it still. “Spence, please. He could kill you.”
Mr. Spencer was an ox of a man—at least six foot four, and solid. Spence was also big and strong, but his dad had the upper hand on him in both size and weight.
“How would that work, Amber?” he asked me gently. “If my dad went to jail, what would we live on? Mom doesn’t work; I only make so much cutting lawns. I mean, how would we survive?”
“We could help you,” I offered. I had no idea if my parents would be open to the idea, but I could ask. They loved Spence, so maybe they would be willing to help his family make ends meet.
He laid his forehead against mine and sighed sadly. “There’s no way I’d do that to your parents,” he said. “And no way my mom would ever take charity. You know how she is.”
I did know how Mrs. Spencer was. From the moment I’d met her there’d been tension between us. Secretly, I disliked her only slightly less than I disliked her husband.
“But what if someday he hits your mom?” I said to Spence, knowing how loyal he was to her. “Or your sister?”
“He won’t,” he told me, and it hurt so much to think that he believed that. He really believed that as long as he was there to take his father’s physical abuse, Mr. Spencer wouldn’t harm his wife or his daughter.
“But, Spence, what if after you go away to college, he does hit your mom or Stacey? What if without you there to take the punishment, he moves on to the next convenient target?”
Spence hugged me tightly again. “I’d have to kill him,” he said.
A chill went through me. I knew when Spence was kidding, and when he’d said that, he wasn’t.
I started to cry, because the whole situation seemed so hopeless. “What about talking to Mr. White?” I asked him, desperate to find a better way to deal with what was happening at Spence’s house.
“The new school counselor?”
“Yeah. I met with him last week about Britt and—”
“What’s up with Britt?” he interrupted.
I shook my head impatiently, annoyed that he was trying to divert me. “She’s not eating, and she keeps saying she thinks she’s fat. Anyway, the point is Mr. White seemed really nice, and he didn’t try to pull Britt out of school or anything dramatic. He just set up a couple of meetings with her, and I swear she’s better. I mean, she ate most of her lunch today. And that was just after a couple of meetings with him.”
Spence rocked me back and forth in his arms. It was so soothing. “I don’t know what meeting with him would do, Amber. I mean, I’ve been eating all my lunch every day.”
I pushed against his chest again, my temper back. “Why are you making fun of this?”
“I’m not, babe, I’m not,” he said, holding up his hands in surrender. “It’s just…this is bigger than a school counselor, okay? I know it. I do. But it’s either put up with my dad’s bullshit for another year and a half, or send him to jail and we’re out on the street.”
“But what if it keeps getting worse?” I asked him, pulling back to look at the bruises on his face. Spence told anyone who asked that he’d been learning how to box. During football season no one even mentioned his occasional black eye or bruised jaw, but I could always tell the difference between a mark he got on the football field and one he got at home.
“It won’t,” he said without conviction.
Again I thought about going home and telling my parents to call the police. What I didn’t know was if Spence would ever forgive me for it, which was the only thing that was keeping me from making that call.
Then Spence was shifting me off his lap and helping me to my feet. “Come on,” he said. “It’s getting late. I’ll walk you home.”
We made our way off the field and began walking toward my house, which was only a mile from the school. Spence held my hand and we were mostly silent, each lost in our own turbulent thoughts. About five minutes later, the quiet of the Sunday afternoon was shattered by the high-pitched squealing of tires and a thunderous noise.
“What the hell?” Spence said.
And then, just above the tree line, we saw the curling rise of black smoke. In the distance, a woman screamed and that was followed by more cries of alarm. Spence took off running, and I ran after him. He was much, much faster than me, and within moments I’d lost sight of him, but I kept going. It was an agonizing two-block run, by the end of which I was completely out of breath, but I finally made it to the street where a crowd had gathered.
A station wagon had plowed into a telephone pole and erupted in flames. I searched the crowd for Spence, but couldn’t see him anywhere. The sound of sirens grew loud enough for me to cringe, and I stepped onto the sidewalk as the fire trucks roared past. At last I reached the crowd and called out for Spence, but I couldn’t find him. My heart began to race, and I felt so panicked and
afraid. I kept my eyes averted from the car and the blackened form inside; it was all too horrible a scene to take in.
“Spence!” I cried as an intuitive fear mounted. “Spence!”
And then, someone, I’m not even sure who, took me by the arm and pointed me to the front of the crowd where a small commotion was taking place. I pushed my way forward and found Spence wrestling with two firemen, his hands badly burned and his hair singed.
“Dad!” he screamed, his voice ragged and agonized. “Daaaaaad!”
And then it hit me: the barely visible blue tint to the car’s back quarter panel with a dent that I’d seen a hundred times before, and which marked it unmistakably as Mr. Spencer’s car. I sank to my knees as flames ten feet high fully engulfed the car.
It was the last thing I saw before I blacked out cold.
“SO,” DR. WHITE SAID AS I SAT nervously across from him, “your mom tells me you’ve been having panic attacks and that you blacked out yesterday while in the middle of one.”
“Yeah,” I said, thinking that what I’d experienced felt way more intense than a simple dose of panic.
Dr. White twirled his pen along his knuckles. It had a slightly hypnotic effect. “What’s been triggering those, do you think?” he asked.
I squirmed in the leather chair, worried that at any moment I’d say something that would make him think I was crazy, because by now, I was convinced that’s exactly what I was. Still, meeting Dr. White a few minutes before had been a surprise. He was older than I expected, with hair that matched his last name, but his eyes were youthful and kind, and his manner was easy and relaxed. Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad.
“I don’t know,” I said. So much was overwhelming me lately, and the day before, when I’d driven Cole not to his house, but to his grandmother’s—with whom he didn’t even live—had just blown my mind.
Dr. White smiled at me. “Can I tell you a secret?”
“Uh…sure. I guess.”
He pointed to me then back to him. “This works better if you tell me what’s going on with you. Otherwise, we’ll have to play charades, and, fair warning, I’m awesome at charades.”