Page 160 of Things We Hide from the Light
“Because your brother has a crush on her and he’ll be distracted.” She held out the five-dollar bill again.
He snatched it out of her hand, his freckled face lighting up. “Thanks, Mom! You’re the best.”
I watched him dash off into the crowd, cash held triumphantly over his head.
“Sorry about that. My entire life for the past decade has been nothing but interruptions,” Angie said. “Three boys who go to bed every night and wake up with all manners erased from their brains so you have to start over with feral cave babies every morning. Anyway. What was I saying?”
“I should probably head out,” I said, looking for an escape.
“Oh! I know. I was saying I’ve been thinking about you a lot.”
And we were back to awkward. “Ah. Yes. That,” I said.
“I always regretted not trying harder to force my way over those walls after…you know.”
“My cardiac arrest in front of half the town?” I filled in glibly.
The dimple flashed again. “Yeah, that. Anyway, even in the midst of my teenage narcissism, I knew I should have tried harder. I should have made you let me be there for you.”
“Made me?” My shoulders tensed. “Look, it was a long time ago, and I’m over it. I’m not going to blame a bunch of teenage girls for not wanting to hang out with the ‘dead girl.’”
“Ugh. If I were Wayne Schlocker’s mother, that boy would have been grounded until college.”
Wayne was an athletic, God’s-gift-to-girls-and-football turd. It didn’t surprise me that he’d been the one to come up with the nickname.
“You do know that Cindy punched him in the middle of the cafeteria for that, don’t you? And then Regina squirted an entire bottle of ketchup on him. The whole team started calling him Wayne Shit Locker after that.”
“Seriously?”
“Of course we did. You were our friend and you were in the hospital. What happened was never a joke to us.”
I had to ask. I needed the answer to my first unsolved mystery. “Then why did you just disappear?”
Angie cocked her head and gave me a mom look. “We didn’t. At least not at first. Don’t you remember? We were there every day while you were recovering. In the hospital, then at your house.”
I did vaguely recall swarms of teen girls crying, then laughing in my hospital room and then my bedroom. But the swarms had gotten smaller and smaller until there were no visits.
“You know what? It’s not important. It happened a long time ago.”
“The fault is mine. Teenage me expected teenage you to bounce back. To go back to normal,” Angie admitted.
But normal hadn’t been in the cards for me. Not for years after.
“I kind of expected that too,” I admitted.
“Instead of the ‘normal’ I expected, you went into a dark place. Which now, after Austin, I understand. I didn’t then.Neither did the other girls. And because we didn’t understand, we let you push us away.”
Another memory surfaced. Angie and our friend Cindy lying on my bed, flipping through magazines, debating how much cleavage was too much for a school dance. Me sitting in the window with bandages on my chest knowing not only wouldn’t I be showing cleavage, I wouldn’t be going to the dance.
Instead, I’d be traveling to see a specialist.
Worse, no one had asked me to the dance in the first place.
“God, is that all you idiots care about?”I’d snapped at them.“Dates and boob tape? Do you know how vapid you sound?”
I winced at the long-buried memory.
I’d felt abandoned, but I hadn’t accepted responsibility for the role I’d played. I’d all but evicted my friends from my life.
