Send Me a Sign(6)

Gyver reached out to touch my shoulder. “I’m here.”

“Thanks.” I leaned my cheek against his hand and took a deep breath. It stirred the faintest sense of comfort, the first flicker of reassurance. “You have your guitar with you, right?”

“I’ve got my acoustic in the car.”

“Can you play me that song? Do you know it?” It had seemed scarily appropriate: “blood,” “fear,” words whose definitions had changed overnight. Knowing the singer had faced this too, I needed to look for more signs in the lyrics.

He’d already pulled a pick from his pocket and was twirling it as if this were any other night and this were any song request. Then he paused, “You really want to hear it again?”

“Please.”

He squeezed my shoulder before backtracking to the car. After finishing the water, I fiddled with the empty bottle, spun it, and told myself if it stopped with the cap facing me, my friends would take the news well. If it stopped facing the lake they wouldn’t. It twirled an irregular circuit across the table. I held my breath.

Before it finished rotating, Gyver plucked it off the sun-bleached boards and tossed it into the recycle can. “You want to play spin the bottle?” he joked, then saw my stricken face and gestured to the guitar. “You sure, Mi?”

I nodded.

No matter which singer he covered, I preferred his version to the original. A girl could fall in love with a voice like his and lose herself in his performance. Not tonight. His deep voice was unsteady—it cracked on the first line and broke the word “hopeless” in half. Normally his eye contact was electric, but tonight he looked away as he sang.

When he got to the chorus, his intensity was intimidating—until he choked and stopped playing. I wasn’t surprised to find tears blurring my view of the lake, but I was shocked when he looked up and he was crying too.

I wanted to hug him—to remove the guitar strap from his neck and drape myself around it instead—but I couldn’t move. I’d made Gyver cry. The knowledge reverberated somewhere beneath my rib cage with an ache too intense to name.

Gyver put the guitar on the tabletop and moved to sit on the bench next to me. I tilted my head against his shoulder. He slipped an arm around me and leaned his head against mine. We stared out at the water, united in our fear. The silence was filled with the chirps of crickets and the splash of fish surfacing to swallow mosquitoes.

“I think you’re wrong,” I whispered.

Gyver eased his head off mine and examined my face. He smiled, but it faded before erasing any of the pain from his eyes. “You usually do. What am I wrong about this time?”

“It’s not an angry song. It’s a sad, scared song. You’ve got it on the wrong playlist.”





Chapter 4

The next morning I deleted the drunken voice mails and beer-clumsy texts from Ryan, Hillary, Lauren, and Ally. Hil sounded annoyed. “So, you disappear for three days, show up at the party where you pout all night, and then you disappear again? What the hell, Mia? Is everything okay? If you’re done being no fun, come meet us at Matherson’s.” There was a message from today too: plans for a hangover lunch.

I wandered into the kitchen and found my parents sitting with coffee and chemo books—a departure from their typical newspaper routine.

“Good morning, kiddo. How are you feeling?” Dad stuck a napkin in his book to mark his page. He believed that anything worth knowing could come from a book, chart, graph, or diagram. He made sense of the world through numbers and data—which was why he’d liked gymnastics more than cheerleading. He understood gymnastics’ scoring: points added for difficulty, deductions taken for not sticking a landing. Cheerleading competitions, with their unquantifiable categories like “crowd appeal,” baffled him. He sat in the stands with his clipboard, trying to do the work of all the judges at once, until my mom lost patience with him asking, “Did that girl bobble?” “Would you say their voice quality is strong or barking?” “How would you rate their tempo?” and finally told him, “Put that away and just watch your daughter.”

Yesterday’s news had launched him into leukemia fact-finding overdrive. His fingers twitched over the book’s cover, and he looked as if waiting for this conversation to be over so he could resume his reading was causing him actual pain.

“I’m fine,” I said.

Mom swept me with a head-to-toe gaze. “What happened to your elbow? I’ll get you some cover-up.”

“It’s no big deal. I banged it.”

My dad nodded. I wondered if he was aware that he was flipping the cover of his book open and shut. “We talked to Nancy Russo this morning. It sounds like it was some party. You’re lucky she let Gyver come get you.”

“I wasn’t drinking.” I grabbed the orange juice from the fridge and expected that to be the end of the conversation.

Mom didn’t believe in discipline and Dad didn’t believe in upsetting Mom. She had been an adored only child. She now wanted to be adored by her only child. She didn’t bother with rules or punishment; she stuck with bragging about my accomplishments and making vague comments that teenagers were “so difficult.”

“Of course not,” she agreed now. “Even so, you need to be careful. But you know this. I’m sure you were being safe.”