Chapter Sixteen
Dr. I is in the gym where he said he’d be, sitting on the bleachers, reading his book. He waves me over.
“So how’d it go?” he asks. I see him see my puffy eyes, the splotches that must be on my cheeks.
“Good,” I say vaguely, expecting him to poke a stick at it, good how?
“Good is good,” is all he says. Then he stands and pockets the book. “C’mon,” he says. “Let’s walk over.”
I follow him out the door, down the rec center’s manicured sidewalk, replaying the things I said in the circle, second-guessing them now, worrying I said too much. At the same time, there is a sort of lightness in my chest, as if saying those heavy things somehow let the heaviness out.
“How’s that paper coming?” Dr. I asks as we wait for the light. “The one on Dorian Gray?”
“It’s not,” I admit. “I haven’t even started and it’s due tomorrow.”
“Twenty-five hundred words on the separation of soul and body, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Want some help?” he asks, and I bob my head because I think he’s offering to get me out of it. “I think it’s a trick question,” he says instead.
“Huh?”
“Your topic. I don’t think Wilde believed it was possible to separate the soul from the body. I think that’s the whole point of the book.”
so much for a way out
“But isn’t that the trade Dorian made with the painting?” I ask. “Losing his soul to keep his face?”
“That was the trade he thought he was making, certainly. But that’s not what he ultimately got. The painting didn’t take his soul out of his body. It turned his soul into a body — it created a physical representation of something that had only been abstract up to that point. The invisible became visible, bringing Dorian face to face with the terrible truth of who he’d become.”
The light changes and Dr. I starts across the street.
“He couldn’t escape himself,” I say, catching up to him, a weird feeling in my chest as I say it. neither can i
“That’s part of it,” Dr. I. says. “But I think Wilde was getting at something even more nuanced than that. I think he was saying that Dorian couldn’t see himself — not without the painting. Remember, the novel was as much about art as anything else. I think Wilde was showing his readers that sometimes fiction is more honest than fact.”
“More honest how?”
“Consider what happened in the book,” Dr. I replies. “The portrait of Dorian started changing, supposedly to reflect the state of his soul— but his soul wasn’t actually getting older and uglier. A soul is immaterial, remember? Think about our buddy Descartes. So it can’t age or get ugly. Only the body can do that. But you walk away from the book understanding that what was on that canvas was more ‘true’ than the ‘real’ Dorian, even though, really, the painting was just a symbol of reality, not reality itself.”
“My brain hurts,” I say dryly.
He smiles. “That means the wheels are turning.”
“Ha. You’re an optimist.”
“Have to be, in my line of work. Otherwise the job’s too depressing.” As we hit the sidewalk, the morning bell rings. “Just don’t overthink it,” Dr. I says then, stopping at the place where the sidewalk splits. “Your paper. You read the book, you understand the idea. Write from your gut and you’ll be fine.”
“I think you’re overestimating my gut,” I say. A kid on a skateboard shoots me a funny look as he wheels past, and suddenly I am hyper aware that I’m openly chatting with the school shrink. “I should get going,” I say, pointing vaguely at the building.
“Class.”
He nods. Doesn’t budge. He seems to sense my sudden awkwardness, my intense need to bail. “Good luck with the paper,” he says. “And I hope everything turns out okay for your friend.”
I’d momentarily forgotten about Marshall’s procedure. The light feeling I left the group with is pushed out by dread.
“Thanks,” I mumble, and start across the courtyard toward school.
Hannah isn’t under the stairs or at her locker. I didn’t really expect her to be here today with Marshall’s procedure happening this afternoon, but the fact that isn’t she sends me back into a spiral just the same.
I make myself verbalize it. Not to a room full of also-broken people this time; just to one. Myself, in the bathroom mirror, halfway through second period when the panic gets so intense I’m jittery with it, ankle bouncing furiously beneath my desk. Which, in a weird way, sort of feels like progress. The old me would’ve been frozen with fear, trapped by it, while at the same time trapping it, burying the anxiety so deep it couldn’t possibly escape. Now I’m wearing it right on the surface, harder to hide, easier to fight.
And fight it I am, or trying to anyway, as I stare at the mirror and watch my mouth move with the words “I’m scared that Marshall will die” over and over again. But this is only half of it, I know that. The what but not the why. The bathroom is empty so I try to finally do it, dig deeper, get down into the dirt like the shrink in the hospital said.
The truth is buried at the bottom, covered in muck.
i’m afraid marshall will leave because every one leaves
He might not walk out the way my dad did, or cheat like Wren, but that doesn’t mean I can trust that he’ll stay. He might not be a bad guy, but he doesn’t need to be. The world isn’t safe, or fair.
Then again, the things I’m most afraid of aren’t the things that actually happen. It’s the things I don’t expect that destroy me. My dad leaving. My friends pretending like I didn’t exist. Wren cheating. The SUV that ran that red light. I never saw any of that coming, and it came anyway. So maybe, just maybe, if I’m scared that something will happen to Marshall, nothing will.
please don’t let anything happen to him
please let him be okay
Instinctively, my eyes flick to the ceiling. And even though I’m pretty sure there’s no one up there to hear me, there never has been, and definitely not someone inclined to help, I ask for something else.
please let me get better
let me finally be okay
I mean my scars and the aphantasia and the hallucinations that haven’t stopped. But even more than that I just mean me, whatever is separate from all that.
Then, not my thoughts but a man’s voice, echoing in my head.
“I know it’s scary, but you’re okay. Do you hear me? You’re okay.”
My mind scrambles. For a split second I can’t place them, these words, they strike me as random and strange. Then my thoughts clear, and I remember him. The man in the white coat who appeared at my window right after the accident and fixed my wrist and told me I was okay, stretching the word out to three syllables, oh-oh-kay. The man no one else saw.
why didn’t anyone else see him?
I rub my left wrist. It still aches a little, on really cold days. Which is most days, here. Is it possible that the bones were never out of place, that the man never reset it, that I imagined the entire exchange? Imagined, code for hallucinated, because that’s what I’m really asking. Did no one else see him because I made him up?
I squeeze my eyes shut and I’m back there, in the car, glass everywhere, breathing in burnt rubber and old pennies, which I know now wasn’t pennies but blood. The man is there, leaning into the car, holding my wrist. His hands are dry, almost papery, and warm on my wrist. I can’t see him in my mind, can’t see any of it, but the memory replays just the same, a movie on a dark screen.
There are footsteps behind me, someone coming in. “What are you doing?” a familiar voice asks. My eyes spring open. It’s Sophie, from the lunch table.
“Nothing,” I say, meeting her eyes in the mirror, watching her gaze shift from mine when I do. Avoiding eye contact like I used to but don’t so much anymore. She’s looking at my scars now, so I look at them, too, but just one quick glance. The flip side of avoidance is rumination, my old back-up plan when avoidance craps out. Fixating on the thing that upsets me, like a record needle stuck in a groove.
“It looked like you were praying,” Sophie says bluntly.
“I wasn’t praying,” I say, and I sound defensive. “I was just thinking.”
“About what?”
“My accident,” I admit. “And Marshall. He’s—”
“In the hospital,” Sophie says. “I know. Hannah told us yesterday. That’s why I thought you might be praying.”
“Oh.” And now I feel like maybe I should’ve been praying. Then again, in a way I sort of was, if it counts as praying when you’re not even sure that you even believe in God. “Well,” I say, turning around to face her, watching her gaze shift again. I’m about to tell her I need to get back to class when I notice a bunch of fresh scratches down the right side of her face that weren’t there last week. “Is everything okay?” I hear myself ask instead.
Sophie shrugs. There are volumes in this.
“What happened?” I ask.
“Nothing,” she says. And in her voice I hear a familiar note. The way my own voice used to sound in middle school when my mom would ask how my day went and I’d lie because the truth was too mortifying to speak.
“What brought you in here, then?” I ask.
“It’s a bathroom.”
“And if you really had to pee you would’ve gone by now,” I say. “I’m sort of an expert at the bathroom hide-out.”
Sophie looks away. “I hate second period,” she says flatly. “That’s all.”
“Why?”
She doesn’t answer me. She doesn’t answer me because she doesn’t trust me. Because I haven’t given her a reason to. Because she doesn’t know that we are the same.
“I used to hate lunch,” I tell her. “My friends stopped saving me a seat when my panic attacks started, and everyone else had their regular tables already. So I ate in the bathroom every day pretty much all of eighth grade.”
I’ve never told anyone this. But there it is, the truth.
Sophie is quiet for a few more seconds.
“The girls at my lab table make fun of me,” she says eventually, still not looking at me. “They think I don’t know they’re doing it because my brain can’t figure out sarcasm. But it’s kind of obvious when the kids at the next table laugh.”
“What kind of stuff do they say?”
“That I’m pretty. That they love my clothes.”
My heart sinks in my chest. I want to tell her those awful girls don’t matter, but what will that do? Some stupid cliché about sticks and stones won’t take the sting away, because, FYI, WORDS DO HURT. They freaking hurt a lot. And unlike sticks and stones, it’s not our bones that end up broken. It’s us.
“People suck sometimes,” I say to Sophie instead.
“You don’t,” she says.
I burst out in a laugh. “Thanks. Neither do you.”
“Will you sit with us at lunch?” Sophie asks then. “Since Marshall and Hannah aren’t here?”
The invitation catches me off guard. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to sit with them. I wouldn’t have thought they’d want me to.
“Definitely,” I say, and for the first time since I met her, Sophie smiles.
Third and fourth period crawl by and then it’s lunch time and time speeds up because Marshall’s procedure is supposed to start at twelve thirty. I try to be engaged in the conversation at the table, though it’s hard without Hannah or Marshall there to referee. In L.A. I always sat with Wren in the cafeteria, at the lacrosse table, crowded with people who liked hearing themselves talk, which meant there were never lulls in conversation or any expectation that I would speak. At this table, there are many pointed questions and even pointier stares and abundant awkward silences that don’t seem to be awkward to anyone but me. I tell myself it’s exposure therapy and force myself to stay in it, to let it be awkward until it isn’t any more. It half works.
“Have any of you ever been to the support group that meets at the rec center?” I ask at some point.
“Is it for Asperger’s?” Brendon asks.
I shake my head. “No. Anyone can go.”
“I went a few times,” the kid at the end of the table says. Everyone is calling him Dash, unclear whether that’s actually his name. Heads turn to look at him now. “Dr. I thought it would help improve my social competence.”
“Did it?” I ask.
“Mostly it made me realize how much other people lie,” he says, and goes back to his food.
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“The whole point of going is to talk about the things you’re hiding,” he says. “Because that’s normal. To hide how you feel. To act like you’re okay when you’re not okay. To lie.”
“Well, it’s not really lying,” I say.
“Yes, it is,” Dash insists. “If you feel one way and act like you feel another way, that’s lying.” His eyes flick around the table. “We don’t do that. We don’t lie.”
“But in the group, people tell the truth,” I point out. “That’s why they go. To be honest.”
“There were fourteen people there the day I went,” Dash says bluntly. “There are five hundred and seven kids at Crossroads.”
“Being honest is hard,” I hear myself say.
“Why?” Sophie asks.
because the truth isn’t pretty, pops into my mind, and suddenly I’m thinking about Dorian Gray. He was so desperate to deceive the world about who he was that it literally destroyed him.
“I need to go,” I say abruptly, pushing my chair back.
It’s twelve twenty-seven by the time I get to the library, which means I only have seventeen minutes until the bell, but for once the time crunch doesn’t derail me. I log on to one of the computers and open a blank page and just start typing, don’t even bother to pull out my book. “In his novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde suggests that man’s attempt to separate his soul from his body will eventually lead to the loss of both. Dorian Gray thought that hiding his true self from the world would set him free, but it actually did the opposite. It made him a prisoner to a lie; a lie that drove him deeper and deeper into darkness and ultimately destroyed him.” I type these words in a flurry then sit back and read them, instantly doubting that they make any sense, but at the same time feeling like there is something in this idea, as bad as I am at expressing it. I grab my copy of the novel from my backpack and start flipping pages, looking for scenes that support my theory, that The Picture of Dorian Gray isn’t about the desire for eternal beauty or the dark side of decadence, but a cautionary tale about living a lie. Skimming passages with this idea in mind, the story starts to take a different shape. From the very beginning what Dorian wanted was a chance to hide, to tuck the truth away behind a pretty mask. Not because he was a bad person, or even a vain one — not in the beginning, anyway. Before he saw the painting he wasn’t even aware of his good looks. More than anything, it seems to me now, he was an insecure person, unsure of his own value beyond his appearance.
i know what that’s like
And it strikes me now that I probably would’ve made Dorian’s trade, if I believed it were possible to put my true self on a painting I could hide from the world. But I didn’t have a magical canvas, so I tried burying the truth inside me instead, building little mental boxes to hold the things I didn’t want anyone to see. The all-consuming panic. The swirling thoughts. The sinking shame. The fear that I’m not good enough, have never been good enough, that if anyone really knew me, they’d leave. Like my dad. Like my friends. Like Wren.
But hiding the truth never diminished it; if anything, it grew uglier in the dark. Just like Dorian’s painting under that purple sheet. His shame made him do things he never would’ve done in the light.
I prop the book open on the desk beside me and keep writing. By the time the bell rings, I’m five hundred words in. I send myself the document, weirdly excited to finish it tonight. Knowing that I will.
It’s not until I’m sitting in fifth period half listening to part two of the lecture on Van Gogh’s madness that I realize that it’s already one fifteen. Marshall’s procedure started forty-five minutes ago. My heart picks up its pace. If all goes well, the whole thing should be over by two.
Somehow I sit through the rest of fifth period, and then all of sixth and seventh, without jumping out of my skin. I do, however, get reprimanded by my math teacher, twice, for tapping my pencil on my desk. I’m not used to this, the bubbling, unconfined feeling of anxiety let loose. This isn’t a dull whirl behind my belly button, this is a thousand bumblebees buzzing through my veins. Time is creeping slowly again now, every minute feels like an hour I might now live through.
When the final bell rings at three fifteen I sprint across the courtyard to the bank. As soon as I open the car door, Dad hands me his phone.
“Thanks,” I say breathlessly, dialing the hospital’s main line by heart. Marshall’s mom picks up on the second ring. “Hi,” I say awkwardly, feeling weird suddenly for calling so soon. “It’s Jessa. I was just calling to see if—”
“He just woke up,” she says, and I can hear her smiling. I feel a whoosh of relief. “Hold on one sec.”
“Hey,” comes Marshall’s voice.
“Hi. How’d it go? How’re you feeling?”
“Better now.”
I smile. Then realize Dad is watching me and blush.
“The procedure went great,” Marshall says. “They were in and out in an hour. The worst part was the catheter in my thigh - the heart stuff I couldn’t even feel.”
“So you’re okay,” I say, and hear my own relief.
“I am.”
“How’s Hannah?” I ask.
“Dunno,” Marshall says. “She’s at home, practicing.”
“Wait, she’s not even at the hospital with you?”
“Long story,” he says. “But it’s fine. I want her to feel good about her audition. It’s important to her.”
I physically bite my tongue to keep from saying what I’m thinking, shouldn’t you be important to her, too?
“So can I come see you?” I ask instead, glancing at my dad, a silent is that okay? Dad nods. “Or would that be weird?”
“Guys, Jessa has a hospital gown fetish and can’t stay away,” Marshall announces to his parents. “Are you cool if she comes by?”
“Ew!” I squeal.
“Sorry,” Marshall adds, in a mock whisper now. “Apparently the gown fetish was a secret. Don’t tell her I told you.”
In the background, I hear his dad laugh. His mom says something I can’t make out.
“They say of course you should come by,” Marshall says then. “They were just leaving.”
“I’m on my way.”
Dad drives me to the hospital and drops me off at the heart wing, tells me to call him on his cell when I want to be picked up. My own heart is pounding as I come through the automatic doors into the lobby. Not with anxiety this time, but giddy anticipation, a buzzy excitement for what could come next, if I let it, which in this moment I think I might.
“There she is,” Marshall says when I come through his door. “And . . . now I’m realizing I didn’t think this through. You look as hot as always and I’m in a purple dress.”
“Well, it’s the gown I came for after all,” I say lightly.
“Creepster.”
“Right?”
I drag a chair over to his bedside to sit.
“So I have a question for you,” I say, the buzzy feeling so intense I almost wimp out.
“No,” Marshall deadpans. “You can’t see the back of my gown.”
“Ew.” I make a face. “I’m being serious.”
“Okay. And I will seriously pretend you didn’t just make a yuck face when we mentioned my butt. Go.”
“To be clear, ‘we’ were not discussing your butt. But anyway.” I take a quick, shaky breath. “Will you go on a date with me?”
Marshall’s face lights up so quickly it makes my heart hiccup with gladness and relief.
“I guess I’m not the only one who had a change of heart,” he says. “See what I did there? Change of heart?”
“Very clever,” I say, breathy with the realness of this. The realness of us.
“Will this date involve a lifeless art show and Cowboy Woody khakis? Because otherwise, I’m out.”
“Obvi,” I say. “Any other requirements?”
“Yes,” he says. “You can’t bring the wall.”
I look at him blankly. “Huh? What wall?”
“The one right there.” He gestures at the air between us. “The one you think I can’t see.”
I stare at the space and it seems to materialize. A wall, made of brick and mortar and fear. A wall I’m not ready to get rid of yet.
“I don’t know what you want from me,” I say tightly. “I’m not like you. I’m not good at this.”
Marshall makes a fist, pretends to punch through the invisible wall. Then he reaches his arm out and lays his palm on my collarbone, and when he does there is a sensation inside me like window blinds snapping up. Every part of me wants to shrink back, to pull the blinds back down, to build the wall back up.
“I want your heart,” Marshall says simply. “I want you to trust me with it. I don’t think you do yet.”
A memory springs to mind. Wren and me in his car, parked somewhere. His hands, so grabby, trying to peel my layers off. I want all of you, he whispered in my ear. But he didn’t, not really. He never once looked at me like this.
My heart is beating wildly. Surely Marshall can feel it, thumping in my chest.
“It’s a mess,” I say, shifting in my seat. “I’m a mess.”
He shrugs. “So am I. So is everyone on the planet.” He lifts his hand to my left cheek. My scars prickle beneath his fingertips.
We’re both quiet.
“I don’t know how it ends,” I say finally, pulling away from him. “This. Us. That’s what scares me. Not the idea of us. The end of us.”
“Maybe there won’t be one.”
I look at him. “Marshall.”
“Okay, so I don’t know how it ends, either,” he says. “Nobody does. But I know I won’t hurt you.”
“You can’t promise that,” I say. I’m thinking about my dad. I’m thinking about the girl with the braids at the support group who lost her little brother. I’m thinking about how broken the world is. I’m thinking about how easy it is to get hurt.
i’m letting fear win
“I can promise I won’t do it on purpose,” Marshall says then. “And here’s what else I can promise,” he adds, taking my hand in both of his. “When you finally realize that you are far, far out of my league and break up with me, I won’t weep loudly and hold onto your ankles.” He frowns. “Okay. I can’t promise that. But I can maybe promise not to do it in public.”
I laugh and the fear thins, making space for light and breath.
“That seems fair.” I lean over and kiss the back of his hand.
“Speaking of kissing . . .” he says.
“Um. Were we speaking of kissing?”
“In my head we were. We were talking about the two times I tried to kiss you and was denied.”
“What! You haven’t tried to kiss me once!”
“I’m pretty sure I have. Twice. That day in the rain under the bleachers. And then again at Little Man. I thought about it two more times, but I’m willing to accept that those don’t count.”
“There was a table between us at Little Man. Kissing would’ve been awkward.”
“So you thought about it.”
“I didn’t say that. Anyway, it wasn’t even a date.”
“Uh huh.”
I punch him in the arm. He grins and catches my hand.
“I was contemplating a third attempt,” he says casually, hand still holding mine. “But it seems kind of obvious now. And there’s the whole hospital gown thing, which I know is a turn on for you, but makes me feel kind of unmanly.”
“Who says you get to be in charge of the kissing?” I ask, feeling bolder now, but still buzzy and breathy, a tingly feeling down my spine. I slide to the edge of my seat. My knees bump against the hard plastic frame of his bed.
And then, I don’t know, my brain sort of shuts off as I move from sitting next to him to leaning over him, one hand in his, the other on the bed behind him, holding me up as I tilt my head down to kiss him on the mouth. I feel him grin as he tugs me closer to him and kisses me back, my hair spilling out over his pillow, probably in his face.
I melt. Literally, that’s what it feels like, like my insides are pooling into liquid beneath my skin. His hand is on my shoulder, then in my hair. The arm that’s holding me up starts to cramp but I ignore it, don’t want this kiss to end.
“My parents will be back soon,” Marshall says in a husky voice. “And I don’t think my door locks.”
I bolt back into my seat. “How soon?” I ask, batting wildly at my hair.
“They said twenty minutes,” he says, straightening his hospital gown. It’s at this moment that I realize he still has an IV needle in his arm. i just half made-out with a guy in a hospital bed. “But knowing my mom,” Marshall is saying, “she’ll come back early. She can’t stand the idea of all these machines doing their jobs. She has to check me herself.”
“Check you for what?” I ask.
“Symptoms of device rejection. Chest tightness, dizziness, shortness of breath.” He lays a hand on his chest. “Also symptoms of Jessa acceptance, apparently.”
I feel my face fall. “Wait, you’re kidding right? Kissing you didn’t—”
He grins. “Put me into heart failure? Nah. It wasn’t long enough for that. But we could try again . . . ” He catches my arm with his hand and gently tugs me to him.
“Your parents,” I say, giggling, swatting him away. For a second, I’m a stranger in this moment, a foreigner in my own life, because I don’t giggle. Fake giggle, maybe, but not real giggle, but here I am doing it, happiness bubbling up inside me, accidentally spilling out.
“Oh, they’ll be psyched,” Marshall says, but he lets go of my hand. “Their heart-defected son finds romance at last.”
“Um. You’ve never dated anyone before?”
“Does a series of racy instant messages with a girl in a congenital heart defect chat group count?”
I laugh, but it sounds forced. For some reason the idea that he’s never done this before freaks me out.
“I had a make-out buddy freshman year,” he adds, as if reading my mind. “This girl who used to hang out at the skate park in the afternoons. I think her name was Nicole?”
“You think?”
“She kind of mumbled it the first time we hooked up. And then she told me she was moving to New Jersey so it seemed kind of pointless to spend time investigating.”
“That’s so shady.”
“I know, right? If you’re gonna hook up with random guys at the skate park, at least have the decency to introduce yourself properly.”
“I meant you,” I say, laughing. “How long was she your make out buddy?”
“Eh. Not long. A month maybe.” He pauses, and his face gets more serious for a sec. “What about you and Wren?” he asks. “How long were you together?”
“Two years,” I say. two years and three months. “We started dating the beginning of freshman year.”
“Why’d you break up?”
“He was cheating on me,” I say quietly. “With this girl from school. I found out the night of my accident.”
Marshall sucks in a breath. “I’m sorry,” he says.
“Yeah.”
We’re both quiet for a minute.
“So when’s this epic first date of ours?” he asks finally.
“Whenever you’re better, I guess? When do you get to go home?”
“Tomorrow,” he says. “We can probably do it Saturday, as long as you pledge to my mom that we won’t engage in any highly aerobic activities.”
There’s a knock on the door. His parents, coming back.
“How’s it going in here?” his mom asks.
“Excellent,” Marshall says, his eyes sparkling at me. “Jessa just asked me out on a date.”
My face floods with heat.
“Well, that sounds fun,” his mom says, smiling.
His dad, bearded and professorial, leans around her shoulder. He’s an older version of his son, except with a tangle of silvery scars on each cheek, faded but impossible to miss. Scars that are so realistic looking that they could be real. But if they were, Marshall would’ve mentioned them to me.
stop staring
I force my eyes to the spot between his dad’s eyebrows, my old trick.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Jessa,” his dad says, extending his hand. “I’m Paul Jamison.”
“My dad here is a sansei in the lost art of the handshake,” Marshall says in a mock whisper. “Look at his form!” He bows his head at his dad.
“My son here is a smart ass,” Mr. Jamison says mildly as he shakes my hand. “Thank you for putting up with him.”
His wife jabs him with her elbow. “Language, Paul!”
I laugh. “It’s nice to meet you, too,” I say.
His dad looks at his watch. “Well. I should probably leave now, if I want to pick Hannah up as instructed.”
“Hannah said she could squeeze me in from five to six,” Marshall explains.
“Where is she now?” I ask.
“At home,” Marshall says. “Since my parents needed both cars today, she didn’t have a way to get home to practice at lunch, so she just stayed home the whole day.”
“Oh,” I say, eyes darting to his parents’ faces, looking for their reaction, not seeing much of one there.
“Hannah’s our practical one,” his dad says, sensing my question.
what does being practical have to do with it?
“She seems pretty nervous about her audition on Saturday,” I say casually.
“Oh, she’ll be fine,” his mom says, with a funny wave of her hand. “She always is. She came out of the womb like that. Capable. She’s barely ever needed us, that one.”
“Whereas I remained in the infant stage for a good thirteen years,” Marshall says.
“That’s not what I meant,” his mom says. “You were both great kids. But you were the one with the delicate heart, both physically and figuratively.”
“Wow, Mom. You make me sound like such a stud.”
“Studs are overrated,” his mom says, leaning over to kiss her son’s cheek. “How’s that delicate heart feeling by the way? Any of the symptoms Dr. Smith mentioned?”
Marshall shakes his head, but the corners of his mouth turn up just a little. He’s thinking about the kiss, and now I’m thinking about it, too.
“Well, I should probably go,” I say, reaching for my bag. “I have a paper due tomorrow.”
“My dad can drop you off,” Marshall says.
“Absolutely,” his dad says, reaching for his coat.
I am not especially excited about making small talk with his dad — anyone’s dad — for twenty minutes, but don’t see a graceful way out of this.
“Thanks,” I say, and manage a smile. “That’d be great.”
“So Marshall tells us you’re from L.A.,” his dad says when we get into his car.
“Yeah. I moved here at the end of January,” I say.
“How do you like it so far?”
“I like it a lot,” I say. “Thanks to Hannah, really. She showed me around my first day and kind of took me in. She’s pretty much my only friend in Denver. Other than Marshall, I mean.” As I say it, I think about Sophie and the other girls at the lunch table today, it strikes me that maybe I’m wrong about that. “I haven’t spent as much time with her lately, though,” I add. “She’s been really focused on her audition.”
“Our little tugboat,” Mr. Jamison says, and he sounds proud. “I honestly don’t know where she gets it. So determined, so driven. Completely unflappable. And so independent, too.” He glances over at me. “I’m glad she found you. She’s needed a good girl friend, though she’d never admit it.”
i did too
“She’s okay, though, right?”
Mr. Jamison frowns. “What do you mean?”
“The pressure she puts on herself. All the stress.” I feel weird, like I’m accusing him of not being a good dad or something. I shift in my seat.
But his face relaxes. “Nah. If she were a different kid, I might worry. But Hannah thrives under pressure.”
She doesn’t seem like she’s thriving, not lately. Then again, the way she looks to me isn’t the way she looks to everyone else. I’m the only one hallucinating bruises on her face.
Dad looks surprised to see me when I come through the back door. He’s hunched over the kitchen table, sketching a wood deck on a blueprint of a backyard. “I was about to head back to the hospital to find you. How’d you get home?”
“Marshall’s dad drove me. Sorry I didn’t call.”
“That’s okay. How’s Marshall doing?”
“Good, actually.” I smile. “The procedure went really great.”
Dad smiles back. “I’m so glad to hear it. You were pretty worried, huh?”
I nod. The worry is mostly gone now, but there are bits of it clinging to the back of my throat. I swallow thickly.
“And the support group this morning?” he asks.
I nod again. “It was fine.” I fiddle with the strap on my bag. “I think I’ll go back Thursday morning, if you don’t mind taking me early.”
“Of course I don’t mind,” Dad says. “But what do you think about maybe trying to drive yourself?
“Yeah, maybe,” I say, to avoid making a whole thing of it. “Can we see how I feel on Thursday morning?”
“Sure, Bear.” Dad smiles. The scars on his face seem to disappear in the fold of his cheek, and for a second he looks the way he used to, smooth skin, my Dad. My eyes go from his cheeks to his forehead. weren’t there scars above his eyebrows, too? There aren’t anymore. My heart hiccups with relief.
i’m getting better
“I’m almost finished with these plans,” Dad says then, leaning back over the table with his drafting pencil. “Want to play a board game or something after?”
“I actually have a paper due tomorrow,” I say. “For English. Okay if I use the computer in your room?”
“Of course,” he says. “Maybe you can take a break for dinner in an hour or so? I’m making shrimp stir-fry tonight.”
I smile. Dad used to make shrimp stir-fry all the time when I was little. He’d put on a red apron and make a paper hat and pretend he was a chef at Benihana in Beverly Hills, where all my friends went for their birthdays but we couldn’t afford to go. And all at once I’m struck by the normalness of this moment, the normalness of us. For the first time since I moved to Colorado, this arrangement doesn’t feel temporary or strange. It doesn’t even like an arrangement at all. It feels like my life. The disappointment that he left five years ago is still there, but it’s not the strongest feeling I have anymore. Mostly I’m grateful that he’s here now, that I’m here, that the story has finally changed.
“I expect an onion volcano,” I tell him, smiling as I head down the hall towards his room. “Five slices high, at least.”
“Anything for you, Bear,” he calls, and I feel my heart squeeze.