“No,” I said, walking myself backwards on the swing and then lifting my legs up and swinging forward. Noah did the same thing, matching my height, which wasn’t very high.
“You know,” I started, looking at the kids, who were now filming each other in what appeared to be fits of hysterics over something. “I’ve never done that before.” I pointed at them.
“What? Skateboard? Or fall off walls?”
“Both.” I straightened my legs and the swing moved higher. Noah did the same. “I sat in that window and watched everyone else do them. I never did. I was either in my house, or in the hospital.”
“You never got to be a teen,” Noah said, straightening and pulling his legs back with more force now, making his swing go even higher. I looked over and copied his movements, thrusting mine into the air too.
“I never got to be stupid and wild and a drunk idiot who tries to skateboard down a staircase.” I kicked my legs and the swing went higher still.
“I did a bit of that in my youth,” Noah confessed.
“See,” I said, going higher still as Noah followed suit. “I never did. Ever.”
“I’m sorry.” Noah looked over at me, his hair moving back and forth with the motion of his swing. Our eyes locked. He was swinging higher than me now, and I leaned back further in my seat to match him. Noah laughed and did the same, making his swing shoot up into the air. I laughed as I tried to catch up to him.
“I’m going to beat you!” he shouted as he got higher.
I squealed in excited terror as I threw my body back and forth, making the swing go so high that I got an actual fright when the chains made a little jolt on my way back down.
“No, you’re not!” I screamed, and kicked my legs with abandon.
“TRY ME!” Noah shouted back, reaching new heights now that I just couldn’t match, no matter how much I tried. We were laughing so loudly that my ribs hurt. The laughter made it impossible to kick our legs anymore and we both stopped, simply enjoying the feeling of our swings beginning to slow down and then finally, finally, stop. I kicked my shoes in the dust below, sending a little puff of it flying, and watched it as it settled back down. This dust had been kicked and moved by so many laughing children over the years, but not me. I turned to Noah. He was resting his head against one of the chains, watching me.
“No wonder . . .” I said, as something dawned on me.
“No wonder what?” Noah asked.
“No wonder Zen is the way she is.”
“You didn’t get to experience life, growing up.”
“No.”
“You watched life pass you by through a pane of glass.”
“Yes. Everything always happened out there.” I kicked up the red dust again, and it went everywhere. “No wonder I have no personality.”
“That’s not true. You do have a personality.”
I looked up at him and rolled my eyes. “Yes, beige, bland, chicken-eating, no-one-ever-notices, gray-cardigan-wearing, no-date-going me. That’s a real sparkling personality. No, it’s hard to develop a personality from a hospital bed, or behind a sheet of glass. I feel like I lost who I was in the field that day.”
Noah looked thoughtful for a while. “So, let’s go out and find it. Let’s go out and re-live it all.”
“Re-live what?” I asked.
“Let’s go and be dumb teens! Let’s get into trouble and stay out late and be wild and crazy and get grounded because we snuck in after curfew and threw up on our mom’s carpet.”
“Eeew.”
“Yes, it wasn’t one of my finest moments,” Noah said. “So, let’s go!”
“Where?”
“To a cool party!”
“Wha— how? I mean, how and where would we even go?” I shook my head.
Noah looked around, and then, as if a lightbulb had gone off inside him. “I know exactly who to talk to about that!”
. . . And that’s how we found ourselves driving to a club ten minutes later with a back seat full of eighteen-year-old skater boys with black hoodies, purple hair and more piercings than I’d ever seen on anyone’s face before.
CHAPTER 50
“Where the hell are we going?” I whispered at Noah as we started driving into the dimly lit downtown area. Honestly, this did not look like a great place. This did not look like the kind of place you wanted to be when the lights went down. This looked like