Anything but Ordinary(56)

Bryce stood. An anvil dropped between them. An unmovable, unchangeable truth.

“I wish I had told you,” Bryce said, backing up. Gabby followed Bryce with her eyes.

“How could you?”

“It was a huge, giant mistake.” She was yanking the words out, pulling them like string, and none of what she was saying could ever be right.

“Which time?” Gabby’s voice was like ice.

“What?”

“Which time was it a mistake?”

“Every time,” Bryce said automatically.

“He still loves you.”

“No, he doesn’t. I told him to make you happy.”

Gabby’s eyes narrowed, her lip still trembling. “Too late.”

Bryce wanted to disappear somewhere, blend into the air or the water.

Gabby got up, too, stepping away from the chair with her arms stiffly at her sides. Her feet scuffed the white patch of fabric on the ground.

“You’re standing on your dress,” Bryce said, feeling tears well up. She had ruined everything.

“Don’t be an idiot.” Gabby laughed bitterly.

The room was so silent then. So quiet. Bryce could hear cars pass by outside.

Gabby broke the silence, staring at the floor. “I guess since you haven’t left yet, I could ask you why, but I think I kind of know why.” She looked at Bryce with a small, sad smile, her eyes still narrowed. Bryce didn’t understand.

Before she could muster up a reply, Gabby continued. “He was still yours, in your mind, wasn’t he?”

“I don’t know,” Bryce said, shaking. She clenched her jaw, trying to control it.

“I feel sorry for you,” Gabby said. She spoke slowly, drawing out each word.

“Don’t,” Bryce said. “It was my fault. I don’t know what—” She stopped. She wished she could stop saying that. She didn’t know anything. And it seemed like she never would. “Listen,” Bryce said, collecting herself.

“I don’t have to listen to anything.” Gabby jumped on Bryce’s words.

“I’ll be gone.” The words rushed out of her. “I mean it. I’ll leave you alone. You guys could work things out.”

Gabby shook her head. “It’s too late, Bryce.” She gathered her dress in her arms and walked past Bryce to the door.

“Gabby, please,” Bryce begged, but she didn’t know what she was asking for. Gabby stopped in the doorway. “I’m sorry.”

“Me too,” she said.

Her footfalls echoed in the empty church, and the door swung open, creaking, and finally shut.

Soon Bryce left, too, leaving her gown on one of the pews as she exited through a side door. She didn’t call her mom to pick her up.

The day was gray, her mind was gray.

None of it was hitting her, but not because she wasn’t letting it. There was nothing left of her to absorb the impact. Bryce had done all the damage she could possibly do, and now everything was in pieces. Sometimes Bryce had to pause in the middle of a parking lot, or on someone’s lawn, and wrap her arms around her stomach. She was falling apart, and the pieces were going to float away from her. Her arm would fall off first, then a leg, her head would drift up to the sky like a balloon.

The long, dry walk ended, and Bryce was home on River Drive, standing in front of the big blue house. Her fingers and toes were numb, and her limbs ached from tiredness. Her family was inside, laying out their clothes for a ceremony that wouldn’t happen.

Bryce took a deep breath.

“Forgive me,” she said out loud to everyone. To her family. To Carter. She walked up the sidewalk with the last ounce of energy she had left. All she wanted was to curl up under a blanket and hope that time passed quickly.

Forgive me.





ithout going into too much detail, Bryce stepped into her house and announced the canceled wedding. She stood behind the couch, where her mother sat in a knee-length silk dress next to her father in his best suit.

“Why?” they had asked, worried.

“It’ll blow over,” Bryce had said listlessly. “I’m going outside.”

Bryce had made it about halfway through the pasture before she collapsed on her knees. She lay in the grass, the grass where she and Sydney pretended to shoot each other with guns, and let tears run down her cheek into the dirt.

Bryce was dying. The sheer, hard fact of that would remain under everything she did, as if there was a voice that wasn’t hers saying, “Remember?”

You’re eating a bowl of cereal, Bryce. Cold milk and puffy, flavored corn. Will these half-digested Cocoa Puffs still be inside you when your stomach stops working? Will your heart be in midbeat, or will it have just finished one? Will you be thinking of Carter or your family? Or will you just be at the drugstore with your mom, expiring with a list of useless prescriptions in your hand?

The voice had infinite questions, but Bryce had no answers. The answers would only come with the thing itself.

Since she had found herself in a hospital bed, the thought of dying hadn’t occurred to her once. It hadn’t come to her in dark thoughts. It hadn’t even come to her in visions. It had only been secondhand: In the tension behind everyone’s words, in the fear running across their faces when she sat up or stood, in the way people she didn’t know touched and talked to her, as if her closeness with death was the only thing about her they should pay attention to.