11
AFTER DINNER, MOM INVITES PHIL to come to the park with us. We go a lot in the summer after supper, when it’s finally cooling down. There’s this loop Mom likes to walk—to help herself unwind, she says—but most of the time Xan and I do our own thing. There’s a playground with a swing set, a koi pond, and a bandstand for when they have concerts in the summer.
A lot of the time, Filipe comes with us and we’ll bring a Frisbee or a baseball to toss around, but after what happened a couple hours ago, I don’t even bother to invite him. Don’t want to get in the way of his one-on-one time with Theo.
It’s not that I need to have Filipe all to myself or anything. He can be friends with whoever he wants. I just don’t get what the big deal was today—why it needed to be one-on-one. And anyway, if somehow it did, why couldn’t he find some way to say it, instead of being a jerk while waiting for me to figure it out?
Filipe and I used to be able to just tell each other stuff. But now it feels like there’s stuff he’s not saying—that he’s purposely leaving out. And at the same time, he’s mad at me for not being able to read his mind.
When we get out of the car at the park, Xan’s about to run off to the playground like usual when Mom says, “Hey, hey, not so fast.” Xan stops in his tracks. “I thought we could walk the loop together. The four of us, I mean.”
The four of us? I don’t exactly want Mom to walk the loop alone with Phil. But the alternative might be worse.
“Can I look for sticks?” Xan perks up. “And rocks?”
“Absolutely,” Mom says. “But you can only bring one of each back. Got it?”
I have a feeling Xan will push back on this later, but for now he says, “Got it.”
All I want to do is lag behind them, be Xan’s two extra arms for holding sticks and rocks, but Phil isn’t making that easy.
“Heard you were the hero at the library today, Drew.”
“What? No I wasn’t,” I say, shoving my hands in my pockets as Phil slows down so that he’s next to me while Mom helps Xander with a stick that’s too big.
“So modest,” he says. “Just like—” He clears his throat. Just like who? I wonder, but he doesn’t leave me room to ask. “Anyway, so your mom says you’re a big reader, too. Makes sense, I guess. All that time around books. What’s your favorite? Or favorites? I know it’s not easy to choose just one.”
“I don’t know,” I say, even though of course I do. Right now it’s a tie between Holes and The Hobbit. I’ve reread both so many times my copies are falling apart.
“Well, what’ve you read recently that you liked?”
How come he needs to know so badly? In a day or two he’s going to leave town and I’ll never have to see him again. Right? That’s how Mom explained this whole deal to me, but suddenly I don’t feel so sure about any of it. If he’s got a thing for Mom, what if he—what if he stays?
“I said I don’t know, all right?”
A snap as Xander’s branch breaks. Mom turns back. “Drew,” she says sharply.
“Sorry,” I mumble.
“It’s okay,” Phil says.
I wish he would speed up or fall back behind, but it’s like the dude can’t take a hint. Maybe I need to ask him the right prying question. Something to get him off my back.
“Do you have kids?” I ask. “Or a wife? Or a husband?” I add quickly, covering all the bases. You never know.
“Drew, that’s enough.” Mom’s holding a big stick, and while she’s only holding it because of Xan, I decide to knock it off for now. We’ve still got a ways to go till we finish the loop.
“No, no, that’s okay. It’s all right to be curious,” Phil says. “I’m not married, but I’d like to have a family someday. Be a father.” He glances ahead at Mom for a second, but she’s not looking back at him. She’s making sure Xan doesn’t run too fast with two sticks in his hands.
For a bit there, Phil goes quiet until Xan makes him carry a few sticks because he’s trying to decide which is his favorite. I try to pull out my cell phone and play a game, but Mom notices and makes me put it away.
The funny thing is, for the whole loop, even though it’s the four of us, it feels like Phil keeps trying to talk to me more than anyone else. Maybe he thinks it’s a challenge. I’m the one person who doesn’t want to be his pal, so he’s going to keep at it, relentlessly, until I change my mind.
Unless it’s something else.
After spending the night tossing and turning, I lie awake as the sun comes up. Between the curry Phil made for dinner and all that weirdness with Filipe, it was impossible to sleep.
Sure, he and Theo are on the soccer team together and the whole team went to camp last week for some kind of team-building thing. But Theo is older. He doesn’t even go to the same school as us. And I heard a rumor that he goes to parties with high schoolers. So why does he suddenly want to hang out with Filipe? Since when did Filipe become cool enough to hang out with Theo?
It doesn’t make sense. None of it does. Not one part of this summer.
At least I don’t have to worry about Audrey anymore.
I’m lying facedown on my pillow when I hear that sound again. Not the birds chirping. And not the sound of a motorcycle either. That unmistakable squeak of the sliding glass door opening. And then the clapping. The feet clomping on the ground.
I pull the pillow around my ears to block out the sound—the reminder of Phil’s existence in our house—except it doesn’t work. There’s a part of me—my inner brain or whatever—that won’t shut up. That needs to know why he’s doing it.
My alarm clock reads 5:35. Mom is still asleep in her bedroom—will be for at least another hour. I tiptoe by Xan’s room, where the door is ajar. His arms are hanging off the side of the bed, his face planted into a pillow. Typical Xan.
Downstairs, I pull open the sliding glass door that leads out to the back patio.
There he is, except he isn’t doing jumping jacks anymore. I don’t know what to call what he’s doing except being a weirdo. His feet turn in and out as he jumps side to side. His arms are up in the air, flailing. If it weren’t for the fact that he’s like, six-two and in pretty good shape, I’d say he could be mistaken for someone in a senior-citizen aerobics class at the Y.
I step off the patio and onto the dewy grass and clear my throat.
He keeps doing it.
I clear my throat again, this time louder. “Eh. Hem.”
Nothing! He’s either in the zone or doing his very best job of ignoring me.
“What are you doing?”
This time he stops. Feet flat on the ground. He tamped down that whole area of grass with his jumping.
He wears a big stupid grin on his face. “Hey, Drew.”
“What are you doing?” I ask again, scratching a bug bite on my elbow.
“Do you want to give it a try?”
I shake my head. “Not really. Can you just … I mean, what are you even doing? And why do you have to do it? Every. Single. Morning?” Okay, two mornings in a row. But still. Clearly there’s a pattern here.
“Whew! One question at a time, buddy. And while you’re at it, can you let a man catch his breath?” He smiles again.
I do not smile back.
“I’m trying to think of the best way to explain it, but I think that’s just it. You can’t completely explain it. You need to try it to see.”
“No thanks.”
Phil stares at me, still catching his breath.
“You know, you look like a weirdo when you do it.” I imagine Filipe—or worse, Theo—catching me out here, jumping around in my pajamas with Phil, and what they’d say.
Phil laughs. “I’ll bet. You know what—that’s why I do it now, in the wee hours of the morning before anyone’s awake. No one can see me. Well, except …” He gestures to me.
Does he know I watched yesterday?
“I’ll close my eyes. Heck, I’ll turn around. No one’s watching you,” he says. “Promise.”
There’s something about the way he looks at me, almost like how the kids stare up at me right before I begin a puppet show. And for some reason, this time I can’t say no.
“Fine,” I say. “But you have to turn around.”
He does. “You gotta get warmed up first. Try hopping a little bit. Keep your feet just an inch or so off the ground. I’ll do it too.”
I do what he says. I hop. Once and then again, my feet barely clearing the grass. I feel stupid, and I swear someone is watching us, but I peek for a second, and the backyard is as empty as it was when I came out. Next thing I know, we’re going higher, higher and higher until we’re no longer hopping but full-on jumping. Our arms, waving in the air. Our ankles, turning in and out, in and out.
My feet hop left and right, left and right. My heart thumps loudly in my chest as the ground seems to shake beneath my feet. And soon that’s all I can hear. The thumping on the ground, the pounding of my heart. My breath.
“Feels good, huh?” Phil asks.
I’m totally panting now. Maybe? All I know for sure is I definitely don’t feel as much like an idiot as I thought I would at the start. “I guess?”
“Okay, we’ll keep going for another couple minutes.”
It’s like I can actually feel the blood pumping through my body. Out from my heart and into my lungs, my arms and legs, my head, my feet, my stomach.
“Aaaand stop.”
My heels hit the ground.
“Turn your palms out.”
The slightest breeze tickles my upturned palms.
“And breathe.”
My whole body feels tingly now that I’ve stopped moving. I don’t even mean to, but I smile.
“Pretty amazing, huh?”
I’m not ready to give Phil the satisfaction he’s looking for. “It feels all right.”
Finally I turn and face Phil.
“So,” Phil says, “you asked me why I do it.”
“And?”
“I do it every morning because … well, because as you can probably see, it makes me feel alive. For a few moments, I like feeling my whole glorious body working for me. It’s an amazing thing, life, and I don’t want to ever forget.”
The smile on my face is gone. I chew on the inside of my cheek. What’s he trying to say? That I don’t think life is amazing? That if I don’t jump outside in my pajamas every morning like a weirdo, someday I’m going to do what Dad did?
He has no right—none at all—to come into our house and act like he knows everything. What does he think he’s doing, anyway, coming all the way out here from Colorado? Does he think he’s got some magical solution to fix my family? Fix me? That he’s got it all figured out? Because he doesn’t.
My ears get hot, and before I can manage to say any of that to him, I’m darting across the patio and slamming the sliding glass door behind me. The glass rattles so hard I think for a second it might fall out of the door and shatter into a million pieces. It doesn’t, but it should.
Maybe it’d wake Mom up, wake her up from all this. Phil in our house, taking Dad’s place for a couple days? It doesn’t change what happened. Nothing ever will.
But there’s something else rattling too.
My heart, which was beating so hard for the past ten minutes, is now constricting. Banging around in there. The empty cage of my ribs.