my brother.
While I appreciated the rare effort, it wasn’t making it any easier on me. If anything, it made it harder, as I realized more and more that both of their minds had clearly already been made up.
“So, what do you think?” Dad asked, proving my point.
“It’s good, yeah,” I replied, brushing my hand along a barbell. “If Jake starts lifting weights, he’s gonna kick all of our asses,” I made an attempt at a joke, and Dad acknowledged it with a soft chuckle.
“Yeah, right? God help us.”
He sidled up to me, tipping his mouth toward my ear. “I think Mom wants to fill out the paperwork before we leave. But what do you think?”
The sinking sensation in my stomach was indescribable, but all I could do was shrug and say, “I don’t think it really matters what I think, does it?”
“Don’t say that, Blake. You know we care.”
“We?” I challenged, hardening my glare.
He smiled apologetically and shrugged, answering my question without words.
I sighed, forcing myself to climb down from my defensive anger. “Don’t you think you’re settling? There are other places. Hell, there are other options. And you’re, what? Just gonna dump him in the first one you check out?”
He flinched and I knew I’d gotten to him. My words had stung, and that hadn’t been my intention. “Sorry,” I began to apologize, but he shook his head.
“I’ll try to talk to your mother.”
Breathing a sigh of relief, I turned to face the door and saw Jake. His eyes were fixated on me as he gripped his iPod in one hand and his headphones in the other. Furrowing my brow, I walked toward him and asked, “What’s up, buddy?”
He met my eyes with that knowing gaze of his. The one that never failed to irk me. “You’re blue.”
“Blue?” I furrowed my brow and he nodded.
“Blue. Like Grover,” he stated calmly.
I’d never been given blue before. I’d been so many colors of the rainbow, mostly leaning on the negative side, but never blue. It left me unsettled until I got in the car with Jake and my parents and looked it up on my phone.
Apparently, according to the internet, blue had many meanings, but what I repeatedly found was that blue was the color of intuition and support. The color of someone that others find help in. Someone very generous, in their time and otherwise. My heart thumped as I read, as I connected with the color more and more with every webpage I visited. It was such a vibrant, positive smudge on everything I thought to be me, but it clicked. It fit and it simply worked.
I glanced at Jake, sitting beside me in the backseat. He was drawing, a blue crayon held between his fingers. He circled the outline of a black figure holding a sword and shield, pressing the crayon firmly against the page.
I swallowed at my nerves, as I stared at his picture, and I asked, “Whatcha drawing, buddy?”
“You,” he replied simply, not bothering to look at me.
My snorted laugh was forced. “I don’t own a sword or shield. That’d be weird.”
“You don’t need one,” he answered, his tone flat as he circled the figure over and over again in blue. “Don’t worry, Blake. You’ll make it better. You’re brave and you’re a warrior. You’ll make it better.”
I smiled, reminding myself that my parents hadn’t filled out the paperwork yet, because of me. And even though my color of choice was typically black, blue didn’t seem like such a bad color to wear either.
***
“Blake! How are you? Everything okay?” Dr. Travetti asked, opening her office door to me.
“Well, Doc,” I began, entering the room and dropping myself onto the couch, “I guess that depends on your definition of okay.”
She sat in her chair, crossing one leg over the other. Leaning forward, she grabbed her clipboard from off the coffee table and suggested, as usual, “How about you start with how your weekend went?”
I tipped my head back against the couch and studied the ceiling in search of the best words to describe my weekend. Yet, even with thousands of words in the dictionary, all I could adequately come up with was, “Surprising.”
Dr. Travetti urged me to continue, as I knew she would, and I told her about the photoshoot, about how I had called Audrey and invited her to hang out while I had my picture taken. I told her how I then went out with Audrey, Cee, and Shane for dinner, making it the first