Keep Me Still by Caisey Quinn

“Give me your wallet,” a stocky man coming towards us in a black hooded jacket sneers at my father. My mom pulls me in hard behind her so I can’t see his face. Her fingers dig deep into my arms, and I’m not sure if I’m the one trembling or she is. My heart pounds so hard it’s making me sick, and my vision is blurring.
    The gunshots wake me and I’m sitting upright in bed. For a second, I think I’m in a hospital room. There’s another bed next to mine but it’s empty. Shit, where am I?
    Sweat beads down my back and I breathe deep, in through my nose and out through my mouth like Dr. McCalla taught me. College—I’m in college. I reach up with my left hand and touch the raised skin above my ear. I’m not in Georgia, but in California. In my dorm room. And thank God my roommate isn’t here to see my early morning freak out.
    Maybe I can still pass as normal. For now at least.

~ PAST TENSE : Used to place an action or situation in the past. Or in my case, tense shit from the past that just won’t go away. ~

T he sprawling campus of Southern California State University, or SoCal as the locals call it, is crowded as my roommate, Corin Connelly, and I make our way to Freshmen Orientation. Several people move in random directions ahead of us wheeling large luggage carts.
    “Wow, how glad are you that we moved in early right now?” Corin asks, her red curls blowing in her face as she turns towards me.
    “Extremely.” Though I’m managing. A year ago I couldn’t have stood this—the chaos, the crowd, the noise.
    Corin is from New York, and even after a week of living together, she still hasn’t told me exactly why she picked a college so far from home. Not that I really disclosed much either.
    I did mention that if I hadn’t gotten out of my tiny hometown of Hope Springs, Georgia, my head would have exploded. I just didn’t explain that it was literally a possibility. And I left out the gory details involving Landen O’Brien and the brutal beating he’d given my heart. I’d been planning to go to UGA until…well, until he left.
    Now, I’m all alone on the other side of the country. Starting over. Finally.
    I’m trying my best to live each day to the fullest. The word they keep using after every EKG and test they’ve run the past six months follows me around, orbiting my every thought. Inoperable .
    I’ve said it so many times to myself that it’s lost all meaning.
    What Corin doesn’t know—what no one in California knows, thank goodness—is that I barely got through high school due to a seizure disorder. Because I’m especially defective, my particular disorder was one no doctor could explain until recently, when they discovered that my seizures aren’t strictly from my Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, the result of seeing my parents murdered in front of me five years ago, like we originally thought. Apparently God wanted to cover His bets when it came to making my life as difficult as possible. So I also have a decent-sized subdural hematoma pressing on my brain as well. Possibly from the fall I took when my mother fell on me after being shot. A souvenir of sorts of the worst day of my entire existence.
    No matter how you look at it, I should be not be alive. And yet…here I am. My Aunt Kate raised me after my parents’ death. She’s also the only other person on Earth who knows about the late-breaking brain injury news. I have every intention of keeping it that way.
    Inoperable.
    “We’ve got some time,” Corin says, interrupting my thoughts. “Want to run in here and grab a coffee and chill for a few? Maybe let the crowd thin out a bit?”
    “Sure,” I answer, amazed and grateful that she’s already noticed my discomfort in large crowds. I can’t even imagine how she would’ve handled the way I used to be. I’m so much better now that it’s as if I’m a different person. And it’s mostly because of him. Landen . Thinking his name causes me to flinch internally—I