Page 85 of The Sun
Then it closed.
The sneaking around bullshit blew. Literally.
That next Monday,Sunny wasn’t at school. I called her house when I got home, but her dad answered, and I had to pretend I had the wrong number and ask for Josh.
Before class on Tuesday, Daisy strutted over, straight-faced as she placed both hands on my desk and leaned over to whisper, “Mono.”
“What?”
“Sunny’s not here because she has mononucleosis.”
The ominous way Daisy said it, I expected thunder and lightning to sound. She stared at me like it was something horrible, so I glanced around the room, but no one was paying attention to us. “What the hell is that?”
“Some kissing disease you must have given her.”
“I’m not sick.”
She straightened up and rolled those damned eyes of hers. “Well, you will be. It’s evidently super contagious.” She made anXwith her fingers and held them in front of her as she backed away. “So, you just like, stay out of my breathing-bubble area.”
Having grown up without health insurance, I didn’t know much about illnesses except that if I got a sore throat, whiskey and honey helped, and if my fever broke one-hundred-five, I could go to the ER because, at that temperature, they couldn’t turn me away. I could have had the bubonic plague three times, and I would have never known, but this mono crap sounded terrible.
During study hall, I went to the library, pulled theMencyclopedia, and sat at one of the tables next to a group of freshmen girls. One of them giggled and cupped her hand around her mouth before she leaned over to her friend.
Ignoring them, I thumbed through the thin pages until I foundmononucleosis, and what a fucking vile virus it was. What I gathered from my research was that Sunny would be sick for weeks—months even.
Sinking in the chair, I wiped a hand over my face. For some reason, it literally felt like it was us against the world—viruses included.
27
Elias
November 1999
After two weeks of not talking to Sunny, I went stircrazy.
Every time I called her house, her parents answered, and I couldn’t waltz up to her front door with flowers. My only means of communication came from the notes Daisy smuggled back and forth through Sunny’s schoolwork which she dropped off and picked up every Monday and Wednesday.
Those notes were the only way I found out Sunny’s mom had a bad habit of leaving the back door unlocked. Three nights in a row, Mrs. Lower locked that door, but on the fourth night, when I tried the knob, it turned. I paused. Sweat slicked my palms as I fought against the knot twisting my gut before I cracked the door just enough to slip inside the dark house.
Of course, sneaking into the Sheriff’s house to visit his daughter—whom I had been strictly told to stay away from—may not have been the best idea. But I was desperate to see her, kiss her, tell her I loved her.
The floorboards groaned when I reached the bottom of the stairs, and I froze like a deer in headlights. A stairwell had never looked so long or ominous. Each step served as a possible, noisy alarm that would wake her parents. Mr. Lower would likely arrest me and send me to juvie for breaking and entering.
The second my weight landed on that first step, the wooden planks creaked. I swiped a hand over my face, thinking there had to be another way. The latticework outside Sunny’s window had been torn down not long after Mr. Lower caught me in her room so there would be no scaling the proverbial castle wall. No. The stairwell was the only option. Shaking my head, I grabbed hold of the railing and shook it a little. It was sturdy, and the rungs were wide enough to place the toe of my boot between. As I shimmied my way up, I realized love makes people do stupid things.
When I bolted past the Lower’s closed bedroom door, I realized love actually mademedo crazy-stupid things.
I snuck into Sunny’s room, locked the door, and then checked to make sure the latch caught—I wasn’t going to make that mistake again. Sunny laid asleep amongst a mountain of pillows and crumpled tissues. I tiptoed across toward her bed. The mattress dipped under my weight when I sat down, and she opened her eyes.
“Hey,” I whispered, sweeping some of her tangled hair away from her face.
“Hey.” The hoarse sound of her voice sent a twinge of guilt for waking her through my core.
“How you feeling?”
“Like death.”
I stroked my knuckles over her worrisomely heated cheek. “Jesus, you’re hot.”
