The Lies About Truth(56)
Mom registered my disbelief. “Sonia talked me into it.” Huge eye-roll. “It was . . . awful.”
We both giggled, but not loud enough to wake Dad. “I mean . . . awful,” she continued. “Hot as Hades. I hated the food. Black beans for breakfast. Watered-down beer. It took me thirty minutes to decide I hated it and one day to decide I wanted to go home.”
“What’d you do?”
“What do you mean?” she said playfully. “I called my parents, and they changed my plane ticket to the next day.”
“For real?”
“Baby, why would I stay somewhere I hated?”
It was such a simple, true statement. I heard it about my life.
If nothing changes, nothing changes.
“You hear me?” she asked.
“Loud and clear.”
Mom zippered the conversation closed. “Hey, wake up that bear beside you, and tell him to make us some shrimp.”
“But I fell asleep.”
“Oh, honey, he was always going to make you shrimp.”
After the world’s best shrimp, I went for a long run. Eight o’clock. In shorts. Sand kicked up behind me as I rushed mile one and then mile two. Twilight painted the sky purple and orange and gorgeous. I sweated through the layers of my clothes, wishing the last of the sun would fall below the curve, and also that it would stay sunset forever.
I longed to pick a point in the future and transport myself there without having to live all the hard moments in between. I wanted to call my parents and ask them to switch my ticket to a different life.
There wasn’t a different ticket, but there were choices. I thought about my conversations with Mom and Fletcher. They, whoever they are, say it takes seven times to hear something before it sinks in. For me, it took about seventy billion.
I was finally listening.
I hated this shitty spot with my friends. And why would I stay somewhere I hated?
I wouldn’t. Not anymore.
First things first, I sat down in the sand, and rather than write a list, I emailed Max from my phone.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Date: June 26
Subject: I’m SO
Sorry.
I’m sitting out here on the beach thinking about everything that’s happened. I’ll give you one guess which of these things matters to me most.
A) Trent being gay
B) Gray driving the Jeep
C) Something being off between us
Pick C. I pick C.
Max, I should have told you about Trent a long time ago.
Above me is a sky full of stars. In front of me is an ocean full of waves. Beneath me are a million grains of sand that used to be rock. That ocean I love so much beat rocks into sand. I’m afraid that’s what I’ve done to you. Can you ever forgive me?
I love you, Maxwell Lincoln McCall.
Sadie
He fired an email back almost instantly.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Date: June 26
Subject: It took
Millions of years for that ocean to beat rocks into sand.
We’re not that broken.
I love you too, Sadie (May) Elizabeth Kingston.
Max
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Date: June 26
Subject: Will you
come over tonight?
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Date: June 26
Subject: Of
course.
At eleven that night, Max tapped on my window.
“You’re wearing my T-shirt?” he said as he crawled inside.
Tennessee blazed at him, but I willed myself to keep my thoughts elsewhere. Which wasn’t hard. Max was shirtless and in a pair of athletic shorts.
“I’m glad you came,” I whispered.
“I’m glad you asked.”
My eyes drifted to my phone. “Where’ve you been?”
He faced me. “With Callahan.”
Max sat down on the edge of my bed. “Wanna play a game?” he asked, without a hint of play in his voice.
“Something you’ve never told me?”
He nodded and handed me a creased and grainy photo of a chalk drawing. The work, if you could call it that, was clearly mine. Before they dismissed me from the hospital, one of the nurses gave me a bucket of sidewalk chalk and told me to use it all before my follow-up appointment. She told me to draw and then hose, draw and then hose—she repeated that more than twice—that the water would wash away more than chalk. She also mentioned, more than twice, that I should trust her.
“I’ve been giving away chalk buckets for longer than they’ve made chalk buckets,” she’d claimed.
That first week, I had slipped out our back door after midnight and drawn dozens of elementary school–level drawings—emotional outbursts—on our back patio by moon-and streetlight.
“How did you get this?” I asked.
Max didn’t answer, and I examined the photo again.
In the middle, there was a crudely drawn caricature of me, lying on my side, a brown-and-gray cape covering me. I’d written Superhero down in green chalk. There was a string tied around my pinkie toe that stretched toward a huge peach-colored hand.
Below the hand was another line. Don’t let me go.