it up. But I never got the chance. This fucking deer came running out into the road, and I didn’t even have both hands on the wheel. I tried to swerve around it, and then—”
There’s a soft, barely-there noise coming from my right—something small and strangled and pained—and I jerk my gaze to her. She’s got a hand pressed lightly to her throat and her blue eyes are trained unseeingly across the room, angled away from me.
I work my mouth around a clumsy reply that never emerges. I want to tell her not to listen. To press her fingers into her ears. To go stand outside the door for a couple minutes. What the hell was I thinking, doing this? Even being detached and relaying it as mechanically as possible, I can barely stand to say it. Why did I think she could bear to relive it?
“What happened?” Georgia gently asks, ripping me away from my thoughts.
I look at Emory, but he won’t meet my gaze, either. I continue, “It flipped. Four, maybe five times.”
“Six.” Vandy’s ragged voice makes the back of my neck prickle. “It flipped six times.”
I can tell a couple of them—Georgia and Sebastian, who must be out of the gossip loop—are just now putting all this together. I mutter, “Six times. Right. And she got,” I sweep a hand toward Vandy, eyes diverted, “hurt. A lot worse than I did.”
It’s a nice, tidy summary. It’s one I’m used to telling, back at Mountain Point, during those legally-mandated counseling sessions. Usually, I’d go on. I’d tell them how the road was so deserted that it took forever for anyone to pass by and see the fire. Rarely, but sometimes, I’d even go into how I kept walking, hoping to flag down the cops I’d called on my battered cell phone, but then always returning because I didn’t want to leave her there alone, broken and barely conscious, on the shoulder of the road. I never say the other stuff—how the pain was so intense that it made me vomit, or how I kept wishing that I’d just died there, in the driver’s seat, because it already felt like my life was over.
I never admit that I moved her.
“There was…fire,” I explain, shifting my shoulders uneasily, “and she was in the middle of the road, so I had to move her away from the wreck, even though…” Vandy already knows this. I know she does. She was more conscious than not for that part. I can still remember the way she looked up at me, eyes dazed and full of agony as I carefully dragged her to the side of the road. It doesn’t make it any easier to say this aloud. I wet my lips, finishing, “Even though you’re not supposed to move someone with spinal injuries.”
Everyone’s quiet, and I know they’re looking at her more than me. Looking at her leg. Thinking of how she walks. Maybe even remembering how much worse it used to be. I know at one point, early on, she couldn’t even walk at all. I should feel relieved that she can. I should be able to see her merely limping and think ‘thank fucking god’, instead of the constant internal stab of ‘I did that’.
But I can’t.
It’s Carlton who ultimately breaks the silence. “Didn’t you already do time for that?”
I finally lean back in my chair, knee bouncing. “Yeah, a little. I was in juvie for a few months, after the hospital. They let me plead down my sentence as time served, plus probation and community service, on the condition that I enrolled in Mountain Point for four semesters.”
Sebastian rolls his eyes. “But you’ve already done the time. Everyone already knows.”
“That’s the best part,” I say, giving him a bitter smile. “I’m having my record expunged when I graduate. Once I get out of here, it’ll be like it never happened.”
That’s what the lawyer had said.
Like it never happened.
They must all sense the truth of it—that it isn’t fair that Vandy has to walk around with the consequences for life, and that I can just move on and do anything I want. I could be a football star. I could be a doctor. I could be a lawyer. Sky’s the fucking limit for me.
But if this video got out, that’d be a different story.
They seem to accept this as ‘good enough’, which is fortunate. It’s not my fault my ‘biggest sin’ just so happens to be something I’ve already been caught