Fly Away by Kristin Hannah Page B

hard to breathe. It made me cry at thirteen,
     this song. Then, I’d thought it was a tragic love story, I think. Now I know it is
     a tragic life story.
    Don’t be a fool with your life.
    A bicycle appears in front of me, an old-fashioned banana-seated girl’s bike with
     a white basket. It is leaning against a hedge of roses. I go to it and climb on, pedaling …
     where? I don’t know. A road appears beneath me, stretches as far as I can see. It
     is the middle of a starry night, and suddenly I am speeding downhill like a kid again,
     my hair is alive, whipping all around my face.
    I know this place. Summer Hill. It is woven into my soul. Obviously I’m not really here. The real me is lying on a hospital bed, broken and bleeding. So I am imagining
     this, but I don’t care.
    I throw my arms open and let my speed pick up, remembering the first time I did this.
     We were in the eighth grade, Kate and me, and we were on these bikes, on this hill,
     riding into the start of a friendship that is the only true love story of my life.
     I forced her, of course. Threw rocks at her bedroom window and woke her up in the
     middle of the night and begged her to sneak out with me.
    Did I know how our whole lives would be changed with that one choice? No. But I knew
     my life needed changing. How could I not? My mother had perfected the art of leaving
     me and I had spent my entire childhood pretending truth was fiction. Only with Kate
     had I ever really been honest. My BFF. The only person who had ever loved me for me.
    The day we became friends is one I will never forget. It makes sense to me that I
     remember it now. We were fourteen-year-old girls, both friendless and as different
     as salt and pepper. On that first night, I’d told my stoned mom—who’d started calling
     herself Cloud in the seventies—that I was going to a high school party and she’d told
     me to have fun.
    In a dark stand of trees, a boy I barely knew raped me and left me to walk home alone.
     On the way, I saw Katie sitting on the top rail of her fence. She spoke to me as I
     walked past.
    “I love it out here at night. The stars are so bright. Sometimes, if you stare up
     at the sky long enough, you’ll swear tiny white dots are falling all around you, like
     fireflies.” A retainer drew the s’ s into a long lisp. “Maybe that’s how this street got its name. You probably think I’m
     a nerd for even saying that.… Hey, you don’t look good. And you reek like puke.”
    “I’m fine.”
    “Are you okay? Really?”
    To my horror, I started to cry.
    That was the beginning. Our beginning. I told her my secret shame and she held out
     her hand and I clung to her. From that day on, we were inseparable. Through high school
     and college, and forever after that, no experience was real until I told Katie about
     it, no day was quite right if we didn’t talk. By the time we were eighteen, we were
     TullyandKate, the pair, impossible to separate. I was there at her wedding and at
     the birth of her babies, and when she tried to write a book, and I was there in 2006
     when she took her last breath.
    With my hands outstretched and the wind streaming through my hair and memories riding
     alongside me, I think: This is how I should die .
    Die? Who says you get to die?
    I would know that voice anywhere. I have missed it every single day for the last four
     years.
    Kate .
    I turn my head and see an impossible sight: Kate is on a bike beside me. The sight
     of her overwhelms me, and I think: Of course . This is my version of going into the light, and she has always been my light. For
     a brief, beautiful last second, we’re TullyandKate again.
    “Katie,” I say in awe.
    She gives me a smile that seems to sear through the years.
    The next thing I know, we are sitting on the grassy, muddy bank of the Pilchuck River,
     just like we used to, back in the seventies. The air smells of rain and mud and deep
     green trees. A decaying, moss-furred log gives us