Heft - By Liz Moore Page 0,31

I went into Dr. Greene’s office instead.

Have you seen my mom? I asked.

He was shuffling his papers around and he paused.

She went home sick, he said. He took a breath.

I waited.

Kel, he said.

Yes, I said.

—Has she been—OK?

I was leaning in the doorway. Yeah, I said. Why?

—She’s seemed different recently.

She’s great, I said.

The truth, of course, was that she was nothing close to great and the drinking was getting worse. She was also complaining more about her health. She was diagnosed with lupus when I was a little kid but it had never ever affected her, not once. She was one of the lucky ones, she used to tell me. A mild case. But when I was a sophomore she began inventing symptoms. She began telling me that different parts of her body hurt and that she was tired all the time. She’d be asleep at five. She’d tell me she was running a fever and ask me to put a hand on her forehead but she never felt hot to me.

When I walked in that afternoon, mad because I’d had to take the train, I found her on the couch (she lives there now, it’s her home) and she looked very bad, even I had to admit. She pulled up the sleeve of her shirt and showed me a rash that she’d never had before. I told her it was probably eczema. She told me her body hurt her all over.

You didn’t ask if I needed a ride, I said.

I thought you had practice, she said.

—You should have asked. It was canceled. I took the train.

God, I feel like shit, she said. She sort of propped herself up on her elbows. Honey, she said. Can you make me a Cuba libre?

She’s the last person on earth to call them that. Everyone else says rum and Coke.

This was when I still made drinks for her. Before she hid it from me.

The next day she didn’t go to school.

The day after that either.

For two weeks she didn’t go to school and that’s when I realized she wouldn’t be back.

We had to petition the town again to let me stay at PLHS because my mom didn’t work at the school anymore. Coach Ramirez took me with him to a school board meeting and told them, Here is a straight-A student with a very sick mom, and I dressed up in khakis and tucked my stupid shirt in. And I am a straight-C student if I am anything.

All this young man wants, said Coach, is to finish school with his friends and keep learning from the teachers who love him.

I guess they all felt bad enough for me to give me permission to stay.

A pretty woman, someone’s mother, came up to me afterward and said she just couldn’t imagine what I was going through and then she handed me a five-dollar bill. Literally just gave me a five-dollar bill. I didn’t know what to do so I put it in my pocket without even thanking her. I wish I’d given it back.

• • •

Lindsay Harper pulls into the spot next to mine as I’m getting out of my car. She drives a Lexus that her dad gave her for her sweet sixteen. She’s tiny and built and wearing a field hockey uniform, the skirt of it rolled to show her hard tan legs.

Keeeeeeel, she says. She always says it like that, sweetly, sweetly, her voice descending from high to low.

She comes around the car and stands in front of me, her arms wrapped around each other shyly, wearing knee socks and rubber soccer sandals. She is unsure whether she is going to touch me. We both are. Finally I settle on grabbing her by the shoulders and pulling her in toward me, giving her a hard rub on the head. Owwww, she goes. She tries to wriggle free but I’m stronger.

Where ya goin, I say. I wonder if I smell like my house, like my mother in her damn FIVE O’CLOCK SOMEWHERE T-shirt.

Lindsay pushes her little fingers into my side and I release her.

My hair’s all fucked up now! she says, combing it with her fingers, looking at her reflection in my car window. My shitty car. My mother’s shitty car that she hasn’t driven in two years. My driver’s ed instructor took me to get my license.

I start walking. I am unsure of myself around her in a way I have never been with any girl. Accidentally, sometimes, I am rude to her.

Hey!