Dissonance - Book One

forty-five

I awake suddenly and jolt straight up in my bed, dripping in sweat. It has been twelve years and the nightmares about the accident aren't getting better despite my parents' insistence that therapy will help. If anything, the nightmares are getting worse. I try to catch my breath and take a swig of water from the bottle I keep next to my nightstand. I reach for the small angel I keep on my bedside table, but it must have fallen on the floor. Streams of sunshine blast in through my bedroom shutters that I forgot to shut, yet again. I must have dozed off while reading. It's the only thing that quiets my mind at night. A copy of Brave New World lies next to me, confirming my suspicion. Even after all these years, this book is still a requirement for students to read their junior year; as if there haven't been any other books written in the last century. I squint in the harsh morning light as I look at the time on my cell phone. They let me sleep in again. Other parents would have forced their child to get up, but not mine. I have the accident to thank for that, although I'm far from thankful. I'd gladly get up at the crack of dawn if it meant they could still be here.

The smell of coffee funnels down the hallway and into my room. Even though I never drink the stuff, I love waking up to the aroma. I drag my body out of bed and go to the bathroom to splash water on my face. My reflection in the mirror is far from stellar. The sweat from my nightmare has matted the hair to my head in a greasy clump. I pile it on top of my head and twist it into a loose messy bun. There isn't time to shower. I'm late again, per usual. I stumble down the stairs and into the kitchen. I grab a piece of bread from the toaster, butter it, and plop down on a stool at the counter across from my mother whose eyes I try not to meet.

"Cutting it kind of close, don't you think?" my mom says in a voice that I can only guess is her best attempt at sounding irritated. She isn't of course, irritated that is. They never are with me. It's one of the perks of being the only child to survive a horrific car crash: complete and total immunity from ever having to be held accountable for anything. The guilt of the accident weighs heavy on them, even after all these years. I could get away with murder, but I don't press my luck. In some ways, I wish they would hold me more accountable for my actions, but they know they don't have to. I have, as my friend Lex has informed me, an irritating habit of always doing what's right. My therapist refers to it as "survivor guilt." He says I feel the need to be perfect and to always please everyone because of the guilt I feel over surviving the accident while my brother and sister are buried six feet underground. But I don't see it that way. It's less about making the right choice and more about simply doing what comes naturally to me. Things just seem to come more easily to me than most, another annoying personality trait that Lex loves to point out.

"Hey, you know me. I always find a way to get there on time," I say, using humor as a means of deflection. I take a long sip from the smoothie my mom has set down on the kitchen counter in front of me: strawberry banana, my favorite. She makes me one every morning.

"No, you always find a way to talk yourself out of your tardy," she laughs and gently swats at my hand with a spatula. She gives me a smile, then returns to pushing the eggs around in the pan. But what she doesn't know is that I've never talked my way out of a single tardy, in fact, I never really talk at all. I mainly sit in the back of the class trying to go unnoticed.

"So what's on the agenda for this weekend?" my father asks, trying to change the subject as he peers out from behind his newspaper. I think my dad might be the only person left on Earth who still reads the actual paper. It's hard to believe they print a paper in this day and age, but it has become somewhat of a novelty for aging millennials who miss the "good old days" as my father often refers to them.

The cover story catches my attention and I scan the article while stuffing my face full of slightly burnt toast. It's about the dangers of climate change. It seems like this topic is consuming every news outlet as of late. Today's tragic story focuses on a school bus full of children that was wiped out in the aftermath of Hurricane Charlie. The giant environmental company, Environettix, has jumped to the rescue, once again, and offered monetary support to the families of those who tragically lost a child: a small token, considering the city of Gulfport has agreed to pay them millions to install hurricane walls to protect them in the event of future natural disasters. The view of this particular journalist however, is that the disasters are not "natural" at all. "We" are to blame for this tragedy, as in the human race, for treating our world like a giant trash can, which has in turn resulted in environmental changes on an epic scale, such as frequent and increasingly powerful hurricanes. It seems like everything these days can be blamed on global warming, that is, except for my tardies. The prevalence of climate change in the media was one of the reasons I chose the topic for my midterm paper. I traced the current climate crisis back to, what many believed, was the beginning of the end: the day the United States abdicated from the Paris Agreement. It all kind of spun out of control from there. It was the belief of nearly ever modern-day climate science expert that this had been the tipping point for the world's current climate crisis.