I asked Darryl how come he never asked me about it when it first happened.
He said he asked me about it last night. But then Mr. Nico came.
And I said he said Gramps asked him to ask me.
And he said Gramps did ask him to ask me.
And I asked why didn’t he just ask me.
He asked me what there was to ask.
I told him he could just ask why I did it.
So he did. Just asked. Just asked it while helping me piece my mother’s cheek together.
And I told him. Well, I didn’t just tell him. First I counted to ten. I don’t know why, after all that buildup. I guess I was trying to figure out the best way to say it. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. And then . . .
Diary, I’m going to try to tell you how it went, but I might get some parts wrong. But I’m going to try anyway. This is how it went.
I hate running the mile.
What do you mean, you hate running the mile?
I hate running it. I never liked it.
But you’ve been running the mile for so long. And you’re so good at it.
Because you made me. That’s not what I said. Not yet. I said,
I know I’m good at it but
You’re not just good at it. You’re the best. First place. Your mother
I know my mother would be proud. I know I’m doing it for her, but what about me?
What about her? She didn’t get to do this. To run her race, Sunny.
But but but
And then I started counting again. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. And then . . .
But when do I get to run MY race?
I pushed the bottom of my mother’s jaw into place, and judging by the shading of black and brown and gold, I could tell her cheek was lifted. She was smiling. I was not.
Then came the boomtick. But not with dance, with words. The stuff I usually write in you came out and flew right at him. And this time, I told him everything.
I don’t like running, I like dancing.
Running is boring, and nobody
even pays attention to the mile,
and you never asked me if I liked it,
never even asked me. Never asked me
what I do like, or if there’s anything else
I want to try. Never noticed my brown face
blue and gray like business suits. With one leg
too long. As long as I kept winning, right?
And even when I do, you tell me it’s not good
enough. My form was this, my stride was that,
my breathing is off, breathe, Sunny. Breathe.
That’s what you say? You say I have to breathe,
but I can’t. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe.
Dear Diary,
Boom tick tick tickboom don’t mean shoulder shrugs and robotic moves and tippy-toe to heel . . . things. It don’t mean an explosion of dance. At least not for Darryl. But it does mean an explosion. An explosion that begins with a vibration. Darryl’s body shaking like you shake, Diary, when the wind hits your pages. Shaking like you might rip out and fly away. Darryl’s jaw was jumping, and he bit down on his own mouth to trap the cat in, I think. He kept nodding at me as we stood on opposite sides of the big table, nodding like he heard me, nodding like he heard someone else whispering to him. The nod turned into a bow. Him, folding in half.
I asked him if he was okay, and he just nodded. Then he bent over, his puzzled face kissing my mother’s puzzled cheek, then swiped the puzzle box off the table. All the peace, but none of the pieces.
Darryl apologized, his voice, eeee-ing like a creaky door. Like a house settling. Then he told me to go to bed.
So, I said night.
7
Thursday
Dear Diary,
You know how I always say I was born in the middle of a hurricane? Well, that’s true. But I realized last night that maybe I was born in the middle of two. And this morning felt like a third.
It started the usual way Thursdays start. No, it didn’t. It didn’t start the usual way at all. Aurelia was late. My father was already gone to work by the time the doorbell rang, and when I opened it, there she was, holding a paper bag with our sausage biscuits in it.
She said there had been an accident, and as soon as she said it I thought about Patty’s aunt, who got in a car accident a few weeks ago, and that scared me, but then I knew nothing was wrong because Aurelia was standing in front of me with her arms and legs and head connected to her body, so I knew she was okay. And because of that, I went from being all the way scared to all the way happy, and wrapped myself around her and squeezed tight.
Aurelia is like my best friend. I don’t need her to ever be accidented. Ever.
Then she said she wasn’t in an accident, somebody else was, but that it was just a fender bender and everybody was being nosy and we’d better hurry up and eat so we can get going.
Diary, the sausage biscuits were cold. We warmed them up and that made them hot, but also hard. But I had to eat, and I didn’t want to seem ungrateful because Aurelia bought them for us, so I started choking mine down, and then I actually choked, mid choke-down. A chunk of bread that had scientifically become a stone in the microwave got stuck in my throat. And well, I started to panic.
There are things that happen when you panic, especially when you’re choking. Things I never knew. I had never choked before. The first thing you do is think you’re going to die. That’s also the second thing you do. And then you start pointing at yourself. It’s weird. Every time I see someone choke in the movies, the people they’re with never seem to notice, and I always thought that was fake, until it happened to me. Aurelia was sitting right in front of me, looking right in my face, and she couldn’t tell I was choking and thinking about dying and thinking about dying again, until I pointed to myself. To my mouth and throat. And then the guessing game began.
Sunny?
Then, You choking? (Ding ding ding! Correctamundo, on the first try!)
I’m choking! I yelled in my head, but it just sounded like cack, cack, kech, krrr, krrr, all of which are basically the word “choke” without the vowel sounds. That’s what choking does. It eliminates vowels. I realized that, too.
Then Aurelia jumped up, and screamed what we both already knew.
You’re choking!
Now, this is the part that I didn’t expect. No one really knows what to do. Not me. Not Aurelia. Not even you, Diary. So I did the first thing I could think of, and no, it wasn’t dance. I just started throwing things. Not, like, really throwing things, but knocking things around. I spun and swiped the rest of the breakfast off the island, even Aurelia’s, then I staggered backward and knocked the dish soap and paper towels and basically everything on the counter onto the kitchen floor. I don’t know why. Just a reaction. When you choking, you just have to move. Can’t just stay still when there’s a chewable but not-so-chewable golf ball stuck in your throat, cutting your air.
Aurelia also didn’t know what to do, so she ran over to me and told me to turn around and started beating on my back, which, let me tell you, doesn’t work. Then she threw her arms around me, grabbed me around my stomach and just started yanking me and pulling me toward her, which I guess was supposed to be the Heimlich maneuver. And she did that for a while, and I kept hacking and hacking, and eventually, guess what? It didn’t come up. It just went down.
That was breakfast.
That’s how the day started. With me almost choking to death on a hot piece of a too-hard biscuit. And after I got over how scary it was, we laughed about it.
It can only go up from here.
Dear Diary,
I’m sure you could probably guess that me and Aurelia were late to the hospital. When we finally got there, Gramps was in the lobby already. But he wasn’t waiting for us, he was talking to Patty’s aunt. The same aunt I had just been thinking about when Aurelia came to the door talking about car ac
cidents. Now, Diary, I don’t know if this is true, but I might be one of those special people who make things happen by thinking about them. So I’m going to try to remember to think about throwing the discus on Saturday morning. I’m going to imagine myself throwing it a long, long way. I’m also going to imagine my father laughing. And I’m going to do that right now.
Anyway, Patty’s aunt was talking to my grandfather and telling him something about how hard it’s been for her to depend on other people since she broke her arm, and how Patty is doing the best she can, but she doesn’t want to distract Patty from school and running.
Then Gramps introduced me to her, and before she could say anything, I just gave her a hug because I had just been thinking about her, which now that I think about it, might’ve been weird. Even weirder than a wave.
I also didn’t think about how a hug could hurt. Especially when your arm’s broken.
I apologized, and I told her that I only hugged her because I know her. From practice. And that I was Sunny.
Guess what, Diary? She called me a celebrity! And said she’d heard a lot about me and how I was going to be the first thrower for the Defenders. I told her that was true but that I might not be as good a thrower as I am was a runner.
And she said she thinks I can throw the discus a mile. Maybe even two.
Diary, I wanted to tell her that was impossible, but she was so nice and she already had a broken arm, and I’d already almost died, so I felt like maybe we should let some of the small things slide. She thanked my grandfather again, then told me she’d tell Patty she saw me. And once she went to catch her ride, Gramps asked me and Aurelia what took us so long.
Aurelia told him it was a long story and that it didn’t matter because we were there and we were ready. But Gramps didn’t look good. He looked like something was happening behind his skin. Like his thoughts were making his stomach hurt. Like they were milk that had become glue in his gut.
Dear Diary,
I know I said a little while ago that my day can only go up from here but
Like I said, Mr. Rufus deserves his own entry.
There’s something weird that happens when your grandfather, who is a doctor, tells you your favorite patient of his took a turn. “Took a turn” doesn’t mean what it means on the track when you take the turn. It doesn’t mean what it means when you’re doing a puzzle and you take a turn to put a piece in. It means upside down. It means not good. It means stuff like amniotic embolism, or, in Mr. Rufus’s case, coma.
There’s something weird that happens when you hear, He’s fighting for his life. There’s a feeling that comes over you, that came over me, that sounded like, Cushhhhhhh. The same sound of a crowd going wild or a TV on a bad channel. I felt like a TV on a bad channel. Like I didn’t have a signal and couldn’t get a clear picture. It’s weird for nothing to be a feeling. The feeling of nothing is still a thing. And it sounds like Cushhhhh, and it feels like falling in slow motion.
But I was somehow able to say, in regular motion, that I wanted to go see him.
Mr. Rufus changed overnight. Like, even though he’s just in a deep sleep—a deep sleep he might never wake up from—his face looked completely different. I can’t really say if he looked like he had become older all of a sudden, or if he maybe went backward and became an infant again. I don’t know, but it kind of seemed like both.
Gramps said that there was no point in us doing our dance routine because Mr. Rufus wouldn’t be able to see us, but that if I wanted to talk to him, he could hear me.
So I sat next to his bed. I didn’t really know what to say to him. I mean, I only know him from coming to the hospital twice a week and dancing for him. But he’s the one who always danced with us. He always bopped around in the bed and laughed and it was kinda like he understood me, just by doing that. I figured I could share whatever was on my mind. I mean, I didn’t know what else to really talk about. So I leaned over and whispered in his ear and told him I almost choked to death this morning.
Gramps said, what?! And almost freaked out, but then caught himself and told me to keep going. And I explained how weird it was, and how I couldn’t breathe and I couldn’t speak and I was scared, so I pretty much wrecked everything around me. And I told him how Aurelia was sitting right in front of me, and she couldn’t tell I was choking. How she was looking right at me. I admitted that I didn’t know why I was telling him this and that I guessed I just needed to tell someone how scared I was. Then I switched up on him and told him my birthday was on Saturday. And as soon as I said that, I thought about how maybe that’s not a good thing to talk about while Mr. Rufus is in a coma. So I stopped there. Because, Diary, I could feel myself Diarrhea-ing. So I paused. Just gathered my thoughts, which you know is sometimes hard for me to do because they are all over my head. Some are in the back and some are in the front and some are tucked just behind my ears, and others pressing hard against my eyes. And a few, I think, are at the tip-top of my head. Thoughts that want to sprout out and be like antennas or something like that—maybe they would find a signal to clear up the picture—and I thought about telling Rufus all this, but then I thought maybe Rufus would like to hear about something more . . . interesting.
Baraka. I asked him if he’d ever seen it. Then I told him, not Barack Obama. Buh-RAH-kuh. I told him it doesn’t have words or actors or nothing like that, but it’s still pretty good. I told him Aurelia thinks it’s about everything. That we’re all moving. Even when we’re not moving. I told him that was the good news. That he’s still moving.
When I finished telling Mr. Rufus about how much I hoped he could see Baraka once he got out of his coma, and to not spend money on popcorn and nachos and gummy things because he wouldn’t even be able to eat them, Gramps asked if there was anything else I wanted to say.
And then it hit me.
He could hear me. I know, I think, every move, every action, has a sound. Has a tick or a boom. Or something. So I did the dance routine, without the music, without the moves, but with the sound. And I ended with attitude. My kind of attitude. Mr. Rufus’s kind of attitude.
Not, What!
But, Wow!
Dear Diary,
Because me and Aurelia were so late, most of our regular dance appointments were already getting their treatments or being visited by family, so we couldn’t catch everyone. Mr. MacAfee was already deep into nap time, so we decided to just leave. But before we did, Gramps wanted us to come back to his office.
He said he had something for me.
When we got there, he opened a drawer and pulled out a folder, and in that folder was a copy of a photo.
Aurelia leaned over my shoulder to see it.
My mother. It looked like she was at a party, maybe a barbecue or something. The picture was mostly a blur because she was in motion. But her face was clear.
Gramps pointed to what looked like a whoosh of wind, which was apparently a bulging belly, and said that was me.
Aurelia said she remembered the day it was taken. That it was during the baby shower. Your mother was about to pop.
Gramps said, if he recalls correctly, this was a few days before I was born. He said it might even be this exact day, but back then.
And Aurelia covered her mouth. Which meant it was probably true. She went on about how my mother didn’t want a normal thing with gifts and games and all that. That she wanted to have a party. A real party. She wanted to dance, even though she could barely move because of her belly. Aurelia said my mother wanted me to know what happiness felt like, no matter what, from the inside out.
I stared at the photo. Her face. My face in hers. My body in hers. Baraka, all over again, the tears pushing against the backs of my eyes, my thoughts interrupted by Aurelia’s sniff sniff sniffle.
Aurelia said she was sorry.
I told her it was okay.
Gramps told me to give the picture to my father. He said there are certain things he can’t tell him. Certain things only she can.
&nbs
p; Dear Diary,
Practice was weird because I showed up with a photograph folded and stuffed in my sock, and a million things on my mind. Choking. Mr. Rufus. My mother. I tried to push everything back back back, into the trunk of my head as we all stretched (on Lu’s count). Toe touches, high knees, jumping jacks, some other kind of toe touches, a different kind of high knee, some arm stretches, right, then left, then right, then . . . everybody left me. As in, left the track. It was Thursday, and Thursdays used to basically be Sunny Days because they were always my time to shine. This was our long run practice. The practice to show and improve endurance. And endurance is my specialty. But now, because I don’t run anymore, the rest of my team broke out without me, Whit leading the way while I stood on the field. By myself. Not totally by myself. Coach was there. But still.
Coach brought over a milk crate full of discuses, clanging around like caveman plates. And while he was waddling from the weight of them, he yelled out that today was the day.
Today . . . is . . . the . . . day!
Coach dropped the crate. He pulled one of the discuses out. Flipped it in his hand, then handed it to me. Then he grabbed another for himself.
Diary, holding a discus should be like holding a Frisbee, but it’s not. Not at all. And that was a surprise. But it’s actually like holding . . . um . . . actually, I’ve never held anything like it before. You have to lay it flat in your hand, and just let your fingertips barely grip it. Not a real grip. Just a tip grip.
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