“Charlie,” I said, controlling my tone. “What’s going on? That spot used to be your favorite since we were in college. And you’d always order the vanilla milkshake the second we sat down.”
“I still do,” Charlie replied, dropping his head, tone shifting toward gray.
A loud instinct roared inside me. I wanted to reach across the distance between us, put my fingers under his chin, lift his head back up, and tell him everything was going to be okay, that everything would be smooth sailing (or sculpting, depending on who you asked), even though I had no idea what was wrong in the first place.
Then I wanted to push him into the bushes nearby and tell him he deserved that after the shit he put me through.
I did neither of those things.
“Come on,” Charlie said, head still dropped. “We’ve got a lot to catch up on. I think.”
And he started to walk down the street, a trail of questions following behind us as we headed to the diner in heavy silence.
4
Charlie Marsh
This felt equal parts weird and exciting and sad, all jumbled together in a bottle labeled “super fucking confusing and fucked up.”
Austin and I walked down a quiet street lined with magnolias, neither of us saying anything. We strolled past a row of redbrick-faced homes, one of them my own, the front yard looking extra colorful with the bright red roses in bloom next to the purple peonies. Ever since my accident, I found that gardening helped on the days I struggled the hardest.
I considered asking if he wanted to stop and check it out, but we kept walking, and I didn’t say a word.
Why would I? Austin was a stranger to me. There might have been something that tied us together in the past, but I had zero memory of it at all. Nothing in this handsome guy’s face rang any bells, so I figured I should get to the bottom of our history before I invited him in for a house tour.
“So, you’re not originally from Blue Creek, right?” I asked. I already knew the answer was no, or I would have remembered him. I only had a chunk of seven years missing from my memory, so Austin must have been in Blue Creek around that time and not earlier or I would have noticed him.
How could you not? He was six foot something of solid and charming man.
“I’m not, no.” Austin looked at me. I could feel his eyes digging through me. I could almost hear his thoughts shouting past my own: What’s going on, why are you acting like this?
Austin didn’t say whatever was on his mind and just stuck to answering my question. “I was born and raised in Granada, Spain. I moved to Blue Creek when my parents split at nineteen. My mom’s originally from here, so we moved in with my grandma. I—Fuck, Charlie, what’s going on? You know all this shit about me. What happened?”
I rubbed a hand against my face. We turned a corner and found ourselves on the main street that cut through town. “Come on,” I said. “Let’s go sit, and I’ll explain everything.”
Juno Pine’s Diner was filling up for the dinner-hour rush, and filling up by Blue Creek standards meant there were still plenty of tables open. We walked across the red-and-white checkered floor, my heart pounding harder with every step. The rear of the building had wide windows that looked out toward the tree-lined mountain range, serene clouds dipping over the tall peaks. It was a sight that usually filled me with peace, but that wasn’t happening today. My anxiety already bubbled up toward the surface with every step we took toward my booth. I hated talking about my accident, fucking hated it. The topic never failed to ruin my day, putting me back in a headspace that left me feeling scarred and permanently damaged.
We sat in the booth, next to the green-and-blue karaoke machine. Before we even opened the menus, Sanji Weaver hopped over to our table with a notepad in hand, her bright blue nails matching with the blue in her uniform. She already had my vanilla shake written down.
“All right,” I said as Sanji left the table. I settled into the red leather booth, suddenly very interested in the wrinkles of my shirt. I pressed them out with my hands.
“Charlie?”
“Right, right.” A deep breath and then, “I was in an accident. A really bad one. Like the kind of accident that makes all the doctors say, ‘Holy shit, I didn’t think you were going to make it.’”
Austin’s eyebrows were almost lost in his hairline. “Fuck me. What happened?”
Funny, I wouldn’t mind doing exa—don’t get distracted.
“I fell. From fifteen feet in the air. I landed in a bush but still hit my head against the ground. Thankfully my shoulder hit first, absorbing most of the impact—and cracking in three places—but my head wasn’t spared. I had to be put into a medically induced coma to control the swelling and then went through four different surgeries. I’ve got a metal plate in here as a souvenir,” I said, pointing at the side of my head and lifting my hair so Austin could see the scar. “Along with a seven-year gap in my memory. Meaning everything from eighteen to twenty-five is just gone.”