Page 131 of What You Wish For

“Are you hurt in any way?”

There were a lot of ways to answer that question, but I went with, “No.”

Then, as a kind of grand finale of his questioning: “Are youfucking kidding me?”

At that, I stood up. My legs were shaking—and so was pretty much everything else—but I did it, anyway. We faced each other in the surf. Duncan was hunched over, like he was clenching every abdominal muscle. His hands looked clenched, and so did his arms and shoulders for that matter. He wasn’t looking directly at me, just near me, as if he were so mad, he couldn’t even see.

“What”—he demanded, his voice tight with rage—“in the hell were you thinking?”

It didn’t sound like a question that wanted an answer.

“What the hell”—he said again, this time louder—“could youpossiblyhave been thinking?”

“Not my best decision,” I said.

But Duncan was now telling himself the story of what had just happened, every word incredulous, as if every single moment of what I’d just done had been impossible. “You took off running down the pier—and then youflung yourself off the end of it.”

“I regret that last part,” I said.

He wasn’t listening. “Was it idiocy? Was it a suicide attempt? Are you on some kind of drugs I don’t know about?”

These were all rhetorical questions.

“I can’t even believe what just happened. I can’t even believe youjust did that. Is this a nightmare? Am I trapped in a nightmare right now? That was, hands down—with only one horrific exception—the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen anybody do.”

I didn’t argue.

“You could have died. You should have died! Do you have any idea how many pilings are down in that water? How much debris floats up under those piers? Logs and construction boards and crap from offshore rigs? There could have been barbed wire! There could have been fencing! Peopleperishjumping off this pier!”

“People jump off this pier all the time!”

“Crazypeople! And even if you weren’t killed on impact, do you have any idea how close we are to the port? There are riptides all along here!”

I raised my hand a little. “I wasn’t thinking about riptides—okay? I wasn’t thinking at all.”

“You sure as hell weren’t!” he shouted. “You could have been swept out to sea in minutes—at night—so far I would never have been able to find you!”

I’ll grant that he was pretty much right about most of this stuff—and maybe this is just a quirk of my personality—but I can only get yelled at for so long, even by someone who’s right, before I start yelling back.

“I wasn’t thinking, okay?” I yelled back. “I was trying to be brave. I was trying to help!”

I sloshed my way closer to him in the water. Now he was watching me—the first time I’d seen his eyes since we made it to shore.

“Don’t help!” he shouted. “I don’t want you to help!”

But I charged after him. “Somebody has to!”

I’d forgotten how good it could feel to really yell. How satisfying it could feel to let yourself burn clean with anger like a flame. Duncan turned away, but I came after him and edged around to get up in his face. “You’re living some kind of half life, and you’re dragging a whole school full of terrified kids with you. You said I didn’t know what fear was, and I thought maybe you were right—but I’ll tell you something!I almost killed myself just then—but I still think I was right all along. You need to wake up and live.”

He was breathing hard. “Every morning, I get up and go to school. I shower and put vitamin E on my scars and shave and get dressed and shine my damn shoes and I walk into that place and spend all day every day watching out for those kids and keeping them safe and not curling up in the fetal position on the floor of the men’s room. I keep it together! I meet all my responsibilities! How the hell is that not enough?”

He turned away—like that was some kind of argument-winning rhetorical question.

But it wasn’t rhetorical. I ran after him. “Because it isn’t!”Great point.“I want you to be alive. I want you to feel something!”

“I feel something!” he shouted. “I feel everything!”

But then, it was like in the wake of that declaration, he could suddenly see clearly. It was like, for the first time since we hit the water, he really saw me there, just feet away from him, drenched and shivering and defiant in the water, my hair in wet strings against my neck.

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