Chelsea Fine - Best Kind of Broken

Lying in bed, I roll onto my side and stare at the four gray paintings hanging on the far wall. Sadness does not flood into me like I anticipate. Nor does anger or peace. The only thing I feel, as the waking sunbeams slide over my sheet-wrapped body, is longing. Deep, wailing longing.

Not for the girl in gray—that girl is at peace and unbroken—but for the boy next door, who is anything but. And yet the boy next door feels farther away than the girl in gray.

I let out a long, slow breath as I stare at Charity’s face. Today marks the one-year anniversary of her death. A year has gone by, but somehow no time has passed. I’m still here, at the precipice of my future, waiting for life to happen. I’m still the broken girl who woke up in a hospital bed without her best friend, without her hero.

I thought time stopped for me, but time is not something I ever had or ever will have. It simply is. It never begins. It never ends. So the sun rises and sets, and my scar heals and fades, and the morning birds chirp on.

There is nothing extraordinary about today, except that it has come and I have lived to see it.

But perhaps that is precisely what makes today more extraordinary than any day before.

With a deep breath, I get out of bed.

I’m sitting against a log right at the edge of the lavender field with my back to the trees beyond. The air smells like Pixie.

The inn lights are mostly off, giving darkness over to the night and showcasing the many stars in the clear sky. It’s quiet out here, no guests milling about the grounds or taking late-night walks, no storm.

I light the cigarette in my hand, take a drag, and tilt my head up to the stars as I exhale.

Everyone kept a wide berth around me today, no one brave enough to start any conversations with me or make direct eye contact. I’m not sure what they were afraid of. Me breaking into tears?

Angelo was the only person who even acknowledged the shittiness of today, and even he didn’t use words. He simply walked past me as he was leaving for the night and handed me a single cigarette and a lighter.

He’s a scary bastard, but he has a soul.

I’m not a smoker. Sure, I’ve smoked before. But I’ve always been an athlete, and a smoking athlete is a weak athlete. So I’m not big on cigarettes.

But today hurts.

So I’m smoking.

I hear crickets in the distance and the sound of wind sweeping through the purple fields.

I’m alone. I’m thinking. I wish I wasn’t thinking.

I hear the back door to the kitchen close and see a form step outside with a trash bag. I know that form. I’ve felt that form against my body.

Pixie starts to turn away, but freezes when she catches sight of me in the shadows. How she sees me I’m not sure, but she’s on her way over.

I stay seated and rub a hand down my face.

Her walk is slow and deliberate until she stops beside me, dressed in her work clothes. Even though we both had the day off, we still decided to work. Work keeps the demons out.

She watches me smoke for a moment. “Got one for me?”

I exhale a cloud of smoke. “No.”

She plucks the lit cigarette from my hand. At first I think she’s going to stomp it out and lecture me on the health ramifications of smoking. But she doesn’t. She takes her own slow drag and breathes the smoke in before handing it back to me.

I take it from her, both annoyed and turned on. “You shouldn’t smoke.”

She sits on a rock in front of me, just a foot or so away, and I can feel my body respond to how close she is.

“I shouldn’t do a lot of things.” She looks at the stars. “Charity hated cigarettes.”

I shift against the log.

“She would always try to smoke, but end up coughing and gagging.” She tucks a strand of loose hair behind her ear. “It was fun to watch her try, though.” A small smile plays at her lips.

I take another drag, watching her carefully. “I don’t remember that.”

“Yeah, well. I don’t think she ever wanted you to see her try. You were her hero, you know?” She plays with a lace on her shoe.

“I don’t remember that either.” My lungs are shrinking and I can’t quite get the air I need to keep my eyes from stinging.

“You were my hero too,” she says softly. “You still are.”

She drives her eyes into me, and all the memories I just ran away from, all the thinking I wasn’t doing, it all comes swooping back in, picking me up with razor-sharp claws.

It feels like Charity is right here, sitting between us. It’s tense and it’s heavy, but, somehow, it doesn’t feel wrong. Pix must feel it too because I see her shift on the rock.

I wish I could protect her from everything bad, always. I want to protect her from drunk driving and asshole guys, of course. But I also want to protect her from the sadness of losing Charity. The guilt.

“It’s not your fault,” I say.

Her eyes glide to mine in the darkness.

“What happened to Charity,” I continue, “wasn’t your fault. Not at all.”

The moment Charity’s name leaves my lips, a charge goes into the air, and at first I’m afraid of it. Like maybe I just unleashed an emotional hell that will take me another year to shove back inside my soul.

But then I take a breath and my chest rises freely, because saying Charity’s name feels good. No. It feels safe.

Safe with Pixie.

She leans forward on the rock so our faces are directly in front of each other, and she looks right at me, silent. It’s not sexual. It’s not playful. It’s Pixie asking for my full attention, and now she has it.

“It’s not your fault either,” she says.

I look down at her scar.

She follows my eyes and takes my face into her hands, tipping my chin up so I’m gazing at her soft face. “And what happened to me wasn’t your fault.”

I pull my head away and look at the dirt.

“It wasn’t your fault—”

“Stop, Pix,” I say quietly.

She’s quiet for a few minutes; then she slides down the rock until she’s right in front of me, knees in the dirt, apron on the ground.

“I forgive you.” Her steeled eyes wait for mine to meet them and hold me there under the stars. “You have nothing to be forgiven for,” she says, “but I still forgive you. Will you forgive me?”

I stare at her in horror. “For what?”

“For getting wasted with Charity at that party. For encouraging her to leave. For letting her drive drunk.”

She’s insane. None of that was her fault. None of that was—

“I forgive you,” she repeats. “Will you please forgive me?”

The look in her eyes tells me we’re not talking about blame. We’re talking about heartbreak and loss and all the things we don’t know how to deal with.

“I forgive you,” I say, meaning it even though there is nothing that needs to be forgiven, and I’m looking at little Pixie, six years old and stealing my Transformers. Six years old and wiggling her way into my heart. She’s still there, wrapped inside me like she’s mine. And maybe she is.

Suddenly it’s gone. The guilt, the heaviness. The fear of letting myself be happy, love fully. It’s all gone. Because Pixie just forgave me. And maybe I just forgave myself.

The air around us is free. It’s like a million tiny weights are floating up off my chest and into the sky, and I didn’t know I could feel so much relief.

She moves to sit beside me, and my body tenses as hers slides down my side until she’s leaning against the log. Reaching over, she takes the cigarette from my hand and brings it to her mouth. Tiny red embers glow in the darkness as she sucks smoke into her lungs and tips her head back, resting it against the log as she stares at the sky.

I shift down a bit, the side of my body rubbing against hers until our shoulders are level, and rest my head back as well, looking at the sky as Pixie slowly exhales beside me. A cloud of gray smoke feathers into the air above us, blocking the night sky until dissolving into the black and unveiling the heavens.

We gaze at the sky for a long, quiet minute, and the only sounds I hear are the crickets and Pixie’s steady breaths.

I feel like a kid again. Stars above me, Pixie beside me. There’s solace in the silence that floats between us, and I wonder if she feels it too. I could stay here all night, where the sky is bigger than anything in my life and lavender scents the air. I could stay here forever.

I hear the smile in Pixie’s voice. “Remember when Charity and I tried to jump off the porch roof and you got all mad?”

I scoff. “What were you, like six?”

“Yeah. We were being fairies, remember? We had our costumes on from Halloween and we were going to fly.” She says this in exaggerated wonderment and I laugh. I actually laugh.

Charity was a pain in the ass to keep alive. It wasn’t just the porch thing. The girl climbed ridiculously tall trees and went cliff jumping and stuff. But the fairy thing, that was the beginning of it all. Charity and Pix were dressed up with my mom’s makeup on and they were carrying these stupid wands. Ugh. They were so adorably annoying.

“I didn’t let you fly,” I say.

“No. You told on us.”

I smile. “I sure as hell did.”

And then we’re silent for a moment, but the air isn’t so smoky and I’m not so heavy.

“That was the first time you ever called me Pixie,” she says quietly.

I inhale, thinking about little Sarah dressed up like a fairy in my backyard, all pink and sassy. “Yes, it was.”

She pauses. “I like being Pixie.”

I don’t say anything, but I smile.

Inhale.

I pull the sharp heat and bitter taste of the cigarette through my lips, feeling my insides burn and my eyes blur as the smoke expands in my lungs. I don’t want to talk. I don’t want to cry. I just want to sit here, beside my hero, and remember.

Exhale.

The smoke floats into the quiet summer sky, swirling above us and fogging up the stars.

I bring the cigarette back to my mouth, but Levi gently pulls it from my fingers before it reaches my lips. Keeping his eyes on the sky, he deftly smothers the burning tip into the dirt as the smoke above us thins out until it clears completely.

Inhale.

The stars are more beautiful without the smoke obscuring their brilliance.

Exhale.

Much more beautiful, actually. Real.

We stay like that, shoulder to shoulder, eyes fixed above, for countless minutes.

Inhale.

Lavender. Summer air. Spearmint.

Exhale.

There aren’t any monsters out here.

This morning, I feel like I’m whole again, like my lungs have expanded and made my chest a paradise for oxygen, as I finish showering and cross the hall to my room.

“Thirty-seven minutes!” Pixie shouts from next door. There’s a lightness in her tone I haven’t heard in a long time, and it makes me wish she would keep speaking, even if only to scold me.

“You need a new hobby!” I yell back.

“Jerk.”

I smile at the wall. “Nag.”

And the day begins.

I get dressed and retrieve my To Do list from Ellen. Scanning the items she’s scrawled out, I glare at her. “Another chandelier?”

She smiles. “The one in the west wing hallway.”

“You haven’t used that chandelier in ten years.”

“Right. Because it’s broken.”

“That hallway is already well lit. You don’t need it.”