Loud Awake and Lost Read online

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, I’m sorry. But look. Maybe it’s for the best. It’s not like you forgot that you got elected president or you can’t remember how to play concert piano.” Kidding all the way, so was it my imagination that Rachel had gone tense? Averting her eyes, cracking her knuckles down the line. As if waiting for me to admit something.

  “What?”

  “What…?” Rachel repeated. Then she blew through her cheeks, her eyes scanning the room. “What the yuck is that?”

  “Oh.” I reached and picked it up. “It’s plasticized teeth. I had them for a couple of months before I got my veneers.”

  “Ew! What’s it doing here?”

  “I guess I wanted to keep it. Sentimental, maybe. I thought I could hold pennies in it or something.”

  “Ember, that’s vomit-worthy. But lucky you, because I’m making an executive decision.” Rachel grabbed my teeth and made a show of dangling them between her thumb and forefinger. Then she dropped them, used-Kleenex-style, into my jewelry box.

  “Were you always this bossy?”

  “I’m not as bossy as you are gross.”

  “Gross hurts nobody. Bossy has the power to annoy. Bottom line, poor me.”

  “Gross offends everyone. Bossy can be helpful. Bottom line, poor me.”

  Our “bottom line, poor me” routine was an old joke, worn thin as a favorite T-shirt. Pretty dumb, but it had been such a long time since we’d done it that I had to smile.

  “I’m so glad you’re back,” said Rachel. “And the best part is I can tell it’s the real you.”

  My smile lost heart. “What do you mean, the real me?”

  “No, I didn’t mean— Nothing.” She flinched, barely. “I mean, you’re always Embie. But you’re more Emberish to me when you’re actually here. And here you are. That’s all I meant.”

  “Ookay.”

  Suddenly Rachel jumped at me and hugged me again, hard. “Forget it. Don’t listen to me. I’m overly happy. I missed you like crazy and now everything’s back to normal and that’s a good thing. And that’s all there is to it.”

  “I missed you, too.” The time for questions wasn’t now. But Rachel had lodged the thought, and now it was stuck. If there had been a real and a not-real me before the accident, then…which one of us had come home?

  3

  Good as New

  “What? You’re cold? How?” Dad got noisy when he felt doubtful. He didn’t mean to be. Mom liked to say that Sam Leferrier’s voice was the loudspeaker to his soul.

  “Not so much,” I lied as I accepted the platter of wild rice. Frozen, more like. I’d pulled on my ugly-comfy pajama-jeans and a baggy cable crewneck right before we’d come downstairs for dinner. Rachel hadn’t noticed, and I didn’t want to tell her, but my body temperature had suddenly plummeted.

  I’d had similar moments at Addington, and they still spooked me. It was as if my veins were getting pumped with an injection of ice water. My still-healing body was a mystery to me. I randomly seemed to switch on and off, on and off, in jets of heat and frost, tears and laughter, sleep and sleeplessness, dreams and nightmares.

  Of course, Dr. P’s case studies had already proven that this was normal.

  “But it’s sixty-eight degrees!” Dad reproached, following me into the dining room with a platter of roast chicken. Mom and Smarty were finishing setting places.

  “I know.” I set down the rice and the mat for the chicken. Dad’s face was rosy from cooking. I’d inherited his love of it. “Dr. P calls them ‘abreactions,’ ” I told him, aware that Mom was listening in. “It’s like an energy purge. There are physical and psychological kinds. They’ll get better.”

  “But he never told us about that,” said Mom. She looked upset—she never liked to be caught by surprise when it came to any detail of my recovery.

  “Yes, yes he did, Natalie. He did once, to me. It’s a post-traumatic symptom—yes, yes he did,” Dad overly assured her. They were always in a back-and-forth, making sure the other knew everything. Full shared custody of their broken treasure.

  “Just be sure you keep regular contact with Dr. Pipini,” Dad reminded. “You’ve been under rigorous medical surveillance for eight months. And now you’re almost totally unmonitored.”

  “Except by you and Mom, my twenty-four/seven EMT monitor team.”

  “Hmm, funny.” Dad’s tone said that I wasn’t, not really. But I wasn’t exactly joking, either. Appeasing my parents’ concerns had become as routine as breathing.

  Sunset fell through the dining room windows as we all seated ourselves around the table. The light dappled the herbed roast chicken, the wild rice and string beans, the blackberry cobbler in sundae glasses. Across the table, Rachel was happily inhaling all the potato salad like it had been a week and not a year since she’d last dropped by our house for supper.

  “I can taste the rosemary, Dad,” I mentioned. Conversations about Dad’s window-box herbs were a better choice than conversations about medical surveillance. Taste, my best sense, hadn’t been exactly spotlighted by the Addington cafeteria experience.

  “All summer I watched it grow, thinking about you coming home to us, Emb,” said Dad.

  “It feels like proof I’m really here.” I yawned.

  “You’re overtired. Maybe you shouldn’t go to school tomorrow.” Mom spoke quickly, as if she’d been waiting for the right way to work this in. “Honey, I was thinking. You might need a few more days at home to get your bearings. And we could use the free time to go into the city and neaten your bangs, maybe get you a new winter coat.”

  “I kind of like my bangs looking a little wild,” I said.

  Not the right answer. Mom pretended she hadn’t heard. “School will seem awfully intense, probably, with all the academic demands.”

  But now Dad was restless, folding his dinner napkin into small triangles. He didn’t agree with Mom; I could sense it before he spoke. “Come on, Nat. Ember starting back at school is the smarter, more proactive move. She’s got a net, with all her same friends and teachers there to support her. And it’s a gentle transition, no matter what happens. We’ve all been over it.”

  All been over what? The smarter move? Was there a dumber move? What did my parents think might happen to me at school? “Dad, what do you mean, no matter what happens?” I asked. “That sounds so dire.”

  “No, I just meant, because we need to gauge your recovery. That’s all. Take it day by day.”

  “Right.” Though I wasn’t sure that Dad was saying all that he meant.

  “Hey, Chef.” Rachel waved a spud-speared fork across my line of vision. “When are you whipping up a dinner here? We’ve gone too long without a Leferrier Friday Folly. Might be fun—a chance to bring the whole gang together.”

  “Oh.” I hadn’t hosted a Folly in…a year? Over a year?

  “You didn’t forget how to cook, did you?” Rachel gave me a look of mock inspection. “I can handle the lost memory. I can handle the Frankenbolt in your spine, but you’ve been a kitchen genie since fourth grade.”

  “I didn’t forget. Actually, I’ve been saving recipes like always. I was making files at Addington.” What I couldn’t say was that every time I’d started reading one of my floppy, dog-eared cookbooks or visited some of my favorite gourmet websites, it had been like the language of a country I’d studied but had never visited. Except for now—boom!—here was some taste back. Homegrown rosemary. Bright buds of whole-grain mustard in the potato salad. The blackberries baked soft and sweet under their biscuity cobbler blanket. “We’ll do something this Friday,” I said impulsively. “Let’s invite the crew. Why not?”

  “Done! Deal!” Across the table, Rachel leaned forward and high-fived me. “I’ll come over early and chop stuff.”

  “Sweet.” But this Friday felt close. Could I? For real? I glanced down at my hands, soft and pink, the only part of my body that was less marked up than eight months ago. Hardly any evidence of my chef’s nicks, scars, or blisters on th
em.

  “And maybe we’ll ask Holden?” Rachel’s voice gave away how much she was pretending that this was a casual question.

  Holden Wilde. My ex and Rachel’s other bestie—plus Holden and Rachel were first cousins, a thicker skin of closeness. Rachel had been shocked at our breakup, almost a year ago now. So had my parents. Everyone adored Holden.

  Obviously I had, too. I’d adored him most.

  Holden had visited me at the hospital right after it happened. Then, a few weeks after, when I’d transferred to Addington, he’d come to see me again. I could hardly remember the first visit. I’d been on drips, feeds, the IV. In pain, out of it.

  But when I saw him in the doorway at Addington, my eyes had stung with gratitude. He’d brought me a teddy bear and a six-pack of cozy socks, and he stayed with me past the soup and custard lunch. He’d looked cute that day, too, in his preppy Mount Gay Rum insignia hoodie and with his hair swooped over one eye. His casual put-togetherness had made me feel even more mortified about my scars, my straggly hair, and my stubbly legs. Holden being sweetly Holden, he’d seemed to understand this. He’d let me grip his hand, he’d let me cry, he’d let me lash out in rage—it had been so hard, in those first weeks, to hold on to any one emotion for longer than a minute. Every feeling had been an imperative, and they’d all needed to be exorcised like demons.

  “You’ll get through it, Ember,” he’d said, cupping my face in his hands and pressing a kiss to my chapped mouth and my chin, just before he’d left. “I know you’re feeling pretty beat up, but never forget it’s what’s inside that counts.”

  Which had confused me. As bruised and damaged as I knew I looked, it was me-on-the-inside that felt the most in need of repair.

  After that visit, Holden had called a few times—conversations filled with more clumsy brakes-and-goes than a driver’s ed test. Eventually, the calls stopped. And I didn’t call him, either. We were broken up, after all. Besides, it was his senior year. I owed him the kindness of not dragging him down into my mess.

  And then one late-in-August weekend, Mom had arrived at Addington with some family albums—Mom preferred the old-fashioned process of cutting and pasting and hand-note captions to anything digital. I opened the most recent album, not quite knowing what I’d find. What I found was Holden. Through the months and holidays, Holden kept staring back at me. Navy eyes, walnut-brown hair. His signature smile that was almost fierce, even though he was one of the gentlest, most unassuming people I’d ever known.

  I’d unpeeled my favorite shot—Holden and me last fall, at Clarence Pumpkin Patch on Long Island—and hid it under my flat-foam Addington pillow. For company. For privacy. For memories—although, truth be told, by the time that picture had been memorialized in the scrapbook, we’d been walking the plank toward breakup.

  But still I didn’t contact him. Not until a month ago, when it looked like I’d be released. I sent the first text. He answered in thirty seconds. The texts turned into Gchats that lasted for hours. Suddenly we had so much to say.

  And so we’d gotten close again. On laptops at least.

  “Not sure you’ve heard, but Holden’s started NYU. He’s on campus, but he’s home some weekends.” Rachel’s voice broke my reverie. “I’ll invite him from you? Super casual?”

  “Yeah, that’d be cool. We’ve been texting a little bit, actually. So maybe I’ll invite him myself.” Obviously I knew about NYU. I’d helped Holden pick out his classes, and I’d heard about his sweaty, clarinet-playing roommate and his brilliant Intro to Psych professor. Holden had even let me in on some details of his crush, Cassandra Atwater from Toronto, who lived down the hall and was on the diving team.

  “Oh! Well! That’s great!” Rachel couldn’t hide her surprise. Holden plainly had kept Rachel in the dark about us being in touch. I was relieved and grateful for his discretion, but not surprised. Holden wasn’t exactly Mr. Overshare.

  “Friday Folly. Oh my goodness. There were times I thought I’d never…” Mom’s voice broke. She cleared her throat and lifted her glass of water. “To Ember. Good as new.”

  And now everyone raised a glass to knock mine in loving bumps. The thanks for my second chance beaming in their faces. After all, I, Ember Grace Leferrier, beloved only child of Sam and Natalie Leferrier, had survived a car accident that should have ended my life. Instead, February 14th had cost me a broken jaw, two major spinal fusion surgeries, a shattered right kneecap, and nine teeth.

  Not exactly my happiest Valentine’s Day.

  I’d been rescued from the wreck of my parents’ car, pulled from the ice and filth of Bowditch River, and medevaced to NYU’s ICU. Where my first back operation had been followed by emergency neurosurgery four days later, after my blood pressure had mysteriously plummeted and CT scans revealed that my frontal lobe was red-imaged with brain bleeds from what they’d first thought to be a minor concussion. I’d been on the ventilator for a week and a half and at NYU for five more weeks before transferring to Addington in April.

  Where I’d spent the past eight months relearning how to use myself.

  I’d been repaired by the very best that science could do for me. Tonight, I was home for roast chicken. I was as good as new. Except that I was too cold, and my head was thumping, and my stomach had knotted up with a harsh, inexplicable fear, as if only hours ago I’d been dragged up from that winter water like a ghoul. With a taste of blood and brine in my mouth, and a heart pumping wild for all that I’d lost and couldn’t even begin to remember.

  4

  Survivor’s Guilt

  “Whaddaya call a deer with no eyes?” I watched Rachel slip her messenger bag over her chair arm and then let her body fall into a yoga butterfly pose, knees pitched over the edge of her seat.

  “I give up. What?” I dropped my lunch tray of grilled cheese, salad, Sprite—and braced for her bad joke.

  “No eye deer.” Rachel scrutinized me. “Sooo? How was your very first morning back to the grind? Would you rather be doing arm curls and therapy at Addington? Or did you miss Mr. Altoona playing air guitar in the courtyard?”

  “Ha.” Mr. Altoona was our school’s manic IT guy. I cracked the soda tab. It wasn’t until I’d sat down that I could feel my muscles ease. Like I’d gone a few rounds in a boxing ring, instead of just shown up six weeks late for my first day of senior year. “I’ll be playing a lot of catch-up. I’m just patting myself on the back that I got through it.”

  “What’s your schedule?”

  I ticked it off. “Concepts in Math, AP English, Theory of Knowledge, and a meeting for yearbook staff.”

  “And? So far, tolerable?”

  “My adrenaline’s on overdrive, my brain’s fried, and I probably could use a couple of Advil. But otherwise, yeah.” I nodded. “I’ll survive.”

  “Truth is, I always knew where you were today,” said Rachel, “by the trail of Oh my God there’s Embers.”

  I smiled. “Everyone’s been amazing.” I’d been pretty embarrassed by it. I’d walked in to find my locker festooned with foil balloons. There was a fruit-and-cookie basket for me at the yearbook meeting, and a box of chocolates personally delivered to me by Mr. Singh, our school principal. I’d been bombarded with hugs from kids I hardly knew. It had been a veritable outpouring.

  What I didn’t trust myself to tell Rachel was how it had all seemed…off. Lafayette was a huge high school, nearly thirteen hundred kids strong, and in my time here I hadn’t exactly distinguished myself with my unique brand of fabulous. I’d been a good dancer, I knew I was cute, I had friends—but I wasn’t some physics genius or Vogue beauty or star athlete or the Campus-Hot-Guy’s girlfriend.

  Even my standout identifying feature—my long, coppery hair—was gone. Mermaid hair, Holden had called it, though I’d usually kept it pinned up in a heavy dancer’s bun. After the accident they’d cut it short, and now it was chin length, with my bangs shaggy to hide my scar and with short, raggedy patches behind each ear where squares had been shaved for all my E
EG scans.

  My hair hadn’t made me famous. But my accident had.

  Crazy as it was, it was kind of like I really had died last February. All day, I’d been treated almost as if I were a hologram. All day I’d had this jittery sense that kids were waiting for my Tales from the Other Side. I’d wanted to find Rachel, to cling to her a little, to explain my fear of being this spectacle—a freak-show apparition at my own homecoming.

  Instead I’d hid in a bathroom stall, letting the panic rip through my body in short jagged breaths. It was too much. It was too much to rejoin this slipstream of kids and classes and after-school pep rallies, caught in a dazed half-smiling, half-pretend state that just because I hadn’t died, I was all the way here.

  Maybe Mom was right. Maybe I wasn’t ready to handle it just yet.

  Emotion was a rush and roar, and I let it sweep over me. Splashed water on my face. Pulled the Shetland lock of bangs over my scar. Made it to the cafeteria in a basic state of okay.

  But Rachel had her eyes on me. She always did. “You’re amazing,” she told me now. “Go, Embie! You are strong like bull.” Another old joke, because I was a Taurus, a sign that I’d never felt kinship with. Rachel was always trying to make it better for me, probably acting on her instinct as a fair, justice-seeking Libra.

  Soon enough, like clockwork, like I’d never been gone, the roundtable began to gather with all my best school friends. Kids I’d been sharing lunch with since middle school. It stunned me to see them. My eyes and cheeks were hot. Junior year seemed like both a week and a decade ago.

  Sadie Anderson, Perrin Seymour, Tom Haas, and Keiji Takana. We were eight in all, including Claude McKechnie and his new Italian girlfriend, Lucia, an exchange student who even made sentences like “pass the salt” sound cranked-up sexy.

  Lucia kept stealing covert glances at me. Sadie, Keiji, and Perrin were hyper-smiley, but whenever Tom met my eyes, his were careful with concern. Nobody was sure how to act.