Anything but Ordinary(42)

Gabby smiled through her tears, and Bryce laughed, softening. “You don’t need to impress me.”

“I hope I don’t mess it up,” Gabby said, burying her head into Bryce’s arm, her dark hair fluttering in the breeze. “Law school is going to be so hard.”

“Oh, stop.” Bryce shook her head. “You’re smart. You’re strong. You can do anything. And…” She gulped. “And you’ll have Greg.”

Gabby heaved a sad sigh. “I honestly don’t know if he’ll like D.C. We’ve been fighting about it, about Greg getting a job. But…I need him with me.” Gabby leaned next to Bryce, putting her head affectionately on her shoulder. “I’ve lost so many people I love. I don’t want to go it alone.”

Bryce thought with a pang of the pictures she’d seen of Gabby’s father—of his handsome, bearded face, his kind dark eyes. In a way, Gabby lost her mother that year, too. She was never the same after her husband died. And then there had been Bryce herself.

“Not all of them come back like you do,” she added playfully.

Bryce wriggled out from Gabby’s arms.

Not all of them come back. She couldn’t argue with that. Her thoughts were too twisted, her mind too tired, her eyes too full of city lights, her disappointment too great.

So Bryce sighed, shaking her head at the world that didn’t look nearly as cruel and confusing as it felt, and followed her best friend back down the ladder.





ryce stood in the doorway of her house. The van honked as it pulled away. The party was over.

She tossed her house keys on the table by the door, and saw a note in her mother’s loopy handwriting:


Bry—off to Aunt Martha’s until Sunday. Call us or Carter if you need anything—said he’d be around. Love, Mom.



Bryce sat at the kitchen table, her bag at her feet.

Her hands were clenched in fists as she stared at the table. She had brought all this on herself. Kissing Greg, wallowing in the past, letting herself hope for a different future…it had all been her fault. She felt helpless, but worse. Like she was sinking to the bottom of a pool with weights around her ankles, and she had strapped the weights on herself.

She looked at the clock. An hour had passed just sitting.

Every part of her was tense. She needed to not feel so much, to make everything less sharp and real. She needed to be numb.

Bryce entered Sydney’s room. As usual, it smelled like her vanilla lotion, cigarette smoke, and a sweet, herbal smell Bryce didn’t recognize. She dug through drawers, tossing clothes onto more clothes, shoving aside art pencils, scissors, hair bleach, scratched CDs. And then she found it. Alcohol. The scent wafting from the blue, half-empty bottle was unmistakable. TRIPLE DISTILLED VODKA, the label read. It wasn’t tequila, but it would have to do.

Bryce grabbed a jug of orange juice from the refrigerator and made her way down the stairs, out the basement entrance. Her entrance.

“This is perfectly legal,” she said to no one, stomping through the field full of dry grass.

Once in the barn, which looked even more ragged and dusty in the daylight, Bryce twisted the lid of the blue bottle and took a swig. Her throat was on fire, shooting flames down her chest to her stomach. When the bitterness on her tongue got so bad she began to gag, she remembered the orange juice.

She perched on a stray beam. She used to sit in this very spot, keeping her dad company while he worked on his plane. She took another swig. “To flying,” she said, and laughed to herself. When she felt this wound up at seventeen, she just took dive after dive until she was so tired she couldn’t think. But she couldn’t do that anymore. She took another swig, “To Sydney,” and something like hot molasses was traveling through her veins. Sydney was probably out drinking right now. Bryce doubted her sister would ever toast her, though.

She drank to the last night she spent here with Greg, to the shivering feeling that came when she was with him, like she would explode from happiness and fear.

She drank to Gabby, who had better have the best married life of all married people, ever.

The booze was working.

She climbed into the barn’s loft and was pleased to see the rope she had tied to the rafters was still there. She loosened it, upsetting a roost of swallows. She poised her foot on the knot she tied when she was nine, tightening her legs and arms, ready to hold on. And then she was swinging, flying with the birds through the clouds of five years’ dirt, silence except for the flutter of wings, the fibers from the rope pulling against the beams.

She made up a game where she balanced the blue bottle on a shelflike piece of wood protruding from the hayloft walls. She swung wildly on the rope, steering herself so that she could swipe the bottle off the shelf for a drink, and then set it back on her return trip.

But she got bored when she became too good at that game. She was too good at games.

She returned to the house, the bottle almost empty. She stopped at the pool. The ripples seemed to attract the sky’s colors more than usual.

And then, without a thought, she crossed her hands in front of her, and dove in.

The water was cool and familiar. Her clothes weighed her down. She could have been swimming through pudding. But she managed a few laps. No freak-outs. No weird flashbacks. The water didn’t morph or meld into anything other than what it was. Everything was free and easy.