“Who’s smart?” It’s Trish.
“Me, apparently,” Scott says in his stern voice. “Just because I’m the only one here who knows better than to leave this one on her own. You have to keep an eye on her.”
“What happened?” Trish asks. “Why the crowd?”
No one answers, not audibly anyway.
“God, Parker…” Trish says in her eye-rolling voice. “I was only gone five minutes. What could you have possibly done in five minutes?”
THIRTY-ONE
I change back into my school clothes; it’s easier to just shower at home and then put on PJs for the evening. Trish does the same and leaves first. I call Sheila and she’s waiting in the parking lot listening to CDs in the car. She offers to come get me but I tell her it’s fine, I’ll cane over there in a few minutes.
As I leave the gym, Scott says, “Parker.”
“Hey, you’re still here? What are you up to this weekend?”
“What? I don’t know. Look… you can’t keep doing this.”
“Doing what?”
“Throwing yourself off cliffs because you know I’m always there to catch you. If I hadn’t tackled you… We were ten feet from the bleachers! You’d have broken bones this time. Or worse! It’s… it’s not fair.”
“Fair?” I say, my anger waking up. But I’m torn. He sounds mad yet I hear something more. He’s afraid.
“You can’t just assume I’ll always be there to protect you. It’s not my job.”
“I didn’t even know you were there. Just because you run by my house every morning doesn’t mean I think you’re shadowing me everywhere—God, you’re not, are you?”
“Of course not—”
“Did you know I walked home from school this week and bent my cane and got stranded? You think I was mad you didn’t rescue me?”
“I didn’t know—”
“Of course you didn’t. I just do what I do. It’s got nothing to do with you. I don’t know why it worries you so much. It’s not like we’re together.”
“I still worry about you getting hurt.”
“Well I don’t know what you want from me. I’m grateful you caught me, definitely, yes, thank you, but you shouldn’t feel any special obligations.”
“But I do.”
“Why?”
Silence.
“Because I’m blind?”
“Of course not.”
“You sure? If some other random blind person came to school, you wouldn’t run around and protect them too?”
“I wouldn’t have to—how many blind people run around?”
I laugh but he doesn’t. God, he’s so… How am I ever going to get over him?
“I was wrong before,” I say, feeling a calm I’m grateful for. “I did love you last month, and all the time before that. I just thought the Scott I loved turned out not to be real. I loved the Scott I thought you were and hated the Scott you turned out to be. Then I found out the Scott I hated was the one who wasn’t real. You, the real Scott, I’ve never stopped loving you.”
Wow, that came out a tangled mess. How can I say that more clearly?
My calm tells me not to.
Instead I say, “Things might be complicated now, and confusing, but we can sort it out. We’re the two most honest people we know, right?”
“Right.”
“So tell me one of two things. Say yes, you love me, but… Or say no, you don’t love me, but… And we can go from there.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“That’s what the buts are for, to add complicated parts. You have to start somewhere.”
“That’s the problem. When your dad sent me away, I was ready to wait, but I thought it’d be a week or two, maybe a month. Then summer vacation came, and the months dragged on until finally a couple weeks into freshman year, in a different school where we wouldn’t bump into each other, it clicked. You weren’t just mad at me, you were gone. Never coming back.”
“I know… I’m sorry.”
“I know you are, but just like you had this other Scott in your head that you built up as this guy who’d betray you, I got a Parker in my head who’d throw our entire history and friendship away in an instant, and… and just bail without even a word.”
I start crying. On the inside anyway, tears soaking into my scarf. I struggle to keep my breathing steady. Not to hide; I just don’t want him to stop talking.
“Do I love that Parker? I feel really bad that I hurt her, but for her to just disappear like that… And now you’ve decided the bad Scott in your head isn’t real, so now he’s gone and it’s just back to the real me again… but…”
He doesn’t want to say the rest. Neither do I.
“But that Parker in your head really is me.” I can’t stop my voice from quavering—I struggle to keep it from getting worse. “I did bail on you.”
“Yeah.”
“I… I…”
I was only thirteen!