Amber

Chapter 31

March 28, 2015

Dear Journal,

We need to catch up.

You've missed a lot. For starters—I'm sixteen now ...

For the record, it feels not entirely different from being fifteen, except I can now legally drive the car I don't have while looking at my awkwardly smiling face from the photo on the driver's license I don't possess.

I guess that's the lesson of growing older. You learn that all of the things you reach for continue to grow right along with you, just enough so that you can never grow enough to catch them.

Hannah took me out for ice cream on my birthday—one of the only normal things she's done lately. But it wasn't even normal because she was dressed sort of like a monk and kept asking all of the people behind the counter if they felt like they were alive or just living. Their responses were mostly in the form of asking her how many scoops she wanted and if she had a peanut allergy.

I've had Brad over to our house a few times, but they were brief visits with, like, my parents around and us all sitting downstairs and them asking him questions to get to know him. Sort of the game show-like question-and-answer format that's apparently necessary before he can make the big ascent up to my room.

And then the other day, I went over to Brad's house for the first time ...

Brad asked me in his typical little aloof and indirect way.

"My stepmom is making a casserole Thursday night, and she always makes extra. Do you like chicken pot pie? It's sort of like that except with rice and no carrots."

Brad was quiet the next few days leading up to Thursday, like someone had pressed the mute button on the Brad remote and it got stuck that way. I knew he was nervous because I've known him long enough now to know that cool and relaxed Brad is actually sweaty-palmed and pants-shitting Brad. The more quiet and calm he seems, the more he's breaking apart inside.

I wasn't sure if Brad had brought up the subject of me coming over to his dad and stepmom, or if his dad and stepmom brought it up to him. All I knew was that I wasn't about to bring it up to Brad for fear of him panicking and aborting the whole thing. (Guys are sensitive and fragile creatures behind a hard outer shell. Like eggs. Except when you crack them open, the clean-up is a hell of a lot messier.)

Brad's house looked the same from the outside as it had the first time I saw it. Except this time the basketball hoop showcased a new net on a sagging rim, and the lone tree in the front was starting to sprout leaves instead of shed them.

Brad has told me about his dog—a golden retriever named Benny who's Brad's favorite member of the household. But he failed to mention that Benny is fifteen years old! (One foot in the grave by standard people-to-doggy-years conversion.) So I was more than a little surprised when the first thing I saw after Brad opened the front door was a slow-moving oval of brown fluff with chronic sad face and all of the energy of a doormat limping along the wooden floors to greet us. Brad provided the introduction and then spent the next ten to ten thousand seconds convincing Benny of how good of a boy he was.

God, there is nothing more adorable than a cute boy in love with his equally cute dog. Probably the number one reason for female fatalities caused by heart explosion.

I tried not to think back to the time when I thought Brad's house was in another dimension. How I had thought it would be easier to visit Saturn than it would be to navigate all of the black holes that threatened to suck me inside before I'd have a chance to step inside of that front door. There were so many reasons why I didn't belong there. So many alternative paths of our lives that were somehow avoided. So many asteroids that could have bumped me off course from arriving there, hand firmly in Brad's as he led me through the foyer into the kitchen where his family sat—all smiles and finger waving—as if Brad mentioned how much it melts my heart.