This Girl: A Novel

the living room, so I follow and sit on the sofa. “How is she?”
    I shrug. “Still asleep. She hasn’t come out of the bedroom since she got there last night.”
    Julia nods and leans back into the couch, then rubs her hands on her face. “She’s scared, Will. She was so scared when I told her. I knew she would take it badly, but not like this. I wasn’t expecting this reaction at all. I need her to be strong when we tell Kel, but I can’t tell him when she’s this emotional.”
    “It’s only been seven months since her dad died, Julia. Losing a parent is hard, but the possibility of losing both of them at her age is incomprehensible.”
    “Yeah,” she whispers. “I guess you would know.”
    She still doesn’t seem convinced that Lake’s reaction is normal. Everyone reacts differently to devastating news. I didn’t even cry right away when I found out my parents died, but that’s not to say it wasn’t the worst moment of my life.
    I was on my way to a game when I got the phone call. I was the emergency contact on their records. The person on the other line was telling me there was an accident and I needed to get to the hospital in Detroit. They wouldn’t tell me anything, no matter how much I begged. I tried calling my parents cell phones several times but never got an answer. I called my grandparents to tell them about the accident, since they were just minutes from the hospital. That was one of the hardest phone calls I’ve ever had to make.
    I drove as fast as I could, holding my cell phone in my hand against the steering wheel, keeping a constant eye on it. All I could think of was Caulder. I just knew something terrible had happened and that my parents weren’t answering their phones because they wanted to tell me in person.
    When an hour passed and even my grandparents still hadn’t called, I tried their phone for the fifth time. They weren’t answering, either. I think it was after the sixth time I called them and they pushed it through to voicemail that I knew.
    My parents. Caulder. All of them. They were all dead.
    I pulled up to the emergency room and rushed inside. The first thing I saw was my grandmother doubled over in a chair, crying.
    No, she wasn’t crying. She was wailing. My grandfather had his back to me, but his shoulders were shaking. His entire body was shaking. I stood there and watched them for several minutes, wondering who these people were in front of me. These strong, independent people I had admired and respected and thought the world of. These people that could be broken by nothing.
    Yet, here they were. Broken and weak. The only thing that can break the unbreakable is the unthinkable. I knew the moment I saw them alone in the waiting room that my worst fears were confirmed.
    They were all dead.
    I turned around and I walked out. I didn’t want to be in there. I had to go outside. I couldn’t breathe. When I reached the grass across from the parking lot, I fell to my knees. I didn’t cry. Instead, I became physically ill. Over and over, my stomach repelling the truth that I refused to believe. When there was nothing left in me, I fell backward onto the grass and stared up at the sky, the stars staring back at me. Millions of stars staring back at the whole world. A world where parents die and brothers die and nothing stops to respect that fact. The whole universe just goes and goes as if nothing has happened, even when one person’s entire life is forced to a complete halt.
    I closed my eyes and thought about him. It had been two weeks since I had spoken to him on the phone. I had promised him I’d come up the next weekend to take him to his football game. That was the same weekend Vaughn begged me not to go. She said midterms were in two weeks and we needed to spend time together before then. So, I called Caulder and canceled my trip. That was the last time I had talked to him.
    The last time I would ever talk to him.
    “Will?”
    I looked up after hearing my grandfather’s voice and he was standing over me, looking down. “Will, are you okay?” he asked, wiping fresh tears from his defeated eyes. I hated seeing that look in his eyes.
    I didn’t move. I just lay there in the grass, looking up at him, not wanting him to say anything else. I didn’t want to hear it.
    “Will . . . they . . .”
    “I know,” I said quickly, not wanting to hear the words come out of his mouth.
    He nodded and looked away. “Your grandmother wants . . .”
    “I