KAT
WE SIT OUTSIDE MEG’S HOUSE FOR A LONG TIME, MOM AND ME. SHE KEEPS the car running the whole time; she has to, it’s twenty below. She doesn’t say anything, just waits for me, patiently, to get out of the car. Like she has been since we arrived, which was long enough ago that my knuckles are stiff and uncomfortable from gripping my knees so tightly.
That’s all I have to do—get out of the car. Take a dozen steps down the sidewalk. Knock on Meg’s door. All of which I’ve done multiple times before. Plus, I’m wearing my confidence-inducing pink shirt (not to be confused with my lucky pink shirt). So I should be able to get out of the car.
But thinking of getting out of the car makes me think of facing Meg’s eager excitement, which makes me think of the party, which makes me think of my fear of standing alone and awkward and overwhelmed in a corner while crowds of people jostle me and trap me in and judge me with their piercing eyes because I can’t remember how to do the most basic task of living—breathing. I hate my brain. I hate crowds. I hate people.
I wish that one “party” I went to provided a full explanation for my fear. But I was afraid of parties—afraid of people, really—long before that. I have no excuse. I’m just scared.
I drop my head between my legs, searching for breath somewhere other than my lungs. I can’t find it. One . . . I try to count. One . . . I can’t remember how to count.
“Kat.” Mom puts her hand on my shoulder. She hands me my phone. I’m not sure why she even has it. “Tell Meg you can’t make it.”
Obediently, robotically, I tap out the message. Breathe. Breathe. Head back between my knees. Tires rolling. Somewhere far away a phone is ringing. Somewhere in my head a phone is ringing. I don’t know how to answer it.
I awake Saturday morning to more ringing, though it turns out to be my normal weekend alarm, not the telephone in my head. In fact, my mind is unusually quiet as I get up and have breakfast. After spending some time last night with a paper bag, a hot bath, one of my anxiety pills, and hours of listening to The Velveteen Rabbit on repeat before I finally fell asleep, I feel almost like myself again. Sort of. A heaviness still weighs down my chest, like my lungs have turned to lead.
I need to call Meg, though. I need to explain. I need her to know I tried. I really tried. And I need her to know I’m sorry.
I stare at her name on my phone screen for what feels like an eternity before I finally fill my leaden lungs with air and jab at the call button.
It barely rings before she answers. “Okay, dude,” she says, without even saying hello. “Did someone die or something? Because that’s the only reason I can think of for you standing me up.”
“I . . . no—”
“Then what? Seriously! How could you leave me hanging like that? I had to babysit Kenzie all night.”
“Well, I—”
“Kenzie fell asleep in my bed and peed in it. Peed in it. Have you ever slept on a mattress that smells like pee? Even like a million spritzes of Febreze can’t mask that smell. Ugh. Seriously, ugh. What the heck, Kat?”
“You’re not even giving me a chance to explain,” I snap, more angrily than I mean to.
“Fine. Explain.”
The pause draws out into one second, then three, then five. It is not silence, exactly. I can hear her hurried, angry breaths, and my shaky, shallow ones. The tension builds like radiation around a frog in a microwave in a cruel, psychopathic joke. Each breath counts down to its doom. This is my chance to explain, to make it right. To hit stop and rescue the frog before it—well, before. But what exactly am I supposed to say? I’m sorry that I’m incapable of acting like a normal human being? I’m sorry I’m overwhelmed by crowds and terrified of small talk? I’m sorry I agreed to go to your stupid party in the first place?
“I don’t know,” I mumble moronically.
“Then I don’t know why I’m even bothering to talk to you,” she snaps, then hangs up the phone.
The line is dead.
The frog’s in a million tiny pieces.
Even the air in my lungs turns to lead.
MEG
I AM REDEFINING THE TERM BFF. LYRICALLY. NO, LIMERICKALLY. NO. COME on, what’s the word? The one that means for real, not just for pretend, not exaggerated. Gah, I feel so stupid sometimes. I kick my desk, making my laptop screen shudder. Screw it. Whatever the word is, that’s how I’m doing it.
I bring up the slang site, log in, and enter the definition:
BFF: Big Fat Frog, or Blind Friendly Fish, or Bean Fueled Fart.
Because it definitely doesn’t mean Best Friend Forever. Not for me. I don’t know if I have some kind of built-in people spray—like bug spray, but for people—or what, but no one sticks with me forever. Not best friends, not anybody.
The friendship bracelet girls lasted three months last spring; Lindsey lasted—I count on my fingers—three weeks; I had a boyfriend for just two months; my birth dad only stuck around for four years of my life; Stephen-the-Leaver lasted seven, and those years were obviously for Kenzie and Nolan, and not for me.
I thought Kat could make it at least seven years. I thought Kat would be around forever.
Nope.
Try a whopping . . . one . . . two . . . two months! Not even.
Well, screw you, too, Kat.
Screw you all. Why don’t you all go shove a hive of hornets up your butts?
Oh, and literally. The word is “literally.”
In the laundry room, I practice ollie after ollie, bashing my knee on the washing machine every time I glide over to check my phone. No messages.
I set my phone on the arm of the couch as Nolan curls up beside me to read his dinosaur book. I check it as he reads aloud a page about herbivores. No messages. Nolan notices my distraction and starts the page over from the beginning.
There are no messages as I wrestle with Kenzie, do homework, help Mom cook beans and rice, watch Lorenzo the turtle swim in circles, play dolls with Kenzie, and try to watch a LumberLegs video, then give up because I keep turning to grin at Kat but she’s not there.
No messages when I shower, change, climb into bed.
No messages until I lean over and flick out the light. Then, from out of the new darkness, my phone dings. I flick the light back on.
There’s a message—not in my texts, but online.
Dear Flash,
I looked for you at the party last night, but didn’t see you. Any interest in going for coffee with me sometime? My treat, as a thank you for protecting planet earth.
—Grayson
It’s Grayson, which is, hello, amazing!
But it’s not Kat.
I roll over and press my face into my pillow. No text messages. Not a single one, all day long. I hug the pillow to my chest. Then I roll over again and type a message back to Grayson—because I may be made of people repellent, but I’m not stupid.
KAT
MEG DOESN’T TEXT ME ALL DAY, AND I DON’T BLAME HER. SHE SHOULDN’T have hung up on me, but I probably should have been honest with her about my attacks. But how do I tell Meg that sometimes my heart races and my palms sweat and my lungs completely forget why they exist, all because I can’t handle parties? Because I can’t remember what beans to buy?
One pinto . . . two black . . . three French style . . .
Although my breathing’s calmed since last night, I still feel like my heart is racing—though it’s not. I held my fingers to my throat and timed it to check. And I still feel like an elephant is sitting on my chest.
Meg probably wouldn’t even answer if I called, but maybe Luke would for once. Luke never gets panic attacks, but he always understood mine.
I call him, listen to it ring and ring and ring until the ring’s replaced by his stupid voice-mail message about being too busy partying or studying or whatever to answer. He never answers now that university has gobbled him up and swallowed him whole. Maybe he’s joined some fraternity cult. Or he could be dead on his dorm room floor. We’d never know.
I don’t leave a message.
I wander downstairs and throw YouTube onto the big-screen TV. I choose an old LumberLegs series, where he and his buddies decide not to close up any of the rifts that spawn, and their world becomes completely unstable—walls falling apart, equipment disappearing, underworld beasts rising up from the earth in the middle of their castles. Hilarious. I grab a blanket and wrap it snug around and around me in a cocoon before settling on the couch to watch my favorite episode, which is the one where Legs will lose his legendary sword to the rifts and have to fight off a mob of filthworms with a boot.
The tightness around my heart loosens just a little.
I’m only a few minutes into the episode when I see Granddad wander into the room out of the corner of my eye.
“Is it too loud? Sorry, I’ll turn it down.” I wriggle my shoulders to free my arms from my blanket cocoon. Mom’s always telling me to turn things down. “Granddad is sleeping” or “Granddad is reading.”
“No, it’s fine,” he says, just as I manage to free my arms and reach for my tablet. He lowers himself onto the other end of the couch, and even through Legs’s squeals as the filthworms start rising from the earth, I can hear Granddad’s bones creak from the effort. I hit pause, freezing the screen on a close-up of a filthworm—with its cartoony, eyeless face—crawling over Legs’s feet.
Granddad peers at the screen, then looks at me. “You feeling any better today? Where’s your friend Meg?”
I shrug. “Mostly.”
I don’t know how to answer the other question, but he doesn’t press. Instead, he just nods. His bushy white eyebrows rise. “Does watching funny things help?”
Help what? Distract my mind? Encourage every tense muscle in my body to relax? Loosen the death grip around my heart?
“Yes,” is all I say.
He nods again. “Used to help your grandma, too. She had panic attacks. Has your mother told you that?”
I shake my head. She’s never mentioned it. Granddad offers the information like it might help me, but since I never knew her, it doesn’t.
Except that it feels like maybe Granddad understands me after all. Maybe.
He waves his bony arm toward the screen. “Don’t let me stop you. Carry on.” He relaxes into the couch cushions, which I wish he wouldn’t do because I worry he’ll never be able to get back up again.
“You won’t—” I say, then break off. I have no idea what Granddad does and doesn’t like to watch, and it’s not my place to decide that for him. He can just leave when he realizes he doesn’t like it. If he can manage to get back up off the couch.
I press play and try not to look at Granddad as Legs lets out another high-pitched squeal. The filthworms surround him. As he swats at them, his sword disappears. Another squeal.
“Is he—is he fighting those things with a boot?” Granddad asks. And then he chuckles.
I grin.
We watch the rest of the video in silence, except for Granddad’s laughter, which rings out at all the right spots. Just like Meg’s.
MEG
I AM GOING TO GET ICE CREAM. TEN FLAVORS OF ICE CREAM AND CHOCOLATE and sauces and that marshmallow fluff stuff, and then I’m going to spend my Sunday afternoon eating it all instead of wailing about Kat’s departure from my life. But as I search through our closet for some mittens, the doorbell rings. And there she is. Kat. On our front porch. She pushes past me into the front hall before I can decide whether to slam the door in her face.
She kicks off her heavy black boots, scattering snow across our welcome mat, then sets her bag down on the floor with a thud and slides off her ginormous coat and hands it to me, wordlessly. I take it, also wordlessly, and hang it in the closet, because I don’t know what else to do. By the time I’ve closed the closet door, she’s halfway down the stairs to the basement with her bag. I take the stairs two at a time after her to catch up. I don’t want to freak her out again by jumping the whole thing.
Kat kneels on the floor and starts rummaging through her bag.
“I thought we were fighting,” I finally say.
“We are.” She starts pulling stuff out of her bag. Some cables. Batteries. Then a Wii remote. More batteries. Another remote.
“So what . . .” I trail off, not sure what I’m trying to ask. What are you doing here? What’s all this stuff? Isn’t our friendship over?
“I wasn’t sure if you had a Wii.” Her words aren’t inflected as a question, but she looks up at me expectantly, waiting for an answer. She needs to pluck one of her eyebrows; it’s a little fuller than the other.
“We do.” I gesture toward the cupboard below the TV. “It should already be hooked up. Nolan was playing his car game yesterday.”
“Oh, good, that’s easy then. Here are the games I brought.” She spreads six Wii games across the floor. “Pick one.”
“What? Why?”
“I brought only games that I haven’t played in years. So it’s fair. And you can pick which one. Best of three to determine who wins.”
“Wins what?”
“The argument.”
She’s talking nonsense, but she’s here, in my house, apparently ready to play a video game. With me. I point to a game at random. “Okay, then that one.”
“Freddy’s Farm Frenzy,” she says, picking it up and heading over to the Wii. “An excellent choice.”
She pops it in, and next thing I know, we’re perched on the edge of the couch, waving our arms around, trying to herd animals into a pen. Fighting to herd the most. Or not fighting. Or something.
I win the first game, but Kat wins the next. She’s about to win her second, but right before the timer ticks to zero, she pauses the game and turns to me.
“Good call,” I joke. “I was about to win.”
She doesn’t laugh, and when I turn to look at her, her face is somber. She takes a deep breath, then lets it back out before saying, “I have panic attacks.”
“Panic attacks?” I parrot back.
“Yes. About stupid things. A year or so ago, I was at a grocery store, and I couldn’t remember what type of canned beans Mom had asked me to pick up, so I had a complete meltdown. Started hyperventilating right there in the lentils aisle. The store manager had to use my own phone to call Mom to come get me.
“Mom found me a counselor after that. She was mostly crap, but she must have helped a little, because I haven’t had one since we moved here. Or rather, hadn’t had one. Until Friday night happened.”
“Oh,” I say. “So that’s why you couldn’t come?”
She nods. “I had one at a party before. I really can’t do parties. I’m sorry.”
I should be disappointed, maybe, that there won’t be any parties in our future. But I’m just so relieved to have her back.
“I have ADHD,” I spit out.
“Yeah, I figured.”
“Shut up,” I say, smacking her in the arm. There’s no malice in her voice, though. Not like Lindsey used to have when she talked about my hyperactivity like it was a disease. I tug at one of my curls, even though Mom always tells me not to. “I thought our friendship was over.”
“I don’t want it to be over. Do you?”
I am suddenly giddy. “Definitely not.” I lean into her shoulder. “We should fight more often.”
She scowls at me in her normal, grumpy, wonderful way. “I’d really rather not.”