Not If I See You First(55)
TWENTY-TWO
I’m not sure how long I’ve been asleep. The morning’s a blur… a longish while behind the custodian’s shed… a few minutes of calm, or at least less hysteria… being led somewhere interrupted by another breakdown… some curling up on grass, sobbing hard enough that I threw up breakfast, or maybe that was still behind the shed, I’m not sure… another attempt at walking with no sense of direction until the stairs tell me it’s the parking lot… crawling into the backseat of Sarah’s car, being driven home to an empty house, hands fishing in my bag for keys and then being propped up and half carried up the stairs, aching with exhaustion and wanting to crawl into bed, getting help pulling off my jeans and burrowing under my comforter, coughing as much as crying until finally losing consciousness.
“Is anyone here?” I call, or try to; it comes out a feeble croak.
“We’re all here,” Sarah says. The bed shifts as she lies down behind me and spoons me as much as she can with me under the comforter and her above it. “It’s me, Fay, and Molly.”
“You guys missing school?”
“I don’t miss it much,” Sarah says. “You guys?”
“Don’t miss it a bit,” Molly says from my desk chair.
The bed wiggles from someone leaning against it. “You’re the one we miss, Peegee,” Faith says, only inches away. Her thin fingers wrap around my exposed hand. “You went away. And you don’t have to come back yet if you’re not ready. We’re not going anywhere.”
Her voice is so worried and tender a sob grows in my throat. I start to clamp down on it, to force it back wherever it came from, like always, but I remember I already lost my gold star today so I relax and let it out… and another… and she’s right, I’m not ready. Faith’s hands squeeze mine and Sarah’s arm tightens around my waist and I cry again. Just my throat and face this time, not the body-quakes like before. My eyes and scarf are wet and sticky but it’s not time to get a dry one yet. Faith lets go with one hand and strokes my head like I’m a cat.
“Thank you,” I whisper.
Faith kisses my forehead.
I guess I fell asleep again soon after Faith kissed me. I have no idea how long it’s been. Sarah’s still nestled in behind me, her arm across my waist. I can feel her breath on the back of my ear. She’s breathing slow and steady and even a bit loud. I realize she’s asleep and it makes me smile a tiny bit. I’m amazed that I can smile even this much now.
“Faith?” I whisper. Sarah rouses and stretches.
“She’s downstairs,” Molly says. “Your aunt was on a field trip or something with your cousin Pete and they picked up Sheila on their way back. They all got home a few minutes ago.”
“What’s she telling them?”
“Faith said, ‘I’ll go tell them Parker’s having a bad day.’”
I hear Petey—it can only be Petey—pound up the stairs, but other footsteps catch up. Then slower steps thump back downstairs again. Two other sets of footsteps come and stop outside my door. After some murmurs one keeps walking and I can tell it’s Sheila and she goes into her room and shuts the door. My door opens and closes again.
Faith kneels down and takes my hand.
“Everyone’s home,” she says, “but they’re going to let us be. They’re all worried about you. Especially Sheila.”
“Sheila? Why?”
“Why not?” Molly asks. “It would take a pretty hard case not to worry about you after this morning.”
“Molly!” Sarah says in her scolding voice, but I shake my head.
“It’s okay. She saw? Or heard? Everyone did, didn’t they?”
No one answers. I reach out of the covers to clamp Sarah’s arm onto my waist and snuggle in and smile a tiny bit again.
“I don’t care. I’m glad I saved everyone from another boring Wednesday.”
“And, she’s back,” Molly says.
“But you don’t have to be, Parker,” Sarah says in her trying-to-tell-me-something voice. I think I’m going to be hearing a lot of special voices for a while.
“I want to be.”
“I know, but you don’t always get to decide. It’s only been three months. You walked around like a zombie for a week afterwards and then made that stupid Star Chart and you’ve been a ticking time bomb ever since…”
“And I exploded.”
“You did, and it was epic!” She squeezes me. “It’ll be the top story at all our high school reunions. But I think we have some work ahead helping Marissa recover from the trauma.”
I laugh and it hurts. It feels weird to laugh after so much crying and my body aches all over: my stomach, my throat, the muscles in my face, and my eyelids feel swollen.
“And this is just the first time,” Sarah says. “Not the last. You gotta let it out when it comes, not bury it under all those stupid stars if you don’t want to explode every few months. It’s been how many years since my dad left and I still cry sometimes.”
“You do? Why don’t you tell me?”
“It’s not a secret. Your furniture moves around now with new people in your house and you don’t tell me every time you bruise your shin. It’s just the way things are now. There’s no point in saying oh yesterday I heard the ice cream truck drive by and it reminded me how my dad would always say that it only plays music to say they’re out of ice cream, but if I said nuh-uh and please enough times he’d say okay and buy me a Neapolitan ice cream sandwich, so I sat on the couch for a few minutes and my eyes got a little wet, but it wasn’t a huge thing, just one of hundreds of little things happening all the time.”