by Halli Gomez
FEBRUARY 8
I should have texted Khory on Sunday to find out if she was okay. What happened at her house on Saturday was just weird. I had no idea what to do or what to say, and I wasn’t the invade-your-privacy type. So this morning I scanned the halls for her before and after every class, but I may have missed her, since a tenth of the time I was focused on the floor.
By lunchtime I had pretty much given up. I stuffed my books in the locker, repacked my backpack with science and math books, and grabbed my lunch bag. Then started the trek toward the cafeteria.
“Hey.” Khory’s friend Jay was by my side. “Uh, Khory told me you’re helping her in math. I hate to ask, but do you think you could help me with a couple things before our Pre-Calc quiz? I know its last minute. It will take five minutes. Ten tops.”
Did he realize the quiz was today, right after lunch?
“Uh, sure. We can do it now.” I moved closer to the lockers and stopped to take my backpack off. I expected my stomach to start gurgling on cue, but no matter how loud my stomach yelled, I was so sick of ham and wheat bread, it would never be appetizing.
“Great.” Jay tilted his head. “But not here. We can go over it while we eat.”
Cafeteria? Middle of the room? I could feel the air being squeezed from my lungs. My legs wobbled as I slung my backpack over my shoulder. But Khory would be there. Was seeing her worth the risk of having a full-blown anxiety attack? I smiled to myself. Of course it was.
We walked down the hall toward the cafeteria. I tightened my leg muscles and got away with two bows instead of full bends, but as I counted the third round of ten—one, two, three, four—the urge grew. Five, six. It started at my waist. Seven, eight. And traveled up my body and into my arms. Nine. My fingertips tingled. My body leaned forward. My arms stretched out toward the ground. I willed the floor to come to my hands. I know that was stupid, but I desperately didn’t want to meet it at its level. My arms reached further. It was coming. I couldn’t stop it.
Ten.
I stopped, bent all the way, and let my fingertips touch the cool floor. I stood up and pretended like it was completely normal.
I took giant steps to catch up with Jay, who hadn’t slowed down to wait for me, and caught the tail end of him complaining about logarithms. Not wanting to make a bigger fool of myself, I mumbled, “yeah, that sucks,” as if I’d been there the whole time.
Jay sighed, and I continued counting. We had a long way to go.
From the corner of my eye, I saw Jay glance at me. His eyebrows were scrunched together.
“Dude, I’ll run ahead and save us seats,” Jay said. “You know it’s crowded in there.”
He sped off with a quick flick of his hand. My muscles relaxed; I got to ten and touched the floor.
The lunch line was pretty short by the time I got to the cafeteria. I searched the middle tables. Jay was alone with an empty seat next to him. No Khory. I scanned the back corner where Riley and Nicholas sat. Why did I agree to help Jay? I sighed and headed to the dead center of the room.
Jay held an uneaten wrap in one hand, a pencil in the other, and stared at his open math book like he was burning it with laser eyes. His eyebrows were still scrunched together. I sat down and forced air into my lungs. Oxygen in. Carbon dioxide out. Repeat.
“I can’t get this inverse thing.” He stabbed the book with his finger because obviously his heat vision wasn’t working.
I glanced at the empty seats across from us, then pulled the book toward me and read the examples. “Let’s see. Okay, I can explain this.”
I dropped my sandwich, pulled a pencil and a spiral notebook from my backpack, and opened it to a blank page. I drew a right triangle, labeled the sides, and wrote an equation: sin C = 6/10, or 0.6.
“Since we know the sin of C, we use the inverse sin function to find the angle,” I said.
“Okay,” Jay said.
We worked out a few problems. After five minutes, he felt comfortable enough to take a bite of his food.
Rainn blew to our table. With a green scarf and the green streak in her hair, she was like a tree in a tornado. Her lunch bag flew into mine, and she landed in the seat across from Jay with a thump.
She leaned forward toward him. “Did you talk to Khory?”
“No. Why?”
“They caught the guy. That’s why she’s not here today. She went to the police department. It’s all so surreal.”
Jay opened his mouth, but nothing came out. The wrap dropped from his hand. I turned to Rainn. She covered her face with her hands. I looked back at Jay.
Someone say something!
“How,” Jay whispered.
Rainn uncovered her face. “DNA. He’s been living in Florida or Georgia. Somewhere south. They don’t know much, just that he’s in jail there for something else.”
“Burglary,” I said. “I heard part of that.”
They turned toward me. “I was at her house Saturday working on math. Her dad was on the phone with a detective.” My cheeks grew warm. “I wasn’t listening. She told me to be quiet so that she could hear.”
“So what did you hear? I bet her dad wants to kill him.” Rainn put a hand on her forehead. “I can’t even imagine how Khory’s feeling right now.”
“I don’t know. I didn’t understand what they were talking about,” I said.
“You don’t know about her sister?” Jay asked.
I shook my head. “I saw pictures at her house. Khory and her sister. I just thought she had a different schedule.”
“Where’d you go to elementary school?”
“Richmond Park.”
“That’s why. I live a couple houses down from them, and we’ve been friends since second grade, so I was around when it happened. Khory had a twin sister, Krista.”
Had? “Was Khory the girl that was almost kidnapped? Her sister. She was the one who didn’t escape.”
Jay nodded and slumped toward the table.
I did remember. We were ten. Some crazy guy drove up to their front yard and tried to take them. Got them in the car, but one got away. Khory. They found her sister later, but it was too late. Dad had to know, being a cop, but he never mentioned it. Maybe he figured I was safe since I stayed in my room most of the time. I took back everything I’d said about his job. No drug dealer, robber, or rapist was worse than a guy kidnapping a kid, doing who knows what, then killing her. I was frozen again and still couldn’t enjoy the stillness. At least the tics had respect for the dead.
Then the tics came back with a vengeance, so fierce I couldn’t hold them in. My neck twitched. I squeezed my hands so tight there were fingernail indentations in my palms. They were deep.
“It’s sad,” Rainn said. “She had finally let it go. As much as she could, I guess. But when I talked to her Saturday night, she was so angry.”
“Well, what do you expect?” Jay asked.
“I know. I just hate it when she talks about death. Why are there crazy people like that out there?” Rainn grabbed her lunch bag and stood up. “I can’t eat.”
She left Jay and me sitting there. He moved his food around but didn’t eat. I thought about death. On your own terms is one thing, or even old age, but like that? It made me nauseous. My neck twitched, and a shooting pain traveled down my back. My face scrunched up, which made my cheeks sore. The pain easily rated a seventy.
The people around me stared and pointed.
“Dude, did you stick your finger in an electrical socket?” a muscular kid three seats down asked. His friend twitched and shook, and everyone laughed.
Jay glanced at me, then put his head down. What did I expect? I was just the math tutor. And since our tutoring session was over, I grabbed my lunch bag and fled.
. . . . . . . . . .
I spent the rest of the afternoon trying to think of the right thing to say to Khory, but all I came up with was sorry or things will be better now. Lame. Lame. Lame. I was already established as a non-conversationalist, and if I were
her, I would tell me to mind my own business because I clearly didn’t understand. And I knew all about people not understanding. I’d been wishing for someone to understand me for the past six years. That’s why I had to say something.
As soon as Terri finished her instructions for Jude, dinner, and Dad, I sat on my bed, pulled out my phone, and texted Khory.
ME: Rainn told me about your sister. I’m really sorry.
I pressed the arrow and fell back on my pillow. Done. My neck twitched ten times. I squeezed my hands. The phone vibrated and tickled my palm. I sat up, saw Khory’s name, and pressed the green Accept button.
“Hello?” Why did I answer like a question?
“Hi, Troy. It’s Khory. Thanks for the text. Rainn told me you guys talked during lunch.”
“Yeah. I’m, uh. I don’t know what to say.”
“I don’t know either. It’s so weird,” she said. “I wanted to tell you that’s what the phone call was on Saturday. I didn’t mean to shove you out.”
“It’s okay.”
“I’d still like to get that help in math. Do you want to sit with me at lunch tomorrow?”
“Sure,” I said. Except I wasn’t, because today I’d been humiliated out of the middle section and I doubted she would want to sit at my table in the back corner.
“Great. And thanks for talking to me. See you tomorrow.”
“Yeah. Okay. Bye.”
I had to focus on the fact that she invited me to sit with her at lunch. Again. I smiled and watched the screen fade to black. Lunch tomorrow. The only time I’d get to see her.
We might work on math, but I was sure the main topic of conversation would be the guy. And Khory’s sister. Especially if Jay and Rainn were there. I didn’t want to be left out, so I grabbed my laptop and scoured the internet for stories. I found a bunch of articles, all with the same smiling faces that hung on the wall of her house. Below the pictures were details of what happened.
I knew the basics, but did I really want to know more? The OCD pull was strong. It made me want to read every word. Every noun, adjective, and verb. I was the one person who couldn’t skip extra-long setting descriptions or the word said in novels no matter how hard I tried. And I tried hard.
But once I read the articles, the details would be stuck in my brain forever, making a comeback whenever the time was wrong, because that’s what these disorders did. They tortured me, invaded my thoughts, took over. I fought against my brain and muscles and closed the tab. I didn’t want to look at Khory and see the details. I knew enough to understand part of the shadow that covered her face.
I thought of her loss, and the tingle I felt when I stared at her lips and hair now felt heavy like a brick. Technically, Mom’s disappearance wasn’t permanent, but it was brutal. Her slinking away in the dead of night was like the pain of someone being ripped from you against your will. Like a claw reaching into your chest, pulling your heart out, and tearing it to shreds.
Hardly Qualified said I wasn’t the only kid who lost a parent and that I had to figure out a way to accept that Mom was gone. Well no shit, but that didn’t make it any less painful.
After that session, I had a hard time falling asleep. When I finally did, I fell into a nightmare and the cold, dark lair of a monster. He was big, twenty feet tall, with red-and-brown slime dripping from his mouth. When the slime fell, it formed a sour-smelling pool at my feet. That’s when I realized it was the blood and guts of all the moms who had disappeared.
That nightmare plagued me for years, until I was old enough to know it wasn’t real. At least not for me. I didn’t need to read the details of what happened to Khory’s sister to know the monster in my dreams was her reality.
FEBRUARY 9
Khory marched down the hallway in the fast lane. She was hard to miss even if I hadn’t been searching every corner of the school for her. And today it wasn’t just her hair or smile. There was a fierceness about her. Basically, a “get out of my way, I have places to go.”
I certainly wouldn’t be the one to stop her. My tongue-tied-slow-walking self couldn’t do that on a normal day. I grabbed my lunch bag, books for Pre-Calc and Geography, and started moving in the slow lane toward the cafeteria.
When I stood up after one bend-down, a whiff of coconut lingered around me. I inhaled and my head spun.
“Lunch, right?” Khory asked. “I brought my math notebook.”
I stared at her and thoughts swirled in my brain. The monster from my nightmare. The math tutor. And the kiss.
“Yes.”
I took a breath, focused my attention straight ahead, and started counting. She grabbed my arm and pulled me forward. For a second, I forgot what number I was on.
We hung close to the lockers. She took ten steps with me, waited like last time, until, finally, we were in the cafeteria and on our way to her regular seat.
I longed for the comfort of the back corner, but I had to focus. The list. Math tutor. First kiss. Even without those, I couldn’t say no to her. She was different. No one else moved at my pace and made me forget what number I was on. And she was beautiful.
Jay and Rainn were already at the table. This time, there was no squirming in seats and no head-to-toe inspection. We sat. Rainn, Khory, then me. Jay turned away from me and stared at the table.
Rainn gave Khory the full-body inspection, touched her hair, and rubbed her arm. “You’re looking better than this morning. Have you been doing your breathing? Remember, breathe in, count to ten, and breathe out.” Her arms floated up as she inhaled and floated down as she exhaled.
“Hmph,” I mumbled.
“What?” Rainn asked.
“Nothing. Sorry. I didn’t mean anything.” I dug into my lunch bag and pulled out my sandwich.
“You don’t believe in natural remedies? Well, I don’t believe in medicating every problem away.”
Has she seen me? Did I look like someone who’s medicated everything away? She may not have a name for them, since explaining myself was not my strong point, but there was no way she, or anyone, could miss my tics. My body moved more than a toddler on a sugar overload.
Khory seemed just as interested in my answer. Could I do it now? I should. Knock out number six by telling them about the Tourette?
My neck twitched as I formed the words in my brain: Tourette syndrome. I squeezed my hands together and felt my body heat up. I hated those words, the bizarre behavior they represented, and mostly that they belonged to me.
“Someone told me to do that once,” I said instead. “It didn’t work. At least not for me. Everyone’s different.” I put my head down. Please let this be over.
“It is possible they didn’t teach you right. The breathing, it has to come from the diaphragm. Most people just inhale as far as the lungs,” Rainn explained.
I nodded. I couldn’t remember how HQ said to breathe, but knowing him, it was wrong.
“I’ll be happy to teach you. It really works. Right, Khory?”
“It does. Most of the time,” she said, then sat up straight. “Look, I did a lot of breathing yesterday. And crying and screaming. But that’s done. He’s in jail, so I want to focus on something different for a change.”
There was that look I saw in the hallway. The spark of excitement. Determination.
She leaned forward, hands on the table. “I’ve been thinking about this and decided it’s time to get out in the world. Aren’t there things you’ve always wanted to do? Places you’ve always wanted to visit?”
Now she was talking my language. I was tingling, and it wasn’t tic related for once. Make the most of your time here. Fulfill your dreams.
“I’m going to make a list of all the awesome things we do. I’ll call it Krista’s List. It’ll be like a bucket list in reverse, because this one will keep growing. I owe it to her to make the most of my life. What do you say, guys?”
“I love the idea!” Rainn clapped her hands together.
“Sounds cool,” Jay said. “You have to put the
Vomit Comet on the list.”
Khory, Rainn, and I stared at him. Really? Something named Vomit should be on a to-do list? I’d hate to see him drunk.
“Oh, my gosh. You guys don’t know about it?”
We shook our heads.
“It’s not really called that. It’s Gravity Redefined. There’s a company with a plane that simulates being in space. I guess some people barf, and that’s how it got its nickname.”
Space. Like a real astronaut. My whole body tingled.
“Can anyone do it?” I asked. With my luck there would be an age or disability restriction.
“Yeah, I guess so, but it’s like five thousand dollars,” he said.
My shoulders slumped. Figured it’d be a money thing. Why was everything so damn expensive? No way I’d be able to save that kind of money.
“Well, I don’t know if we can make that happen,” Khory said.
“I know, sucks right?” Jay asked.
He had no idea. Being an astronaut instead of just seeing the space shuttle would have been the ultimate number five. I bit into my sandwich. My hands squeezed and smushed the bread. They watched me. I wiped my hands on a napkin, then nodded, smiled, and did just about everything but stand up and cheer about the list. Hopefully that was enough to fool them into thinking I was excited, too.
“Great! So let’s start with a movie. I haven’t seen one in the theaters in years,” Khory said. “I don’t even know what movies are out.”
“There’s a new Ryan Reynolds movie. I’ve been dying to see it,” Rainn said.
Jay moaned and shook his head. “It’s a love story. Count me out.”
“I’m thinking about getting back together with Diego, so you won’t be the only guy,” Rainn said.
Clearly I wasn’t invited. That’s right, I was just the math tutor. And I should have been okay with not being included, because Tourette and movies don’t mix, but a teeny part of me hoped I was wrong. I put my head down and focused on making my sandwich appear somewhat edible again.
