“You know, Parker …” Molly blurts out with some energy, maybe impatience, but then doesn’t continue. She sighs.
“What?”
“Never mind.”
I want to let it drop, too. I haven’t spent enough time with Molly to know if I’m going to like her or just tolerate her—the amount of energy I’m going to put into this depends a lot on which it’s going to be—but either way we’re going to be with each other more than with anyone else, all day, every day, all year.
“You can’t take it back,” I say, just as a fact, not an accusation. “I know there’s something in there now. Spit it out before it gets infected.”
I can hear her breathing. Thinking breaths. I calculate whether to prod her more or wait her out.
“It’s just …” she finally says. “I know we only just met …”
Another breath.
“Do you want me to help you?” I ask. “Or let you flounder around some more?”
Molly blows air out her nose. I can’t tell if it’s the laughing kind or the eye-rolling kind.
“Yeah, sure, help me out.” I hear a little of both. A good sign.
Embedded in the concrete path under my sneakers is the bumpy metal plaque describing the founding of John Quincy Adams High School in 1979. I know exactly where I am.
“Here.” I hold out my cane. “Fold this up for me?”
She takes it. “Why?”
I turn and walk briskly toward the stairs, arms swinging, counting in my head … six … five … four … three …
“Parker!” Molly scurries after me.
… two … one … step down …
I march down the stairs, counting them, hitting them hard and confident, legs straight like a soldier, each time sliding my foot back to knock my heel against the prior step.
At the bottom I keep marching and counting silently till I reach the curb where I know Aunt Celia’s car will park. I stop and spin around.
“Cane, please?”
It touches my hand. She didn’t collapse it like I asked. I do and slide it into my bag.
“Maybe you’re thinking I’m a stereotypical blind girl who’s out to prove she doesn’t need anyone’s charity. But instead of being nice to people who are just trying to help her, she’s a bitter and resentful bitch because she’s missing out on something wonderful that she thinks everyone else takes for granted.”
Now I’m starting to wonder if Molly is just a loud breather, though I didn’t notice it in the library and it was pretty quiet in there.
“Am I warm?” I ask.
“Not very. But not everyone has to be.”
It takes me a moment to get it—which isn’t like me at all—and now it’s too late to laugh.
I smile. “Touché.”
Aunt Celia’s car pulls up and stops.
“I suppose you can tell if that’s your aunt’s car, just by the sound?”
“Pretty much, yeah.”
“My dog can do that, too.”
I turn my head to face her, something I don’t often bother doing.
“I’m starting to like you, Molly Ray. But believe me, it’s a mixed blessing.”
“Oh, don’t worry. I believe it.”
The car door thunks open. Aunt Celia calls out, too loudly, “Parker, it’s me, hop in!”
I sigh, definitely outwardly.
School was okay. Better than it could have been. Even though half the people didn’t know the other half, everyone knew enough people so it wasn’t too awkward. It’ll take time to get all the noobs up to speed on The Rules, but I have plenty of help.
Some people I don’t know very well were helping me with the noobs. Maybe just to be nice, or maybe it makes them feel important telling other people what to do. Or maybe they were protecting me like I’m the school mascot. That would really suck. I’m nobody’s poster child.
The ride home was quiet, just how I like it now. I don’t know what cars are like when I’m not in them but I get the idea people talk at me more because they think I’m bored sitting there without any scenery. My view never changes, but other than different people and cars on the street every day, I don’t think their view changes much either.
I told Aunt Celia a couple months ago she didn’t need to entertain me while driving; now she doesn’t talk in the car at all. She’s black or white about everything. I said it nicely—I wasn’t telling her to shut up or anything—but she clammed up anyway. Maybe her feelings got hurt but it’s not my fault if people don’t like the truth.
“Hi, Big P,” my cousin Petey calls down from the landing.
“Hey, Little P. How was school?”
He trots down and sits on the third-from-the-bottom step next to me.
“Boring.”
“You’re too young to be bored at school. You’re not supposed to get bored until the fourth grade.”
“I was bored in the second grade, too,” he says proudly.
“So was I,” I whisper.
“Why are you sitting here?” he whispers back, probably just because I whispered first.
This truth I don’t want to tell, not to Petey anyway. It’s a tough enough situation as it is, my house filled with relatives—who I used to only cross paths with every couple years—now sleeping in my dead dad’s room and home office. I don’t want to tell him how I miss talking with Dad on the ride home from school, or how we wouldn’t be done when we got home so we’d sit at the kitchen table and talk some more, drinking iced tea, until he finally had to get back to work. I don’t want to tell Petey how I didn’t think about this until I climbed into Aunt Celia’s car today, when the silence—which I created and now can’t break—sucked all the air out of the car until I thought I’d pass out. How I want to sit at the kitchen table and talk to Dad now, but if I do everyone will think it’s weird, me sitting alone in the kitchen doing nothing. I don’t care if people think I’m weird, but they would bug me with questions.
Like Petey’s doing now, because sitting on the stairs doing nothing is weirder than sitting at the kitchen table. But I don’t want to tell him that instead of sitting in my room having a one-sided conversation with my dad where no one can see, I want to do it in a place where I feel him: in the kitchen, in his office (off-limits, since it’s my cousin Sheila’s room now), or at the base of the stairs, where I never sat with him in life but sometimes do in