Chapter Text
I was cold.
I was wet.
I could not open my eyes.
Those were the first things I understood. Not the pain, though there was pain somewhere underneath everything. Just the cold, the wet, and my eyelids stuck shut.
I tried opening them anyway.
Nothing happened.
Am I dead?
I probably was. All I remembered were headlights, loud music, somebody swearing.
I didn’t think I had said anything.
I never did.
There should have been more pain.
The lack of it bothered me more than the pain would have.
No glasses. I hadn't thought to grab them. I couldn't see three feet without them, and I sneaked out through the window anyway, at eleven at night, into a street I couldn't see properly.
My mother was going to be so angry. I left the window open.
I think he was drunk. I didn't think about it then.
He was big, with curly brown hair, and the car was swerving, and one thought came very calmly, he is going to hit me.
And then I stood there.
I had time. I saw the car. I knew what the car was going to do. There was enough time for one whole thought.
I used it to stand still with my hands in my pockets.
I don't know why I didn't move.
Well.
At least the glasses made it.
Then something else came up, and it came up fast, like it had only been waiting for everything else to go quiet.
You're useless.
What's with that tone, huh? You're being pompous now?
She can't even control what she eats.
I don't think you're worth it anymore. I don't need you. There's no point in staying friends. Goodbye for good, Sara.
Those times I didn’t say anything either. There was no point. I was always wrong anyway, so I'd just wait until it was over and then I'd go home.
The last one was his. March, in the hallway by the gym.
I remembered what he said. I remembered what the floor looked like, and that somebody's locker was open behind him.
But I couldn't remember one word I said back.
My head hung onto something else. A tennis racket in somebody else's locker.
He was the one to end it.
It took about a week to work out that it was my fault.
There was just one thing I wanted, and it was stupid.
I wanted the crane back.
He folded it out of a receipt outside the pharmacy while we waited for his mom, before any of that. He was bad at it. One wing came out shorter than the other and it never sat straight on anything.
He handed it over like it was nothing.
I put it in my coat pocket.
I didn't take it out again.
Not once.
Not in eight months.
Four of those months were after the hallway.
I was wearing that coat when the car came.
So it was gone too.
On the road somewhere, maybe. Or in a bag at a hospital with the rest of me.
I just want one more chance.
Not to fix it. I wasn't thinking about fixing it.
I wanted to be outside the pharmacy again with nothing happening, and him being bad at folding, and his mom taking forever.
That was all.
That was everything I wanted, and it was the one thing I couldn’t get.
Because going back isn't something that happens.
Not for anyone.
Not ever.
Black.
Everything was black, and it stayed black, and it kept on staying black.
I counted. I got to four hundred and something and lost it and started again. I kept doing that until the numbers stopped meaning anything.
Time didn't work in there. I couldn't tell where one thing ended and where the next one started. It could have been years. It could have been four seconds. I had no way to know.
Then things moved. Black swirls went one way and then another, bumping into each other before drifting apart again. Black snow fell around eerie towers that grew up out of the ground, and I was in the middle of it, wrapped up in nothing.
My body felt heavy. Then light. My legs were held tight and then they weren't there at all. I could breathe. I couldn't. Colors turned up at the edges and disappeared before I could look.
After a while, I stopped minding.
I would like to have that back.
Not everything.
Just that crane.
Then I fell.
Down through the dark, into something else, and then lower. My body burned, but I kept falling.
Then laughter.
I hadn't heard a sound in years. Decades, maybe.
But that was laughter.
"Oh," something said, amused.
"Oh, you poor thing. You've gone and made something out of nothing."
Then a pause. The sound of somebody settling in.
"Yes."
"I think I'll watch."
My eyes opened.