“Start a boxing club,” Clive says.
I look at him like, what? Are you kidding? “Do you think I want to hang out with the uppity bitches in our school?”
“I thought it would be fun, but you have a point there.”
So I’m a one-person boxing club, running every other day and boxing two times a week which my mom can’t understand and neither can Anthony who should be working out with me, but that’s another story.
After Clive and I go out for teriyaki salmon and vegetable tempura and miso soup inside shiny black lacquer bento boxes so that the whole thing feels like a black tie dinner, I go back to his house where I practically live now and change into sweats.
“Gia, be careful,” Clive says. “Remember what Anthony keeps saying.”
“I’m careful, I’m careful.”
“Do you want Thomas to ride along with you?”
“I’m fine, Clive, don’t worry.”
I don’t know if it’s the full moon or my music or something inside my head or someplace else, but I run to Riverside Park and keep running along the Hudson River as the sun sets and the sky gets darker and the lamplights cast a hazy yellow glow on the water. I start to get crazy thinking about things like when the American Indians were here before us and how they believed not in a separate God, but a godliness in the whole world, in the mountains and the rivers and the sky and in the plants and the animals, a kind of spiritual web that connected everyone and everything.
All that makes me feel like I’m part of a bigger plan. Maybe it’s not exactly what the priest in our church says, but I can’t actually pinpoint the last time I was there anyway because, even though my mom prays on a daily basis, I don’t go anymore. I’m not sure why that is, but I think it has something to do with feeling that religion has let me down and hasn’t given me any right answers. Either that or I’m asking the wrong questions.
I run and keep running and start to think about everything in my life, and then—flash—there’s Michael’s face and I remember exactly how he looks with his movie-star green eyes and thick dark lashes. And how he looked at me and how he kissed and tasted and how hot it felt to kiss him back and feel his lips on mine and be held in his arms, and I try to forget that because it’s over and hopeless and stupid, and I start running faster and then see a car slow down on the side of the drive and I watch it out of the corner of my eye even though it’s probably nothing, and I try to out run the memories and shake off the emotional whiplash, and pretend, pretend, pretend I’m getting over feeling what I’m feeling, but my brain is stronger than my heart. And it’s just not buying it.
A figure gets out of the car and walks in a crouched-down way and crosses the highway, darting past cars going sixty that are honking at him like, what the fuck? He heads toward the running path, which is totally insane and suicidal, and I run faster and faster, and he crosses one lane and waits and then he’s almost near me when I hear an earsplitting crash and whine and wham of one car careening into another and then another and then—oh my god—the guy running toward me gets hit and his body goes shooting up into the air like a rocket. I scream and scream and can’t stop screaming and so does everyone else on the running track and I stand still, frozen, as the body drops to the ground and a car horn gets stuck and won’t stop beeping and it’s like a nuclear alarm to the world of something insane and out of control taking place, and inside my head somewhere I hear my dad’s voice screaming, “Run, Gia! Run away! Run for your life!”
I turn and go the other way, my heart pounding like it’s been squeezed up into my mouth, and I don’t stop running, sweat covering me like a layer of oily rain. I keep going and going until I’m back at the other end of Manhattan, where I slow down and finally start to walk again.
One foot. In front. Of. The other. My body trying to feel normal again, even though I doubt it ever will be because of the image of the crash and the body propelled toward the sky is now tattooed on my brain.