The Lies About Truth(5)

“Hello, I’m right here.” I waved, annoyed.

Dad turned his attention back to me. “I’m not trying to be insensitive. Just the opposite. I’m worried about you. . . . We’re worried about you. Mom said we shouldn’t push you back into school, but this outburst, or whatever it is, is more proof you need to be around people. This summer . . . you’re going to be around people.”

My stomach dropped into my toes. My voice quivered. “You’re going to make me, aren’t you?”

Mom and Dad exchanged a glance. “Yes,” they said together.

I got up from the table and quietly pushed in my chair. “You don’t understand—”

“We do.”

It was a solemn chorus, a firm decision.

Mom stood and walked toward me. Her arms folded around me, stroking my hair. Her heart pressed into mine. I felt it beating against me, fast and strong, afraid and confident. Heartbeats are a dichotomy. I left my hands at my side.

“This isn’t a punishment,” she said. “We almost lost you. We’re not going to stand back and watch you lose yourself.”

“I get it. I get it,” I mumbled.

I broke the embrace and walked down the hallway to my bathroom. I stripped myself down to skin and scars and stepped into a cold shower.

I didn’t understand that paper, but I understood my mom and dad. Understood that they wouldn’t budge, and my screaming And if I don’t? would only force them to lay down more consequences. But I wanted to argue. I wanted to fight some more, and I didn’t know why. I wanted to be furious at them, but some part of my brain said they were probably right.

I wouldn’t be making lists in the sand if they weren’t.

When a bad habit became a rut, people noticed. Especially when that rut was the size of the Grand Canyon.

The shower calmed my muscles but not my emotions. I retreated to my room and eyeballed the traitor, Big.

The stuffed blue ostrich sat, floppy and worn, in the middle of my pillows. Just where I’d left him this morning. It wasn’t exactly public knowledge that I’d removed much of Big’s polyfill stuffing and replaced it with paper scraps of my random thoughts. Actually, it narrowed the whodunthisshit to Gina, Gray, Max, Fletcher, Metal Pete . . . Who else? There were maybe a couple of girls from school who had seen Big on an overnight trip, but surely none of those people had time for something like this.

Big was soft in my hands and crinkly to my ears as I squeeze-checked him. He sounded and felt full. Digging carefully into the hole, I removed the first scrap and read. Shame is a fast emotion; I felt it within the first five words I’d written just last week.

I will stop drawing baseball threads around my scars with a Sharpie. I will stop.

I hadn’t stopped yet. Three nights ago, after a deflating doctor’s visit—“No, we can’t do more surgery right now”—I’d gone back to the habit.

Folding the paper into a tiny square, I placed it on my nightstand and removed another. This was a tedious process. The papers weren’t uniform and the hole was small. Ideally, everything—memory, secret, or thought—went in and stayed in.

When I unfolded the next one, I laughed. It was much older.

I have now watched every single episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Twice.

God, why couldn’t the sender have picked that one?

I didn’t even remember writing that. It must have been a while ago; I’ve seen the series five times now. There was no telling all the crap I’d shoved into Big over the past five years. As I held him, I realized there was no way to know what was there and what was missing. No way to know if someone had read everything or just that one thing. Searching for the skinny-dipping slip and hoping to God that, somehow, someone had seen it fall out and had returned it to me discreetly was the only choice I had.

Of course, if that were the case, they wouldn’t have typed and delivered it like a cloak-and-dagger *.

Still, I wished for a simple answer.

Not everything I removed from Big required an in-depth read. I bypassed plenty on Trent, the wreck, Gina and Gray, funny memories, ridiculous theories, and a slightly embarrassing number of overdramatic thoughts about everything from my period to my parents. Forty-one tries later, I hit the jackpot.

I turned thirteen years old today and I went skinny-dipping with Trent McCall.

I hadn’t expected to find it. But there it was. Despite my worries over who and how and what, the memory itself made me laugh.

I stared at my window now—wishing for a tap, tap, tap.

The night I wrote about started when Trent raised my windowpane a little after midnight. It had been my birthday for three minutes. “Sadie May, come with me. I have a plan.”

Trent was good with plans. I hopped down beside him rather than ask what it was. He always had bread crumbs in his voice, and I followed them like a fairy tale.

Sneaking out was a novelty we both enjoyed, and so far, we hadn’t been caught. We biked the two miles to the end of Santa Rosa Boulevard, then the remaining few miles toward Destin. Traffic on 98 zipped by us, but Trent never slowed down. I kept my eyes on the pavement as he pulled into the public parking on our side of the Destin Bridge.

“What are we doing?” I asked as we chained our bikes to a sign.

“Smoking, drinking, and skinning.”

“Excuse me?”