All This Time(26)

I turn my head toward Marley, but she doesn’t say anything, just waits for me to go on, a soft, unhurried look on her face.

So I tell her about my football career ending. How broken I felt when I saw the X-ray, years of training and dreaming destroyed in a fraction of a second, Kimberly holding my hand in the ambulance and at the hospital, too. She never left my side.

“Don’t get me wrong. We fought, too,” I admit. We’d argue over going out with the team after my injury, when I just wanted to hang out at my house. Or when she wanted to do an epic college road trip to see a bunch of schools, but I didn’t want to because I was sure I already had a full ride to UCLA. Or when… Well, we argued about a lot of things. “Probably more than most couples. But I always thought it was just because we cared so much.”

I scrape my heels across the grass. “I don’t know. It seems so stupid now. It was all so…”

“Trivial,” Marley says, looking up at me, and I can tell she gets it. She doesn’t press for more after that. Doesn’t ask me the big questions, what happened to Kim, to me. And maybe that’s why I keep talking. I tell her everything. From the graduation party to the visions.

Marley listens, without interruption, until my words trail off. Her eyes are thoughtful as she bites her lower lip, like she’s replaying my words in her head.

“Did it ever feel like that to you?” she asks, looking over at me. “That you were controlling everything?”

“No,” I say firmly, but it sounds false to my ears. Especially when I look at it now. Something about telling the whole story makes all the tiny cracks more visible. There were more of them than I remembered, enough that could lead to a big break. “I don’t know,” I say finally. “I think maybe, after I lost football, I felt kind of helpless. Like my whole future was gone. I guess I thought if she was there, I wouldn’t be alone in that. Maybe I just wanted to be in control of something.”

“Most days, I still feel that way,” she says, nodding, her eyes distant. I want to ask, but I don’t pry any further. I know for a fact that her not asking helped me. I have to trust she’ll tell me when she’s ready.

“Still want to hang out with me even though my ex-girlfriend is haunting me?” I ask to lighten the mood.

Marley laughs at that as she sits up and gathers a handful of cherry blossom petals. “Maybe she isn’t,” she says, making a fist before letting them drop from her hand one by one. “Maybe you’re still trying to be in control. Trying to keep a part of her here.”

I watch the petals drift slowly to the ground. “Pretty pathetic,” I say as I shake my head. “I mean, she dumped me.”

“I’m so sorry, but…,” Marley says, and I look up to see a smile forming on her lips. “I mean… Kim. Come on. What an idiot.”

What? Did Marley just say that? I cringe, but completely unconsciously, a laugh bursts out of me. “You can’t say that. She’s dead.”

I’m pretty certain that’s an unspoken cardinal rule. You can’t talk shit about dead people. Unless they’re, like, a dictator or a serial killer.

“Well, she broke up with you,” she says, standing and brushing away the small flecks of dirt and grass clinging to her yellow skirt. “Not smart.”

Her words catch me off guard, but her expression isn’t flirty. I think she’s just being a good friend.

It’s nice to be able to talk to someone about the breakup. Someone who will actually acknowledge I was dumped without making me feel guilty about it.

I stand, and she looks up at me, reaching out to lightly touch my arm, the point where her fingers touch feeling like a ripple of water vibrating out across my body. Her expression grows serious again.

“I’m sorry you’re hurting,” she says. And it doesn’t feel like an empty phrase, a generic sentence that everyone repeats out of politeness.

It sounds genuine.

And it’s exactly what I needed to hear. She’s not pushing me to just be better already. Not judging how I feel or what I’m doing. She’s just letting me feel it.

“Doesn’t hurt as much as it used to,” I say back, surprised to find I mean it.



* * *




After a while we walk around the park, a few of the leaves on the trees already turning orange and red and yellow. Some drift off their branches and fall in front of us, and our feet crunch noisily over them.

Marley pulls a half-finished red-and-white box of popcorn out of her bag, leftovers from an earlier pond expedition with the ducks. She holds it out to me. I take a handful, popping a few kernels into my mouth.

“Do you have any dreams outside of all of that? Outside of football? UCLA?” she asks. Our shoulders are almost touching as we walk, like some invisible barrier between us has disappeared.

I swallow, looking away at the pond peeking through the trees. It’s what my mom’s been trying to ask me. The question I haven’t had an answer to.

“I don’t know. Football was always my first choice. But since that’s out, and since my plans with Kim are out…,” I say, shrugging. “I don’t really know where to start.”

“What do you want?” she asks. “Not Kim. Not Sam. Not your mom. You.”

I take a deep breath, saying the first thing that comes into my head, completely unfiltered. “I think right now I just want to be. I don’t want to go to UCLA and pretend I have it figured out. But I don’t really want to go anywhere else, either.”