by Jaime Reed
Channeling my inner five-year-old, I folded my arms and poked out my bottom lip. “I don’t wanna go out, either. I need to rest up for the surgery anyway.”
“We won’t be out long. The fresh air will do us both good.” He leapt from the couch and held out his hand.
My stare swung from his open palm to the suspiciously upbeat boy standing over me and blocking the TV. He didn’t look like he would move anytime soon, so I planted my feet on the floor and took his hand.
Though I expected a long drive, we only traveled a few blocks toward a new subdivision that was under construction. People lived in the finished houses in the front of the complex, but their backyard views contained stacked lumber, abandoned machinery, and mountains of dirt.
Three blocks deep into the neighborhood, Mateo parked in front of a powder-blue, two-story bungalow. No one seemed to live there, judging by the bare windows and the REALTOR sign on the grass.
He killed the engine, then opened his door. “You wanna come in?”
I pointed to the house. “There? Why? Who lives there?”
“I do,” he replied. “Well, me and my mom. I’ll show you around. Vamos.”
I tore off my seat belt and flew out of the truck. Mateo unlocked the door to the house, then waited for me to step onto the porch. His new keys twirled on a link around his finger.
The house was small, but roomy enough for Mateo and his mom to not trip over each other. The kitchen was top of the line, with stainless steel appliances and plenty of cabinet space to house Mateo’s cooking ingredients. I could almost smell the spicy, decadent meals he would prepare. Thinking about it made me miss him already.
“Hey, at least you have your own bathroom.” My voice made a hollow echo against the blank walls of the second floor.
He inspected the hall closet. “Yeah, no chance of someone walking in on me while I shower.”
I slapped his back, shocked that he would bring that up now. “I told you it was an accident.”
“If you say so.” The sly grin he gave me from over his shoulder was both a warning and an invitation. I chose the former and backed away slowly.
Admiring the high ceiling and the skylight in the center of the hallway, I asked, “When did you get this place?”
“Earlier this week. Mrs. Trina had some people donate their furniture. Our insurance covers most of the expenses, and we have enough saved until my mom gets better. We’re going to start moving some stuff tomorrow.”
I spun in his direction. “Tomorrow?”
“Yeah.” Keeping his eyes on the floor, he shoved his hands in his pockets and stepped closer. “I won’t be able to come to the hospital for your surgery, but I’ll be there afterward. I promise.”
He sounded so sincere, but I couldn’t hide my disappointment. “It’s no big deal,” I said quickly, trying to cover. “You’ll just be sitting in a waiting room for hours. Might as well kill time doing something constructive.”
“You’re right. So let’s go.” He reached for my hand and guided me to the door.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“Our last stop.”
After he locked everything up, we hopped back in his big junkyard truck and headed to the middle of town, rolling up to Aberdeen Park around sunset. Mateo parked in front of the Brew-Ha-Ha Café across the street from the park. I didn’t want to risk ruining the moment by grabbing coffee inside.
I climbed out and watched the orange-and-pink sky peek through the trees.
“You’d think we’d get sick of this place.” I circled the rear of the truck and joined his side.
“I am, but I wanted us to experience this moment together.” He took my hand again, checked for traffic, then led me across the street to the park.
That was the second time within the hour that Mateo held my hand. It felt nice, oh so nice, but what kind of “moment” were we having exactly? From all the smiling and touching from his end, a “moment” resembled a date. I rejected the theory outright. We were both in sneakers, jeans, and hoodies—not proper date attire. And he’d mentioned nothing about dinner.
Aside from a few scattered tree limbs, Aberdeen Park had been restored to its previous glory. The lampposts, benches, and wooden fences were repaired, the grass was trimmed, and all the trash and hurricane debris was gone. We’d accomplished a lot in just a few weeks and it was something to be proud of, but the victory came with a bitter aftertaste. This place would always remind me of Alyssa’s collapse and all that had followed.
By the time we reached the main entrance of the park, Mateo went quiet. He strolled beside me, fingers threaded through mine while he kept checking his phone. That cost him some serious cool points. Even for a nonofficial, kinda-sorta date, constantly checking your phone was a surefire way to ruin any chance of a second date.
“You expecting a call?” I asked, my attitude spiking to a 7.5.
“Nope. I’m checking the time.” He glanced at his screen once more. “The sun goes down at 5:42.”
I searched my surroundings. Joggers and dog walkers roamed the smaller pathways. Grinding wheels on concrete alerted me of a few skaters nearby. Nothing seemed suspicious outside of Mateo’s need for darkness.
“What happens then?” I asked.
“The fruits of our labor come to life.” As if on cue, the air swelled in a soft yellow glow. I looked up at the trees and their twinkling branches. I turned to the left and then the right of the path, marveling at the canopy of Christmas lights we’d strung up.
“I almost forgot how pretty they were.” The lights shone brighter than the stars in the purple sky. They floated within reach, spaced together so that the gaps in between never got cold. It was how the universe should be.
“What’s the secret of the universe?” I asked to no one in particular, not expecting an answer.
Mateo supplied one anyway. “That there’s more than one secret and more than one universe.”
I eyed him warily. “You’re just a fount of untapped wisdom, aren’t you?”
He bowed his head. “I try. Any other questions?”
“Okay.” I glanced around the park for inspiration. “What’s the meaning of life?”
Not missing a beat, he answered, “Relationships and experiences. All kinds. Great or small.”
Whoa! I hadn’t expected that. For my next question, I considered something simple. “What’s your middle name?”
With a sheepish grin, he stared at the lights above, his gaze averted. “Esteban.”
I let the name play in my head and swirl around my tongue. Why did everything sound hotter in Spanish? “I like it.”
Those greenish-brown eyes met mine again. “Any more questions?”
“All right.” I took my time, sifting through the miscellaneous drawer of my mind for something meaningful. Then I found a question that had been popping up regularly in the past month. “Why do bad things happen to good people?”
His playful smile fell. His brows pinched together, his face taut in a pensive expression when he answered, “So you can better appreciate the good. The world is full of opposites and they all complement each other. Otherwise, you’re miserable on either side of the scale.”
I never thought of it that way. “Opposites?”
“Yeah, like how food tastes better on an empty stomach. Water tastes awesome when you’re dying of thirst. To see clearly in bright light, you cover your eyes with dark shades. To be immortalized in history, you have to die. Opposites. They’re everywhere. People say opposites attract, but that can also be true about life, you know?” He shrugged.
I lifted a fist toward my temple, opened the palm, and mimicked the sound of an explosion. “I don’t know how true that is, but wow. Mind: blown. All right, last one.”
He spread his legs and bent his knees slightly, rubbing his hands as if getting ready for a pitch. “Lay it on me.”
My heart was racing as I pushed out the words. “How can you tell if someone’s meant for you?”
“Ooh! That’s a tough one.” He scratched the stubble on his chin. “My dad taught me this one trick in third grade. See, in The Matrix, there’s red pill versus blue pill. In relationships, there’s red versus yellow Starburst. No one likes the yellow ones, so if a girl takes it anyway, she’s a keeper. If she takes the red one, she’s a selfish, spoiled brat and it’ll only get worse from there. Dump her.”
Was there an AMBER Alert for common sense? Because all the logic in that explanation had gone missing. Maybe I spoke too soon about the wisdom thing, but I could now understand why his parents weren’t together anymore. “I’ll make a note of that,” I told him.
He smiled. “Speaking of notes, you have a history of good ones.”
My brain stalled for a moment then sputtered to life again. “What?”
“You know, notes. Like the one you put in my locker in the eighth grade. I don’t usually keep notes and cards, but I couldn’t throw that one away. It spoke to me. I didn’t understand it at the time, but I knew it was important.”
As I had the day Mateo first showed up at my house, I underwent a near-death experience. My soul left my body for two seconds. How the heck did Mateo know that note was from me? Alyssa said he didn’t know and she had no reason to lie. She had more reasons to gloat and spit the live acoustic version of “I Told You So.” Maybe Mateo was fishing for clues now. None were coming from me.
I held up my hands and backed away. “I—I don’t know what—”
“I kept it with me constantly, read the lines over and over, dying to know who wrote them.” For every step he took closer, I took two back.
“At first, I thought someone else wrote it,” he continued, his gaze on me, “but that was a dead end. Then I just gave up and totally forgot about it … until after the storm when I went back to my house and picked up my dad’s old trunk. All my valuables were locked in there. So was that letter. I was surprised you didn’t see it.”
He’d kept my letter all this time? He thought it was something valuable to stow away in that musty trunk? I didn’t know what to say. He’d gotten me alone, lowered my guard, put me on the spot. Then, before I could respond, Mateo began speaking again. He was reciting something, I realized. Words I’d written four years ago rolled off his tongue like a first language. On paper, they’d sounded awkward, a child’s weak attempt to sound grown. But the cadence, the rise and fall of his voice, released a spell that pinned me still.
“This is not an easy thing to say. I can’t crack a joke like I normally do. My feelings are too strong, too heavy to take lightly. When I see your face in a crowd, I forget my name and think it’s yours. I forget the places I’ve been and the things I’ve seen, and somehow know we’re meant to be—”
“Mateo, stop! Please, just stop.” I pushed him back with my outstretched hands. Oh my God! The cringe was so real! What was I thinking when I wrote that? “I can’t do this right now. I was fourteen and in a really weird place …”
He kept coming until my hands lay flat against his chest. The heat of his shirt warmed my fingers; his heartbeat pulsated under my palm.
“I get why you never told me this was from you,” Mateo said, “but I really wish you had. It would’ve saved me a lot of detective work.”
I dropped my hands. “What?”
“When I was cleaning out the spare room in your house for my mom, I found school supplies: markers, scratch-and-sniff stickers, and colored paper. I found old essays and book reports in there, too. Your handwriting hadn’t changed, and whaddaya know? A perfect match.”
This was too much. He’d known all this time and he picked now to bring it up? The eve of my operation?
As if he knew what I was thinking, he said, “I was planning to tell you after the surgery, but I didn’t want to waste any more time. I’m not saying it will, but if anything were to happen to you tomorrow, I … I needed to at least experience this once.” He closed the gap between us and held my waist.
Too stunned to argue, I allowed him to pull me against him.
He began reciting again, his voice soft, his eyes on me.
“I’m not scared that you’ll find out and reject me. I’m afraid that you might love me back. And being your girlfriend means loving the things you love, too. So I’ll never tell you who I am, only how I feel. That’s enough for me.”
He finished reciting my letter, then lowered his gaze to my lips. “Now I’ve got a question for you, Janelle Pruitt. Now that I know how you feel, is it really enough?”
“It’s a start,” I whispered.
Mateo bent forward, placed a hand on my cheek, and touched his lips to mine. The kiss was gentle at first, then slowly gained pressure and urgency. My fingers threaded in his soft hair, playing with his curls.
This wasn’t a kiss. This was years of daydreams and self-denial and wasted opportunities. It was a clash of emotions: gratitude that this was happening, and regret that we hadn’t done this sooner.
If only I’d just told him how I felt before now, I would’ve had more moments like these: more kisses, more touches, and more freedom to stare at him without looking away. If something did happen to me tomorrow, this would be the happiest moment I’d ever had with Mateo. What a waste—all this drama born from insecurity and pride.
Everyone had secrets they worked overtime to keep hidden, and those fears gained pressure under the surface. The truth would eventually erupt, destroy all in its path, and once the smoke cleared, you’d realize it was just a crush. It was just a storm. It was just insulin. Those huge, world-ending issues all seemed small now.
I hadn’t realized I was crying until Mateo wiped my tear with his thumb. Neither one of us said a word as we stood with our foreheads together until the sky grew totally dark. We both talked too much anyway.
On the day of the surgery, Grandma Trina and I left the house at ten a.m. to arrive on time for the early check-in. The surgery had been scheduled for that afternoon, but we needed last-minute testing and a final dialysis treatment for Alyssa.
I’d hoped to say goodbye to Mateo, but he’d already left for school by the time I awoke that morning. The door to the room across the hall from mine was open, and looking inside the room proved painful. It had somehow developed an identity crisis. Technically, the room belonged to Sheree, but Mateo had been here for so long that I’d come to think of it as his. And it already felt empty without him—especially after what had happened between us in the park last night.
His absence had me feeling like I’d been stood up at prom. It stung a bit that he hadn’t bothered to see me off, but I had to stay focused.
Grandma Trina drove us to the Atlantic Wellness Center. The huge facility was made up of three buildings locked in a triangular formation with a courtyard in the center. Grandma Trina and I entered the pavilion at the rear of the second building. According to Dr. Brighton, that was where all the magic happened.
We found Alyssa and her mom in the waiting room outside the transplant unit. We had another four hours before we’d get called in for surgery, and the first few minutes were taken up by floor-gazing and awkward small talk.
“Is Ryon coming?” I asked Alyssa.
Her head lifted from her phone and she brushed the hair from her face. “Yeah. He’s coming after school.”
“Oh.” I tapped my feet. “Are you nervous?”
“Yeah. I’m pretty freaked out, but I think things will go well.” She glanced around the waiting room. “This place is state-of-the-art and top-notch. I don’t think anything bad will happen to us.”
“There’s more to it than that,” I told her. “There’s also the aftereffects we’ll have to deal with.”
“Yeah, well, I’m sure there’s a pill for that somewhere.” She flashed a smarmy grin. It was her defense mechanism: giving attitude before showing fear. I couldn’t knock her for it; I’d done the same thing in situations that were less terrifying.
A nurse in blue scrubs stepped into the room, chart in hand. “Alyssa Weaver?”
“I hope so, too.” My smile fell as I watched her sluggish steps toward the nurse. She no longer had the energy or the coordination to strut.
Ten minutes later, I, too, was called to the back room for another round of tests. Urine, blood, tissue samples. Blood pressure, EKG, X-ray, and ultrasound. It was the speed round version of my donor evaluation, where everything was done in two hours.
“After assessing all of your test results, we’ve decided that your left kidney will be the one we’ll remove,” Dr. Foster said, looking more into his file than at me. He was the surgeon in charge of the transplant, the man behind the magic.
“Now, this could be done a few ways, but we will be using the keyhole method,” he said. “It produces less scarring and a shorter recovery time.”
“Uh-huh.” I nodded out of reflex so we could speed things along. I’d gone through the rundown of the surgery before with the doctors, so I wasn’t hearing anything new. The routine loses its luster once the trick has been explained in agonizing detail. Let’s keep it real: Nobody wanted to know how the sausage was made, so to speak. And right now, I was more concerned over whether the butcher was missing any fingers.
Dr. Foster was a nice-looking guy, though. Olive skin, salt-and-pepper hair, trim physique, and a bit on the short side—roughly five six. He had all ten fingers, and he looked to be in his forties. So I wasn’t dealing with some old, jittery dinosaur who should’ve retired a decade ago. That was comforting. Still, the whole thing was draining me, body and soul, and I would die happy to never see another lab coat or needle again after this.
“There will be three half-inch incisions in the front, one just under the left rib for the camera. The other two will be work ports, located on either side of the belly button.” Dr. Foster indicated the points on my stomach with the tip of his pen.
“Uh-huh,” I mumbled, chewing on my thumbnail to the meat. My stomach was gurgling, my right knee would not stop bouncing, and I observed all of this as if it was happening to someone else.