Chapter 19 Now
Now
My entire chest went warm with Beau’s words, my heart picking up speed.
I missed him too. I could admit that out loud.
He just did. I took a breath in through my nose and then opened my mouth to speak.
But then a lump of sadness formed in my throat, and my eyes dropped from his to the floor.
He missed the old me. The person I was before my life imploded.
I was different now. He wouldn’t like the new version.
“You don’t know me anymore,” I said.
The door handle was pressing into my back. I pushed against his chest and he took a step backward, his hand dropping from the wet paper towel on my neck. I freed it from beneath my hair and threw it into the garbage. My toes on the floor felt cold and prickly.
“Are you saying that the person who fails tests and skips school and breaks rules is the real you?” He crossed his arms, letting me know exactly how he felt about the person he’d just described.
Me. The person he’d just described was me. Maybe? I hardly knew myself before all this, and I definitely didn’t know myself now. If this was the person I’d become under intense pressure, then maybe it was who I’d been all along. Maybe pressure revealed truth. “Maybe it is.”
“Indy,” he said on a sigh.
“Who was I before, then?” I asked. “The girl who only cared about seeing a letter on a paper? Her name rise in the ranks?”
“You were always more than your grades,” he said.
“Was I? How? That’s the only thing I ever did. That I ever had.” I picked a mint off the counter and turned it over in my hand several times before unwrapping it and putting it in my mouth.
“You’re funny and smart and kind and everyone liked you.”
I laughed a little. “Liked. That’s the key word, isn’t it?”
He pressed his eyes closed for several beats and then turned and marched into the back stall.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Peeing.”
I gasped. “The rule!” I threw my fingers into my ears, yelling “La la la.” I also squeezed my eyes shut for some reason.
I could only hear the sound of my own voice, so maybe he really couldn’t hear me earlier.
My singing definitely wasn’t as pretty as his.
In fact, it sounded screamy, desperate, and slurry as I tried to do it around the mint still in my mouth. Something brushed my arm and I yelped.
“Still just me,” he said when I dropped my hands and abruptly stopped my cover-up noise.
“Give a girl a warning next time.”
“I thought I did. But hopefully there won’t be a next time,” he said, drying his hands on a paper towel. He went back to the binder and ripped out some pages, which he started folding.
After folding them in thirds, he tore each page along the folds, then stacked the newly torn rectangles together. “I made cards.”
“Cards?”
“Playing cards.” He passed me the first two pages he’d torn into six rectangles and went back to tear more.
On the paper he’d drawn hearts in each of the corners with numbers or letters. And then another big version in the middle.
“Want to play Go Fish?” he asked.
I laughed. “Go Fish? That’s the game you’re choosing?”
His face broke into a crooked smile as well. He had a great smile. “I don’t know a lot of card games.”
“But you know Go Fish?”
“Everyone knows Go Fish. And had we met before seventh grade, we probably would’ve played it together many times by now.”
“I’ll play Go Fish with you, Beau Eubanks.”
“Good, Indy Blair,” he said, handing me a couple of pages to tear.
We sat on the floor to finish the task. We were always good at projects, at working together toward a goal. Until we weren’t.
“Do you have any jacks?” I asked.
“I have one.” He handed it across the middle to me.
That made four pairs for me. He had three. I sat with one knee up, my chin resting on that knee, my arms wrapped around it, the cards clasped in front of me.
“What games did you play in elementary?” he asked.
“At school?” I asked.
“Wherever.”
It was ironic he was asking, because I’d been trying to think of things from my childhood all day, all week, half the month, really.
Activities we’d done as a family. But more than just the games, specific moments of playing them, specific things that happened, how I felt.
“Mainly tag,” I said to him, because we may have been acting friendlier, but I knew that the second we were out of this bathroom we wouldn’t speak again.
I couldn’t talk to him like I used to, ask him for advice or help.
“Tag is a good one,” he said.
“Do you have any sevens?” I asked.
“Go fish,” he said.
I drew one from the middle. It wasn’t a seven. I nodded for him to go.
“Do you have any fours?” he asked, staring at his floppy hand of cards.
“Your handwriting is terrible,” I said as I studied the cards I held, trying to decide if the number on one of them was a four or a nine. It looked like both or neither. “Has it always been this bad?”
“I was making fifty-two cards. It was getting tedious. Show me and I’ll tell you.”
“I’m not going to show you. You’ll tell me it’s a four. You know, in the middle of each card you should’ve drawn as many hearts or clubs or whatever suite to match the number.”
“That would’ve taken even longer,” he said.
“But it would’ve solved my right-now problem.”
He leaned forward, trying to peer over the top of my cards. “Just show me, punk.”
I held the cards to my chest as he attempted to pull my arm down. With my free hand, I smacked his shoulder several times.
He laughed. “Fine, do you have any nines?”
“Go fish,” I said.
“Give me my four!”
“It might be a queen, now that I’m looking.”
He shook his head and drew a card from the middle. “Such a cheater,” he teased.
My cheeks immediately went hot and my eyes shot to the floor.
“I didn’t mean it like that,” he said quickly.
“Why not? It’s true, isn’t it?”