Forever Mark

by Jessyca Thibault

  Kellen took the ball from me. “We also have this theory that maybe if he gets hit in the head with the ball enough times it’ll knock some sense into him.”

  Kellen stood up and launched the ball at Sleeping Beauty.

  “Ow, what the hell?!” he screamed as the ball bounced off the back of his head. He turned around and saw Kellen standing in the bleachers.

  “Sorry, man,” Kellen said. “It slipped. Maybe if you weren’t high you would have seen it coming.”

  “Fuck you, Kellen.”

  “Love you too, bro.”

  Kellen sat down and grinned. “One of these days he’ll get it.”

  “Or you’ll give him a concussion.”

  “The hospital is the perfect place for a drug detox,” he said. “So, besides the aggressive encouragement, how did you like the game? It wasn’t too boring, was it?”

  “It was good,” I said.

  “But?”

  “No buts, I’m just thinking.”

  “What are you thinking about?”

  I looked out at the court and saw that all of the guys had dispersed in different directions. The park was empty except for Kellen and me. I hopped off the bleachers and walked over to the ball, picking it up and getting a feel for its grip. I stepped onto the court and dribbled the ball to the three-point line. Bending my knees, I aimed for the basket and took the shot. The ball soared straight through the hoop, hitting nothing but net. Just like it always had.

  Kellen whistled. “I thought you said you didn’t like basketball,” he said, jogging over to me.

  “That doesn’t mean I don’t know how to play.”

  “So you hate basketball, but you’re awesome at it?”

  “It’s not really basketball that I hate,” I said.

  I told Kellen about my father and how basketball had been our thing, about how I’d practiced for hours and hours so I’d be good enough for the school team, how I quit tryouts when I’d realized my father wasn’t going to show up to any of my games. I told him how Bree ended up playing when we got to high school and that it had felt like a punch to the gut.

  Kellen listened to me without saying a word. When I finished he walked over and put his arms around me.

  “I completely gave it up when my father left,” I said. “This was the first time I’ve even watched a game in years.”

  Kellen shook his head. “I’m sorry, Carson. If I had known, I wouldn’t have pressured you to come.”

  “You didn’t pressure me,” I said. “I wouldn’t have come if I didn’t want to. I came for me. I wanted to face my fear,” I added, smiling.

  Kellen pulled a piece of paper and a pen from his pocket and unfolded it. I could see it was the Happy List.

  “You want to do the honors?” he asked, grinning.

  I took the paper and put a big check mark next to item number ten.

  “Done,” I said.

  “Great.” I could see the corner of his mouth pull up. “Now how about we knock out another one of those activities?”

  Kellen walked over, picked up the basketball, and passed it to me.

  “Kellen, I haven’t played in years.”

  “Then it’s a good thing we’re alone so there aren’t any witnesses when you kick my ass after not playing for years.”

  I bounced the ball against the pavement, catching it when it rebounded back to me.

  “C’mon,” Kellen said. “Just a friendly little game of one-on-one.”

  I looked up and stared at the basket. I guessed one game wouldn’t hurt.

  “Fine,” I said.

  Kellen grinned and got into a defensive position. I dribbled up the court and he followed me. I faked right, twisted, aimed, and took a jump shot. The ball sank through the hoop.

  “Dang, take it easy, Michael Jordan,” Kellen said.

  I laughed, feeling a rush of energy. As Kellen and I played the moves came back to me effortlessly, kind of like riding a bike. My brain evaluated the different situations in a split-second and my muscles reacted from memory. For every shot Kellen made, I made two. After a little while he ditched the traditional rules of basketball, picked me up, and put me over his shoulder as I set my feet for another three-point shot.

  “Foul!” I cried.

  “All’s fair in love and basketball,” he said, running across the court with me still over his shoulder.

  “Kellen, what are you doing?”

  “Sweeping you off your feet.”

  I laughed, part of me thinking that was the worst line he’d come up with so far.

  The other part of me knew that it was actually working.

  Chapter 30

  Storybook Weekend

  I didn’t know it was possible

  To get lost in someone else’s story

  To find peace

  Within pages already written

  To find yourself

  Within someone else’s imagination

  To find friends

  In an entirely other world

  To find that you’ve been missing out

  On something you never knew existed

  The day after Kellen and I played basketball in the park (in which I creamed the boy) he picked me up from school and brought me to his house. We ate cupcakes while playing Go Fish with Tony, who had so much fun that he asked if I would come back the next Friday. I did and we made packaged cinnamon rolls in the oven and colored pictures from one of Tony’s coloring books. Mine was a picture of a little boy playing with a dog. I made the little boy’s skin blue and I colored the dog green. Kellen said that six out of ten psychologists would say I was disturbed. I stuck my tongue out at him.

  “All great artists are misunderstood,” I said before nodding at his picture. “Plus, at least I can color inside the lines.”

  “Touché.”

  Tony loved my picture. “They’re aliens!” he announced before picking it up. “Can I keep it, Carson?”

  “Sure,” I said. I watched as Tony walked over and secured my picture to the front of the refrigerator with a magnet.

  I wasn’t expecting that to affect me as much as it did, but my mom never put any of my drawings or colorings on the refrigerator like that when I was little. For Tony to just walk up and decide that it was worth being put up there with all of the other pictures and memories, it just meant a lot. I felt like I finally belonged somewhere. Tony couldn’t possibly understand how special that moment was to me, but I knew Kellen got it. He picked up my hand under the table and squeezed it gently. When I looked over at him he was looking down and smiling to himself as he continued coloring outside the lines. Tony told him he would not be putting his picture on the refrigerator. I felt even more honored that mine had made the cut.

  Before I left that night Tony declared that Fridays would be “Dessert Before Dinner with Carson” days. “It’ll be a tradition!” he said excitedly.

  So when Kellen and I got to the house the following Friday and Tony said he wanted ice cream, we got to work preparing sundaes. A few minutes in though, we got distracted and ended up having a friendly food fight in which Kellen sprayed whipped cream at my face and I squirted chocolate syrup on his shirt. We were throwing sprinkles at each other when Tony walked in the room.

  “Stop!” he yelled. “You’re wasting the sprinkles!”

  “She started it,” Kellen said, pointing at me.

  “Did not.”

  So we stopped throwing the toppings and brought our sundaes into the living room where we watched a Disney movie with Tony, who sat between us on the couch. I’m not exactly sure which movie it was because I was a little distracted by Kellen flicking gummy bears at me behind Tony’s back. Tony got bored with the movie after he’d finished his sundae though, and he started telling me about a camping trip.

  “Carson, guess what Kel and I are doing this weekend?” he said.

  “I don’t know, what are you doing?”

  “You have to guess!”

  “Robbing a bank,” I said.


  “No, we’re going on a boys-only camping trip in the woods!” Tony’s little face lit up with excitement.

  “That sounds like fun,” I said, even though the idea of sleeping outside with the dirt and bugs and bears had always made me feel kind of itchy.

  “Yeah,” Tony said. “But you can’t come because it’s only for boys.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “I still like you though,” he assured me. “It’s just that you’re a girl.”

  “That’s one of my favorite things about her,” Kellen said.

  It was the first weekend in a while that I didn’t hang out with Kellen. When I woke up Saturday afternoon I cleaned my room so my mom would stop nagging me about vacuuming and dusting and picking my bras up off the floor. Then I did a little homework. It wasn’t fun, which is why I only did a little. I tried to make spaghetti for dinner just to change things up, but it was gross, so I ordered pizza with the money my mom left on the counter in case I needed a taxi or something (why I would need a taxi is beyond me but every weekend she practically lived at the bakery and so she left the money on the counter for emergency taxi rides and every weekend I ended up using it to buy takeout).

  When I finished half the pizza I went up to my room to stare at the ceiling for a few hours and think about life and the meaning of human existence. That’s when I noticed the book on my desk, the one Kellen bought me that morning we had green doughnuts and watched the sunrise.

  I hadn’t even glanced at it since I set it down that day, so I figured I’d just try reading the first chapter and then I could at least tell Kellen that reading wasn’t for me and he could return the book or whatever. I mean, I didn’t have anything else to do, so what the hell, right?

  What the hell was exactly right. As in, what the hell did they put in that book to keep my eyeballs glued to the pages?

  I read the first chapter. And then the second chapter. By midnight I was in the middle of another chapter so I stayed up and kept reading, telling myself that I would stop when I got to the next chapter. But then I got to a really good part so I just kept reading. I read straight through the night and then I read straight through Sunday, stopping only to take a shower and grab some leftover pizza. I finally finished the book at five o’clock in the morning, which is why I got absolutely no sleep the whole weekend and was sitting on the school bus looking like a zombie on sleep meds.

  And it was all Kellen’s fault.

  Well, it was sort of his fault, indirectly at least. I was blaming him, so that was all that really mattered.

  I pulled out my phone and called him, resting my head on the grimy bus window. I think I’d lost my ability to make sound judgements.

  “Good morning, beautiful,” he said.

  “That book that you got me, did you say it has a sequel?” I asked.

  “You read the whole book, didn’t you?” I could hear the grin in his voice.

  “Yes and it took me all weekend and I’m kind of sleep deprived so if you say ‘I told you so’ then I will literally pull your vocal cords out of your throat one by one.”

  “Man, that’s graphic,” he said. “But I will get you the next book.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You are very welcome, Miss Reynolds,” he said. “I’ll stop by your school this afternoon and drop it off.”

  “Okay, I’ll see you later.”

  “Just do me a favor and try not to pull out any vocal cords in the meantime. I hear that’s frowned upon in the court of law.”

  “I make no promises,” I said before hanging up.

  I wished I had terrible eyesight. I knew that was kind of an awful thing to wish considering there were people in the world with truly terrible eyesight who would probably give anything to be able to see the beautiful world around them, but there was absolutely nothing beautiful about high school.

  Maybe if the world was blurry I would’ve missed all the nasty looks and smirks that were thrown my way when I walked into school that morning. Maybe I wouldn’t have seen the way people were staring at me while I was at my locker or while I was sitting in my seat during first period. I felt like a lab rat the whole first half of the day. Finally during lunch period I went into the bathroom to see if maybe some immature jerk had stuck a sign on my back when I’d dozed off on the bus, but there was no sign. As I looked in the mirror it became crystal clear why everyone was looking at me funny though.

  I guess I was so tired when I woke up that I forgot to put on makeup, so there was no powder on my face to hide the cluster of freckles that spread across my cheeks and nose. Then there were the bags under my eyes, which were also extremely bloodshot and lacking their usual ring of dark shadow and liner. On top of that I apparently mistook an orange shirt for a black one (I was really tired that morning) and of course I left my sweatshirt on the bus. So instead of the black on black on black look I’d been sporting for the past three years, I came to school looking like a strung out traffic cone. No wonder people were staring.

  I was feeling more self-conscious than ever as I sat and waited for Mrs. Aito to start math class. I should’ve been safe in my little corner in the back of the room, but people kept turning around to gawk at me. So I was sorry to all the people with poor vision in the world, but it would’ve be an absolute blessing to not be able to see right then, though I’d probably need to be deaf too since the loud whispers had started. Maybe the loud whispers had been around all day, but I just wasn’t paying attention. I’d been too concerned with avoiding eye contact and trying not to drool on my desk. I felt naked now though, and the whispers wouldn’t stop.

  “Is that Carson? Woah, now we know why she wears all that makeup.”

  Shut up.

  “Guess there’s no funeral to go to today.”

  That’s not even original.

  “Damn, look at her hair. Can you say faded?”

  Stop talking.

  “And those roots.”

  My hair does not look that bad…does it?

  I nervously ran my fingers through my hair. I honestly hadn’t noticed that the black was fading so much and my roots were growing out. I guess I’d been spending so much time outside and, sure, it had been a while since I’d touched my hair up, but I didn’t think it was that noticeable.

  “Do you think she’s having a mental breakdown?”

  “She looks like she hasn’t slept in weeks.”

  “Maybe she’s working too hard.”

  I could hear a group of girls start laughing, but all I could do was slough down in my seat and stare at my desk.

  “Remind me to never sit in that seat. Who knows what it’s infested with.”

  I picked up my pencil and wondered how hard I would have to jam it into my ear to break my eardrum.

  Finally Mrs. Aito walked into the room and the whispers died down a little. She started talking about triangles and the Pythagorean Theorem and for the first time I wasn’t completely lost. I actually kind of got it. I focused on the board and the problem that Mrs. Aito was working on, drawing a diagram and scribbling numbers into my notebook. When Mrs. Aito asked what the value of the hypotenuse was, I didn’t even think before I blurted out, “Five.”

  The whole class turned and stared at me.

  “Carson?” Mrs. Aito asked, like she was unsure it was really me. In her defense, I did look a few shades brighter than usual.

  “Yeah?”

  “Did you have an answer to the problem?”

  I cleared my throat and stared straight at the board, focusing on the triangle. I felt about 25 pairs of eyeballs burning holes into my face.

  “Five,” I said quietly.

  Mrs. Aito’s mouth broke into a giant smile. The woman was beaming at me. It was embarrassing.

  “Yes,” she said. “That’s right. Wonderful job, Carson!”

  “Yeah, wonderful job, Carson,” the girl in front of me mumbled.

  I wanted to hit her in the head with my math book.

  I could tell the rest
of the period was going to drag on. Mrs. Aito kept drawing triangles and asking questions and I could feel her looking at me, but I kept my head down and didn’t say another word.

  Chapter 31

  Muted

  You can’t say anything

  You want to

  You want so desperately to

  You want to be able

  To say they’re hurting you

  You want to be able

  To scream how badly

  But you can’t

  You want to ask them

  No, beg them to stop

  You want to tell them how close you are

  To breaking, shattering

  You want to call for help

  But you can’t

  Because you can’t say anything

  When the bell rang I bolted out of my seat and headed for the door. I was in no mood to hear how proud Mrs. Aito was of me for answering one problem right. It wasn’t like I’d turned into a genius or anything.

  I was also in no mood to deal with my next class, so instead of heading to English I rushed into the bathroom down the hall, locked myself into a stall, flipped the toilet seat down, and sat there. I pulled my knees into my chest so I was one little orange ball, wondering how I always ended up like this, sulking in a bathroom stall.

  I wanted to scream, but I didn’t want anyone to hear and come looking to see what freak was yelling her head off in the bathroom. So I decided to just sit there quietly and wait for the final bell to ring. Kellen would be there soon after and by then the halls would be empty and I wouldn’t have to see or hear anyone on my way to meet him. He’d give me a hug, tell me I looked beautiful even though I looked like a deranged carrot, and everything would be okay. Maybe he’d even stay while I did tutoring with Bree and then we could go do something and everything would be okay.

  Everything would be okay.

  Everything would be okay.

  I reminded myself that everything would be okay over and over again until I heard the screech of the bell, and then I kept reminding myself for the next thirty minutes. That’s when I started to worry that everything was not going to be okay. I looked down at my phone. No new texts.