Beth Hyland - Fall Into Forever

The overhead fluorescent lighting hurts my eyes, so I quickly brush my teeth and wash my face. Back in our room, I slip under the covers, shielding my eyes from the light with my hand. As soon as Cassidy puts away her Caboodle and climbs into bed, I turn out the light clipped to the windowsill near my head and feel myself relax.

I love the dark, the absence of light. It washes over everything, rounding out sharp edges and blending objects together.

“Thank God you weren’t with him,” Cassidy whispers from her bed a few feet away.

I don’t tell her that I was.

The ache at the base of my skull that I’ve been trying to ignore spreads outward, like a drop of red food coloring on a wet piece of paper. Cassidy says something else, but her voice sounds like it’s coming from inside a tin can.

The walls in my hospital room were a sickly, sterile white when I woke up. That I do remember. Something was in my mouth, going down my throat, choking me. Like the monster in Alien. It was on my face, a ridged tentacle reaching into me, and I was going to become its host. I needed to get it out. I tried to move my hands but couldn’t. I wanted to scream but there was no sound.

My head is really throbbing now. I try not to make any sudden movements as I get up and shuffle carefully across the floor to my desk and open the drawer. One pill rattles around inside the prescription bottle.

My vision is narrowing, which means I don’t have much time. Even in the dark room, I can see an inky blackness around the edges. Cassidy is talking to me, but all I hear is the sound of my pencil cup hitting the floor. She grabs my upper arm and a pill is thrust into my hand. I take it and with a hand on my shoulder, she ushers me back to my bed, tucking the covers around my shoulders like my mom used to do.

“Thanks, C,” I say weakly.

“Are you going to be okay? Do you need anything else? Should I, like, call someone?” I can hear the concern in her voice.

“I’ll be fine in the morning.” At least I hope so. “I always get this way when I think about what happened.”

“Well, then,” she says with finality, fluffing a pillow behind my head. “That’s an easy fix. We just won’t talk about it anymore. You’re here at PSU and it’s time to put your past behind you.”

I couldn’t agree with her more.

* * *

Jon

“Okay, here’s the last one.” I set the cardboard box on Stella’s dining room table, grab another cookie from the plate—still warm from the oven—and shove it in my mouth. The chewy gingersnaps are so damn good, I could eat a million of them. “Do you want any help going through this stuff?” I peer into the box. It’s filled with stacks of old pictures and books. No wonder it’s so heavy. She’d never have been able to carry it down the narrow attic stairs on her own.

Stella wipes her arthritic hands on her apron. “No, son, you’ve done enough. This is wonderful. Thank you.”

Although I’m not her son, I like it when she calls me that. Maybe it’s standard grandparent lingo, but since I don’t have any, I wouldn’t know.

I follow her into the kitchen, where she takes another batch of cookies out of the oven. The whole house smells like molasses and spices.

I pull out a chair from the small table near the window, turn it around, and straddle the seat. “Have you talked with Henry yet?” I leave off the part about him being a total deadbeat.

“I’ve left him a few messages, yes.”

“But he hasn’t called you back?”

“Not yet.”

What kind of son gambles with his mom’s money, anyway? An elderly lady on a fixed income. Now she’s having a garage sale to try to make enough to pay a few bills. I thought selling a little of her weed would help, but Chris fucked that up. I made a partial payment at the power company myself, but if Stella finds out I did it, she’ll be upset and insist on paying me back. It’s the least I can do for her, though. I’d have paid the whole thing if I had the money. If it hadn’t been for Stella sticking her neck out for me a few years ago, I’d most likely be in jail right now. Or worse.

“How are your plants doing? I can try to sell some more bud, even though this last time didn’t work out so well.”

She frowns. “I don’t want you doing that anymore. I’m sure your friend will pay me. You need to be focused on school and work.”

What she kindly fails to mention but that both of us know is that I’ve already gotten into trouble selling weed. Back in high school. And it wasn’t from the three plants she grows for medicinal use.

“Well, he should’ve gotten you the money already. He promised me.”

“I’m sure he’ll have it soon.”

She always sees the good in people. Her loser son. My loser friend. Me. It’s her fatal flaw.

The plastic bag I brought with me sits within my reach near the back door. I grab it and I pull out Ivy’s coat. “Do you think you could get the bloodstains out of this?”

Stella wipes her hands on her apron and takes it from me. “Why?” she asks, a hint of a smile on her coral-red lips. “Did you kill someone and need to hide the evidence?”

Very funny. “I...uh...got into a fight with someone and the blood sprayed all over this girl’s coat. I promised I’d try to have it cleaned.”

Shaking her head, she clucks her tongue at me. “A fight? Oh, Jonny.” My shoulders feel as though they suddenly weigh two hundred pounds. She only calls me that when she’s disappointed in me. But then, I’m good at doing that. I guess you could say I’m an expert. “Don’t stoop to their level. You’re better than they are. I know it’s hard, but…”

I don’t tell her that it was because of the weed.

Ivy

In the mirror, I see Cassidy lying in her bed with headphones on and her laptop open. This is her typical morning routine before class where she watches a few YouTube videos before doing anything else. I don’t know how she does it. I have to pee first thing when I wake up. She yawns loudly, not realizing how obnoxious it sounds, because she can’t hear herself.

After that disastrous White House party on Friday night, I stayed in our room the rest of the weekend, not even wanting to risk eating at the dining hall in case Aaron was checking out the dorms and the on-campus meal service. Cassidy, the sweetheart, brought me food and on Saturday night, we ordered pizza with real cheese. (She paid for it later with a stomach ache, spending the next hour in the bathroom.) Normally, she’d have gone out, but she claimed she needed to study for some big test and planned to stay in anyway. I knew she was feeding me a bunch of BS, but I appreciated it all the same.

Earlier this morning, before Cassidy woke up, I went running. With the migraine finally gone, it felt good to get out. The oppressive cloud hanging over my head since Friday night isn’t totally gone—it’ll never be completely gone—but the run helped.

I finger-comb my damp hair, trying to decide if I want to pull out the hair dryer. Since I don’t need to be to class for a while, I decide not to bother and let it dry naturally. I put on my favorite lip balm, slip a hairband around my wrist for later, and call it good.

Cassidy whips off the covers, looks at me, and frowns. “Is that what you’re wearing?”

I’ve got on my favorite jeans that are fraying out at the bottom, no-longer-white Toms that are getting a hole in the toe, and a large gray PSU sweatshirt with a coffee stain on one wristband.

Obsessed with fashion and makeup tutorial videos, Cassidy wouldn’t be caught dead walking out in public like this. In fact, she’s wearing cute PJ shorts with a matching shirt that says Sweet Dreams in rhinestone sequins across her chest. And if that’s not enough, the clothes she plans to wear today were picked out last night and are folded neatly on her chair.

“No, I’m just putting this on temporarily before I slip into the Tom Ford gown I have hanging in the closet.”

“Bitch.” She stands and yawns again. “What happened to that cute top of mine you were going to wear?”

Since we’re approximately the same size, we borrow each other’s clothes all the time. It’s like having two wardrobes for the price of one. Only she has a lot more clothes than I do.

“It’s brand new with the tags still on. You should wear it first.” Besides, I just wore her teal top on Friday night.

“I don’t mind. Seriously.”

Even though Cassidy comes from a really wealthy family, she’s not snobby or pretentious. You should see their house in Portland—it’s this huge three-story mansion. I’ve never been there, but from the pictures I’ve seen of her bedroom, it looks like it could be featured on one of those HGTV shows my mom watches. All she and her mom ever do when she’s home is shop. Half her clothes here still have the tags on them. But I still don’t feel right about wearing something she hasn’t worn yet.

She grabs her phone from the charging station—a narrow shelf above her desk that her stepdad was somehow able to mount on the dorm room wall without using nails—and scrolls through her texts. “Ivy, listen to me.”

Okay, here we go. I can tell I’m about to get a lecture.

“With the new quarter, you’re starting new classes and meeting new people.”

“Yeah, and your point is…?”

She huffs. “Hello?”

“New people. As in guys?”

“Of course I mean guys. Do you want that to be the first impression they have of you?”