Chapter Text
She was 15 and studying two chapters ahead of class when her world ended.
…
The first thing she registered was the car.
Their parents drove a black Mercedes. The car in their driveway was a sheriff’s car.
The second thing she registered was her brother launching himself at her and for a moment she thought he was trying to tackle her, which would be in line with their relationship, but instead, he held on to her and shook, which was not in line with their relationship.
(In fact, Elizabeth didn’t remember the last thing she had actually hugged her brother. To Will, she was the bossy older sister, the insufferable math nerd well-loved by adults but not people their age. Having her as his sister was bad for his street cred, he had once informed her. She had rolled her eyes back then and thought to herself, what a little shit.
Truthfully, she didn’t care in the least what her peers or Will thought of her. She had fully embraced the Type A overachiever stereotype that Will always made sound like an insult, and if he didn’t understand why she was determined to graduate high school as valedictorian and captain of as many organizations as possible, well, it was because he would never know how it felt to grow up seeking the validation of a father who wanted sons.)
But Will was holding on to her like she was a lifeline and is that blood in his hair —
“Miss Adams? I’m afraid we have some bad news about your parents.”
…
Beside her, Will had been crying and sniffling since they sat down in the local police station, a striking contrast to her best attempt to channel the stoicism of a marble statue.
The scared little girl inside of her wanted to unravel, to cry, to scream, to curl up in a fetal position, to do something besides answering questions from a detective who had pity all over his face. But her parents were dead now and Will was clinging to her arm and she did not have the luxury of time to fall apart, so she took a deep breath, shoved the scared little girl into a box, and continued answering questions as though her life depended on it.
(Her sanity might.)
“Unfortunately, your parents listed each other as their emergency contacts so we’re looking for someone to come take care of you and your brother. Do you have any family in the area, Miss Adams?”
“We don’t, officer.”
“Is there anyone we can contact? Grandparents? Aunts and uncles?”
“Mom didn’t have siblings and her parents died a few years ago. Dad’s parents are gone too, but there’s Aunt Joan.”
“Do you know where she is?”
“We…don’t see her often. I think she’s in London.”
…
The days after the accident passed by in a haze.
They stayed with their neighbors while Aunt Joan made her way over from London. Elizabeth had most of the burial ceremony planned before Aunt Joan arrived, despite their neighbors’ gentle words that she didn’t have to do it all by herself, that she could leave it to the grown-ups.
But this is all I have, Elizabeth wanted to scream, it’s all that’s keeping me from having to face my parents’ death.
Elizabeth didn’t say that to their neighbors or any of the other well-wishers (her parents’ friends, her father’s colleagues from UVA, even a few of Will’s friends from school), just nodded and accepted their soft condolences and pitying looks while pretending not to hear their murmurs of ‘look at those poor children’ and ‘I just saw them at her birthday party last week, I can’t believe they’re gone’. Instead, she kept checking things off the to-do list, burying herself in the administrative humdrum of burial spots and epitaphs and wake proceedings.
The first thing Aunt Joan did after picking them up from the neighbors’ was to give each of them a long, warm hug and Elizabeth almost, almost broke down, but the moment passed and Aunt Joan started discussing next steps, allowing Elizabeth to scramble back into the cold safety of plans and decisions, keeping her safe from the all-too-raw hole in her heart.
“Listen, I know you both grew up here in Charlottesville, but I think it would be best if you came to London with me. A change of scenery could be good for you, and you can stay with me and Uncle Rich when you’re not in school.”
“School? In London? Where would we go?”
“There’s a boarding school an hour outside of London that my friends speak highly of. It’s called Houghton Hall. I made some calls before I came and got you both in.”
“But…what about the farm? The horses? Our stuff?”
“We can put some of it in storage for a few years until you’re old enough to decide what to do with it. It won’t make sense to keep the property, though. Or the horses.”
“We’re selling the horses?”
A pause, then, “I’m sorry Lizzie, I know how much you love them.”
By some miracle, Elizabeth got through the whole ceremony with her eyes damp but cheeks dry while Will hiccupped and sobbed throughout. A little part of her was envious that he could just let himself grieve like that, but she shoved that part into the same box where she kept the scared little girl inside her.
(She learned that if she held her breath for long enough, the urge to cry would go away.)
The days after that were filled with meetings.
There was their parents’ estate planner, who did his best to be gentle and sympathetic while speaking exclusively in financial jargon about the landholdings and trust that they had inherited, and at one point told them that they were very lucky to be so financially sound ‘despite the circumstances’, before hastily backpeddling at the look Elizabeth gave him. There was the realtor Aunt Joan had hired, who appraised the value of their home in cold terminology like ‘furnishings’ and ‘estate’ and ‘livestock’. There was the school administrator who assured them that considering the circumstances and the fact that they were only weeks out from the end of the school year, the school would be happy to move them along to the next grade, only to be informed by Aunt Joan that she was planning to enroll them elsewhere.
Elizabeth kept her composure throughout the ordeal. At first, it felt like she was barely keeping it down, on the metaphorical verge of throwing up every time she had to open her mouth, but days passed and her suffocated devastation faded into numbness.
It was better this way, she told herself.
…
On paper, Elizabeth was doing well at Houghton. She had skipped a grade after acing her placement exam and spent the summer catching up on 10th grade curriculum in Aunt Joan’s apartment in London. No one at school seemed to care about any women’s sports apart from hockey so she dropped sports from her schedule and joined the debate team instead, and was soon added to the school representative team as whip speaker.
On paper, she was thriving.
In reality, she was miserable. Almost everyone else in her year had known each other since Year 7 and no one had any incentive to befriend the new girl joining them in Year 11, and Will’s dorm and classrooms were so far away on the opposite side of their ridiculously large campus that she saw him maybe every couple of weeks, and usually only because she had tracked him down after class.
It didn’t help that Will, who had been so scared and clingy in the immediate aftermath, had retreated into a dismissive, distant shell, brushing off her attempts to talk and check in on him as though she was being a nuisance.
Ironic, really, that she used to resent him, just a little bit, for monopolizing their parents’ attention, only to find herself desperate for him to let her pay attention to him.
“Will!”
“Oh my god Liz, you have to stop doing this.”
“This? As in, swinging by after class to check in on you?”
“Yes! Stop worrying about me and hovering around me.”
“Will, we almost never see each other these days.”
“Because we have our own lives now, Liz! Stop being so overbearing, I hate it.”
“Wha— I don’t, I mean, what’s wrong with wanting to know how you’re doing?”
Silence, but his retreating back said enough.
She didn’t know how to tell him that she wasn’t hovering for his sake, that it was about her as much as it was about him. That not seeing him for too long made her feel like she was drowning in a gnawing anxiety that she could not describe with words.
That there were days when she woke up in her unfamiliar room surrounded by unfamiliar faces in an unfamiliar place and could barely recognize the life she now lived. That there were days when she woke up with such heaviness in her heart she was worried about having a heart attack, only to realize that it was the figurative hole in her heart that she had let scab over, untreated and unhealed.
That seeing him kept her grounded, a brief respite from her restless, flailing attempts to build herself a new life and a new home.
(There were also days when she woke up and wondered if this had been her life all along, if the bucolic childhood had been nothing more than a figment of her imagination — vineyard picnics in the spring, morning horseback rides on the weekends, mid-afternoon and post-dinner drives to BJ’s for desserts — and that maybe her existence had always been this gray and numb, then she would catch a glimpse of Will and remind herself that yes, once upon a time, she did have a family and a childhood that she could look back on fondly.
It didn’t make the hollowness go away, but at least she was not hallucinating.)
But the more she tried to hang on to Will the more he seemed to relish her presence, so she banked her sanity and well-being on what little she had that couldn’t be taken away from her instead, and if she started to top the cohort in math as a result, well, who said coping mechanisms couldn’t be productive?
…
The first Thanksgiving was hard. Dinner with Will was quiet, the clank of cutlery accompanied by light conversation about how their days were going (he’d signed up to volunteer with some medical nonprofit for winter break, she had a debate tournament coming up the following week, he’d managed to stay out of detention for two months straight, she ribbed him for setting a new record). By unspoken agreement, they both steered clear of bringing up how different their dinner was from the cheerful, noisy, loving holiday that they were used to — the hours spent preparing stuffing and competing with Will on who had the most consistently chopped ingredients (she always won, not that Will ever admitted it), the overflowing dinner with leftovers they would love but soon tire of, the cozy evening with a roaring fireplace, playing board games and half-watching a movie in the background.
The first Christmas was worse, on her own in the London apartment while Aunt Joan and her husband spent the week in Barcelona, the lights in festive London almost mocking her for being alone on such a joyous occasion.
(Mom used to give them a free pass on snacks during the holidays, but despite Elizabeth’s best attempts, she could not fill the hole in her heart with caramel popcorn.)
…
Slowly, slowly, Elizabeth started to gain her footing. First the math nerds, who welcomed (or at least didn’t protest) her presence in their quiet, nerdy, and slightly socially awkward circle. Then a select few of her debate teammates, borne out of all the hours they spent sitting around a classroom crafting, polishing, and demolishing arguments, even though she found most debaters far too smug and condescending (or just misogynistic) to be likable.
“So, basically, we’re debaters who can’t stand other debaters?” Joey, her closest debate teammate — literally, as the third speaker to her fourth, but also figuratively, as her closest friend — had asked her at one point.
She had thought about it for a moment and nodded. “Do you think that makes us better or worse than them?”
Joey hummed. “I think I rather not think about it.”
She started to pick up basic Arabic from Joey and read the translated version of Arabic works that he loved (“You have to read it in Arabic to fully appreciate it, Lizzie!” “I can barely put a sentence together in Arabic, Joey, I don’t know how you expect me to read a poem .”). He told her about growing up in Switzerland, where he had spent more time than his home country of Bahrain before moving to London for school (“Why not stay in Switzerland?” “Well, father says he wants me to have a British education. Personally, I think I’m just a diplomatic gesture of goodwill. Or possibly leverage.”). She told him about growing up in wine-country Virginia and sneaking sips from her parents’ wine glasses (“Isn’t 18 the legal age for drinking?” “It’s actually 21 now, but c’mon .”), about the rolling hills and the Blue Ridge mountains in the fall. When he cracked a joke about the aloofness of British parenting leaving their British classmates emotionally stunted (“They’re basically walking exhibits of what it looks like to grow up unloved!”), she froze him out for a full week before telling him that she, too, had no parents to love her (he apologized profusely; she let it go; their friendship survived).
She stopped trying so hard to spend time with Will, and he stopped trying to avoid her. If he knew that she kept tabs on him through friends, he made no indication during their monthly lunches, which were surprisingly actually pretty cordial — they would swap stories, his always more chaotic than hers; she would bug him to eat more, he would retort by telling her to eat healthier; she would hand over his allowance and any shopping she did for him, he would acknowledge her efforts with a cheeky ‘thanks mom’.
Her 16th birthday came and passed without fanfare since she hadn’t told anyone about it, not even Joey. Will got her a bag of expensive popcorn that probably cost him a good chunk of his monthly allowance, but she didn’t eat it right away. Not yet.
The week after, she dragged Will out to the local chapel where they lit two candles without a word said between them. She went back to her room that evening and ate the whole bag of popcorn in one go.
Come senior year, she poured her life and soul into A Levels (how anyone could ever think that a two-year linear curriculum was a good idea, that was beyond her) and debate, stepping down from tournaments to focus on training her replacement and running the club with Joey. Will never missed an opportunity to point out her increasingly frazzled air whenever they met for lunch (“It’s a terminal exam, Liz, not a terminal illness.” “Shut up, just wait three years and you’ll know how this feels.”) and gave her good god so much grief the few times she bailed on lunch to study, but secretly she was glad that Will was feeling more like his old self — her little shit of a younger brother. She had to trust that she, too, would come to feel more like her old self.
And she was, she could feel it. She was still a Type A overachiever with a frustrating sibling, still far fonder of books than people, still more prone to arguing than letting someone get away with saying something stupid (and better at it now, thanks to debate training). Thinking about her parents no longer felt like ripping open the hole in her heart, to unleash a vortex that threatened to drag everything into its endless depth, and more like prodding at a sore spot that hurt but wouldn’t kill her.
She no longer woke up feeling like her heart was about to burst out of her chest.
And yes, the holidays were tough.
(Their second Thanksgiving on their own, she hadn’t bothered to pick a dinner spot. They order takeout and put the TV on for background noise. It was quiet and low key and a year ago it would have killed her, but the memories of Thanksgiving in Charlottesville were further and fuzzier now, and she settled in the simple comfort of her brother’s company.
She stayed at Houghton that Christmas, the only one in the Year 13 girls’ dorm. Will was off somewhere volunteering again and she hadn’t seen the point in leaving for London if she was going to be on her own anyway. Then a snowstorm buried the front door of her dorm building the morning after Christmas and shrouded her in a loud, ringing silence that felt heavier than any other silence she’d ever experienced, and she resorted to reciting her English Lit readings out loud to avoid feeling like she was drowning.)
But regular days? She could do regular days pretty damn well.
Grief was a process. Grief had a formula to it. One step at a time.
Somewhere between drawing molecular structure diagrams of hydroxyls and drafting essay plans for 19th-century British politics, Elizabeth applied to UVA. Between her grades and extracurriculars, her Virginia residency, and her dad’s tenure in the Economics department, she figured her application was as close to a slam dunk as it could be, though still a step down from legacies and wealthy donors, but she was still flooded with a mix of thrill and relief when they sent an acceptance letter along with a scholarship offer.
“I didn’t know you were applying to UVA,” Will said over lunch in April. “I mean, makes sense, but I half expected you to go for Oxford or Cambridge like half the class.”
Elizabeth made a face. “And spend another three years with these people, in rainy England? God no.”
He chewed thoughtfully. “Is your admission conditional on your final grades? My chemistry teacher thinks I have a shot at Imperial or UCL medicine, but I hate standardized tests and apparently, college acceptances here are conditional on final grades.”
“Nope. Unconditional. But it doesn’t make sense for you to go back to the States for college, Will, if you’re set on becoming a doctor.”
“That’s true. But wait, if it’s unconditional, why are you still studying?”
“Have you ever known me to not care about a test, even ones that weren’t important?”
“Yeah, I forgot how weird you are.” He pushed his plate over. “Here, have the rest of my fries. I need to run to my group project meeting.”
He started to leave before turning back to the table. “Oh, I almost forgot — congrats, Liz.”
She rolled her eyes and grabbed a fry. “See you next month, Will.”
He hesitated. “Liz?”
“Yeah?”
“When you go back to Charlottesville…what if it doesn’t feel like home anymore?”
She studied her brother carefully. “It won’t,” she said slowly. “Not at first. But it will still be familiar. And someday, it might even feel like home again.”
Someday.
Two years after her parents died, Elizabeth found herself buried in the final stretch of studying before the A Levels, and apart from the hour she took to light candles with Will, she paid barely a thought to their death anniversary. The sore spot was more of a scab by this point, visible and ever-present but ultimately harmless.
By the time her grades were available, Elizabeth had already moved back to Charlottesville for college, so Will picked up her results slip in her place. He called after to inform her, his voice intentionally bored and dry, that to no one’s surprise, she had gotten As on all four courses.
The Brits may not have a valedictorian system but between getting straight As and being co-captain of the debate team, Elizabeth was reasonably sure that her 15-year-old self would have been proud of her.