Jessica Sorensen - Saving Quinton

The idea of her taking care of me like that both pleases and appalls me. I want her to stay, which means there’s only one thing I can do. Fighting the impulse inside my body to grab her and crush my lips against hers, I get up and limp toward the doorway, dodging around her friend. I head across the hallway to Delilah’s room. The door’s wide open and the room is unoccupied, which is what I’m looking for.

“Where are you going?” Nova chases after me, but I slam the door right in her face. Like the asshole that I am. I lock it and she starts to bang on it, shouting for me to open up, but I ignore her and flop down on the dirty mattress. Then I reach down between it and the wall where I know Delilah hides her stash and take the small plastic bag out. There’s barely enough for a line in there, but it’ll have to be enough for now, at least until Nova stops banging on the door.

I can hear her talking to someone on the other side as I scrape the remaining crystal out of the bag and onto the Tupperware bin beside the mattress. It sounds like she’s crying, but I could be wrong and honestly I don’t care. I only care about one thing, knowing it’ll make everything feel better and then everything—the fight, Nova—won’t matter.

There’s a pen on the bin and I pick it up as someone knocks on the door. They say something but I don’t hear them as I lean down and suck the tiny white crystals up my nose, feeling the gnawing ache in my body slowly evaporate.

“Quinton, please open up,” Nova says through the door with one soft tap of her hand. There’s a plea in her voice that rips at my throat, but the white powder entering my system quickly heals it. Sure it’s only temporary, but all I’ll need is another hit once the wound starts to open again. I’ll never have to feel again if I follow the process.

Nova says something else, but I cover my ears with my hands and ball up on the mattress until her voice fades out.

And I fade with it.

Nova

I can’t stop crying. The tears started flowing the moment Quinton locked himself into that room. I didn’t know what to do, so I tried everything I could. I begged. I pleaded. I sobbed as I pounded on the door. But he wouldn’t listen and it hurt me to think about him broken and beat up on the other side, doing God knows what while I couldn’t do anything to stop him, all because of a door. A stupid door with a lock that I couldn’t break.

Finally Lea dragged me out of there and I can barely remember what happened over the next few hours, other than that I ended up back at her uncle’s house in the guest room bed with a blanket over me and I feel so exhausted.

“We should have never gone there,” she says as she lies down on the bed beside me. “That was bad, Nova. Like really, really bad.”

“It was the ugly part of life,” I agree, my tears subsiding. “But it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have gone there…he needs my help, Lea.”

“He needs more than your help,” she replies, tucking her arm under her head. “He needs to go to a hospital and then rehab or something.”

“I know that.” I rotate to my side and stare out the window at the stars in the sky and the view calms me. “But I don’t know how I can get him to do that, so I’m doing the only thing I can think of right now.”

“I’m worried about you,” she admits. “I don’t think you should go back there.”

“I have to,” I whisper. “Now that I’ve seen him…seen how he’s living, seen the condition he’s in, I can’t walk away.” I thought maybe my feelings for him would have changed, that maybe last summer was just an illusion built around weed, but it’s not. And I realized that the second I saw him lying in that bed, and when he kissed me, half out of it, it only heightened my feelings. And I didn’t see Landon this time, I just saw a broken guy I wish I could just hug better.

“Nova, please just think about it,” she says. “Think before you go back. Promise me you will. I think you’re going to get in over your head…and those papers I was reading…helping meth addicts is complicated. You need to understand what you’re getting into and if you really want to get into it.”

“Okay, I promise I’ll think about what I’m doing.” But I already know what the answer will be. I’m going back because I’m not ready to give up on him, not when I’ve barely gotten started. I have to figure this out, somehow.

“And read the papers,” she adds, fluffing the pillow and getting situated.

“Okay,” I promise again, wondering just how much insight papers from the Internet can give, but I guess reading them won’t hurt. At the moment I’ll do anything I think can help.

It gets quiet and I close my eyes, ready to fall asleep, wishing upon wishing that I could see a way through this.

* * *

“If you were stuck on a desert island,” I say to Landon as he draws line after line in his sketchbook. I scoot forward on the bed, pretending I’m scratching my foot, when really I just want to be closer to him. “What’s the one thing you’d want there with you?”

He frowns down at his drawing, a self-portrait, his face half shadowed, his hair shorter on one side, and his cheekbone shaded to look sunken in so it looks like he’s wearing the mask from The Phantom of the Opera. “I’m not sure…maybe a pencil.” He stares at the pencil in his hand and then looks at his drawing. “But then again, if I couldn’t have both a pencil and paper, there really wouldn’t be any point to taking one and not the other.” He sets the pencil down on the paper and rubs some smeared graphite off his hand with a thoughtful look on his face, while I pretend not to be sad over the fact that he didn’t say he’d want me on the island with him. “But then again…” He looks up at me and his honey-brown eyes burn with intensity. “Maybe I’d just take you.” He strokes his finger across my cheek, leaving a smudge there I’m sure. “Having you there could have its perks.”

I crinkle my nose like it’s an absurd idea when really my stomach is fluttering with butterflies. “How would that be a perk? I’m not resourceful in intense situations…I’d probably do more harm than good.”

He shakes his head, tracing his finger up my cheekbone to a lock of my hair. He twirls it around his fingers as he sets his pencil and sketchbook to the side. “No way, Nova Reed, you’d be a lifesaver.”

“How do you figure?” My voice sounds breathless and I hate it because it gives away everything that I’m feeling—the effect he has on me. And even though we’ve kissed and touched each other, I’m still not certain where he stands—how he feels about me.

“Because…you save me every day,” he says.

My forehead creases as I stare into his eyes, searching for a sign that he’s joking, but he looks so serious. “Save you from what?”

He pauses, searching my eyes, but for what I’m not sure. “From fading.”

His words hit me square in the chest and I open my mouth to say something, but no words come out, just like always whenever he says something so sad. Finally I manage, “I still don’t get what you mean.”

“I know,” he says with a sigh, unraveling his fingers from my hair. “It doesn’t really matter…I was just trying to say that if you and I were trapped on an island, I know you’d end up being the one to save us, because I know you’d never give up and it’d make me not want to give up either.”

I’m not really sure if it’s the answer I want to hear or how it connects to me stopping him from fading in the real world. I could ask him, but he silences me with his lips, kissing me softly, but with passion behind it, gripping my waist. And before I can think too deeply about what he means about wanting to give up, he gently pushes me down on the bed, lying on top of me. He covers my body with his and I melt into his embrace as he kisses me until I’ve forgotten about everything except him and me and the brief warmth engulfing our bodies.

* * *

May 17, day two of summer break

Nova

When I open my eyes, the sunlight blinds me and I’m sweating from the heat. No one bothered to close the curtain last night and without any mountains around, the heat of the sun is intense. I throw the blanket off and blink as I gradually sit up. I’m so exhausted that all I want to do at the moment is give up. Curl up in a ball, throw the blanket back over my head, and sleep until the next day, maybe longer. But I can’t help thinking about the dream I had last night. At the time I didn’t think anything of it, and honestly I’m surprised I even remember it. I know you’d never give up and it’d make me not want to give up either.

It hurts, thinking about Landon, because he did give up and leave me. In the end I wasn’t a lifesaver like he thought. I was just a distraction from his pain and I didn’t save him. I don’t want to be a distraction this time around. I want to do things differently. But how? How can I make sure Quinton doesn’t end up like Landon?

After thinking about it for a while, I do something I haven’t done in a long time. I sneak out of bed, grab my laptop, and go out onto the sofa to watch the video Landon made right before he ended his life. I’m not even sure what the point is. Whether I just want to see him again, or analyze the video. Watching his lips move, the pain in his eyes, the way his inky black hair falls across his forehead, it takes me back to that night when I woke up on the hill. Just after he made this video, I would find him, hanging from his bedroom ceiling. Music would be playing, like it is in the video. I often wonder if, had I woken up just a little bit sooner, I would have caught him making the video, instead of right after he hanged himself. Could I have stopped him? Was he waiting for me to wake up and stop him, but I took too long and he gave up?