The Sea of Tranquility (25 page)

“Am I dying?” I ask.

“I think you’ll live. Why?” She’s amused.

“Because giving up your sugar is like giving up your life’s blood. I figure I must be dying.”

“Consider it a transfusion. You’re as pale as me right now. It’s scary.”

“I didn’t think anything scared you.”

“Not the sight of blood. Unlike some people.” She smirks at me.

“I owe you a shirt. You didn’t have to do that.”

“You were bleeding like a son of a bitch. I didn’t have time to fight with yours. Besides, you know how many people have seen me without my clothes? Doesn’t bother me.”

I’m not touching that last part. I like thinking about her without her clothes, but I don’t like thinking about anybody else seeing it. “I thought you said it wasn’t that much blood.”

She tightens the gauze and puts my hand back on the table. “Relatively speaking, it wasn’t.”

“Relative to what? Being shanked?”

“You should probably still get stitches.” The look I give her tells her that is not happening. “It’ll heal faster. Plus, you need to get it looked at to see if you sliced a tendon or something.”

I wince at the
sliced a tendon
comment and I catch her smirk at me again. She’s getting to do a lot of smirking at my expense tonight.

“The longer it takes to heal, the longer you won’t be able to play with your tools,” she sing-songs. I’m not oblivious to the double entendre and I could probably make some lame comeback about still having my right hand, but she knows she’s hitting home right now and I’m listening. “Compromise,” she says, grabbing her phone and shooting off a text. “Margot’s off tonight. If she’s home, you let her look.” The phone beeps a few seconds later and she holds it up.
Come on over.

***

An hour later, we’re back at my house. My hand is treated and wrapped and I’ve been sworn off tools for at least a week, depending on how it heals.

“Your left hand sucks now, too.” She picks up my bandaged hand and turns it over in hers. “You’re going to go crazy aren’t you?”

“High probability.” The thought of a week or more of not being able to work is more depressing than I want to admit.

“You won’t even be able to wash the dishes.” She’s loving this.

“We’ll use paper plates,” I respond dryly.

“I sit with you for your therapy,” she says, and it takes me a minute to realize what she’s talking about. The garage, the tools, the wood, the work. My therapy. The thing that keeps me sane. “Want to come along for mine?”

***

Her therapy turns out to be nightly running. Not jogging. Not a leisurely stroll. Hard ass running. She’s been kicking my ass for three days in a row like a tiny, porcelain drill instructor. It’s miserable and exhausting. I’ve thrown up every time. I wish I could say I hate it.

I haven’t been able to keep up with her, at least not for any real distance. My legs are longer and I can take her in a sprint, but I have no stamina. She can go hard for miles, but the way she does it, nothing about it is for exercise. She runs like something is chasing her.

“It gets easier,” she says, standing several feet away while I purge in the bushes at some unfortunate stranger’s house.

“Only if I keep doing it,” I respond, thinking I should start running with a bottle of mouthwash. Or at least gum.

“You’re not going to?” Not surprised or curious. Disappointed.

I don’t do well with disappointment. Especially not hers. If she wants me to run with her, I will. Maybe she’ll eventually get tired of waiting for me to keep up and she’ll send me home where I can hide in my garage. Running away is her thing. Hiding is mine.

When we get back to my house, I jump in the shower immediately and offer to drive her home when I get out. I have to yank myself out of the water because I could probably stay in there all night. Every part of my body aches.

When I get out to the family room, there’s a note on the coffee table.

Had to run – no pun intended. Couldn’t trust myself knowing you were wet and naked in the next room. Didn’t want to tempt fate. See you tomorrow.

P.S. I folded your laundry. Don’t worry. I didn’t touch your panties.

On the bottom, it’s signed with a little drawing of the sun with a smiley face in it which has to be the most out of character thing I’ve ever seen from her.

I head over to the utility room and there’s a perfectly folded pile of my clean laundry on top of the washer. When I open the dryer door, there’s nothing left in it but my abandoned boxer shorts.

CHAPTER 30

Nastya

“Ice cream.”

I know those words. I like those words
. I look up from the Physics textbook that has been my close companion for the past three hours. I will never pass this test. I should never have even signed up for the class. I was reaching from the beginning. Josh is standing next to me and leans over, shutting the book. I have a feeling this may have something to do with the frustrated barrage of profanity that left my mouth moments ago.

Academics have never been my forte. I’m not very smart, a fact which I have no trouble proving to myself several times a day. Asher is the smart one. He checked off that box on the family rubric. Asher has baseball and school. I had the piano. Now I don’t have anything.

“You need it. We’re getting it. Now.” Angry dad voice again.

“Now?”

“Now. Remember when you said that bad things happen when you don’t get enough ice cream? Bad things are happening. You’re all stressed out and cranky like a teenage boy who’s not getting laid.”

“Nice analogy.”
Do they get cranky?

“Sorry, it’s true. And nobody likes a cranky Sunshine. It goes against the laws of nature.” He pulls my chair away from the table with me in it.

“You make me sound like a petulant four year-old.”
Petulant – sulky, crabby, peevish, moody, sullen.
Picked that one up from Asher while he was studying for the SATs.

“You’re acting like one. With a more colorful vocabulary. Get your ass in the truck. We’re going.” He grabs his keys and stands in the entryway, holding the door open and waiting.

We pull up to a strip mall a couple miles away at eight o’clock and I follow him into an ice cream parlor that’s tucked away in the back corner of the plaza. If you didn’t know it was there, you’d probably never find it. It’s a Tuesday and it’s mostly empty except for a family at a corner table with a little boy whose clothes seem to have seen more chocolate ice cream than his mouth. I haven’t been in here before. I prefer to eat my ice cream out of the container at the kitchen counter where no one can watch me. Ice cream makes me happy. I like to concentrate on the joy.

This place is a little pastel paradise. It’s small and screams CUTE! at the top of its lungs from every direction. Six glass-top tables are scattered around the front of the shop. It must be a nightmare to keep them clean in a place full of melting sugar. The chairs have silver metal frames that match the table bases and padded vinyl seat cushions in pastel pink, yellow, blue and lavender. I look down at myself in black on black. I look like teenage Elvira walking into a Bonne Bell commercial.

There’s a girl I don’t recognize wiping down the tables in the front and a girl behind the counter that I do. She’s a senior named Kara Matthews from my ex-music class. She stares at us when we walk in. Then she must realize that she’s doing it, because she looks away, but it’s pretty obvious what she’s thinking.
Nastya Kashnikov and Josh Bennett walk into an ice cream parlor together on a Tuesday night.
It’s like the beginning of a bad joke. Or the apocalypse.

“What do you want?” Josh asks, knowing I can’t answer him here. I raise my eyebrows at him impatiently. He holds his hands out in surrender at the look I give him. “I didn’t want to be accused of being a chauvinist, but if you don’t tell me want you want, I’m just going to have to guess.” There’s mischief there and I don’t trust him. I shrug. I’m an excellent shrugger. It’s rivaled only by my ability to nod.

There’s nothing I can do. I sit down, facing the front windows, so I don’t have to look at Kara Matthews or let her look at me. I’m thankful that I’m still in my school clothes. Josh walks back to the counter and I can hear his voice but I can’t figure out what he’s saying. I do hear Kara Matthews.

“Seriously?” she laughs. I wonder what he’s said, but he spoke too low for me to hear. The thought of Josh Bennett flirting with Kara Matthews is outside the realm of possibility for my imagination. I trace my fingers around the beveled edge of the glass table and try to predict what kind of concoction he’s going to walk back with just to taunt me. Probably lime sorbet and peanut butter cup ice cream or some equally vile combination. The wait lasts forever. It shouldn’t take this long to order ice cream and I almost cave and turn around when I hear him walking back to the table with the uneven footfalls I have memorized by now.

“Dinner,” Josh says, coming around from behind with what can only be described as a trough of ice cream. He sets it down in front of me. He must have gotten every kind of ice cream they have. It reminds me of something my dad would do. Something so utterly ridiculous that I would have no choice but to be cheered up from whatever tragedy had befallen my young life. Back before I knew what real tragedy was. When the hard things were the fact that Megan Summers had better clothes or that I had messed up during a performance. Charles Ward was the master of cheer ups when I was little. Better than a barrel full of puppies. Maybe even better than melty ice cream.

“I didn’t know what kind you wanted so I got them all.” He’s not lying. I look at the trough and I’m fairly certain the only ice cream flavors not in there are the ones they haven’t invented yet. He sits down across from me and leans his elbows on the table, unsuccessfully trying to stifle the shit-eating grin on his face.

I don’t have a pen and talking here is out, so I grab my phone from my purse and text the boy sitting across the table from me. His phone beeps a second later and he pulls it out to read the two-word message I sent him.

Where’s yours?

And then he does something that shocks even me. Josh Bennett, king of the brooding stoics, laughs. Josh Bennett laughs and its one of the most natural, uninhibited, beautiful sounds I’ve ever heard. I know Kara Matthews is watching us and people will talk tomorrow. But right now I can’t even care. Josh Bennett laughs, and for one minute, everything is right in the world.

***

“We’re going on vacation over Thanksgiving,” my mother tells me on the phone when I get home from Josh’s.

It’s ten o’clock and there were three messages from her, along with a text that simply read
Please call
. Ten o’clock is never too late for my mother. Not anymore. She pores over pictures until all hours. Before the attack, I never remember her working through the nights like she does now. But after, it was all she seemed to do. My mother went through the most prolific period in her life while I was recovering. She’d say she stayed up because she wanted to be awake if I woke up and needed anything, but I don’t think she could sleep. It was easier to crawl into a computer full of her photographs than a bed full of her nightmares. I’d sit up with her sometimes, because I couldn’t sleep, either. I’d watch her, amazed at just how much a person could accomplish fueled by tea and regret.

“We’re staying in a beautiful house. We’d like you to come.” She waits for a reaction. She always waits. There’s a hope my mother never loses that, one day, I’ll fill that pause. She probably wouldn’t even care what the words were at this point, just that they were there.

“We thought it would be fun to go skiing.”
Skiing?
Seriously, Mom?
With the hand?
I don’t want to go on vacation. I certainly don’t want to go skiing. I’d rather be hit in the face with a dodgeball. Repeatedly.

“I already talked to Dr. Andrews. We can make an appointment to have your hand looked at again before we go. She thinks it should hold up fine as long as it isn’t for too long of a period. If it starts to bother you, we can go in and sit by the fire and drink coffee.” I hate coffee. I can’t ski. I’m from Florida. I have no sense of balance or coordination and a hand that likes to randomly lose its grip at inopportune times. Not to even mention the fact that it’s so full of plates and screws that it will set off every metal detector in the airport.

My brother is the athlete. He must be in heaven. I don’t want them not to go because of me, but I don’t think that’s an issue. They’ll go whether I do or not. And I’m not going. I’ll be miserable and then everyone will be miserable and it’ll be my fault. Again. I’m tired of being responsible for other people’s misery. I can’t even put up with my own. My mom keeps talking. She’s not afraid of being interrupted, but she wants to get all of her selling points made. Like the faster she gets them out, the more convincing they’ll be.

“The house is big. It belongs to Mitch Miller, your father’s boss, and he’s not using it this year so he offered it to us. Addison is coming, too.” Addison is coming? It fits. Morals were never the big issue with my mother, just excellence. Asher and I could probably screw half the country under her roof as long we didn’t lose focus. I wonder if it would still apply to me now that I’m not good at anything anymore. Knowing Asher, he probably isn’t even sleeping with the girl yet, but it’s an easy thing to judge my mother on so I use it.

I tap the phone three times which means I’m hanging up.

“Please at least think about it. Margot’s going to come, too, and I don’t want you to be alone on Thanksgiving.” I hang up before she can tell me that she loves me. Not because I don’t want to hear that she says it, but because I don’t want her to hear that I don’t.

***

My life outside of school has become virtually unrecognizable, but almost nothing between the hours of 7:15 and 2:45 has changed. Josh and I barely acknowledge one another, Drew flings sex-bombs at me at every turn and I try to sidestep dress code violations. The rest of my time, I spend avoiding whatever it is that needs avoiding that day. Nasty looks from Tierney Lowell. Being propositioned by Ethan Hall. Everyone at lunch.