43
NOW (JUNE)
When I get back into the house, Dad is waiting in the hallway.
“What was that about?” he asks.
“Nothing,” I say.
“Sophie, you’ve been crying.” He reaches out, and I move away when his hand makes contact with my cheek. “Did Trev say something—”
“We were talking about Mina,” I interrupt. “I got sad. Trev wasn’t—I was just sad.” I rub at my arms, stepping farther away from him. “What are you doing home? Did you forget something?”
“Your shots are today,” Dad says. “Didn’t your mother tell you?”
“Oh. She did. I forgot.”
“I thought I’d take you.”
I can’t stop the hesitation that passes over me, and I can tell he’s hurt by it. It’s the barest flash in his lined face, but it’s there.
I remember, suddenly, all those days he took off work so he could drive me back and forth to physical therapy. How he’d sat in the lobby doing paperwork while I bullied my body into working better. How he’d always wrapped his arms around me afterward.
“Sure,” I say. “I’d like that.”
On the drive to the doctor’s office, we talk about ordinary things. About the soccer team that Dad’s dental office sponsors, how he’s thinking about retiring from assistant coaching because Mom wants him to take swing dancing classes with her.
“Have you thought any more about college?” Dad asks as we pass the post office.
I glance at him. “Not really,” I say.
I can’t. Not yet. There are things I have to do first.
“I know how hard it’s been for you, honey,” he says. “But this is an important time. We need to start thinking about it.”
“Okay,” I say. Anything to get him to stop.
Dr. Shute’s office is in a brick building across from the railroad tracks, and Dad pauses a second before getting out of the car, like he’s sure I’ll snap at him the way I did when he took me to therapy with David. So I stand outside the car, wait until he gets out, and we’re both quiet as we walk inside.
He stays in the lobby when the nurse leads me back, and I have to bite my tongue to keep from asking him to come with me. I tell myself I don’t need him to hold my hand, that I’d learned how to handle getting the shots solo at Seaside. I’ve learned to depend on myself. I sit down on the exam table and wait.
The door opens, and Dr. Shute pops her head in the exam room and smiles at me, her red glasses hanging on a beaded chain around her neck. “It’s been a while, Sophie.” After a minute of small talk and a rundown of my pain level, she leaves so I can get undressed. I take my shirt off, lying facedown on the exam table in my bra. The table is cool against my belly through the crackly paper, and I dig into my jeans pocket and come up with my phone as Dr. Shute knocks and comes back inside. I page through my music and put in my earbuds, letting the sound warp my senses. I press my forehead into the cradle of my arms, concentrating on my breathing.
“Let me know when you’re ready,” Dr. Shute says. She knows the deal, knows I can’t stand to see the long epidural needle, knows how freaked out it makes me—that even after all this time, after all the surgeries, I can’t handle a stupid needle sinking into me.
I’ll never be ready. I hate this. I’d almost prefer another surgery.
“Okay, do it,” I say.
The first one goes into the left side of my spine, in the middle of my back, where the pain is the worst. I breathe in and out, my clenched fists crumpling the paper liner set over the exam table. She moves down, three more on my left side, ending deep in my lower back. The long needles pierce through me, the cortisone pushes into my inflamed muscles, buying me some time. Then four on the right side. By the time she’s moved to my neck, I’m breathing hard, the music fuzzy in my ears, and I want it to stop, please, stop.
I want Mina holding my hand, brushing my hair off my face, telling me it’ll be okay.
On the way home, Dad pulls into Big Ed’s drive-through and orders a chocolate–peanut butter milk shake. It’s exactly what I need at that moment, and tears well up in my eyes when he does it without being asked. It’s like I’m fourteen again. I never thought I’d want to go back there, to the days of physical therapy and canes, floating on a cloud of Oxy, but I do. Because then, at least, she’d been alive.
When Dad hands over the shake, he meets my eyes, not letting go of the cup. “Are you okay, honey?” he asks, and I want to hide inside the concern in his voice.
“I’ll be fine,” I say. “Just stings a little.”
We both know I’m lying.
44
ONE YEAR AGO (SIXTEEN YEARS OLD)
“I hate you!”
I duck just as a shoe comes flying out of Mina’s room, closely followed by Trev.
“Jerk!” Another shoe sails down the hall, and Trev barely looks at me as he stalks past, his face stormy. He yanks the back door open and charges outside, leaving the door swinging on the hinges.
I can hear Mina muttering angrily underneath her breath, and I peek around the corner, knocking lightly on her open door. She whirls around, and my chest tightens when I see she’s been crying.
“What’s wrong?” I ask her.
“Oh.” She brushes the tears away. “Nothing. It’s fine.”
“Um, bullshit.”
She flops on the bed, on top of a pile of papers scattered across her comforter. “Trev’s a jerk.”
I sit down next to her. “What’d he do?”
“He said I was being too open,” Mina snarls.
“Okay,” I say slowly. “You’re gonna have to fill me in more than that.”
Mina rolls over to her side, freeing up some of the papers she’s lying on. She grabs a stapled stack, handing it to me. “It’s my personal statement for the Beacon internship. I asked him to read it, and because he’s an asshole”—she shouts the last word so he can hear it—“he told me I shouldn’t submit it.”
“Can I read it?” I ask.
Mina shrugs, throwing an arm over her eyes dramatically. “Whatever,” she says, like it doesn’t matter, which means, of course, that it does.
She’s quiet for the five minutes that it takes me to read. The only sound in the room is the rustling of paper when she shifts on the bed.
When I finish, I stare at the last sentence for a long time, trying to think of what to say.
“Is it that bad?” Mina asks in a small voice.
“No,” I say. “No,” I say again, because she looks so unsure, and it makes me want to curl up next to her and tell her she’s wonderful until she stops. “It’s beautiful.” I squeeze her hand.
“It’s supposed to be about what shaped me,” Mina says, almost like she needs an excuse. “It was what I thought of first. Trev said he’d proof it for me. I didn’t think he’d get so mad.”
“Do you want me to go talk to him?”
Her gray eyes, still red and puffy, light up. “Would you?”
“Yeah. Be right back.”
I leave her in her room and walk outside to the shed in the backyard that Trev’s converted into a shop. I can hear the rhythmic scrape of sandpaper against wood as I walk up to the doors.
Trev’s hunched over his workbench, sanding a pair of triangle trellises for my garden. I watch for a moment, his broad fingers moving confidently over the cedar, smoothing the rough edges. I step forward into his domain, breathing in the smell of sawdust and the sharp bite of motor oil.
“I don’t want to talk about it, Soph,” he says before I can speak. He keeps his back to me, moving to the other side of the trellis. The sandpaper rasps against the wood, motes of sawdust floating up in the air.
“He was her dad, too. She should be able to write about him.”