Unravelling. Elizabeth Norris

isn’t that easy to walk up to a guy in front of his friends and say, I’m pretty sure I died the other day and you brought me back to life. What do you have to say about that?

      Instead I look at Ben and say, “Can I talk to you for a minute?”

      He shrugs.

      Fabulous. “Like, somewhere else?”

      Someone snickers, and I glance to the right where Reid Suitor is sitting with four other guys whose names I don’t know. Reid and another guy are—no lie—chewing on pieces of grass.

      “You lost, baby? Or are you looking to rebel against Daddy?”

      “Wow, that’s original. What eighties movie did you steal that line from?” I say, turning left to the speaker. Elijah Palma. Great. This is already going worse than I had expected. Maybe I should just tell myself Alex was right—near-death experience triggered the firing of random nerve endings in my brain, and I imagined those visions. Maybe it was a sign there really is a hell and I’m going to end up there.

      Elijah shrugs. His washed-out blue eyes are so bloodshot, he looks half-dead. “Hey, I’m willing to take one for the team.”

      Someone punches Elijah in the shoulder and says, “Knock it off, asshole.” I know without looking that it’s Ben. His voice is already familiar to me, even though I’ve barely heard him say two words.

      “Take one for the team?” I know I shouldn’t be egging him on, but I can’t help it. I still haven’t figured out what the hell I’m going to say to Ben, so I might as well burn my frustration by picking a fight with his friend. “What team are you even on, anyway?”

      And no, I have no idea how to properly trade witty insults. But no one notices, because I’ve just implied Elijah’s gay, and it doesn’t matter that it wasn’t particularly clever.

      “I don’t screw uptight virgins,” he sneers, and my face floods with heat.

      Reid laughs, apparently in agreement.

      I want to say something back, but my voice is frozen. Elijah, Reid, Roxy, Ben—they’re gone, no longer in front of me. Instead I’m fifteen again, waking up at 2:13 a.m. after I just lost my best friend, in a car parked outside Chad Brandel’s house with my jeans undone and my underwear ripped.

      Doubled over in hysterics, Roxy leans into Elijah, and he wraps an arm around her. They’re perfect for each other.

      “I said shut the fuck up, dude.” Again, it’s Ben.

      But Elijah keeps going. “You think you’re the first prude to get in some kind of accident and realize you’re wasting your life away? You can’t just come over here for a pity fuck and an adrenaline rush. You—”

      A fist crashes into his cheekbone, and the force rocks him backward, knocking Roxy to the side. A couple other guys laugh.

      And then Ben is standing in front of me, holding on to his hand and rubbing his knuckles. He jerks his head toward the L building, and we both start walking that way.

      It hasn’t escaped my notice that he stuck up for me. That he just punched one of his friends—a kid notorious for getting suspended at least once every few months for kicking the shit out of someone—because I’d been insulted.

      The notion is a little barbaric, but I’m too flattered to care.

      Ben opens the door to the first classroom and holds it for me. The lights are on, and about ten kids are eating at a table in the far corner of the room, but I don’t see the teacher. There’s only a note on her whiteboard that reads Do NOT leave a mess in the microwave. Please ☺.

      “Hey, Ben,” one of the girls at the back table says. “Everything okay?” Only, as she stands up, I realize she isn’t a student at all. Miss Poblete is five foot nothing and probably in her late twenties, but she could easily pass for a student.

      Ben nods. “Yeah, we just needed a quiet place to go over a few things.” As Ben lowers himself into a sitting position on one of the tables, I wonder why he seems so comfortable here.

      Poblete smiles at me and sits back down.

      “Book club,” Ben says.

      “What?”

      He nods toward Poblete and the others. “She has book club meetings every Monday. If we’re quiet, they won’t listen.”

      My cheeks warm again as I turn to look at him. There’s no easy way to say any of this. “You were there, at Torrey Pines, the day I got hit by that truck,” I whisper.

      It’s not a question, but he nods anyway. So much for Alex’s theory that Ben doesn’t go to the beach.

      “What did you do to me?”

      He looks down at his feet, dangling a few inches above the floor. He swings them lightly, nervously. “Nothing.”

      I shake my head even though he isn’t looking at me. “No, I remember you. I remember seeing your face when I opened my eyes.”

      He shrugs and doesn’t take his eyes off his shoes. “I checked to see if you were okay.”

      I don’t know him at all, but I know he’s lying. “But I wasn’t okay.”

      “You—”

      “Don’t—” Lie to me, I want to say as I step closer to him. Instead I say nothing and glance toward the back of the room. No one’s looking at us.

      When I turn back to Ben, he’s staring at me. His jaw sets into a hard line. “I’m not sure what you want me to say.”

      “You did something to me, something I can’t explain.” I pause, trying to find the right words. But I’m not sure they exist. “I . . . I died.” I rush on before he can tell me I’m crazy. “I mean, I felt it. I felt myself die—my heart stopped, there was nothingness, then there was this lightness—” I stop because I’m not making any sense. “But then suddenly I was back and you were leaning over me. I couldn’t move, but you did something to my back so I could, and the doctors who looked at my X-ray said my back had been broken and healed again.”

      I’m close enough to him now that he can’t swing his legs without them hitting me.

      “So, Ben Michaels, what did you do to me?”

      He looks up when I say his name, and his eyes connect to mine—they’re as black as an oil well. And I remember the way they looked at me before. “Does it matter?”

      “Yes. Yes, it does.”

      “Why?”

      “Because I need to know,” I say, my voice rising uncontrollably. I take a deep breath and try to maintain my composure. Then I whisper, “Something happened to me, and I need to understand what it was.”

      “No, you don’t,” he says with a small laugh.

      And even though he doesn’t sound condescending, it makes me feel like he thinks I’m just a silly girl. Irrational and crazy. My fists clench at my sides, and I bite the inside of my cheek.

      “You’re alive now, focus on that, right?” he says.

      He waits for a response, but I don’t give him one. Sophomore year I tried to be a peer mediator, and they told us the best way to get people to keep talking was just to be silent. When you don’t say anything, the other person is tempted to fill that silence, and you can get more out of them. I didn’t make it as a peer mediator because I kept injecting my own opinions and judgments—shocking, I know—but I held on to that advice. It actually works.

      And it works on Ben. He sighs and runs a hand through his hair, tugging on the ends. “If you keep focusing on what happened, when you actually die, you’ll still be thinking you haven’t really done anything.”

      I pull back, and a hushed gasp