Last Year's Mistake - Gina Ciocca Page 0,10

the dirt.”

I couldn’t help but smile back. “Definitely. We’ll have to hang out sometime.”

But we didn’t hang out sometime. We hung out all the time.

I knew I liked David as soon as I met him, but I had no idea the boy who knocked me over with a baseball would become my go-to plus one any time I was bored or lonely. Or breathing. I didn’t know he’d give the best hugs, or share my love of summer and my irrational fear of bats and my obsession with chocolate chip cookies.

I had no way of knowing he’d become my best friend in the world.

Five

Rhode Island

Senior Year

I didn’t see David again for the rest of the day after Ryan walked him to class. I half wondered if Ryan had chopped him up and stashed the parts in an empty locker. But he seemed back to normal when he drove me to get my car after school.

I wished everything could go back to the way it was that easily. My family and I had been living in Rhode Island, right outside Newport, for the past year, just as I’d always dreamed of doing. That night, however, my dreams were filled with images of Norwood. More specifically, the piece of Norwood that had turned up like a metastasized tumor in the last place I expected.

Deep down, I knew I shouldn’t have been so surprised. We’d met in Newport, after all, and his grandfather’s house hadn’t been a vacation home like Uncle Tommy’s; Jay had lived there year-round. In the back of my mind, I’d always known I might see David again, especially since he and Mr. Kerrigan were Jay’s only family. And I’d mostly succeeded in not thinking about it.

But every image I’d tried to suppress for the past year found a way to break through the dam that night. I saw the delicate white and purple flowers in the empty field near the house David had shared with his father. The way he’d pick them and sneak them in my hair when I wasn’t looking, because he knew I was petrified that bugs would crawl out and nest in my scalp. The photo I took of him, beaming after he’d pitched a perfect game.

Then the images became more distorted and nightmarish. I looked down and saw blood everywhere. It stained my clothes, my hands, my face. I started to cry, and when David tried to comfort me, I got blood all over him, too.

Suddenly everything disappeared: David, Norwood, all of it. I stood in the hallway at Clayton, not a speck of blood in my perfectly highlighted hair, and not one red smear on my pretty white sundress. I stared at the glass doors at the end of the hall, knowing something was about to go terribly wrong. David walked in, just as he had that morning. Only this time it was the David I’d met three years ago. The one with an air of uncertainty about him and too much black hair hanging in his eyes and braces on his teeth.

His clothes were disheveled, and the closer he got to me, the easier it became to see dark splotches of blood all over him.

“David,” I gasped, keenly aware that the hallway had filled with gawkers. “You’re covered in blood.”

“I know. It’s happening to me, too.”

“What’s happening to you?”

David’s eyes hardened, and I barely recognized the voice that spoke his next words. “Do you even care?”

That’s when my eyes flew open and I struggled to sit up, fighting off the tail end of dream paralysis.

No Freud required to analyze that one.

I knew, even in my sleep, that what I’d had with David in Norwood would never translate to the life I’d lived for the past year in Rhode Island. Beautiful as he might be, he served as a reminder of my ugly past. He didn’t fit in my new world, and having him here would only ruin everything. The same way he’d ruined everything once before.

According to the clock, I still had ten more minutes before my alarm went off. But the last thing I wanted was to fall back to sleep and revisit my dream. So I dragged myself into the bathroom. I cast a skittish glance in the mirror, and even though I didn’t see blood pouring out of my nose or mouth, I still ran to the kitchen and downed some vitamins before jumping in the shower.

Normally a shower would have soothed me, but that morning it stimulated my