“How was school?” Dad asked.
“Good!” I said. Dad nodded and turned on some music. I wanted to tell him about my story right away, but it was not safe to drive and read and if I read it to him he would not see the pictures. I hummed along to the song and bobbed my head but I did not kick my feet because that noise distracted Dad, which was not a safe thing to do. Finally we pulled into the driveway.
“Dad!” I said. “Dad, look what I did today! I wrote a whole story!” I ran around to his side of the car.
“Did you now?” he said. He smiled a little bit and since I did not see him smile often, I thought that was a good sign. Dad liked books, so I thought he would like my story. “I bet you’ll be the next Faulkner.”
He took the story from my hands and smiled when he read the cover. He smiled at the first page where I found the car. He smiled at the second page where I drove the car. He looked confused on the third page where I saw the beautiful lady. Then he frowned. My tummy felt sick and suddenly I wanted my story back. I was too scared to move though because he reached the page where the lady explained that she was me, and the lines were on his forehead like when he was very angry. He skipped the last three pages and read the note the teacher attached instead.
“Why does your teacher think you were being serious?” he asked. He looked at me and I felt like I had not had a bath for days but in my insides instead of my outsides. “This is a joke, right?”
I wanted to lie to Dad and I wanted to tell him the truth, and I did not know that a person could want two things like that at the same time. I looked at my shoes and felt myself starting to cry, which was a bad thing because Dad said crying was for girls, but I knew I was a girl but Dad thought that was a joke and he seemed angry about it and thinking about that made me cry even harder. Dad knelt and put his hands on my shoulders.
“Look at me,” he said. I shook my head. “Look at me!” he repeated, and his hands squeezed my shoulders. I wanted to close my eyes but I had already made him so angry. I did not want to be bad or in trouble. “You need to tell me this was a joke.”
“Yes, sir.” It was what I said when an adult was angry with me and I wanted them to stop being angry. He let go of my shoulders and put his hands on his knees. I sniffled and wiped my eyes and looked back up at him, but he was looking at the sky. He took a deep breath.
“Son,” he said, “I want you to have a good life. Boys who really think the things in your story are confused. They don’t have good lives. So you’re not one of those boys.”
“Yes, sir,” I whispered.
He messed up my hair and smiled again, but the smile did not reach his eyes. “I don’t want to hear anything else about this, okay?”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“Come on, cheer up,” he said. I sniffled and looked at the ground. “Let’s go play catch, okay? Take your mind off it.”
“No, thank you,” I said, adding, “sir” before I went inside.
7
As I walked away from the party, I took deep, calming breaths of crisp night air. The sun had set, and the stars were out. I still wasn’t used to how crisp and clear they looked here. Smyrna wasn’t in the city proper, but Atlanta’s light pollution reached a long way, leaving the sky a blue-and-purple smear. Out here you could make out everything, even the dim band of the Milky Way. I wished I could walk up into the sky and live on some distant planet, far away from the things I was afraid of. I wondered if joy could ever be felt by itself without being tainted with fear and confusion, or if some level of misery was a universal constant, like the speed of light.
“Hey.” I was halfway down the block when I heard a voice behind me. I turned to see Grant standing in the middle of the empty street. “Leaving already?”
“I’m not feeling great…” I trailed off. I desperately wanted to finish the sentence with the truth, but what was there to say? I think I like you, but I’ll never have a normal life. I think you like me, but you’ll never understand who I am.
Grant pulled out a flashlight and flicked it on. We both blinked at the sudden radiance.
“Come with me?”
He turned toward the woods, and my feet knew before my brain did that I was going to follow. I was never going to be free of my past; it was always going to be there, waiting to suck me in and crush me like a black hole. The only way to escape it was to keep moving.
As we walked deeper into the woods, the short grass quickly gave way to grasping, thigh-high yellow blades. “That thing with Parker…” I began, thinking about how Grant had stood his ground. I wondered how many more times he would have to come to my rescue before I disappeared like Tommy. How many more friends would he have to alienate? “Will you guys still talk after this?”
Grant shrugged as the flashlight’s beam illuminated a path for me to follow. “It would all blow over if we just had it out real quick after school,” he replied evenly. “But he’s huge, and mean, and so this stupid thing’s probably gonna go on for months.”
He paused as we approached a waist-high thicket of poison ivy. “Think you can jump it?”
“Not really,” I said, still a little dizzy from the beer.
“Mind if I lift you?”
“I think so,” I said, my throat going dry. I touched my fingers to my neck. “I think it’s okay, I mean.”
He laughed and grabbed my hips, easily carrying me over the ivy. I felt warm where his hands had touched me.