EMILY DICKINSON
After spending Sunday at home and most of the day Monday at the doctor and running errands with Mom, it takes a second to readjust to school Tuesday morning. I wave to Ayla in the hall when I see her.
She lifts her hand in a semi-wave. “I’ll catch up with you later, okay?” she mumbles as she and her lit-mag buddy head up the hall. Feeling brushed off, I shuffle to my locker, head down, unaware of Chatham until I collide with his solid frame.
“I missed you yesterday.” He grins, holding out a hand for me.
When our hands touch for a moment, I smile. Being this close to him sends my nervous system into overdrive. Sights and smells and sounds from Saturday bombard my senses—his warm lips on mine, the curl of damp hair on his neck, the touch of his firm hands on my wet skin.
“My appointment took longer than I thought, and then Mom wanted to hang out.” I turn away, digging around in my locker, trying to come up with a plan. I have to be honest with him. I have to tell him about the epilepsy. Today. Before this relationship goes any further. No matter what, I’m not a liar. I need to be honest with him to make things right with Ayla, and to explain my situation before Hitch comes to school next week. Or before Maddie fills his head with rumors and speculation.
“Is everything okay?” he asks.
Am I okay? Well, let’s see, that’s way trickier than it sounds—yes and no. “Uh, yeah, it was just a . . . follow-up.” A follow-up to almost a decade of neurological disorder.
“That’s good,” he says, catching a binder for me and slipping it back in place before it can hit the floor.
Squeezing my eyes shut, I try counting to ten. At three, I cave. “Listen. We need to—” I turn to face him and notice for the first time the black circles of exhaustion carved beneath his eyes. “Are you okay?” I ask, my disclosure conversation all but forgotten.
He shrugs. “Just tired. Mary Catherine’s afraid of storms. I was up with her most of the weekend. Then we had late practice last night.”
When he slings my backpack over his shoulder, I smile, remembering the first time I met him in the counseling office.
“Thanks to my awesome tutor, I’m back in the starting lineup.” He hides a yawn behind his free hand.
“I’m sorry about your sister.” I touch his arm—a pretty bold move on my part, I must say.
“No big deal.” He loops the arm around my waist, pulling me toward him. “It comes with the territory.”
No big deal? Walking around half dead, sporting industrial-sized black bags under your eyes, is just a part of loving someone with special needs. What would Chatham look like if I seized on him? If there’s a nicer guy anywhere in the world who doesn’t deserve to be weighed down by a disabled girlfriend, I can’t imagine him.
I don’t care what Mom or Ayla or Dr. Wellesley say. I’m not telling Chatham about my epilepsy today—not when he looks like one of the POWs we’ve been studying in US History.
“Since you’re the one responsible for my improved grades and starting position, I thought you might want to come to our first game.” His hand tightens on my waist. “I could save you a seat behind the bench.”
I glance up at him to make sure I’m hearing this right. It’s one thing to visit a lighthouse, just the two of us. It’s something else to have him save me a seat behind the bench. It’s so visible, so out in the open. It screams relationship. “Oh.” My lips part. My brain forms a response, but the words lodge in my throat.
His hand falls from my side. “It’s okay if you don’t want to,” he says, his voice barely audible over the noisy traffic in the hall. “Not everyone likes basketball.”
I don’t care much about basketball, but that has nothing to do with my hesitation. All I’ve ever wanted since I was diagnosed with epilepsy is to be normal, and this is my shot. It’s just I don’t know if I’m ready for it. I’m chest deep in rising water and don’t know how to swim. The water’s about to rush over my head, and I’ve got two seconds to make a decision: head back to safety or start pumping my arms and legs.
“No. It’s not that.” I’m on tiptoe, gripping the floor of the pool with my toenails. “I’d love to go.” Just like that, the bottom recedes. My arms and legs are moving, but with more thrashing than pumping.
“Awesome. You can meet my parents.”
I swallow a lungful of water. “Great,” I gasp, forcing a smile.
He delivers me to math, where I spend the next fifty minutes trying to digest what just happened in the hall. Thankfully, I am so completely invisible to Mr. Gravitt that he fails to notice me. When he surveys the room for daydreamers, I shrink in my seat, scribble a random equation on my bare paper, and squint at it like Einstein puzzling through the theory of relativity.
The bell rings, and I scurry to the bathroom. I need a second to gather my thoughts before facing Chatham and Ayla in second period. And—my stomach tightens—Maddie. Who may or may not have figured out my secret. I bolt myself into the last stall, drop my bag on the floor, and collapse on the toilet. Digging my fingers into my thighs, I suck down a couple of steadying breaths.
When the bell rings a minute later, I jerk, and my butt lifts six inches off the toilet. Unfortunately, I snag my foot in the strap of my backpack, and before I can catch myself, my hand slips inside the rim of the toilet. I slide to the floor, disgusted with myself.
I drag my hand out of the toilet, push off the sticky floor with the other, and try not to gag. When I stand, I’m eye level with one of my favorite author’s names written in silver paint pen. Frances Hodgson Burnett. In bubbly letters, some optimistic girl has scribed a quotation from The Secret Garden.
I remember how badly I wanted to be Mary Lennox when I was little and slip out of my life and into her magical garden of blossoming flowers with its friendly robin. Now I study the fat words meandering up the wall: If you look the right way, you can see the whole world is a garden. Oh, how I want to believe those fifteen words—or at least meet a teenage girl with that hopefulness.
Then I realize I have met a girl like that: Ayla. And she’s sitting in second period disappointed with me. I can’t blame her. After her mother deceived her the way she did, I’m willing to guess Ayla has zero tolerance for anything resembling dishonesty—even if it’s not really a lie, even if it’s just a lack of full disclosure.
I grab my backpack and head to the sink to wash my hands before moving out of the safety of the bathroom and into whole wide world, praying that Frances Hodgson Burnett knows what she’s talking about.