Filed to story: If He Had Been With Me Book PDF Free
I look to my right to—
Sylvie!
Where is she? Did she get out?
And then I see her.
On the other side of the low median we hit, sprawled across the wet asphalt.
She’s crumpled. Surely broken.
I am…okay. I can move.
Get to Sylvie. Tell her to lie still.
Make the call.
Get Sylvie to the hospital.
Go home to Autumn.
With a plan in place, I climb out of the car and run across the rain-soaked pavement to her.
I fall to my knees in front of Sylvie, putting my hand to the ground. It’s wet—
Jack
One
“Phineas Smith is dead.”
“Lexy,” I say. It’s too fucking early for her to call. It doesn’t matter if we’re sleeping together again. “Stop being a drama queen,” I groan into the phone and roll over in bed.
“Jack. I’m not kidding.”
“Lex, I don’t care how pissed you and Sylvie are at him—“
“Finn died last night, Jack.” She raises her voice. “That’s what I’m telling you. He died. He’s fucking dead.”
I sit up.
“Bullshit.” It’s still too fucking early for Alexis to be calling me because Finn finally dumped Sylvie. The sun is hardly up.
“Finn’s dead, Jack,” she says. “I just got back from the hospital with Sylvie and her parents. There was an accident. Sylvie has a concussion, but Finn died.”
“Bullshit,” I say again, because it has to be. No. No?
“Yeah. Finn’s gone.” Alexis is crying. She’s actually crying.
“Fuck,” I say. “No. How?”
This can’t be real.
This really can’t be real.
Surely she’s going to say that he’s in a coma or clinically dead and on a ventilator, but there’s still a chance? There’s got to be some hope?
“What? I can’t understand you, Lex.”
I strain to listen. Outside, birds are singing. The sky is clear after the rain.
“How the fuck did Finn get electrocuted?”
It’s like pounding my head against a wall, the way I’m trying to find the comfort or hope that’s supposed to be in every bad situation. There is none.
Finn is dead.
I try to make it right.
Okay, I say to myself.
Finn is strong. He’ll learn to live with—
But no.
There has to be some way this can be undone.
But no.
This is death.
I hung up with Alexis a few minutes ago. I’m supposed to be getting ready to go by her place, but I’m sitting on my bed.
“Finn’s dead,” I say aloud.
We have to go back in time and fix this, I think.
Time travel is not an option. Except every problem in life has a solution. If you think hard enough, work hard enough, there’s a solution. Right?
I need to tell Finn that he can break up with Sylvie over the phone. That’s the solution.
But it’s already done. He’s gone.
My mind spins, trying, trying, trying to find a way out of this maze. There’s got to be a way I can think this into not being true. Death is so final. Over. Done. Finn.
“I’m going to his house,” I say into my phone as I pull out of the driveway. My voice is shaking.
After I hung up with Alexis, I was frozen, staring at everything and nothing, trying to make sense of it. Then I called for my mother to come to my room like when I was a kid waking up after a nightmare. I didn’t trust my legs to work.
Mom sat next to me on the bed and held me, and I told her the news. It’s been years since I’ve held on to her like that, like I’m drowning. With six other brothers in the house, it took a serious injury to get one-on-one time with Mom. She stroked my hair, and as my sobbing slowed, I remembered the last time I’d needed her like this, when I’d cracked my shinbone in sixth grade. It had seemed like an eternal wait in the emergency room before I’d been given pain medication, though my mother had sworn it was only twenty minutes.
There’s no medicine for this pain.
Eventually, Mom asked about Finn’s mother, and I said I didn’t know how she was. That got me out of bed. Mom was hesitant to approve my plan, but after I used her line back at her about Finn not being lucky enough to have a big family like ours, she told me to go ahead.
I pull the car out of the driveway and hold the phone against my shoulder with my cheek so I can use both hands to turn. Finn would tell me that using both hands doesn’t make up for talking on the phone in the first place.
“But everyone is coming over here,” Alexis says.