If I Was Your Girl(16)

“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.

We kept walking, Grant still leading the way. The path opened onto a lake glimmering with faint white slivers. A chorus of frogs joined the cicadas’ call, singing in their own asynchronous rhythm.

“I think boys aren’t taught that smart’s the same as scared sometimes,” I said.

“You may be right.” He pointed the flashlight up. “We’re here.” A tilted wooden platform nestled atop three thick tree branches. Clumsy, mismatched boards nailed into the trunk below served as a ladder.

“Where is here?” I asked. He looked sheepish.

“You’ll see.” He climbed up onto the platform and shone the flashlight down. I blinked. “Do you trust me?” He reached down and offered me his hand.

“Did you just quote Aladdin?” I took his hand and he easily hoisted me up.

I crawled over to the edge of the platform. From above, the lake reflected the moon clearly, a perfect white circle against its shimmering surface. I took a deep breath and turned to find Grant sitting with his back against the tree trunk.

“Thanks for coming out here with me,” he said.

“Thanks for bringing me.” I breathed in the cool lake air and sighed. “Do you live near here or something?”

“No,” Grant said, looking suddenly cagey. “I, uh, used to. This was Tommy’s old hideaway.”

“Your friend?”

“Yeah. We used to come out here, when his folks fought or somebody screwed with him at school.”

“What really happened to him?”

Grant rubbed his thumb over his fingertips. “He died.”