Seventeen and Invincible

He had held me next to him for what felt like hours. I was sure we had both gotten pretty tanned—or burnt—from the sun. It was, unfortunately, now time for us to go.

“I have band practice,” he stated as he turned to look at me through his dark, black-rimmed sunglasses. I nodded. “Do you wanna come?” I shrugged. “Do you want me to take you home?” I shook my head. “What do you want to do?” I shrugged again and stood up slowly. “Are you going to be okay? Do I have to come stay with you; make sure you don’t do anything bad?”

“Gar, I’m fine. I’ll be okay.” He looked at me uncertain before nodding, standing and bending to pick up and fold the large quilt that we’d used to cover the splintery dock. “I promise. I’ll be okay.” I knew that Garrett was picking up on the one thing I didn’t promise. I had promised that I’d be ‘okay,’ but I never promised I wouldn’t hurt myself—that part was just assumed. We both knew that the minute I walked through the door to my house I was only a flight of stairs and twenty-five steps away from the exacto-knife in my top desk drawer. When Molly had agreed to buy it for me, it was under the pretense that I needed it for a social studies project—to cut out pieces of cardboard. If she had known why I really wanted it, she might still have bought it for me and told me not to leave a mess of blood on the light grey carpeting when I killed myself.

Molly, if you haven’t realized, wasn’t exactly your typical mom. She worked three days a week as a German tutor for middle school and high school students, and she hated to cook. She left the cleaning to yours truly, and believed that all laundry should be done by hand. We didn’t even own a washing machine. The biggest thing of all, though, was that she hated me. When I say hate I don’t mean like they typical mom and daughter are fighting and say it out of rage—I mean she really, really resented me and my existence. It hurt at first, to realize how unwanted I was, but eventually it just became normality. Molly got pregnant at sixteen. She and Greg were kicked out by their strict, religious families. They somehow wound up in the United States—New York until I was four, Seattle, Washington until I was seven, and then finally Tempe, Arizona, three blocks away from the Nickelsen house. Molly had always wanted to make something of her life. She wanted to be an artist and she had wanted an abortion when she found out she was pregnant. Needless to say, she never had it. Needless to say, I was here. Needless to say, I had my days when I wish she’d had it. Needless to say, there were times when I was vehemently against abortion.

“Yo!” he called pulling me out of my trance. “Are you coming to band practice?” I nodded, glancing out the window. “You don’t have to if you don’t want to.”

“What else am I going to do? Go home?” He sighed and drove to Pat’s house, parking on the curb.

“What else is bothering you?” he asked frustratedly as he turned to look at me. “Can you please, please just tell me?” I sighed and glanced over at him. I refused to mention anything in the hopes that Molly would change her mind.

“It’s just home, okay? You know how much I hate it,” I sighed.

“I know,” he sighed, “but I also know there’s more than enough room at my house if you want to stay there.”

“I have to go home eventually.” I unbuckled my seatbelt and pushed open the door. “Come on,” I mumbled.

“Ani, please, just talk to me about it.” I turned to look at him and then I turned back to continue walking toward Pat’s house. “Anika, come on.”

“Not now Garrett. Come on, you have to go to band practice.” I pulled open the front door and walked down and into the basement.

“Where’s Garrett?” Jared asked. I rolled my eyes and sat down on the old, beaten up couch.

“Taking his sweet ass time.” He made an ‘o’ with his mouth and noted my annoyed state.

“What happened?” If I heard ‘what happened?’ or ‘what’s wrong?’ one more time, I was going to go nuts.

“Nothing happened!” I sighed and stretched out on the couch. Garrett trudged down the stairs coming into the light of the basement.

“What did you do to her?” Pat asked quickly.

“He didn’t do anything to me!” I sighed and covered my face with my hands.

“She won’t tell me what’s wrong, I’ve been asking for days. Apparently she doesn’t want to talk about it,” he said with a hint of bitterness. Pat shook his head and grabbed my arm to drag me upstairs.

“What the hell is going on?” he asked. “Why are you two mad at each other? Why are you fighting?” For a small person, he sounded a little bit harsh.

“We aren’t fighting Pat,” I yelled, the tears finding their way back to the surface. “This is all on me, okay?” I choked. I sat down at the kitchen table, burying by face in my hands. “We’re not fighting.”

“Then what is going on? Why are you crying?” I shook my head and refused to meet his eyes. “You need to explain this to someone. Why can’t you talk to Garrett?” I shook my head again.

“Because, I can’t talk to him about this. I don’t want to. I can’t.”

“What is it that’s so awful that you can’t talk to Garrett?”

“Molly wants to move back to Munich!” I looked away and then back. “You can’t tell him, because she could always change her mind, but she seems pretty set on it.”

“I-I’m sorry,” was all he whispered.

“And what’s worse is whenever I’m around Garrett lately, things feel different. Like the night of the party, when I saw him making out with Nicolette, I couldn’t breathe and I could feel my heart pounding, and I was tearing up and my throat was dry.”

“Anika…” I stood up and walked outside.

“Tell Garrett that I’m going home. I’ll see him tomorrow.”

“Anika,” Pat tried to stop me. I walked out the front door and down the street. I didn’t live too far from Pat, so it was a distance I could walk.

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It took me forty-five minutes to walk home with tears pouring out from behind my sunglasses. I guess he lived further away from me than I thought. When I walked in, I ignored Molly’s calls and I walked up the stairs and into my room. I reached into the top drawer of my desk and I pulled out the exacto-knife. I held it to my wrist until I felt someone’s hand on my shoulder.

“Stop,” he whispered, his voice about to crack. “Please, don’t do this to yourself.” I closed my eyes and opened them again slowly. I felt an arm snake around my side to pull my wrist away from the knife. The knife fell to the floor and I turned to into his embrace. “Shh, it’s okay. You’ll be okay. Whatever it is, it will be okay.” I sobbed and felt his hold on me tighten. “Pat said you didn’t want to talk about it. As long as you aren’t mad at me and promise to tell me eventually, I can live with that.”

“Why would I be mad at you?” I wiped my eyes furiously.

“I don’t know, but Ani, whatever’s going on, if I can help, please just tell me. What are you feeling? What are you running from?”

“I don’t know,” I lied. I held fistfuls of his shirt in an attempt to hold onto him forever. I didn’t want to let go.