Heartbeat. Elizabeth Scott

“Be angry at me, Emma, but don’t ever be angry at your bro—”

      I get out of the car and slam the door shut on him. His words.

      He’s right, though. Mom would be shocked by what I almost said. By what I was thinking.

      Mom was terrified of the pregnancy, but she loved Dan. She wanted to make him happy, and I know she would be sad to see how things are between us now. That she would tell me not to blame anyone, that things happen and choices are made.

      She would tell me hate only destroys.

      I know this because she did.

      “Hate almost killed me after your father died,” she told me once, when I was nine and decided I wanted to know everything about him. “I was so angry, Emma. Angry at your father for driving in the rain. Angry at him for not somehow knowing that there was going to be an accident. About a month afterward, I was sitting alone, just staring at nothing, and I was hit with this wave of...” She trailed off.

      “I went to his books—I’d boxed them all up because I couldn’t bear to see them,” she said after a moment. “I opened a box and got one out. I sat down with it and just started ripping the pages out. If he’d seen me, he’d have been so horrified. But he couldn’t. And I thought ‘Good, that’s what you get for leaving me.’ I missed him so much, I loved him so much, and yet I hated him for being gone.”

      “You hated him?”

      She nodded.

      “Were you...were you sorry that you...?”

      “Oh, no,” Mom said. “Never. You were the best thing that ever happened to me. But even knowing that, I would look at you when you were little and know he’d never see all the things you were able to do. I knew that he’d want to be there. But he wasn’t and I hated that and I hated him for it too, and the hate was so...it was like a pit, Emma. I couldn’t ever see the bottom of it and I finally realized if I didn’t stop, it would take over my whole life.”

      “You really hated him?”

      Mom looked at me. “When someone you love...when they die, you want it undone. You’d do anything to have them back, and it’s easy to believe that if only this had happened or that had happened, everything would be fine. And that’s what makes you angry. What makes you hate. You don’t want to believe that sometimes bad things happen just because they do.”

      “Mom, I’m sorry,” I whisper now as I step into school, and I hope she hears me. That she forgives me. That she can help me find a way to untangle the knot of hate in my heart, because it’s there.

      It’s there, and I feel it.

      It’s there, and I can’t make it go away. I understand what she meant now about the edge and how hate can take over everything. I see it. I feel it.

      But I don’t know how to stop it.

      And the one person who could, the one person who’d be able to pull me back, is gone.

      12

      I’m in a pretty bad mood when Olivia finds me, and she takes one look at my face and wordlessly hands me a rubber band. Olivia’s mom is a worrier who had a pretty messed-up childhood, and she always wears a rubber band around one wrist so that when she feels a burst of worry or a bad memory coming on, she can snap it against her skin and remind herself that she’s here.

      I put the rubber band on and give it a good yank. It stings—a lot—but I don’t feel better. I already know I’m here. I already know what’s on my mind.

      Anger.

      I’m starting to get scared at how angry I am, though. At how, when I try to find a way out, even for a second, I can’t.

      I snap the rubber band again as Olivia opens her locker. Still nothing. I do it again, and again, and then the band breaks, falls off my wrist and to the floor.

      I stare at it. Someone steps right on it, and then it’s gone, trampled off down the hall.

      I look at my wrist. There’s a red welt on it.

      My mother has marks on her skin from the tubes and needles. She has to be turned and moved so her skin won’t get sores.

      “Okay, that clearly didn’t work,” Olivia says, grabbing my arm as she closes her locker door. “Come on, we gotta get you to your locker before classes start.”

      “I left my books in Dan’s car,” I say, and look around as Olivia says something about finding a notebook for me to take to class.

      I see people walking by. Fast, slow, laughing, frowning. So normal. I hate that too.

      And then I see Caleb Harrison standing by a locker, staring at me. I see him look at my wrist, at my face, and I can’t see anyone walking by anymore.

      He saw me yesterday. He saw me with Mom yesterday.

      He knows something’s wrong with me.

      “Here,” Olivia says, sticking a notebook into my hands just as the bell rings. “See you later.”

      I nod. What happened to Mom isn’t a secret, but the whole baby thing never really got much attention. I thought it would—I thought it would pull in the nighttime reporters, the ones who are seen on TV everywhere—but it didn’t. There were a couple of things locally, sandwiched in between stories about allegations surrounding the governor, but that was it.

      “Death...and life,” they always said, like my mother and what happened to her could be boiled down into three words and a pause.

      Some people in my classes said they were sorry or asked how I felt, but that was right after it happened, and when I didn’t break down and scream, when I kept coming to school, things went back to how they’d always been. Who was applying where, who needed what SAT score, who was going to hire someone to help them write their entrance essay and who was stressing out and how badly it would screw their grades.