Chapter 12 #2
I wasn’t even certain that I could still swim with my condition. Each night I did my exercises for physical therapy. Some days, it felt as if they were helping, but I still didn’t trust my body.
I was a little scared I’d instantly drown.
Plus, now with Mom gone, the pool felt .
. . sad. My friends used to come over all the time in the summer for pool parties.
Dad would grill up hot dogs and hamburgers.
Mom would gossip with my friends’ moms. Lorelai would be .
. . well, Lorelai. Which meant she was as extra as all get out.
It was such a happy time. It was odd how things I once loved so much became achingly sad after Mom passed away.
I wished the good could feel good again.
“Holy balls, you’re rich-rich,” Ash remarked, studying the pool area. “You have a waterfall attachment on your pool! A waterfall!”
I couldn’t help but chuckle at the way his eyes bugged out.
“You swim?” I asked.
“I like to every now and then,” he replied. “You?”
“Yes, well, I did,” I said, growing uncomfortable. “I don’t do it anymore since the accident.”
He tilted his head with a look of confusion. “The accident?”
“You know, the car accident.”
“Oh.” He walked over to a hammock and sat inside it. “You were in a car accident?”
I snickered, baffled by his surprise. “Yeah. That’s why I’m like this.” I gestured toward myself. “I wasn’t always ugly and broken.”
Ash’s eyes studied me. “I don’t think you’ve ever been ugly and broken.”
There they were again, those fluttering feelings. “Yeah, well, that’s just you being nice.”
“No, it’s not. I’m the opposite of nice. I’m a major dick.”
Doubtful, Ash.
“You should’ve seen me before the accident,” I explained as I walked over and sat in the hammock beside him. “Then you’d see how ugly and broken I’ve become.”
“Why do you do that?” he questioned, his hands in the pocket of his hoodie.
“Do what?”
“Be so mean to yourself.”
I swung in the hammock, embarrassed by his comment. “I don’t know.”
“Well, as your newfound friend, I think it’s only right for me to tell you to stop being an asshole to yourself. The world has enough assholes. You don’t have to be your own, too. You can have an asshole, but you don’t have to be an asshole.”
I wanted to argue with him, but he wasn’t wrong. Sure, I had a handful of bullies, but the biggest one in my life was the one staring back at me in the mirror each day. I hated that he called me out on it, though.
Was this what it meant to be friends with Ash? A life of him wanting me to . . . like myself? That seemed a bit dramatic. I was really succeeding in the self-loathing ballpark. The last thing I needed was a friend to tell me I deserved better treatment.
“What’s your favorite word?” he blurted out, as if that was the next task for him to tackle after noting how I bullied myself. His mind was like a buzzing bee that kept whipping around from topic to topic.
“What?”
“Your favorite word. What’s your favorite word?”
“I don’t have a favorite word.”
He paused his rocking in the hammock and leaned in my direction, disgusted by my response. “You don’t have a favorite word?!”
“Nope.”
“But you like to read and write a lot?”
“Yup.”
“Karla, you need a favorite word. It’s like the main thing a writer and reader need in their lives.”
“What’s your favorite word?”
“Pineapple.”
I chuckled. “Pineapple?”
“Yes, pineapple. It’s such a ridiculous word, equal parts goofy and tasty. Plus, I have a thing for words that have more than one word in them. I call them wordlets. Cutlets of words hidden in a bigger word.”
“Well, why isn’t your favorite word a watermelon?”
“Because I hate melon and I hate drinking water.”
This boy was weird.
Who knew weird could be cute?
“No one hates water,” I argued. “It keeps us alive. More than half our bodies are made up of water.”
“Yeah, I get the perks of it, I do, but . . .” He shivered in disgust. “It’s so . . . bland.”
“Of course it is! It’s water!”
“Exactly. Don’t even get me started on sparkling water. Why would I want my bland drink to sparkle in my mouth?”
“My mom used to drink that stuff,” I said with a shiver of disgust.
“I’m sorry to hear your mother was a monster.”
I snickered. I tended to do that more and more with him around. But also, that was the first time I laughed about something connected to my mom. That was new. I thought I’d always feel sad when I thought about her, but Ash made me laugh.
Ash paused before his head tilted down toward his pocket. “Is it hard for you to talk about her sometimes?”
“All the time,” I corrected. “It’s hard all the time.”
“Yeah. Same. And then sometimes it just slips out. I hate the accidental slip-outs.”
Curiosity filled me. “Who did you lose?”
“Oh, uh, I . . .” His words faltered as his eyes shut. He took a breath and reopened his eyes. “My little brother, Rian. He passed away last year.”
“Oh, gosh.” I wanted to say I was sorry for Ash’s loss, but “I’m sorry” always felt so flat.
So meaningless. So much like water. Bland and uninspired.
“That totally sucks,” I spat out. That wasn’t much better, but I was realizing that there weren’t great words when it came to death. Just heavy and hard ones.
“Yeah.” Ash nodded, a tiny smirk finding his face. “It totally sucks.”
“Do you like when people ask you questions about him?”
“Depends on the day and the hour, I guess.”
I picked at my fingernails. “What about this day at this hour?”
The palm of his hand rubbed the back of his neck before he raked his fingers through his messy black hair. “Maybe not this day at this hour.”
Noted.
We both were quiet again. I somehow forgot how to be a friend.
Ash made me nervous. I didn’t exactly know why, but it was true.
I hadn’t felt nervous around a person in a long time.
I’d felt hatred around people, or like the butt of their jokes, but not nervous.
I was still trying to understand why my pulse stuttered the way it did when I was around Ash.
Maybe I was afraid of saying the wrong thing and pushing him away. Maybe I was scared of him realizing I was as uncool as all the other kids at school said. Or maybe, just maybe, I was afraid of opening myself up to another person after losing all the people I thought would be my friends forever.
Either way, we were quiet, and in the quietness, I was a wrecking ball of nerves.
“Notebook,” I blurted out of nowhere.
“Notebook?”
“A wordlet. Note and book.”
Ash smiled, and I felt it in my gut. “Moonlight.”
I scrunched my nose in thought. “Sunflower.”
“Somewhere.”
Oh, he was quick with this. I wouldn’t have put it past him to have a catalog of these words in his mind already.
I stood from the hammock, since my body didn’t love being placed in it.
Please don’t start aching now, body. Give me a little more time to just be normal.
I started walking toward the house. “Firefly.”
Ash hopped out of the hammock and followed me back into the house toward the kitchen, where Ellie had put out enough snacks for an army.
Ash grabbed a handful of chips and shoved them into his mouth. “Tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?” I asked, eating my own handful. “How is that two words?”
“To and morrow.”
“What does ‘morrow’ mean?”
“Morning. My dad used to always say it whenever he was going off to work overnight. ‘Have a great night, boys! I’m off to morrow!’”
I smiled a little.
Ash didn’t talk much about his dad.
He hardly talked about his family at all, actually.
“Are you and your parents close?” I asked, grabbing one of Ellie’s homemade cookies.
“We used to be. Now they both work all the time. Or my dad is working on some house project. Sometimes he asks me to help him, but that’s it. We don’t really talk. Not like we used to.”
“That sucks.”
“Yeah. We used to do hang outs all the time in our family room and have game nights, but we don’t anymore.”
“I miss what life used to be.”
“Yeah . . .”
Ash wasn’t smiling anymore, and that made me sad. Boys like him were meant to smile more than most. When they frowned, it was heartbreaking.
“Sometimes I think my parents blame me, you know,” Ash said as he stared out at the bowl of chip dip.
“Blame you for what?”
“Everything.”
“Oh . . .” I shifted around, feeling a tingle of discomfort in my lower back.
No, please stop . . .
Sometimes, my body decided it didn’t want to function like a regular body, and mysterious aches would appear after a week of successful physical therapy.
I knew by the end of the day I’d be near tears with heating pads on if I didn’t sit down soon.
But I also didn’t want to sit because I didn’t want Ash to think I wasn’t strong enough to stand for a few minutes in the freaking kitchen.
“If it makes you feel better, I think my dad blames me for everything, too.”
“For the accident?”
I nodded.
“Can I ask what happened? Or is that . . . ?”
“A car accident. I was fighting in the back seat with my little sister, and I distracted my parents. My dad was driving and swerved to avoid a deer, because he looked back to make us stop fighting. We ended up hitting a tree, and I went flying out of the car.”
“Oh . . .” Ash’s “oh” reminded me of my own—the kind of “oh” when you didn’t know what to say. But unlike me, he followed it up with a question. “Do you blame him? Your dad?”
“Yes and no,” I confessed. “Somedays, when I want to feel mad, I blame him. Other days, when I want to hate myself, I blame me. And most of the time, I want to hate myself.”
He smiled, but it felt sad. I knew those kinds of smiles too well.
“You ever want to stop being alive?” he asked, pulling no punches.
That was a heavy question.
I shouldn’t have been surprised by the heaviness of it, though, seeing as how I first met the boy in a cemetery talking to dead people.