forcing Coach to take me out of the game, which means we’ll probably lose. Well, guess what? I’m pissed too. But some of the guys, like Dave, are looking at me like they feel sorry for me, the same way Mabel looked at me earlier this morning. Poor Ryden Brooks. His life is so fucked that he can’t even keep his head straight.
And the saddest part is, they don’t know the half of it.
The track is like a belt around the soccer field—on my left, inside the belt, the team is practicing. On my right are the stands. I pass by the home stands, then the visitors’ stands, again and again. As I approach the home team side for the third time, my eyes land where Meg and Mabel sat during the championship game last December. Meg was six months pregnant and looked like a shell of her former self. But she pushed herself out of the house and cheered so much during that game that if you didn’t look at her, just listened, you would never know how sick she really was.
She was my good luck charm. Downey won its fourth state championship in a row last year, and Meg was there for all of it.
You know, that may have been the last moment things were truly great.
• • •
There is one place I haven’t checked yet.
A few days later, I get up early and drive to Meg’s and my secret spot at the beach. I haven’t been here since she got too sick to come with me. It looks exactly the same, right down to the half-empty Sprite bottle stuck in the sand that we must have forgotten to take home with us last time.
I scan the area for a journal peeking out of the sand or sitting in the grass. I even look up at the trees to see if there’s anything nestled in the branches. There’s nothing here. I don’t know what I was expecting. Even if there had been a journal here, the weather would have gotten to it by now.
Hope sits in her harness on my chest. Her wails feel all wrong here; they don’t mix with the serenity of this place. But then, this moment is strange for lots of reasons. This is the spot where she went from being a whole lot of nothing to the smallest beginnings of a something.
I bounce her up and down to try to keep her calm. It sort of works.
I sit in the sand and close my eyes, letting the sounds and smells and memories of the place fill every empty part of me. It all happened right here. It’s still happening right here, like one of those weird sci-fi movies where time is stuck in a loop, and the people in it are trapped, destined to repeat a moment over and over without ever moving forward.
May 24…
“Turn left up here,” Meg said. It was the night of the dance—the one we were skipping. I’d just picked her up from her giant house and met her pod people parents for the first time. They hadn’t been very welcoming.
“Uh, why?”
She gave me a sly smile. “Just do it.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
We drove on for a while, Meg dictating the turns, me having no clue where she could be taking us.
“Okay, now slow down,” she said when we got to an isolated one-lane road surrounded by woods. It was still light out, but everything got really dim as we continued driving under the leafy branches. “There’s a turn soon, but I can never remember exactly where it is.”
“A turnoff here?” I asked. “That leads to what? There’s nothing here but trees.”
“Ah, ye of little faith. Oh, there it is! Right past that weird branch that’s sticking out. Turn right.”
Sure enough, there was a tiny dirt road just wide enough for my car. I maneuvered us onto the path and inched the car forward at about three miles per hour. The road, if you could call it that, was really curvy and rocky. I had to lean forward over the steering wheel as we crept along, being extra careful not to drive over any tire-puncturing rocks or cute, furry forest creatures. The Sable wasn’t exactly made for off-roading. Low hanging tree limbs and rogue, leaf-covered branches snapped against the windows—I felt like I was going through some sort of prehistoric car wash.
And then Meg was telling me to park and we were out of the car and walking through the woods.