I took the marshy evening air deep into my lungs. The storm gave us a break from the heat, and I filled my lungs again, breathing in until I thought they might burst.
Paul looked over at me, a wide smile on his face. “Don’t you love the way it feels after a rain?”
I looked down at my feet. My flip-flops were slinging mud onto the backs of my legs.
He slipped his hands into his pockets. Then he pulled them back out again and shook his arms. He was being all wiggly and kind of goofy. He turned around and walked backwards, facing me. “I just can’t believe I’m on a walk with you.”
“Paul.” He never stopped joking around.
“Sorry, sorry.” He lifted up his hands as though I was holding him at gunpoint. “Playing it cool is not my strength.”
I shook my head and gave him a look. “You think?”
He tripped on a rock, stumbled, and righted himself before flipping around to face forward again. He grinned. “Playing it cool is over-rated anyway. I never got what I wanted by pretending I didn’t want it.”
“Hmm.” What did he want? And anyway, I wasn’t so sure about his logic. I pretended all the time that I didn’t want things I actually wanted—vital for avoiding disappointment.
I looked around, wondering if anyone was watching us. Then I shook my head at myself and blew out a large breath. It was hard not to fall into old habits.
Things were so good at home right now. I could scarcely believe the last two weeks were my actual life. Trying to protect that, to somehow engineer the world so that nothing bad would happen was second nature. I sternly reminded myself I wasn’t doing that anymore.
I wasn’t going to worry about who was looking at me, I wasn’t going to make sure Mom didn’t lose her temper, or make sure Abe didn’t get underfoot, or make sure I didn’t do anything to set Dad off. It was futile, and not my problem, and I would resist the inclination. I suddenly felt bolder. “What is it that you want, Paul?”
He laughed and raked the hair out of his face. “For this walk to last until I wear holes in the bottoms of my shoes.”
I didn’t let that comment penetrate. He was just teasing me, like he did everyone, all the time. We crossed the gravel at the edge of Stacker Park, and walked over to the playground. Paul sluiced the water off the picnic table with his palm and sat on the top, resting his feet on the bench. He patted the spot beside him, but I went to the swings.
I tipped one up to dump off the water, and sat in it, dangling. My feet skimmed the surface of the puddle, then I slipped them under the water, flip-flops and all. After a moment, the shoes floated to the top. “The mud is so smooth under here.”
“It’s a hundred years’ worth of rock dust and shoe rubber, ground down into a fine paste.”
“Probably.” I turned my face up to the sun, which peeked out between fat, gray clouds. In spite of the warm sun, I shivered. “The mud is almost cold on my feet. You should try this.”
He toed off his work boots—the only pair of shoes I ever saw him in—yanked off his socks, and rolled up his jeans. He hopped off the table and came to the swing beside me.
The puddle beneath his feet was bigger than mine. He dipped his toes in.
“Go on; dig your feet down into the mud.” I wriggled my toes in the muck.
His legs jostled as he complied. “You realize we’re at risk for getting sliced by broken glass, right?”
“I never met a risk I didn’t like.”
“Is that true?”
“I said it, didn’t I?”
“Yeah, but is your tetanus shot up to date?”
I chuckled. “I wouldn’t know, but probably not. We don’t go to the doctor unless we’re near death or have a broken bone.”
He tilted his head toward me. “You’ve had two broken bones. You broke your leg when you were really little, and you also broke your arm once. You had a purple cast on your arm, and you wouldn’t let anybody sign it.” I looked at him quizzically, and he shrugged. “I have a good memory.”
“I didn’t let anybody sign it because I wanted it to stay pretty. Turns out it wasn’t set properly, and it healed a little crooked. You can still sort of see.” I held up my left arm, indicating the very slight curve in the bone of my forearm. Why was I telling him this?
“The radius,” Paul said. “We memorized the bones in biology last year.”
We were quiet for a while, gently swaying in our swings, our feet holding us in place like anchors in the mud. Paul was good, a truly good person. He was kind to everyone—which meant he wasn’t here because I was special, but because he was.
He looked over at me, but I kept watching the ground. A breeze blew my hair across my face. I was grateful for the hiding place. “What else do you remember about me?”
“Lots of things.” He smiled. “We both survived Mr. Thackish in fifth grade.”
I crinkled my nose. “How do you know which teacher I had in fifth grade? You were long gone to middle school by then.”
He reached out and tugged on my chain, bouncing my swing. “Don’t pretend you don’t know. It has been thoroughly revealed by this point that I’m sweet on you, and I’m not scared to admit it.”
He grinned, and I began to wonder if he was serious. I swallowed, my heart racing, and I stared at the puddle beneath me.
“You’re not the only one who enjoys a little risk,” he added. “That’s one of the many ways we’re alike.”
I shook my head, my thoughts swirling so fast I could only grab onto one. He thought we were alike? I wondered where on earth he was getting his information. I should just say it. Get it over with and stop wasting his time. If I talked to him just a little bit, then he’d see I wasn’t who he thought I was. “We’re nothing alike.”
“We are way more alike than we are different.”
“We couldn’t be more different. You’re the nicest guy, and I’m—”
“You think I’m nice?” He beamed.
I rolled my eyes up to the sky and bit my lip so I wouldn’t smile. “Well, let me tell you how we’re different.” It seemed important to push this point. I never wanted him to think I tricked him into believing I was a sweet girl. “People don’t say the kinds of things about you that they say about me.”
He bit his lip and furrowed his brow, staring at where his feet disappeared into the water. It took a minute before he spoke. “You sound like you believe the people.”
“When you hear something enough times, you start to believe it.”
“I never believe things I hear over things I see.” His voice was so soft.
I tilted my head forward so my hair hid my face again, and didn’t respond.
“The things people say about you don’t match up with the Celia I know.”
My face grew hot, and I tucked my chin closer to my chest to make sure he couldn’t see. “So you do hear things.”
He cleared his throat. “There are four other senses aside from hearing, you know. He held up one finger. Let me tell you what I see. A few weeks ago, I saw you helping Abe carry his sleeping bag and pillow and a bunch of other stuff down the street.”
That would have been shortly after the big fight. He wanted to stay at Jeremy’s, and he needed to have a lot of his stuff around him. “Doesn’t count. Big sisters are required to help their little brothers.”
He lifted another finger. “I tasted the caramel brownies you baked as a gift for Malcolm’s mom. I got the last one, a corner piece, and I still have dreams about it.”
“Oh, good grief. That was not a big deal. She’s fed Abe and Fay a million times and those brownies weren’t nearly enough to pay her back.” Though I tried not to show it, I liked how it felt when Marigold saw me around town and mentioned the brownies.
He flipped up a third finger. “Sometimes, when you stand close enough to me, I catch the scent of a campfire on your hair.”
I smelled like wood smoke? Fantastic. “So?”
“People smell like campfires when they spend time around one with their family and friends.”
I swirled my feet in the puddle, the edge of the water tickling my ankles. “Okay then, what’s your little story to go along with the sense of touch?” I sat tensely. Ronan spread enough stories about that particular sense—most of them false or at least exaggerated.
“I have a lot of stories to choose from, believe me.” He tapped his chin thoughtfully. “One time last spring, Esta was crying in the hallway at school, and you hugged her. And then you wiped her face with a tissue.”
“Everybody hugs their best friend.”
He shook his head and groaned, frustrated. “Celia. Listen, please. To me, you are cold lemonade on a hot day. You are at the restaurant working shifts for your friends. You are petting dogs you pass on the sidewalk. You are baking brownies you’ll never get to taste. The people have it wrong.”
I swung myself quietly for a bit, thinking about what he’d said. I lifted my muddy feet out of the puddle and wiggled my toes.
“You work hard at making people think you’re tough,” he said.
“I am tough.”
“You’re strong, is what you are. Being strong is better than being tough. Marigold once told me that true strength is having a thin skin.”
I blinked. “Paul, you’re…”
I didn’t know if I should finish my thought. I could feel Paul practically vibrating beside me.
“I can’t take it anymore. What am I?”
I glanced over at him. I felt my palms prickle with sweat as I gripped the chain. I had been about to blurt out how he was the only person who had ever talked to me this way, how what he said made me feel good, but I caught myself in time. “You’re happy.”
His eyes turned downward. “I’m not always as happy as I seem.”
“Give me a break, Paulie. I think you would be happy even if piranhas were gnawing your feet off. You’d say something like, ‘Oh, this is actually excellent because now I won’t have to buy new shoes anymore and I can use that extra money for video games.’”
A laugh busted out of him, and he kept grinning until he looked over at me to see that I wasn’t even smiling. He straightened out his features. “That’s not being happy though, Celia, that’s trying to make the best of a bad situation. It’s just being optimistic.” He tugged on my chain, jostling me, and then lifted his feet out of the puddle. They were filthy, and his toes were starting to prune. “Good, there must not be any piranhas in there.”
I chuckled, but still felt lost in thought. I let go of my chain long enough to brush my hair away from my face. “Maybe having more optimistic friends will be good for me.”
“Are we friends, Celia?”
I rested my head against the chain, and studied his face. Who knew with him? He had about a million friends, and he treated them all the same. He seemed to trust with no boundaries. He had no boundaries at all, in fact. He punched all the guys on their arms, he laughed with everyone, he kissed girls on their foreheads, and held their hands for no reason. “Time will tell.”
The look he gave me when I said that did strange things to my chest. It was tight, like I couldn’t get enough air. Just then, Abe appeared over the crest of the hill and ran across the grass toward us.
“Thank God!” he said, leaning over and resting his hands on his knees, trying to catch his breath. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you.”
I jumped out of my swing, suddenly on high alert. I grabbed his shoulders. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing! Everything is great! Dad got home just as Mom was starting dinner, and he told her to put the ground beef back in the freezer. He wants to take us all to dinner in Bakerstown. He sent me out to find you.”
“Oh. Okay.” My pulse still pounded in my ears and I felt short of breath as I calmed myself. Nothing was wrong. I skimmed my shoes off the top of the puddle and slid them onto my filthy feet. “Bye, Paul.” I spun Abe around by his shoulders and we took off, quickly putting distance between us and the swings.
“Yeah, bye, Paul!” Abe shouted into the wind, arms spread out at his sides, spinning as we ran toward home.
Five days later, I had officially lost my mind. I stood in the kitchen and scanned my body, clad in cotton shorts and a tank top. And a sports bra—God help me. The water bottle was heavy in my hand. Where did runners keep their water? I took a huge swig and set it on the counter, figuring my stamina wouldn’t be so great that I’d require hydration. This was my first run, after all.
A run. I shook my head at myself and slipped the elastic off my wrist and used it to pull my hair into a tight ponytail. I was about to become a person who went on runs. Something was shifting in me. I had found some extra energy, some strange motivation that made me want to do things I hadn’t done in a long time.
Fay left two days ago after dinner, and I was at loose ends, unsure of what to do with myself. After she drove away, Mom and I went in the house and just stood there for a minute, in the strange silence. She said she was craving something sweet and I asked her to teach me how to make frosting roses. So we’d baked a cake to fill the time and the silence, but it also flung me back into a feeling from childhood—just my mom and me in the kitchen, nothing so wrong a sweet treat couldn’t fix it.
Though I was grumpy about Fay being gone, and I missed her most when I was working and she wasn’t there with me, Mom and I had both been full of a slowly expanding promise, riding the high of the last week of life in our house. Dinner in Bakerstown had been good. Mom and Abe and I had started out the evening a little wary, but Dad hadn’t ordered beer with his dinner, and he’d held Mom’s hand on top of the table while they had coffee and listened to Abe jabber on. The days since had been more of the same. It wasn’t unusual to have a time of peace after a time of turmoil, but it was unusual that he wasn’t drinking.
Now it was late afternoon, nearly five, and I stepped into the back yard. I hoped it would be a little cooler than it had been midday, but it wasn’t.
Dad and Abe were in the yard, bent over, looking closely at something. “That’s it, you’ve got it,” Dad said, his voice whisper-soft, urging Abe along.
“Am I blowing too hard?” Abe asked.
“No, no, keep going. You’re doing it just right. Look, it’s about to catch!”
They parted and I saw a spark of fire erupt beneath Abe’s hands. He gasped in wonder.
Dad scrambled for the scraps of newspaper by his knees. “Here you go, son, feed that flame.”
Abe delicately pushed the paper into the flame, and as it grew, his smile grew too. “It worked! I can’t believe it worked.”
“The work’s not done yet,” Dad said, his smile as wide as Abe’s. “Get those little sticks and prop them up on the log like we practiced.” He watched as Abe set up the sticks, his tongue held between his teeth in concentration. Dad’s hands moved alongside Abe’s, not touching anything, but copying Abe’s movements as he made them.
The little sticks caught, and the fire rose higher. They put a couple larger logs on it, then sat back. The flame rose higher, and Dad laughed deeply. “You did it, son.” He ruffled Abe’s hair.
I took a step closer, wondering, because Abe had started fires many times. Abe noticed me then, and grinned. He held up a magnifying glass. “Celia, I started a fire with this! Can you believe it?”
“That’s a real thing? I thought that was something made up for cartoons.”
“No, no, it’s real,” Dad said. “Would you like to learn? It doesn’t take but a minute.”
I bit my lip, hard, to stop the tears in their tracks. I wished Fay was here to see this. I wished Fay was here, period. She’d make fun of my outfit and I’d roll my eyes at her, and we’d be happy. I smiled at my father. “Maybe some other time. Right now I’m going on a run.”
“Why would you want to do a thing like that?” Dad teased.
“I have legs, so I might as well use them.”
He waved as I jogged out of the yard, and I felt light as air, like I could run a hundred miles.
That feeling lasted about two blocks. Running didn’t feel the way I remembered when I was a kid. At eight years old, running down the sidewalk had meant my thighs bunching up under my skin as my feet pounded the pavement, the breeze blowing my ponytail side-to-side, my lungs straining like a morning stretch. This felt more like having the flu.
I’d planned to go to Esta’s and try to convince her to run with me. My new goal was to make it to Esta’s alive. I took a shortcut behind the stores on Main Street, hoping to shave a minute or two off this torture.
As I plodded past the hardware store, a wolf whistle sounded from the parking lot. Every muscle in my body clenched tight, and I refused to look to see who it was.
“Hey, Celia!”
Recognizing the voice, a smile found me and I looked over to see Nick and some other boys sitting on the trunk of an ancient blue Oldsmobile. I wound my way through the cars, slowing to a stop when I reached them. “You do realize you’re rude, crude, and socially unacceptable, don’t you?” I panted, leaning over and resting my hands on my knees.
He patted the trunk beside him. “Take a load off. There’s plenty of room on this beast.”
I hopped up onto the trunk, the expanse of which would allow for at least six people. “I hope you don’t whistle at the girls you actually like,” I said.
He shoved me on the arm. “Of course not. I’m only a heathen with my oldest and dearest friends.”
I stuck my tongue out at him.
“These are my cousins, visiting from Decatur. Ian and Noah.” Nick slugged each one on the shoulder as he introduced them.
“Cousins with a car, that’s pretty sweet. I’m Celia.”
“Why the heck are you out running in this heat, anyway?” Nick asked.
I shrugged. “I got it into my head that I should join the track team this year. Maybe even cross country this fall. Four blocks in, and I’m rethinking.”
Nick sighed dramatically. “That’s a relief. I was worried you were running from Ronan. I bet he’s been chasing you down, trying to get you back.” Nick had never liked Ronan. I appreciated that about him now.
“If I was running away from Ronan, I’d be running a whole lot faster than that.” The boys all laughed, and I looked up in time to see Paul and Malcolm going into the hardware store. Paul jerked his head away from us before I caught his eye, but he saw me. I was sure of it. And he didn’t even stop to say hello. He had his hands tucked in his pockets, and his shoulders were tight, his head angled away from me. I’d never seen him walk so stiffly. Was he mad at me?
I sighed. He probably was. I’d probably done something or said something to ruin whatever nice things he’d ever thought about me. I swallowed thickly, and hopped down off the trunk. It was just like me to be terrible in some way and not even know what it was.
“I better get back to it,” I told the guys. “It was good to meet you.”
Nick patted me on the shoulder. “Hey, take it easy, okay? Let’s hang out some time—just the old gang. You, me, Molly, and Esta. Sound good?”
“Yeah, that actually sounds great.” I walked to the edge of the parking lot, then picked up my pace, heading not toward Esta’s, but right back home. I suddenly didn’t have the energy for anything other than a cool shower and lying on my bed with the fan pointed directly on me.