by Avery Sawyer
I succeeded on both accounts, but just barely.
Emily’s group rounded the field then and she spotted me. She was jogging at a slow, steady pace, but she stopped and sat down next to me.
“You should keep going,” I said, hiccupping. “Mr. P. is going to have a conniption fit if he sees us out here. He’ll make you start over.”
“Whatever. You okay? I saw you take off after Josh like a racecar driver. Admirable. Did you ask him out?”
“Are you kidding me? I made a total and complete fool of myself. Before we started, I told him I loved to run, and then I couldn’t even keep up with him. Look. He’s running with Tarie now. Her legs are like a mile long.”
“So? I bet he doesn’t even notice. He’s just a faster runner than you are, no biggie. At least you got to talk. Tomorrow you can tell him you have asthma.”
“But I don’t have asthma.”
“Oh yeah. Well, tomorrow you can tell him you think anything athletic is a waste of time, and as a result you have the lung capacity of a small Chihuahua.” Emily crossed her eyes at me, and I giggled.
“Seriously, my side aches so bad I’m pretty sure I’m trying to pass a kidney stone.”
“Drama, drama. Let’s go.”
“Noooooooo. Don’t make me!” I grabbed onto the side of the bleachers like they were a giant life raft.
“Come on, lady. I’m not letting you fail gym.” She pulled on my arm and I was forced to stand up. “Jay-sus.”
“I hate you.”
“I know.”
We finished the mile run in just under ten minutes. Josh’s time? Five minutes, twenty-two seconds. He started going out with Tarie Calderon that weekend.
Note to self: I hate running.
CHAPTER 32
CAN I GET A RE-DO?
“You’re actually pretty good at this,” I said to Reno. He had made nine baskets in a row. I noticed his legs weren’t as skinny as they used to be and his biceps were kind of impressive.
When did Reno get hot?
“Have you been lifting weights?” I asked.
“Are you messing with me?” He was slightly out of breath, but he sunk his tenth shot. He was sweaty, but when I walked up to him to pass him the rebound, he smelled sort of…nice. As in, not bad.
“No! No, I’m not messing with you.”
“Well then, yeah. I am lifting weights. There’s a workout room at school and sometimes I go in there late, when I know the football players are gone. It feels good. You should try it.”
“No thanks. But, um, that’s cool.” I watched him dribble and wished I had something to sit on. I realized I could just sit on the ground, so that’s what I did.
“Yeah. Yeah, it is. I never thought I could be that guy, you know. But maybe I am. I’m going to try out for the team. And I’m going to ask Theresa if she wants to hang out.” When he smiled, I noticed a tiny dimple on the side of his chin I’d never seen before.
“Great.” I zoned out while Reno kept dribbling and shooting. I thought about whether he’d be popular when he made the basketball team. He’d probably start loving school and forget all about me. It reminded me of the first time I realized how much I relied on Reno. When he started middle school, I still had a year left in elementary school. It started out fine, but took a bad turn.
I remember fidgeting in an uncomfortable chair, in an office with a bunch of colorful posters on the wall. Picking at the skin around my thumb nail. Someone I didn’t like was asking me questions.
“Robin, your teachers are concerned. It’s March, and you haven’t turned in any work since January. Mrs. Kettering says you scored at least 95% on all tests and quizzes before winter break, now you’re scoring below 60%. She says you aren’t even bothering to fill in answers.”
The woman looked at me expectantly. I kept staring down at my hands. Hands were so amazing, when you thought about it. So complicated, all the things they could do. Or not do.
“Well?”
“I don’t know,” I finally replied. I just wanted to get out of there. School seemed so completely pointless. I had no friends, and the homework was stupidly simple.
“Do you have something better to do than your school work?” she asked.
I lifted my head up an inch or two, made eye contact with her, and quickly looked back down.
She sighed. “It says here your parents recently separated and that you live with your mother. What is she like?”
I didn’t say anything, just kept picking at my fingernails. I was wearing dark red polish and peeling it off was satisfying. It looked kind of gruesome.
“Do you think it would be a good idea to ask her to join us here today?”
I snorted the tiniest bit.
“I’ll take that as a no,” the lady said. Ms. Mendoza, I think she said her name was. I was annoyed with myself for making any noise at all. “The rest of your classmates are going to graduate fifth grade in the spring, Robin, and enter middle school in the fall. All of your teachers would really like you to join them, but, like I said, they’re concerned.
“Your test scores are very high. There is no reason for you not to be a straight-A student. You were a straight-A student.” She looked at my face like it was a computer screen flashing an error message. Like she could press the right combination of keys and get me humming again. Wrong.
I deciding this was getting boring, so I opened my mouth. “Why? Why bother?”
“Well, you’d avoid failing fifth grade, for one.” She paused, waiting for me to say something. “Tell me why you’ve decided not to do your work, Robin. Did something happen?”
I looked at her for several long moments. There was zero reason to trust this person, with her curly black hair and long eyelashes. She looked like she had definitely gotten good grades all through school. She probably thought that grades were, like, the meaning of life. Her clothes were new and she leaned forward a little bit, like she couldn’t wait to see what the next words out of my mouth would be. All those straight-A’s, and here she was, stuck in a room with an eleven-year-old with ghoulishly streaked fingernails.
“What’s so funny?”
“Nothing.”
“Let’s just say for a minute that I send you back to class, you continue to stare off into space or whatever it is you’ve been doing in there, and you fail fifth grade. Then what? What do you think happens then?”
“I don’t know.” There wasn’t any more polish left on my fingernails. I looked down at the little flecks of it stuck to the carpet. I wondered if the janitor would notice.
“I will tell you. You’ll have to complete summer school classes so you can join your classmates in the fall. Is that something you’d enjoy?” She sat back in her seat.
I thought about the small apartment I shared with Mom. How it didn’t have air conditioning, not even a crappy window unit, because ours was broken and she’d never gotten it fixed. How she cried a lot since Dad stopped calling from the road. How I didn’t cry at all, ever. How I saw things other people didn’t see, like the way adults always pretended they had things under control or knew exactly what they were doing when they really didn’t.
Summer school didn’t seem so bad. Ms. Mendoza’s tactics weren’t having the effect she intended.
“Maybe,” I said.
This surprised her. “You’d enjoy summer school? Really?”
I refused to answer her. Even though I wanted someone to fix what was wrong with my family (and our air conditioner), this curly-haired lady wasn’t going to be that someone. She turned away from me to shuffle through some papers on her desk. She found what she was looking for and turned back, handing me something. It was a brochure. On the cover was a picture of some kids looking at a tidal pool, with a bunch of rocks behind them. One of the kids had a glass test tube.
“This is a six-week program called Summer Science Institute, for gifted and talented students interested in biology,” she explained. I rolled my eyes.
I made a noise that
was something like, “So?” But I opened the brochure. The program took place at the University of Miami. For part of the six weeks, kids got to collect specimens near the ocean. It looked like the camp was mostly about marine biology. There were more pictures inside. Students were on boats and looking at computer screens. I swallowed. Ms. Mendoza noticed. I was starting to really dislike her.
“There is no cost to participate in this Institute,” she said. “One hundred students are selected from around the state of Florida each summer. Room and board are provided, as well as books and supplies. Based on your test scores, I think you’d be an excellent fit. When you write your essay, you could mention winning the school-wide geography bee last year. That was very impressive.”
“What essay?”
“Those who want to get in—it’s very competitive, Robin—have to write a three-page essay about why they’d like to participate.”
“No way,” I said. “Besides, I couldn’t leave my mom alone for that long.”
“Why’s that?” Ms. Mendoza narrowed her eyes.
“She’d miss me,” I said lamely. My mom and I, we were two. Two only. One of us couldn’t leave. You couldn’t get by with just one.
“I bet she’d be very proud,” Ms. Mendoza countered. “It’s an amazing opportunity. A much better fit for you, I think, than summer school here.”
She didn’t have to say it, but I heard it in her tone. You don’t belong here. Just because I was good at taking multiple choice tests, teachers got all excited. What if I was just as dumb as everyone else, really? Why was this lady so convinced I wasn’t a loser? I wasn’t convinced.
“Of course, none of this is an option until you make up all the work you’ve missed.” She turned away from me again. This time, she grabbed a folder from her desk. It was huge, bulging with papers. “This is a collection of assignments and work sheets. I collected them from all of your teachers. You have three weeks to finish it all. After that, there’s another week before the essay deadline. I’d be happy to read your draft before we send it in. What do you say?”
I glared at her. I was supremely pissed off that she’d collected all of my missed assignments. What right did she have to butt into my life and then sit there looking all pleased with herself, like some sort of demented Cheshire Cat?
“I’ll think about it,” I said.
I hadn’t gone to that camp. I knew that. But instead of the memory feeling like a little detail from my life that didn’t matter, thinking about that talk with Ms. Mendoza made me want to bawl. I wanted to go to Science Camp and now it was too late. It had been a long time since I really cared about anything like that, and now I did. I wanted to go back in time.
And I wanted Reno to like me again. But it was too late.
I wished my eyes had little WATER OFF switches. I was going to have to put Vaseline on them, they were so red and puffy and sore from all my tears.
CHAPTER 33
ROAD TRIP
I returned to school and sat by myself at lunch. Obviously. I had packed my own lunch the night before night but forgotten to check it before I left the house. When I opened my bag (brown paper, plain—anything else was a crime in my school), I saw a sandwich (whew), an apple (not bad), and Mom’s calculator (what?). At least two out of the three were edible. I pulled my sandwich out and opened my mouth. I realized it was still in its Ziploc a moment too late. I don’t recommend biting into a Ziploc bag. Someone will notice.
“You have to take the sandwich out of the bag first, Short Bus!”
The sad thing is, I responded to this. I actually turned around in my chair and tried to figure out who was calling to me. Josie Palomino grinned at me and nodded. “How do you like that?” she asked me with her eyes.
Not a whole lot, Josie. Thanks. For the first time, I thought about faking, about pretending my injuries were worse than they actually were so I could stop going to school completely. Could I convince Dr. Kline? I thought I could, and probably pretty easily, but the more important question was whether I’d be able to live with myself if I did.
I had to stay here. I had to absorb all of this. Everyone missed Emily; they all felt it just like I did, but they didn’t cry or share memories with each other like you would if a person had died. She was in limbo and so was everyone else, waiting for her to come back, or not.
Allison Miers caught my eye then, and I saw something in her face I hadn’t seen in anyone else’s since I’d been back: gratitude. She was the one they used to pick on. And now she got a break, because I was so much more interesting. I nodded at her and felt the tiniest bit better. My existence was making life better for one other person, even if it was just Ally Miers, who didn’t wash her hair and couldn’t talk to you without asking nine questions. Maybe it was only fair to take a turn in front of the firing range.
I thought about how my mom was always saying that the world would be a better place if everyone had to be a waitress at least once in their lives. How everyone would learn really quickly that it’s nearly impossible to have an entire night go well, because the kitchen always slowed down or made a mistake and the tables had only their waiter to blame. Some customers didn’t tip, or they said mean things, even when the screw-up or the extra wait had nothing to do with the person who took their order. Mom believes that if everyone did her job, even for a few weeks, they’d never be cruel or impatient to a waiter again because they’d understand how tough it could be.
Right now, I’m the waitress. The kitchen has made a massive mistake, and every table in here hates me. The only way I can fix this is to fix Emily.
That afternoon, I had to do something. Something my mother would never approve of and something I couldn’t do on my own. I had to find my dad. My mom claimed she couldn’t reach him, that his cell phone number was disconnected, but I knew he wasn’t that far. The last communication I’d had from him was a postcard from a restaurant less than two hours away in New Smyrna, a beach on the Atlantic coast just east and north of Kissimmee. He was working there, saving some money until a new “opportunity” came up.
The postcard showed a picture of a bar with a swimming pool on its deck, and it said WELCOME TO PARADISE. If paradise was only ninety miles away, I had to go, right?
My mom was at work, so I left her a note designed to not give her heart failure. I knew the only thing she worried about more than my head was my future, so I told her I’d be at Reno’s all night preparing an entry for a state-wide computer science competition. She would be all excited that I was finally applying myself and possibly about to become the next Mark Zuckerburg. I didn’t even think there was a state-wide computer science competition for high school kids right now, but I knew she’d be too tired from work to log on and check when she got the note. If she ever asked about it, I could just say we were eliminated in the prelims because our programming was buggy. I called Reno and asked him to pick me up. Thank God he was free and his dad let him have the Jeep.
“We’re road tripping,” I announced when I got into the front seat.
“Excuse me?” Reno put the vehicle back into park and stared at me. “I like your dress.”
“Thank you. Not that far. Three hours round trip, not even. We’ll be back in time for Jon Stewart, I promise.” I smoothed out my sundress, which was bright yellow. I’d never worn it before and I felt strange in it, but if I was going to go through with this whole father-daughter reunion crap, I wanted to look nice. Pretty, even.
“I’m not supposed to use the SunPass,” Reno said. I could tell he was annoyed with me but intrigued.
“That’s no problem. We can take I-4 most of the way. I need to go to New Smyrna Beach. I want to see my dad.”
Reno let out a low whistle. He took his foot off the brake. It could go either way now. I turned to him, my eyes full of pleading.
“Robin…I don’t know if this is such a good idea. When was the last time you talked to him?” He cracked open a bottled water and took a long swallow, and then offered it to me. I shoo
k my head. I have the world’s smallest bladder and I couldn’t demand a stop in Sanford if I really wanted us there and back before eleven.
“It’s been a long time. I just…need to know how he is. I don’t want to call. It’s not that far.” I could hear the begging in my voice, but I allowed it. This had to happen. It had to happen now. I needed to know if my dad cared that I’d been hurt. If he did, maybe things between us could be better somehow. If he didn’t, well, at least I would know for sure where I stood.
“You’re right, it’s not, but with traffic…and how do you know if he’s even there for sure?” Reno tapped his fingers on the steering wheel.
“Stop being so reasonable! Don’t you get tired of considering every action seventeen times, from thirteen angles, before you take it? Don’t you ever just want to drive? It’s the ocean, Reno. Just go.”
He stared at me, fully knowing I was manipulating him, pushing the biggest button I knew how to push, the one that said: I’ve always acted like an adult in a kid’s body and I know that’s weird and I can’t help it but please don’t call me out for being lame because you know it’s kind of nice, actually, to have someone around with sense. “Fine,” he finally said. He looked straight ahead, pissed at me. I could take that. We were going.
“Thank you,” I replied, and turned back to the windshield.
We were silent until the Kirkman exit, which was only eleven miles north of Kissimmee but equaled thirty-five minutes in I-4 time. There was, of course, an accident backing up traffic. It was in the south-bound lane, I could see the lights, but it didn’t matter. People slowed down for any and all reasons. I checked my purse to make sure I had enough cash in case we needed to buy gas. I didn’t have a credit card yet. I wondered if Reno did. I bet he did. For emergencies.
Finally, he turned up the radio. John Mayer was singing. Reno made a disgusted sound and turned it off. I couldn’t help it; it made me laugh. Then he laughed too, and the ice was broken.
“So you think this is a mistake, then?” I ventured. I played with my skirt, noticing how white my legs were. I needed to spend more time outside.
