Heartbeat. Elizabeth Scott

      3

      Dan drives me to school in the morning. He has done this since he and Mom got married, and I used to like it although I did start to ride with Olivia when she got her license.

      That stopped when Mom died. I wanted Dan to remember I was around. I wanted him to remember Mom.

      Like, Mom worried about my grades. Not that they weren’t good enough, but that I was working too hard. Dan told her that in order to grow up I had to be allowed to make my own choices.

      Oh yes, Dan and his choices.

      We drive to school in silence. At seventeen, I’m old enough to get my license, but the waiting list to get into any of the driver’s ed classes within half an hour of the house stretches out for months. I’d planned to put my name on a list last year but never got around to it.

      Last year, before everything happened, Dan promised that over the summer he’d teach me how to drive and then I could just go get my license.

      I don’t want him teaching me to drive now. What if something happens? What if I get hurt? If my body stops working, my brain stops functioning? Would he have machines keep me alive in case his son might one day need something? A lung, a kidney, bone marrow?

      But I do ride in the car with him to school. I do it because it means he will have to pick me up afterward. That he will have to see me, that he will take me to see Mom. He works at home, so he can do that.

      Or at least, he used to work at home. I don’t know if he still does, or if all the database consulting he did stopped when Mom did. Lately, he hasn’t mentioned any two-hour phone calls to talk someone through using a new feature he’s built.

      But then, I haven’t asked. I don’t want to talk to him.

      He was going to stay home with the baby, and Mom was going to go back to work. That was their plan. She was an assistant manager at BT&T bank. They sent flowers when she died. They didn’t send anything for the baby. Maybe they didn’t know what to do about it, but maybe they heard about what Dan’s doing and think he’s keeping a dead woman alive so he can get what he wants.

      If they do, I love them for that. I mean, I know it’s a baby and it’s partly Mom, but I wish Dan had just once thought about what Mom would have wanted. It was so easy for him to choose to keep her here, dead, and it’s so hard for me to think about, much less see.

      “I got a call from your AP History teacher about how you’re doing in class. Maybe we should talk about it,” Dan says as we stop, one car in the many that are waiting to snake into the high school. Mostly freshman and sophomores get out here. Juniors get rides with their friends who have licenses or, better yet, get their own and a car to go with it.

      I could get a ride with Olivia, but I don’t.

      “See you later,” I tell Dan and get out of the car. I won’t talk to him about school just like I won’t ride to school with Olivia anymore. If I did, then Dan would get to feel like things are normal and they’re not. They are so not. Not while Mom is still...

      The tears hit me hard, hot pressure behind my eyes, in my throat, in my chest. It’s hard to breathe, to see, to think.

      I look down at the ground and walk, blinking hard once they’ve started to spill down my face.

      I cry without making a sound now. I have cried soundlessly, wordlessly, since I stood with Dan at the hospital and heard, “I’m sorry, but...”

      Dan cried openmouthed then, sobbing, yelling his grief for everyone to see. I tried to hug him. I felt for him because I thought he loved her, because we were in the same place, because she was gone and he felt the gaping hole that had been born too, a Mom-shaped space in the universe.

      He didn’t hug me back. He didn’t even seem to see me.

      And then the doctor told him about the baby.

      “Hey,” Olivia says, and I know it’s her because I would know her voice anywhere. We’ve been friends since first grade, and we’ve been through period trauma, boy crap, bad hair, her parents and their ways. And now Dan and his baby.

      “Hey,” I say. I wipe my eyes and look at her. “How’s the car?”

      Olivia makes a face at me but also wraps an arm around my shoulders, steering me toward our lockers. Her parents gave her a fully loaded convertible when she got her license, one with a built-in music player, phone, navigation system—you name it, the car had it. Could do it, and all at the touch of a button.

      Olivia sold the car—through the one newspaper left in the area, which is basically just ads—and bought a used car. It’s so old all it has is a CD player and a radio. We bought CDs at yard sales for a while, but all we could get was old music, which we both hate, and the radio is just people telling you that what they think is what you should think, so we mostly just drive around in silence.

      It used to bother me sometimes but now I like it. The inside of my head is so full now that silence is...I don’t know. There’s just something about knowing Olivia is there, and that we don’t have to talk. That she gets it. Gets me and what’s going on.

      Her parents were unhappy about the car, though. Really unhappy, actually, but then there was a big crisis with one of their server farms at work and by the time they surfaced for air they hadn’t slept in four days. And when they said, “Olivia, that car was a gift,” she said, “Yes, it was. A gift, meaning something freely given, for the recipient to use as she wanted to, right?”

      As we hit her locker, we pass Anthony, and he says, “Ladies,” bowing in my direction. A real bow too, like it’s the nineteenth century or something.

      “Ass,” Olivia says.

      “A donkey is actually not as stupid as people believe. However, you are entitled to your own beliefs about asses. And me.” He looks at me. “Hello, Emma.”

      I sigh. “Hi, Anthony.”

      “If you ever want to talk about your grades, do know that I’m here.”

      I can’t believe I ever thought the way he talked was interesting. It’s just stupid, like he’s too good to speak like a normal person. “I know, Anthony.”

      “I really would like to be of assistance to you. I believe in helping everyone. I’m talking to Zara Johns later. I think she feels threatened by the fact that I’ve been asked to help her organize the next school blood drive.” Translation: he’s butted in, and Zara’s furious.

      “Either that or she just doesn’t like you. Emma, let’s go,” Olivia says, slamming her locker shut, and we head for mine.

      “You okay?” she says, and I nod. Anthony doesn’t bother me at all anymore, just like Mom said would happen. I look at him and feel nothing. Well, some annoyance, but then, who wouldn’t after listening to him talk?

      Of course, I didn’t always think that he was annoying. I open my locker, deciding not to go down the Anthony road, and hear the guy next to me say, “No way! I mean, everyone knows what’ll happen to Caleb if he steals another car.”

      Olivia and I glance at each other. If Anthony is the ass end of the smart part of the school, Caleb Harrison is the ass end of the stupid part. He’s a total druggie and three years ago, when we were freshmen, he came to school so high he couldn’t even talk. I heard that stopped last year, but then, as soon as school got out, his parents sent him off to