I read her paper on Macbeth. It was good. Really good. She had style, and I thought maybe she should become a writer. I had the feeling that her life was going to provide her with plenty of material.
“So what do you think?” She was smiling. She already knew her paper was good.
“Brilliant.”
“Are you mocking me?” She crossed her arms.
“Nope. And uncross your arms.”
She threw herself on my dad’s reading chair. “You’re quiet today.”
“Yeah.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Who, me? There’s nothing ever wrong with me. Don’t you know that?”
“Now I know there’s something really wrong. You’ve been a little different lately. Like there’s something eating at you.”
“Yeah, well, maybe I’m figuring a few things out.”
“Like what?”
“Like I don’t really want to go to college, for one thing.”
“That’s crazy.”
“Can we not talk about college? Please.” I combed my hair with my fingers and started biting one of my fingernails.
“You haven’t done that since fifth grade.”
“What?”
“Bite your nails.”
“It’s Mima,” I said.
“What?”
“Mima. Remember how she had cancer?”
“Yeah, I remember. That was a long time ago, Sally.”
“The cancer’s back. It’s metastasized. You know what that is?”
“Of course I do.”
“Of course you do.” I tried to smile.
“Is it serious?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
“So what’s going to happen?”
“I guess we know how this is going to end. Dad’s not optimistic.”
“Aww, Sally—”
“Shit, Sam. I’m—?I just am, hell, I don’t know.”
“Oh,” she said, “I get it. But—? But I don’t know, ever since school started, you’ve been a little—?I don’t know.”
“I don’t know either. But now this thing with Mima. Ouch.”
“Ouch,” she said.
All of a sudden she was sitting right next to me on the couch. She took my hand. “I know how much you love her,” she whispered. I was the one who should have been crying—?but it was Sammy who had tears running down her face.
“Don’t cry, Sammy.”
“I love her too, you know?”
“Yeah, I know.” And Sam did love her. She had a lot of empathy. Maybe that’s why she liked all those bad boys. They were outcasts. It was like she was picking up strays and taking them in. It’s like she could see past their rough exteriors and see the parts of them that hurt. Maybe she thought she could take away the hurt. She was wrong, of course. But I found it hard to fault her for her good heart.
“Sally, you know you’re going to have to be a man about this, don’t you?”
“I don’t think I know how to be a man,” I said.
“It sucks, I know, but sooner or later—”
“Yeah, sooner or later,” I said.
We were quiet for a long time.
“You want to throw the ball around?”
She smiled. “Yeah, I think that sounds like a great idea.”
We did that, Sam and I—?we’d take out the baseball gloves and play catch. One of the great things about Sam was that she didn’t throw like a girl. She had a good arm, and she knew how to handle a ball. My dad taught her that—?he taught both of us. You know, for a gay guy, my dad was pretty straight.
We tossed the ball around until twilight. Sam and I didn’t always talk when we played catch. It was like we could be together and be alone all at the same time. After we put the gloves away, I told her about Fito. “Did you know he was gay?”
“No, but I’ve seen him and Angel together, and I thought it was kind of an odd pair. I mean, Angel’s such a pretty boy. And Fito’s such a schizophrenic dork. I mean, they don’t make a good couple.”
“Like you really know. You don’t like Fito.”
“Look, I like him better now that I know he’s gay.”
“That makes no sense.”
“It makes perfect sense.”
“In your world, I guess so. He’s just a guy, Sammy. A lost soul. I like him.”
“Oh, so you’re into picking up strays.”
“No, Sam, that would be your specialty.” I gave her a look.
“I don’t want to have this discussion.”
“I know you don’t. Then you’d have to explain your obsession with bad boys.”
“I don’t have to explain anything to anyone.”
“Wrong. Sometimes you have to explain things to yourself.”
“Look who’s talking.”
“Touché.”
Sam laughed. “Well, now that we’ve agreed not to talk about what really matters, what shall we talk about next?”
I shrugged.
But then she said, “You know the other day, when you showed up at my door and there was something going on with you and I let you off the hook by changing the subject to my shoes?”
“Yeah. And?”
“What happened?”
Sam. She really knew me. “I punched a guy in the stomach,” I said. Like it was nothing.
“What?”
“You heard me.”
“Why?”
“He called me a pinche gringo, and I just, hell, I punched him.”
“What’s that about, Sally? You planning on becoming a boxer?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
She was wearing a question on her face, but she didn’t say anything.
I walked her home. That was my dad’s idea. He said he didn’t like the idea of Sam walking by herself at night. “You never know,” he said. Sometimes I thought he cared more about Sam than her own mother did.
As we were standing in front of Sam’s front door, she looked at me and said, “There’s something different about you, Sally.”
I shrugged.
“You’re a lot more complicated than I thought you were.”
I didn’t know why I was hanging my head.
She put her hand on my chin and gently raised my head and looked straight into my eyes. “Whatever it is that’s going through that pretty little head of yours, well, you can’t hide it from me.”
I didn’t say a word.
She kissed me on the cheek—?and then she said, “I’ll love you till the day I die, Sally.”
I cried all the way home.
What If
SAM AND I had this game. I think it started as a cell phone game when we both got phones in the ninth grade. The game was called “What If.” We’d be talking or texting, and one of us would say something like What if hummingbirds lost their wings? And the other person would have to think of an answer that began with Then. In fact that was one of the first questions I texted Sam: What if hummingbirds lost their wings? We had twenty-four hours to come back with an answer, and it took her precisely ten hours and seven minutes to text me back: Then it would rain for days and the world would know the rage of the grieving sky. I mean, it took her a while to get back to me—?but her answer was brilliant. At least I thought it was.
Once, when we were walking to school, I asked her, “What if we’d never met?”
“Then we wouldn’t be best friends.”
“Not,” I said. Not meant that the answer was unacceptable. You only got three nots and you were out. Like in baseball.
“You shit.” She hated getting notted. Then she smiled. I knew she’d come up with something. “If we’d never met, then there would be only three seasons.”
“Hmm,” I said. “Am I supposed to guess which season?”
“Yup.”
I thought a moment—?then I smiled. “Spring. Then there would be no spring.”
“Spring,” she said.
“Sometimes you’re really, really awesome, Sam.”