"Damn it!" Tyler smashed his fist against the steering wheel. It didn't seem to produce the release he wanted so he hit it again and again and again. The dull thudding gave the car its own heartbeat.

I had never seen him so worked up. He couldn't seem to sit still, as though the car was slowly closing in on him, suffocating him. The speedometer edged up mile by mile, the tires spitting out gravel behind us as we sped through the dark streets. It was only when I let out an involuntary gasp of fear as we took a sharp turn that he seemed to remember I was there and eased up on the gas.

"Dash, shit—I'm sorry." The fist he had been abusing on the steering wheel opened and slipped into my hand. His skin was hot and swollen against mine and I instinctively interlocked our fingers, as though maximum contact will allow me to draw the heat and anger out of him.

"I'm sorry," Tyler said again. He looked almost ashamed. "They shouldn't have—I mean I never thought they would fight again—not with you there and—" He stumbled over his words like there were giant potholes in his train of thought, rattling him from the inside out. The pulse in his fingers beat quickly, too quickly, against my own.

We rumbled down a dark road, only our headlights cutting a swath through the shadows. The silent radio display cast a reddish haze on Tyler's face, sinking his eyes into deep, dark hallows. I squeezed his hand and he took a deep breath, one long enough to fill all the recesses of his lungs.

"I thought they had finally put everything behind them. They haven't fought in almost two years—at least not while I was around to hear it."

I stared straight ahead, concentrating on the point where the headlights were swallowed by the murky night. "Mia must have been close with your family."

There it was again, that strange thread of jealousy of a girl dead and gone. Saying her name felt wrong, like a curse word, sticky and forbidden. But I've never had trouble swearing. This felt worse, as though it was taboo, as though saying her name aloud was bad luck.

"It was hard on all of us," said Tyler. "And I didn't handle it well. It put a lot of strain on my family."

I didn't want to talk about Mia, didn't want to feel this great chasm between us where the memories and ghosts of our dead friends linked us with a bridge made of smoke. A bridge we could see but couldn't cross.

"Were you—were you with her when she died?" I asked. I felt rather than saw him flinch.

"No," he said. "She died alone." I was thrown off by the sudden harshness in his voice, like every syllable had barbed wire wrapped around it.

"Tyler, is there something—"

"Shit!"

I jerked forward hard as he slammed on the breaks. On instinct I threw my hands out and my fists collided with the front of the car, knuckles stinging as they connected with the hard plastic. Screeching filled my ears, an endless shriek of rubber and asphalt. The seatbelt knifed into my chest and I cried out, my voice rivaling that of the skidding tires.

Just as quickly as it started it was over.

Air shuddered in and out of my body and there were tears flowing freely down my cheeks. Frozen in the beam of the headlights was an enormous deer. Huge dark eyes stared impassively at us and then, with a flick of its tail, it bounded away. Mist swirled in the headlights where it had been.

I dropped my hands, rubbing my sweat-slicked palms up and down my jeaned thighs, shaking from head to toe. I couldn't seem to get enough air. Color danced along the edge of my vision. Everything seemed to be in working order, but it felt like I was having a heart attack. I hadn't even noticed that Tyler had thrown his arm across my chest to try and hold me in place.

With trembling hands I unbuckled my seatbelt and fumbled for the latch on the door. Ignoring Tyler, who was saying something, my name maybe, I stumbled out of the car. Cold November air filled my chest and froze the tears on my face. At first it was bracing, and then as the smell of burning brakes filled my lungs with it, it was all I could do not to vomit.

The cold was inside me, freezing my blood, turning my nails and eyelashes brittle. I sat down on the wet grass on the side of the road, not caring that it was soaking into my jeans, not caring that I was on the side of dark, unfamiliar street. Drawing my knees to my chest, I buried my nose between them, inhaling the smell of fabric and detergent and my perfume. Anything to get rid of the gasoline-laced air.

Above me the bare branches rattled and clacked in the wind like a grisly wind chime made of bones. The memory of the beeping hospital machine echoed in my ears in time with my racing pulse.

A hand on my shoulder made me jump. Tyler had crouched down beside me.

"Are you okay?"

I merely nodded. I had swallowed my voice.

He had moved the car to the side of the road and turned the hazard lights on; a warning. They flashed behind him, illuminating his features and then turning him to a silhouette, light, dark, light, dark, a pulsing orange halo.

"I'm so sorry, I didn't see the deer," he said.

"Not your fault," I mumbled.

Now that the shaking had subsided and my head was beginning to clear, the all too familiar feeling of shame was pooling inside me like acid, eating away at my organs, burning through me until I was afraid I was going to combust and fly apart into a million pieces.

"Is there anything I can do?"

I shook my head vigorously and unclenched my arms from where there were locked around my knees. Next, I relaxed my fists, biting my lip when the pulsing of bruises filled my knuckles with the return of blood to my fingers. I dug my fingers into the earth, using it as leverage to push myself back to my feet. Without a word, I walked back to the car. Skids marks on the road ran parallel to my path, permanent scars on the asphalt.

I stared straight ahead as Tyler pulled back on to the road even though I could feel his gaze like a whisper against my skin. I didn't want to see the look on his face, the one of pity, the kind you gave senile old people and three-legged dogs—where the only thing you could do was feel bad for them.

"When did it start," asked Tyler, finally testing the silence. But his voice didn't break it, it softened it almost, dissipating, dissolving, wrapping around me like steam in a shower. It was calming.

"The nightmares started after the funeral, when I had been weaned off the narcotics from the hospital. The first flashback happened the week I returned to school, when two cars got into a fender-bender in the parking lot. I had to sit in the nurse's office for an hour before I could go back to class. That's when I started seeing a therapist."

"I'm guessing they put you on anxiety meds?" he asked. But there was no probing in his voice, no curiosity. None of the careful tip-toeing around my feelings while at the same time wanting to find out what was wrong with me. It was just a question.

"Yeah," I admitted. "But I started ditching them after a while. They made me feel—"

"Like a zombie?"

"How'd you know?"

"I did a stint on them for a while after Mia."

I never would have known. Tyler had always seemed calm, so in control of his feelings and thoughts and words. I had always envied him for it.

"I hated them," I said, pulling on my fingers. "I hated being medicated. But I hate feeling out of control too."

"Control—it's kind of like memory. It's not precise and sometimes it only comes back in pieces. But the more you work at it, the easier it gets."

I looked out the window, but there was nothing but darkness. "How come no matter what we are doing, it always seems to lead back to them?" I asked.

Tyler reached out for my hand once more and I took it gratefully.

"Because they are a part of us," he said, simply.

It seemed to take a minute for my brain to process his words, as though it had to deconstruct them letter by letter. He was right, I realized. I was trying to separate Danny into my past so that maybe I could be free of his ghost in my future. But you can't separate someone who is a part of you. My time with him had made me, for better or worse, who I was now, the same way his death had.

While I had been lost in thought, we had driven onto campus and were pulling up to my dorm.

"I lived here my freshmen year," said Tyler, looking up at the building.

"You did?" I asked surprised.

He nodded, pulling into a space and putting the car in park. My fingers were still intertwined with his. He studied our hands, staring at the point where mine folded easily into the curve of his much larger palm. But he seemed to be staring through them.

After a minute or so he looked back up at me.

"Can I show you something?"

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Hmmm, what do you think he's going to show her?

Anyway what did you guys think? :) Comment, vote, share, whatever you feel, thanks for just stopping by to read! It always makes me day :)