He couldn’t know what it felt like to have a man walk up to you and shoot the two people you loved most in the world, before he turned the gun on you; what it would feel like to wake up in the hospital two weeks later to be told you were the only one to survive and there were no leads as to who’d killed the only people you loved—no one to hold responsible for your pain other than yourself.
Months later and still not a single lead, no fingerprints, no motives, no eye-witnesses; my parent’s lives evaporated with no one to blame but me. After all, it was my selfishness that had begged them to come visit me on my birthday up at Stanford so I wouldn’t have to celebrate alone, me who’d chosen the ill-fated restaurant where we’d all been met with a 9 millimeter and destiny, and me who’d ordered dessert and wasted away another hour at the restaurant.
If I’d only resisted my sweet tooth we’d have been out of there earlier and still together today. Sure, the gunman had been the one to pull the trigger, but I’d loaded the gun. That day I awoke parentless, I made a sacred vow that I would never again let my selfishness compromise another person I cared about. Never again.
I heard the newspaper fold back into place before he kneeled beside me. He replaced the article at the bottom of my drawer, grabbing my hand in his. “You’re amazing, you know that?” he said, the last thing I imagined him saying given the information he’d just been privy to.
The surprise of it broke me out of the snare of remorse and guilt I got caught in every time I revisited that night. I looked at him and his eyes were victorious, not sad, or doling out pity like the multitudes had.
“Here you are,” he said, gesturing at me. “Fighting like there’s no tomorrow. Fighting to make them proud, even in death.” He smiled, it was all teeth and fondness.
“Come again?” I asked. He had to be joking. Me, a fighter? Yeah, and elephants fly.
“You can act as humble as you like,” he said, pulling me up. “But anyone else would have given up on their dreams and let fear and sadness cripple them.”
Did he realize that was me? Fear, sadness, guilt, remorse, self-loathing . . . take your pick.
“Your parents must have been incredible people,” he said, drawing his fingers over my cheek.
“They were the best,” I said, and instead of trying not to think about them, I let my memory bank fill with them. Summers on the Oregon Coast, strawberry crepes Saturday mornings, my mother’s perfume that was like walking through a lavender field, the way Dad’s favorite polo shirt would smell after mowing the lawn. I let the memories overtake me, and unlike what I’d thought, they gave me strength instead of flat-ironing me to the ground.
“I’ve upset you,” he said, watching a tear skid down my face. “I didn’t mean to.”
I nodded. “No. You’ve made me happy,” I said, sniffing through a laugh. “Strangely happy.”
“Are you alright?”
I eyed him.
“Given the circumstances?” he edited.
Attacked by a couple men that were as mysterious as they were terrifying, letting the skeletons topple out of my closet onto a man that was so near perfect he should have taken off in the opposite direction from me, but here he stood, firmly rooted to the shoddy carpet in my dorm room. I should be anything but alright, but I felt nothing but. “I’m the most alright I’ve been in awhile,” I said, knowing he was the reason for this.
“The article said you went to Stanford,” he said, looking strangely amused. “Why did you transfer?”
I waved my hand in the air. “I needed a change, and had heard such wonderful things about rural Oregon, and there was this little thing”—I pinched my thumb and index fingers together—“called academic probation I was put on.” After my parent’s had been murdered and a bullet had run through me, my mind was on everything but study sessions and declaring majors.
“A change,” he repeated, the only thing he’d pulled from my explanation. “I wonder what it would take for you to make another change.”
I looked back at him, and I already had my answer, but it shouldn’t have come so quickly or without doubt. It defied everything I knew of this world, this couldn’t exist . . . but at the same time, I couldn’t deny what was taking place within me. Thankfully, I didn’t spurt out what the very core of me knew. “Something pretty big, I guess.”
“Pretty big like what?” he pressed.
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said, stepping back and removing my hoodie, glad I had on a tee-shirt that was clean, fitted, and didn’t have some fill-in-the-blank fun-run sprawled across it. “But I’ll let you know when I find it.” I smiled and tossed the hoodie in the garbage; there was no amount of stain remover that could ever wash tonight off it.
“Okay, so something pretty big then,” he quoted me as if committing it to memory. His eyes outlined my figure, although I could tell he was trying not to let them.
Feeling self-conscious, I fidgeted with my shirt, pulling, twisting and smoothing, not able to meet his gaze.
“What are you doing Sunday?” he asked suddenly.
I took a step back and gripped the footboard of my bed. “Not much. Homework, laundry, chess club”—I said in a joking voice (sadly, I actually did have chess club on Sunday afternoons)—“exciting stuff like that.”
He swallowed, looking like he was working up some courage. “Would you like to spend part of it with me?”