Rewriting Our Tragedy

August would spend the rest of his life trying to get back to me. I never knew that.

I thought he'd only ever married me out of guilt, so I deleted his number, blocked him, told him to his face I'd never wanted him, and shoved him out of my life as hard as I could.

That was the mistake that cost me everything. The first time I lived this life, I fell for him at seventeen and never gave him room to breathe.

I threw out the love letters girls slipped into his locker. I knocked Margot's homemade lunch out of his hands in front of the whole class. Then the auditorium came down.

I shoved him clear and lost both my legs under the rubble. My parents called that a debt. They made him marry me to pay it.

After that I lived in a wheelchair and turned mean, and I dragged him down into the dark with me for years. Margot said it to my face once: he was built to shine.

Instead he got a wife who was a locked room he was too decent to walk out of. So I told myself the kindest thing left to do was take myself out of his life for good.

I was wrong about almost everything that night. Then I opened my eyes. Seventeen again. Both legs working. A school hallway roaring around me.

A second chance to hand him back the life I'd stolen. And there was one thing I still hadn't worked out. He loved me. He always had.

Chapter 1 My first meeting with Margot ended with me screaming. She hadn't even raised her voice. She just looked at me, flat and tired, and told me to let August go.

Maybe it was the words. Let him go. Like he was something I'd trapped. Whatever it was, it stripped the last mask off me, and what was underneath wasn't pretty.

By the time I'd pulled myself together and rolled home, August had already cooked. The smell hit me the second the elevator opened. Honeyglazed ribs. My favorite. "Where'd you go?

You hungry?" He came around behind my chair and crouched, tucking a loose strand of hair behind my ear like it was the most natural thing in the world. I caught his wrist.

Something in me had already gone cold. "What's wrong?" He smiled. "Tired, love?" "When." My voice came out flat and hard.

He blinked, brows pulling together. "When did you see Margot." "The other day. At the market. It was just—" I hit his hand.

Hit it again, hard enough that my own knuckles ached. "I knew it. I knew it. Old flame. The two of you riding off into the sunset." "You're sick of me. You want out.

Just say it." He bent closer, patient, but the exhaustion in his eyes had no bottom. "Reesie. There's nothing between her and me. Nothing." I couldn't hear him.

My skull was full of static, a dozen strange voices talking over each other, none of them clear. "Get out," I said. "Get out, get out—" I swung at him, and he let me. Took it.

Never lifted a hand to stop me. When my arms finally gave out, he pressed my open palm flat to his cheek. "Reesie. I'm not leaving you." "I don't want your pity.

Get OUT." I slapped him. Hard. The whole of my rage behind it. His head snapped to the side. The mark came up red almost at once.

I shoved him off, wheeled myself into the bedroom, and locked the door. He apologized through it. He begged. I wouldn't open it. I was furious, and I couldn't have told you why.

By the time my head cleared, the room was wrecked and the sky was black. That was when it landed. I'd gone crazy. Actually crazy. I opened the door.

He was sitting against it on the floor, knees pulled up, head back on the wall, asleep. The door moving woke him.

He was up in a heartbeat, hands skimming over me, checking, checking. Are you hurt. Are you okay. Only when he was sure did he pull me in. "Reesie.

I know you're scared in there." "Whatever happens, you have to believe me. I love you." The hallway light stung. My eyes went hot.

I held him back, slid my hand into his hair, and in the light I caught it: the thin scatter of gray at his temples. My chest went tight.

I hadn't really looked at his face in a long time. So I took it in both hands and looked. Redrimmed eyes. Soft anyway.

He smiled at me, and it was the kind of smile that breaks something in a person. Margot was right. He was supposed to be out there, chasing everything he loved. A whole wide life.

Not this. Not boxed into a few square feet because of me. "I'm sorry," I said, and heard my own voice shake. Then it all came up at once, and I was crying too hard to breathe.

He kissed me quiet. Kissed the apology off my mouth, kissed the tears off my face, said it into my ear, over and over. "Reesie. Don't be sorry.

Reesie, I love you." He said it like he meant it. He always said it like he meant it. That was the cruelest part.

A man could sound that much in love and still only be paying off a debt. Chapter 2 I knew I could come apart at any second. Days like that one played out between us all the time.

So while my head was clear, I found a lawyer and made a will. When it was done, something in my chest finally let go, like a stone I'd been carrying had been set down.

August saw me steadier and lit up like it was the best news of his life. He took me to the coast.

Stood at the edge of the water and shouted into the wind that he wanted forever with me.

He took me up the mountain in a cable car to watch the sun come up, and kissed me while the light spilled over everything, and told me he loved me. Again. And again.

Every word went in like a blade. Because I was certain it was the guilt talking. I lay there and counted them, every I love you, the way you count a debt being paid down.

He wasn't telling me he loved me. He was telling me how sorry he was. So on a perfectly ordinary day, I told him I wanted honeyglazed ribs. He wanted to take me with him.

I dug in and said I didn't feel like moving. At the door he promised, twice, that he'd be home early.

I smiled and kissed his cheek and waved him off. "Drive safe." I watched from the window as he waved back and got in the car, and the second he pulled away, I broke.

I hit my own legs, over and over. Dead weight. Useless. The thing that had ruined us both. When the worst of it passed, the apartment was quiet. Tomb quiet.

And in that quiet the old lie sounded like the only truth left: that he'd be better off without me, that this was the one good thing I had it in me to do. I was wrong.

I'd spend a whole second life learning how wrong. I closed my eyes. There was a pink cartoon lunchbox in my hands. Voices everywhere. Kids, jeering, loud.

The boy in front of me was young again, exactly the way I'd kept him in memory, his face gone red with embarrassment. And my legs. I looked down. They were whole. Unbroken.

The floor dropped out of the world. Then my knee buckled and I went down hard, sprawling across the tile. Food everywhere.

The jeering got louder. "Reese, what is your problem?" Margot shoved through the crowd, her eyes on me, not friendly.

She took in the lunch she'd packed, knocked across the floor, and her face went hot. "Reese. Happy now?

How long are you going to keep this up?" I reached down and pinched my own leg. Hard. It hurt. The tears beat everything else out of me, spilling over before I could stop them.

The whole crowd went quiet at once. "Don't think crying makes you the—" I scrambled up off the floor and started cleaning, hands shaking, gathering the wreck of it.

And while the class watched and muttered, I went to the trash and pulled out every love letter I'd thrown away. Wiped each one clean. Stacked them neat on August's desk.

Then I emptied my locker of every snack I'd hoarded and pushed all of it into his arms. I bowed to the two of them. To Margot. To August.

Low, and I meant it. "I'm sorry." Chapter 3 A test came back drowned in red X's, a score in the single digits, and I cried through forty straight minutes of physics.

Not over the grade. Over the fact that it was real. I'd been reborn. Mr. Pell peered at me from behind glasses thick as bottle bottoms, baffled. "Reese, what's the matter?

Is it really that hard?" My voice cracked for real. "Sir. Physics is really, really hard." "Then you'd better transfer to the humanities track. Fast." The class howled.

He rounded on them. "Oh, you think that's funny?

Look at your own scores before you laugh." August had just finished a problem at the board and stepped down, and the sight of his work cut Mr. Pell's tantrum off midbreath.

The old man scanned it, smiling, nodding. "See this? Everybody, look at this." He clapped August on the shoulder. "Keep it up.

You've got a real shot at the Olympiad this year." Then, to me: "Reese, anything you don't understand, you ask August." I glanced at the quiet boy. Then dropped my head, fast.

After night study I bolted for the gate. The new legs weren't broken in yet, and I went stumbling across the lot like a colt. Margot caught me before I cleared it. "Reese.

Don't push it." I turned. "Push what?" "August doesn't like you. You get that you're exhausting, right?" "I know." I tugged at my backpack strap.

The guilt sat heavy. "I owe him an apology." Whatever speech she'd loaded up died in her throat. I bit my lip, stepped in, and took her hand. Looked her dead in the eye. "Be happy.

Both of you." Her brows pulled together. "What?" "I know you like him. Go for it. Don't hold back." White, then red.

The specific mortification of a girl whose secret just got read out loud. "You— what are you even saying. You're the one who—" I was already turning.

Already running into the dark. "Reese!" she yelled after me. "Quit talking nonsense!" Monday, I cheerfully boxed up my books and moved to the humanities class.

Backpack on, I climbed up in front of the room I'd sat in for two years and grinned at all of them. "It's early, I know.

But I hope every one of you crushes it when the time comes." I pulled a fat bag of snacks out of my pack. "I was a lot to deal with.

I'm sorry for that, and thank you for putting up with me this long." Every scene I ever made you sit through, this is me walking offstage early. No encore.

I handed something to everyone. When I got to August, I picked out his favorite, a tin of canned peaches, and set it down. "Sorry I took up so much of your time.

Hope I didn't throw you off your game." He looked up at me for half a second, then back down. "You didn't." I knew him. He'd always been the patient kind. The easy kind.

Which only made me want to cry. Fifteen years tangled up together, and the debts had all run one direction. I was never the only one those broken legs kept caged.

But this time I'd caught it early. Early enough to set the whole thing right. Early enough to hand him back the life that should have been his.

Chapter 4 This time, the one blocking my way was August.

I was outside the bubble tea place, working through a tray of street fries, when he stepped up beside me and took my drink off the counter before I could. "What's up?" I said.

He hung the bubble tea off my finger. Then, a little clumsy, dug a thick notebook out of his bag. "I put together the math problems that come up the most." Careful eyes.

Testing the water. One hand holding the notebook out, the other strangling his backpack strap.

The dim yellow shop light sat on his hair. "What's this for?" I finally swallowed my food. Before he could answer, I made myself casual. Stepped in.

Tipped my chin up and grinned, all teeth. "You don't actually like me, do you?" His face went red fast. Boiledshrimp red.

He blinked like the world had glitched and looked away, refusing to land his eyes on me. Then, a beat later, the anger came up, brows pulling tight.

He pushed the notebook flat to my chest and dropped his voice. "I'm just saying thank you for the snacks." "And Reese.

Right now, school is what matters." In all the years I'd lived beside this boy, I'd almost never watched him get pushed to that edge. My endless noise, my endless wreckage.

All of it had sanded the corners off him, a little at a time. Maybe he'd gone a kind of crazy too. The difference was that I got to say my pain out loud.

He just swallowed his, year after year, to keep my ridiculous pride intact. My chest pulled tight. I smiled anyway. "Ha.

You're really taking that seriously?" The look on his face froze over. He studied me, and for one second he didn't understand me at all. "Reese.

Sometimes you're cruel." This time, I was the one with nothing to say. I'd taken an eagle built for open sky, snapped its wings, and folded it into a room the size of a closet.

Cruel was exactly the word. By the time I looked up, he was already walking off into the moonlight, backpack on his shoulders.

The streetlight stretched his shadow out long across the ground. Smaller and smaller, and he didn't look back. Chapter 5