20 Million Tiny Particles

24. Driving

I had to get out of there.

It was somewhere around three in the morning, long after Sheridan had passed out with the bathroom trash can beside her bed and I'd quietly answered the door and asked her new friends to just text her in the morning because she was too sick to hang out any longer tonight.

The stubborn half of the pill kicked at my nervous system. I had fallen asleep for a brief thirty minutes, maybe, but now I was up again, staring at the ceiling. I couldn't slow my thoughts.

Why had I accepted whatever Sheridan had given me? I didn't even Google it. It could've been dangerous. It could've been life threatening.

But then I turned my head on the pillow and told myself how stupid it was that I even thought that. She was right; it wasn't illegal. Whether we used it for asthma or energy, it was some over-the-counter thing that any old eighteen year old can ask for. So it couldn't be that bad -- right?

I didn't see the point of staring at the ceiling, so I slipped out from under the hotel sheets and ducked through the dark of our shared room into the bathroom, flicking on the fluorescent overhead light only after I'd carefully closed the door behind me.

I sat on the toilet staring at my feet for what must've been twenty minutes. Then I splashed my face with cold water and examined the pale, sleepless girl in the mirror. I couldn't get back into bed and wait for sunlight all night, and I couldn't strain my eyes and my brain by scrolling through my phone for hours either. I needed air. I needed not to be trapped in this overly warm shared space hoping that Sheridan's breathing wouldn't waver.

So I slipped back into the room, tiptoed toward my bedside table to unplug my phone and pick up my purse. Carefully and quietly, I stuck my socked feet into my tennis shoes thrown at the base of my bed. Then, with no stirring from the girl in the other bed, I unlocked the deadbolt and slipped out into the silence of the mildly lit hall.

I auto-piloted myself into the elevator with no regard for the fact that I probably shouldn't be sulking around in strange hotel hallways in the dead of night with no one to notice I was gone. No one with currently firing neurons, anyway.

With no plan, I ended up at my car, parked by its lonesome on the closer end of the parking garage. This is how young, capable girls die, I told myself as I wandered toward the Jeep. I opened the door and tucked myself inside, having at least the common sense to lock it after me.

I stared at the dash. I stared at my legs, quilted in plaid pajamas. What was I doing?

I never much related to the whole "devil on one shoulder, angel on the other" mentality until now. I was logical, reasonable. I was all myself, and if I was making bad decisions, it was all me that was responsible, not some foreign half of me floating overhead, pulling at my strings.

Maybe it was the pill, maybe it was the ghost of Sheridan in the back of my mind, maybe it was Mom, God, maybe it was Bryce. But it wasn't me. It wasn't me that put my key in the ignition, turned it, pulled away from the parking spot and out of the garage and onto the road.

This summer was fucked, I decided somewhere between the first and second red light. I wanted to make something out of myself, pull myself out of the rubble and turn nothing into something, but it was done. It was the same stuff -- the same trying so hard to fit in, the same fighting with my sister and my dad, the same old missing Bryce until I cried myself to sleep. All that was new was the empty space my mom left when she crashed her car into the semi truck at forty-five miles an hour.

It doesn't even feel fast.

I was pushing sixty on the one-lane highway, passing a gas station lighting up the atmosphere that was otherwise empty and dark. It was the kind of road you see in the in-between of an airport and a hotel block. It could've been Knoxville, it could've been Chattanooga, it could've been Atlanta. It was everywhere and nowhere all at once, just like Sheridan and the infinite swirl of things floating around her.

All I wanted to do was call Mariah -- to tell her everything, from the late-night drive to meet Bryce the Great to the conference, to everything in between. I wanted to tell her I was so sad. I wanted her to laugh at who I had become and shake me to get back to who I was.

But the sweet fantasy faded as I remembered that, in a sense, Mariah never really knew who I was before. Nobody did. Nobody knew that when my father woke me in a daze at eleven o'clock that night and said to get up, that Mom was in an accident, that I wasn't surprised at all. That I grumbled, "Did you let her drive?" as I put on sweatpants and hobbled to his car so he could drive us to the hospital. I didn't know until we pulled in that I'd never see her alive again.

No one knew that I was angry long before I got to be sad. And most days it's more of a mix of both than only the latter.

Nobody knew that it wasn't an easy break. When I said, "It was a car accident, someone ran a red light," I let their faces express shock. I saw them react with disappointment and disbelief that someone could do that, that someone could be so irresponsible, so careless -- someone else.

Nobody knew that we sent flowers to the truck driver after he walked home without a scratch. The poor guy didn't know what was coming toward him that night, a bat out of hell, a flying saucer crashing into earth.

Nobody knew that a part of me was relieved. Because how else could it end?

I gripped the wheel. No map in the world could point me toward a destination that made sense. I just had to move. I had to push through the buzz of the stimulation in my blood, careening faster toward the lights of a fast food strip ahead. Golden arches lighting my way, pulsing in my memory.

Nobody knew that what hurt the most was that he didn't call. Didn't even show at the funeral.

Nobody knew how that was what kept me up at night.

And how could I ever admit it?

Ahead, a yellow light advanced toward me at light speed. The back of my brain said "hit the brakes" but it was too slow, too quiet in the wings of the tap-dancers on stage behind my eyes. I would make it through the light. No one else was on the road.

As I fixed my eyes on the yellow light, I didn't see the pickup truck turning out in front of me. I heard myself say "shit" and turned the wheel to slide on screeching tires onto the shoulder. The brakes hit hard underneath my feet, my head falling forward like Sheridan's had slumped forward in the hotel room, cradled in my palm.

I heard the truck honk as it sped off in front of me. The driver might as well have screamed, "Hey bitch, you're not alone out here."

I breathed in and out. My heart raced harder than it ever had. My fingers trembled against the vinyl of the steering wheel cracking into a million pieces where it was worn from years of hands gripping tightly.

I had to get home. I had to get out of here -- out of all of this. This wasn't fun. This wasn't working. I wasn't okay.

I pulled back the skin of my temples, feeling hot tears welling up in my eyes. I had to get home.

But for now, all I could do was look in the rearview, pull carefully back out onto the road, and find my way back to the hotel.

So for now, that was what I did.