Breaking Free (6 page)

“You’re lying.”

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, but all I saw behind my darkened eyelids was Jenna’s face surrounded by a pool of bright red blood.  I gasped and my eyes snapped open.

“Everything okay?”

I shook my head and placed my hands on the ground behind me, ready to push myself into a standing position.

“Want to talk about it?”

I shook my head again, but before I could get to my feet, JC rested his hand on my ankle.

“Want me to distract you from whatever you’re
thinking about?”

“
It won’t work.”

“Try me.  I’m a pretty good storyteller.  At least that’s what Jalen always told me.”

“Who’s Jalen?”

“
He was my little brother.”

“
Was? What happened?”

“
That
is not a good story.  I have a much better one about Prince Jalen who lives in a faraway land where he slays dragons with bolts of electricity from his fingertips and fights off enemies with cannon balls the size of cars.”

“Sounds like an exciting place.”

“It is.”  As JC started telling me the story, a red-faced Neeky stumbled out of his tent with Jason right behind him, carrying two flasks.

“These were taped to his
legs,” he told Chris, before adding them to the locked storage cabinet.

I focused back on JC as he continued his
tale complete with quick-sand-like pits of gooey green slime and friendly nunchuck-wielding ninjas who came to Prince Jalen’s aid.  I imagined the story was pretty awesome to a little kid.  Actually, it was pretty entertaining to a sixteen-year old and within a few minutes, my mind had temporarily left Jenna behind so I could follow the adventures of Prince Jalen as he rid the world of evil monsters.

Chapter 8
:  August 24

“
What are you smiling
about, Señorita Kelsie?” Marta asks, lowering her plate into the sink.

“Prince Jalen.”

“His brother?”

“Yes
.  JC used to tell him stories.  They always ended the same way—Prince Jalen defeating the bad guys and keeping his friends and family safe—but the means to that end were always different and usually pretty creative.”

“
He told you these stories?”

I nod.  “It started on our third day.  That was the first time I thought
about …”  I stop myself.  I don’t talk about Jenna with anyone.  Well, except JC, but that’s no longer an option.  I’m certainly not going to tell Marta about her.  “Once I accepted my month of camping and stopped spending so much energy being angry, my mind had time to wander.  A wandering mind is never good …” I say evasively.

“Not when you’ve seen the things you’ve seen.”

“Or caused the things I’ve caused,” I say without thinking, then snap my head up to see Marta’s reaction.  I didn’t mean to go there.  I’m usually good at keeping my mouth shut.

“
Pobrecita,” Marta murmurs, turning on the water and scrubbing the plate with a sponge.  “So much guilt for someone so young.”

I lower what’s left of my sandwich and push the plate
away, having lost my appetite.   No one knows what really happened.  Everyone thinks it was an accident, but I know better.  Jenna, my best friend since third grade, would still be alive if it weren’t for me.

It was a Saturday night and we were at her house like usual since her parents always had plans on Saturday nights.  They also had a fully stocked liquor cabinet and never seemed to
notice when some of it went missing.

It’s not like we made a habit of getting drunk, but sometimes it was a nice way to forget about a bad day.  Or a bad week.
  It seemed like I was having more and more of those as time went on.  As I grew older, I was never the daughter my parents wanted.  Although I had a solid B+ grade point average, that wasn’t good enough.  Sure, I made it onto the cheerleading squad, but why wasn’t I captain?  Sheila’s friend from the country club had a daughter win a national art contest—why didn’t I win anything?  It’s like I didn’t provide them with enough bragging rights to keep them in the upper echelon of their circle of friends.  I was depressed for months when I finally realized my parents didn’t care about me, only what I could provide for them.  That made me even less interested in trying to please them in the future.

The argument
we had the day everything fell apart was over college.  Sheila insisted I apply to UCLA because “you never know what might happen.”  She thought my dad might be able to pull some strings if he made a large endowment to the university.  I told her I didn’t want to get into college with a bribe and my plan was to go to Cal State Long Beach.  I had done pretty well on my SAT so I figured I had a good shot there.

She
shook her head in disgust and said, “Don’t be so sanctimonious.  You need all the help you can get.”

As usual,
I ran to Jenna afterwards.

“What’s up, girl?” she asked when I barged into her bedroom.  She was sitting on the floor
painting her toenails with fluorescent purple polish.

“Sheila.”

“Bitch.  Do you want to talk about it or forget about it?”

“Forget about it.”

“Perfect.  Mom and Dad are going out.  Let’s have a little soiree tonight!”

“
That sounds like fun.  Who should we invite?”

She shrugged.  “
Becca, Gabe, Rachel…”

“Brad?”
I asked, raising my eyebrows.

She picked up a pillow and threw it at my head.  “You’re still after him?”

“Come on, I think we’d be good together.”

“You mean you’d have a good time.”

“No, well maybe, but I think there could be more there.”

She rolled her eyes. 
“You want a lasting relationship with Bradley Winston?  The guy who considers two weeks long-term.”

“I can change him.”

“Like you changed Rick and Steve and Travis.  Shall I go on?”

“
They weren’t so bad.”

“They were assholes!”

“They were just looking for something different than me.”

“
Brad’s an asshole, too.”

“Don’t you dare talk about my future husband like that,”
I said, grinning and throwing the pillow back at her.

“Omigod.  If you two got hitched, I’d
be the one standing up and protesting when the minister asked if anyone objected.”

I smile because I know it’s true.  “W
hat would you say?”

“That you’re a sweet, wonderful person
with terrible taste in men.  Brad is a useless player who doesn’t deserve you.”

“
Give him a chance.”

She paused and pointed
the polish brush at me.  “Okay, I’ll give him tonight to prove me wrong.  But you have to promise to forget about him if he doesn’t do anything to dispel his playboy image.”

“Deal.”

“Come here,” she said grabbing my ankle and dragging me towards her.  “You need a pedicure if you’re seeing your future husband tonight.”

“I can’t be caught in that awful color.”

“It’s stylish.”

“Says who?”

“Teen Vogue.”  She points at the magazine lying on her bed.

“They said fluorescent purple is in?”

“Yes.  Well, purple.”

“A
dark, deep purple.  That’s broody and mysterious.  This is clown-like.”

“Hopefully, Brad likes clowns, then,” she said, finishing my big toe and moving on to the next one.

“We’re shopping for new nail polish tomorrow,” I said, grabbing the magazine from the bed.  “You get no say in the color.”

She crinkled her nose at me and then swiped the brush on the to
p of my foot, forming a heart.  “Brad and Kelsie, sitting in a tree …”

“
There will be more than k-i-s-s-i-n-g happening tonight.”  I raised my eyebrows and she shook her head.

“Not in my room! You’ll need to do that outside.  I don’t want Brad germs in my house.”

“How about the pool house?”

“Y
ou could use one of the floats,” she said with a smile.  “Maybe that one with the hole?  Then you could throw it out afterwards.”

“
We could get Sheila’s fancy float from my house.”

Jenna laughed.  “I’d love to see Sheila’s face when you told her you had sex on that thing.
  You could mention it during one of her parties with all the country club ladies there.”

“
That would be better than the time we put baby powder in her hair dryer.”  I laughed, remembering how her entire head, face and all, was coated afterwards.  She ended up being at least an hour late for her fundraising event that night.

“I forgot about that.  Man, we’
re cruel sometimes,” Jenna said, but couldn’t stop smiling.

Later that evening
, our friends arrived and it didn’t take long before we loosened up thanks to a few drinking games.  Throughout the night, I tried to get Jenna to see something positive in Brad, but he didn’t help himself.  I even ended up finding myself being less and less attracted to him. The problem was I had a plan and I didn’t want to mess that up.

“My girl, Kelsie, here thinks you’ve got potential,” Jenna
said, narrowing her eyes at Brad.  “I’ve got my doubts.”

He draped his arm across my shoulder. “You’ve got good taste,”
he whispered in my ear, but not quietly enough.

“No, she’s got horrible taste in men!  Disaster after disaster and you fit the mold perfectly!”

“Let’s get out of here,” he said to me.  Before I could answer, a techno song reverberated from his pocket.  He pulled out his phone and checked the screen.

Jenna reached over
and grabbed it from his hands.

“Give it back!” he yelled
.

She
stumbled over the back of the couch and read the text out loud.  “
Babe.  Where are you?  I thought you were coming over tonight.  I’m lonely.  Stace.”

“
So Stace doesn’t know you’re here putting the moves on another girl?  Perhaps I should text her …”

Brad leaped over the couch, elbowing Rachel and
Becca in the progress, and stole his phone back.  “We broke up last week.  She’s just trying to get me back.”  Looking at me he said, “Seriously, there’s nothing going on between us.”

I nodded, but Jenna sho
t me an angry glare.

Brad circled around the sofa and
wrapped his arms around my waist.  “Let’s go to the beach.  Maybe do a little skinny dipping?  What do you say?”

“
Umm …”

“No!  The answer is no, Kels!” Jen
na yelled from across the room.

“Come on, it will be fun.  Just for a little while.”

I looked to Jenna who was giving me her serious face.  She did not want to go. “Let me talk to Jenna for a sec,” I said, unwinding myself from his arms.

As soon as I was free from his grip, Jenna grabbed
my shoulder and marched me to the half-bath down the hallway.  Once the door was closed, she let me have it.

“He’s an asshole.  I gave you one night and he proved me right. 
We made a deal.  It’s time for you to forget about him.  Plus, we’ve been drinking.”

I sat on the closed toilet seat and said,
“You’re barely even tipsy.  And the night’s not over.  We still have one hour.  Plus, the beach will be fun.  We haven’t been at night in a long time.”

“We can go tomorrow
night, the two of us.”

“
It’s just an hour.”

“Kels,
I don’t get it.  What is it with this guy?”

I groaned
because I didn’t want to tell her the truth.  I rarely kept anything from Jenna, but I knew she’d be against this plan.  Sitting in the bathroom with her, trying to stand up for a guy who viewed relationships very differently from her wasn’t going to get me anywhere, though.  I had to tell her the truth.  It was my only option.  “Sheila is on some kind of committee with his mom and she talks about what a wonderful boy he is and how I could never land a boyfriend like him.”

“So we’re doing this to spite your stepmom who you hate?”

“Yes.”

She rolled her eyes and said, “As long as we’re clear on the motive.
So what exactly is your plan?”

“Make him think I’m the type of girl he wants so he comes over to the house a few times when Sheila’s there.”

“Promise me you won’t sleep with him.”

I crinkle up my nose.  “
Probably not.”

Shaking her head, s
he grabs my hands and pulls me up from the toilet.  “Why didn’t you just tell me this from the beginning?”

“
Because I knew you’d try to talk me out of it.”

“Any chance I can do still do that?”

I smiled and shook my head, knowing that I had gotten my way.  We returned to the party and after everyone finished their drinks, we all headed to the beach.  Jenna and I went alone in her Miata.

We were
last in the line of four cars as we traveled the windy roads of the country club, but lost everyone else as soon as we got to the exit.  Jenna took our usual short cut to the 405 that runs along lesser used country roads and we assumed everyone else took the more common route.  Despite not wanting to go, I could tell she was enjoying herself.  We put the top down and blasted the radio while our hair whipped in the breeze.  Then our favorite song came on.    We belted out the lyrics and danced in our seats.

Right as the
chorus started, my bag fell to the floor.  I leaned over to grab it, but when I sat back up, there were two bright lights headed straight towards us.

“Jenna!” I screamed.  She was looking in the rearview mirror at something.  “Jenna! Car!”

I grabbed the steering wheel and yanked as hard as I could.  We swerved to the right, flew off the embankment, skidded sideways, and rammed into a tree.

I don’t know how
much time passed or what exactly happened, but my next memory is standing over Jenna’s body on the pavement.  It was twenty feet from the mangled wreckage.  The tips of her blond hair were crimson and my first thought was she had a really bad dye job.  I smiled and imagined we’d get a good laugh about that later.

When I knelt
down, I realized the dye was more widespread.  It formed a halo around her head like some sort of weird angel.  I ran my fingers through it, smearing crimson lines towards me.