Free Heartbeat by Elizabeth Scott

“Are you okay?”
    He looks at me and then pushes his hair back with one hand. His eyes are wide and very green, even under the hospital lights. He looks so surprised.
    “Emma?” Dan says, and it’s time for me to go, to see Mom. I leave without looking back because I’m embarrassed and just...I don’t know. I shouldn’t have said anything to Caleb.
    “Hi, Mom,” I say when I’m sitting next to her. I don’t say thirty. I don’t say anything about that at all.
    “Today was okay,” I say instead, and tell her about Olivia and Roger. I look at her still face. I know there is nothing to see, that who she was is gone but she’s here. She’s still here, right here.
    Except she isn’t.
    I should know this by now, but grief is slippery, a tangle of thorns that dig in so deep you don’t know where they stop and you start. You don’t know where you are.
    I think of Caleb and how he looked when I asked where he was. So surprised, like no one would ever wonder where he was. How he was.
    He has thorns too, and I wonder if he knows where his end and he begins.

20
    I see Caleb before first period the next morning. I’m alone because Olivia is at the orthodontist making sure her braces-free teeth are still straight. She got her braces off before high school started but I know she’s afraid that she’ll end up with them again. Her father had them twice, and so did her mother.
    I am at her locker, though, because she wanted me to grab one of her notebooks and give it to her later. I haven’t picked up the notebook. I’m staring at a picture of me and Olivia from last summer, the two of us sitting in my backyard laughing at something I don’t remember now.
    Mom took the picture. I remember that.
    “You missed the bell.”
    I blink and look over at Caleb. He’s looking at the picture, and then he looks at me.
    “That was taken before, right?” he says, and how can he tell?
    “You’re smiling,” he says, like I’ve asked him.
    I stare at him.
    I stare at him because he’s right. I can’t remember the last time I smiled for real. I turn away, shut the locker on the picture, the me that was, and then glance at him. His head is bowed a little, all that blond hair falling over his face, part of the trifecta Olivia told me about.
    I see it, him, but I see something else too. His hair is something for him to hide behind. My own bangs are down past my nose now and I haven’t gotten them trimmed. I don’t push them back. I let them swing forward, shadow my sight.
    I’m hiding too.
    “Aren’t you going to first period?” I say.
    He shrugs. “Study hall, so no. You?”
    “I—” I have Advanced French, or the class you take before French Literature, where you read French novels in French. I have taken French since the sixth grade and done well, beyond well, but now I just sit in class, the words washing over me, familiar but faraway sounding, like the echo of a song you can’t quite remember. “No.”
    He pushes his hair back with one hand then, those green eyes on me, and I think of the lake. Of how I’d heard he sat and watched the car sink. I am sure, suddenly, that he did. “Yesterday I had...there was court stuff. Judge follow-up.”
    “Oh.” I think of thorns, of grief growing deep. Becoming you. “Do you miss her?”
    He looks away, and doesn’t say a word.
    I know what that kind of silence means, and clear my throat. “So what happened?”
    “To Min—?” he says, and then stops. “Wait. You mean to me, right?”
    I nod.
    He heads toward the gym, the far end of the school, and stops after a second, looking back at me.
    I am walking toward him, and then I am walking with him.
    “You’ve probably heard it already,” he says. “Drugs, theft, suck camp, my dad’s car, and now community service at the hospital.”
    “For your dad’s car?”
    He walks over to the vending machines. Our feet hit the floor at the same time with every step. I like the sound it makes. “Yeah.”
    I look at him.