No one was particularly pleased with the amount of alcohol I’d consumed but the threats to pump my stomach were just that.
The whole time my mum remained calm, listening to the painkiller doses, writing down how often she needed to wake me because of the concussion and any symptoms that signalled an immediate return to A&E. Dad cried in the car on the way back. He didn’t want me to see him, but I saw his shoulders shake and noticed Mum take her hand from the gearstick and rest it on his knee.
The next day was spent in pain. And shame. My parents sat with me, talking to me, telling me that they loved me and that I couldn’t punish myself like this.
“Why not?” I whispered. “I deserve it.”
Mum tilted my chin up, forcing me to look at her.
“We don’t.” Mum kissed my forehead, her hand on Dad’s. I leaned into her and Dad hugged us both so hard that I worried he would pop a stitch.
HANNAH
The hand that is not in Aaron’s has found its way to the bump. I think about the child I don’t yet know and I get an inkling that maybe I have more in common with Aaron’s parents than with him.
AARON
Penny was waiting for me in the library on Monday. She took in the damage as I sat down — the yellowing bruise around my eye, the patch of stubble where I couldn’t shave around the stitches on my jaw, the taped fingers.
“I miss him too, you know,” she said, tracing a pattern on the table with a nail coated in chipped navy varnish.
“I know. I—”
“Don’t you dare say you’re sorry, Ty. Don’t you dare.”
“I wasn’t going to.” How could sorry even start to cover the span of my guilt?
She gave me a sidelong look and a smile. “Of course you weren’t.”
I said what I should have said straightaway. “I was going to say that I’m here if you need me.”
Penny nodded, as if she was trying to shake off the tears I could see were falling. “I need you, Ty.”
I closed my eyes and dipped my forehead to rest on hers. I wanted to tell her that this was a bad idea. That I wasn’t the person she thought she needed. Only I couldn’t do that to her. Or to me. I’d already lost one best mate. I couldn’t lose the other.
That was two weeks after Chris died — eight more to live through until the inquest. Eight more weeks in which I hid the truth from Penny. I don’t know what I thought would happen after that — I’m not sure I was thinking at all — but when the time came to go to the magistrates’ court, I told Penny one last lie about having a doctor’s appointment and went with my parents to face whatever judgement was cast.
The purpose of the inquest was to go over the witness statements and confirm the circumstances that led to Chris’s death by questioning the witnesses — me and the woman driving the car — on points that had not yet been cleared up. Every word I heard myself say seemed to hammer home my guilt, discussing the fight in details that were only too easy to recall because I relived them every waking second. And I hoped for something to change, that I would finally be exposed for what I was, finally made accountable.
The verdict was death by misadventure.
Death by misadventure. That’s a phrase that plays in my head sometimes, the way a fragment of a tune, or a poem might, cropping up to remind me that nothing multiplies guilt like the implication of innocence. As if I’ve ever been close to forgetting.
As I walked out with my parents I saw Chris’s dad waiting by the doors as his wife came out of the toilets, her face blotched red from tears I’d caused. I wanted to tell her that I was so sorry — not just for what I’d done, but that I wasn’t about to be punished for it — but she beat me to it.
“You killed him!” A sentence that started in a hiss and ended in a shriek. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a few people turn towards us. “My son is dead because of you…”
“I—” But she was sobbing into her hands and I could see her tears spilling out through her fingers as Chris’s dad put his arm around her and pulled her into him. I expected him to be angry too — Mr Lam’s temper was legendary — but when he looked at me, his eyes weren’t blazing with fury, they were dull, deadened with loss.
“Go away, Ty,” he said, pulling his wife close as I felt my mum’s hand on my arm. “You’ve done enough damage.”
The next day was worse.
When I got to school, I saw one of the lads I sat with in ICT was waiting by the front doors. As I reached them he handed me a rolled-up newspaper.
“I thought you should know,” he said as he went inside.
I unrolled the paper to face a photo of Chris on the front page.
There had been a reporter from the local paper at the inquest, one who had given Chris’s parents a sympathetic ear. Chris was the fourth “youth” to die on the region’s roads in as many months and the paper was at the heart of a campaign to impose lower speed limits in residential areas. That morning the paper had been delivered to every house within a ten-mile radius of our school.
My hands started to tremble as I read the article, littered with quotes from my friend’s grieving parents. It told how their son had been fighting by the side of the road with a friend, “a typical bit of teenage rough and tumble”, which had turned to tragedy when Chris fell into the path of a car. It led on to say that though the driver hadn’t been speeding, the way Chris had fallen… I couldn’t see the words, I was shaking so much.
I was scared of going inside. No one in the school needed to see my name in print to know who Chris had been with. My hand looked strange on the door as I summoned up the courage to push it open. The world felt tilted, unreal, as I walked down the corridor. I could feel people looking at me, but I didn’t dare meet their gaze.
Penny was waiting by my locker, her friends clustered nearby, kept away by the forcefield of fury that surrounded her. As soon as I was within striking distance she lashed out, the slap stinging my skin. I saw her pull back for another, but she hesitated, fingers curling like a dying flower until her fist fell limply against my chest, fresh tears falling from closed eyes.
I tried to hold her, but she pushed me away.
It’s not like she’ll come running to you…
“Penny, I—”
“Don’t you dare say you’re sorry, Ty.”
I didn’t know what else to say.
“It says you were fighting. What were you fighting about? What could be so important that you’d push him in front of a moving car?”
“I didn’t” — I closed my eyes, saw my hand letting go of his jacket, his foot on the kerb — “push him.” It was barely a whisper.
“What were you fighting about?”
But I shook my head. I would have confessed to pushing him rather than tell Penny that the boy she loved, the one she mourned so keenly, had slept with someone else.
“Tell me!”
“It’s not important.”
“How can you say that?” Penny screamed in my face, battering my chest with her fists. I tried to put my arms around her, but she fought me away and ran off down the corridor. I made to go after her, but there was a hand on my arm, a warning, “Leave her, mate.”
I didn’t want to hear it and I spun round in anger, my fist bunched and flying, remembering how it felt to fight. Wanting something to take me away from what was happening…