Page 111 of Goodbye Days

But at least someone cares about her enough to ask. Everyone steers clear of me. There must be some threshold for looking lonely that I’ve crossed. Where people sympathize with you but fear they completely lack what it takes to fill the echoing chasm inside you, so why try?

The only person who looks in my direction is Adair. She walks past with four of her friends and gives me a viperous serves-you-right glare. My solitude is nectar to her. Don’t worry, Adair, Eli’s ghost is having his revenge on me for trying to get with his girlfriend.

And so it goes. I’m starting to wonder if jail might not be so bad. Tuesday. Wednesday. Thursday. Friday. The only difference with Saturday and Sunday is nobody can see me being alone. And then repeat: Monday. Tuesday. Wednesday. I rarely see Jesmyn, and when I do, she manages to not even accidentally look at me.

My parents can sense my isolation. I must be radioactive with it. My dad takes me to Parnassus Books and tells me to pick out anything I want. I’m not in the mood for much, though.

The police return my phone and laptop on Thursday. They drop them off at Mr. Krantz’s office. I can’t turn my phone on quickly enough. Maybe she texted me, unaware I still didn’t have it.

Nothing.

I contemplate texting her. Calling her. Leaving her a note. Something. But then I remember her face when she told me not to.

I count the hours until my appointment with Dr. Mendez that Friday. He’s pretty much all I have left. And if we didn’t pay him, I wouldn’t have him either.

This is the time I’d normally be listening to Jesmyn practice. In brighter days. It’s funny (and by “funny,” I mean “horrendously sad”)—to refer to the period when you were only dealing with the deaths of your three best friends, the hatred of their loved ones, and the prospect of incarceration as “brighter days.”

I hear my mom answer her phone from my bedroom, where I sit, trying to read Slaughterhouse-Five for AP English lit.

Something in the formality of her tone pricks my ears and I strain to listen.

“Okay…so at five? What channel? Okay. And—okay. Should we call you afterward? Okay. I’ll tell him. Thank you so much.”

My mom hurries down the hallway to my dad’s study, and he stops playing his acoustic guitar.

Please don’t both of you come this way. Please.

I hear them both coming my way. Surely at some point, my recently overworked adrenal glands will simply explode with a little popping sound.

“Carver?” my dad says, knocking on my doorframe, my mom beside him. They’re not smiling.

I turn but say nothing.

“We just got a call from Mr. Krantz. He said that in an hour, the district attorney’s office is holding a press conference to talk about your case. He expects them to announce some decision.”

“Okay,” I say finally, my blood howling, turning every muscle to mush.

“Meet in the living room in an hour to watch?” my mom asks.

“Okay.” My intestines feel like a steamroller is slowly ironing them flat.

My parents leave. I settle in for what will surely be one of the longest hours of my life. I want to text Jesmyn so badly. And I don’t even know what I’d say. First I’d have to apologize. Once I cleared that barrier, if she even wanted to hear more, all I’d have to say would be: Somewhere, someone has the answer to this question: Will Carver Briggs’s life be ruined? (Correction: more ruined). And I have to wait an hour to learn the answer.

The hour passes. I sit in the living room, one parent on each side of me.

“All right, Kimberly,” the newscaster says. “I understand we’re going live now to the Davidson County Courthouse, where the Davidson County district attorney, Karen Walker, will be making an announcement?”

“That’s right, Peter. They’re going to announce what course of action they’re planning to take with regard to the car accident that claimed the lives of three teenage boys on August first. Some of our viewers will recall that this accident was linked to texting.”

My mom is shaking next to me. I take a ragged breath; it feels like my lungs are full of wet cement. My pulse hammers in my temples, a headache brewing at the base of my skull.

The camera cuts to an empty podium with several microphones. The district attorney steps up to it.

“Thank you all for coming today. The accident that claimed the lives of Thurgood Edwards, Blake Lloyd, and Elias Bauer on August first, was a tragedy by any definition. The remaining question, though, was whether it was a crime as well. Over the past nearly three months, our office, in conjunction with the Nashville Metro Police Department and the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, has diligently investigated this question. We have concluded that…”

My vision narrows to a laser pinpoint.

“…this tragic accident was…”