Sex I’d always actively avoided thinking about. The whole thing seemed horrifying, frankly. Even leaving aside the specific mechanics of the act, that amount of touching, that amount of skin seemed utterly repellent.
I knew Anna didn’t feel the same way. I’d accepted, on some level, that she probably had some kind of physical relationship with whoever she was meeting, but the pills…the pills felt like damning evidence of how far apart we’d drifted, of how many milestones I’d missed.
Dying, on the other hand, I hadn’t avoided thinking about as such. I just hadn’t spent any real time considering it. It had seemed like a pointless thing to spend any mental energy on. Where life was concerned, the options were binary: you were either alive or not.
Which had suited me fine, until now. Especially since in my experience, all dead people were old or strangers. Which didn’t mean that death wasn’t sad, didn’t mean everyone got as many years as they wanted. It just was what it was.
Now I wanted there to be more options. I’d had no training wheels—while I’d once wound up at the hospital with a concussion and a broken arm after a rope swing accident, Anna had never had anything worse than a cold or a skinned knee.
So it simply had not occurred to me that Anna could be hurt in any serious way, let alone be suddenly gone entirely.
Of course, maybe not thinking about it was the only way to stay sane—anything else could drive a person crazy, knowing that at any moment they could lose everything.
I don’t know. It’s hard to say.
—
THE NEW TABLE ARRIVED THAT weekend.
“I really think this will be better,” Mom said. “Don’t you?”
“It’s nice,” I said. “The other one was ugly.”
“I agree. Your dad bought it at a garage sale, and when he brought it home I didn’t have the heart to tell him.” She smiled and then shook her head. “The one nice thing about it being so ugly was that I never cared about water stains. Want to bet how long it will take before this one is marked with its first?”
I began to smile and then I paused. “Wait a minute.” I jogged up to Anna’s room and began to remove three of the coasters from her bedside table. Then, as I held them in my hand, I imagined these things of hers absorbing water from our glasses, the cardboard buckling over time, until one of my parents deemed them no longer usable and tossed them away. I slid them back into the drawer.
Not wanting to come back downstairs empty-handed, I walked to my room and grabbed some old paperback books I’d been planning to get rid of.
“Here you go,” I said as I deposited the books on the new table. “We can use these until we get new coasters.”
While I didn’t expect her to give me the third degree, I did think she might at least pause, silently questioning why I thought books would make good coasters—or—even granting that—why these particular books, when the living room was full of contenders. But her expression didn’t even flicker. “Okay,” she said. “Thanks.” Then she smiled at me and pulled a book over to her side of the table.
Sometimes I wondered if I should find it convenient or unnerving just how odd my parents apparently expected me to be.
Drinking in a bar, dancing. It felt like I was changing my story, rewriting my script, but it was rebellion lite—not really hurting anyone, not even myself.
The boundaries between him and me, those remained clear. I might have been pushing other lines, might have occasionally had a third beer—gotten a little blurry from it—but I didn’t mess with that one. We stayed in our right roles.
THERE HAD BEEN OCCASIONAL MOMENTS over the last week when I’d thought I might actually be getting better at this running thing. On Tuesday, my legs had hurt less, not more, than the day before, and I thought I’d turned a corner. Since then, I’d had a relapse, though, and now I was back to doing the sit-ups portion of the drills as slowly as possible to give myself a break from dashing around like a headless chicken.
Beside me, Sarah was doing her sit-ups so fast she reminded me of a rower heading right for the finish line. I could probably bounce a quarter off her stomach, I thought. Not that I want to, but I bet I could. I bet it’d fly straight back up.
Suddenly I found Mr. Matthews leaning over me. “You okay there?” he asked. “Did you get winded?”
I blinked and realized that I’d paused between sit-ups and was staring at Sarah’s stomach.
“No, everything’s fine,” I said, and slid back down to complete another sit-up.
—
THROUGH THE SWEAT AND EXHAUSTION of my time in track, I’d learned the following about Mr. Matthews.
• He drove a green VW Beetle, but only if the weather was bad.
• He tapped the side of his leg when a race was close.
• He began to stammer when he got annoyed.
I had no idea if any of these things were relevant.
I suspected not.
Sometimes I found myself staring at him too hard in practice and had to force myself to look away. I couldn’t help but wonder, if it was true about him and Anna, how it could’ve started. Would it have been a slow process, a gradual accumulation of a million small movements, impossible to pinpoint exactly when the line was crossed? Or was there no doubt about when they became something different to each other, when he was no longer her teacher, her coach, when she was no longer his student?
I didn’t know that either. The only thing that was becoming increasingly clear was that to get any closer to the truth, I’d need to supplement track practice with observations of him in other settings.
Watching him when he wasn’t expecting it. Possibly, for example, in the privacy of his home.
—
TWO DAYS LATER, I
