Smashed Read online

  *

  For Putnam, with love

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Part 1: Summer

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Part 2: Fall

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Part 3: Winter

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Part 4: Spring

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Acknowledgments

  To Linda Pratt, editorial adviser, agent, friend: You are extraordinary at what you do. Thank you for taking all my calls and talking me off the cliff more times than I can count; for loving the work, and getting the work; and for your wise editorial advice. It would not be the same book without you. To Gretchen Hirsch, my wonderful editor: Thank you for your enthusiasm and humor, for expertly guiding my revisions, and for pushing me further than I thought I had it in me to go. I miss you already. To Michael McCartney for the absolutely best knockout cover design an author could hope for. I’m amazed every time I look at it. And to my new editor, Emily Fabre, who stepped in with grace, energy, and skill, my sincere thanks.

  To Janet Freeman: Thank you so much for being my very first reader; you said all the right things. To Laura Rankin: My deep appreciation to you for reading and recommending this book early on—and for sharing Linda with me. It’s made all the difference.

  Huge thanks to my authors and NCTE friends for all your love, support, and friendship—and for promising to wave my book around on your travels. You are the best. A special thank-you to Kylene Beers for reading an early draft and helping me start sending it out. Your support gave me courage.

  To the Division I field hockey coaches who talked to me about recruiting rules and likely scenarios, thank you for helping make my book accurate.

  To Putnam, thank you for supporting my writing, always, even though it makes your life harder, and to Lily, for understanding that writing makes Mama happy. And to Catherine Cauthorne—for all you do and have done, my sincere gratitude.

  Sometimes when I’m driving I see things that I don’t want to see.

  Things that aren’t really there: A flash of my car careening off the road. A tree trunk smashing into the windshield, spraying sharp bits of glass, like bullets, into the car. A bloody body slumped, lifeless, beside me. Sometimes it’s a moving picture, like a movie, sometimes a solitary image—a snapshot, a tableau.

  I shut my eyes but they won’t go away, won’t stop. Flash, flash, flash. They intrude, like a thief breaking into my mind, stealing my sanity.

  It’s been happening ever since I got here.

  For a long time, I tell no one.

  When I finally tell the doctor at the university, she says there’s a reason this is happening.

  “Yeah,” I say, “I’m going crazy.”

  “No,” she says. “There’s nothing crazy about it. These are symptoms of trauma. Normal reaction to trauma.”

  “Normal” is no longer a word I use to describe myself. I look at her, blink once, consider what she’s said. Where I come from, people don’t talk about things like that. Trauma is a topic left to The Oprah Winfrey Show. The closest thing in Deerfield, Maine, to admitting anything bad happens is a bumper sticker that says SHIT HAPPENS.

  There are a lot of counselors here at school, but Pam is the only one who’s a doctor, so they send me to her. I think she’s reserved for the worst cases. So I tell Dr. Pam a few things to see how she’ll react. At first I like how she nods at me, never looks surprised. But after a while it annoys me, so I tell her more to see if I can shock her. She looks very concerned, but that’s it. No shock.

  Dr. Pam tells me it’s not so strange, this whole business of seeing things I don’t want to see, of thoughts and visions circling through my mind again and again like a merry-go-round out of control. She talks about war veterans who flash back to Afghanistan or Vietnam at the sound of fireworks on the Fourth of July, who get jumpy when they hear a hunter’s gunshot—even a car backfiring.

  “It’s not like I was in a war.”

  She is still for a moment before she speaks. “No. But you thought you killed someone once. And you thought you were going to die.” She pauses again. “Twice.”

  Twice.

  The word echoes in my head. I can’t even remember the first time. But the memory is lodged like a bullet in my brain; it’s lurking in there somewhere. If it came out, maybe I could get rid of it. But I don’t want to remember any more than I already do.

  I glance at her wastebasket, sure I will throw up. I want to run, but I can’t. I’ve been sentenced to these weekly sessions with her. It’s a condition of my playing hockey here. Plus, Pam’s not surprised that I’m seeing things. For the first time, I wonder if she could actually help me.

  “It’s called post-traumatic stress disorder—PTSD,” she says.

  I don’t care what it’s called as long as I’m not crazy.

  Something else happened, too. Like a nightmare, but I was awake. Awake but in a dream, another vision that I couldn’t control, couldn’t escape from. It was happening all over again and I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t get away… .

  My roommate found me, in our room, yelling at no one she could see.

  But there are some things I keep to myself for now, and Dr. Pam says I don’t have to talk about anything until I’m ready.

  “What if I’m never ready?” I ask.

  “That’s okay,” Dr. Pam replies.

  Ha. I remember my first counselor, Gail, and I don’t believe that for a minute. But Pam’s been nice to me, so I give her the benefit of the doubt. What other choice do I have, really?

  She asks me to start at the beginning, a year ago, when I was seventeen.

  It seems like a lifetime ago.

  summer

  1

  The summer before my senior year I hooked up with Alec.

  Alec Osborne: tall, cute, built. The guy every girl wanted and every boy wanted to be. That’s how it seemed, anyway. He was captain of the football team, captain of the baseball team. Damn, he was captain of the debate team. Even the teachers looked at him with awe. He was it in our small high school.

  But this is the honest-to-God truth: I never saw why. I never knew what they saw in him—the pack of friends that swaggered with him through the halls, the girls, his teachers. To me it was bizarre, his appeal. I couldn’t see it. He was a big jock; that helped his case. But it was more than that. He could sway people, win them over. But not me.

  That’s what I thought, anyway.

  Alec’s friends were football players mostly, or basketball, or baseball, or all three. They were good-looking. But they were arrogant, too. Not all the guys who played sports—that’s not what I’m saying. Just these guys Alec hung out
with. There were plenty of good guys who were athletic. My best friend, Matt, for one. And field hockey means everything to me; it’s my life. No, playing football wasn’t what made Alec the way he was. I’ll never understand what made Alec the way he was.

  Anyway, we went to the same parties, had a few of the same friends. Both of us were totally devoted to our sports. We had those things in common; that was it. He’d never been part of my plans. But back then, what I planned and what I did weren’t always the same thing.

  Sometimes that was a problem.

  You can make your head spin asking yourself why you did something. Something your gut tells you is trouble. But there are some questions that don’t have answers—not good ones, not ones you can live with. This is what’s true: I let myself get sucked in by Alec, even when I knew better.

  And I did know better.

  It started early that summer, in June. I’ve gone over it in my head a hundred times.

  *

  “Nine!” Matt hollered as I emerged from the water. He held up nine bony fingers as if that made it official.

  “What? That dive was so a ten!”

  “Sorry,” he said, poker-faced. “Toes not quite pointed on the touch. Gotta deduct one for that. If I don’t, what does a ten really mean? What is a ten really worth? I mean, if I allowed that …”

  “Shut up.” I laughed and swiped my arm across the lake’s surface, sending a mini tidal wave in his direction. Water flew up and over where he sat on the side of the dock, his long legs dangling over the side.

  “Shouldn’ta done that,” he said, grinning, and hopped in, arms and legs flying, chasing me all the way to the ring of buoys and beyond, straight across the lake.

  Breathless, we collapsed in the shallow water on the opposite side. Kids’ voices echoed across the lake’s surface. Our little town beach sat in one of the lake’s narrows, and a ten-minute swim got you to the other side. Not far, but a world away when the beach was crowded and noisy, which it was on this first truly hot day of the summer.

  Matt leaned back, his elbows sinking into the wet sand. His legs stretched out into the lake, toes poking out of the water.

  I propped myself up next to him, then lifted my chin to the clear blue sky. “There goes Cassie.”

  Matt looked up. A tiny, silent airplane passed slowly overhead, leaving a thin white trail in its wake.

  Cassie, the third member of our trio, who any other summer would have been sitting here beside us, had left that morning for London. There, she’d spend the summer with her aunt and cousins seeing and doing things I could barely imagine. I’d lived in Maine all my life. I’d been to Boston twice. By car. That was as far away as I’d ever been.

  “Must be nice,” Matt said.

  I kicked at the soft sand under my feet, sending smoky clouds through the water. “No kidding.”

  We were stuck here like the rest of our friends, working two jobs, trying to save money for college.

  “I’ll miss her,” I said.

  “I’ll miss her boat.”

  “Matt.”

  He laughed. “She’s insane in that boat.”

  I pictured Cassie—all five feet two of her—at the wheel of her parents’ motorboat, red hair lit up in the sunshine, grinning as she gunned the throttle and took off down the lake. We loved going fast in that thing, the wind tangling our hair, our loose Tshirts flapping in the breeze.

  “Remember this?” Matt threw his arms dramatically across his chest in a big X and leaned back in the water, laughing.

  I shoved some water at his head. He knew I remembered.

  It had been June and Cassie had just moved here, so we were about thirteen. The three of us had ridden in Cassie’s boat up to the widest part of the lake and shut off the motor as far from any shore as we could get. I’d dared them to jump in with me, and we’d plunged into the dark blue water in shorts and Tshirts. Matt came up hollering. The water was still only about sixty-eight degrees on the surface, and when you jump off a big boat, you go down deep.

  “It’s like the ocean!” Cassie yelled, pulling herself back on board.

  Exhilarated by the cold, I went back under, then opened my eyes and swam until my breath ran out.

  “You’re crazy!” Cassie said to me when I came up again. She was hugging herself, shivering in the sunshine. “Are you really staying in there?”

  “It doesn’t feel that cold,” I said.

  “That’s because everything’s numb,” Matt said.

  When I climbed back into the boat, my thin white T-shirt—under which I’d worn nothing—had turned transparent. I threw my arms across my chest in the big X.

  “Don’t worry.” Matt turned around and grinned. “There’s nothing to hide.”

  “Men,” Cassie said, rolling her eyes, and tossed me a life jacket. We all remembered what Cassie now referred to as “the wet T-shirt incident.”

  *

  “Men,” I said to Matt now, but Matt’s attention had shifted, his whole demeanor changed.

  “Shhh,” he said, and touched my arm, signaling me to stay still.

  I followed his eyes to a line of ducklings that had just emerged from some brush, swimming in the shallow water behind their mother. While the mama duck hovered protectively, the baby ducks dove for food.

  We watched them, silently, until they finished, lined up once more, and swam away.

  “Reminds me of your family,” I said.

  “We’d need Dad and Grandma taking up the rear,” he said. “And Mom’s protective of the twins, not me.”

  “That’s because you don’t need protecting.”

  “Not anymore,” he said, and a shadow crossed his face. Sometimes I forgot how bad it had been in middle school, when Alec Osborne’s sidekick, Scott Richardson, had relentlessly bullied Matt. It was so many years ago—and Matt could hold his own in any situation now—but he’d never gotten over it.

  “Definitely not anymore,” I added. “Let’s swim back.”

  *

  The beach was quiet, only a few stragglers left. The air had cooled and the mosquitoes were starting to swarm in the shade under the tall pine trees where Matt and I sat on a bench putting on sneakers and Tshirts.

  “Damn things,” I said, and swatted another one. They could eat you alive in June. “Let’s get out of here.” I ran to grab my bike.

  When I wheeled it around, Matt was standing still, skateboard tucked under one arm, his eyes fixed on the dirt parking lot across the road.

  “What the hell is he doing here?” he said.

  I followed Matt’s gaze to a blue and silver pickup truck, the handles of a lawn mower sticking up in the back. Alec Osborne sat behind the wheel. He lived in Deerfield, ten miles away, where there was a bigger lake and a nicer town beach.

  “Who cares?” I said, and I meant it. I had no use for Alec.

  “I do,” Matt said. “I can’t stand that guy.”

  “No one can.”

  “That’s not true,” Matt said, “and you know it.” He jumped on his board.

  I climbed onto my bike and began to pedal slowly, watching Matt as he weaved down the lake road on his skateboard just ahead of me. His balance seemed effortless. With each turn, his long, slender body bent gracefully, a tall blade of grass in the wind. The breeze blew his bright blond hair back from his face.

  Something made me hang back. I stopped pedaling, letting Matt get farther ahead. Then, I don’t know why I did it—curiosity, the strange sensation that someone was watching me, the pull of something I didn’t understand—but I looked back toward the beach as we rode away. And for an instant, my eyes locked with his: Alec Osborne had stepped out of his truck and was standing still on the pavement, staring up the road after me.

  2

  I dashed out the door at six forty-five the next morning, the screen door banging behind me. Across the street, Matt’s father’s logging rig was already gone; the two of them had left before dawn. They’d log until midafternoon, then head home in time f
or Matt to get to his night job, busing tables at the single fancy restaurant in Deerfield.

  In our ancient barn, my bike leaned against a wall covered with cobwebs. I glanced at my watch; in fifteen minutes, I’d teach my first swimming class of the summer. I got on my bike and rode.

  The cool air blew my dark hair back, whipping it in the wind. Ten minutes later, I flew past Cassie’s house; seconds later I was at the beach, my face damp from a thin mist that hovered in the morning air.

  The Junior Lifesavers were first, my twelve-year-old brother, Will, among them, griping as they jumped into the cold water. With each class that followed, the kids got younger and the sun rose higher. The mist rose off the lake and disappeared. By noon, I was finished and the afternoon was mine. Summer was officially here.

  But the hours stretched out in front of me with nothing to do. I was already restless, bored. Matt had always worked long hours with his dad in the summer, but Cassie was usually around. We should be buzzing down the lake in her boat, I thought. I wondered what she was doing in England right now. Not sitting alone on a beach, I was sure of that.

  “Hey, Katie.”

  The voice startled me. Turning, I squinted into the sun. Alec Osborne stood against the chain-link fence that separated the beach from the lake road, smiling at me.

  “Hey,” I said, surprised.

  Weird. If we’d passed each other in the hall at school just two weeks before, we wouldn’t have said a word. But here, surrounded by mothers and little kids, we were the only two from our high school anywhere in sight, and he was standing three feet away from me. Here, it would be rude not to.