The Jodi Picoult Collection #4 Read online

  I wanted to cut.

  But.

  I had promised.

  I took the telephone handset off its cradle beside my mother’s bed and carried it into the bathroom for privacy, since any minute now, you would hobble upstairs to get ready for bed. I had programmed Adam’s number in. We hadn’t spoken in a few days, because he’d broken his leg and had surgery—he’d IMed me from the hospital—but I was hoping he was home now. I needed him to be home now.

  He had given me his cell number—I was surely the only kid over age thirteen who didn’t have one, but we couldn’t afford it. It rang twice, and then I heard his voice, and I nearly burst into tears. “Hey,” he said, “I was just going to call you.”

  It was proof that there was someone in this world who thought I mattered. I felt like I’d just been pulled back from a cliff. “Great minds think alike.”

  “Yeah,” he said, but his voice sounded thin and distant.

  I tried to remember how he had tasted. I hated that I had to pretend I knew, when in reality, it had already faded, like a rose you press into a dictionary under the Qs, hoping you can call back summer at any time, but then in December it’s nothing more than crumbling, brown bits of dried flower. Sometimes at night I’d whisper to myself, pretending that the words came out in the low, soft curve of Adam’s voice: I love you, Amelia. You’re the one for me. And then I’d open my lips the tiniest bit and pretend that he was a ghost, and that I could feel him sinking into me, onto my tongue, down my throat, into my belly, the only meal that could fill me.

  “How’s the leg?”

  “Hurts like hell,” Adam said.

  I curled the phone closer. “I really miss you. It’s crazy here. The trial started, and there were reporters all over the front lawn. My parents are certifiable, I swear—”

  “Amelia.” The word sounded like a ball being dropped from the Empire State Building. “I wanted to talk to you because, um, this isn’t working out. This long-distance thing—”

  I felt a pang between my ribs. “Don’t.”

  “Don’t what?”

  “Don’t say it,” I whispered.

  “I just . . . I mean, we might never even see each other again.”

  I felt a hook snag at the bottom of my heart, drawing it down. “I could come visit,” I said, my voice small.

  “Yeah, and then what? Push me around in a wheelchair? Like I’m some kind of charity case?”

  “I would never—”

  “Just go get yourself some football player—that’s what girls like you want, right? Not some guy who bumps into a fucking table and snaps his leg in half—”

  By now I was crying. “That doesn’t matter—”

  “Yes it does, Amelia. But you don’t understand. You’ll never understand. Having a sister who’s got OI doesn’t make you an expert.”

  My face was flaming. I hung up the phone before Adam could say anything else and held my palms to my cheeks. “But I love you,” I said, although I knew he couldn’t hear me.

  • • •

  First the tears came. Then the fury: I picked up the phone and hurled it against the bathtub wall. I grabbed the shower curtain and pulled it down in one good yank.

  But I wasn’t mad at Adam; I was angry at myself.

  It was one thing to make a mistake; it was another thing to keep making it. I knew what happened when you let yourself get close to someone, when you started to believe they loved you: you’d be disappointed. Depend on someone, and you might as well admit you’re going to be crushed, because when you really needed them, they wouldn’t be there. Either that, or you’d confide in them and you added to their problems. All you ever really had was yourself, and that sort of sucked if you were less than reliable.

  I told myself that if I didn’t care, this wouldn’t have hurt so much—surely that proved I was alive and human and all those touchy-feely things, for once and for all. But that wasn’t a relief, not when I felt like a skyscraper with dynamite on every floor.

  That’s why I reached into the tub and turned on the water: so that I would drown out my sobs, so that when I grabbed the razor blade I’d hidden in the box of tampons and drew it over my skin like a violin’s bow, no one would hear the song of my shame.

  • • •

  This past summer, my mother ran out of sugar and drove to the local convenience store mid-recipe, leaving us alone for twenty minutes—which is not that long a period of time, you’d think. But it was long enough to start a fight with you about which TV show we should watch; it was long enough to yell There’s a reason Mom wishes you were dead; it was long enough to watch your face crumple and feel my conscience kick in.

  “Wiki,” I’d said, “I didn’t really mean it.”

  “Just shut up, Amelia—”

  “Stop being such a baby—”

  “Well, you stop being such a dickhead!”

  That word, on your lips—it was enough to stop me in my tracks. “Where did you hear that?”

  “From you, you stupid jerk,” you said.

  Just then, a bird smacked into the window so loudly that we both jumped.

  “What was that?” you asked, standing on the couch cushions to get a better look.

  I climbed up next to you, careful, because I always had to be. The bird was little and brown, a swallow or a sparrow, I could never tell the difference. It was sprawled on the grass.

  “Is it dead?” you asked.

  “Well, how would I know that?”

  “Don’t you think we ought to check?”

  So we went outside and trudged halfway around the house. Big surprise, the bird was still exactly where it had been moments before. I squatted down and tried to see if its chest was moving at all.

  Nada.

  “We need to bury it,” you said soberly. “We can’t just leave it out here.”

  “Why? Things die all the time in nature—”

  “But this one was our fault. The bird probably heard us yelling and that’s why it flew into the window.”

  I highly doubted that the bird heard us at all, but I wasn’t going to argue with you.

  “Where’s the shovel?” you asked.

  “I don’t know.” I thought for a moment. “Hang on,” I said, and I ran into the house. I took the big metal mixing spoon Mom had in her bowl and carried it outside. There was still batter on it, but maybe that would be okay, like sending Egyptian mummies off to the afterlife with food and gold and their pets.

  I dug a small hole in the ground about six inches away from where the bird was. I didn’t want to touch it—that totally creeped me out—so I sort of flicked it into the hole with the edge of the spoon. “Now what?” I asked, looking up at you.

  “Now we have to say a prayer,” you said.

  “Like a Hail Mary? What makes you think the bird was Catholic?”

  “We could sing a Christmas carol,” you suggested. “That’s not really religious. It’s just pretty.”

  “How about instead we say something nice about birds?”

  You agreed to that. “They come in rainbow colors,” you said.

  “They fly well,” I added. Until about ten minutes ago, anyway. “And they make nice music.”

  “And birds remind me of chicken and chicken tastes really great,” you said.

  “Okay, that’s good enough.” I shoveled the soil on top of the dead bird, and then you crouched down and made a pattern on the top with bits of grass, like sprinkles on a cake. We walked side by side into the house again.

  “Amelia? You can watch whatever you want on TV.”

  I turned to you. “I don’t wish you were dead,” I admitted.

  When we sat down on the couch again, you curled up against my side, like you used to when you were a toddler.

  What I wanted to say to you, but didn’t, was this: Don’t use me as your model. I’m the last person you should look up to.

  For weeks after we buried that dumb bird, every time it rained, I would not sit near that window. Even