“Anytime,” I say, my pride increasing. “I can keep going if you want me to. Tell you all of Tristan’s little secrets that only happen behind the walls of our apartment.” He grows quiet again and I wonder if I said something wrong. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine. It’s just that it’s weird… you two living together.”

“Us three live together,” I remind him, kind of thrown off by the hint of jealousy in his voice.

“Yeah, I know, but still…” He trails off. “Never mind. It doesn’t matter. I shouldn’t even be getting onto the subject of this anyway.”

The subject of what? Tristan and me living together? I’m not 100 percent sure what he’s trying to get at, but I let it go, deciding it’d be stupid to push him. “So what is the weather like over there?”

It takes him a second to answer. “Cloudy and windy. How’s the weather over in Idaho?”

“Dry and sunny.” I scoot back down on the bed and roll to my side to face the frosted window. “Although it’s a little cold.”

“Yeah, it’s the same way here, too.” He wavers. “Nova, we don’t have to talk about mundane things like the weather. Like I said, I’m not fragile.”

I’m not sure where to go from here. We’ve been through so much together, yet at the same time I don’t really know him, not the sober version, anyway. “So what do you want to talk about?”

“How about you and me,” he says, his voice cracking. “And what we are.”

His bluntness makes me stutter. “I-I’m not sure how to answer that. I mean, I don’t really know the answer.”

“Neither do I and I’m not sure how we can figure that out or… or if we should.” He pauses. “God, I just replayed what I said in my head and I didn’t mean for that to come out the way that it did. What I meant was that right now, I kinda am still trying to fix myself and I don’t want you to feel obligated to wait around for me to get better.”

My heart slams excruciatingly against my rib cage. “You read my letter, didn’t you?”

“No… why? Did you say something like that in your letter?”

“No,” I say quickly. “And you don’t even have to read it if you don’t want to. Or maybe you threw it away already.”

“I still have it,” he tells me reluctantly. “I was just too afraid to read it, afraid of what you said. Afraid it might mean too much.”

“You should probably just burn it. I sometimes ramble when I write, like when I talk, and I don’t know how you’re going to take the stuff I said.”

“I don’t want to burn it. And besides, I’ve always liked your rambling. It can actually be insightful sometimes.”

“You say that now,” I tell him, forcing a teasing tone. “But try living with it.”

He’s silent for a moment and I have no idea what he’s thinking. Whether he thinks I’m crazy? Amusing? I remember that when I was younger I wished I could have mind reading powers, and I’m starting to wish that again so I could crack his head open and see what on earth he’s thinking.

“Nova, I’m going to read the letter,” he says. “I just want to make sure I can handle whatever’s in there.”

“I wish I could answer that for you,” I say. “But I don’t know what you’re expecting. Really, it’s just my feelings. About you and me.” Feelings I can still barely admit to myself. I was actually surprised at what came out of me. How much I care for him and how much I see him when I look into the future.

“Then I’m not sure I’m ready yet.” There’s an ache in his voice. “If it’s rejection then I’m worried it’ll break me and if it’s the opposite… if you want me as more than a friend then I’m not sure I’m ready for that, either. Because honestly, I’m really weak right now and even taking care of myself feels really hard.”

I get what he’s saying a little too well. It took me over a year to watch Landon’s video after he committed suicide, because I worried whatever was on there was going to shatter me into pieces. When I did finally watch it, though, I didn’t shatter. In fact, I started picking up the pieces of my life, but only because I was ready to.

“Then wait to read it until you’re ready,” I tell him. “And for now, I’m okay with just being your friend.” It feels like such a huge lie when I say it and actually kind of hurts my heart a bit.

“I would love that,” he says, unwinding. “So tell me something friendly.”

I snort a laugh. “What does that even mean?”

“I don’t know.” He sounds amused. “Tell me something you’d tell Lea or Tristan.”

“Um, well, I watched Anchorman for the first time tonight.” God, I’m so lame.

“And what’d you think of it?”

“I fell asleep,” I admit. “But only because I was tired to begin with.”

“Yeah, but it’s not for everyone,” he explains. “Although I know Tristan loves it.”

“Yeah, he’s the one who made me watch it,” I divulge. “He acted like I was crazy because I never had.”

He pauses again. “I’m jealous of him,” he confesses. “And I only said that because my therapist has been pushing me to talk aloud about stuff that’s bothering me… and it’s bothering me… that you and Tristan get to spend so much time together.”

“It’s not like that,” I promise. “We’re just friends and roommates.”

“I know, but I just wanted you to know that it’s making me feel… jealous,” he says hesitantly. “Although, if something did happen between you two, I’d understand.”

“We’re not going to get together. Trust me,” I say, thinking about what happened back on the sofa and how much I would rather it had been Quinton than Tristan. “And besides, we fight all the time.”

“Really? You two never did before.”

“Yeah, we did. And he can be kind of cranky… I think he sometimes has a hard time adjusting to the boredom.”

“I can see that,” he states with understanding. “I’m already getting sick of staring at my walls and I’ve only been out for a day, but talking to you helps.”

“Well, I can talk your ear off.”

He laughs. “Please do.”

I smile at the beauty in his laughter. “What do you want me to talk about?”

“You.”

“What do you want me to tell you about me?”

“Everything… I want to know everything about you, Nova like the car.” Amusement laces his tone as he says the nickname he gave to me pretty much the first day he met me.

My smile takes up my entire face. Not because of his comment but because it’s the first real moment I think Quinton and I have had without drugs and anxiety filling in the blanks in our conversation. And so I do the only thing I can do. I start talking. In fact, I talk well into the early hours of the next day. And for a moment everything feels perfect, but I have a hard time believing it’s going to stay because it never seems to. Things just always sort of happen. Life always just sort of happens. And no matter what I do, I can never keep the bad out completely, despite how much I want to.

Chapter 3

Quinton

November 17, day nineteen in the real world

Jesus, time moves slow. Really, really slow. Especially when all I can think about is everything that’s happened. I knew I had a rough road ahead of me, but this is ridiculous. Everything is pissing me off today. The rain. The clouds in the sky. My therapist. It’s our sixth meeting and I’m starting to realize he’s a pushy bastard. Nothing like Charles at the rehab center, who always let me do things on my own terms. Greg, my new therapist, seems to take the opposite approach, like if I don’t start talking as soon as possible, then I’ll never get better or “learn to deal with my feelings,” as he puts it. Plus, after a suggestion he made to my dad, I’ve started helping around our community. Doing things like volunteering at the homeless shelter and visiting the elderly to keep me busy, like that’s the key to keeping me out of trouble. It’s not like I hate doing it. In fact, at times it’s nice because it makes me feel like I’m attempting to create something good to make up for all the bad I’ve put in this world. I just feel weird being out and about with people, who I swear can see what’s hiding under my skin. The invisible scars that make up my past and the things I’ve done.

Add that to the fact that I’m living in my old bedroom in my old home with my father, and I’m feeling a little unbalanced right now, like I’m walking on a tightrope and am about to fall. On one side lies a fall to that rock bottom I’m so familiar with and on the other is the fall that just ends it all. Both seem like easy choices, yet I keep making myself attempt to balance and walk forward, especially when life keeps throwing me challenges. Like the other day when I was in the grocery store and I saw Lexi’s mom. She didn’t see me, thankfully, otherwise I might have slipped up in my sobriety. She’s verbalized in the past how she feels about me and she has every right to feel that way. One day, though, I wish I could just tell her I’m sorry and that I hope maybe she can forgive me. The same with Ryder’s parents. I want them to know that I think about them all the time. That I hate that I’m the one who lived. That I’m trying to make up for it the best I can.

Despite the fact that life is complex, writing seems to help a lot, actually. So here I am writing and in just a few minutes I’ll go to a job interview for a painting job. Not an artist painting job, but a construction painting job, which isn’t ideal, but the hours are flexible and right now I have no more than a high school education so my job options are limited. Nova thinks I should go back to school, but I’m not sure I can handle that right now. Still, it’s nice listening to her ramble about the plus sides of getting a college education. The girl really could have a job as a motivational speaker if she wanted to, with all the positivity she sends out. I like her positivity, just like I like having her as a friend. I like everything about her and I wish I could tell her that. How much she means to me. But that’d be opening a door I know I’m not ready to open, which is why I haven’t read her letter, even though I’m dying to. In fact, I stare at it every day.

Even though there’s good stuff going on in my life, I still have frequent nightmares about the accident. I keep seeing Lexi die over and over again. Then myself. When I wake up, it feels like I’m back in the place of death again. That’s actually another thing Greg’s been pushing me to talk about. My death. He thinks for some f**king reason that some of my emotional problems and obsession with dying are connected to the fact that I already died. He even asked me how I felt when I died, what I saw, how I felt when I came back. I told him to f**k off, though, so he dropped it.

It made me angry that he opened the door and I was even more angry at myself for still not being able to talk about stuff like that. I still have such a very long way to go, everyone keeps telling me, like I don’t get it. I know I do. I think about it all the time, how long it might take me to get some sort of balance in my life. But the fact that I can envision that long away has to mean something, right? Has to mean there might be some sort of hope for me other than relapse, a word I became very familiar with in rehab. A lot of the people were in there because of relapse and I can’t help but think about it. How easy it’d be just to do it again. Get lost. Stop thinking about jobs. And therapy. Stop dreaming of Lexi and death. But it’s also hard because I have a few people now pushing me in the opposite direction.

Still, I can’t help but be hyper-aware of all the places I know I could get drugs from. Like Marcus down the street, who’s still dealing, from what I heard. Or my old friend Dan, one of the guys I first got high with. I ran into him the other day at the grocery store while I was picking up some milk for my dad. He looked ripped out of his mind and it made me sort of envious. He even asked me if I still did it and I almost wanted to say yes, because I knew where that path would lead me. But instead I found myself saying no and a few minutes later I was standing in the checkout line, such a simplistic, boring thing, which allowed too many thoughts to slip into my mind. Like how close the lake is to the grocery store, the one where the accident took place. The one where I died and came back to life. The one where two lives were lost.

“Are you about ready to go?” my dad asks as he knocks on my doorway before strolling into my bedroom, interrupting my writing.

I stop moving the pen across the paper and glance up from the notebook. He’s dressed in a polo shirt and slacks, instead of his usual button-down shirt and tie, but that’s because he took today off from work.

“What time is it?” I ask as I set the notebook and pen aside on my bed.

He glances at his watch. “A quarter to two. It’s a little bit early, but I figured we could stop and get a bite to eat and maybe talk or something.” He scratches the back of his head, seeming uncomfortable.

“Sure.” I get up from my bed and grab my jacket off the back of my computer chair, then we head out of my room.

As usual, neither of us talks as we get into the car and drive down the road. The entire journey there’s nothing but silence, but I’m familiar with it. In fact, it’s become really comfortable. Things only start to drift toward unfamiliar territory when my dad pulls up to a restaurant instead of a fast food drive-through. Sit-in dining has never been his thing. In fact, I can’t even remember a time when he took me to a restaurant.