Chapter 3

“Look. Before you talk with them you need to know something,” Evan started when I was sitting up on the bed, while the doctor was putting some kind of medicine on the open infected cut on my leg. I couldn’t feel it much, but the fact that there was some pain relaxed me. The doctor had told me I wasn’t paralyzed in that case. I still had hopes. Apparently, I had “a good 40% chance of walking”. If 40% was what they had hoped for, I must’ve been an idiot, hoping for a 50/50 chance. I had a bit more than 5 months to recover. And after a year of the accident, if I still couldn’t move great, it was going to be permanent. No pressure, right?

“Yeah?” I asked carefully.

“The man who was driving… You said there were two more car wrecks on the highway. If I understood right then the guy had driven on the wrong side of the road, so another car tried to turn away in panic. But the woman driving that car turned into some other car who was also trying to avoid conflict… The black car you talked about kept driving until he crashed into you guys.”

My eyes widened as I opened my mouth in shock, wanting to ask something but not sure what it was. “So… Other people were hurt too?”

Evan nodded. “That wasn’t as bad as your crash, but they were all taken to the hospital, and about a 7-year-old kid choked on one of the airbags.”

I got goosebumps all over my body as the doctor stopped working with the medicine and calmly wrapped my leg into a new bandage. “Is he dead?”

My brother gave me a few small nods, which made my heart hurt even more than it had before. I lowered my head and pressed my eyes shut, taking small and shaky breaths. “And? Why did I need to know that?” I asked quietly a few moments later when the doctor had left the room, leaving the two of us to be.

“At first the police want to talk about what you saw and what happened—if everyone’s versions fit together. But…” he sighed and continued, “The other victims are going to go to court. I talked to Bob about it… We’d like to stand with them.”

I moved my eyes back onto his face questioningly, “Like how?”

“You’d have to repeat your words in the court. You’d have to talk about what happened to you and all the bad incomes. The parents of the small boy are the main ones doing it. They’re suing the man. We don’t know if he was drunk or high or just stupid, but he’s a murderer. Everybody wants to get compensation for losing that much. And also… the government is paying your hospital bills, but we still need money for physical therapy. Bob doesn’t have loads of money. If you’re going to stand in the court with the others, you’re going to win. And everybody needs that right now.”

I stayed quiet for a while, confused about my own thoughts, but eventually talked up. “You should become a motivational speaker…”

#

“A black Audi?” Officer Gagnon asked in disbelief. “How do you know it was an Audi?”

“I used to help my dad fix cars when I was little,” I explained quietly. “And everything seemed to happen in slow motion, so I can pretty much say that there was a gaggle flying over us.”

The man nodded worriedly, and I observed at his notebook upside down when he wrote down something similar to ‘hyper-aware of the situation’. It made me get a bit nervous when his long fingers started tapping the pen between them against the table and his dark brown eyes met mine again, his other hand reaching out scratch his beard for a moment. The tapping and the scratching made me want to vomit, which was when I realize I was hyper-aware of everything, indeed.

“How many people were there in your car?”

I realized that he probably already knew all of that but was just testing my mental stability and if my memory was still as good as before the crash. “4. My mom, me, and my two sisters.”

“And do you know what happened to all of them?”

“They said my mom had a serious head wound and her skin had burned all over,” I explained quietly with a shaky voice, observing his pen as he was writing it all down absentmindedly. “My sister died immediately because her neck broke. My little sister is here with me. She’s fine now, but she had been under medicine before I woke up. She still has bruises that haven’t healed and she’s quieter, but physically nothing’s broken.”

I didn’t dare to look up as I reached my hand to wipe away the tears on my face. My throat was starting to hurt from the amount of crying that needed to be done soon. I kept holding it inside, but it wasn’t healthy.

“And you, Ms. White? Can you tell me what your injuries are like?”

“I have a spinal cord injury. My legs won’t move—I don’t feel the left one at all. I have a broken arm,” I said, staring at the cast around it. “My head hurts all the time. I have a wound that is infected. I was in a coma for about a week.”

The officer nodded, writing some more things down. “And have you gotten a court invite?”

I gulped when I met his eyes, nodding a little.

#

My eyes opened slowly once I woke up. Sleeping during days was comfortable and never made me have nightmares, which helped a lot. During nights I always had to have somebody close to me just in case I was choking or panicking because of my dreams or just something happened, but during the day they could all go somewhere and not just sit in the hospital room. Of course, Kyle was still sitting here, reading what I thought was the 4th book that he had brought.

“Kyle?” I asked tiredly, looking at him through my half-closed eyes. The boy turned to look at me and smiled softly.

“Hey,” he said simply before turning back to the book.

“I’m hungry,” I murmured, making him look at me again with his eyebrows raised up. “Pass me the candy?”

He nodded, placing a small piece of paper between the pages, and dropped the book onto a chair. He grabbed me a pack of Jolly Ranchers and opened them, grabbing a few before handing it to me. “They’re mine,” I mumbled with a smile, making him smirk as well.

“They said you have to eat healthy. I’m helping you with that,” he said, sitting down on the chair he was previously on, observing me as I made my bed move to a sitting position. “I want a bed like that at home,” he mentioned.

“It’s kind of stiff…” I popped the watermelon candy into my mouth and turned my head to face him normally. “Where are the others?”

“Oh, uh… They went to get some more stuff. And to you know… pack it,” he said carefully.

I nodded. The moving was going to be the least painful part. Collarpie was smaller than Saratoga Springs, and in another state, but there was snow too, and my mom used to own a house there. I think it was Evan’ now.

Bob and my mom used to be best friends. They knew each other from the age of 5 when they started going to kindergarten together. Then, throughout the years, they joined a gang, eventually got out of it… When my mom fell in love with Harold White and got pregnant, she moved to his home city. So, here we were, in Saratoga Springs, upstate New York. I had gotten into doing biathlon because of Bob, actually. He had always wanted to try and when we were little, we used to go on skiing trips with the two families. Using a gun professionally while skiing just added to the drill. That’s why I joined a skiing club when I was 6, and with a few years started competing. When I turned 12, we started practicing with the rifles too.

Now, mom was dead. Grace was dead. My dad was in jail for being a fucking serial killer. Bob and my mom hadn’t talked for a while, after a big fight about something unknown. My life was shit. And the older man was regretting all of their fights and words, especially when he found out that my mom had signed him as the one to look over us when something happened to her. Now it had. He was so kind and funny. I wasn’t even scared of living with them. Olive seemed to love them too.

“Can I eat some of your chocolates?” Kyle sighed, observing the sweets on my table with longing and loving eyes.

“Sure, it’s not like I can do it all by myself anyway,” I said, making him grin big as he got up again. He grabbed a Snickers bar and a huge milk chocolate one of my best friends (from the biathlon competitions) had sent from Finland. Fazer.

“Leave half of that for me, please,” I said. He nodded questioningly, making me add, “It’s from Finland. One of the best chocolates I’ve ever eaten.”

Kyle’s eyes widened a little. “Oh. I shouldn’t be eating—”

“No, it’s fine,” I said. “Just leave half of it for me.”

“You sure?”

I smiled tiredly and nodded, popping a candy into my mouth. “You should leave some for yourself for later as well. It’s amazing with milk.”

He got up, exchanging the bar for a regular American one. “I’ll take a row from it when we have milk,” he said, winking at me and making me smile all over again.

I observed the way his long fingers opened the paper around the chocolate, how he folded it down and then bit into the corner. I giggled, earning his attention, his eyes happy as he looked at me. “You bite it just like that?”

“Are you one of the persons who starts vomiting at it?” he asked with his mouth full.

“No,” I giggled.

He smiled again as he swallowed, looking happy and adoring as his eyes burned into mine. “You have a cute laugh.”

I smiled again, lowering my head a little as I tried not to blush. We sat in a comfortable silence for a while until I had eaten more than half of the pack of candies I had, and he was already eating the Snickers.

“Hey, your sister had markers here, right?” he asked suddenly, forcing me to make eye contact.

“Uhh, yeah…?” I nudged my head towards the table, and he smiled again, fetching himself a few basic colors. Once he came back, he moved the chair to face my bed and carefully took my hand, moving my arm into the right position.

After half an hour, we were both talking about stupid things and giggling while having the conversation. The cast on my arm had weird drawings on them, a dark blue “Kyle Wenom was here” with a star, dominating all of it.