Gabby whipped her head around to see that Aria was right. All the other students were jogging around the track, at least a quarter of a lap ahead.
“Anytime now …” shouted the coach. Gabby drew a deep breath and took off.
Gabby hadn’t run in more than a year, but she was still good at it. And for a moment, as the rubber track fell away under her shoes, everything was fine. She remembered the thrill of pumping legs and pounding heart. She’d forgotten how good it felt.
And then she thought of being in the woods behind their old house, racing Marco up the hill, the moment when she passed him and looked back and knew that something was wrong. The thrill dissolved into panic, and Gabby staggered to a halt halfway around the track, unable to breathe.
“What’s wrong?” asked Aria, catching up and coming to a stop beside her.
Gabby squeezed her eyes shut. This was wrong. This was all wrong without Marco. Running was something she did because of him. Something they were supposed to do together.
“I can’t do this,” gasped Gabby.
“Sure you can,” said Aria.
“No, I mean, I can’t do this. I can’t do track. I don’t want to.”
Before Aria could say anything else, Gabby turned and hurried away. She cut across the field to the bleachers and sank down onto a low metal bench, her head in her hands.
A few seconds later, she felt Aria sit down beside her on the bleachers and then a hand come to rest on her shoulder. Gabby usually hated those small physical gestures — nurses and doctors used them all the time — but she didn’t mind it from Aria. It was strangely calming.
“I started running because of Marco,” Gabby whispered without looking up. “He wanted to get in shape for soccer, and I wanted to spend time with him. He’s the one who taught me how to sprint. It’s hard enough that I’m going to school and he’s not. I can’t do track without him. I can’t take it away from him.”
“You’re not taking anything away, Gabby,” said Aria gently.
“I’m sorry,” said Gabby, shaking her head, “but this is his. It doesn’t feel right without him. I need something else. Something that isn’t so … full of memories.”
She closed her eyes and took a few long, slow breaths, in through her nose and out through her mouth, the way the doctor had told Marco to breathe if he felt a wave of panic coming on.
“She okay?” Gabby heard a girl ask from the track.
“She will be,” said Aria. When Gabby opened her eyes she saw the girl — one of the graceful runners — jogging away. Then Gabby looked over at Aria, who was holding the sheet with the electives on it and looking over the other options.
“We’ll pick something else for tomorrow,” Aria said cheerfully. “Something brand-new.”
“What about cheerleading?”
“No way.”
“Debate?”
“Are you kidding?”
They were making their way to the hospital. Gabby kicked a pebble down the sidewalk while Aria crossed out after-school options with a blue pen.
“Foreign language?” she offered.
“Two languages is enough for me,” said Gabby. “Do you speak any others?”
Aria shrugged. “I don’t think so.”
“My abuela only speaks Spanish,” explained Gabby, “so Marco and I grew up speaking both that and English. My dad knew how to speak Spanish, but he didn’t like my grandmother much, so he went out of his way to speak English when she was around.”
Aria hesitated. Gabby hadn’t mentioned him before. “Where’s your dad now?” she asked carefully.
“Gone,” said Gabby, kicking the pebble hard enough to send it skittering into the street. The blue smoke swirled and curled around her shoulders. “He left way before Marco got sick.” She found another pebble and began to knock it along down the road. “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure,” said Aria.
“Why didn’t you write anything in your journal?”
Aria shrugged. “I didn’t have anything to write about.”
“What about your family?” asked Gabby.
Aria’s steps slowed. “What about them?”
Gabby shrugged. “Couldn’t you write about them? What are they like? What do they do? Do you have any brothers or sisters?”
Aria’s heart twisted. She wasn’t sad, not exactly — she knew she didn’t need a family, knew that wasn’t part of her purpose — but the questions left a strange emptiness in her chest. “It’s complicated,” she said at last. It wasn’t a lie.
“I’m sorry,” said Gabby. “I didn’t mean to be nosy. I shouldn’t have —”
“It’s no problem,” said Aria with a smile. “It’s just … ooooooooh!”
She caught sight of a shop window and veered off the sidewalk and up to the glass. Inside was a shelf filled with brightly frosted cupcakes.
“So many colors,” whispered Aria, peering in through the glass.
Gabby laughed. “It’s tinted frosting,” she explained. “Food coloring —”
But Aria had already gone in. The whole shop smelled sweet like sugar, and when she breathed in, she could taste it on her tongue. She spent several minutes wavering between a chocolate cupcake with pink icing and a vanilla cupcake with blue icing and a swirl cupcake with purple icing and ended up asking for half a dozen, two of each, so she and Gabby could both try all three.
They sat on a bench outside with the open box. Aria couldn’t believe the cupcakes tasted even better than they smelled! She tried to pick her favorite and couldn’t.
“Can I take one of these to Marco?” asked Gabby before biting into the swirl cupcake with purple icing.
“Of course,” said Aria, who was now cutting two cupcakes apart and putting them back together in new combinations. Gabby carefully nestled a vanilla cupcake with blue frosting into the container to keep it safe.
“Does Marco like cupcakes?” asked Aria.
“He likes anything that’s not hospital food,” said Gabby. “And I think it might cheer him up.”
“You’re a really, really good sister, Gabby,” said Aria, taking a big bite of cupcake. Gabby blushed.
Cupcakes devoured, the girls continued on toward the hospital. As it came into view up ahead, Aria yawned.
“What was that?” she asked, surprised.
“Sugar crash,” said Gabby, suppressing a yawn herself. “It happens when you eat a lot of sugar and get really hyper and then you get really tired. Maybe you shouldn’t have tried all the cupcakes.”
Aria yawned again. “Tired?”
“Yeah. Tired. You know. The feeling you get when you need to sleep.”
Aria stared at Gabby. “But I don’t …” She trailed off with a frown, then said, “I don’t normally get tired.”
“Well, you don’t normally eat a pound of sugar, do you?”
“No,” she admitted, yawning a third time as they crossed the parking lot.
“Do you have to volunteer today?” asked Gabby. Aria shook her head. “Then why did you come with me?”
Aria shrugged. “I just thought I’d keep you company.”
Gabby started to smile. And then they reached the gray hospital steps, and her smile faded. Gabby’s shoes came to a stop, her fingers tightening on the cupcake box as she stared up at the revolving doors. Aria watched the blue smoke, which had calmed a little, swirl into motion again, engulfing her. But before Aria could ask Gabby a question, the other girl took a deep breath.
“Let’s go,” she said, and started up the steps.
Gabby cradled the cupcake box as she and Aria wove through the halls toward Marco’s room. She knew he would be in a bad mood from missing school, so the cupcake seemed like the least she could do.
A tiny bit of blue sky, she thought, holding the box close.
When they got to his room, Gabby peered in through the window and let out a small sigh of relief when she saw that he was alone. It was easier that way. Marco liked to pretend things were normal almost
as much as she did, and sometimes, if they were careful, they could get through a whole conversation without mentioning his condition or the hospital. They could carve those pieces out and focus on the other parts, ignoring the holes. When Gabby’s mom was there, the holes were all she saw.
“Hey, Gabs,” said Marco, looking up from his schoolwork as she and Aria came in. He gestured to the textbooks scattered on the bed. “I hope your first day was way more fun than mine.”
“I survived,” said Gabby, looking around. “No Henry?”
“He came by earlier,” said Marco. And then his eyes went past her, to Aria. “You have a shadow.”
“Marco, this is Aria,” said Gabby. “Aria, Marco.” She felt herself smile when she introduced them and realized she was proud to have gone to a new school and returned with a new … friend? Yes. Aria could definitely be considered a friend. “We go to Grand Heights together, and Aria also volunteers here,” Gabby added.
“Aren’t you kind of young?” Marco asked Aria.
“Do you have to be a certain age to help people?” asked Aria, sounding genuinely curious.
The edge of Marco’s mouth went up. “No, I suppose not.”
“We brought you a treat,” said Gabby. “Better eat it before Mom shows up.”
Gabby handed him the cupcake, and Marco nearly wept as he pulled it out of the box and dug in. He took only a couple of bites of the cupcake before he had to stop — these days his stomach couldn’t keep up with his eyes — but he cradled it in his lap as if it really were a piece of blue sky, of freedom.
And then Gabby’s mom came in.
The first words out of her mouth were, “Marco, what on earth are you eating?”
She swiped the cupcake out of his hands and deposited it on the side table, then produced a napkin and began wiping the frosting from his fingers.
Marco rolled his eyes. “If anything kills me,” he said, pulling away, “it won’t be a cupcake.”
“Marco!” Gabby’s mom scolded, appalled. He slumped back against his pillow as tears brimmed in Mrs. Torres’s eyes.
Gabby sighed and said, “It was my fault.”
Her mom turned and blinked, seeming to notice her for the first time.
“Gabrielle,” she scorned, “you should know better.”
“I know,” said Gabby. “It’s just, we stopped on the way back from school,” she added, giving her mom a weighted look, “and I thought it would be a nice treat.”
Mrs. Torres softened, then reached out and smoothed Gabby’s hair. “Well, that was very sweet of you. And yes, school!” She perched on the nearest chair and took Gabby’s hand. “How was it? Were your classes all right? Did you have what you needed?”
Gabby felt a hand at her shoulder as Aria whispered, “I’ll be right back,” and then both the hand and the voice slipped away. Gabby nodded absently, not wanting to lose her mom’s attention.
“Go on. I want to hear all about it.”
Her mom said that, and Gabby wanted to think she meant it, but she’d barely opened her mouth when a knock came at the door and a nurse came in, saying something about paperwork. Mrs. Torres’s hand slid from Gabby’s as she straightened and nodded and said of course, and followed the woman out.
Gabby stood there a moment, staring at the door, a tangle of emotions wrapping around her like smoke, thick and suffocating. And then a voice reached her through the cloud.
“Hey, Gabs,” said Marco gently. “Forget her. Tell me. And remember I’m trying to live through you over here, so make it good.”
Gabby hesitated, then nodded, and slid into the chair beside his bed.
“Now,” said Marco, lifting the cupcake from the table and taking another, much smaller bite, “start at the beginning.”
Gabby told Marco almost everything: from how left out she felt on the school bus to the journal assignment in English to how she and Aria sat together at lunch. She didn’t tell him about trying to run track and the fact that she couldn’t bring herself to do it without him. It would only make him upset.
“Where did your friend run off to?” asked Marco when Gabby was finished.
She looked around the room, as if Aria might simply be hiding in a corner. “I don’t know,” she said, trying to hide her disappointment. “She probably went home.”
“Speaking of, you should go, too,” said Marco. Gabby frowned at the thought of the empty apartment but didn’t complain, only dragged herself to her feet.
“Hey, Gabs,” Marco added. “Thanks for the cupcake. It tasted like —”
“A piece of sky?” asked Gabby hopefully.
Marco smiled. He knew what she meant. “I’m not sure sky has that much sugar or artificial coloring, but yeah. It tasted like normal, and that’s exactly what I needed today.”
Gabby smiled back. “That’s what I’m here for.”
“I hope you don’t feel like that,” he said. “Some days I don’t feel like I’m more than this — this sickness — but you are, okay? Don’t be this place. Don’t be …” He trailed off and then picked back up. “Just be you.”
Gabby wondered who that was but didn’t say that, only nodded.
“Night, Marco.”
“Night, Gabs.”
The orange cat was back on the apartment steps, catching moths. Gabby knelt and scratched behind its ears, wishing she could coax it to follow her up into the empty apartment, for company. Marco wasn’t allergic, but when he got sick, Mom decided all four-legged creatures were germy carriers of evil.
Gabby went upstairs. She stomped on the floor and said hello to the ghosts and hummed while she made herself dinner. Then she turned on the radio and sank down onto her bed to do homework. It was a nice evening, and she left the window open, relishing the fresh air — not fresh like the woods behind their old house, but miles better than the hospital — while she worked.
Most of the assignments were easy enough, but when she got to English, she found herself staring down at the still-blank journal.
I’ll be collecting these tomorrow at the end of class, Mr. Robert had said. So I suggest you find something to write about.
Gabby tapped her pencil against the page.
My name is Gabrielle Torres, she wrote.
I am twelve years old, and I don’t know who I am. I know who I was when I was eleven, before my brother got sick, but somewhere between then and now I’ve lost it. Myself, I mean. I don’t know how to find it again. I thought a self was something you always had, something that grew up with you. Something you couldn’t lose. I thought you only got one self, but if that’s the case, then what happens if you lose it? Do you try to find it, or replace it? I want to go back to being the person I was before, but it doesn’t work that way. Before-Gabby doesn’t exist anymore. And now? Now I don’t know who I am.
That’s what she wanted to write.
That’s what she should have written.
But she couldn’t do it.
Instead, she wrote a lie. It started as a small one — My family just moved here so my mom could start a new job — and then got it bigger — My brother, Marco, is in tenth grade over at Grand Heights High — and bigger — He’s going to try out for soccer soon — spiraling away before Gabby could stop it. She wrote a paragraph, and then a page, and then two, all of it what she wanted to be true. A life where Marco had never gotten sick. A life where everyone was happy and healthy and Gabby didn’t feel invisible.
And Gabby knew she should stop, knew this was wrong, but she liked the girl on the page more than she liked the one writing on it, and she wanted it to be real, even if it only felt real for a few moments.
So she kept writing.
One minute Aria was sitting on the couch in the common room, and the next a hand was shaking her awake. For a dazed second, she had no idea where she was, and then she blinked and remembered. She’d been wandering through the hospital, trying to shake off the “sugar crash” and give Gabby some space.
She wanted to be there for her, of
course, but she couldn’t always be there. And it wouldn’t do Gabby any good if she learned how to be herself only when Aria was with her.
Aria had made her way to the common room, hoping to see Henry and find out more about his purple-black smoke. Only he hadn’t been there, and she couldn’t stop yawning, so she’d decided to sit down and then … had she fallen asleep?
“Young lady,” said the nurse, whose hand was still on her shoulder. “Visiting hours are over. It’s time to go home.”
Home? Aria nodded absently and looked around the common room, still groggy. Beyond the window, the sun was going down.
“Do you have family here?” pressed the nurse. “Is someone coming to pick you up?”
Gabby. Where was she?
“I live close by,” said Aria, getting up.
She regretted the cupcakes as she trudged back through the hospital to Marco’s room. When she got there, she saw Marco sitting up in bed, writing in a journal, but no Gabby. She double-regretted the cupcakes as she made her way downstairs and out the revolving doors onto the ugly gray steps of the hospital. And then she realized that she couldn’t remember the way to Gabby’s house.
The sinking sun and the glow of the hospital cast her shadow like a door on the concrete. Aria tapped her shoe, and the shadow fidgeted.
“I need to find Gabby,” she told the shadow. “Take me home,” she said, and then frowned and corrected herself. “I mean, take me to Gabby’s home.”
The shadow obligingly filled with light, and Aria said thank you and stepped through. An instant later she found herself stepping out of the glowing pool and onto the sidewalk in front of Gabby’s building. The light went off inside the shadow, and Aria took a small step forward, nestling her shoes in the right place just as Gabby herself came through the front doors, a bag of trash in hand.
“Aria?” she asked, surprised. “Where did you come from?”
“The hospital,” said Aria, grateful Gabby hadn’t walked out a second sooner.
Gabby dropped the bag she was holding in the garbage bin. “What are you doing here?”
Everyday Angel #1: New Beginnings Page 5