I thought of the three words he’d spoken earlier—the three words—and wondered if the pills gave him confidence too. He seemed more sure of himself than I’d ever seen him off the court.
We’d just hit halftime on a John Wooden championship game when Jake’s phone rang.
“Kolt,” he said, setting the phone to speaker so he could use both hands to shift himself on the couch. “How’s it going?”
“J-Money,” Kolt said. “We’ve got to get you out of that house.”
“Nah,” Jake said. “I’m good.”
“You haven’t left that couch in way too long. I will drive you to Disneyland tomorrow, dude. Just say the word.”
Jake played a card—a good one—and waggled his eyebrows at me. “Neither one of us can afford Disneyland. And you just want to take me there because my crutches get you to the front of the line.”
“That cuts me real deep, Jake. But I’ll forgive you if you get out of your freaking house. How about I take you to the lake?”
“Daphne’s over. We’re playing cards.”
“Please tell me you’re at least playing strip poker.”
I leaned over the phone. “Hey, Kolt. You’re on speaker.”
“Ah, good. Daph, as much as Jake needs a win right now, I think you’d better waste him at this one. Get my boy down to his skivvies and then beat him at one more hand and rip that brace right off him. Then we can actually go somewhere.”
I smiled at Jake and shook my head. “We’re not playing strip poker, Kolt. And the brace stays on four more weeks if you want him to heal right and be healthy for basketball season.”
“Okay, okay. Well, lucky for you, Jake, I know this other game you two can play, where you’re this injured war hero and Daphne is the sexy nurse and—”
“I’m hanging up now, Kolt,” Jake said. “We’ll call you if we need any more ideas.” He blushed pretty bad, and it made the heat rise to my cheeks too.
I watched Jake as he hung up the phone, and I realized Kolt was right. Jake was trying to be happy, probably for my sake, but it was hard for him to be stuck on the couch.
“Should we go to my house?”
Jake dealt us another hand. “Your dad hates me.”
“No, he doesn’t,” I said, but neither of us totally believed it. Not after a year and a half of Dad encouraging me to go out with other guys—sometimes in front of Jake—because nobody could possibly be good enough for his little girl.
“We can stay here, but Kolt’s right. We’ve got to do something.” I stood up. “I’ll be right back,” I told him, ducking into Luke’s room to look for something fun to do. We’d never done Legos together before, but maybe that would at least get Jake’s hands and brain working?
Then my gaze landed on something else: Luke’s Red Cross T-shirt, lying right there on his bed. Maybe it’s not a terrible idea, I admitted. I mean, considering it came from Kolt. I picked it up and put it on, trying to channel my inner Jenna. The shirt fit a little tight across the chest and left a sliver of skin showing above the waistband of my jeans, which meant it was probably exactly what Kolt had in mind.
“Good evening, Mr. Foster,” I said, strutting back into the living room. I felt the heat in my cheeks as I straightened his prescription bottles and adjusted the pillows under his knee. “I’m the on-call nurse tonight. Any new symptoms to report?”
Jake sat up straighter. He tried to think of an answer, but I’m pretty sure he was distracted by my “uniform,” which gave me a flush of confidence.
“Um, yeah. My shoulders are a little tight,” he said. As awkward as I was at this game, we’d definitely gotten his mind off his injury.
I sat behind him on the arm of the sofa. “Yes, you’re right,” I said as I began to knead his shoulders and neck. I leaned around and kissed him on the temple, and again on his earlobe. “What else?” I whispered.
“Rapid heartbeat.”
I slid my hand under the collar of his T-shirt and rested it against the smooth muscles of his chest. “Hmm. Yes. Rapid indeed. Let me check that from another angle.”
Jake moved to the back of the couch and pulled me on top of him. I ran my thumbs across his jaw, stopping just below to feel the throbbing pulse in his neck. “Tight shoulders. Rapid heartbeat. Anything else I should know about?” I traced my fingers back until they tangled in his hair, and we locked eyes for a long moment.
“Yes,” he said, and swallowed hard. “I think I mentioned the thing about the digestive system.” Then he let out a long fart that shook the couch.
A laugh burst out of me before I could stop it. Meanwhile, Jake looked like he wanted to laugh and cry and hide in a hole all at once. “I am so sorry,” he said. “I swore I was never going to do that in front of you, and I made it a year and a half. But I told you these pain meds are messing me up.”
I fell against him, laughing so hard my shoulders shook. I guess that gave him all the permission he needed to laugh too. We were pressed so tight together on the couch we could feel each other laughing, which made it funnier somehow, which shook another huge fart loose inside him.
“Feeling better?” I asked.
“So good. I’m done. I promise.” He let his head fall back against the cushion. “No, that’s not true. I can’t promise anything.”
“This is the sexiest game ever,” I said, tugging at the Red Cross T-shirt where it looked like Luke had wiped some nacho cheese.
“You do make a great nurse, Daph,” he said, reaching to tuck my hair behind my ear. “At least, you would, if you weren’t destined to be a brilliant pharmacist instead.”
I studied his face, wondering how somebody could make me burn with want and shake with laughter and swell with gratitude, all in the space of a few minutes. And then it all swirled into one feeling inside me, and there was no keeping it in, even if I’d wanted to.
“Jake,” I said as the corner of my mouth crept up into a smile. “I love you too.”
“Then I’m the luckiest man alive,” he whispered, and then he kissed me.
We crushed the competition all summer. Nobody expected it after Jake’s injury, including us. But the wins kept coming, and the team kept jelling. And even though Jake was mostly on the sidelines with Coach, it still felt like he was the leader we needed.
But as time went on, things got weird. For example:
Jake quit football to keep roofing, but even with all the extra money he was making in the preseason, he was always asking me to spot him at Best Burger.
Then the night of the first football game (a big L), the team was literally sitting there talking about what a difference Jake would have made on defense when we got the word he was back in the hospital after another accident. I swear, the first thing I thought was that I hoped he was okay. But the second was that I hoped he’d be fully recovered before basketball season.
And he is, I guess. I mean, he stopped cracking jokes, and he’s even worse about taking them, which I didn’t think was possible. But even though he hasn’t been as consistent on the court as he was junior year, there are still moments when he belongs on the SportsCenter highlight reel, and even whole games when you see all those buckets of promise inside him poured out on the court.
Basketball season—our season—is going strong, but I miss him sometimes, even when he’s standing right in front of me. And that doesn’t make sense, until one day it does. Until the day I see Jake and Coach together in the locker room after Jake’s worst practice of the season. He’s acting like it’s the end of the world, even though he still smoked the rest of us.
“It’s my knees,” he tells Coach. “I can play through the pain, and I’ll keep doing it, but it’s hard to be at the top of my game. It’s like the harder I play, the more it hurts, you know?”
I keep behind the corner of the lockers so they won’t see me, but I still hav
e a clear enough shot of them to see the way Jake’s biting his tongue but trying to hide it.
He’s not telling the truth about something.
Coach nods. “I know. Let’s get you to the athletic trainer. I want you alternating ice and heat, every night. We’ll get those knees back where they belong.”
“It felt a lot better before I ran out of oxys—”
Jake hasn’t finished the sentence before Coach is in his face, shoving Jake’s chin up with his clipboard. “We’re not fixing one problem with another. And trust me, pills are a problem. Heat, ice, PT, tape or braces, if you need them. That’s what we’re going to do about this. Ibuprofen, if you have to have it. Understand?”
Jake nods, hangs his head. But when Coach walks back into the office, Jake’s eyes follow him, still begging.
We swore we wouldn’t use any of that stuff, I want to say. Did you forget? Or did you lose that part of you too?
Because it wasn’t just one promise on that first day, in the back of Coach B’s Jeep. We promised again when my brother got so high that he missed his own hearing and again the day he went to prison for selling. We promised every year on the anniversary of the day Jake’s dad drove his truck into the ravine.
I want to grab him and shake his shoulders. Hell, I want to punch him in the face. I must have made a sound, because he looks up, and suddenly the smile is back.
“Hey, there you are. Want to go spotlighting?”
“Sure.” I scratch the back of my neck and tell myself I imagined it. The begging, the hunger, the supposed-to-be-smooth cover-up when there’s no promise of scoring what you want. Because this chill guy in front of me is my best friend, and even superstar Jake Foster can’t go coast to coast that fast.
It’s dark so early now that we grab the spotlights and some Best Burger and head out right then. Once we’re surrounded by sagebrush, Jake turns on the spotlight while I drive. We find all kinds of animals: deer, pronghorn, a couple of foxes that dart away so fast I wonder if I imagined them too. But the others stay still and let us get a good look, so blinded by the light that they can’t turn away. Sometimes we climb out of the truck and see how close they’ll let us come, neither of us really sure what we’d do if they decided on fight over flight.
“We should have brought Luke,” Jake says when we find a doe and fawn, bedded down under a juniper. We get out of the truck, but this time we don’t walk any closer.
“Nah. He’d just give us some lecture on nocturnal versus crepuscular or the anatomy of the eyeball in the presence of bright light.”
Jake laughs. “You’re probably right. How did he turn out so good with such a crap male role model?”
“Are you kidding?” I ask. “He’s got you.”
Jake picks the dirt from under his fingernails. “Yeah. Right.”
“You’re going to play college hoops. You’re every kid’s hero. ASU send your letter yet?”
“Nah, not yet.”
I can tell it’s bugging him. The county paper already ran a story about the big shot from Cedar Hills signing with Gonzaga.
“It’s coming. They’re probably just fighting over who gets to hand-deliver it.”
He tries to smile.
“And hey,” I add, “you’re a better big brother than I ever had.”
Jake looks up. “I heard Kmart got clean and he’s living in Flagstaff.”
I shrug. “Wouldn’t know. He hasn’t come home in years. But I doubt it. My parents always have an address to forward stuff to, but he made us promise not to come find him. Easiest promise I’ve ever kept.”
I turn the spotlight off, and when her eyes adjust, the doe leads the fawn deeper into the trees, somewhere safe from pain-in-the-ass teenage boys.
We lean back against the tailgate, and it’s quiet for a minute. Not summer quiet, either, with the bugs and frogs in the background. Winter quiet, when everything’s gone to sleep.
Jake and I don’t do so well with quiet. Never have. So we both blurt something out at the same time.
I say, “Do you think God can make a spotlight so bright that even He can’t look into it?”
And at that exact moment, Jake says, “I think I might have a problem.”
At least, I think that’s what he says. But my voice is louder, and my conversation is easier, so that’s the road we roll.
Later that night, after I’ve showered all the sweat and grit from my skin, I still can’t shed the memory of that moment. And I realize I’ll never know what was down that other path, because it’s way too late to talk about it now.
carbon
hydrogen
nitrogen
oxygen
96 percent of your body is made
of those four elements.
One time
Daphne explained it to me with Legos,
even though I am smart enough to understand it without them.
96 percent of a person is built
with just those four bricks.
It matters how you connect them.
N2 is most of what we breathe
with every single breath.
In and out,
like waves on a shore.
H2O is water, and you can’t live without it.
H2O2 is hydrogen peroxide, and it will kill you.
C6H12O6 is glucose—plant sugar—if you connect it one way,
but
there are about a hundred other ways
to combine those same Legos,
and some of them are poisonous.
I build another molecule in my mind sometimes:
The one I looked up after the roof.
The one I’m most afraid of.
C18H21NO4
And then I break it apart
turn it into
water
sugar
air
so it can’t hurt anybody
it’s supposed to be helping.
carbon
hydrogen
nitrogen
oxygen
Four elements. Four words.
The ingredients
to make
or wreck
your world,
even if somebody tells you:
It’s not your fault.
It’s not your fault.
When I see the text,
I rush it to Mom,
who rushes it to the police,
who track the text location
to an empty hill in the middle of nowhere.
The good news: fresh tire tracks.
The bad news: tires so old and bald
they don’t tell us anything.
It’s not your fault.
I hear her talking on the phone,
but it isn’t the police.
It’s the pharmacy, with four words
I hear on speaker
that make her worry lines even deeper:
“Too soon to fill.”
“But I’m out. I took them exactly like you said,
and I’m already out.”
“But I need them, especially with all that’s going on.”
“Yes, I understand. Two weeks. I’ll call back.”
She doesn’t understand,
because she doesn’t know
what I know.
She sits on the couch and buries her head in her hands,
so I sit down beside her
gentle like snow
and ask the question gently too.
“Mom, are there pills missing?”
“They counted wrong at the pharmacy.
And it’s not the first time.
I love Ashland Drug, but I’m transferring somewhere else.
; It’s just too many mistakes.”
It’s not their fault, I want to tell her.
It’s not a mistake.
Is there a way to make her see without hurting her more?
“Painkillers?” I ask,
but not because of the pain in her face.
“No,” she says, shaken awake.
“I haven’t needed painkillers since my surgery.
Just my blood-pressure pills
and my sleeping pills.”
And I breathe a little easier because
maybe it was the pharmacy’s mistake.
But pills are pills are
carbon
hydrogen
nitrogen
oxygen
and I should probably tell her
what I saw
and what I know.
It’s not your fault.
That’s what Jake’s text said.
Except he’s wrong.
It is my fault.
Because I saw
and I knew
and I said nothing.
Still, I say nothing.
A Jake joke
from The Book of Luke and Jake:
A chemist walks into a bar and says, “I’ll have a glass of H2O.”
His buddy says, “I’ll have a glass of H2O too.”
Then he died.
Jake promised himself that once the last refill from his surgery ran out, that would be it. No prescriptions, so no pills.
It almost worked too. He’d been toughing it out for nearly two weeks before one of the punks on the JV team left his locker open and Jake saw an orange prescription bottle on the top shelf.
It was Darius Ruckert’s locker. Jake recognized the Lakers sticker on the door. He laid a hand on the locker and nearly shut it before he remembered that Ruckert wasn’t injured—and saw that it wasn’t even his name on the bottle. He wasn’t doping, was he? That stuff would mess you up in a hurry.
Fadeaway Page 8