Smashed
Authors: Lisa Luedeke
* * *
For Putnam, with love
Acknowledgments
To Linda Pratt, editorial adviser, agent, friend: You are extraordinary at what you do. Thank you for taking all my calls and talking me off the cliff more times than I can count; for loving the work, and getting the work; and for your wise editorial advice. It would not be the same book without you. To Gretchen Hirsch, my wonderful editor: Thank you for your enthusiasm and humor, for expertly guiding my revisions, and for pushing me further than I thought I had it in me to go. I miss you already. To Michael McCartney for the absolutely best knockout cover design an author could hope for. I’m amazed every time I look at it. And to my new editor, Emily Fabre, who stepped in with grace, energy, and skill, my sincere thanks.
To Janet Freeman: Thank you so much for being my very first reader; you said all the right things. To Laura Rankin: My deep appreciation to you for reading and recommending this book early on—and for sharing Linda with me. It’s made all the difference.
Huge thanks to my authors and NCTE friends for all your love, support, and friendship—and for promising to wave my book around on your travels. You are the best. A special thank-you to Kylene Beers for reading an early draft and helping me start sending it out. Your support gave me courage.
To the Division I field hockey coaches who talked to me about recruiting rules and likely scenarios, thank you for helping make my book accurate.
To Putnam, thank you for supporting my writing, always, even though it makes your life harder, and to Lily, for understanding that writing makes Mama happy. And to Catherine Cauthorne—for all you do and have done, my sincere gratitude.
Sometimes when I’m driving I see things that I don’t want to see.
Things that aren’t really there: A flash of my car careening off the road. A tree trunk smashing into the windshield, spraying sharp bits of glass, like bullets, into the car. A bloody body slumped, lifeless, beside me. Sometimes it’s a moving picture, like a movie, sometimes a solitary image—a snapshot, a tableau.
I shut my eyes but they won’t go away, won’t stop. Flash, flash, flash. They intrude, like a thief breaking into my mind, stealing my sanity.
It’s been happening ever since I got here.
For a long time, I tell no one.
When I finally tell the doctor at the university, she says there’s a reason this is happening.
“Yeah,” I say, “I’m going crazy.”
“No,” she says. “There’s nothing crazy about it. These are symptoms of trauma. Normal reaction to trauma.”
“Normal” is no longer a word I use to describe myself. I look
at her, blink once, consider what she’s said. Where I come from, people don’t talk about things like that. Trauma is a topic left to
The Oprah Winfrey Show
. The closest thing in Deerfield, Maine, to admitting anything bad happens is a bumper sticker that says
SHIT HAPPENS
.
There are a lot of counselors here at school, but Pam is the only one who’s a doctor, so they send me to her. I think she’s reserved for the worst cases. So I tell Dr. Pam a few things to see how she’ll react. At first I like how she nods at me, never looks surprised. But after a while it annoys me, so I tell her more to see if I can shock her. She looks very concerned, but that’s it. No shock.
Dr. Pam tells me it’s not so strange, this whole business of seeing things I don’t want to see, of thoughts and visions circling through my mind again and again like a merry-go-round out of control. She talks about war veterans who flash back to Afghanistan or Vietnam at the sound of fireworks on the Fourth of July, who get jumpy when they hear a hunter’s gunshot—even a car backfiring.
“It’s not like I was in a war.”
She is still for a moment before she speaks. “No. But you thought you killed someone once. And you thought you were going to die.” She pauses again. “Twice.”
Twice.
The word echoes in my head. I can’t even remember the first time. But the memory is lodged like a bullet in my brain; it’s lurking in there somewhere. If it came out, maybe I could
get rid of it. But I don’t want to remember any more than I already do.
I glance at her wastebasket, sure I will throw up. I want to run, but I can’t. I’ve been sentenced to these weekly sessions with her. It’s a condition of my playing hockey here. Plus, Pam’s not surprised that I’m seeing things. For the first time, I wonder if she could actually help me.
“It’s called post-traumatic stress disorder—PTSD,” she says.
I don’t care what it’s called as long as I’m not crazy.
Something else happened, too. Like a nightmare, but I was awake. Awake but in a dream, another vision that I couldn’t control, couldn’t escape from. It was happening all over again and I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t get away. . . .
My roommate found me, in our room, yelling at no one she could see.
But there are some things I keep to myself for now, and Dr. Pam says I don’t have to talk about anything until I’m ready.
“What if I’m never ready?” I ask.
“That’s okay,” Dr. Pam replies.
Ha. I remember my first counselor, Gail, and I don’t believe that for a minute. But Pam’s been nice to me, so I give her the benefit of the doubt. What other choice do I have, really?
She asks me to start at the beginning, a year ago, when I was seventeen.
It seems like a lifetime ago.
1
The summer before my senior year I hooked up with Alec.
Alec Osborne: tall, cute, built. The guy every girl wanted and every boy wanted to be. That’s how it seemed, anyway. He was captain of the football team, captain of the baseball team. Damn, he was captain of the
debate
team. Even the teachers looked at him with awe. He was
it
in our small high school.
But this is the honest-to-God truth: I never saw why. I never knew what they saw in him—the pack of friends that swaggered with him through the halls, the girls, his teachers. To me it was bizarre, his appeal. I couldn’t see it. He was a big jock; that helped his case. But it was more than that. He could sway people, win them over. But not me.
That’s what I thought, anyway.
Alec’s friends were football players mostly, or basketball, or baseball, or all three. They were good-looking. But they were arrogant, too. Not
all
the guys who played sports—that’s not what I’m saying. Just these guys Alec hung out with. There
were plenty of good guys who were athletic. My best friend, Matt, for one. And field hockey means everything to me; it’s my
life
. No, playing football wasn’t what made Alec the way he was. I’ll never understand what made Alec the way he was.
Anyway, we went to the same parties, had a few of the same friends. Both of us were totally devoted to our sports. We had those things in common; that was it. He’d never been part of my plans. But back then, what I planned and what I did weren’t always the same thing.
Sometimes that was a problem.
You can make your head spin asking yourself why you did something. Something your gut tells you is trouble. But there are some questions that don’t have answers—not good ones, not ones you can live with. This is what’s true: I let myself get sucked in by Alec, even when I knew better.
And I did know better.
It started early that summer, in June. I’ve gone over it in my head a hundred times.
* * *
“Nine!” Matt hollered as I emerged from the water. He held up nine bony fingers as if that made it official.
“
What
? That dive was
so
a ten!”
“Sorry,” he said, poker-faced. “Toes not quite pointed on the touch. Gotta deduct one for that. If I don’t, what does a ten really
mean
? What is a ten really
worth
? I mean, if I allowed
that
. . .”
“Shut
up
.” I laughed and swiped my arm across the lake’s
surface, sending a mini tidal wave in his direction. Water flew up and over where he sat on the side of the dock, his long legs dangling over the side.
“Shouldn’ta done that,” he said, grinning, and hopped in, arms and legs flying, chasing me all the way to the ring of buoys and beyond, straight across the lake.
Breathless, we collapsed in the shallow water on the opposite side. Kids’ voices echoed across the lake’s surface. Our little town beach sat in one of the lake’s narrows, and a ten-minute swim got you to the other side. Not far, but a world away when the beach was crowded and noisy, which it was on this first truly hot day of the summer.
Matt leaned back, his elbows sinking into the wet sand. His legs stretched out into the lake, toes poking out of the water.