chapter three

daniel

The roar of metal was in her ears a few weeks later when I pulled up outside her house. She didn't know I was coming, but it was evident from the scattered way she spoke to me on AIM that night that if she didn't have company, she was going to do something she regretted. Her parents were out; the lack of cars in the driveway bothered me. She wouldn't do anything stupid – typically – but that was no reason to give her opportunity.

Running a hand through my hair, I checked the clock in my car before stepping out. Just past seven on a winter night in California, and the stars were out in full force, a light breeze stirring my clothes as I walked up to her front door and rang the bell. I heard "Animal I Have Become" playing faintly beyond the closed doors, and nearly broke them down.

It wasn't long, though, before she opened the door and blinked in surprise to find me there. She looked older, somehow, with her hair straightened and dark eye shadow flaring above those blazing rain-gray eyes. "Daniel," she said, her features smoothly over as abruptly as they'd wrinkled. "What are you doing here?"

I raised my eyebrows at her. "Want to get something to eat?"

She frowned, leaning against the doorway, chestnut hair falling around her shoulders. I hadn't seen her in almost a week, but it had made a difference. She seemed thinner than she'd been before, and had the look of recovering from an illness. "Why?"

I shrugged. "I'm bored, and you obviously could do with some company." She opened her mouth to argue and I shot her a look that silenced her. "Don't deny it. You're all over the place right now."

Her eyes darkened, and when she laughed, the sound was bitter, close to madness. I forced myself not to take a step back. "You don't want my company right now, Daniel," she said, eyes flashing. "Leigh should have warned you."

"Leigh is currently...out of sorts," I said quietly. Her unfelt smile faltered, and I knew she was struggling to hang onto it. "Come on. Your company can't be that bad."

Her smile definitely wavered. "Truthfully, I've taken too much cough syrup and Tylenol in the past few hours to successfully stand for long, Daniel. I've been sick. That's part of what's making me...all over the place, did you call it?" Her eyes flashed briefly again in amusement. "I'd be surprised if I made it far." At the unmoving look on my face, she finally sighed. "Fine. If you insist. Let me grab a sweatshirt." She turned and walked slowly inside, emerging a moment later as she pulled a sweatshirt over her head, though the effort of walking at the same time was clearly costing her.

She was, as I'd put it, all over the place; our conversation on the drive across the valley to In-N-Out leapt unexpectedly from subject to subject, from light-hearted talk to bursts of rage and darkness on her part. It would have been enough to set anyone on edge, but particularly me. Leigh had created a mental image out of Brígh for me, one of power and strength, one of composure, but she was anything but that tonight.

In one of the silent stretched, she looked out the window at the headlights, brooding darkly, and abruptly commented, "What if we were the only people in the world, Daniel? What would you do with just a crazy, sullen bitch like me for company?"

If my eyebrows jumped up to my hairline, I didn't think it was quite my fault. I glanced sideways at her, her temple against the cool windowpane, gazing out into the night. The fire in her question seemed to have faded already, to be replaced by a melancholy ache on her hard features. "We'd listen to far too much of Simon and Garfunkel, stay up too late to be healthy, and probably run out of tea before the week was out," I answered.

She laughed quietly – a pained laugh, and her eyes went unfocused briefly. "D'you know you're the first person to bypass the 'crazy, sullen bitch' part and just answer the goddamn question?"

It was then that the image Leigh had planted in my mind of Brígh truly dissolved. She was vulnerable – perhaps more vulnerable than all of us, and the cracks were showing through, places and pieces of her that she tried so hard to keep inside and found she could not. She was powerful, sure – powerful and remarkable, intelligent and beautiful, but she was also breaking apart on the inside. I half-wanted to know why, and half-didn't. I'd never pictured Brígh as the one who needed saving. That was my sister, never her best friend.

I felt her eyes on me when I looked back to the road, as though she heard my thoughts. "Don't trust me, Daniel," she said softly, her voice full of defeat, and I turned to look at her, startled. "Whatever you do, never trust me."

Her words echoed through my mind in the silence that enveloped us for the remainder of the way to the burger joint, while I paid for our food and waited for it. I went back out to the car to find that she had passed out in the passenger seat, her features calm in sleep as they never were during the day. I looked at her for a long moment before setting down the food between us and kicking the car to life again, driving out of the city and into the countryside before she so much as stirred.

When she did finally wake, I was already putting the car into park in the middle of a grassy field, chilled with the slight drop of temperature in a desert night. For a moment confusion flashed across her eyes before the memories of the past few hours came back to her. "Sorry," she said, pulling the seat back up into a less relaxed position. Not a trace of grogginess was in her voice. "This cold has a weird effect on me."

"Could be the number of pills you swallowed for it without food, too," I said dryly, and she looked away. I thought I saw her cheeks burn, however briefly. "C'mon." I kicked open the door, grabbed a blanket and the foot, and clambered out of the cab of my truck. She followed, albeit warily.

I shook the blanket out over the bed of the pickup and hopped in. For a second, out of the corner of my eye, I saw her steady herself against the side of the truck, her eyes closing, face paling as though she might be sick, but by the time I got a real look she was straightening again, climbing into the pickup as agilely as I had, if slower.

Our talk was lighter as we dug into the food. She looked up at the stars thoughtfully as she chewed on a Double-Double, eyes picking out constellations and pointing them out to me. Her face ached of something half-remembered, a passion that was old and dead. "Have you ever had someone ask you," she asked abruptly, after swallowing some fries, "if you wanted to die?"

I looked at her through the darkness. Her features seemed open, merely inquiring, not like the question before in the car, when she'd been so abruptly dark and tired. "Not really," I answered, ferreting around in the wrapper for the last of my fries. "Have you?"

"Yep," she said without hesitation, looking back up at the stars.

"What did you say?" I asked, half-knowing the answer but dreading it anyway.

"Yes," she said simply.

I frowned. "And how long ago was this?"

She glanced back down at me, saw the look on my face, and shook her head, a smile breaking across her features, the first real smile I'd seen from her that night. "Fairly recent. No, you don't get it. Everybody interprets that question as, 'Do you want to kill yourself?'" She laughed lightly. "Just interpret it another way. Of course I want to die – eventually. That's one way to interpret it. I don't want to be immortal, have no interest in living forever." She gazed thoughtfully at the sky overhead.

"But not the way you interpreted it," I pointed out quietly.

"No, not the way I interpreted it," she responded, just as quietly, eyes still fixed on the heavens, roving the patterns of stars. "I interpreted it simply as it was: Do you want to die? Yes." The serious note began to enter her tone again. "I want this to be over. The torment. The pain. Of course I want to die. I'm sick of living a life half-alive, intelligent enough to be powerful but not powerful enough to figure out what it is I actually want. Something that can make things less routine and more like they actually matter." She sighed, leaned back against the bed of the pickup, and closed her eyes. "Do I want to die? Of course I want to die."

The conversation skipped again. She jumped to so many different places so quickly that I could scarcely keep up. The only thing I knew was that I had to keep up. I didn't know what would happen if I didn't, but I couldn't risk falling behind and letting her forge on alone. I didn't know if it was truly the illness that was making her like this, or if it was just some part of her shining through that she couldn't control because she was that sick, and her mind was that scattered. I didn't know anything for sure except to keep up, both with the inane jokes and the deepness of the questions she fired off. I felt, almost, that she was testing me.

It was nearly midnight by the time a lull came, this time with both of us breathless from laughter. When she wasn't being overcome by the internal darkness, she had beautifully amusing things to say. She pointed upward, her fingers tracing out a patch of stars against the sky. "See that?" her voice asked. My eyes were fixed on the heavens, too. We lay side-by-side, gazing up at the stars, trying to catch out breath.

"Yeah," I said, though I didn't see much except a group of randomly oriented stars.

"I always wanted to get up there when I was younger," she said, and I couldn't help but think, Younger? You're hardly shy of sixteen. "Always thought I'd figure out a way to travel space. Dad always thought I would, too." Her mouth twisted, and she let her hand fall. "Gave up on it."

I turned my head to look at her. "Why did you?"

She shook her head. "Not sure, really." She regarded the skies with a longing in her features. "God knows I still want to go. So bad. Leave everything behind, start over. Somewhere else. Somewhere new. Where things could be different. But..." She shook her head. "I mean, what good would it do? Some things will follow me. They always will. Whether I like it or not."

"What are the things, Brígh?" I asked her, out of a driving curiosity and an irritation that she never came out and said what was bothering her.

She turned her face away from me, away from the stars, and I didn't need to see her shoulders heave to realize she was crying. "Hey," I said softly, sliding an arm beneath her shoulders to pull her into my arms. "Brígh, it's okay. You don't have to tell me."

She shook with the power of her sobs, trembling with the ferocity of her tears, and I sensed that if she hadn't been half out of her mind with the cold, she would have pushed me away. She let me hold her head gently against my shoulder as she cried, the sound of her sobs tearing into the night. I automatically rubbed her back, soothingly, trying to calm her to no avail.

It was a long time, though I was always unsure of how long, that I held her while she cried. When eventually her sobs trailed to quiet tears, and her tears to occasional sniffs, still I held her, though I knew that soon, she would push away from my embrace.

Eventually, she lifted the sleeve of her sweatshirt to her face and swiped it across her eyes, letting out a shaky laugh. "God, Daniel, I'm sorry."

I glanced down at her, into the rain-gray eyes that were embarrassed and – I'd never thought I would see that emotion there – afraid. "No," I said, unsure of what I was saying no to. "You needed that."

She grimaced. "Didn't make my throat feel much better."

She was known for that – going from drop-dead melancholy to feigning lightness in a heartbeat. It seemed simple for her at the times she was darkest to simply jump from place to place, never really interested in where she was going. Her eyes searched mine, and then she sighed, shook her head, closed her eyes and rested back against my shoulder again.

"I just want it to be over," she said softly, and then she was asleep against me.