by R. K. Ryals
Suddenly, I sit up, bringing the phone with me, my hard gaze boring into the camera. “So, is it wrong that I sometimes wonder why she forgot about me? Because she still has me. I’m alive, and I’d do anything for her.” I pause, struggling. “Is it?”
Press stop.
Send.
Go back to staring at the fan.
SEVENTEEN
The real world
#friendsforever
Knock, knock.
The door creaks.
I stir, my phone digging into my cheek.
“The auntie called me. Said you were having a miserable morning, so I’ve got everything from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to Annabelle.”
Gracie steps into the room, her frizzy blonde hair crying over the loss of its weekday flat-iron, her blinking eyes lined in thick blue liner, a veritable Cleopatra Smurfette. She holds up a stack of DVDs, then fans them out.
I wipe my mouth, check my phone’s speaker for drool. “Because people dying is less depressing?”
“Would you rather watch sappy movies with happy endings? Because what do you gain from that? Other than a cavity and a new reason to be miserable? With these,” waves the movie fan, “you gain a whole new appreciation for life.”
“No cannibals,” I say firmly, pointing at Annabelle.
We clatter downstairs, the blue pullover Gracie wears yelling #bluebrilliance at me from her back in bold, iron-on print. Way more presentable than my Boss pajama bottoms and I blame it on my bedhead T-shirt.
Aunt Trish leans against the bar flipping through a stack of mail when we enter the kitchen, and she looks up, her gaze meeting mine, nodding ever-so-slightly in Gracie’s direction.
I smile.
Relief relaxes her features.
Gracie sets the movies on the bar. I slide them over.
“You couldn’t show up with something a little less gory?” Aunt Trish asks, eyeing the DVDs.
Gracie pulls open the refrigerator, peeks inside, closes it, and moves to the cupboard. “I will never understand watching happy people meet and sleep with happy people.” She throws a look at the movie stack on the bar. “That stuff is real.”
“Real?” Aunt Trish glances at me, mouths, “Hide the knives.”
Uncle Bobby stomps through the backdoor, a hammer, a pack of nails, and a thick roll of Christmas lights in his arms. “You really want this done today?” he asks Trish.
“They don’t have to be turned on,” she points out. “You know how I feel about getting stuff up early.”
Uncle Bobby scowls, stops at the bar, glances at the movies. Touches three of them. “Friday the 13th.” He grins. “Camp and boobs.”
“Out!” Trish orders.
“See?” Gracie joins me, nibbling a blueberry pop tart. “Fine cinema that celebrates the female form.”
“Teenage boys have been ‘celebrating’ with those movies for years,” Uncle Bobby deadpans.
Trish smacks him with the DVD case.
Gracie and I hurry to the living room.
“Talk to me.” Gracie pops Annabelle into the player, turns to me, and waits.
“About?”
“Everything.”
I crack, like an egg, all of the emotional gooey bits leaking out of me. I tell her about Mom, about her increasing delusions, and the way she’d broken down that morning.
“Do you think she’ll be better off institutionalized?” I whisper.
Leaning close, Gracie touches my arm. “Your mom needs the help.” No sympathy, just honesty.
My back hits the couch, the leather crackling. “I can’t wrap my head around any of it.” There are a lot of things I’ve left unsaid—stuff about Matthew, and the guilt I feel over liking him when Mom’s leaving.
Gracie reads me well. “And?”
“And what?”
“You know what?”
I glance at her. “He’s contagious, and I’m definitely catching what he has.”
“Oh, God! Reagan!” Gracie throws her hands up. “Matthew Moretti. We talked about this.”
The movie plays, but we don’t watch it.
“You don’t know him,” I say.
“And you do?”
“Here, I’ll show you.” Leaving her, I run upstairs, grab the letters I’d gotten from Matthew, and bring them to her.
She reads them. Glances at me. Rereads them. “Whatever.” She hands them back. “My opinion hasn’t changed.”
I stare, thrown off by her cold detachment. “That’s not like you.”
She shrugs, avoiding eye contact. “I just think you have enough going on right now without worrying about Matthew Moretti.”
“I’m not dating him.”
“But you’ve thought about sex with him, right?”
“What? Where did that come from?”
“What’s the big deal? It’s sex. We all think about sex. It would be completely abnormal if you didn’t think about doing it with him.” She touches the letters. “Especially after those.”
We grow quiet, and I glance at her. “Have you done it?”
She shrugs again, still not looking at me. “Kind of.”
“Kind of? How do you kind of have sex?”
“When you kind of don’t finish.”
Stunned, I sit up and stare. Even though Gracie and I aren’t so much best friends as outcasts sticking together for survival, I thought I knew everything about her. Apparently not.
“It’s not a big deal,” she says.
“Who was it?”
“Kevin House, sophomore year. Did the whole party thing—which is totally overrated—got drunk, went to his car, started making out, tried … other stuff, and then when he got the condom on, I just couldn’t do it.”
I’m speechless, thrown off by the fact that she almost, kind of did it with Kevin. Kevin? “Nothing wrong with that.”
She looks at me, eye-to-eye. “Come on, Rae, you know the real reason why I couldn’t.”
My back sinks into the couch. I grab one of Aunt Trish’s throw pillows and hug it. I do know why. Why is the reason her doing anything with Kevin shocks me. Why is the reason I forgave her so easily after our argument at school. Why is the reason she covets Ruby Rose. “You know I’m not—”
“I know.”
Because of everything with Mom and all the confusion I feel over Matthew—the conversations, the letters, and the videos—I know I’ve been a terrible friend. Truth is, Gracie and I use each other. She needs someone to help her quit hiding, and I want a real friend, not someone to hide behind. I’m tired of surviving.
I’ve known for a long time that Gracie is gay, but because we’ve always had this safe relationship where we talk about some things and not about others, we just never broached the subject. We need to change that.
We’re going to need each other. Hashtag for real. “If I was into girls, I’d totally be into,” I snapshot her face with my fingers, “all that hotness.”
“Reagan!” she hisses, glancing at the kitchen.
“’Fess up, Gracie Edgewood! What’s the best boob shot in the stack of movies you brought?”
She laughs, flushes, and says, “Friday the 13th part III. Debbie. Personal opinion only.”
I grin. “And there we have it. Just so you know, I’m pretty sure Aunt Trish and Uncle Bobby already suspect you play on the same team. You don’t have to hide it.”
She points at me, and then points at herself. “So, no chance …”
I lift the letters. “Trust me, I wish my heart would change its mind. Besides you don’t lust after me. You just feel safe with me.” I study her. “You know you’re my best friend, right? Or that I want you to be. For real.”
“Yeah. You’re mine, too, Rae.” Sitting back, Gracie rests her head on my shoulder and fingers the paper in my lap. “You want my two cents?” Lifting her chin, she meets my gaze. “Not that I don’t think what Matthew wrote about Kagen is true, because I do think Kagen crushes on you. Or did. But get real. This is high school. Ka
gen isn’t going to do shit. He’s got a reputation to maintain, and Vanessa is part of that reputation. Matthew’s totally smoke screening you.”
Pushing away, Gracie faces me. “Matthew Moretti has a lot on the line this year. He needs that basketball scholarship. Everyone knows it. Especially if he wants to get picked up for the pros one day. So,” she shrugs, “he talked to you for his grandmother, did his good boy deed, realized he liked what he saw, and now he’s running scared from anything that looks like commitment. Whoosh!” Her fingers explode outward. “Smoke screen.”
“I know.” Gracie stares, and I shrug. “Recluse or no, I know when someone is pushing. Kagen is a word he uses, not a person.”
Gracie pokes me in the arm. “He is a person.”
“You know what I mean!”
“I get it.” She smiles. “I’m totally into your strange way of explaining things.”
We watch the movie. It feels good to have someone who gets my brand of weirdness.
“Hashtag cute doll.” Grinning, Gracie points at the television.
“Hashtag scary ass doll.”
“Trying too hard.”
“Hashtag burn doll?”
“Doesn’t work.”
Glancing at the screen, at the scene playing, I shudder. “Hashtag burn them all!”
She laughs. “Totally works, even with three words.”
EIGHTEEN
The real world
The videos
SUNDAY BRINGS SUNSHINE, doughnuts, and a video message.
The message waits on my phone when I wake up, having been sent at six o’clock in the morning.
I click on the attachment, wait for it to load, press play.
Matthew appears on the screen, and I can see all of him, which means he isn’t holding his phone.
He sits on the edge of his bed, a button-up shirt splayed open over his naked torso. I stare unabashed because he can’t see me doing it. The skin on his chest is as tan as the rest of him. No chest hair. Not too lean. Not too broad. Smooth and fluid.
Glancing at the screen, he leans down and laces a nice, clean pair of tennis shoes. “My ‘out’ shoes,” he explains. “I only pull these out for special occasions, so they actually look half decent. I’m driving up to LSU to see my brother, Dominic. He knows some of the guys on the basketball team, and I’m having lunch with them later.”
Finished lacing the shoes, he rests his elbows on his knees. “I’ll be honest, after all of the emotional shit I spouted in my first video, I wasn’t sure you’d send another. So, I’m pleasantly surprised.”
Stooping, he snatches a book off of the floor. “They keep getting more real, too, like you’ve forgotten you’re talking to a camera. Which is,” he swallows, “a lot more open than I’d thought you’d be able to get with this.”
He fiddles with the book in his hands, running his fingers over the spine and thumbing through the pages. “You were finally able to say it, huh? The whole leaving thing. I knew about it. The stuff that Nonna told me, but …” His head falls, rises again. “I can’t even begin to imagine. The thought of waking up one morning and my mother being gone …”
He can’t finish, and I feel myself choking up.
“I sat here forever trying to decide what I should say. After your story,” he shakes his head, his hair falling over his forehead, “I just couldn’t think of anything that sounded right. It all seemed wrong. So, I’m going to do something … anyway, if you don’t know already from the way I quoted it before, my favorite book of all time is The Outsiders. So, I’m going to read something to you from it because it made sense to me.”
Opening the book in his hands, he pulls a bookmark out, glances up at me, and then clears his throat. “I had it then. Soda fought for fun, Steve for hatred, Darry for pride, and Two-Bit for conformity. Why do I fight? I thought, and couldn’t think of any real good reason. There isn’t any real good reason for fighting, except self-defense.”
He finishes, clears his throat again, and then looks at me. “I’m not real sure why that passage feels right. Maybe it’s because I think you’re fighting, too. Fighting this thing that’s coming—how your mom is leaving—and it’s a good fight because you’re trying to protect yourself from what’s happening. Just don’t let it stop you from seeing the bigger picture.”
He grips the book until his knuckles turn white. “Tell anyone this and, well, I know where you live.” Laughing shortly, he says, “I’m a lot like Ponyboy, which is why I think I relate to that book so much. I like books and sunsets. I see things, and I appreciate the way they are, you know? Like a basketball. It’s just a ball, but if you take away the way it sounds, it’s so much more. When I’m on the court, I see the ball in slow motion, the way it hits the floor, bounces, passes from hand to hand, and sinks into the net. I wonder what it would be like to be the ball, to be all over the place all at once, to be passed around while trying its best to make it to the goal.”
Smiling softly, he peers at me through shuttered eyes. “There went the rest of my man card, but I have a sneaking suspicion, you’ll take good care of it, so I’m not worried.”
Standing, he walks toward his phone. “I’m out of time, but …” He goes out of frame, leaving me staring at his stomach. The phone moves, and I get a blurred view of his room before I see his face again. “For what it’s worth, I don’t think you’re wrong to be angry.” Smiling, he adds, “A bit of advice: Let go more often. You bypass beautiful, rocketing straight into phenomenal when you do. Sad is sad. Happy is happy. When you just let yourself be you, any emotion at all, and you own it, you seriously come alive.” He winks. “Keep it real.”
The phone goes dark.
THE SUN IS high when I stop outside my mother’s bedroom door. I reach for the knob, drop my hand, reach for it again, and then I leave it, marching down the stairs, through the kitchen, and into the backyard before suddenly exhaling.
“Come on, Reagan!” I berate myself.
Something pounds the pavement, and I glance up to find Matthew’s brother, Christopher, standing outside the Moretti house, a basketball in his hands. He dribbles it, pauses, studies the net, dribbles again, and then throws. The ball sails through the air, rides the rim, and then sinks into the hoop, the white net swaying.
Matthew’s confession replays in my head, and I jog over. “Is this a private game?”
Christopher pauses, ball in hand, and assesses me. “You any good?”
“Nope.”
He throws me the ball. “Then, yeah, let’s play. Horse. One-on-one might be a little much for you.”
Gripping the ball, I step in front of the net, crouch, and then granny throw it up. I actually make the shot.
Fist pump.
“Are you kidding me?” Christopher asks.
I blow hair off of my face. “That was lucky. I really am a crappy player.”
“It’s probably the way you throw,” he says, laughing. “I haven’t seen the granny throw since elementary school.”
“I’m short.”
“That’s no excuse.” He comes up behind me and drops the ball over my head. “Hold it.”
I take it, and he holds it with me. “This is sad, right?” I ask. “That you’re a freshman and already taller than me.”
“Runs in the family.” He lifts our hands, the ball with it. “If you keep this hand here,” he presses hard on my right hand, “and this one here,” presses hard on the left, “then you’ll get more momentum and spin out of it. Better distance.”
Together, we throw.
Nothing except net.
“What, what!” I cheer. “Again!”
He backs away, retrieves the ball, and then passes it to me.
I stand, legs slightly apart, gripping the ball the way he showed me.
Christopher bends, placing his hands on his knees, watching. “Take your time.”
A car roars down the street. Quiets. A car door slams.
I throw. It sails through the air, rims the hoop, and
then falls to the side, dropping to the grass.
I pout. “Really?”
He laughs. “You did it right, and it looked good. It just takes practice to get it to go in.”
