“You laugh, but it just might happen.”
“Yeah, and I might be Miss America.”
“You might. Lots of cool people have scars.”
“Like you,” I said, trying to pay him a compliment.
“Like Seal, and Tina Fey, and . . . Jesus.”
“That sounds like a really good episode of Saturday Night Live.”
“I’d watch it.” He smiled as I walked to the door. “Last thing before you go.” He closed out every session with the same advice. It was his personal mantra, and I loved hearing it. “Scars tell a story, but this week, you decide what that story’s going to be.”
I hugged the door frame and leaned back into the office. “Hey, Fletcher?”
He stopped fiddling with my folder, where he scratched notes from our session. “Yes, ma’am.”
“I want my story to be good.”
Dr. Fletcher Glasson smiled a smile worthy of an art exhibit at the Met. “It already is.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Therapy days were good and bad.
Every time I left Fletcher’s I felt like a freshly plowed field. The blades of his words turned soil in my mind, and the process exhausted me. Mom knew. She turned on some folk music and told me to rest. I fell asleep on the five-minute drive.
At home, I showered, stomached a few spoonfuls of peanut butter, and tumbled into bed as if I’d run a marathon rather than spent fifty minutes talking about my life.
Mom and Dad took my naptime by force. The two of them crawled into my king bed in their afternoon sweats. I should have anticipated this. I’d heard Dad call his boss this morning and ask for a personal day. Mom must have canceled all her appointments. They clearly weren’t taking any chances I’d emotionally crash after therapy or that I’d located some more Sharpies.
“Seriously?” I said through a curtain of damp hair. “I just got here.”
“Scoot over, Sade. You gave us a save-the-date for a movie.”
“Don’t you two have something better to do?” I teased Dad. “Netflix? Street-sign theft? Or, you know, work?”
“Nope,” Mom said. “You want to call Max? We’ll move to the living room and make it a party.”
I glanced at my phone, which had zero texts or missed calls, and said, “He’s doing his own thing today.”
Mom parted my hair. “You want me to brush your hair while we watch?”
This offer was a ticket to my soul.
I laid my head on her lap. “What movie did you pick?” Her fingers needled through my hair, and I practically purred.
“Your choice,” Dad said. “We’ve got Jurassic Park, The Breakfast Club, and The Empire Strikes Back.”
“Those are all old. I thought we were going to watch something funny.”
“Old, schmold, and I beg to differ with your opinions on humor.” Dad popped me on the head with the DVD case. “If you make it through any one of them without smiling, I’ll grill shrimp for supper.”
“Deal. Jurassic Park.” I snuggled deeper into the bed and Mom’s leg. Dad grilled the best shrimp in the world. This was easy eating.
They started the movie. I fell asleep before the first casualty.
My dreams were made of dinosaur-people. A T. rex the color of Big sat in the middle of the island, granting life-saving advice through a hole in his claw. He told me I had to drive a car in a tank top or be eaten alive. I ripped the sleeves off my shirt, but when I combed the island for a vehicle, my safari Jeep was a Barbie car with a battery problem. I woke up as the T. rex teeth came at my head.
I noticed the TV was off, Dad was sound asleep, and Mom still fiddled with my hair even though her eyes were closed.
“Bad dream?” she asked as I stirred.
Sleepy me had no filter. I told her all about it.
Her thigh muscles tightened beneath me as she stretched. Her fingers stopped while she yawned.
“Tomorrow, I say, you’re going to wear a T-shirt and drive a car.”
I lifted my head off her leg. “Mo-om.”
She just smiled. Our features were similar—full upper lips, wavy blond hair with identical widow’s peaks that pointed to crooked button noses, and blue eyes that were occasionally gray. She was beautiful. The way I might have been with some age, had my face not gone through a window.
“Tomorrow. I really believe tomorrow is the day,” she said.
“And if I don’t?”
“It’s not a threat, baby doll. It’s a hope.”
I relaxed again and she said, “Did you know I’ve been to El Salvador?”
I didn’t. Not once in the entire time the McCalls were gone had she mentioned a visit to Central America. Considering her idea of roughing it was the Hilton, I was shocked she’d even gotten on the plane. If the rest of El Salvador looked like Max’s video of the nunnery, my mother had been miserable.
Mom registered my disbelief. “Sonia talked me into it.” Huge eye-roll. “It was . . . awful.”
We both giggled, but not loud enough to wake Dad. “I mean . . . awful,” she continued. “Hot as Hades. I hated the food. Black beans for breakfast. Watered-down beer. It took me thirty minutes to decide I hated it and one day to decide I wanted to go home.”
“What’d you do?”
“What do you mean?” she said playfully. “I called my parents, and they changed my plane ticket to the next day.”
“For real?”
“Baby, why would I stay somewhere I hated?”
It was such a simple, true statement. I heard it about my life.
If nothing changes, nothing changes.
“You hear me?” she asked.
“Loud and clear.”
Mom zippered the conversation closed. “Hey, wake up that bear beside you, and tell him to make us some shrimp.”
“But I fell asleep.”
“Oh, honey, he was always going to make you shrimp.”
After the world’s best shrimp, I went for a long run. Eight o’clock. In shorts. Sand kicked up behind me as I rushed mile one and then mile two. Twilight painted the sky purple and orange and gorgeous. I sweated through the layers of my clothes, wishing the last of the sun would fall below the curve, and also that it would stay sunset forever.
I longed to pick a point in the future and transport myself there without having to live all the hard moments in between. I wanted to call my parents and ask them to switch my ticket to a different life.
There wasn’t a different ticket, but there were choices. I thought about my conversations with Mom and Fletcher. They, whoever they are, say it takes seven times to hear something before it sinks in. For me, it took about seventy billion.
I was finally listening.
I hated this shitty spot with my friends. And why would I stay somewhere I hated?
I wouldn’t. Not anymore.
First things first, I sat down in the sand, and rather than write a list, I emailed Max from my phone.
From:
[email protected] To:
[email protected] Date: June 26
Subject: I’m SO
Sorry.
I’m sitting out here on the beach thinking about everything that’s happened. I’ll give you one guess which of these things matters to me most.
A) Trent being gay
B) Gray driving the Jeep
C) Something being off between us
Pick C. I pick C.
Max, I should have told you about Trent a long time ago.
Above me is a sky full of stars. In front of me is an ocean full of waves. Beneath me are a million grains of sand that used to be rock. That ocean I love so much beat rocks into sand. I’m afraid that’s what I’ve done to you. Can you ever forgive me?
I love you, Maxwell Lincoln McCall.
Sadie
He fired an email back almost instantly.
From:
[email protected] To:
[email protected] Date: June 26
Subject: It took
Millions of years for that ocean to beat rocks into sand.
We’re not that broken.
I love you too, Sadie (May) Elizabeth Kingston.
Max
From:
[email protected] To:
[email protected] Date: June 26
Subject: Will you
come over tonight?
From:
[email protected] To:
[email protected] Date: June 26
Subject: Of
course.
At eleven that night, Max tapped on my window.
“You’re wearing my T-shirt?” he said as he crawled inside.
Tennessee blazed at him, but I willed myself to keep my thoughts elsewhere. Which wasn’t hard. Max was shirtless and in a pair of athletic shorts.
“I’m glad you came,” I whispered.
“I’m glad you asked.”
My eyes drifted to my phone. “Where’ve you been?”
He faced me. “With Callahan.”
Max sat down on the edge of my bed. “Wanna play a game?” he asked, without a hint of play in his voice.
“Something you’ve never told me?”
He nodded and handed me a creased and grainy photo of a chalk drawing. The work, if you could call it that, was clearly mine. Before they dismissed me from the hospital, one of the nurses gave me a bucket of sidewalk chalk and told me to use it all before my follow-up appointment. She told me to draw and then hose, draw and then hose—she repeated that more than twice—that the water would wash away more than chalk. She also mentioned, more than twice, that I should trust her.
“I’ve been giving away chalk buckets for longer than they’ve made chalk buckets,” she’d claimed.
That first week, I had slipped out our back door after midnight and drawn dozens of elementary school–level drawings—emotional outbursts—on our back patio by moon- and streetlight.
“How did you get this?” I asked.
Max didn’t answer, and I examined the photo again.
In the middle, there was a crudely drawn caricature of me, lying on my side, a brown-and-gray cape covering me. I’d written Superhero down in green chalk. There was a string tied around my pinkie toe that stretched toward a huge peach-colored hand.
Below the hand was another line. Don’t let me go.
“I love this drawing,” Max said, taking it from me and holding it like a talisman. “I snapped a picture before you hosed it off.”
“Why would you do that?”
“I was in the hammock when you drew it. You kept repeating a phrase. Do you remember what it was?” he asked.
I didn’t remember, but I knew.
“‘Hold on. Hold on. Hold on.’”
“That’s right,” he said. “When you were drawing that, you had steel in your eyes. You had . . . mettle.”
“I didn’t have a clue.”
“You did to me.”
“I don’t even remember this moment,” I admitted.
“You don’t have to, because I do. That’s when I knew you had pain that looked like mine. We were in that car together. We lost Trent together. I didn’t have to go through the rest of life alone.”
“You’ve always seemed like you were okay. Sad, but okay.”
“Sadie, I was a thousand miles away. You can’t say everything in an email.” Max folded his body in half, practically burying his forehead in his knees as he spoke. “There are things I never told you, too. Like . . . I woke up one day in El Salvador, and I couldn’t breathe.”
He exhaled so hard that it felt as if it bounced off all the walls. “I just lost myself. I took off running, and I ran until I collapsed. I couldn’t get back up. My dad found me lying in a street. He carried me back to the compound in his arms.”
We were months past this pain in his life, and it sounded as if it had occurred today.
“You could have told me,” I whispered.
“I wanted what I gave you to be the good stuff. That’s why I disappeared this weekend. Stupid. I was angry and hurt and . . .” He stood up and looked at me and then focused again on the photo. “I forgot how strong you were. I’ve been forgetting for a while. The picture reminded me.”
I wanted to ask about Big. If that’s what he meant when he said he’d been forgetting for a while, but I didn’t want to ruin this moment.
I chose to say, “You can just be you.”
His voice was on the brink and he went back to minimal answers.
“I know.”
“How was Callahan?” I asked.
“Happy I knew.” Max’s eyes misted over. “He loved my brother.”
“We all did,” I said.
Max pointed to the blanket fort I’d made in the corner of the room, put a finger to his lips, and said, “Let’s not talk about Trent right now.”
I followed him to the floor and through the entrance.
“You want me to read to you?” I asked.
“Nope.”
“You want me to tell you something?”
“Nope,” he said. “I want you to tell me everything . . . tomorrow.”
I imagined him grinning. I imagined me grinning. I didn’t have to imagine us happy, because we already were.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
In the early dawn, Max and I whispered back and forth about nothing. Talking about nothing was sometimes better than talking about anything.
“You never told me what your surprise was,” I said, poking him awake.
He yawned and asked, “What surprise?”
Even though he knew exactly which surprise. I dug my chin into his chest for teasing me.
“Okay, okay,” he said, stroking my back. “I was going to ask if you wanted to go to the Fountain of Youth Park on the anniversary. Thought it might help to get out of town, and I know it’s on your list.”
Suddenly, it clicked.
“You’ve been working on my list? Haven’t you?”
His hands paused midtouch. “I read your emails over and over. Memorized the things you wanted. Like the tank top and the park. You want to go; just like I know you’ve been working on driving with Metal Pete.”
“How?”
“I asked him.”
“You asked Metal Pete?” My voice climbed a ladder.
“Shh, we’re going to get caught,” he warned. “Yeah. Of course I did. I’d do anything to help.”
I tested Fletcher’s idea on him.
“What do you think about the four of us going?” I asked.
Silence.
More silence.
“Max?”
“If that’s what you want, let’s do it,” he said.
“You hesitated.”
“Five or so hours in the car with Gray—” he said.
“Ten or so hours,” I corrected, since we had to also drive home. “And I’m not sure I can do it either. I’m not even sure he’ll agree.”
“Well, I’ll bring the paintball gun just in case,” he said. “I’ve heard that works pretty well.”
Neither of us laughed. “That was a mistake. I shouldn’t have shot him.”
“He told you to.”
“That doesn’t make it right. But maybe this will.”
“For your sake, I hope he says yes.”
Later on in the day, long after Max slipped out my window, Gina and Gray agreed to meet Max and me at the Salvage Yard on the morning of the anniversary. Two days from now.
That meant I had work to do.
I showed up at Metal Pete’s with two bags of doughnuts and two choices of coffee, still wearing Max’s T-shirt to channel my brave. Surely caffeine and sugar would woo Metal Pete into submission, and the T-shirt would prove I was serious about change.
I walked toward the office feeling hopeful.
Metal Pete eyed me suspiciously when I set the morning feast on his desk. “You’re . . . up to something,” he said. “Spill the beans.”
“That car you promised me,” I began.
> Metal Pete began most expressions with a scrunched nose and raised eyebrows. This one ended up in a smile. “Uh-huh?” he said.
I gave him a prize-winning grin. “Could I maybe borrow that on Thursday?”
“You mean you want to drive it off the lot?”
I nodded.
“Like . . . you’re going to take the car through the gate, hit the gas, and put it on an actual road and . . . ?”
His skepticism wasn’t a refusal. It was a challenge.
“Somehow. Some way,” I said, even though I wasn’t quite sure of that part myself.
“And where might you be taking this borrowed car of mine?”
“St. Augustine.”
“St. Augustine?” he practically screamed. “Whoa, kid. You don’t start small, do you?”
“I’m just glad to finally be starting,” I told him.
Metal Pete strolled over to a gray box that hung on his wall and examined rows and rows of keys. He settled on one, and said, “Follow me.”
Together, we walked down the first row of cars. I had never spent much time in this row. The cars here were all in good shape. Good being a relative thing: most people wouldn’t look twice at them, but I wasn’t most people. I eyed an old black Trans-Am and crossed my fingers. It was a car that screamed Road Trip, and it was much bigger than the Yaris.
But Metal Pete walked past the Trans-Am and stopped at a little red S-10 extended cab. His hand caressed the bed as if the old Chevrolet were a woman he loved.
“Not putting you in a car,” he said matter-of-factly. “Rebuilt this engine myself. It’s the best I’ve got. Plus, it’s insured.”
Don’t cry. Don’t cry, I thought as I considered Pete’s generosity. “Pete . . .”
“Nope,” Pete warned. He took my hand the way my grandfather had when I was a little girl. Squeezing it once, he said, “I won’t have any of that sap. You’re not a tree.”
The keys were in my hand then.
“You’ve got two days to prove to me you can do it,” he told me, and opened the door with a bow.
“I won’t be going alone,” I promised him.
“Naw, I didn’t figure you were.”
I climbed in and rolled down the window. Moment of truth. Sweat lined the creases of my hands as I turned the key.
The engine didn’t argue.
Quickly, before I changed my mind, I tapped the brake and shifted into reverse. The trucked rolled slowly backward, and I watched everything. The parked row of cars behind me. Metal Pete, smiling under his visor. My own nervous face in the rearview.