Reclaim - Aly Martinez Page 0,32
known for his community service, so I included my last twenty bucks in the envelope, hoping I could bribe him into following through.
Shocker, he didn’t. But I spent every day for a month checking the mail and listening to the messages left on the answering machine, hoping he would.
When Christmas rolled around, I was sure we’d at least go to Clovert to exchange gifts. A fire at the papermill changed everything though. Dad was working overtime, and Mom didn’t want to leave him alone for the holidays even long enough for a day trip to see our family. So there I was, once again stuck in Alberton. On a phone call on Christmas Eve, I finally got the nerve to tell my grandma about Nora and asked if she could find the Stewarts’ phone number for me.
She laughed and told me girls were the least of my worries right now, but if I kept up with the basketball drills, made the track team at school, and got honor roll for the second semester, she’d talk to my dad about letting me spend the summer in Clovert again.
Honor roll I could handle.
Even basketball drills each morning in the privacy of my own driveway were doable.
However, track—putting one foot in front of the other and not falling on my face in front of the whole school—was my own personal, custom-made nightmare.
But with a lot of practice, honing my skill, and fine-tuning my natural abilities, I managed to become Alberton Middle School’s fifth-string long jumper and water boy. I did way more of the water boying than the long jumping, but hey, I’d kept up my end of the bargain with my grandma.
And just a few days ago, she’d made good on her end by convincing my parents that another summer of family bootcamp was exactly what I needed.
“I did try,” I told Nora. “I swear I did. I called in favors from my archnemesis for God’s sake, but I couldn’t find you. And I’m sorry. But I’ve been working my ass off all year long just to be sure I could get back here. And you’re standing here, telling me you tolerated me?”
Her eyes flashed wide, and her surprise fueled my fire.
“You know what? Why didn’t you hitchhike to Alberton? Why didn’t you find my grandparents and ask them where I was? Why didn’t you give me the benefit of the doubt that maybe, just maybe, I wanted to be here that night to say goodbye but something happened? To me. Did you ever just stop to think maybe this isn’t the Nora Stewart show?” Sucking in a deep breath, I shook my head and dug into my pocket. “You know what. Forget it. If I wanted to spend my summer in a place where I was tolerated, I’d have stayed at home.”
I threw our ten-dollar bill, which I carried with me everywhere for no other reason than it reminded me of her at her feet, and turned to stomp off.
I wasn’t sure if my heart had taken a single beat since I’d laid eyes on him again.
My chest hurt and my lungs burned, but it was the nearly constant battle to keep my tears at bay that surprised me the most.
He’d missed me.
And he’d tried to come back.
And he’d wanted to say goodbye.
I wasn’t sure if any of it was true. In my experience, lies were as easy to come by as sunrises.
Just hearing him say those words were a gasp of air to a drowning soul.
The ten. Oh, God. It was ours. I could still see his sloppy chicken scratches scrawled across the top. He’d kept it. Nine full months and he’d never spent it. Not on one of his coveted Cokes or a candy bar. Nothing.
If I was being honest with myself, he was right. I had been living in the Nora Stewart show. The night he hadn’t shown up to say goodbye, I hadn’t lain on the bank, staring up at the sky, worrying that something had happened to him. Let’s be honest, this was Camden. It was equally as possible he’d fallen into a ditch and broken his leg, but my mind had gone straight to how I wasn’t good enough.
I wasn’t worth his time.
I wasn’t worth his attention.
I wasn’t worth him staying.
So he’d moved on. Gone home. Never cared about me in the first place. And never looked back.
In my head, Camden had abandoned me just like my mother had because that was more believable. It