Courtney Summers - Defy the Dark

Love is about expression.

You have to express it. You can’t just let it sit inside you. You have to tell people how you feel. You have to show them or they will never know. So I called him. He didn’t answer, but it was just enough to call him so he knew I cared. There were the letters, I wrote the letters, actually sat down and wrote them—no emails, no texts—and I sent them. My fevered handwriting had to make him realize how important he was to me. I did everything.

I sat outside his house and waited for him to be nostalgic about us, to invite me in. Nothing worked. He could never let on that we meant something to him, ever. I understood he was in a tighter spot than I was. He felt like he had a lot to lose, him and his family. He loved me but he was afraid he’d cost them everything. It’s a terrible thing when fear overpowers love and the only way you can reverse it is by shaking a person to their core so that the fog inside their head lifts and the only thing they’re thinking with is their heart.

I should stop calling what happened at the river an accident.

Jed’s sleepwalking is an expression of love.

That’s how I know what I’m going to do is right. I decide to go to the river with him the tenth night, the coldest night. I have no more time to waste. I know, after it, Jed won’t sleepwalk anymore. There is no way he will open the door and not feel the cold. This is our last chance. I put on my jacket and I put on my gloves. I grab a hefty rock from the garden. I finally understand the itch. I know what I’m supposed to do.

I stand outside his house, whispering.

Please come out, Jed. Come out. Please.

After an hour, my voice reaches his ears. He comes out, walking the stone path to the sidewalk and I walk next to him, dangerously close next to him, and he doesn’t wake up and to anyone who sees us, I bet we look like we belong. We belong.

He turns two corners. Left, right.

You do think of me, I tell him.

I trudge after him. I am as ready for this as I was the last time we went to the river, even if it didn’t end the way I wanted it to, then. It would this time.

The houses on either side of us gradually thin out and become less immaculately cared for. Jed’s family avoids this side of town even though every single house was a vote for his father. I glance into the windows. There are no witnesses.

That night, that last night we saw each other at the river, went so wrong for something that started out so right. What happened was I called him and called him and promised I would stop if he agreed to meet me and talk. He agreed but said we’d have to meet somewhere private.

I was the one who chose the river.

Eventually, Jed and I cross the street and reach the brush, the brush you have to go through to get to the green bridge. His slippers crunch over the dead leaves. He doesn’t wake himself but his sounds scratch my insides. When we finally step through the clearing, the roar of the water is in our ears. He pauses.

We have to go the rest of the way, I whisper.

He hears me. We move. The green bridge is what it sounds like. The metal is painted a washed-out green, always has been. It overlooks the dam and it’s a walker’s bridge. The wooden planks can’t support cars but they hold us. My stomach twists. I step onto it with him.

He makes his way to the middle of it. He stops in front of the rail.

The last time we were here, it was like this. I was here first, waited for him, and by the time he arrived, I was crying because he looked so unhappy to be there. That was how much his fear twisted him. It brought down the corners of his mouth, made his face empty. He didn’t want to be with her, but he didn’t know how to be released. Even though he didn’t say that, I could tell. I could tell because I know him better than anyone else.

You love me, I said, and he told me to stop it. He asked me if I wanted money. He thought I was there for money, to keep quiet about what happened and I just repeated myself over and over : You love me .

You love me, I said, and he shook his head. You’ll prove it to me.

And then I stood on the rail.

Things I remember: the shock of the fall, the shock of the water, the water in my mouth, my nose, the nothingness, and then the dirt against my lips as I somehow made my way out of it alive and my family knew and his family knew and that’s the only thing I like about politics now that I think about it—the secrets you’re forced to keep. It was all so hush-hush. Jed’s fiancée and her family could never know about us. My parents promised I’d stay away.

I remember the emptiness after. Because even though Jed was clearly bound to a life he didn’t want, his heart was supposed to kick in and give him the strength to save me from falling and the act of saving me was supposed to make him realize it was me all along, I was the one. I thought because he didn’t, it meant he didn’t love me but it turns out I was just mixed up. He wasn’t supposed to save me from drowning. We were supposed to drown together.

It’s a good thing I didn’t break his window that first night, now that I think of it. If I had—if I’d broken his window and he’d caught me outside his house—I wouldn’t have discovered he was a sleepwalker. I wouldn’t have heard the things he could never tell me in the day. I wouldn’t have gotten this chance to rewrite our history in the dark, the way it was supposed to be.

My fingers curl around the rock. It feels good and heavy in my hand.

In the end, it’s because of my hips.

The nurse doing my physical looks up from the icy calipers pressing against the skin fold at my waist. “When did you eat last?”

Caught.

“Monday,” I mumble. When scores were released. There’s no reason to lie; it’s too late to change anything.

“I want you to go right to the cafeteria after this, do you understand? Eat something soft—yogurt, soup—otherwise you’ll have a terrible bellyache.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I whisper.

She’s still for a few moments before she loops a cold, plastic tape measure around me, pulling it firm but not tight across my navel. “You know,” she says without looking me in the eye, “it’s not about fat; it’s your pelvic bones. They’re perfect for a Nature.” Her hands find my pelvic ridges and grip them almost possessively. I suppress the urge to pull away, to get her hands off me. “Good oblong girdle, wide, but with a generous depth—we’ll have to do some measurements via ultrasound to be sure, but I predict a perfect-sized outlet.”

“My scores are high,” I blurt, not wanting my fate to be fixed yet.

“Not sure it matters,” the nurse says, and marks down numbers for my waist, my bust, my hips. “These hips are going to subtract a lot of points.”

“They’re very high,” I insist. It’s a lie.

She laughs. “Please. Can’t be all that high if you starved yourself to get your measurements down, can they?”

My face burns red and I want this physical over. I just want to leave.

And my stomach is growling.

Traitor.

Three and a half more minutes drag by before the nurse smiles. “You can go now,” she chirrups in a tone that makes me want to strike her.

I grit my teeth, hating that I’ve succumbed to these violent feelings again. I’ve had a lot of them lately—it wasn’t something I ever struggled with before.

Before the scores.

“I don’t know how you did on your exams, of course,” the nurse says, distracted as she writes more numbers on my chart. “But I suspect we’ll see you tomorrow for that ultrasound. Don’t fill up your schedule, just in case.” Her busybody hands sweep me out the office door, quickly but not unkindly, and I shift to the side as another girl from my class gives me a nervous smile and takes my place in the examination room.