Underwater(18)

1. Breathe.

2. You are okay.

3. You are not dying.

I brush the hair back from Ben’s face and pull his chin up to look at me. “We’ll see.”

“You’re going to come, right? Yeah, I know you’re going to come.” It’s like he’s talking himself into believing it. I don’t know what to say, so I plant a kiss on his cheek instead of talking. He plops down on the middle of the living room floor to look at his script. “Wanna read all the parts with me?”

His grin is so huge. It’s as wide as the whole room. I sit down next to him and pull him into my lap. “Tell me who you want me to be,” I say.

“You can be all the parts except for the frog. And the alligator. I want to be the alligator, too. He’s crazy.” He waves his hands up in the air to indicate crazy.

I laugh. “Okay.”

When we finish reading, I send Ben next door to deliver my letter to Evan before I change my mind. I wait. My heart thumps. And I cross my fingers.

Ben comes back a little bummed out.

“Nobody’s home. But I left it for him.”

“Where?”

“By the door.”

“Good job. Thank you.”

So now I have to wait. And wonder. I picture Evan reading my words. What will he think of them?

*

An hour later, it’s dark and cold outside, but it’s cozy and bright in my apartment. I help Ben with his homework and fill up the tub for him with warm water and bubbles. My mom fixes dinner, and we eat together in front of the TV. We watch a cartoon that makes Ben laugh so hard, he snorts.

“Chew your food,” my mom says.

I hear Evan and his mom come home while we’re eating.

I hear them banging around in the kitchen. I hear the whir of the microwave. I tilt my head toward the wall, trying to make out the sound of something meaningful.

“You okay?” my mom asks.

“Mm-hm.”

But she doesn’t stop watching me.

I eventually hear the clanging of dishes in the sink next door. And then I don’t hear anything at all. Ben falls asleep against my shoulder. My mom picks him up off the couch as his arms droop limply at his sides. She shuffles him off to the bedroom.

I sit in the dark for a few minutes. I want to be alone. But then my mom calls out to me.

“Go to bed, Morgan.”

She doesn’t like to fall asleep and then have the noise of me brushing my teeth wake her up an hour later.

I peek out of the peephole of our front door on my way to my bedroom. I can’t see Evan’s front door, of course, but I can tell the porch light isn’t on. Everything outside of our apartment is dark. And quiet. It’s the kind of silence that hurts.

I stop at the entrance to my mom’s room before I turn into mine. She’s sitting in bed, reading a romance novel. She buys them from the spin rack at the hospital pharmacy. The cover of her book has a guy with long hair and no shirt kissing the bare shoulder of a lady in a ripped dress on the deck of a pirate ship.

“Mom?”

She sets the book down on her stomach. “Yeah?”

There are things I want to tell her, but she looks so tired. I want to say I went outside today. I want to tell her Brenda was proud of me. But then I think maybe I need that to be something that only belongs to me right now. I don’t want to get her hopes up.

“I just wanted to say good night.”

She holds her arms out to me, and I cross over and sink into them. She brushes my hair back from my face and kisses the top of my head like I’m Ben’s age.

“You okay?” She talks against my hair so her words are kind of muffled.

I nod and hug her tighter. The safe smell of her makes me wish I could stay there all night. Instead, I stand up, kiss her on the cheek, and sneak quietly into my room so I don’t wake up Ben.

I slide between my polka-dot sheets. I think of Evan and how my words must’ve scared him. It seems like he would’ve come over if he’d been happy to get my letter. This realization makes me question everything Brenda has ever told me. She said lots of people would be thrilled to get a letter from me. But Evan obviously wasn’t thrilled. How could I have been so stupid? And what if this isn’t the only thing Brenda is wrong about?





chapter twelve

The sound of Evan thumping down the stairs early the next morning wakes me up. He’s up before the sun. I peek out from behind the curtains of my bedroom window just as the tail end of his surfboard rounds the corner by the front gate. He’s on dawn patrol, getting some surfing in before school starts. All the good surfers in town do that. I know the smell of him without being there. I think of him sitting astride his board, bobbing around in the middle of the ocean, waiting for a wave and missing Hawaii.

My letter definitely scared him.

I picture Ben waving his hands up in the air last night when he said the alligator in his play was crazy. Maybe Evan thinks about me that way. He doesn’t want to deal with crazy.

I pack Ben’s lunch. I watch him and my mom hustle out the door. My mom’s keys jingle as they dangle from her fingertip when she goes. I smile as I watch Ben soar through the courtyard. He trips and almost falls into the pool, but my mom catches him by his elbow just in time. And then they push through the gate, disappearing just like Evan did this morning. Neither of them realizes I’m standing on the welcome mat watching them go.