I suck in my breath. The grass is itchy against the backs of my legs, and I can hear Finn breathing next to me, see the rise and fall of his chest.
“But you’re not an asshole,” I say, my voice soft. I nudge him gently on the shoulder with my hand and he nudges right back. He stretches his arms farther behind his head, and the corner of his T-shirt hitches up. Even though the light is dim, I can still make out his skin underneath, the way it’s entirely covered with faded yellow bruises.
“Finn,” I say under my breath, half sitting up, and his smile fades as he jerks the T-shirt back down.
“It’s fine.” I hear the note of exasperation in his voice.
“I know I don’t know much about boxing, but are you supposed to get that hurt?”
“It’s not a big deal.”
“But what if your organs are hurt?”
“Parker, my organs are fine, okay?” he snaps. “Stop worrying about everything.”
I flinch, wishing my brain were different.
But what if he’s really hurt?
After a few seconds, Finn clears his throat. “I’m sorry. That wasn’t the right thing to say.”
I turn my head to look at him, but his eyes are closed, and I can see the kid in him, face scrunched tight against the dark, against a ghost of a mom with teeth.
“Okay,” I say. “But will you just be careful when you box? Please? Now that I found you, I don’t want to lose you again.”
As soon as I’ve said it, I wonder if I’ve said too much, but Finn nods, inclining his head slightly, so it’s angled against my shoulder.
“Okay,” he says.
From the distance, I hear an engine and realize it’s coming from the runway, and it’s getting closer, and then I see lights heading our way, getting bigger and brighter.
“Here we go,” Finn says, and there’s something in his voice I haven’t heard before, something bright and untarnished, something new and vulnerable.
I watch as the lights get closer, see the airplane taking shape against the black of the sky behind it, see the enormity of it like it’s going to run us over, like it’s going to run our hearts into the ground.
Right then, Finn carefully twines his fingers in mine, giving my hand a gentle squeeze, and I realize maybe what we have isn’t exactly just friends anymore, but then the engine is roaring, the wind force pushing our hair off our faces, and the plane lifts off right in front of us, its nose rising into the night above us, and then the rest of it, leaving the earth, and for a second it’s so close, I could put my free hand up and touch it, all of gravity holding me close as tons of steel take flight, light as helium.
Thirty-Nine
MY ELBOWS ARE BENT, resting on my knees, and I’m pushing everything I have into the mound of red-brown clay in front of me. One side is uneven, the heel of my palm bumping into it every time it passes under my left hand, leaving a brief phantom space right after. But I wedge my right hand hard against it, pushing gently with the left, until it’s smooth and centered on the wheel.
Maybe it was the little bit of creative confidence I got from painting with Finn in the tunnel last week. Or maybe it’s just all the extra practice I’ve had on the wheel. But the past few times I’ve tried, I’ve managed to center the clay. And each time it happens, I feel this rush of satisfaction, that I’ve wrangled the heaviness into something grounded and steady.
I start to form the lump into a bowl.
Carla is bustling around behind me, taking pots out of the kiln, making small sighs of appreciation as she notices the way her new batch of glazes is settling.
But it’s all background noise, because to my astonishment, for the first time since I started this, the clay in front of me is doing what it’s supposed to do.
I feel a knot of tension in my shoulders, but the rest of me is assured, my fingers lifting up and out, the curve of clay following my lead, walls rising.
“Not bad at all,” Carla says, and I look up at her, startled. She points at the clay in front of me, clicks off my wheel.
Sometime in the past half hour, I have managed to shape something shapeless into a bowl, high and small and not nearly big enough for salad but maybe okay for some ice cream.
“Huh,” I say, looking at it, still dazed. “It’s kind of crooked around the top. And the bottom is heavy.”
“That’s what trimming is for,” Carla says.
“I don’t love this bulge in the middle. I guess I didn’t wedge it enough.”
“Parker, you threw a bowl.”
I wipe my clay-covered hands on my apron. “But it’s not—”
“Stop,” Carla says. “You did this. It’s yours. Not to get all hokey, but you gave it life—you found its shape.”
I look up at her, a smile tugging at the corner of my mouth.
“That is kind of hokey,” I say.
Carla rolls her eyes, shaking her head. “That bowl doesn’t suck,” she says.
“It doesn’t suck,” I admit, looking at the weird crooked thing I made sitting on the wheel.
“And it’s yours.”
“It’s mine,” I say.
And it is. It’s something I made with my two hands, something that didn’t exist in the world before me, something that wouldn’t exist without me.
And for those ten to twenty minutes I was shaping it, my mind was quiet. My hands were steady, strong, my feet solid against the ground.
It’s a terrible bowl. I know that.
And there’s still trimming to get through, which means that I might cut a hole through it or not trim enough. Or glazing: I could pick an ugly color. I might put on too much, and it will run, the pot sticking to the kiln. I might not put on enough, leaving bald spots. The pot might crack under the heat.
I know these things too.
But I think about the day I got my Harvard acceptance, how it felt like a house landed on my chest.
I think about the first day of my internship, how I was too terrified to even get on an elevator.
And I think about now, how I feel like I belong at Carla’s, how I made something that has nothing to do with my parents or Charlie or cancer or Harvard.
I made this.
It’s a terrible bowl, and I feel prouder of it than I did of my SAT scores and Harvard scholarship combined.
I take a wire and slide it under my creation, then use the silver spatula to wiggle the bowl off the bat and onto a piece of particleboard, taking care to tuck plastic around it, keeping it safe until the clay is dry enough to trim.
Carla helps me find a good spot for it on the shelf.
“By the way, I meant to tell you, I finally talked with the volunteer coordinator at Wild Meadows,” she says. “Alice isn’t coming back for a while.”
“Is she okay?”
“They think she had a stroke last week.”
“Oh,” I say, feeling a little crack in my heart, thinking of Alice’s hands fluttering over the paintbrush. “I hope she’s okay. I’d been researching some things to try with her.”
Carla nods. “That’s a good idea, Parker. You know, I took some art therapy classes back in college. I still have a few of the books, if you want to borrow them.”
“Yeah, actually that’d be pretty cool.”
Carla nods toward the clay, and I go over and grab another chunk and start wedging it on the block. As my hands move through it, kneading it, working the bubbles out of it, I wonder if I should tell Carla about Finn’s bruises. But then I remind myself of how I overreacted with Charlie at Kings Island, how I worry too much.
“Do you think it’d be okay for me to visit Alice? Maybe tomorrow afternoon?” I say instead, turning around to look at her.
“Sure, yeah. I bet Alice would welcome a visitor. I can make a call to Nancy, the volunteer coordinator, to see if it’s okay. I’ve got that conference in Dayton tomorrow, but it’s fine with me if you close up for the day. I can text you.”
“Thanks,” I say, nodding. “I’d like that.”
Forty
THE NEXT MORNING, I brace myself and press the doorbell, then step back, my Converse kicking the concrete like a nervous habit.
It’s overcast and muggy, the sky expectant with rain, like it would take one wrong word for it to just let loose.