cw—again.

CONVINCED I NEEDED air that flowed freer than it did in the stairwell, Jace went to get his shoes and led me to the elevator, then out to his car. I hated being in a car almost as much as I hated these episodes, but in the state I was in, I couldn't put up a fight. I was also aware that he only wanted to help, and was sacrificing a class for this.

We slowly drove around the area, to one of his playlists. He usually listened to several variations of R&B and bedroom pop, with the occasional indie folk, so while the sounds weren't surprising, it was still very pleasant to listen to.

It was a little after seven p.m. when he pulled back up outside his apartment, now lit up in the final hours before everyone retired for the night.

He watched me get out of the car, heavy-limbed, first. I thought I was going to throw up, so the moment my feet touched the ground, I doubled over between the passenger seat and door, hands on my knees, dazzled vision to the asphalt. My sweatshirt bunched around my neck with the position, and I heard the driver's door slam shut. Then a phone rang. Jason's.

"Hey, Ash. What's up?" He fell quiet as he listened to what the other person had to say, and his shoes appeared in my line of sight. "Yeah, can't make it today. Something came up." Something pressed up against my arm, and I lifted my gaze to see the bottle of water he held out to me. My muscles felt heavy at the same time that they felt like jelly, but I tried my best to take it from him.

The water tasted sour now, but I forced it down as Jace tried to bring his conversation to an end. Every time he offered an I'll talk to you later, she seemed to magically have something more to say. I wished a lot more people were okay with the fact that not everyone liked phone calls.

Eventually, he was able to bring it to an end, and he came for me immediately,

"You aight?"

I lowered myself to the floor of the car first, then wiped beads of water off my chin. When I tried to catch a breath, my vision faded out for a second. "Yeah," I answered, breathless. "Better."

He leaned an arm against the top of the open door and just watched me for a moment. I tried not to meet his eyes, refused to see the effect of this whole situation branded in his irises.

The parking lot was so quiet, you could register every breath, and I didn't mind being there for a while longer. But, I could practically hear Jace struggle not to give me a lecture. It all eventually came back to this. This stupid, vicious cycle. Where I found myself facing the bright headlights of that truck all over again, the deafening honk, then that split second where the world seemed to slow and allow me take everything in one last time. Then a sudden darkness. A cold, terrifying darkness.

In the thick of it, I always forgot where I was, always forgot that it was just a memory. I could smell the air of that night as though I was living through it all over again. The trail of Emma's perfume entangled with the miasma of burnt rubber and wires and spilled gas.

Suddenly aware that I was forcing myself back there all over again, I drew in a shaky breath and let it out slowly.

"Ready to go up?" Jace asked, forcing my gaze to his. His eyes seemed suddenly withdrawn, pierced with a kind of exhaustion I knew too well.

In the days after the accident, he traveled down from Carlton and preferred to linger in the hospital hallways, sit at my bedside, sleep in uncomfortable positions, and tell me jokes that hurt my sides to laugh at. My mom tried to convince him to go home, have a good meal, sleep in a nice bed. His dad would stop by during appointments and tell him the exact same thing—being here won't speed up his recovery, you know—and it was only after the stress of all of it started to tell on him that he listened.

The next evening, he was back like none of it happened, a smile on his face.

I knew why he didn't want to go home, I knew how much he worried, but I felt guilty for keeping him there.

This felt a lot like that.

"Yeah, just give me a moment," I responded, and he gave me a single nod before he turned away. He walked a couple of steps forward, slowly, then he placed his hands against his hips for a moment and angled his gaze towards the darkening sky. I saw when he let out the breath, saw it in his shoulders. Relief. The guilt settled deeper.

Art was sprawled out on the couch when we walked into the apartment, and he stirred at the sound of Jace putting his keys down.

Jace reached forward to give him a playful slap on his foot. "Yo, Syd's spending the night. Get off the couch. Por favor."

I didn't realize I was still standing by the door until Art sat up after rubbing a hand over his face and stared groggily at me, almost as if he couldn't quite register what was happening. When he looked at Jace, it was with a sigh. "A veces, de verdad no sé por qué me caes bien."

"Yeah, screw you, too," Jason responded with a smile, and Arturo shook his head and turned back to me.

"How are you feeling?"

"Good," I told him with a nod of my own.

"I got leftover stir fry in the fridge, Syd," Jace informed, already on his way to the kitchen. "You mind?"

"Uh, that's—that's fine."

He warmed up food, and we ate in near-silence. His jaw was a little stiff, and a couple of times, I fought the urge to ask about it. Was he upset? Angry? Was it at me or just in general?

Ten minutes after his bowl was empty and I still struggled with mine, I decided that I'd had enough. Wordlessly, he took the bowl from me and got off the couch. When he disappeared into the kitchen, a sudden misplaced silence fell over the apartment, until he turned the tap on. For about five minutes, that and the clink of kitchenware were all I could hear. It happened around me, but I didn't feel part of it, didn't move a muscle. Sometime in the middle of that, I drifted off again.

I wasn't quite sure where I went this time, the void as abstract as ever, but it was his voice that drew me back.

"I'll go have a shower, then you can take the bed."

Jace didn't wait for a response, already rubbing the back of his neck as he turned towards his bedroom. It was the answer I needed.

"I won't sleep," I informed him, but it came out more like a whisper, barely making the trip across.

"What?"

Louder, I said, "I won't sleep. So there's no point giving me the bed."

He watched me for a second, and I almost wanted to yell at him to just say what was on his mind. The weight of his gaze, and his silence, was a little too much for me to bear at that time. Finally, almost like he heard me, he leaned against the wall behind him. "Your mom told me she texted you about the doctor."

Instantly, I wished he'd go back to being quiet.

I made to say something, but he cut me off. "Before you say anything, I'm aware you didn't respond. She told me that, too."

"You guys just talk behind my back now?"

"Syd," he called, calmer than I deserved. "You're getting worse."

I shook my head and looked away. "I haven't had an episode in a while, Jace."

"It's not about the episode. How often do you eat?" I took a little too long to respond, so he continued. "When was the last time you slept at least three hours? You're pale as a ghost—"

"Now you're just exaggerating," I interrupted with a humorless laugh.

"Sydney, your mom's worried about you. So am I."

I regarded him for a moment. "You still don't understand, do you? None of you who claim to want to help actually get it. All you do is . . . suffocate me with what you want. For three whole years." In the back of my mind, I was aware that Arturo could probably hear us if he hadn't gone back to sleep, but this wasn't the first of this conversation, and I couldn't bring myself to feel embarrassed enough about it to care.

Jason nodded, as though contrary to what I said, he did understand, and I should've seen his question coming before it landed. "What do you want, Syd?"

I felt the bolt of annoyance shoot up my back. I was trapped, doomed to repeat every single event in my life over and over and over. I leaned back in the couch and stared at the ceiling, measuring my breathing. My chest expanded beneath the weight of all this, the pain nearly physical. Tears bit at my eyes, the stress of the whole day finally settling.

When I felt like I could speak without snapping, or without my voice trembling, I said, "I don't want to talk about this."

He didn't retreat as quickly as I thought he would. In fact, he didn't even move. He just stood there, still observing me, still biting his tongue.

Eventually, he said, "I just want you to get better."

He lingered for a moment longer, probably waiting for some kind of acknowledgement from me, but when none came, he pushed himself off the wall and went to his bedroom.

In the minutes he was gone, I tried to separate my emotions from each other and deal with them individually. There was guilt. Regret. Uncertainty. Fear. And they all tied back to that summer. The summer that was supposed to transform us but ended up not only splintering us, but scattering the pieces. Even if I wanted to try and put myself back together, too many of those pieces were missing or dissolved beyond recognition. I would always be incomplete. Never quite whole, halfway broken.

On the one hand, I wanted to be able to fall asleep so I could forget all about it, transport my mind into a fantastical dream that gave me joy for three seconds. And on the other, I knew sleeping now would only expose me to something much worse. I had to pick my poison.

When Jason returned to the living room, he did in a gray tee and sweatpants, two pillows tucked under his arm. I didn't look at him as he settled next to me, the couch dipping beneath his weight, and it was that way for a moment.

Then he asked, "Wanna watch a movie?"

I was still tracing patterns on the ceiling, and I wasn't really interested in watching anything, but I recognized this for what it was. His olive branch. He thought he'd upset me.

Maybe I was a little retarded in certain respects, but I knew that everything Jace did came from a good place. I'd gone through so many flickering friends, more so after the accident, when it was harder for me to connect with anyone, but he was a steady presence. Regardless of the number of times I'd tried to push him away, regardless of how often he'd told me off. It was the type of patience and perseverance that existed between family. You didn't just walk away when things got difficult or when you got uncomfortable.

My sternum still felt like it would implode if I drew in a breath too sharp, but I already knew where I was taking this.

When I spoke, my eyes remained on the ceiling, and it was as though my windpipe was being pinched shut with every vowel. "She wanted to go to Yale, you know. For law." The silence pulsed. I let out a chuckle at the reminder of how excited she was about senior year, but it only pushed the tears forward. Soon enough, my vision was blurry. "She worked so hard for it, too." That time, my voice was merely a whisper. "And I—" I drew in a sharp breath, pain blooming in my chest at the realization that I hadn't quite said this part out loud before. "I guess I just keep wondering if I'd been the one in the driver's seat."

Next to me, Jace sat still. Attentive.

My eyes stung, but I decided to keep going. "She begged me to drive, Jace." I finally sat up and looked at what I could make of my hands. They didn't tremble as badly as I thought they would. "I thought it was funny, so I—I made her—made her drive anyway."

He took one of the pillows and placed it in my lap, and I didn't realize tears had started forging paths down my face until the drops fell.

"I don't know how to explain to anyone how badly that eats at me. Every time I realize I'm still here and she's not." I sniffled. Wiped a hand beneath my wet nose. "All because I found it funny."

I tried not to let the images resurface, tried not to recall that the truck had slammed into her side first, tried not to recall that ten seconds before that, she was looking at me, smiling at me, the breeze in her waves. Some nights, when I lay in bed and allowed myself do a countdown of my favorite moments before that night, I wished that smile had been the last thing I'd seen. Wished I'd never come to, much less to the sight of her on the other side of the road, unnaturally placed on a bed of glass bits, choking on her own blood.

"She would've been at Yale, threatening her professors with her intelligence. But she's been dead three years, and I'm just supposed to go to therapy and make myself feel better about it—" My words were almost incoherent at that point, so I kept quiet and wiped the tears off my face.

Jace didn't say anything, didn't make any commentaries. He only processed what I'd just said, then looked at me for a long moment.

We didn't watch anything. Didn't speak, either. We only sat there until my limbs grew heavy and I felt wiped enough to lie down. Then I was thinking about Emma's smile again, rewriting the end and fixing that as the last thing I saw before the world dipped into a cold, terrifying darkness.

this book is generally quite difficult for me to write, but syd's chapters take the cake