Fragile

Hope

The phone clattered to the floor.

I just stood there for a moment, trying to collect all the thoughts that were swimming around in my head. I was hyperventilating so badly that catching my breath seemed impossible and the lack of oxygen was kicking my heart-rate into high gear. These symptoms were all too familiar, so I closed my eyes and tried to focus on taking long, slow breaths. If I could control this sudden release of adrenaline then in a few minutes the panic attack would be over.

I recognized that voice. It belonged to Nathaniel Greer.

 Usually when someone new moves to Brier Creek there's a lot of excitement and literally everyone crowds around them to try and become their friend. I suppose there was a lot of excitement when Nathaniel suddenly showed up in the middle of our sixth grade year, but not because kids were lining up to be his best friend. The rumors flew around fast about Nathaniel and where he'd come from, ranging from "his parents had gone mental and were stuck in the loony bin" to "his uncle is a criminal fleeing from the cops." Every small town has a reputation for spreading gossip faster then toxic waste and Brier Creek was never any different. Everyone knew everyone else's business, at least that's the way it was before Nathaniel showed up, but the mysterious new boy seemed to have everyone biting their tongue, our classmates would steer clear of him at recess and parents would take their child's hand and drag them away if he came walking down the same sidewalk. Nathaniel mostly kept to himself anyway, he never said more then a few words to me even though we'd sat next to each other in Mr. Ellison's class and I don't think I'd ever seen him crack a smile either, he just sat there with his gray hoodie pulled up over his head and a pair of emerald-green that seemed to stare into nothing. Jace used to describe him as a "lone-wolf" which I thought was just some hip teenage boy lingo, I never would've  imagined that it meant the residents in Brier Creek didn't just see Nathaniel as a lonely, homesick kid (the way I did), they saw him as dangerous.

But that's exactly how they saw him after I ended up in the hospital. Sometimes the few memories of my recovery that I have come flooding back to me, a painful reminder that I spent two months bedridden while my body healed from the multiple wounds it had suffered and my brother and our guardian had stopped their entire lives just to be by my bedside, which was only the beginning of the drowning guilt I now felt for ruining my brother's life. Some nights I would pretend to be asleep but I could hear Jace talking to people through from just outside my room. Mostly it was just the cops that showed up for visits but they couldn't talk to me without my legal guardian present and Roe conveniently made himself scare at these times, which I was grateful for. There were a couple other people that stopped by, teachers or parents who offered their condolences. This wasn't the first time that Jace and I had been the recipients of everyone's pity, when our parents died the entire town had practically tripped over themselves to tell us how sorry they were about our parents and how much they liked Matthew and Evangeline Whitaker. I never doubted they were telling the truth, our parents had always been friendly enough, but every time one of our neighbors dropped off a casserole and gave us a fake smile I knew what they were really thinking: Thank God it's not me. That was another thing about small towns, when tragedy strikes there is always two sides to it, sorrow and relief. But this time things were different, I wasn't dead so they couldn't just serve up a casserole and pat Jace on the head like that was going to make everything better, they wanted a witch hunt and they would do just about anything to see that someone burned at the stake, even if that someone was a 12-year-old boy who'd never even spoke to me.

I shook my head vigorously, trying to clear the movie -reel in my head that was replaying these memories. It was all I could do not to think about Nathaniel back then, how angry he must've been when people accused him of hurting me. If he wanted a normal life in this town there was no chance of having it after that. He must hate me, I would hate me, so why was he calling me up on the phone and starting a conversation like we were old friends.