A Summer Storm

Chapter 3: Stand Still

Could one act be selfish and selfless at the same time?

I always thought the difference was in whom it eventually benefits but it doesn't feel like either of us has won.

Eli will. He just doesn't know it yet.

He would never know the hell I saved him from. No matter how much I wanted to explain everything to him, I knew I'd done the right thing. Right in the sense that I was protecting him from a hurt worse than a summer fling moving on just as the season did.

I took away from him what time would've eventually taken, long before he was ready for it.

I took it before it could drain so much of his heart and soul he would be left hollow.

I took it before goodbye was no longer my own choice but a spectacularly painful and bitter defeat.

It already feels like I've lost everything.

"Your parents are getting really worried about you, Cora," Penelope said after a long silence lapsed between us.

I never see people these days anymore but Penelope came home from Columbia for Thanksgiving and I couldn't turn her away. This time, she didn't come with stories as she always did whenever she returned from somewhere with new experiences. At this point, hearing them would just remind me that they were stories that would never be mine to tell someday. So instead of gushing over her first few months of college, she and I sat there in relative silence—me not having much to say and her not knowing what to ask.

"There's no point to it anymore," I said, staring out of the window. "You can't worry about something you already know is coming."

"You know it's not that," Penelope insisted, sympathy gentling her disapproving tone. "They know something changed this summer. You came back different. You're not eating much, you're holed up in here all the time, you don't talk. It's like you're not even here anymore."

I smiled faintly. "Just practicing."

I regretted the hurt in my best friend's eyes. Just couldn't help myself these days, could I? Hurting people seemed to be the only thing I was good at anymore. But it was hard to care about others' pain when so much of it filled my soul.

"You should've told Eli the truth, Cora," Penelope said. "Because the lie is eating you up inside."

Penelope was right—the lie I'd left Martha's Vineyard with had been slowly destroying any remaining shattered pieces of myself that I'd clutched together with a bleeding hand on my way home. It should really be just a matter of time before time came collecting.

Someone knocked at my door later that evening.

"I don't want to be disturbed!"

I probably shouldn't yell at my parents whose burden was heavier than mine—watch the life you'd given wither before your eyes, unable to stop it even if you had all the money in the world. But I just wanted to be left alone.