Take Chances Read online

  * * *

  May 27, Day 7 of Summer Break

  I started this ritual when I got to college. I wake up and count the seconds it takes for the sun to rise over the hill. It’s my way of preparing for another day I don’t want to prepare for, knowing that it’s another day to add to my list of days I’ve lived without Landon.

  This morning worked a little differently, though. I’m home for my first summer break of college, and instead of the hills that surround Idaho, the sun advances over the immense Wyoming mountains that enclose Maple Grove, the small town I grew up in. The change makes it difficult to get out of bed, because it’s unfamiliar and breaks the routine I set up over the last eight months. And that routine was what kept me intact. Before it, I was a mess, unstable, out of control. I had no control. And I need control, otherwise I end up on the bathroom floor with a razor in my hand with the need to understand why he did it—what pushed him to that point. But the only way to do that is to make my veins run dry, and it turned out that I didn’t have it in me. I was too weak, or maybe it was too strong. I honestly don’t know anymore, what’s considered weak and what’s considered strong. What’s right and what’s wrong. Who I was and who I should be.

  I’ve been home for a week, and my mom and stepfather are watching me like hawks, like they expect me to break down again, after almost a year. But I’m in control now. In control.

  After I get out of bed and take a shower, I sit for exactly five minutes in front of my computer, staring at the file folder that holds the video clip Landon made before he died. I always give myself five minutes to look at it, not because I’m planning on opening it, but because it recorded his last few minutes, captured him, his thoughts, his words, his face. It feels like the last piece of him that I have left. I wonder if one day, somehow, I’ll finally be able to open it. But at this moment, in the state of mind I’m stuck in, it just doesn’t seem possible. Not much does.

  Once the five minutes are over, I put on my swimsuit, then pull on a floral sundress over it and strap some leather bands onto my wrists. Then I pull the curtains shut, so Landon’s house will be out of sight and out of mind, before heading back to my computer desk to record a short clip.

  I click Record and stare at the screen as I take a few collected breaths. “So I was thinking about my last recording—my first—and I was trying to figure out what the point of this is—or if there even had to be a point. “I rest my arms on the desk and lean closer to the screen, assessing my blue eyes. “I guess if there is a point, it would be for me to discover something. About myself or maybe about… him, because it feels like there’s still so much stuff I’m missing… so many unanswered questions and all the lack of answers leaves me feeling lost, not just about why the hell he did it, but about what kind of person I am that he could leave so easily… Who was I then? Who am I now? I really don’t know… But maybe when I look back and watch these one day far, far down the road, I’ll realize what I really think about life and I’ll finally get some answers to what leaves me confused every single day, because right now I’m about as lost as a damn bottle floating in gross, murky water.”

  I pause, contemplating as I tap my fingers on the desk. “Or maybe I’ll be able to backtrack through my thoughts and figure out why he did it.” I inhale and then exhale loudly as my pulse begins to thrash. “And if you’re not me and you’re watching these, then you’re probably wondering who he is, but I’m not sure if I’m ready to say his name yet. Hopefully I’ll get there. One day—someday, but who knows… maybe I’ll always be as clueless and as lost as I am now.”

  I leave it at that and turn the computer off, wondering how long I’m going to continue this pointless charade, this time filler, because right now that’s how it feels. I shove the chair away and head out of my room. It takes fifteen steps to reach the end of the hall, then another ten to get me to the table. They’re each taken at a consistent pace and with even lengths. If I were filming right now, my steps would be smooth and perfect, steady as a rock.

  “Good morning, my beautiful girl,” my mother singsongs as she whisks around the kitchen, moving from the stove to the fridge, then to the cupboard. She’s making cookies, and the air smells like cinnamon and nutmeg, and it reminds me of my childhood when my dad and I would sit at the table, waiting to stuff our mouths with sugar. But he’s not here anymore and instead Daniel, my stepfather, is sitting at the table. He’s not waiting for the cookies. In fact he hates sugar and loves healthy food, mostly eating stuff that looks like rabbit food.

  “Good morning, Nova. It’s so good to have you back.” He has on a suit and tie, and he’s drinking grapefruit juice and eating dry toast. They’ve been married for three years, and he’s not a bad guy. He’s always taken care of my mom and me, but he’s very plain, orderly, and somewhat boring. He could never replace my dad’s spontaneous, adventurous, down-to-earth personality.

  I plop down in the chair and rest my arms on the kitchen table. “Good morning.”

  My mom takes a bowl out of the cupboard and turns to me with a worried look on her face. “Nova, sweetie, I want to make sure you’re okay… with being home. We can get you into therapy here, if you need it, and you’re still taking your medication, right?”

  “Yes mom, I’m still taking my medication,” I reply with a sigh and lower my head onto my arms and shut my eyes. I’ve been on antianxiety medication for a while now. I’m not sure if it really does anything or not, but the therapist prescribed it to me so I take it. “I take them every morning, but I stopped going to therapy back in December, because it doesn’t do anything but waste time.” Because no matter that, they always want me to talk about what I saw that morning—what I did and why I did it—and I can’t even think about it, let only talk about it.

  “Yeah, I know, honey, but things are different when you’re here,” she says quietly.

  I remember the hell I put her through before I left. The lack of sleep, the crying… cutting my wrist open. But that’s in the past now. I don’t cry as much, and my wrist has healed.

  “I’m fine, Mom.” I open my eyes, sit back up, and overlap my fingers in front of me. “So please, pretty please, with a cherry on top and icing and candy corn, would you please stop asking?”

  “You sound just like your father… everything had to be referenced to sugar,” she remarks with a frown as she sets the bowl down on the counter. In a lot of ways she looks like me: long brown hair, a thin frame, and a sprinkle of freckles on her nose. But her blue eyes are a lot brighter than mine, to the point where they almost sparkle. “Honey, I know you keep saying that you’re fine, but you look so sad… and I know you were doing okay at school, but you’re back here now, and everything that happened is right across the street.” She opens a drawer and selects a large wooden spoon, before bumping the drawer shut with her hip. “I just don’t want the memories to get to you now that you’re home and so close to… everything.”

  I stare at my reflection in the stainless-steel microwave. It’s not the clearest. In fact, my face looks a little distorted and warped, like I’m looking into a funhouse mirror, my own face nearly a stranger. But if I tilt sideways just a little, I almost look normal, like my old self. “I’m fine,” I repeat, observing how blank my expression looks when I say it. “Memories are just memories.” Really, it doesn’t matter what they are, because I can’t see the parts that I know will rip my heart back open: the last few steps leading up to Landon’s finality and the soundless moments afterward, before I cracked apart. I worked hard to stitch my heart back up after it was torn open, even if I hadn’t done it neatly.

  “Nova.” She sighs as she starts mixing the cookie batter. “You can’t just try to forget without dealing with it first. It’s unhealthy.”

  “Forgetting is dealing with it.” I grab an apple from a basket on the table, no longer wanting to talk about it because it’s in the past, where it belongs.

  “Nova, honey,” she says sadly. She’s always tried to get me to talk abou
t that day. But what she doesn’t get is that I can’t remember, even if I really tried, which I never will. It’s like my brain’s developed it’s own brain and it won’t allow those thoughts out, because once they’re out, they’re real. And I don’t want them to be real—I don’t want to remember him like that. Or me.

  I push up from the chair, cutting her off. “I think I’m going to hang out next to the pool today, and Delilah will probably be over in a bit.”

  “If that’s what you want.” My mom smiles halfheartedly at me, wanting to say more, but fearing what it’ll do to me. I don’t blame her, either. She’s the one who found me on the bathroom floor, but she thinks it’s more than it was. I was just trying to find out what he felt like—what was going on inside of him when he decided to go through with it.

  I nod, grab a can of soda out of the fridge, and give her a hug before I head for the sliding glass door. “That’s what I want.”

  She swallows hard, looking like she might cry because she thinks she’s lost her daughter. “Well, if you need me, I’m here.” She turns back to her bowl.

  She’s been saying that to me since I was thirteen, ever since I watched my dad die. I’ve never taken her up on the offer, even though we’ve always had a good relationship. Talking about death with her—at all—doesn’t work for me. At this point in my life, I couldn’t talk to her about it even if I wanted to. I have my silence now, which is my healing, my escape, my sanctuary. Without it, I’d hear the noises of that morning, see the bleeding images, and feel the crushing pain connected to them. If I saw them, then I’d finally have to accept that Landon’s gone.

  * * *

  I don’t like unknown places. They make me anxious and I have trouble thinking—breathing. One of the therapists I first saw diagnosed me with obsessive-compulsive disorder. I’m not sure if he was right, though, because he moved out of town not too long after. I was left with a therapist in training, so to speak, and he decided that I was just depressed and had anxiety, hence the antianxiety medication for the last year and three months.

  The unfamiliarity of the backyard disrupts my counting, and it takes me forever to get to the pool. By the time I arrive at the lawn chair, I know how many steps it took me to get here, how many seconds it took me to sit down, and how many more seconds it took for Delilah to arrive and then take a seat beside me. I know how many rocks are on the path leading to the porch—twenty-two—how many branches are on the tree shielding the sunlight from us—seventy-eight. The only thing I don’t know is how many seconds, hours, years, decades, it will take before I can let go of the goddamn self-induced numbness. Until then I’ll count, focus on numbers instead of the feelings always floating inside me, the ones linked to images immersed just beneath the surface.

  Delilah and I lie in lawn chairs in the middle of my backyard with the pool behind us and the sun bearing down on us as we tan in our swimsuits. She’s been my best friend for the past year or so. Our sudden friendship was strange, because we’d gone to high school together but never really talked. She and I were in different social circles and I had Landon. But after it happened… after he died… I had no one, and the last few weeks of high school were torture. Then I met her, and she was nice and she didn’t look at me like I was about to shatter. We hit it off, and honestly, I have no idea what I’d do without her now. She’s been there for me, she shows me how to have fun, and she reminds me that life still exists in the world, even if it’s brief.

  “Good God, has it always been this hot here?” Delilah fans her face with her hand as she yawns. “I remember it being colder.”

  “I think so.” I pick up a cup of iced tea on the table between us and prop up on my elbow to take a sip. “We could go in,” I suggest, setting my glass down. I turn it in a circle until it’s perfectly in place on the condensation ring it left behind, and then I wipe the moisture from my lips with the back of my hand and rest my head back against the chair. “We do have air-conditioning.”

  Delilah laughs sardonically as she reaches for the sparkly pink flask in her bag. “Yeah, right. Are you kidding me?” She pauses, examining her fiery red nails, then unscrews the lid off the flask. “No offense. I didn’t mean for that to sound rude, but your mom and dad are a little overwhelming.” She takes a swig from the flask and holds it out in my direction.

  “Stepdad,” I correct absentmindedly. I wrap my lips around the top of the flask and take a tiny swallow, then hand it back to her and close my eyes. “And they’re just lonely. I’m the only child and I’ve been gone for almost a year.”

  She laughs again, but it’s breezier than before. “They’re seriously the most overbearing parents I know. They call you every day at school and text you a thousand times.” She puts the flask back into her bag.

  “They just worry about me.” They didn’t use to. My mom was really carefree before my dad died, and then she got concerned about how his death and seeing it affected me. Then Landon died, and now all she does is constantly worry.

  “I worry about you, too,” Delilah mumbles. She waits for me to say something, but I don’t—I can’t. Delilah knows about what happened with Landon, but we never really talk about what I saw. And that’s one of the things I like about her—that she doesn’t ask questions.

  One… two… three… four… five… breathe… six… seven… eight… breathe… Balling my hands into fists, I fight to calm myself down, but the darkness is ascending inside me, and it will take me over if I let it and drag me down into the memory I won’t remember; my last memory of Landon.

  “I have a brilliant idea,” she interrupts my counting. “We could go check out Dylan and Tristan’s new place.”

  My eyes open and I slant my head to the side. My hands are on my stomach, and I can feel my pulse beating through my fingertips, inconsistent. Tracking the beats is difficult, but I try anyway. “You want to go see your ex-boyfriend’s place. Seriously?”

  Swinging her legs over the edge of the chair, Delilah sits up and slips her sunglasses up to the top of her head. “What? I’m totally curious what he ended up like.” She presses her fingertips to the corners of her eyes, plucking out gobs of kohl eyeliner.

  “Yeah, but isn’t it kind of weird to show up randomly after not talking to him in like forever, especially after how bad your guys’ breakup was,” I say. “I mean, if Tristan hadn’t stepped in, you would have probably hit Dylan.”

  “Yeah, probably, but that’s all in the past.” She chews on her thumbnail and gives me a guilt-ridden look as she smears the tanning-spray grease off her bare stomach. “Besides that’s not technically accurate. We kind of talked yesterday.”

  Frowning, I sit up and refasten the elastic around my long, wavy brown hair, securing it in a ponytail. “Are you serious?” I ask, and when she doesn’t respond, I add, “Nine months ago, when he cheated on you, you swore up and down that you’d never talk to that”—I make air quotes—“ ‘fucking, lying, cheating bastard’ again. In fact, if I remember right, it was the main reason you decided to go to college with me—because you needed a break.”

  “Did I say that really?” She feigns forgetfulness as she taps her finger on her chin. “Well, like everything else in my life, I’ve decided to have a change of heart.” She reaches for the tanning spray on the table between us. “And besides, I did need a break, not just from him, but from my mom and this town, but now we’re back and I figure I might as well have some fun while I’m here. College wore me out.”

  Delilah is the most indecisive person I’ve ever met. During our freshman year, she changed majors three times, dyed her hair from red, to black, then back to red again, and went through about a half a dozen boyfriends. I secretly love it, despite how much I pretend that I don’t. It was what kind of drew me to her; her uncaring, nonchalant attitude, and the way she could forget things in the snap of a finger. I wish I could be the same way sometimes, and if I hang around her a lot, there are a few moments when I can get my mind on the same carefree level as hers.
/>   “What have you two been talking about?” I wonder, plucking a piece of grass off my leg. “And please don’t tell me it’s getting back together, because I don’t want to see you get crushed like that again.”

  Her smile shines as she tucks strands of her red hair behind her heavily studded ears, then she removes the lid from the tanning spray. “What is with you and Dylan? He’s always put you on edge.”

  “Because he’s sketchy. And he cheated on you.”

  “He’s not sketchy… he’s mysterious. And he was drunk when he cheated.”

  “Delilah, you deserve better than that.”

  She narrows her eyes at me as she spritzes her legs with tanning spray. “I’m not better than him, Nova. I’ve done supercrappy things, hurt people. I’ve made mistakes—we all have.”

  I stab my nails into the palms of my hands, thinking of all the mistakes I made and their consequences. “Yes, you are better. All he’s ever done is cheat on you and deal drugs.”

  She slaps her hand on her knee. “Hey, he doesn’t deal anymore. He stopped dealing a year ago.” She clicks the cap back onto the tanning spray and tosses it into her bag.

  I sigh, push my sunglasses up over my head, and massage my temples. “So what has he been up to for a year?” I lower my hands and blink against the sunlight.

  She shrugs, and then her lips expand to a grin as she grabs my hand and stands, tugging me to my feet. “How about we go change out of our swimsuits, head over to his place, and find out?” When I open my mouth to protest, she adds, “It’d be a good distraction for the day.”