P.H. Low

Study Break

The driver’s car is so enormous, Eli can barely see through the windshield.

It is one of those black SUVs built like a tank—three tons of sheer gas-guzzling machinery, doors he will have to step up to enter, the driver a professional-looking masc in a dress shirt and sunglasses. Yet as Eli clambers in, legs clenching from the exertion—as June slides Eli’s crutches and backpack next to his feet and then dumps their luggage into the trunk, waving away the driver’s help—a whiff of tire rubber hurls him headlong back into last August: midnight in the thick of summer, all liquid heat and seared asphalt, orange streetlights pooled in velvet dark and the scream of headlights barreling too fast too fast—

“Hey,” June says, buckling in beside him, and he realizes he’s pressed back into his seat, hands clenched around the armrests. “You going to be okay? Is this different enough?”

He swallows. Shame wells in him—at how much this ride will cost, at the cancellation fee her app will charge, even if they call off this metal monstrosity that was supposed to help him shake the memory of June’s sedan on its way back from a karate tournament. And, too, they are headed to a retreat, even if it is for studying. They’re supposed to be having something like fun.

“I’ll survive,” he says faintly, and the driver starts the engine.

The first five minutes—he switches his eyes to the dashboard clock as often as he can without courting nausea—are quiet enough: slow flicker of buildings outside the window, R&B crooning low from the speakers, June’s hand warm and callused around his. But then they merge onto I-76—cars zooming past, the too-close roar of a semi, and tension ratchets through him, crawls beneath his skin tire screech red glare crunch of metal—

“Eli.”

He gasps, dragging himself back to the silver curve of the door handle, the gloss of the mahogany steering wheel in the driver’s steady hands. June’s thumb tracing slow circles against the inside of his forearm, her mouth half-open with the beginning of an apology.

“Don’t start,” he says thickly, sensing yet another round of the discussion they’ve hashed out repeatedly over the past few months—It isn’t your fault, he was drunk—but then the driver switches lanes a hair too fast and Eli’s mouth fills with the echo of glass grit. “Oh—”

“Eli. Breathe,” June says, and he puts his head between his knees in out in out his legs cramping again, airbag thump and glass in his hands streaming crimson and it hurts, it hurts—

“N-No,” he half-sobs, mortification peeling him open. “No no no please—”

“Eli.”

“I know, I know, I’m sorry—”

“It’s okay. Let it out.”

A strangled sound out of his throat, and he presses his knuckles to his teeth, his eyes wet. Nine months after the drunk driver and he should be well on the way to recovery. Nine months after and he should not be falling apart like this inside every car—pulse spiking in his chest, pain singing through his legs and spine as if in the direct aftershock of collision.

“Sorry,” he repeats, this time to the driver glancing at him surreptitiously in the rearview mirror. “I had—there was a—”

But June, her deep brown eyes fixed on his—she is still taking a full course load this semester; has scheduled her LSAT for two months from now, and volunteers at one of the local schools, and is organizing the university karate club’s trip to the national tournament. And Eli knows it is not the same—she came away with only a mild concussion, a stiffness in her neck sometimes when the mornings are cold—but there is a part of him that has been trying to keep up with her since they were children sprinting across their adjoined backyards; that looks at all the classes and volunteering and research he has let fall by the wayside and sees not the rest he needs for recovery, but something precious slipping through his fingers.

He touches the pucker in his cheek where a particularly large shard of glass once embedded itself. “H-How much longer?”

“About twenty minutes.”

“All right.” He exhales noisily, embarrassed; pushes away the echo of fluorescent hospital lights, the afterimage of his legs crushed between his seat and the metal door. June is rubbing his back now, in slow circles between his shoulder blades, and he focuses on the sense of safety trickling through his skin, her low hum as she harmonizes with the song on the radio. He is here, he tells himself over and over: blue sky shining through the windows and the jut of distant skyscrapers, concrete noise barriers giving way to wind-rippled trees. What’s past is past—his job, as his parents put it, is only to walk forward.

“Eli,” June starts again, “I’m sorry,” but he shakes his head.

“You weren’t—you weren’t the one who broke the law.”

“Not the point.”

“But you’re studying for the—” A convertible cuts in front of them, horns blaring, and a whimper breaks out of his throat.

Nineteen interminable minutes later, the car stops. The heavy door beside him swings silently open. Eli fumbles for his seatbelt and crutches, and June offers her arm as he climbs out, halfway to solicitous.

“That wasn’t worth paying extra, was it.”

“Er,” he says, tucking the crutches under his arms. “The interior was nice.”

“But it didn’t significantly reduce your symptoms.”

“I—no. Not really.” His chest is still tight, a hollowness rattling inside his ribcage. “You should be the doctor.”

“Ha. Like I’d have the brain for it.”

“I’m not sure I have—” Eli starts, but then their driver sets down his suitcase and bows toward the flagstone path before them, and for the first time since they’ve arrived, he looks up.

The cottage is something out of a fairytale—ivy-covered stone walls and sloping roof, the forest around it rustling damp and green; a garden enclosed by immaculately trimmed hedges. And then there’s the quiet. His and June’s dorm, though tucked into the less raucous side of campus, sits on a street corner across from three different hospitals, overlooking a favorite throughway for police cars and fire trucks; their upstairs neighbor blasts an intermittent bass beat from eight in the morning until midnight. Here, though, as the hum of the SUV fades into the forest, there is only the susurrus of wind through leaves, the ringing absence of urban chaos.

Eli takes his first full breath in the last half hour, calm seeping deep beneath his skin.

“Oh,” he says, hazy. There is so much green his eyes sting. The photos on the website did not capture it at all. “It’s so—”

“Perfect for studying in, yeah?” June takes up her suitcase, heads up the path when Eli gestures that he’ll manage his own. “You can have that little office space with the file cabinets— it’s almost as bland as your bedroom.”

“Ah.” He pushes away the thought of the test prep books and flashcards stuffed in his suitcase. In the past few months of them living together, he has kept the space in front of his desk relatively free of decoration—at first to help him concentrate, and then because he couldn’t bear for June to see how little he actually did. But he only says, “I can’t focus when there’s too much on the walls.”

“Well, I can’t focus when it feels like I’m in generic office hell.”

“Another reason to rethink being a lawyer,” he says, and she flicks his forehead. “Ow.”

“Sorry, I’ll do it harder next time.”

“No no don’t—”

She laughs and presses her lips to his temple, just a touch. And for a moment, he does not have to think about the constant ache in his legs and lower back, or the hundreds of chemical reactions that seem to have erased themselves from his memory—does not fear the climb in his pulse every time a car door closes him in. Only a deep cool lake of quiet brimming beneath his skin. Only that he is with June, and he is home.

#

The cottage’s interior is just as quaint as its outside—squashy sofas and plush grey rugs, a mishmash of knickknacks and china plates gathered on shelves in every room. Yet the overall effect is one of comfort rather than crowdedness, as if this is a place people actually live.

“Cute, huh?” June lays out her suitcase in the middle of the living room, riffling through button-downs and underwear before fishing out a plastic bag that smells like a suspicious cross between cooked meat and curdled skin. “Lunch?”

“Er,” Eli says, inhaling carefully. “Is that a rotisserie chicken?”

“Yeah, and now my clothes smell like ass.” June unveils the container with a flourish, sets it on the kitchen table. “But I wasn’t about to take another Uber to the fucking grocery store.”

“Oh,” Eli says faintly. More food packed beneath June’s underwear—Tupperware containers of curry and rice noodles from June’s mother, apple crumble muffins for breakfast, a somewhat incongruous bag of arugula, and he swore he’d set up a reminder somewhere to do an extra shopping trip but there was so much else to prepare, all his rehab equipment and medications and textbooks he hasn’t opened in months. Eating slipped his mind. “I’ll pay you back.”

June raises a brow. “You can try.”

He sighs—they have, in fact, been engaged in a five-year Venmo war in which he keeps attempting to reimburse her for various household items and she keeps sending it back. “Maybe I will.”

“Well, the last time my parents visited, they were horrified at the number of protein bar wrappers in the trash can under your desk. So consider all the homemade stuff forcibly pressed upon you by Aunty Mai.”

Of course they looked in his wastebasket. “And she’d be furious if I tried to offer her money in exchange, huh.”

June grins. “Exactly.”

“That’s—that’s playing dirty.”

“What, are you still surprised?”

#

The office, contrary to June’s oh-so-complimentary sales pitch, is a dream of a study room—a wide bay window overlooking sheer forest, the promised file cabinets overshadowed by a beautifully carved oak desk. Even fully spread out, Eli’s books and scratch paper and pencil pouch do not take up even half the available space.

Yet as he flips open his book to a fresh practice test, the old fear congeals in his stomach. The orgo questions he could have at least broken into component parts last year only dredge up the memory of his anxiety attacks during midterms, the way he’d hobbled out of the exam room to hyperventilate in a storage closet. The blot analysis charts drag him back beneath the fluorescent strip lighting of the lab, and from there to the hospital, his hospital, his limbs cocked at wrong angles and spattered dark red.

He cannot go back to premed. Even if the kindness of his doctors and nurses has been perfectly inspirational; even if, the cynical part of him whispers, he now has the perfect essay topic. He cannot spend the rest of his life walking through the kind of place where he saw his femur poking out of his right thigh.

His phone pings, and he startles so hard he knocks his pencils to the ground. But it is only his parents, responding to his text that he’d arrived safely—and then, shortly after, his father linking him to yet another article about some cancer survivor who became a motivational speaker.

The weight on Eli’s chest presses deeper.

In the first couple months of his recovery, his parents were more anxious than he’d ever wanted to see them—hovering over his bed past visiting hours, pressing home-cooked meals into his stitched-up hands when he could barely hold down pudding. These days, however, with the doctors expecting full recovery—just this last stretch of rehab—his Ma and Ba have taken to the idea that he needs more encouragement, that he’s simply not trying hard enough.

He sends them a thumbs up, and then turns off his phone and reaches for his crutches.

The garden is a festival of color—roses blazing crimson and cream, peonies exploding in showers of soft petals, delicate purple blooms whose names he doesn’t know swaying gently in the wind’s caress.

June sits cross-legged on the nearest bench, thoughtfully chewing her nails as she contemplates her laptop.

“Hey,” she says, seeing him—and then, at his expression: “Art-less walls getting to you?”

He makes his slow way toward her, hips twisting awkwardly as something twinges in his lower back. “Sure.”

“You give up too easily.”

Her tone is teasing, but he looks at her then, the truth burning at the tip of his tongue. June visited him after the ugliest of his surgeries; still pretends not to look, some mornings, when the simplest leg exercises drive him to tears. Yet she still believes in him—in what she sees as the whirring engine of his mind; in the quiet, implacable persistence he used to project. In how, despite the fear that vises his ribcage day after day, he has always scraped the grade.

We’ll apply to all the same places, she has said—and kept saying, even after the crash. We’ll get each other through. And he knows medical school will be even more difficult than what he has endured thus far; the exhaustion is already heavy in his bones. But he cannot bear to smother the light in her eyes when she looks at him, the answering glow in his own chest. For the one thing they still might have in common, when it is only his world that has been breaking apart.

He lowers himself onto the bench, rests his head on June’s shoulder.

“Remember when we visited campus for our college tour, junior year?” she says, scratching out a logic chart on a piece of paper. “And at the Q&A that snot-nosed admissions rep was like, ‘Well, actually, our acceptance rates are quite low, so most of you in this room should not even hope to be admitted?’”

He laughs weakly. “Oh god, that put me off applying so much.”

“And yet we did. As a personal fuck you to that guy.”

“We did,” he concedes, and she turns to look at him again, her eyes soft.

“Don’t underestimate yourself,” she says quietly. “Anywhere you go, they’ll be goddamned lucky to have you.”

Then she bends back toward her practice set and he watches the robins flitting through the trees, his head still resting on her shoulder, and aches for something he cannot name.

#

Here are his days after the crash: sobbing into his sheets as a nurse tried to move his legs; shouting himself awake to the echo of red glare and the thud of breaking; the smell of blood crawling constant up his nostrils. His college advisor’s barely concealed shock, when they met over video call to discuss medical leave, at the stitches that zigzagged his face.

His parents, once adamant he fulfill his-their American dream, have become softer-spoken—treat him now, begrudgingly, with something like gentleness. June’s patience-bordering-on-penance is greater than anything he has the right to ask for; her parents worry over him as if he’s their own. But none of them have been inside his body. None of them know, truly, what he means when he says it has been hard. And now, with their hopes awakened again—his year off only a brief interlude to the path he must blaze through the world—he cannot figure out how to tell them.

#

He does try, though, after dinner.

He and June are nestled on the couch—though nestled is perhaps a loose term, as his back is propped upright by a plastic support, legs extended stiff across the ottoman. June pages through streaming options—mostly animated shows, since he gets nauseous now at live-action blood and fight scenes—while guilt fills him to brimming.

The precise show is not the point, he tells himself. More that they are watching it together. More that their fingers are softly intertwined, her leg pressed warm against his. But he has always needed everything to be correct.

“I heard this one was good,” June says, hovering her cursor, to which he nods. But before she can press play, he rests his hand clumsily on top of hers, his face heating.

“I—um. Ah. Question for you.”

Her mouth crooks—she seems to find it endlessly amusing that he loses his powers of speech upon physical contact. “Yes?”

“Do you—are you ever afraid you’ll fail?”

She cocks her head, knowing. Not about his latest uncertainty, perhaps, but this is the way he has always been—every quiz a thin ledge between life and death, every final exam the edge of a blade. The crash has only sharpened what was already there.

“Like, out of law?” she asks.

“Y-Yeah.”

“Sometimes.” June burrows in next to him. “But I’m putting in my best effort, and I think that has gotten me a decent way so far. And if I’m struggling, there are people I can talk to, family and friends and tutors and professors. There are ways to break my problems into smaller parts.” Then, softly: “You’re not alone, you know.”

And Eli does know, despite the way his life bent that night like a candle in the wind: that the people who love him will not leave if they have a choice. That they want him to succeed, however strange their ways of showing it.

But if he is too exhausted to reach out to them—if the cracked clay pot of his mind simply cannot bear any more strain—is that okay? Isn’t it worse to be part of a support network, then, because those who love him will have to see him fall?

“I don’t think I’ve had a full night’s sleep in a year,” he says, his throat going tight. “I can’t—I haven’t—studying has been—”

 “I know.” June cups his face in her hand, traces the knot of tension at his temple, and he exhales unsteadily. Of course she knows—for the past few months, she has listened to him yell himself awake at least twice a week, held his hand as he heaved and struggled against his blankets. “You’re still recovering, eejit. You shouldn’t hold yourself to your old standards right now.”

“I’m not.”

“Aren’t you?”

“I’m—I’m only taking one class,” he protests, heat blotching his cheeks. “I’m not in the lab anymore at all, I’m barely studying for the MCAT—”

“But you’re beating yourself up because you think you should,” June says, and he deflates.

“Oh.”

“Eli.” Her dark eyes are intent. “If you need more time, then take it. More than half of med school applicants do at least one gap year.”

He curls his hand around hers, lightning adrenaline lancing his heart. To admit he cannot follow where she goes—and then to stop trying, forever—it will break him, deeper than bone.

“Why do you know the med school gap year statistics?” he says faintly, and she winks.

“Premed Q&A boards.” She reaches for her laptop—reading in his face, perhaps, the border neither of them will cross. “Next episode?”

“Sure,” he says, tucking his hurt carefully back inside him, and she presses play.

#

He wakes to rolling credits and someone shaking him gently by the shoulder.

“Eli. Pspsps.”

A dense fog between his temples, his limbs gone heavy and slow. “Nuh?”

“Show’s over.” June, her lips soft against his half-open mouth. “And I want to be horizontal.”

He unsticks his eyelids, utterly disoriented. A tendon in his neck has stretched to aching, his legs gone rigid. When he attempts to push to his feet, something spasms through his spine.

“Oh,” he huffs, gesturing at his back. “‘mstuck—”

“Want help?”

“I’m—no thanks—er, yeah—”

“Here we go, then.” Her hands firm at his elbows, finding their grip, and then she pulls him to standing and he gasps, tears springing to his eyes.

“Oh,” he says again, as June hands him his crutches. The pain has wound tighter, now accompanied by a precarious twinge in his right knee, and the soft carpets of the living room seem like an impossible expanse to cross. “It—ah—maybe I should just sleep here tonight.”

June frowns. “Won’t that make it worse?”

“Yeah, but.” He sways forward and ends up, somehow, with his face pressed into her hair. She smells like the warm musk of her body wash, an edge of citrus that might be her hair spray, and electricity branches through his palms and the arches of his feet, desire and shame both. Their first night here, and he should be kissing her breathless as they stumble toward the bedroom, touching her beneath the sheets until she cries out his name. Proving he’s all right, and banishing her guilt once and for all. Instead, he feels as if he has aged forty years in one. “Sorry. I—I wanted to stay awake, I wanted to watch the show with you—”

“Hey.” She tips her head up, traces her thumb along the puckered scar at his cheek. “What did I just say about old standards?”

“I’m not—this isn’t an old—”

“Bullshit.”

He makes a sound of frustration. “But even the new ones,” he says, hating the waver in his voice. “I’m so tired, and everything hurts, and I can’t stand the thought of spending my life in even more hospitals and I have no idea what I’d do instead, but I look at you with all your dreams and I want you to have them even if I can’t be there beside you, I want you to be free of all this—”

A ghosting of warmth against his knuckles, and the rest of his words lodge in his throat. She has raised his hand to her lips, her eyes wide and solemn: a knight pledging loyalty, or a lover saying goodbye.

“June?” Eli says, unsteady.

She does not speak—only kisses the inside of his wrist, the archipelago of scars that trails up his forearm—and heat wells in his eyes. She has always had a flair for drama, always known how to maneuver around people so even those she rejects or disagrees with feel as if they’ve been seen. He just never imagined she would do it to him.

“June,” he repeats, but then her mouth brushes the inside of his elbow, permanently tender from hundreds of needle-stings, and a sob falls out of him like a reflex.

“Does it hurt?” Her voice husky, distant. “I never meant to hurt you.”

“N-N-No. I know.” He leans hard on the crutches, gulps a breath, then another. Don’t leave me, he wants to cry out, don’t go. But he will never ask her to stay, not if she doesn’t want to. She has already done enough. “I just—talk to me, please? What are you thinking about?”

“That I’m sorry. Again.” She looks up, her face drawn. “Were you only continuing with premed because of what I’d said about applying together?”

“I—no—not just that—”

“But it was a source of undue pressure.”

“That’s not your fault either, I never told you—”

“Eli.” She pulls back, and suddenly it is her eyes that are shining, her voice gone tight with unshed tears. “I wish you had, earlier. I—I’d like to be the kind of person you feel like you can tell.”

Eli swipes awkwardly at his tears, his head spinning. That she is not angry, even after all the energy she has poured into keeping the two of them together. That this is not the secret that, brought to light, fractures them forever. “But I haven’t told anyone else.”

“Exactly.” A twist at the corner of June’s mouth. “I’ve been cheering you on because I thought you were doing what you wanted. Not so you’d feel shitty that you weren’t.”

“Well, I did want it,” he says, and more tears leak out, trail hot down his face. “For a—for a really long time—”

And then another sob breaks out of him and his knees go weak and June wraps her arms around him, taking his crutches and easing him back onto the sofa.

“Eli,” she says, over and over, as his whole body heaves to the point of retching, “it’s okay, it’s really okay—” and he holds her close, some broken thing in his ribcage shaking and shaking, and doesn’t let go.

P. H. Low is a Locus- and Rhysling-nominated Malaysian American writer and poet with work published or forthcoming in Strange Horizons, Fantasy Magazine, Tor.com, and Diabolical Plots, among others. P. H. is a graduate of the Viable Paradise writing workshop, a Pitch Wars 2021 mentee, and a first reader for khōréō, a magazine of speculative fiction and migration. P. H. is represented by Sara Megibow and Savannah Brooks at KT Literary. Find P.H on Twitter @_lowpH and online at ph-low.com.