Saving Quinton

  Lea glances up from the screen with a look of sympathy on her face. "I'm sorry, Nova."

  I take several deep breaths, fighting the urge to count the cracks in the ceiling as I sink down on the mattress, wondering what I'm supposed to do. The plan was to move out of the apartment and head back home for summer break. Spend three months in my hometown, Maple Grove, until I return to Idaho to start my junior year of college. And I'm one for following plans, otherwise the undetermined future unsettles me. It's one of the things I learned to do to help alleviate my anxiety.

  I had plans this summer, to spend time with my mom, play music with Lea when she visits for a few weeks, and work on a documentary, maybe even get some better camera equipment. But as I take in what I've just learned about Quinton, I'm starting to wonder if I should be following a different plan, one that I should have followed nine months ago, only I wasn't in the right state of mind to.

  "It also says that he was driving too fast." Lea adjusts the laptop, angling the screen so the light doesn't glare against it. "At least that's what it says in this article."

  "Does it say that it was all his fault?" My voice is uneven as I drape my arm across my forehead, catching sight of the leather band on my wrist and the scar and tattoo just below it. I got the tattoo a few months ago when Lea suggested we each get one to mark something important in our lives. I loved the idea and decided to get the words "never forget" to always remind me of my downward spiral. I got them just below the scar on my wrist, the one I put there myself, because I never want to forget just how dark things can get and how I pulled myself out of them.

  She leans closer to the screen again, her long black hair falling into her eyes. "No...it says that it was both drivers' fault...that Quinton was driving too fast, but that the car in the other lane was, too and the other car took the corner way too wide and swerved into the wrong lane...it was a head-on crash and some of them weren't wearing seat belts."

  "Does it say anything about the other two people in the car being Quinton's girlfriend or his cousin?" Sadness shoves its way into my heart.

  She pauses, reading something over. "It says something about a Lexi Davis and a Ryder Morganson, but not how they knew Quinton."

  "Morganson." The painful reality seeps into my skin and I prop myself up on my elbows. "That's Tristan's last name...oh my God...Ryder has to be Tristan's sister." The pieces start to connect, but it's like the outside of the puzzle is put together and the middle pieces are still missing, so it's still incomplete and doesn't make sense. "I don't get it...why would Tristan let Quinton live with him after that?"

  "Maybe because he's a forgiving guy," Lea suggests with a shrug, and when I give her a doubtful look, she adds, "Hey, some people are like that. Some people can forgive and forget easily and when you're high all the time...well, I'm guessing it's really easy to forget, although I have no way to know if this is true or not. I'm just guessing."

  "It is," I admit, remembering the few months I spent wandering around in trailer parks and fields, tasting but never fully indulging in the land of drugs and misdirection. "And now that I think about it, there was tension between the two of them...God, I can't believe I didn't know about this...I spent all that time with him and never knew."

  She twirls a strand of her black hair around her finger. "Nova, I think you and I both know that you could spend a hundred years with a person and still not know them if they don't want you to know them."

  "Yeah, you're right." I knew Landon for years and even though I knew he was sad, I didn't understand why. When he died, I was even more confused--still am. Lea knew her dad for twelve years, and then he took his own life. She told me that he always seemed content, not ecstatic about life or anything, but still she'd never thought he'd do that. A lot of people don't think someone they love will end their life.

  Lea reads the screen for a few minutes longer, while I mess around with my long brown hair, braiding it to the side, trying not to think about the many places Quinton could be, how much harm he has to be doing to his body and mind, but it's all I can think about. I can feel myself drifting to that place where I don't have control, just like I didn't with my dad and Landon. Everything is just happening and I'm lying here, unable to know how to stop it.

  "Please tell me why you're so sad," I whisper as I watch Landon flip through the pages of his sketchbook, desperately searching for a specific drawing.

  He shakes his head as he tilts it to the side, observing a sketch. "I'm not sad, Nova, so stop asking."

  I pull my knees to my chest and lean back against the wall. "You look sad, though."

  He glances up at me and the anguish in his eyes makes it hard to breathe. "Nova, seriously. I'm okay. I just need to figure out a few things about...with this project I'm working on." He roughly flips another page and then another.

  I sigh, then get up from the floor and walk over to him, sitting down on the bed beside him. I can smell the pungent scent of weed and his eyes are a little red. "You know, you can always talk to me about stuff, if you're like having a bad day or something." I want to reach out and touch him, but I'm afraid. Afraid he'll get mad at me. Afraid he'll ask me to go. Afraid he'll break down and cry, tell me what's wrong, and it might be something really bad.

  He keeps sifting through his pages and tugging his fingers through his inky black hair. When he finally looks up at me again, his honey-brown eyes are not full of anguish, but irritation. "Would you mind giving me some time alone for a little while?"

  "You want me to go?" I ask, hurt.

  He nods and I catch him glancing at the glass bong on his desk. "Just for a little while...I'll call you when I'm ready for you to come back."

  I don't want to leave at all, yet I don't want to argue with him either, so I get up and go home, feeling like I've done everything wrong.

  Feeling like I shouldn't have walked out on him.

  "You know what?" Lea shuts the laptop, then gets to her feet, interrupting my thoughts. She's wearing a torn black T-shirt and cutoffs and when she rubs her fingers under her eyes to eliminate any smudged eyeliner, I can see the tattoo on her wrist: Live life with no regrets. It's the one she got with me and it's pretty much her life motto, at least from what she tells me. "I think you need to go turn in your final project for film class."

  I secure my braid with an elastic band I had around my wrist and then sit up on the bed. "Lea, I need to find out where he is...I need to talk to him and see if he's okay." I stand up, tugging on the bottoms of my shorts. "Besides, I don't have a final project to turn in."

  She puts her hands on her hips and gives me a firm look. "That's not true. You have a nice project put together, just not with Quinton's clip in it."

  I dither, unsure I want to turn in the video without Quinton's recording on it, the one from last summer when he told me a coded, brief part of his life. It's so raw and emotional, which is what my final project is supposed to be, and the project feels incomplete without it, but my professor won't let me include it without Quinton's signing a permission form. "But...it's..."

  "But nothing." She strides up to me and shoos me toward the door. "Go turn what you have in so you don't fail, then get some coffee because I know you didn't sleep last night and you look really tired."

  "But what about Quinton?" It's been over nine months since I've seen him and I know it seems absurd to be panicking about waiting a few more hours to find him, but after I found out from Delilah about the accident and that he's been doing crystal meth, it seems really urgent to find him.

  "I'll see what else I can find out and see if I can track him down," she says, continuing to usher me out of the room. "And leave that Delilah chick's number. I'll try calling her and see if I can get her to fess up where they're all living. "

  "Fine." I trudge out of the room and into the small living room that's attached to the moderate-size kitchen and small dining area. I collect my laptop and bag from the sofa, feeling frustration along with a thousand other emotions: sadness, guilt, p
ain, hopelessness. Yet I also feel a little hopeful thanks to Lea, so I turn around and give her a hug. "Thank you for being such a good friend."

  "No problem," she says and hugs me back.

  We exchange this awkward yet simply real silent moment, before we step away from each other and part ways. Tears sting my eyes as I head out the door and into the bright sunlight. I know that Lea will go back to her computer and look for more stuff that will hopefully lead me to Quinton, but it still hurts my heart not knowing where he is.

  It's a strange feeling and I've only felt this sort of ache over one person before. Landon. But I'm not comparing Quinton to him. I refuse to do that again. Landon was Landon, the beautiful artist who bore the weight of the world on his shoulders, who suffered in ways I couldn't understand, but wish I could, but probably never will. And Quinton is Quinton, the beautiful artist, who carries guilt on his shoulders, who, even in his darkest times made me smile when no one else could, who showed me a dark world that made me want to see the light again.

  And I want to make him see the light, too. I just need to find him.

  Chapter 2

  Nova

  After I turn my project in to the professor, I get a coffee from the coffee stand in the quad yard, then rush back toward the apartment that's only about half a mile away from the university, so that I rarely ever drive my dad's old 1967 Chevy Nova. It's a bright day and warm, the sun beaming down as I hurry up the sidewalk with my bag on my shoulder and my laptop tucked under my arm. I sort of feel like I failed, turning in the documentary without Quinton's clip. But I try to look past it and focus on the fact that at least I won't fail my class. Besides, there's always next year and hopefully by then I'll have at least talked to Quinton. At least I hope we'll still be talking. I hope I'll have the chance to take many video clips of him that I can add to my Novamentary, as he called it.

  It hurts just thinking about it, because it reminds me how much I want to help him, but at the same time, I know from experience that I can't make things happen my way. I can't make Quinton get better, just like I couldn't make Landon tell me what was wrong, just like I couldn't make my dad hold on just a little bit longer.

  It's hurting my heart and I need to get my emotions out, so I halt at the final street I have to cross, downing the last of the coffee. Then I set my bag and laptop on the grass along with the empty coffee cup and take my phone from my back pocket. I click it on, then rotate slightly to get the sun in the right position so it's not blinding the screen, then hit record.

  The red light blinks on and an image of me pops up on the screen. I look so different from how I looked in all the clips I made last summer. My skin looks healthier, my cheeks fuller, and my brown hair cleaner, braided to the side of my head, wisps framing my face. My blue eyes are bloodshot and full of sadness. Actually my eyes only appear blue but if you really observe them, then you can see that they're blue with specks of green. Quinton was actually one of the few people who noticed this and it was a genuinely sweet thing, I just couldn't see it at the time because I was blinded by Landon's death. But it's not just my outer appearance that's different. It's also what's inside me and radiates through my expression--the light in my eyes that I thought had died, but that had only briefly dimmed.

  I give the camera a little wave. "Hey, it's me, Nova, again. I'm not sure if you watched my last video or not, which I really doubt you did, since it's pretty much just a bunch of my ramblings about my life. But hey, if you're into that kind of stuff, then you'll get what I'm talking about." I shake my head, sighing at myself, but a smile cracks through. "Anyway, it's been almost exactly a year from when I started my very first video and I'm in a completely different place now. I've let go of my past for the most part, mourned my dad and Landon...well, let go of them as much as I can." I brush my bangs out of my face. "So here's the start of a new summer, which seems like it's going to hold a lot of possibilities, but not necessarily in a good way. In fact, I have no idea how summer is going to go."

  I click off the camera, and then grab my bag and laptop off the ground and cross the street, wondering if Quinton will become someone else I'll have to mourn. It makes me sick to my stomach to think about, but I know firsthand that unless someone wants to quit, and I mean in their very heart and soul wants to stop doing drugs, then they can't. And even then, when they decide they want to quit, there's still the huge battle of dealing with inner demons and finally getting to a place where their mind and body can be empty of drugs and still be at peace...I'm not even sure if peace is the right word, because the path of drugs will always exist in my mind and so will Landon and I'll never completely have peace from either. Now that I've tasted the freedom of numbness and forgetfulness, it's impossible to forget that it exists. The possibility that I could have it again always lives inside and that could be ignited at any moment if a circumstance strikes the match.

  I just have to know how to blow it right back out--I have to fight it with every breath I have. And I'm not in the same place anymore, so I know I can do it. I just wish I knew for certain Quinton could. What I need is to find something that will get through to him, something that will make him see past whatever's blinding him to the future. For me it was Landon's video. It helped me realize what I'd become, where I was going, and that I was trying to escape my feelings instead of dealing with them. In a strange way, that video helped me want to heal myself.

  I drop my bag and laptop onto the sofa and go back to the bedroom. Lea and her boyfriend Jaxon are sitting on the floor, staring at the computer screen. Jaxon is tall and sort of lanky with dark-brown hair that's a little overlong and always hangs in his eyes, and he's behind Lea, massaging her back as she reads an article.

  "Did you find anything more?" I ask, startling them both. They jump, wide-eyed, like I just walked in on them having sex.

  Jaxon's arms fall away from Lea's shoulders. "Oh, hey, Nova," he says, giving me a small wave. "We didn't hear you come in."

  I go over and sit down on the edge of the bed. "I didn't know you were still here. I thought you went home yesterday."

  "I was going to," he tells me, discreetly glancing at Lea. "But I thought I'd stick around for an extra day...maybe longer if I need to."

  The two of them have been arguing over the fact that Jaxon is going home to Illinois for the summer and Lea is going back home to Wyoming to a town not too far away from Maple Grove. It's not the first time the two of them have spent the summer apart, but I guess it's getting to the point where they're committed enough that one of them should go with the other, or they should just get a place here. Yet for some reason they won't. I asked Lea why and she simply said because they couldn't both agree on where they should go, therefore she's starting to wonder if they're even on the same page anymore. It makes me sad because they're a cute couple. Jaxon plays the guitar and Lea sings and when they get up on stage magic happens because they show so much emotion toward each other. It makes playing drums in the background enjoyable, although playing is always enjoyable.

  "He's headed home tonight," Lea states, returning her attention to the computer. "He just stopped to say good-bye."

  "How about I take over trying to track Quinton down and you two go spend some time together?" I suggest.

  Lea's gaze travels back and forth between Jaxon and me. "You don't have to do that. I'm fine with staying here and helping you."

  Jaxon shakes his head, looking aggravated as he shifts away from her, drawing his hands back and putting them on his lap. It's pretty obvious they're fighting and need a moment and my saving-Quinton mission is getting in the way. "I can take over for a while. Just tell me what you've found out and I'll go from there."

  Lea sighs and then leans back on her hands, while Jaxon stares absentmindedly out the window at the clouds moving in. "Nothing really. The article just talked about the accident some more, but there's no information online about where he'd be now. I did get ahold of that Delilah bitch, but she hung up on me when I started asking her too many q
uestions about where they were living--I think she thought I was the police or something."

  I cross my legs out in front of me. "She was probably on something and being paranoid."

  Lea exchanges a glance with Jaxon and then looks at me. "I really don't like her at all. She called me a skank and she doesn't even know me."

  I sigh, wishing Delilah would stop being...well, Delilah, and just let me know where she is. "She'd probably be nicer to you if you were a guy. She has this thing with clashing with other women."

  Lea rolls her eyes, and then goes back to the computer, lining her fingers up on the keyboard. "I can totally see that."

  I remove the elastic from my hair, undo the braid, and comb my fingers through my hair for no other reason than that I'm fidgety and need something to focus on other than the thing I really want to do--count. "Could we maybe do a search on her phone number and see what address is linked to it?"

  Lea shakes her head as she types something. "I already did and it brings up an address in Maple Grove and we know they're not there anymore, since they moved and that damn bitch won't tell you where." She pauses, musing over something. "But what we could do is call her mother and ask her where she is." Lea moves her legs around and lies down on her stomach and props herself up on her elbows, putting her feet on Jaxon's lap. He absentmindedly begins massaging her feet.

  I shake my head. "I doubt her mother even knows where she is."

  "What about her father?" Lea asks, clicking the mouse.

  "He's been out of the picture pretty much since she was born," I say. "And she doesn't have any other relatives as far as I know."

  "What about Quinton's father?" she wonders. "You could do a search for him in Seattle where Quinton lived...or did he not live with his father?"