I nodded. “My brother Logan played in a baseball tournament there a few years ago.” Back when he still played baseball, I added silently. Back when things were normal.
“Cool,” Sam said. “I used to play ball. Maybe I played against him. Are you a baseball fan?”
“Definitely.”
“Sox?” he asked.
I nodded again. “My dad always takes my brothers and me to Fenway a few times each summer.” Then I stopped abruptly, the words caught in my throat as I realized what I’d just said.
“Cool,” Sam said, oblivious. “I haven’t met a lot of girls who like baseball. Did you guys make it to a lot of games this year?”
I swallowed hard. “No,” I said without elaborating.
Sam seemed to register that something was off. He un-slouched from the locker and drew himself up to his full height. He was taller than I had realized.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Fine,” I said.
“Okay,” Sam said uncertainly. He gave me a half smile. “I’ll see you in class then, cool?” He turned and walked away.
? ? ?
The rest of the week sped by, the way the weeks in the fall always did, when your new grade and new classes still felt fresh and exciting. Sam had begun smiling at me in class now and saying hi in the halls like we were friends. I always smiled back and then looked quickly away, as if locking eyes with him would be a dead giveaway that I was beginning to develop a crush.
It’s not like it was wrong to feel that way about him. It was just that I figured I didn’t have much of a chance. Why bother liking him if the chances of him liking me back as more than a friend were slim to none? Summer Andrews was already flirting with him, and on Thursday, I saw him sitting at her popular senior table for lunch. I wasn’t an outsider—I was on student council and played lacrosse in the spring, and people liked me just fine—but I wasn’t a cheerleader either. I was brainy, quiet Lacey who everyone thought of as sweet instead of sexy. And despite what my dad used to tell me freshman year, when I’d come home sometimes on the verge of tears, there wasn’t a single guy at Plymouth East who would go for a nice girl over an easy one.
On Saturday morning, I was lying in bed, half-awake, trying to stop thinking about Sam, when the sounds from downstairs snapped my eyes open. I glanced over at the clock: 6:06. Too early for me to be awake. Too early for the TV in the living room to be on. But there was no such thing as too early or too late in our house anymore.
I sat up and listened, wondering what Tanner was watching. It was a pretty safe bet that it was either a cartoon or something to do with animals. He was obsessed with animals. Sure enough, when I went down the stairs a few minutes later and rounded the corner into the dark living room, my little brother was sitting a foot from the TV, his face bathed in the glow from the screen. I could see a giraffe ambling through the wilderness.
“Good morning,” I said casually, as if it were normal for him to be sitting there, looking like he wanted to climb inside the TV and escape into the wild himself. Tanner turned his head slightly and nodded before returning his attention to the screen.
I went into the kitchen to make us some breakfast. I was determined to pretend that everything was normal until it actually was.
After scanning the fridge to see if Mom had picked anything up on her way home last night—she had—I turned the stove on and slipped three pieces of wheat toast in the toaster. I pulled out a frying pan, put it on the burner, sprayed it with PAM, and cracked three eggs into it, making sure their edges didn’t touch, the way Dad always used to when he made breakfast for us.
A few minutes later, I scooped the eggs, their yolks still runny, out of the pan and onto the toast. When I walked back to the living room, Tanner accepted his plate without even looking up. He was riveted to the screen.
“So what are you watching?” I asked after I’d set two juice glasses down and taken a bite of my toast. I knew it was The Crocodile Hunter, one of Tanner’s favorite shows, but I wanted him to say it. Ever since the accident, he had retreated further and further into himself, and now he hardly said a word, not even to his friend Jay, who came over to play video games once a week. Although, come to think of it, I hadn’t seen Jay for a while now. I wondered if he’d finally given up on Tanner.
Nobody seemed to care but me. I had tried bringing it up with Mom, but she just shrugged and said that it wasn’t all that abnormal and that Tanner would deal with things in his own time. But what did she know? She saw her legal assistant ten times more often than she saw her kids; Tanner was usually asleep by the time she got home. I had also tried talking about Tanner with Dr. Schiff, the psychologist my mom made us visit every other Saturday. But she had just told me that it wasn’t my responsibility. “You’re just a kid,” she would always say.
It always made my blood boil.