My Beating Teenage Heart (28 page)

I caught the bus to the mall. My phone beeped just as I was getting off, signaling that a text message had come in.
Don’t look
, I warned.
You know you shouldn’t
. For at least an hour and a half, I resisted. I turned off my cell and wandered the hallways, sipping a fruit smoothie. Then I hid out in a corner of the mega bookstore.

Once it was three-thirty it was safe for me to catch the bus home again, and I headed for the exit nearest the bus stop, wishing I could spend every day this way, surrounded by people who wouldn’t know anything about me that I hadn’t told them. I thought if I could do that it might not even matter so much about the texts and emails. Impulsively, I flipped open my cell and saw there were two messages now. I read the newest first. It was from an unknown number, like all the othee acours, but what it said was very different:

T tried to hook up with I on Saturday after she left the party but he said he was interested in someone else. Then the rumors about you started. Coincidence??

I wondered if Shenice, feeling guilty for her part in things, was the one who’d sent me the message. I didn’t think I could’ve been any madder at Teena than I already was. So much damage inflicted out of pure spite—apparently just to keep Ikenna away from me—yet knowing where the rumor had sprung from didn’t automatically make it easier to stop. Was I supposed to go to war with Teena over this? Drag Ikenna into the mix and start bad-mouthing her back? Or would that only make a bigger mess? I felt overwhelmed thinking about it, like I was floating in a sea of toxic sludge that I’d never be able to wipe off.

But the second message—filled with a nastiness similar to what I’d read so many times before—made me want to crush whoever had sent it underneath my heel. My fingers flew over the keys as I texted back:

I know what the truth is and so does everyone who really knows me. Maybe you (whoever you are) don’t care about the truth. But you should. Karma is a bitch.

My blood was boiling as I pressed send and stalked out the door—rage, sadness and confusion braided so tightly inside me that I couldn’t tell one emotion from the other. Hot tears were rising and they wanted out. I blinked them back, rubbed my eyes roughly like they were just itchy, not emotional. My purse rolled off my shoulder as I stepped from tile floor onto pavement, upending and scattering its contents on the sidewalk. My mascara rolled for five feet and then fell off the curb and into the road that edged the parking lot. The lip gloss landed near my wallet and house keys. My cell phone’s battery cracked loose and spun away from the rest of the phone.

Spearmint gum. One wrapped panty liner. A gold glitter hair clip. A pink ballpoint pen. Hand sanitizer. Four loose quarters and two dimes. One purple rubber band. A tiny leather notebook that I never wrote anything in but that I’d persuaded my father to buy me at a stationery store two months earlier because I liked the inspirational messages at the top of each page. A small package of salted cashews. All these items sprawled out on the sidewalk around me. My brush was the only remaining thing tucked safely away in my purse.

A tear sprung loose as I dropped to my knees to pick up my purse. A guy bent down next to me and scooped the cashews and notebook into his hands. With his head bent all I could see was curly brown hair. “Here,” he said, raising his head to look at me as he dropped the nuts and notebook into my open purse.

Breckon Cody’s smoky blue eyes peered into mine. The single fugitive tear continued to snake down my cheek as I peered back at him.

“Are you okay?” he asked, reaching for my change and hair clip.

“Do I look like I’m okay?” I snapped. I’d never seen him before in my life but I’m as certain it was him as I am s hidth="1em"of my own identity. I’ve spent what feels like a lifetime watching him since then. His voice alone would be enough to give him away, but in my memory he’s a different Breckon—everything about him felt healthy and happy, whole. On April 21 he was the boy he was supposed to be.

Breckon blinked in surprise, probably wondering why I was giving him attitude. He held his palm open so I could pluck the quarters from it. He was wearing a brown down jacket, and now that I remember meeting him face to face in life, I also remember, as I took the change from his hand, feeling envious of this good-looking white boy I didn’t know, just like I had of the woman pushing the stroller earlier. It seemed as though his biggest problem would’ve been a possessive girlfriend or a case of athlete’s foot.

“I’m sorry,” I told him, suddenly feeling that there was something so mysteriously profound about this boy who was a stranger to me picking up my things from the pavement that for a moment I forgot to breathe. “You’re just being nice.”

Breckon ambled to the curb and rescued my mascara. “It’s okay,” he said kindly. “You got everything now?”

I felt light-headed and I don’t know … strange, like something was wrong with me although I couldn’t have explained what, but I scanned the immediate area and, finding nothing remaining on the pavement, zipped my purse shut. “Yeah, thanks.”

“No problem.”

We walked away from each other, him into the mall and me through the parking lot and towards the bus stop. One moment I was moving forward, my purse looped over my shoulder, and the next I was dropping like deadweight. I didn’t feel myself smack the pavement. The end came faster than light.

Somebody, somewhere in the darkness said, “sudden cardiac arrest.” Someone said, “stay with us” and then later, “hypertrophic cardiomyopathy,” but I’d already disconnected from the husk of my body and didn’t know what the words meant or even who I was. No more Ashlyn Baptiste. No tunnel with a white light or visions of my body below me. I had been swallowed whole by death.

And then there really was nothing for a time, the absence of all things.

No in-between period of revelations or reunions with others who had died. Before I fell from the stars there was nothing upon nothing and before that there was Breckon Cody, the last face I looked into before I died. I should’ve had an opportunity to say goodbye to my family. We all deserve that chance, but it’s a longing—a regret—that I can’t hold on to any longer. I’ll love them for as long as my consciousness persists but I know my story in full now and it’s over.

Something happened to Breckon and me that day in April. I sensed it when I stared into his eyes but didn’t recognize it for what it was then—a moment out of time, a moment during which my soul recognized that I was leaving before the rest of me caught up to that reality.

I wasn’t ready to go. I clung to life—even when it was finished. I clung to
him
, thm>h

The Bourneville Water Bridge arches over the gap separating Bourneville Bay from Lake Ontario. The bridge is about a hundred and twenty feet high and has to be closed in high winds and other bad weather conditions. I remember once, last year near Christmas, that the winds whipping around up there tossed a tractor-trailer onto its side. If it had been in the right lane rather than the middle the tractor-trailer might have been blown right over the edge and crashed into the lake below.

When I see the bridge loom in front of us I know what Breckon’s planning. The ache inside me is deeper than the Nile. I say anything I believe he’d want to hear—I shout, I beg, I try to reason with him. None of that changes his course. He’s already pulling over in the right lane, killing the engine. There’s no real shoulder, just a couple spare feet of asphalt separating the right lane from the guardrail, but he opens the door and climbs out. He treks decisively alongside the guardrail, towards the highest point of the bridge, his eyes pointed at the pavement. It’s four minutes to eleven and the traffic is light. Tonight there’s no wind. Anything that happens will be on purpose.

Breckon stands flush against the guardrail and stares down at the lake below. It’s calm and dark but it would be deadly from such a height. Massive internal injuries from hitting the water too hard.

I summon serene, healing thoughts as he gazes into the darkness. It worked before but it doesn’t work now. His breath sounds like a gasp of defeat.

And what can I do? Without a body, how can I stop him?

All I am is thought.
Shackled
. If I could go for help …

It’s never worked before. If it did, where would I go?

Breckon’s parents. Jules. Ty
.

I know where they all live. I can see their streets, houses, rooms inside my mind.
Help him
.

Desperation swells my power. What happens next is so wracked with confusion that I lose myself in the act. A plea for help that I beam out to all of them simultaneously. There is nothing in the universe that can hold me back. I split in four. I spy into their rooms—Breckon’s parents sleeping, Jules spooning yogurt into her mouth at her kitchen table and Ty playing a video game in his bedroom. I see my own panic reflected in Jules’s and Ty’s eyes, and Mr. and Mrs. Cody fight for consciousness as if their sleep was shattered by the noise of a smoke alarm. For a moment I’m such undiluted
message
that my own identity is three-quarters lost, but the final quarter remains with Breckon on the bridge. That anchor summons the other parts of myself like a magnet.

Breckon curls his hands around the top of the guardrail and climbs over to the otheer t Ir side where there’s just enough room for him to stand, facing out towards the lake a hundred and twenty feet below, his arms locking around the guardrail behind him. No boundaries keeping him in place now, nothing promising to keep him safe except his own two arms. His phone rings in his pocket. That proof of his connection to the living world makes him tremble but it’s not enough. Another minute and he’ll be gone.

Cars whir behind us. I would beg him to stay for hours, days, months if that’s what it would take to make him listen. If I had a body I’d be on my knees.

But he’ll go anyway. I can see it in his face. Hear it in his lungs. He’s ready to leave the world behind.

I brace for that moment. I cry without tears.

And then … with a chime of music that isn’t music at all but the sound of eternal stars, my solitary existence as Breckon’s shadow gives way to something more beautiful than I have ever known. I have no body, but I can feel the phantom hand that takes mine in hers. Warmth floods my soul. Fear and uncertainty disappear into the cracks in the pavement. My loneliness retreats into the night, conquered.

I can’t see her but I can sense her, and I know without question that she’s the girl who would’ve loved my glow-in-the-dark ant habitat, young Skylar with the white-blond hair. It was her who turned Breckon’s phone on the day after her funeral. I sense that too. It was the only sign she could send him from such a distance. She didn’t cling to life like I did. She’s been somewhere beyond reach, until this moment, when Breckon’s need has never been greater.

There’s no reason to speak. We understand our purpose perfectly and together we fling our invisible arms around Breckon squeezing love, light, hope and forgiveness into his bones. Tears hurtle down his cheeks as we crush him to us. The heat’s so great that we melt into a single burning entity. Life force doesn’t die with death. I’m not the only one. We
all
live.

She lives still.

Breckon feels her also; I see it in his eyes. He recognizes her in the swirl of warmth surrounding him, and he scrambles—his face wet—over to the safe side of the guardrail. His phone’s still ringing in his pocket as I feel Skylar recede slowly back into a part of the universe I can’t touch until all that’s left is the memory of her presence and a kind of gold twinkle in the sky. Stardust.

Breckon’s trembling worse now, his fingers shaking so hard that he struggles to answer his phone. On the bridge a black minivan slows and pulls over to us. The driver, a guy in his thirties with a shaved head, rolls the passenger window down and leans towards it to shout to Breckon: “You okay out there? You need a boost or something?” The man cocks his head in the direction he came from. “That your car down there?”

“I’m …” Breckon’s voice splinters as he pulls his cell away from his face. “It’s okay … It needs more than a boost. I’m … getting a tow.”

“You su&re, buddy?” the guy repeats. “You positive you’re all right?”

Breckon nods, his red-rimmed eyes countering his words. “I’m fine. Thanks.”

“Okay,” the guy says doubtfully. He closes his window and drives away into the night.

Breckon presses his phone close to his ear again, silent but nodding at the voice at the other end of the line. Still with me and still with the living. Safe on the Bourneville Water Bridge on a night with stardust but no wind.

twenty-two
                            breckon

“Breckon,” Jules repeats
as I lurch back towards my car. “Hello? Are you there?”

But I can’t answer her yet. My voice is in pieces.

I don’t know what I felt out on the other side of the bridge. My mother would say it was a memory and my grandmother would swear it was Skylar herself, in the form of a greenish-blue light. I didn’t see any light but whatever it was, I know I can’t follow through with ending things. However much I want to escape, I need to stay. Not just because it’s what Skylar would want, although it feels that way right now, but because someday, eventually, it’s possible that it could be what I want too.

I don’t know, but I hope so. There’s always a chance I could change my mind again tomorrow or the day after that; realize I’d been tricked by misfiring brain cells faking some kind of ethereal experience that never really happened.

But for tonight what I know is that it would cost too much to give up. I can’t stand the pain but I don’t want to die.

“Yeah,” I whisper to Jules. “I’m here.” I still sound like shit. I can’t hide it and I wonder why I ever tried.

“Where are you?” she asks urgently. “Who was that asking if you need a boost?”