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Chapter Five
THE AIR IS CRISP and I can actually smell fall in the air. Fall has always been my favorite season. I love waiting for the seasons to change, watching the leaves go from green to brown, smelling the cedar in the air. Football season leads to hockey season, and hockey season leads to my life being interesting for a little while. I’ve always loved waiting for the sports seasons to start, raking the yard with my mom, and jumping into big messy piles of loose leaves, then stuffing them into plastic bags with pumpkin faces printed on them.
We always had so many leaves to deal with because of the two massive birch trees in the front yard. Fall in Michigan never lasted long enough, though. By the third football game, the gloves and coats came out full force. And while I was sad to see fall go, I’ve always liked the bite of the cold air on my skin. Unlike most people, I thrive in winter. For me, the cold means sports, holidays, and a crap load of sweets piled on the kitchen counter. Dakota always hated the cold. The way her nose would turn red and her curly hair would dry out drove her insane. She always looked cute, wrapped up in layers of sweaters, and I swear to you, the girl wore mittens in September.
The best park to run the track in Brooklyn happens to be a bit far from my apartment. McCarren Park joins the two hippest parts of Brooklyn: Greenpoint and Williamsburg. Full beards and lumberjack flannels come out in droves in this part of the city. The locals bring their black-framed glasses and establish tiny little restaurants with dim lighting and small plates of heaven. I don’t quite understand why men in their twenties want to dress like men in their seventies, but the food that surrounds the cool kids here is well worth having to stare into a crowd of men with handlebar mustaches. The walk to my favorite park is a little over twenty minutes, so I usually run there, then run for an hour, and cool down during the walk home.
I pass a woman loading a tiny baby into a running stroller. My knee hurts, but if she can run with a baby in a stroller, I’ll be just fine. Two minutes into running, the ache in my knee shifts into a throbbing, sharp pain. Thirty seconds later, the pain is shooting from muscle to muscle. I feel every step from my fall in the shower. Forget this.
I’m off today, and even if my leg’s acting up, I don’t want to sit in the house on my first Saturday off since I started working. Tessa has to work tonight. In addition to her telling me, I saw it written on her little planner board on the fridge. Deciding to call my mom, I pull my phone out and sit down on a bench. She’s due soon and I can feel her nerves from here. She’ll be the best mom my little sister could be blessed with, whether she believes it or not.
My mom doesn’t answer. Well, my only friend is busy and my mom didn’t answer, meaning I don’t know what to do next. I’m officially a loser. My sneakers hit the pavement and I start counting the steps as I walk. The pain in my knee isn’t too bad as long as I’m walking instead of pushing my body to run.
“On your left!” a woman running with a stroller calls as she passes me. She’s pregnant and the stroller has two chubby babies inside. This lady has her hands full. This is a trend in Brooklyn—lots of babies and the strollers to match. I’ve even seen people pushing their strollers, baby and all, into bars in the early evening.
I have nothing to do. I’m a twenty-year-old college student living in what is purportedly the greatest city in the world, and I have absolutely nothing to do on my day off.
I feel sorry for myself. Not really, but I would rather wallow and complain about my boring life than attempt to make new friends. I don’t know where to begin making friends. NYU isn’t as friendly as WCU, and if Tessa hadn’t spoken to me first, I probably wouldn’t have made any friends there either. Tessa is the first person I’ve started a friendship with since Carter died.
Hardin isn’t included in this because that was a much more complicated situation to start. He acted like he hated me, but I had a feeling it wasn’t as clear-cut as it seemed even then. Really, it was more that he felt the relationship between his dad and me was the epitome of everything that was wrong in his life. He was jealous, and I understand that now. It wasn’t fair that I got the new and improved version of his previously alcoholic, emotionally abusive father. He loathed me for our shared love of sports. He hated the way his dad moved my mom and me into a big house, and he despised the car his dad bought me to drive. I knew he would be a difficult part of my new life, but I had no idea that I would be able to identify with his anger and see through his pain. I didn’t grow up in a perfect home like he had assumed.
I had a father who died before I had a chance to know him, and everyone around me tried to make up for that. My mom filled my childhood with stories about the man, trying to make up for his early death. His name was Allen Michael, and by her report he was a well-liked man with long brown hair and big dreams. He wanted to be a rock star, my mom told me. Stories like that made me miss him without even knowing him. He was a humble man, she says, who passed away from natural causes at the unfairly young age of twenty-five, when I was only two. I would have been lucky to know him, but I didn’t get the chance. Hardin’s pain came from a different
