Skinny(18)

Later that night, I’m in my bed waiting to fall asleep. Maybe it’s because I’m close to leaving consciousness or maybe it’s because of the curly-haired man at the podium at the meeting earlier, but I let my mind drift. I count up twelve months from now, and I imagine a world for me that’s different. I’d have something to look forward to next in my life — a next first day of school, a next Thanksgiving, a next Christmas, a next musical away. There is a strange lifting feeling in my heart. I recognize it and try to push it back down again. It’s an idea — a dream — that something could change. Three hundred and sixty-five days from now.

I will be sixteen. I’ll go to the Fall Ball with Jackson. I’ll wear a strapless red dress and high heels. He’ll touch me. I’ll dance. At school, I’ll walk the halls in miniskirts and black knee-high boots. I’ll laugh. I’ll sing in front of people. They’ll clap and cheer and throw flowers onto the stage. I’ll bow.

Next summer, a year from now, will I wear shorts and sleeveless tops? So different from the stretchy jeans I wear now, even in the hottest days of summer, and the black size 5X T-shirts. Will I finally feel the sun on my skin? Will I uncover my legs from all the clothes I’ve kept my body hidden under? I wonder. All of it is right in front of me. Only a year away.

“Don’t.”

Then I stop wondering and start to actually want. I want to go swimming.

“Don’t.”

I want to learn how to drive a car.

“Don’t do it.”

I want to climb the stairs and not be out of breath.

“Don’t want.”

I want to stand in front of that crowd at next year’s musical and have them clap at my success.

But then right before I let myself drift off to sleep, I hear it. A whisper in my dreamy, sleepy ear. Louder. Louder. Louder.

“It will never happen.”





Chapter Six


The surgery is scheduled for three weeks before school is out. May 2 at 8:00 a.m. to be exact. It would have been better if I’d been able to finish the semester, but evidently surgeons don’t care too much about summer break. I have to cut my stomach up on their schedule.

Because of my grades, I’m able to get myself out of pretty much every thing. My average is high enough to be exempt from final projects, and I arrange to do all the other work ahead of time. All my teachers seem fine with my upcoming absence. Especially when I’m sufficiently vague about my medical issues. They really don’t want to ask a lot of questions. Mr. Blair is the only teacher left to talk to, so I hang around after the bell on Friday. I lean against the wall, waiting for him to explain the homework assignment to Kristen Rogers for the third time.

“Are you next?” It’s Jackson. He gestures toward Kristen and Mr. Blair.

“Go ahead,” I say. “I’m not in a rush.”

“Great. Thanks.” He smiles at me as he slides into place between me and the teacher’s desk. “I just have a quick question about number three on the homework and I can’t be late to spring training. The coach will kill me.”

“I see some things haven’t changed.” I smile back at him. Next week every thing’s going to change, but I don’t say anything about that. I just want him to remember how things were. His head tilts to the side and he looks at me quizzically.

“What do you mean?”

“You were always the last one to show up to every thing,” I say. “You know . . . when we were kids.”

Remember. I plead with him silently.

His dark brows draw together over those beautiful blue eyes as if he’s thinking hard about it. “I guess so,” he finally says.

“He has no idea what you’re talking about,” Skinny says.

He turns back toward Mr. Blair’s desk, tapping his pencil against the notebook in his hands to fill the sudden silence. I’m left staring at his broad shoulders in front of me, thinking of the past.

Sometimes on those spring nights when we were kids, Rat, Jackson, and I would chase one another with flashlights in the open space behind our back fences. We played until the hamburgers were finished grilling on the outside patio and our moms called us to dinner or until the moon rose so high in the sky that hiding in the dark was almost impossible.

The game went like this. If you were “it,” you won the game by shining the flashlight onto the hidden person like a spotlight. They’d have to freeze in the position you spotted them — arms stretched out, legs crouched, mouth wide open — until you released them with a click of the flashlight. If you weren’t “it,” there was only one place you could be safe from the flashlight’s beacon and only one way you could win the game. If you could successfully hide from the spotlight long enough to make it to the big boulder out near the walking trail, climb atop it, and proclaim loud enough for everyone in hearing distance, all the open back windows and sliding patio >doors that surrounded our little piece of wild, “Home free!” — then you were the winner.