We talk a lot every day but not about everything. She doesn’t like to talk about her deadbeat dad, so I don’t ask and I try not to talk about my cool dad too much. We didn’t talk about Rick for the same reason, I thought, just the other way around, that she didn’t want to rub it in that she had a boyfriend.
But Sarah’s not just my best friend—she’s my only really close everyday friend. Faith and I go way back and I can count on her but we don’t know each other’s details anymore. Now I’m realizing that Sarah and I don’t talk about Sarah’s life outside of school much at all. Not her dad, who pretty much only sends her cards on her birthday and Christmas except when he forgets. Not her mom, who struggles as an accountant to afford to stay in their house and not move to an apartment. And, apparently, not her boyfriend even though she’s been thinking about their relationship a lot lately and last night called him and broke up. The fact that she went through all that without sharing even a hint of it with me… it’s making my stomach twist into a hard, cold knot.
“But what?” Sarah asks.
Something’s shaking loose inside me. I feel maybe angry but definitely sad that Sarah and I aren’t as close as I thought… Am I being selfish, thinking about myself when my best friend just ended a two-year relationship? And my normal impulse to ask about this directly, to blurt out cold hard truths, is failing me and I don’t know why. It’s like all the other truths I toss out easily mean nothing but this one means something and that’s making it different.
“Parker, is something wrong?”
Something’s definitely up. She isn’t using her normal questioning voice. She sounds suspicious, or guilty, I don’t know, like she knows I’m upset but doesn’t want to acknowledge it.
“No,” I say, impressed that I sound normal. “I’m just thinking about you and Rick.”
“It’s fine, really.” She sounds relieved. “Tell me about your date with Jason.”
“Actually, I was in the middle of something with Petey. I just wanted to make sure you were okay. I’ll tell you about it later.”
“Oh, okay. But it went fine? You’re going to see him again?”
“I think so.”
“Okay, well… talk to you later?”
“Yep.”
Silence.
“Are you sure nothing’s wrong?” she asks.
“Yep, all fine, talk to you later,” I say in my easy-breezy voice despite the ice-cold ache in my chest. I hang up.
And unless I’m forgetting something trivial from when we were little kids, it’s the first time I’ve ever lied to Sarah.
SEVENTEEN
I feel like I’m falling.
I’m told I’m not much of a bobber—the rocking many people do when they can’t see. People don’t realize how much their ability to stay still and upright is not just in their inner ears but also depends on seeing the room or the horizon. Maybe it was that I could see for the first seven years of my life, or maybe it’s the way I lost my sight, but I don’t feel floaty much.
Until now. I’m disconnected from Earth. I know I went into shock when Dad died, and by the time I came out of it enough days had passed that I could more or less transition to being normal, or at least seeming normal. I think I might be in a different kind of shock now. When Dad died I lost my main rock but I had Sarah and I hung on for dear life. How much of my stability is based on people I cling to? A lot more than I thought because now that I’ve lost my last rock, I’m physically dizzy… floaty… with an unpleasant swoopy-ness. Like falling.
I can’t call Faith. I mean I could, and she’d listen, and I don’t have secrets from her, but these days there’s plenty we don’t know about each other and it would take too long to tell her.
The rest of Sunday went… Well, it was weird… At any given moment it felt like time was crawling by, like night would never come, and when it did, it felt like the day had flown by. I mostly hung out with Petey, playing games and sitting in front of the TV like a zombie. When my phone quacked around nine, I didn’t answer and then I texted Sarah that I was busy with Petey and we could talk tomorrow and she said okay, which was an unusually short answer for her given how we never miss our nightly phone calls even though I’m often playing with Petey and usually just put the game on hold.
My Monday sprints were a mess. Twice I felt the grass by the sidewalk and had to slow to adjust my direction. Then on my first sprint I lost count of my steps. I run too fast to actually count all the numbers; I just count one to nine over and over, then say ten, twenty, thirty… except I lost track of whether I had just said forty or fifty…?
I assumed fifty so I wouldn’t run into the far fence, but when I finished the leg and walked to the fence it was farther than usual so I’d probably been counting right all along and just second-guessed myself. Like they say for taking tests, stick with your first answer.
The second sprint went okay but I lost count again in the third. After that I ran instead of sprinted, counting out real numbers, but even then I felt off so I quit and went home.