I had one message from Nicki: details of our trip to Val’s, which she wanted to do tomorrow. I dialed Val’s number. My finger hovered over the Send button as if the way I pushed it would determine how the call went, as if I had to touch it in exactly the right way.
• • • • •
“Really? You’re going to be here tomorrow?” Val said.
“Yeah, a friend of mine is driving there. Visiting her cousin.” That was the cover story. I couldn’t tell Val we were coming all the way to Brookfield to see her. Not until I knew whether she wanted to see me.
“Well, you have to come by. Will you have time?”
“We can manage it.” Yeah, we could probably find time for the whole purpose of our trip. “We should be there around eleven.”
“You can have lunch here. That’s great; I can’t wait to see you.”
Can’t wait. Was she just being nice? Thinking it would be fun to see an old friend? Or was there another thread in her voice?
Maybe I should just be glad that she wanted to see me. Maybe I should get the hell off the phone before I said too much.
“See you tomorrow,” I said. My stomach rolled over, and it felt like a hummingbird was stuck in my throat. Tomorrow. After all this time, after four long months, I would be with Val tomorrow.
• • • • •
“A girl was here to see you this morning, while you were out running,” Mom said to me at dinner that night. “I’ve seen her in the neighborhood before—I can’t remember her name—”
“Girl?” I said. It took me a minute to realize who she meant. “Oh, Nicki Thornton. She lives down on Route 7.” I picked a sliver of onion out of my green beans. “That reminds me, we’re doing a hike tomorrow, bringing a lunch and everything.” That would explain my being out of the house all day.
“Make sure you bring your phone so I can reach you. Is she your girlfriend?”
“No.”
“She would be a very pretty girl if she’d had braces,” my mother said. “Those teeth!”
“There’s nothing wrong with her teeth.”
“She has an overbite.” Mom stuck her teeth out at my father. “Like this.”
“She doesn’t look like that.” Maybe Nicki had a little overbite; I’d never really noticed. My mother had gone gargoyle with her imitation.
“Thank God you never needed braces. Although, I don’t know, your bottom teeth are slightly uneven. It doesn’t show much, but sometimes I think we should have done that little extra bit—”
“Ryan doesn’t need braces,” Dad cut in.
“No, he doesn’t need them, but it would be an enhancement.”
“I don’t need to be enhanced, thanks,” I said.
We all went back to chewing. The thought of seeing Val tomorrow made me want to fly right out of my chair. It was the same feeling I’d had at the edge of the quarry—how I wanted to jump, to fall without landing.
“You’re awfully quiet tonight,” my mother said to me after a long pause.
Before Dr. Briggs went on vacation, we’d had a family session where my mother complained that I never told my parents anything, and they wanted to know what was going on with me. So I said, “I was thinking about skydiving. I’d like to try it.”
Their forks froze. Their mouths paused in midchew. I wasn’t sure, but they might’ve stopped breathing, too.
“I know it’s expensive. But I was looking it up online today, and it only costs two hundred bucks for a one-day session. Less per person if you can get a group.” Not that I had any idea who would want to join a skydiving group with me. “Maybe I could do it for my birthday. They’re open all year.”
“No,” my father said.
“Are you out of your mind?” My mother’s fork clattered to the table. “You think we’re going to let you jump out of a plane?”
“Absolutely not,” Dad said. His face was gray and rigid. Concrete.
“Don’t they have an age requirement?” Mom asked.
I hadn’t checked. But now that she brought it up, it wouldn’t surprise me if they did.
“There’s no way I would allow that. What kind of parents would let their children jump out of airplanes? It’s insane.” Mom’s face went pink on the last word.
“Where did you get this idea?” Dad asked, frozen lipped.
“I was—” I stopped before I could mention the quarry. The way they were acting right now, I was sure they would forbid me to go there if they knew. “I was thinking it would be fun.” It was the truth, but I choked on the word “fun” because they looked so horrified. “Mom was asking what I wanted, a couple of weeks ago. She said I never tell you guys what I want.”
They ate in silence, my mother chopping her green beans into equal segments, my father still looking like he’d taken a shot of novocaine to the jaw. Okay, so much for telling my parents what was going on with me.
“Have you talked to Dr. Briggs about this?” Dad asked.
“She’s on vacation this month.”
“There’s no need to discuss it,” Mom said. “Ryan is not doing this. No place would let a boy that age jump without parental permission, and we’re certainly not giving it. Right?”
“Why are you looking at me that way?” Dad asked her.
“Because you’re the one always pushing him to do more, to be independent. Trust him, you keep telling me. Let him have a life. And this is the kind of nonsense he comes up with.” She breathed in sharply, then groped for her water glass.
My father set down his knife and fork. “Ryan.”
“Yeah?”
“Are you sure you’re not thinking about—” Apparently he was waiting for me to finish that sentence, to know where he was going. When I didn’t, he burst out, “You just said you want to jump out of a plane. Do you really plan to pull the cord on the way down?”
I coughed, spraying squash and beans. “What?”
He pushed my milk glass toward me. “You heard me.”
I drank and cleared my throat. My mother’s eyes were gigantic, her face a soapy color. I wished I had never brought this up. “Of course I’m going to pull the cord. Most places you do a tandem jump anyway, and the instructor pulls the cord. It’s not even a question.”
“Because I don’t see why you would want to do something so dangerous,” he went on.
“God. I just thought it would be fun. I don’t even think it’s that dangerous. You hardly ever hear about accidents—not like with driving a car, and you drive all the time.”
Maybe I shouldn’t have said that about cars. Maybe it reminded him of the garage. He took a long slow sip of water. “Well, the answer is no.”
“Yeah, I’m getting that.”
We went back to eating, the only sounds the scrape and ring of silverware against plates.
I did intend to pull the cord. I had never thought of doing anything else, because to me skydiving was about living, not about death and depression. And though it amazed me that my father thought I wouldn’t pull the cord, it probably shouldn’t have.
People were looking for that in me now. Maybe they always would. If they knew about me, they would watch for signs, and would see them even when they weren’t there.
• • • • •
I sent a message to Jake as soon as I got upstairs: a video clip of someone throwing rutabagas out of a helicopter.
“What’s up?” he wrote back.
“Not much.” I almost told him about seeing Val tomorrow, but I didn’t want him to feel left out. If I’d known he and Val were getting together without me, it would’ve stuck in my throat. “You?”
“Shit nothing. My Amazing Brother won a freakin trophy at freakin soccer camp. Like the 457th trophy of his lifetime.”
Jake’s brother was also known as the Magnificent One, the Perfect Son, and the Kid Who Could Do Anything. “Well he can’t fly can he?”
“Maybe. He just hasn’t TRIED yet.”
“Btw, do you think it’s crazy to want to jump out o
f a plane?”
“Yup.”
“I mean, with a parachute.”
“Still crazy.”
“Don’t you think it would be fun?”
“Are you saying you want to jump out of a plane?”
“Yeah, but my folks won’t let me.”
“Big surprise. Sounds like you need psychiatric help. Maybe a stay at Patterson Hospital . . .”
“Very funny.”
“Personally I think: if you want to jump out of a plane, you should jump out of a plane, though I can’t figure out why the hell you’d want to.”
We sent some more messages back and forth. Usually when I disconnected from Val or Jake, I had a minute of extra emptiness, where I felt more alone than usual. But tonight that didn’t hit me at all, because of the trip to Brookfield. Tonight I had Val to look forward to.
ELEVEN
Nicki looked younger than ever, sitting behind the wheel of her brother’s truck. “This is never going to work,” I said.
“Sure it will.” She stuck a long-billed cap on her head, like a baseball cap but with COOZ’S FARM SUPPLY embroidered on it. It was true that when she had the hat on, it was harder to see how young she was. “I do this all the time. I never get stopped.”
I showed her the directions I’d downloaded, but she waved them away. “Read them to me as we go. I can’t read and drive.”
She started the engine and shifted into reverse. “I can’t believe your brother lets you take his truck,” I said.
“Yeah, well, if he wants me to keep my mouth shut about the plants he’s growing out back and the girls he sneaks into his room, he knows he better not complain. Though he says if I ever get caught, he’ll swear I stole the keys.”
“Oh, great.” I had a vision of my parents picking me up at the police station. That’s all they would need to send them over the edge.
“Relax, Ryan. Did anyone ever tell you you’re very tense?”
I laughed. “It’s come up once or twice.”
“Yeah, I bet.”
We stopped at a doughnut shop before we’d even gotten onto the highway, because Nicki said she needed “something to keep her going.” That something turned out to be a tall coffee into which she poured a splash of milk and enough sugar to make my teeth tingle just watching. She also got a chocolate-iced doughnut with raspberry filling.
“You can’t find these chocolate-raspberry ones just anywhere,” she said through a giant mouthful as we climbed back into the truck. “That’s why I come here whenever I can.”
“Uh-huh.” I sipped my water. I’d decided against coffee, since Nicki thought I was already too tense.
“Seriously. You want a bite?”
“No thanks.”
“Oh, you have to try it. Come on, live a little.” She kept shoving the doughnut, oozing ruby jam, in my face until I took a bite just to shut her up.
“See? Isn’t that good?”
The fudgy icing stuck to the roof of my mouth. The raspberry was tarter than I’d expected, not sickening-sweet. “Yes.”
She laughed. “Don’t sound so surprised. I wouldn’t poison you.”
I licked chocolate off my lips and washed it down with water. We zoomed down the entrance ramp to the highway. Nicki glided into the stream of cars like a pro. Better, in fact, than my mother, whose steering tended to be a little jerky.
“Why do you keep ruffling your hair?” Nicki asked. “Are you nervous?”
“Of course I’m nervous.” I pointed out the window to distract her. “Did you see that hawk?”
“What hawk?”
“On top of that light pole. They sit up there, along the highways, and wait for roadkill.”
“No, I’m too busy making sure I don’t drive into the car in front of us.”
Seeing the hawk made me think of flying, reminded me of skydiving. I told Nicki about it.
“That’s a great idea!” she said.
“My parents don’t think so.” My father was obviously still upset about the whole thing. This morning he had watched me take my antidepressant, which he hadn’t done in weeks. Usually my mother was the one who watched, and even she had gotten almost casual about it. But this morning, Dad had said, “Let me see it,” had made me show him the pill on my tongue, had checked my mouth after I swallowed.
“Yeah, my mom would probably hate the idea, too.” Nicki sighed. “She even got a little weird when I sprained my ankle playing volleyball.”
My dad had never made a big deal when I got hurt playing sports—I think he was even kind of proud when I came home a little roughed up. Not that he wanted me to get seriously injured or anything, but the occasional jammed finger or twisted knee used to get me nothing more than a sympathetic backslap. But that was before the night in the garage.
“You played baseball, right?” Nicki asked.
“Yeah.”
“What position?”
“Second base, usually. I was the backup shortstop and played there a few times.”
“You must’ve been a good fielder. Could you bat at all?”
“There were guys on the team who were better than I was. I was good at running the bases, though. They usually put me at the top of the lineup.”
“If you were that good, why’d you stop?”
I stared out the window. “I told you, mono.”
“But you don’t still have it, do you? You can play next year if you want.”
“I only ever played at West Seaton. I don’t know how I would stack up at Seaton High. I might not even make the team.”
She shook her head. “If I stopped playing volleyball, I would miss it. Don’t you miss baseball?”
I thought of all the games I watched with my father, the way my arm sometimes twitched when the second baseman made a throw, the way my legs tensed up when I watched a base runner. “I don’t know, maybe.”
“You sound like you miss it.”
“Hey, if I want someone to analyze my feelings, I’ll go to my shrink.”
“Touch-y! Why don’t you admit you miss it?”
I ignored her and rubbed at a spot on the windshield so I could see better.
“Come on, Ryan, what do you get out of acting like a robot? Sometimes when you talk I hear all these layers in your voice, I can tell you think about things and you actually care about something, and then you close up and your voice goes dead.”
I didn’t answer her, but I was listening.
“You’re a lot more interesting when you’re not a robot. And this is going to be a looooong car ride if you shut down.”
“Why do I have to do all the talking?” I said. “You talk for a while.” Since we were on the subject of sports, I decided she could talk about volleyball. “Tell me about being a setter.”
“You don’t care about that.”
“Yeah, I do. Go ahead.”
She snorted. “You do not. Tell me one thing you know about volleyball.”
“You get three hits to a side, not counting blocks.”
That shut her up for a second. Then: “Everyone knows that.”
“Come on.” I took the last slug of my water. “Who’s being touchy and shutting down now?”
She laughed. “Okay, I love being the setter because I get to play so much.” She went quiet to maneuver around a driver who had slowed down to talk on his phone. “Ideally, I’m the second hit on every play. I have to know how everyone on the team likes to hit, and not only set it where they want, but at a place where they can hit to the open court.” I could see how Nicki would like that, being in the middle of the action, calling the shots.
She talked on about close games they’d had, mistakes she’d made, her troubles learning the overhand serve. She talked about playing against a school whose ceiling was so low, the balls that hit it were still in play. “Those girls had such an advantage, because they played with it all the time, they knew how to play the ricochets.”
“Home ceiling advantage,” I said, and she laughed.
When she got tired of volleyball stories, I picked up a book I’d brought, but even though my eyes ran over the words, my brain kept seeing Val. I put the book down.
I couldn’t stop thinking about this one time at Patterson, in the dayroom. My therapy sessions had been intensifying, with my counselor pushing me to talk about last winter, when I’d hoarded the painkillers. He wanted to know what had triggered me to buy each bottle—forcing me to relive every stupid, embarrassing, horrible moment that had sent me to the drugstore.
I’d told him how nobody at my new school would fucking talk to me. I’d told him how the mono had used me up and squeezed me dry. On this particular day, I’d started talking about giving up baseball, which was the only thing I’d ever been good at—good enough for people to remember my name sometimes.
My counselor had made me talk about the sense I had that if I disappeared, nobody would remember I’d even been here, because nothing about me stood out. I was one of those ordinary boring people who don’t matter, who never do anything worth noticing. And that was itself a boring problem—not like the problems I heard about in Group every day. So I’d collapsed in the dayroom after my session, seething with self-loathing, feeling like I would bleed from every cell if I moved more than an inch.
Val stalked in then. I pulled myself out of my fog long enough to notice the tears in her eyes, the pinched line of her mouth. “Do you ever think this world is a totally unfair, pointless, fucked-up place?” she said, plunking herself down next to me. Val didn’t often talk that way. I did, all the time, and so did Jake. When Val got bothered, she would pull on her hair or pick her nails or tap her foot, but she rarely gave in to despair.
And usually I would’ve said something like, “Oh, you’re just finding that out?” or, “Yeah, I’ve noticed that a couple thousand times.” But I didn’t say it. I wanted to ask her what was the matter, but I didn’t have it in me. A dense clot of misery filled my stomach, chest, and throat, leaving no room for anything else. Except, around its edges, the pull I had toward Val stirred.
I put out my hand, but I wasn’t sure she would let me touch her just then, so I rested my hand on the edge of her chair. She looked down at my hand. Then she put her hand on my chair, and we sat like that for a minute.
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