15

I WAIT UNTIL THE NEXT DRILL IS UNDERWAY BEFORE TELLING Coach we need to leave and waving goodbye to everyone from the sidelines. Sibby’s eyes go wide and she holds a pretend cell up to her ear. “Call me later!” she mouths.

The car is completely silent for the first couple minutes of our drive home, and I stare out my window at the streets crammed with multifamily houses.

Eventually Mom says, “No one expects you to be able to keep up right now, you know. You could have been honest with them.”

I stay angled away from her. “I’m already one of the newbies on the team; I don’t want them to see me as weak.”

Although what will they think when I don’t show up at the next practice? Because I can’t imagine my fatigue is going to get any better from here—not until I have a new liver inside me.

I wish I’d never gone tonight. In English class this morning, I’d actually half hoped for symptoms so it wouldn’t feel like this disease was eating me up inside so mysteriously, but now I regret ever thinking that. Being oblivious makes everything easier to deny, makes it easier to cling to positivity.

“I can’t say I didn’t feel the same way about being seen as weak when I was starting out at the firm, so I get it. Although I think maybe under these circumstances—”

“Mom, can we please not talk about this right now?”

There’s nothing but her small sigh to indicate she heard me. I catch myself fiddling with my Rolldemort necklace, in the same absentminded way I do a lot, but this time the metal feels heavy in my fingers. I slip a hand underneath my hair and slide the clasp to the front of my neck, but I can’t work the catch free without two hands, which would attract Mom’s attention, so I tuck it out of sight under my sweatshirt instead. I’m not Rolldemort right now. I don’t know who I am.

I can’t believe this roller coaster crested again. I was riding so high mere hours ago and now I’m in a gully. I wish it didn’t have to be like this: all or nothing. I wish I didn’t have to chase highs to try to banish the lows. I wish normal could be good enough. But there’s no such thing as feeling regular these days—I’m either fighting off the darkness or exhilarated to find a few moments of sweet oblivion from it. Up, down. Up, down.

I’m running out of new options for the highs though, since everything I attempt backfires on me. The dress code protest. Sketching in my spot by the dryer. Hanging out with Will.

The mural is a tiny bright spot, but it will go by fast now that it’s finally underway.

Derby was my shining beacon of hope. For the last three years, the track has been the place I’ve felt most like me. It takes guts to endure the elbowing and it takes showmanship to keep the crowd engaged and cheering when we’re basically looping the same endless circle. But now, for the first time, it holds bad memories. Not just from my GI bleed but my feeling so physically incapable tonight and the slap in the face of Sibby not sharing her biggest news with me before she told anyone else.

As if she can read my mind, Mom breaks the silence. “Hey, you didn’t tell me Sibby got into Tufts.”

The car slows as we hit a red light and I sense her turn to me. I steal a glance at her.

“Oh,” she says softly.

“Oh, what?” I snap.

“You didn’t know? Wow, my plan for tonight certainly didn’t pan out the way I’d hoped. Oh, honey. I’m so, so sorry.”

“The light’s green,” I state, a half second before the driver of the car behind us lays on the horn.

Mom hits the gas pedal and I pull my knees up, leaning them into the door. Short of hanging a “Closed for Conversation” sign, I can think of no better hint I could send her. I know none of this is her fault, but I’m too raw for compassion tonight.

She’s quiet through several more lights, then I nearly topple over when she swerves the car into a hard right turn and screeches to a stop. I blink and look around; we’re in the empty parking lot of a closed flower shop.

“Mom, I really don’t want to talk about—”

She waves me quiet, reaching across me to unhitch her glove compartment. “Neither do I.”

She pulls her iPad out, then opens her door.

“We need to get in the back for this,” she orders, sliding from her seat. A second later she’s behind me in the second row.

“This is weird, you know that, right?” I say, ignoring her route and climbing through the opening between the front seats.

I settle beside her and wait for whatever is coming next, though I suspect I’m not going to like it.

“Look,” she says. “You are very clearly wound to a tick trying to keep all these emotions bottled up inside you.”

“Mom—” I start, but she stops me with an upheld hand.

“Just wait. I’m not going to make you talk to me about it. The offer of a therapist is evergreen, but I’m not even going to force that, because, quite honestly, I know you’re a lot like me and neither of us are very good about putting ourselves on the line like that. But. You’re a shaken soda can and we need to crack the lid just a tiny bit and let some air escape. Skating was my attempt, but since that didn’t go so well, here we are.”

“Here we are . . . at a shuttered florist?” I ask, aiming for a little levity to gain control over this strange turn of events.

She ignores my question and asks her own. “Did I ever tell you about the first case I lost?”

“What? Um, I don’t think so.”

“My client was a mom who had three little kids, all born here, so all citizens themselves, but she was from Peru. I’d been so sure I could win the judge over to my side when he saw the little ones, so I had them lined up right behind their mother in the first row of the courtroom. When the judge ordered the woman deported, the oldest—she was maybe eleven—wailed and raged beyond anything you can imagine. It was heart-wrenching. I was so stunned by the loss that I was numb. I barely reacted.”

Mom fiddles with her wedding ring as she talks. “Afterward, my boss could not shut up about how impressed he was that I was able to keep my emotions in check so well in the midst of that scene and he awarded me an even bigger case right on the spot.”

She snorts. “Message received, loud and clear. Tamp down the drama, lock the ooey gooey away, earn everyone’s respect.”

“Okayyyy,” I say. I can probably guess where she’s going with this story as it relates to me, but I’m still not sure what’s up with the iPad or why we’re in the back seat.

She sighs deeply and reaches for my hand. “The thing is, I’m afraid I might have passed that strategy on to you by example, without making sure you also knew one critical piece of information.”

“What?” I whisper, wary.

“You can only bottle it up for so long before it catches up with you. I learned that the hard way when I broke down crying during a different—equally brutal—hearing. But I needed to find a solution, because I knew that keeping my emotions in check wasn’t just about earning my coworkers’ respect; it also let me be the best ally possible for my clients. They’re already terrified and they need to know that they have an ally who is solid and steadfast.” She collects her breath, then says, “So . . . I found one.”

“A solution?”

“Yup. With special thanks to the brave men and women of our military forces.” She turns her iPad to me to display YouTube’s home screen. The video queued up is titled “Soldiers Coming Home, Most Emotional Compilations #26.”

Mom gestures to the screen. “This sucker is guaranteed to have you sobbing your eyes out in two point five seconds, and if it doesn’t, I have a slew of others bookmarked.”

I shake my head in disbelief. “You want me to watch sappy videos with you?”

I’m relieved it isn’t anything worse than that, but also a bit skeptical.

“I want you to let steam out of the pressure cooker. By crying over sappy videos, yes. The trick is, you can keep it from being personal; the tears don’t have to be about you. You just have to release what’s in there. Okay?”

I glance around the back seat. “I—okay. Yeah, I guess so.”

Mom smiles. “Good. And then when we’ve cried all the tears, we switch to epic fail compilations and laugh our heads off. Sound like a plan?”

“How often do you do this?” I have a sudden image of my mother parked in the breakdown lane of the highway, blotting her eyes when a lieutenant emerges from a stuffed bear mascot at his kid’s football game, then clutching her gut as some asshat attempts to use his sloped roofline as a ski jump.

She bites her lip and peeks at me from under her lashes. “Let’s just say I recently upped my data plan.”

I blink at her. “You are an interesting woman, Mom.”

“Takes one to know one,” she says. “Now come here, baby.”

She angles herself so I can fit my back against her chest and props the iPad on my lap. Her chin tucks into my shoulder and her vanilla bean lotion invades my nostrils.

She presses Play.

We’re only twenty-eight seconds in when the first fat tear spills over. By the three-minute mark I have to pause the video to wring out the cuff of my sleeve and Mom laughs around her own sobs. It should feel terrible to cry this hard . . .

But it doesn’t.