Just Friends(55)

“My teammates urged me to get to my car quickly to be the first at High Tide Diner. You know how everyone went there to celebrate?” He raises his eyebrows.

I nod mechanically.

“If we didn’t get there first, we’d be blocked out of our own celebration from the crowd. So, I started beelining it across the parking lot.”

I’ve dug my nails into the center console without realizing it, but Declan continues like it’s a funny story.

“I ran into Cole on my way to my car. He was shouting, ‘Congratulations, Dec! I’ll see you in the NFL,’ then I put my helmet on to make some joke, but his face went pale like he’d seen a ghost behind me. I was confused because my peripheral vision was gone after putting the helmet on, and when I turned around, I saw a car speeding around the corner. It was already so close. I’ve tried replaying this part in my head so many times, tried to slow it down and remember what I saw in those last few moments. It happened so fast, but in the few seconds I had before the car hit me, everything slowed down. It was like in the movies when something explodes and your hearing goes out; time itself seems to stand still. I thought that was, you know, for cinematic effect, but apparently, it’s pretty accurate.” He chuckles. “The car itself looked like a red blob, but the top was down, and I could see the kids inside. And that’s pretty much the one thing that’s still so vivid, after all these years—the way their faces dropped when they realized they were going to hit me. They were laughing so hard until they weren’t. And then I woke up in the hospital.”

He pauses to look at my face as a tear escapes and I have to cover my mouth. I wasn’t expecting to react so viscerally. I’d spent over four years with the outline of this story. And I’d imagined it so many times it started imitating memory. But it paled in comparison to the vivid colors Declan was using to fill it in.

“Are you okay?” he asks, going to touch my shoulder.

“Yes, I’m fine,” I say, steeling myself. “Please, continue.”

“Okay,” he says, offering a small smile.

I’m aware that he shouldn’t need to comfort me during the retelling of his getting hit by a car, so I clamp my lips together and will my tear ducts to dry.

“Well, when I woke up in the hospital, I remember slowly blinking awake to a weird white room with beeping monitors. And then a nurse started firing off questions, asking me how I felt and what I remembered. I basically told her what I just told you.” He subconsciously rubs his jaw.

“Then, the doctor came in. He told me my left hip shattered upon impact. My left femur was broken, along with a dislocated shoulder. Oh, and I had a concussion,” he adds.

“The doctor smiled as he said this next part. He said I was ‘extremely lucky,’?” he says with quotation marks. “As there was no internal bleeding and seemingly no damage at all to my brain or spinal cord. Which, I agree, of course. The odds of me putting my helmet on seconds before getting hit are unbelievable. I’m grateful for that. And I still can’t remember why I did it. Can’t remember what the joke was going to be. But…” His face falls.

“My entire life, as I knew it, was over in a single moment. They said I’d be bedridden for at least six months, with physical therapy after that. A hip break as severe as mine took at least a year to recover. And I’d probably still have a limp when I did recover.” He pauses. “But the first thing I asked after all that was if I could still play football. I need football to keep my dad happy, I remember thinking. And you.” He looks at me, and my heart protests in my chest. “I thought about you, about our fight. The way I—” He shakes his head, collects himself, and then backtracks.

“Anyways. The doctor… he just gave me this, like, sad little half smile. That’s when I knew. Football wasn’t in the cards for me anymore. Everything I worked for my entire life… poof. Just like that. I didn’t believe him at first. I was winning my third state championship just a few hours ago.

I was going down the path to play professionally and have multimillion-dollar contracts thrown at me, and then the next moment, everything went black, and I woke up with none of that? The thing I built my entire identity on was just gone in an instant. And yet, I was still here. Still had to go on without the thing that made me who I was.”

Everything he’s said before this sounded rehearsed. Probably from having to tell it so many times. But this last part seems to rip new emotions to the surface. I can see him tensing his jaw, trying to stay composed. He stares at the steering wheel like he’s waiting for his body to stop betraying him. Seeing his face like this, the agony as he relives it, I can’t sit and watch any longer. I hurl myself over the center, gather him into a hug, and sob into his neck, unable to stop the tears at this point. Maybe sometimes it was okay to let people see you cry on their behalf. It was a small way to show you glimpsed the pain they’d experienced.

“I kept staring at the door—the hospital room door and then my bedroom door—hoping you would walk in any second, and terrified that you would.” His words are muffled by my neck.

“Why—what do you mean by ‘terrified that I would’?” I ask, pulling back and settling into the passenger seat.

He rolls his bottom lip into his mouth like he’s tasting the response. “Because—” He stops, shakes his head, and starts again. “Because I was angry at you for how you left us. But also, because I was angry at myself for telling you to trust me. To rely on me because of my future in football. And then there I was, lying in a hospital bed, never going to play football again. I couldn’t picture looking you in the eyes after that.”