Far From You

42

THREE AND A HALF YEARS AGO (FOURTEEN YEARS OLD)

“I can do it myself,” I say, clutching the bottle of vitamin E oil.

“No offense, but your hand still looks like raw hamburger.”

Mina is not patient or soft. She grabs the bottle, ignoring my protests. It’s normal, her being bossy and my falling into line, so I shrug my robe off one shoulder as she settles behind me on my bed.

I bite my lip, looking down at the carpet. I can feel her eyes on my shoulder where metal dug into the skin, mangling it. Her fingers don’t linger as she gently smooths the oil over my scars with determined efficiency. “This stuff smells like my grandma.” She gets up and moves to my front.

“Lavender,” I explain. “Mom got it at that natural health food store in Chico. Here, let me.” I try to grab the bottle away from her, but she dangles it out of my reach. “Nice,” I say. “Way to taunt the gimp.”

“I dare you to call yourself that in front of your mom. She’ll flip.” Mina smiles wickedly at me.

“She’d probably just send me to the shrink for another six months.”

“She means well. That whole week you were in coma-land, she was freaking out. Soap-opera style. It was intense.” Her fingers trace over the top of my shoulder, the new rough landscape that my body has become.

“She keeps acting like things are going to go back to normal.”

“Well, that’s stupid,” Mina says. “Things are different. But it doesn’t mean they have to be awful.”

“I feel awful, sometimes,” I whisper. “I mean, look at me.” I hold my arms out, my robe slips all the way off my shoulders, and the scar on my chest, a raw split of skin, is even uglier in the light. “I’m gross. And it’s not like things are going to change. She needs to realize that.”

“Oh, Soph.” Mina practically deflates. She sits down next to me. “What happened to you was horrible,” she says. “Beyond horrible. And it isn’t fair or right that Trev and I came out of it fine and you…” She trails off. “But gross?” She presses her hand against my heart. Her thumb brushes up against the edge of the scar on my chest. “This isn’t gross. You know what I think when I see this?”

I shake my head.

Her voice drops. She’s whispering, a secret for just the two of us: “I think about how strong you are. You didn’t stop fighting, even when your heart stopped. You came back.”

The unspoken “to me” hangs between us. We both hear it, but neither of us is brave enough to say it.

“You don’t…you don’t ever wish they hadn’t saved you, right?” Mina asks. She’s staring hard at her hand, like she can’t bear to be looking in my eyes if I give the wrong answer.

I can’t tell her the truth. She’d be almost as scared of it as I am.

“Of course not,” I say.

The truth?

I don’t know.

Maybe.

Sometimes.

Yes.