“I’m running for you, Marcus!” I shout into the night at the moon. Because maybe the stronger I am, the faster I go, maybe it’ll be enough to wake him up.
I think I’m running for me too. Because I’ve never tasted anything like the night air, never felt so free, never done anything that felt so natural. But I don’t need to shout that. No one needs to hear that. Not even the moon.
CHAPTER 14
Daytime doesn’t feel like real time. The only thing real is running.
I can’t shake the feeling that if I can run fast enough, Marcus will wake up. And since he isn’t waking up, I’m not going fast enough. So I keep running. I feel like every time my feet slap against the ground, his heart beats.
Running with my dragon and my lioness by my side is my only reality. Daytime is like a blurred dream. Sometimes I hear Heather’s helium-high laugh, I can tell it’s directed at me, but her words are like pebbles now. They ping off of me and lie in a pile at my feet and I step over them easily.
I don’t speak at school unless a teacher calls on me, and even then I reply in one-word answers. Every night I go farther, longer, faster.
On Sunday we visit Marcus. His vitals are the same, which apparently is a good thing. I get antsy sitting next to him, my feet speaking their own language, a tap-tap-tap, tap-tap-tap against the floor.
When my mom isn’t looking, I lean in close and whisper in his ear. “Marcus, I’m running. Wake up so you can see. I want us to race. I’m good.”
Hearing that I want to compete against him, that I think I have a shot at keeping up, should be enough to wake him up. The idea is laughable. And Marcus is competitive enough that he’d want to show me that he’s always the best. But his vitals stay the same; there’s no twitching finger or fluttering lids or anything to show he can hear me.
“Wake up,” I whisper. I don’t know why I whisper. Nobody ever woke up anyone with a whisper. I want to shout, but the quiet of this room, the sombre seriousness, presses like a muzzle on my mouth. It isn’t just me. My mom, Granny Dee, LaoLao, we all speak in hushed voices. Like we’re trying not to wake him.
You’d think we’d be yelling and shouting and shaking him. Even Granny Dee keeps her voice to a low rumble. And LaoLao barely says a word, just stares at him, drinking him in with her eyes, patting his hand in an uneven beat that almost matches the tapping of my impatient feet.
And my mother. She’s all smiles in the hospital room. Not real ones, though. She contorts her face into something that once upon a time resembled a smile. Imagine a carved smile on a pumpkin, like a jack-o’-lantern. Now imagine that pumpkin starts to rot, to sink in on itself, to smell. And then some punk kid comes by and kicks it in, and the jack-o’-lantern is still smiling, but it isn’t a smile anymore.
My mama doesn’t stink and she isn’t rotting, but I think something inside her has broken and might never get fixed again.
As soon as we step outside the hospital, the pumpkin grimace falls off, leaving her face bare and raw, but that’s better than the rotting smile.
I don’t know if Monica has been to see him. Would they let her in? She still hasn’t been by the house. I see her at school and she looks like a different person. Her hair hangs lank and greasy and her eyes are always red. She wears one of Marcus’s old sweatshirts over a ratty pair of jeans every day. She doesn’t sit with the football players anymore. She sits with Tash in a far corner. She hasn’t said a thing to me since I came back to school. Not hello, not how are you, not a thing.
Maybe she’s waiting for me. I’m thinking about this while I’m in a stall in the school bathrooms one day, grateful for the privacy and solitude the flimsy walls provide. Then the toilet flushes next to me and I recognize Dionne’s voice. She’s talking about Monica. My world goes from fuzzy to clear, reality rushing back in. Bright and loud and painful.
“You seen Monica? Girl looks like shit,” she says. I freeze in my stall, actually stop peeing so I can hear her better.
“At least she’s not sniffin’ around Aaron now that Marcus is gone.” I don’t recognize the other girl’s voice.
“Please. What are you trying to say? That the two of them are the same person? Anyway. Aaron ain’t the same anymore. Haven’t you seen him? Moping around and shit. Can’t even catch a ball these days. Told the coach that he wanted to drop football, and this is his senior year! He’s got colleges looking at him. Fool boy.”
“Aw, come on, Dionne. He’s got colleges looking at him for track. Not for football. He probably just played football because Marcus did. Always did follow him around.”
“Yeah, well, he can’t follow him where he is now. He’s wandering around like a lost puppy.”
“Maybe he needs some lovin’ … some comforting…”
The girls giggle in a way that makes me uncomfortable, then Dionne says, “Nah. I’m over that. For real this time.”