SECOND EARTH
Courtney Chetwynde was coming home.
Spending nearly two months in a hospital had been torture for her. In more ways than one. But she knew she couldn’t rush things. Broken bones took time to heal. So did a broken spirit. She would never be able to shake the memories of what happened to her the night of the accident. That was good. She didn’t want to shake them. She wanted to remember every last detail. She had been riding her bike on a lonely country road when a car ran her off the side of a steep embankment. The fall was brutal. It broke four ribs, and her left arm in two places. Her left leg was broken so badly that they had to put four pins in to help it set properly. She even got a concussion. But as horrible as those injuries were, they weren’t life threatening. The real problem came with the internal injuries. She needed surgery to repair tears in so many places that Courtney would stop listening whenever a doctor discussed how bad off she was. She didn’t want to hear it. In the two months since the accident, not a day went by without some doctor saying, “You’re lucky to be alive.”
Courtney didn’t feel very lucky. If she were lucky, she wouldn’t have been nearly killed. If she were lucky, she never would have gone to summer school and met a guy named Whitney Wilcox. If she were lucky, she wouldn’t have thought he was cute and developed a major crush on him. If she were lucky, she wouldn’t have been riding her bike to meet him when she got run off the road. If she were lucky, she would have realized there really was no such person as Whitney Wilcox. He was an illusion. A lie. As she lay crumbled in the woods on the side of the road that horrible night, just before she lost consciousness, she saw that the person driving the car that hit her was none other than Whitney Wilcox. The guy she was growing to like. The guy she thought might become the boyfriend that Bobby Pendragon wasn’t able to be.
The guy who turned out to be Saint Dane.
The demon had tried to kill her. He had looked down on her broken body from the road above and. said, “I give, and I take away. You people of Second Earth are so easily controlled. I was hoping this would be more of a challenge, but alas. It was not meant to be.” The demon had then transformed himself from the image of Whitney Wilcox into a huge black bird that flew away into the night, leaving her to die.
But Courtney didn’t cooperate. Thanks to Mark Dimond. Good old Mark. She managed to get a call out to him on her cell phone. All she was able to say before passing out was, “He’s here.” It was all she needed to say. Mark knew what she meant. He knew she was in trouble. Mark came screaming up to Massachusetts, where Courtney was going to summer school, and found her near death on the side of the road. Mark saved her life. It was the one thing that didn’t surprise Courtney about the whole nasty experience. She knew that if there was anyone she could always count on, it was Mark.
What did surprise her was that Mark was helped by a guy who had been his archenemy since they were little kids. Andy Mitchell. Mitchell gave Mark a ride from their home in Connecticut up to the Berkshires on a moment’s notice. (Mark didn’t have his driver’s license.) If not for Andy, Mark wouldn’t have made it in time. That was a strange and somewhat unsettling thought. Courtney knew that if not for Andy Mitchell’s help, she’d be dead.
As grateful as she was, it was an odd feeling, because Andy Mitchell had been nothing more than an obnoxious bully for as long as she could remember. He took particular pains to harass Mark. Poor nerdy Mark. Bully bait. But it had recently come out that as idiotic as Andy Mitchell was, he was very gifted at math. So gifted that he was asked to join Mark’s elite science club at school. Sci-Clops. Courtney knew that Mark hated the idea of his beloved club being invaded by the un-beloved Andy Mitchell. But even Mark had to admit that Mitchell was special. Better still, after he joined Sci-Clops, Mitchell stopped harassing Mark. The two seemed to have found common ground and made peace.
But that didn’t make it any less strange for Courtney to see the two of them standing, together, at the foot of her bed in the intensive care unit after she came out of surgery. After that horrible day, Courtney often asked Mark how they could suddenly be so tight.
“You know he’s a turd,” Courtney would say.
Mark would always laugh and say something like, “He used to be, but I’m really getting to know the guy and he’s okay. And he’s, like, a genius, too!”
“Andy Mitchell? Genius?” Courtney would reply. “That’s like saying you found a cockroach that can do algebra.”
But Mark didn’t back down. If there was anyone who deserved to hate Andy Mitchell, it was Mark. Bullies always went after the insecure, brainy types. Mark was the perfect target. Andy had harassed him for years. So Courtney figured that if Mark could forgive him, who was she to hold a grudge?
Especially since he helped save her life. Courtney decided to be less judgmental, no matter how big a slug Mitchell was. Or used to be.
After the accident Mark would often take the train from their home in Connecticut up to Massachusetts to visit Courtney in the hospital and keep her company while she went through therapy. Courtney looked forward to those visits. Being stuck in a hospital three hours from home was not a fun way to pass the time. The doctors didn’t want her to travel until she had completely healed, so she spent week after boring week sitting in her room watching daytime TV. She started getting hooked on soap operas, which embarrassed her. Courtney didn’t think of herself as someone who would be interested in such goofy TV. But it wasn’t like she had a whole lot of choices. Talk shows were boring and she was too old for cartoons. So she got wrapped up in the make-believe lives of some fakey TV characters. When it got to the point where the nurses would come in and ask her, “What happened to so and so?” or “Who’s cheating on who?” and Courtney actually knew the answers, she decided it was time to stop watching. She didn’t want to be working so hard to heal her body, while letting her brain turn to pudding.
Eventually they moved her out of the regular hospital and into a wing that was all about rehabilitation. It was a welcome relief, but a grueling experience. When the cast came off her leg, Courtney had to learn how to walk again. The pain was incredible, but the physical therapists didn’t cut her any slack. She didn’t want them to either. She told them to push her. She’d remind them, “If I complain, push harder.”
That was Courtney. She had always been driven, but the recent turn of events in her life had given her new purpose. It was hard for her to think back on the chain of circumstances that led to her being in the hospital, but she forced herself to. She wanted to remember it all, if only to learn from the ordeal. It was a difficult journey that had begun long before the accident.
Months before, she discovered that she and Mark had made the ultimate mistake by traveling through the flume to Eelong. As much as they had done an amazing job and helped Bobby save a territory, she later learned that by using the flumes, she and Mark had caused the death of a Traveler. Only Travelers were supposed to use the flumes, and by using it themselves they had weakened the tunnels through time and space so badly that the flume on Eelong had collapsed. When it crumbled, it trapped Spader and Gunny, and killed Kasha. The horrible truth was that by trying to help Bobby, they actually had helped Saint Dane in his quest to control Halla. What she thought was her greatest victory turned out to be a tragic failure.
The realization crushed Courtney, who was already going through a tough time at home and at school. Growing up, Courtney had always been the best at everything. Especially at sports. But when she hit high school, she found that others were as good as she was. Some better. Courtney was not used to losing. She wasn’t even used to trying that hard. She didn’t handle the pressure well, which felt like yet another failure. She always defined herself by her abilities on the field. Losing that made her feel worthless and depressed. She barely spoke with her parents. It was becoming unbearable to be Courtney, or to be around her. The many weeks lying in a hospital bed gave her time to think back on that difficult period and try to figure out why things had gone so wrong. She was disappointed in her inability to compete, of course, but she realized that what bothered her even more was the fact that she handled it so badly. Being good at sports was one thing. Having the strength to deal with life challenges was a whole nother ballgame, so to speak. A more important one. Courtney realized she didn’t have the strength to deal with either, and it depressed her.
The months of healing and introspection finally allowed her to admit that the reason she was so quick to jump to Eelong was because she wanted to prove something to herself. Of course she wanted to help Bobby, but she also desperately needed to restore her self-confidence. She wanted to win at something in the worst way. It almost worked, too. That is, until she realized how much damage she and Mark had done by traveling. When the truth came out, she fell into a total depression. It was so bad she couldn’t get out of bed. Her schoolwork was sent
