But I couldn’t walk home to Wellfleet. It was miles to go, and I was so, so tired. I didn’t have to tell Mom the truth. I could lie. Or I could call Beth. Beth would keep my secret.
Just as I started to turn at the entrance, I heard a motor, a car slowing down. I bolted toward the building. The car followed me into the parking lot. Shit! It was Chase, I knew it. Oh, God, what would he do to me now?
“Lillie?”
I stopped and turned. It wasn’t a car. It was a battered pickup truck I knew well. I should’ve recognized the sound of that rusty engine. It wasn’t anything like Chase’s purring sports car.
Ben Hallowell pulled to the curb and stopped his truck. Got out and took a long look at me. “You okay?” he asked.
“Um . . . uh . . . yes.” I swallowed the sudden tears that rose in my throat. “But I could use a ride.” My voice cracked.
“Sure. Get in.” He opened the passenger door for me. It creaked horribly, and I jumped. Ben didn’t say anything. For once, it didn’t seem that he had pulga atrás da orelha. He knew me, he wouldn’t hurt me and he’d take me home.
He got back in, waited till I was buckled, then turned the truck back onto Route 6, toward home. “Rough night?”
“Yeah.”
“Did anyone hurt you?” He kept his eyes on the road.
“Um . . . not really. No.”
He was quiet a minute. “Do you need to go to the hospital?”
“No. Just take me home. Thanks, Ben.”
He nodded.
“If you could . . . not mention this to my father,” I said.
He glanced at me. “Maybe you should mention this to him,” he said, turning his eyes back to the road.
“Maybe.” I leaned my head against the window and closed my eyes, the smell of the truck so much like my dad’s—ocean and fish and coffee. It felt safe here, and a few tears leaked out. Soon, I’d be home, and I’d creep in and take a long shower, and this night would be a memory.
That’s the last thing I remembered.
I woke up in the hospital three days later, minus a spleen, with a broken femur, broken collarbone, broken jaw, two broken ribs and a deep gash on my forehead. There’d been an accident, I was told. I was lucky to be alive. My abdomen had been pierced by a chunk of steel from the engine, resulting in the loss of my spleen, six inches of my intestine and the tearing of my uterus. They’d avoided a hysterectomy because of my age but couldn’t rule that out in the future. “But we can talk about that once you’ve healed,” the doctor said with a kind smile.
My father was there, holding my hand, watching my face as the doctor told me the damage. Neither of us cried. It hurt too much, and Dad . . . Dad wasn’t a weeper. But he held my hand a little more firmly, then kissed it, making me feel unworthy.
This was the price of my stupidity at the party, I told myself. For not going into the police station and just calling my dad and owning what every teenager has to own someday—we were stupid, and we put ourselves in danger. I should’ve known better than to accept a ride from Ben Hallowell, who’d always driven too fast, who’d totaled a car in high school. Dad would’ve hugged me and banged on the Freemans’ door and scared the life out of Chase.
Too late now. I lay in the uncomfortable hospital bed, sipping Ensure through a straw, trying not to breathe too deeply because of the pain that pierced and throbbed with unrelenting fire in my leg, my ribs, my jaw, my stomach.
Hannah came home from college to visit. The Moms came. Beth and her parents; Jessica, Jennifer, Justine and Ashley. I couldn’t tell them what had happened at the party, because it hurt too much to talk. Beth told me Chase Freeman had brought my purse to school and given it to her. Everyone already knew Ben Hallowell had been at the wheel, that he’d given me a ride home.
There were flowers from my entire class, Beth’s parents, a few teachers, the choir director, our neighbors down the road on Herring Pond.
Not a scratch on Ben. Not one scratch. My mother told me this with bitter triumph poisoning her voice. “That’s always the way, isn’t it? The driver walks away. Did you even bother to check if he was drunk, Liliana? Even if he was sober, that truck of his is a death trap. Why didn’t you call a cab, for heaven’s sake?”
He hadn’t been drunk. The police did a Breathalyzer and a blood test, and he passed. But yeah, his truck was a piece of shit.
He came to see me a few days after I woke up, holding a mason jar full of daffodils. “I’m so sorry, Lillie,” he said.