Free Soul Fire by Nancy Allan Page B

other run with Tara. Or, maybe if I had gone down the West Face slower, I would have arrived at Blind Jump a second or two later and missed hitting Justin.
    If only .
    I’m young, yet I feel like my life is over. Ruined. I’m plagued with so much guilt it’s intolerable.
    I must have drifted off to sleep because the next time I opened my eyes, I saw Celeste standing beside me, chewing on the knuckle of her middle finger. She only did that in times of extreme stress, like right before a race. “Oh, Ashla, you scared me to death! I thought you were going to die.” She put her head on my shoulder and threw her arm around me best she could. She was such a good friend. Always there.
    Finally, she stood up, tore a tissue from the yellow box by the bed, and blew her nose daintily. “It was an accident, right? I mean you weren’t trying to off yourself? Right?”
    I nodded.
    She frowned. “Is that ‘yes, it was an accident’ or ‘yes, you were trying to off yourself?’”
    “Accident,” I whispered. Had to say that, although I wasn’t so sure myself.
    I don’t remember finishing this conversation. A while later, they moved me upstairs to a mini ward, but the other beds were empty. Sometime after that, Dad came in alone. His clothes hung from his frame. Why was he getting so thin?
    He stroked my hair and sat down in the chair beside the bed. Neither of us spoke and I soaked up his companionship. Dad meant the world to me. Always had. After a while he said, “Ashla, talk to me. Tell me what’s going on.”
    I looked into his kind brown eyes. “Can’t live with it anymore,” I choked out.
    “You mean the accident?” he asked, knowing the answer. I nodded.
    “Ashla,” he said firmly, “listen to me now. Listen carefully.” I settled my eyes on his familiar, loving face. In the matter of a few seconds, he explained something he called, The Y Factor:
    "Life offers us choices and many opportunities to make them.
    As a youth, if you make an error in judgment it's really about the fact that you are young and still learning to make the right choices. When you’re learning, you don’t always get it right. Sometimes, you make a mistake, and sometimes someone gets hurt.
    It’s what you do next that defines who you are. A good person must determine how to live with what they've done. Normally, that requires you to do everything in your power to make it right.
    What that means is that right now, this minute, you are standing at the doorstep of another opportunity."
     
    As usual, Dad had summed this up into a simple package that made so much sense. His words brought me incredible relief. I no longer felt like a criminal, an outcast, or a loser. I was a girl who’d screwed up and made a terrible choice.
    He squeezed my hand. “Is this where you are right now, Ashla?”
    I nodded, wiping my eyes with the sheet. “So, how do I do that, Dad? How do I fix this?”
    He smiled and rubbed my arm. “You’ve made the leap, Ashla. You’re where you need to be. You're ready to take the next step.” He put his hand on my chin and lifted my face.
    “You’ll do the right thing this time, Ashla. I know you will.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN
    Three days later, I went home. Mom watched me continually as though she was checking my psychological temperature to be sure it was remaining around normal. Before I left the hospital, I’d had a visit from the in-house psychiatrist. He had sat down by my bed and stared at me for the longest time. Having heard that one must look a psychiatrist in the eye or be labeled as having low esteem or some other such thing, I stared right back, wondering what exactly he was getting out of the whole experience. Eventually, he said, “Have you given any thought to what happened?”
    I wasn’t sure which happening he was referring to, so I gave him what Mom calls the one size fits all answer. I told him that I’d failed myself, my parents, my friends, not to mention Justin Ledger, and his family. I’d