This is Not a Test

“Come on!” Rhys shouts. “COME ON!”

We finally reach the athletic field. It’s wide open but there are no other infected, none that I can see. I can hear the girl behind me, though, and she’s close, she’s fast, faster.

She dives for me and we both crash to the ground. The side of my forehead connects with the pavement. I swear I hear it crack and then I’m underwater and everything is strange and removed and I’m strange and removed from it. I turn myself over, slowly, painfully, and stare into milky white irises, all the capillaries around them busted and red. I lose focus. I see one of her, two of her, three of her. Calm settles over me. She licks her lips. I close my eyes.

This is it. Finally.

A splintering sound reaches my ears and then again, again and again. Something splitting open. At first I think it’s me, that when you die, you splinter into a million pieces, but then I feel wet—wet against me, but slick and wrong. And then a dead wet weight on top of me.

Rhys hooks his arms under my arms and pulls me out from under the girl and I blink and she comes into focus; her head is completely decimated, bits of blood and brain all over me, and then I’m on my feet but I don’t feel like I’m on my feet. Rhys drags me by the hand and I trip after him. Everything is turning gray. He urges me on.

“Come on, you can do this—”

It’s quiet around us now but he moves like we’re still being chased. My legs are rubber and I fall. I can’t breathe. He pulls me up again, wraps his arm around my waist and we both stagger to the library door. He pounds his fists against it and I slump to my knees.

“Open the door—open the fucking door!”

PART TWO

Sometimes I’m brave. Like the sleepover at Grace’s. I wasn’t supposed to be there. I went without permission but I was willing to face my father’s wrath after just so I could have something nice, a memory that belonged only to me. And it was nice. I told Grace I liked her family and she said she noticed me watching her parents a lot and I said I wasn’t used to seeing parents together, up close. I guess I could if I watched more TV but that wouldn’t be real and when it’s real and it’s in front of you, two happy people who love each other, a family—that’s better than TV. I got to be part of that for a day. Lily was so mad about having to pick up the pieces afterward, but I still did it. I was brave. I tried leaving. Weeks before everything ended, I was one half of Lily’s old plan and my bags were next to my door and I don’t know how my father found out but he did and he was so angry I had to stay home from school until it didn’t show on me anymore. It was the first time he lost control enough to hit me in the face. I tried leaving again, but Lily took the pills with her. Tried again …

After Rhys pulls me through the door, I go outside of myself somehow. I don’t know how. I wish I knew how. They drag me to the locker room, the showers. Even the shock of freezing cold water against my body can’t bring me back. I watch them scramble to get me clean. They keep asking Rhys if I’ve been bitten, if I’m turning. He says no but he also says wait—be careful—wait until most of the blood’s off …

They keep me under the showerhead forever. They keep me under until my lips turn blue and the water runs clear and then Cary sets my shoulder. I come back to myself for this, for how dizzyingly awful it feels, how familiar. My shoulder has been dislocated before. My father. He watched videos on YouTube about how to put everything back in place so we wouldn’t have to go to the hospital. So I know what’s coming. More pain. I bite down so hard I think my teeth will shatter. Cary tells me it’s okay, it’s okay, but it’s not and then it’s done, it’s over. I close my eyes and the next time I force them open, it’s like looking at the world through distorted glass. I don’t know where I am at first and then—I remember. The school.

But I don’t know where in the school.

My heart beats fast. I touch my forehead. It’s been bandaged sloppily. I blink until my vision clears and I process all these things at once: the nurse’s office. I am in the nurse’s office on a cot with a thin sheet covering me, my forehead is bandaged and I am wearing a scratchy long sweater that isn’t mine, that I don’t remember changing into. I don’t know what is more distressing to me; someone changing my clothes or the hurt. My bones are screaming, my skin feels raw. I try to take some kind of weird comfort in the fact these feelings aren’t ones I’m not used to. I’ve been variations of hurt my whole life. My heart calms. I look around. The door is wide open and the hall is empty. I try to gauge the time. The room is light enough. Day.

I sit up slowly, carefully.

“Still here.”

Rhys sits in a chair against the wall, in front of a poster about the dangers of crystal meth. It’s a series of photos, the progression of one woman’s face over the course of a year on the drug—from haggard to cracked-out. She reminds me of the girl outside and then I get so dizzy with those memories, I feel like I’m going to fall into the sky. I lay back on the cot and take steadying breaths in and out. Rhys walks over and rests his hand against my forehead but there’s nothing comforting in his touch and he does it so quickly, I wonder if I imagined it.

“How am I?”

My voice is gravel. He presses a bottle of water into my shaking hands. I drink it and miss my mouth. The water trails down my chin and onto this sweater that’s not mine.

Rhys takes the water back from me.

“You’re sick.” The way he says it, I can’t tell if it’s an insult or a diagnosis. “Maybe you’re concussed. Maybe you have brain damage. But then I think you must have been totally brain damaged before we went out there, so—”

“Rhys—”

“Or maybe,” he continues, “you’re infected. Maybe you’ll be dead in hours and then you’ll come back—”

“Stop it.”

“But you went out there to die, didn’t you? So who cares.”

I turn my face away from him. He’s right. Who cares. Maybe I’m infected. I try to listen to what’s happening inside me. If there’s any part of me that’s dying and becoming something rotten but more purposeful than what I am now.

“You went out there to die, didn’t you.”

I close my eyes.

“Sloane.”

I open them.

“Yes.”

He moves away from me like I am infected, and then he kicks his chair. Hard. It rattles into the wall and I flinch and he whirls around so fast, my hands automatically fly up to my face. Don’t hit me. It’s such a bad thing to do. He knows I think he’d hurt me and his eyes widen and he steps back.

“You let me go out there with you,” he says. “You risked my life—”

“I wasn’t going to let you die—”

“Oh, fuck you, Sloane—”

“I wasn’t! I didn’t—”

“Well, it came just a little too close for my comfort—”

“You wouldn’t let me go! I wanted to go and you wouldn’t let me—”

“If you want to die, do it like a normal person—slit your wrists or something! Jesus!” Too much. I press my fingers into my temples and fight the urge to puke. He grabs pills from the table beside me and holds them out to me. I eye him warily. “It’s Tylenol. Just take it.”

I take the pills, swallow them dry.

“That man out there,” he says. I pick at my blanket. Maybe if I act disinterested enough he’ll stop talking. “He’s dead because of you. Think he wanted to live?”

“It could’ve been me,” I say. “But you wouldn’t go back inside without me.”

“Because I couldn’t believe what I was hearing—”

“Why? Why couldn’t you? Have you seen it out there, Rhys? There’s nothing out there anymore, there’s nothing—”

“That’s such bullshit, Sloane! And even if it wasn’t, you don’t get to decide that for me—”

“And you don’t get to decide that for me!”

Stalemate. He knows I’m right. He digs his hands into his pockets and tosses a crumpled piece of paper at me and then he leaves. I open it up. It’s water-stained, the handwriting mostly melted, save for a few words here and there. My suicide note to Lily.

I’m struggling to stay awake when Grace comes in. I don’t want to close my eyes because every time I do I see the man, I see the dead girl, I see Rhys kicking the chair against the wall. But mostly it’s the man, staggering around the parking lot calling out for his friend? Lover? Brother? Father? It cuts through me. Did he want to live? Was he fit to live? Was that my call to make? I have to push what I’ve done all the way to my toes, as far from my head as it can get, otherwise, I’ll never be able to let it go. Murderer. That’s what Grace and Trace call Cary, but it’s not Cary, is it. It’s me. That’s what I’m thinking when I hear Grace’s footsteps and then she’s standing in the door. She makes a concentrated effort not to look directly at me.

“Rhys said you might not want to see anyone.” I’m trying to figure out what else Rhys might have said when she continues. “But I wanted to see you.”

I try to guess what’s coming next. He said you went out there to die. He said you’re crazy. He said you’re a risk to the rest of us. He said you’re a murderer.

“He said the man was hurt. Dying.” She pauses. “He said it wasn’t my dad.”

So he didn’t out me.

“It wasn’t your dad,” I say.

She exhales like now she can believe it. She crosses the room and sits on the edge of my cot. She picks at her fingernails for a while before saying, “I don’t understand you.”

“What’s there to understand?”

“You didn’t … you didn’t do it because of what I said to you, did you? Because you wanted to make it up to me?”