Questions I Want to Ask You

by Michelle Falkoff

  Dedication

  FOR MY COUSINS

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Part II

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Part III

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Books by Michelle Falkoff

  Back Ad

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Part I

  1

  The fact that my eighteenth birthday, May 22, also happens to be the last day of school for seniors is a total coincidence, not some sort of miracle. But it feels like one to me.

  I have the perfect day all planned out. First up is my usual six thirty a.m. class at Killer CrossFit, despite the temptation to sleep in. The workout of the day will wake me up, and besides, my girlfriend, Maddie, will be there, and seeing her first thing in the morning guarantees a good day. Then school, which isn’t normally something I get all excited about, but the last day is always a joke, and besides, it gives me a chance to meet up with my boys and plan our beach time before prom and graduation over the weekend.

  The best thing of all is that my dad has to work at the station all night. Which means Maddie and me have the house to ourselves. She told her parents her friend Kelsey is having a sleepover, and for once they bought it. She’s coming over to make me dinner, and I can’t wait.

  Best day ever.

  I pick Maddie up on my way to the box. She looks so cute, as always, with her sweet round face and big hazel eyes and her gym clothes. When we first started hanging out, she wore baggy sweats to the gym, but now she has on spandex leggings and a tight tank top with these crazy straps that spider web out from her neck. “I had no idea workout clothes could be so hot,” I say as she gets in the car.

  Maddie frowns and pulls the tank away from her stomach, but then she lets it go and leans in to kiss me. She tastes like a mixture of coffee and toothpaste, which should be gross but I’m used to it by now. Really, she just tastes like Morning Maddie. Delicious.

  “Happy birthday, Pack,” she says. “It’s going to be a good one, right?”

  “It’s going to be epic,” I agree. “I already picked out a movie for tonight, too. Zodiac—it’s all about this serial killer who never got caught and the detectives and reporter who searched for him.”

  She rolls her eyes as I drive. “Please tell me you’re kidding. Save all that true crime crap for when you hang out with your dad.”

  “What? You’ll love it, I swear. It has all the actors you like, too—Jake Gyllenhaal, Robert Downey Jr. . . .” I laugh as she punches me in the arm. “It’s my birthday—don’t I get to pick?”

  “Of course you do, but just remember: choices have consequences. How exactly do you see the rest of the night going, after that movie?” I don’t have to look away from the road to picture the expression on her face, and I know exactly what she means. Which is why she’s totally right that I’ll be watching Zodiac with my dad.

  “Relax,” I say, and pull into the parking lot. “I was just kidding. I got Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist.” It’s an inspired choice, if I do say so myself. Maddie loves indie music (even if I think it’s too whiny) and she loved the book, too. She’s been bugging me to watch the movie with her for ages. I knew it would make her happy, and if she’s happy, I’m happy.

  Maddie bounces up and down in her seat before getting out of the car to give me a hug. “Perfect choice, Pack. Nicely done.”

  “I aim to please.” The day is off to a good start.

  It gets even better when I see that Jeff, my favorite trainer, is running the show at the box this morning. He does the best job explaining the proper form for all the exercises and plays the best music—all Kanye and Sia and the Weeknd, a mix of dance and rap—as long as no one complains. Since so many of the people at the gym are older, like my dad and his cop buddies, lots of the trainers pick music just for them: stadium rock from the seventies, hair bands from the eighties. If I never hear Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar on Me” again, I can die happy.

  Today’s class is small—me and Maddie and some of the younger people—so Jeff can play whatever he wants. Right now he’s cranking Missy Elliott’s “WTF” and it has me totally amped. I beat my personal record for the clean by five pounds, which I’ve been trying to do for weeks. Maddie’s having a great workout too—she’s finally figured out how to do double-unders. Even when the clock buzzes to tell us the WOD is over, she keeps going, the thin black rope swishing under her feet twice for every time she jumps up. She only stops when she’s completely out of breath.

  “I can’t believe I did it!” she yells, throwing her arms around me. We’re both tomato-faced, dripping with sweat, but we don’t care. Usually Maddie can get self-conscious—she says she feels like a special kind of ugly at the gym, but she’s so wrong about that. The look on her face when she does something she didn’t think she could do is pretty much my favorite thing. She has that look now, smiling so wide I worry her cheeks will pop from the strain, and pieces of her hair are starting to come out of her ponytail and curl up around her temples. I wish I could stick a mirror in front of her face and make her see what I see. But I know that isn’t how it works.

  Maddie’s changed a lot since the first time I saw her. We both have. She lives on the other side of town from me, and we met in middle school. I thought she was pretty even back then, when her sweet round face was even rounder than it is now. I was a miserable fat kid, teased my whole life, though having a dad who’s a cop helped keep the teasing from escalating into bullying. Mostly it was just nicknames. “Padded Paddy” was the first and mildest one, and they only got worse as I got older and kids got more (and less) creative. Patrick the Pastry. Pudding Paddy. Icky Sticky Ricky. Or, my favorite, You Fat Piece of Shit.

  I mostly kept to myself, crushing on Maddie from across our homeroom. I was afraid to talk to her, afraid she’d use one of the nicknames and break my thirteen-year-old heart. I still remember her hiding in a corner at Mike Goldschmidt’s bar mitzvah party, picking at the front of her dress the same way she picks at her tank top now, and I tried so hard to make myself ask her to dance. But the thought of her saying no scared me even more than the thought of asking her in the first place, so I didn’t do it.

  I wanted to be someone who could, though. That’s what finally made me go talk to Dad about my weight. He always told me not to worry, that the pounds would come off when I hit puberty, but even though I shot up a few inches and sprouted hair all over the place, nothing else changed. I kept growing, and my confidence kept shrinking. I needed something to change. I wanted to go to high school a new person.

  Dad said he would do whatever he could to help. We went through the kitchen and tossed all the take-out menus and the junk food and went shopping for cookbooks so we could learn how to eat better. We tried what felt like a million different kinds of exercise: tae kwon do, boxing, that Couch to 5K podcast with the awful techno music in the background.
I hated everything. Martial arts were cool but super boring in the beginning, and fourteen-year-old me wasn’t patient enough to ride it out. Boxing was wicked painful, even with all the extra padding. And running just sucked.

  When my dad’s best friend, Tom O’Connor, a fellow cop he’s known since high school, suggested CrossFit, I thought he was kidding. I hadn’t made it through the sixty-seconds-jogging-ninety-seconds-walking segment of the Couch to 5K plan; there was no way I’d be able to do even half a minute of whatever they did at his crazy gym. But all my dad’s cop friends were super into it, and they convinced him we should give it a shot. “Come to our class,” they said. “We’ll help you get through it,” they said. “You’ll love it,” they said.

  Sure I would.

  The first class was like every nightmare I’d ever had come to life. A class full of people watched me fall on my ass every time I tried to do a burpee. But they weren’t all as super fit as I was expecting, which helped, and Dad sucked at it too, which also helped. Besides, I wasn’t going to quit in front of my dad’s friends, who were nothing but encouraging. Everyone was, and the trainers gave me lots of extra attention because I was the youngest person there.

  “What do you think, bud?” Dad asked. “Should we try it again? Can you wake up that early tomorrow morning?”

  “I guess,” I told him. I hated it slightly less than running, anyway.

  Going into freshman year I had some solid muscle underneath the padding. It had been a rough couple of years learning what my body was capable of and what it wasn’t—I did my first unassisted pull-up, but the two-foot-high box jumps were never going to happen. I fell in love with doing Olympic lifts, and I was starting to feel good about myself. The teasing didn’t stop right away—after the kids found out I was doing CrossFit, they started calling me Six-Pack Paddy in a way that was wholly ironic—but the tone was good-natured. Mike Goldschmidt even asked me about the workouts and came with me a couple of times. He didn’t stick with it, but we did start hanging out a little. And Six-Pack Paddy morphed into Pack, which wasn’t the worst nickname.

  Better than You Fat Piece of Shit, anyway.

  But I knew things were really starting to change the day Maddie overheard me talking about the box at lunch. She wasn’t in my homeroom anymore, but I’d see her walking the halls, and we’d wave and say hi even though we’d never had an actual conversation. We were in the cafeteria; Mike and the guys were eating tacos in blinding yellow shells that even I, as an Irish-American kid just a few generations removed from the potato farms, could recognize as completely not authentic. Sean Kaczynski was giving me shit for bringing my own salad, but I didn’t care. He had no idea how much better it tasted than the crap he was eating.

  Maddie caught my eye during Sean’s rant about how green food was for suckers, and after lunch she caught up with me at the bubbler, where I was rinsing salad dressing out of my Tupperware. “Hey, um, Pack, right?”

  The sound of her voice surprised me, and I turned toward her, which somehow made me lean harder on the silver button than I meant to. The water rose up so high it overshot the Tupperware and splashed on Maddie’s sweater. “Oh, crap, I’m sorry!” I couldn’t believe Maddie was right here talking to me and I’d screwed things up before I even had a chance to say a word.

  I was afraid she’d get angry and walk away, but instead she just laughed and shook her arm. Drops of water flew off her sleeve and one landed right in my eye, making me blink. “Now we’re even,” she said, and the hesitation was gone from her voice. Had she been nervous about coming to find me?

  I rubbed my eye, happy to sacrifice a moment or two of being able to see for a chance to talk to Maddie. “What’s up?”

  “So I was wondering—I mean, I don’t want it to sound wrong, but—it’s just I don’t know if you remember, but we were in the same homeroom—”

  “In middle school,” I said. I had no idea what she wanted to ask me, but I liked that she’d noticed me then. “I remember.”

  “And, well—you look—you look different. In a good way, I mean.” She was blushing now, and looking down at the linoleum floor. “I knew that wouldn’t come out right. I just—”

  If I knew where she was going with this, I could help her out, but I had no idea. All I could do was wait.

  “What did you do?” she asked. “I mean, how? It must have been so hard.”

  That wasn’t what I was expecting. Everyone at the gym had been really nice about the changes I’d made to my body, but the only acknowledgment I got at school was the new nickname, even if it did come with some grudging respect. “It was,” I said. “I worked really hard. Still do. And I changed how I ate. Like, a lot.”

  “Do you mind telling me where you go, what you do? I don’t mean to be nosy. I just need to do something, and I don’t have anyone to talk to about it. All my friends are naturally skinny, and my mother—” She stopped, not hesitating this time but clearly not wanting to say anything more.

  “Of course I don’t mind.” I told her about Killer CrossFit, how it started out feeling impossible but turned into something fun, something I loved. She was nodding and into it and I finally gathered up the nerve to just say it. “Do you want to come with me sometime?”

  That was the beginning of me and Maddie. We didn’t get together right away; first we were just gym buddies, meeting at the six thirty a.m. class, talking a little bit when it was over. She came every day. She was miserable at first; she didn’t know how to do anything, and she’d wear these enormous T-shirts and sweatpants and big heavy sneakers that were all wrong, and her shirt would flap around when she tried to do burpees and she’d get all embarrassed. And lifting was a joke—she could barely handle the forty-five-pound bar, let alone put any weights on it, and her form was terrible.

  Still, she came. She came to class and did as much as she could, even though it took her forever to finish the timed workouts and even longer to realize that people were sincere in cheering when she made it through. She came for open gym every Sunday, when there was no official daily workout, and worked on her lifting technique. She did extra mobility exercises in addition to the regular WOD even though she was so stiff she could barely squat.

  She was amazing. And she didn’t even know it. But I did.

  After Maddie finishes high-fiving everyone in class in triumph for conquering the double-under, we split up and head to our separate locker rooms to shower. It’s a close shave getting to school on time, but we manage it almost every day; it’s better than going to the five a.m. class, that’s for sure. Besides, we aren’t going to get in a whole lot of trouble for being late on the last day of school.

  We get ready in record time and meet at my car, a Ford Explorer Dad got me for my sixteenth birthday, two years ago. The air is spring cool, but we’re still red-faced and a little steamy from the workout, so we open our windows and let the wind bring our body temperatures and heart rates back to something resembling normal. Maddie’s still pumped and chatters away as we pass the mall, the gas station, and Vincenzo’s Sub Shop, a place I used to love before I gave up carbs and adopted the Paleo diet at the recommendation of one of my trainers at the gym. (They have pretty good Greek salads, though. Even without the feta.)

  “I’ve been working on those forever!” Maddie yells over the sound of the wind and the cranked-up radio. Despite the fact that it’s my birthday I let her pick out the music, and Lorde shouts about waiting for a green light. “I didn’t think it would happen! I feel like I can do anything!”

  “You can do anything!” I yell back. I park in the Brooksby High student lot and we head toward the front door. “What’s the next goal?”

  No hesitation. “Pull-ups. Real ones. No bands.” The box has these elastic bands you can tie to the pull-up bar, and you put your foot in to get extra help. They’re all different colors according to how much help you need. Maddie started with the black band, the thickest one, and she’s worked her way through green and blue. Now she’s on red; she just
needs to master orange and then she’s ready to go on her own.

  “And the plan?”

  Maddie waves at some people as we walk down the hall toward our lockers. She’s more social than me, though that’s not saying a whole lot; we both spend more time with each other than we do with other people. I chill out with Mike and those guys once in a while, and Maddie has Kelsey and the girls, but it’s almost like we have to make ourselves hang with them so we’re not spending 100 percent of our time together. I’d be fine if we did, but Dad always makes a big thing about not making all of high school about one person. He likes Maddie a lot; he just worries about me, I guess.

  We go to my locker first, which is really our locker—hers is on the other side of the building, so she keeps most of her stuff in mine. There’s a pink Post-it note stuck on the outside. I pull it off as Maddie rattles off her schedule. “Two more weeks with the red band, then—” She sees me reading and stops. “What is it?”

  “I don’t know. Just says to stop by the main office when I have a break.”

  “Have you been misbehaving?” She raises an eyebrow at me, one of her Maddie tricks.

  “Me, misbehave? Never.” But the note makes me worry. “Maybe I was wrong about not being below a B in one of my classes.” If I am wrong, then this isn’t my last day of school—seniors have to keep up a B average to skip finals. I’m not a dumbass, but school isn’t really my thing, and maybe I cut it too close. But wouldn’t one of my teachers have said something?

  “Let me know when you find out,” she says. “Meet you in the parking lot after school?”

  “As always.” I drive her home from school every day, too. Not that she doesn’t have her own car, but sharing the ride with her is more fun. And her house is usually empty in the afternoons, which means we can sometimes fool around a little before everyone gets home.

  One quick kiss and we go our separate ways to class. Maddie’s in all the classes for the college-bound kids; I’m in Level 2s and 3s, for kids who just need to get by. I’m not sure yet what I’m doing next fall, but I have some ideas and all summer to figure it out. Often I space out during class and imagine my options—I’m thinking something with fitness, maybe a trainer or a nutritionist or something like that—but today all I can think about is that Post-it. I’ve never gotten a note like that before; I don’t think I’ve set foot in the principal’s office all four years of high school.