Chapter 18

A neon-yellow indoor soccer ball whizzed past my head.

The ball hadn’t been aimed at me, of course. Everyone could see I was standing on the sideline, deliberately sitting this one out, like I did most active games at youth group. Of course, it was my choice to wear my prosthesis. Without it, I could’ve hopped and participated. But I chose to wear it because the social aspect of youth group was more important than the dodgeball aspect, and I did better socially when I was wearing the leg. At least I had Evelyn to keep me company.

“Remember when you’d spend hours studying for the SATs every Saturday?” she asked, granting me the dignity of ignoring the near miss with the soccer ball. After all, she knew how it felt to be left out.

“Yeah. Every Saturday.”

“Were you doing practice tests?”

“Sometimes. Or memorizing vocabulary flash cards.”

She tucked an errant strand of brown hair behind her ear. She looked over at me with her manga-sized eyes and her curled eyelashes. She had a tall, thin, boxy frame, so our eyes met at the same height.

“Have you ever thought about doing something, you know, fun with your weekends?”

“First of all, that was last semester. I’m done with the SATs. Second of all, it was fun.” It was spring semester, and I was back home after training in Colorado. I wasn’t going to school, though, since I’d finished all my classes in December.

“Studying SAT words? Fun?”

“Yes, it was ubiquitous fun.” After I said it I realized it was probably not the proper use of the word. Oh well.

“Seriously?”

“Yeah, I enjoy standardized tests.”

“No, I mean did you seriously just use an SAT word to describe how much fun you were having while studying for the SATs?”

“I did. Thank you for noticing.”

Joe Slater blew his whistle, and one of the dodgeball teams was declared victorious.

“You’re so weird.”

“Again, thank you.”

“How many times did you end up taking the SATs?”

“Six.”

“That’s a lot.”

“Had fun every time.”

“Now that you’re done, maybe you should call me more often.”

Ah. There it was. The point of this conversation.

“Maybe I will.”

She smiled and poked me with her finger. “You should.”

It annoyed me slightly when she flirted like this. Because, in fact, I was in love with her, or as close to love as you can be when you’re seventeen and a member of the opposite sex has become your quasi best friend.

Evelyn’s flirting always made me wonder: What if we were more than best friends? What would that be like? But as I said, it was slightly annoying, too. This was because of Mason, her on-again, off-again boyfriend.

“How are things with Mason?” I meant it partly as a reminder: This is why I don’t call you more often. You have a boyfriend.

She sighed. “We’re taking a break.”

This sort of drama was nothing new. “You want to talk about it?”

Talking about her boyfriend was, of course, a total Friend Zone move. But that’s exactly what she and I were: friends.

She looked down at her feet. The balls were flying again; another round had begun.

“He was home from college this weekend.”

“Yeah?”

“But he said long distance was too hard.”

“And he wanted to take a break?”

She nodded, her weight shifting on her closely watched feet.

“That sucks,” I offered.

“Yeah. It sucks.”

“How long has it been… since… how long have you been together?”

“This time?” She smirked and rolled her eyes. “Six months, I guess. But before that it was a year.”

“That’s a long time.”

“He’s right,” she said. “I mean, it is hard. Long distance, I mean. It’s really hard. But still…”

“But still,” I echoed.

Like everyone in the history of the world who has had a crush on his or her best friend, I was too scared to tell her, because if I did I might lose her completely. And the sharp bite of losing her completely would be far worse than the one-sided romantic arrangement we had going.

Joe Slater blew a whistle, and the second game was over. We, the two disabled kids, joined the rest of the group.

I had a choice about whether I wanted to wear my leg or not. Evelyn, though, didn’t have such a choice. Early in high school, she was a standout soccer star, a talented athlete with the gift of speed. But then she contracted early-onset rheumatoid arthritis, and now her joints moved too stiffly for soccer. I guess she could’ve played dodgeball tonight if she had wanted to, but her knees would swell up painfully for several days afterward. So instead the two of us stood and watched from the sidelines. It was something we had never explicitly discussed, this thing we shared. I guess it was both too obvious to warrant discussion and too painful to justify it.