Wing Jones(78)

Aaron is watching me with so much hope shining out of his eyes I’m surprised it isn’t blinding me. I smile a small smile back at him and take another bite of beignet. The second bite is just as good as the first. I take a third bite and chew as slow as I can, trying to figure out how to tell Aaron that right now, running is everything. Racing is everything. Riveo is everything. I don’t have space in my heart for Aaron right now, because when he’s in it, he takes up the whole thing.

“Thanks,” I say eventually. “I think that’s what I need at the moment. Just to focus. Just for a little longer.”

Aaron grins behind his coffee mug. His smile is so big it peeks over the edges. The smile makes me think he doesn’t quite understand what I’m saying.

“Can I still come cheer you on?”

“Sure. I’d like that,” I say. Because surely there is no harm in him being a face in the crowd. “But, Aaron, I still can’t see you. I have to focus. And when I’m with you…”

I shrug, not having the words to tell him what happens to me when I’m with him, how suddenly nothing else matters, and that scares me. It scares me how much my want overrides everything else.

His smile fades like a rainbow in too-bright sunshine. “I get it,” he says, staring down into his mug.

“I’ve just got to win,” I say, hating the defensive tone that creeps in uninvited. “You know?”

He squints at me, scrutinizing me, like my secrets are written on my bones. Like if he stares long and hard enough he’ll be able to see into me and understand. I wish he could. It would make this so much easier.

“You do what you gotta do,” he says. “I know it’s important. But I’m here, all right? If you need anything? If you need … me?”

I do need you! I want to shout, but I clamp the words down tight, lock them in my heart, and nod.

“Thank you,” I say instead.

He raises his now-empty mug in a salute. “Anytime, Wing-a-ling. Anytime.”





CHAPTER 55


I’m sitting on the floor surrounded by balloons and streamers and the cupcakes we stayed up all night baking. Our living room looks like a party for a four-year-old. Monica is pacing back and forth in front of me, and Granny Dee and LaoLao are on the couch, each of them sitting so tense and upright they look like sentries. They haven’t said a thing since my mom left to go pick up Marcus from the hospital. Not even when I dropped not one but two cupcakes on the floor. Not even when I spilled tea. Not even when I hugged a balloon so tight to my chest it popped.

The front door swings open and I hear my mom chirp, “Welcome home!”

I can’t make out my brother’s reply as my mother wheels him in his wheelchair toward us. We’ve put boards down the front porch steps as a makeshift wheelchair ramp. Thank goodness his room is on the ground floor, so that we didn’t have to move his things all around.

“Welcome home!” I try to shout, but he looks so sad, so lost, that my voice comes out feeble. Granny Dee and LaoLao stay silent.

“Come on, you two,” my mom says to them, wheeling Marcus next to me. “Where’s your festive spirit?”

“They’re right,” Marcus mutters, eyes downcast. “This ain’t anything to celebrate.”

“Aren’t you happy to be home?” My mom’s voice is small, small, small.

“I’m not happy” – Marcus grunts as he starts to wheel himself down the hallway toward his bedroom – “about anything.”

The women he leaves in the living room, all the women in his life, stare at one another. Each one of us daring the other ones to go after him. Monica sighs and puts her determined face on. “I’ll go,” she says. She hasn’t even stepped into his room when we hear his roar.

“Get out! Leave me alone!”

I’ve never heard Marcus shout at Monica before. It makes me angry.

Monica returns to the living room, cheeks pink with shame. She tugs down one of the streamers. “I think I better get going.”

“No,” I say, touching her arm to stop her from taking down any more decorations. “You stay. Please. Just a little longer.”

Monica nods but doesn’t meet my eye. A timer goes off in the kitchen and my mom jolts up as if she just sat on a tack.

“The casserole!” she says.

“I’ll help,” says Monica, and the two of them disappear into the kitchen, leaving me with my silent grandmothers.

A crash and a dull thud come from the direction of Marcus’s room.

“You should talk to your brother,” says Granny Dee.

“What?” I scoff. “You heard him. He said he wanted to be left alone. I’m not going in there.”

“Dee Dee is right,” says LaoLao. I’m surprised that Granny Dee doesn’t have a heart attack right then and there – I’ve never heard LaoLao say Granny Dee was right about anything in my whole life.

But Granny Dee just nods. “You are who he should talk to.”

I approach his room slowly, cautiously, not knowing what I’ll find inside.

Marcus is sitting in his wheelchair, his head in his hands. Scattered on the floor are almost all his trophies. Only the ones too high for him to reach still sit on their perches, looking down on him.