One pinto . . . two black . . . three French style . . .
Although my breathing’s calmed since last night, I still feel like my heart is racing—though it’s not. I held my fingers to my throat and timed it to check. And I still feel like an elephant is sitting on my chest.
Meg probably wouldn’t even answer if I called, but maybe Luke would for once. Luke never gets panic attacks, but he always understood mine.
I call him, listen to it ring and ring and ring until the ring’s replaced by his stupid voice-mail message about being too busy partying or studying or whatever to answer. He never answers now that university has gobbled him up and swallowed him whole. Maybe he’s joined some fraternity cult. Or he could be dead on his dorm room floor. We’d never know.
I don’t leave a message.
I wander downstairs and throw YouTube onto the big-screen TV. I choose an old LumberLegs series, where he and his buddies decide not to close up any of the rifts that spawn, and their world becomes completely unstable—walls falling apart, equipment disappearing, underworld beasts rising up from the earth in the middle of their castles. Hilarious. I grab a blanket and wrap it snug around and around me in a cocoon before settling on the couch to watch my favorite episode, which is the one where Legs will lose his legendary sword to the rifts and have to fight off a mob of filthworms with a boot.
The tightness around my heart loosens just a little.
I’m only a few minutes into the episode when I see Granddad wander into the room out of the corner of my eye.
“Is it too loud? Sorry, I’ll turn it down.” I wriggle my shoulders to free my arms from my blanket cocoon. Mom’s always telling me to turn things down. “Granddad is sleeping” or “Granddad is reading.”
“No, it’s fine,” he says, just as I manage to free my arms and reach for my tablet. He lowers himself onto the other end of the couch, and even through Legs’s squeals as the filthworms start rising from the earth, I can hear Granddad’s bones creak from the effort. I hit pause, freezing the screen on a close-up of a filthworm—with its cartoony, eyeless face—crawling over Legs’s feet.
Granddad peers at the screen, then looks at me. “You feeling any better today? Where’s your friend Meg?”
I shrug. “Mostly.”
I don’t know how to answer the other question, but he doesn’t press. Instead, he just nods. His bushy white eyebrows rise. “Does watching funny things help?”
Help what? Distract my mind? Encourage every tense muscle in my body to relax? Loosen the death grip around my heart?
“Yes,” is all I say.
He nods again. “Used to help your grandma, too. She had panic attacks. Has your mother told you that?”
I shake my head. She’s never mentioned it. Granddad offers the information like it might help me, but since I never knew her, it doesn’t.
Except that it feels like maybe Granddad understands me after all. Maybe.
He waves his bony arm toward the screen. “Don’t let me stop you. Carry on.” He relaxes into the couch cushions, which I wish he wouldn’t do because I worry he’ll never be able to get back up again.
“You won’t—” I say, then break off. I have no idea what Granddad does and doesn’t like to watch, and it’s not my place to decide that for him. He can just leave when he realizes he doesn’t like it. If he can manage to get back up off the couch.
I press play and try not to look at Granddad as Legs lets out another high-pitched squeal. The filthworms surround him. As he swats at them, his sword disappears. Another squeal.
“Is he—is he fighting those things with a boot?” Granddad asks. And then he chuckles.
I grin.
We watch the rest of the video in silence, except for Granddad’s laughter, which rings out at all the right spots. Just like Meg’s.
MEG
I AM GOING TO GET ICE CREAM. TEN FLAVORS OF ICE CREAM AND CHOCOLATE and sauces and that marshmallow fluff stuff, and then I’m going to spend my Sunday afternoon eating it all instead of wailing about Kat’s departure from my life. But as I search through our closet for some mittens, the doorbell rings. And there she is. Kat. On our front porch. She pushes past me into the front hall before I can decide whether to slam the door in her face.
She kicks off her heavy black boots, scattering snow across our welcome mat, then sets her bag down on the floor with a thud and slides off her ginormous coat and hands it to me, wordlessly. I take it, also wordlessly, and hang it in the closet, because I don’t know what else to do. By the time I’ve closed the closet door, she’s halfway down the stairs to the basement with her bag. I take the stairs two at a time after her to catch up. I don’t want to freak her out again by jumping the whole thing.
Kat kneels on the floor and starts rummaging through her bag.
“I thought we were fighting,” I finally say.
“We are.” She starts pulling stuff out of her bag. Some cables. Batteries. Then a Wii remote. More batteries. Another remote.
“So what . . .” I trail off, not sure what I’m trying to ask. What are you doing here? What’s all this stuff? Isn’t our friendship over?
“I wasn’t sure if you had a Wii.” Her words aren’t inflected as a question, but she looks up at me expectantly, waiting for an answer. She needs to pluck one of her eyebrows; it’s a little fuller than the other.
“We do.” I gesture toward the cupboard below the TV. “It should already be hooked up. Nolan was playing his car game yesterday.”
“Oh, good, that’s easy then. Here are the games I brought.” She spreads six Wii games across the floor. “Pick one.”
“What? Why?”
“I brought only games that I haven’t played in years. So it’s fair. And you can pick which one. Best of three to determine who wins.”
“Wins what?”
“The argument.”
She’s talking nonsense, but she’s here, in my house, apparently ready to play a video game. With me. I point to a game at random. “Okay, then that one.”
“Freddy’s Farm Frenzy,” she says, picking it up and heading over to the Wii. “An excellent choice.”
She pops it in, and next thing I know, we’re perched on the edge of the couch, waving our arms around, trying to herd animals into a pen. Fighting to herd the most. Or not fighting. Or something.
I win the first game, but Kat wins the next. She’s about to win her second, but right before the timer ticks to zero, she pauses the game and turns to me.
“Good call,” I joke. “I was about to win.”
She doesn’t laugh, and when I turn to look at her, her face is somber. She takes a deep breath, then lets it back out before saying, “I have panic attacks.”
“Panic attacks?” I parrot back.