“Ow! What the hell are you doing?” I yelped, sitting up and rubbing my cheek. A faint light came through my window, like the world outside was starting to awaken, too.
“I didn’t do it hard! Your boyfriend is here.”
“What?”
She grabbed my arm again and yanked, but she still wasn’t strong enough to pull me around. We tussled a little, like when we were kids, until I pushed her aside and went to the window…and she was right. There was Shane, who was not myboyfriend but was, in fact, standing on the front lawn. He had his binoculars and as I stared down, he waved at me.
“He was throwing shit against the glass. You must sleep like the dead,” Morgan grumped. “Go down and see him. Wait!” She grabbed a pack of gum off my desk, the minty kind with guarana that Corbin had given me. He and I had hung out a few times lately. “You have terrible breath. Chew on this.”
“Don’t stick your nose in my face!” I responded. But I did take a stick and put the rest in my pocket.
“Go, before he wakes up Mom and Dad.”
That probably wouldn’t have happened, since they were on the other side of the house and our father’s snoring would have drowned out a fighter jet taking off. But I hurried anyway, because now that I was fully awake, I was very curious about why Shane was in our front yard.
My first question to him was logistical. “How did you get here?” I wondered. He was totally alone. Our street, never exactly bustling, was silent except for some birds calling.
“I got a car. It left a while ago because I’ve had a hard time waking you up. Hi.”
“Hi,” I answered. “Why are you here in the middle of the night?”
“It’s getting on four,” he answered. “Our flight got delayed because of a storm in the East, and we just landed. I came over instead of going home.”
“Why?” I asked again. I pointed to his hand. “What is that?”
“It’s a muffin. I brought it from Virginia,” he explained.
“Do they make special ones there?”
“Uh, no. Yesterday when we arrived at the stadium, they had put out a basket of baked stuff in the coaches’ box for us to snack on. It’s from that basket,” he told me.
“Ok, yes.” I paused. “Wait, no, that still doesn’t make sense. You saved a muffin from yesterday, like, in your pocket? And you’re bringing it to me in the middle of the night?”
“It’s almost morning,” Shane reiterated. “I had it wrapped in a napkin and it was in my backpack.”
We stared at each other.
“I saw all those baked goods and I thought about you. Remember how you made me the blueberry muffins without any blueberries? And then they all fell on the ground?” He was smiling, as if that had been so fun. “I couldn’t eat any of them.”
“Yes,” I agreed. I remembered it less fondly, since I had stayed up for most of the night making those damn muffins only to realize that of course we didn’t have any fruit, and then he’d hit my arm by mistake since it had been dark and he wasn’t able to see me well. I didn’t realize it then but I thought about it now, so I stepped closer and more into view. “Are you paying me back somehow?”
“No. I saw them and I thought about you,” he said again. “I’ve been thinking about you a lot since you moved out. We haven’t seen each other in a while.”
No, we hadn’t. “You’ve been really busy,” I said. That was what I’d been telling myself: he’s not avoiding you, he’s just so busy!
“I’ve been avoiding you.”
Oh. Well, that was great. I nodded.
“I thought that it would be better if I didn’t see you because I knew what I would say,” he continued. “I would have asked you to please come home, because I miss you so much.”
“Oh. Well, that’s great!”
“No, it’s not. I don’t want you to have to take me on as a project. I’m furious about all this, Molly.” He stepped even closer and took my hands. “I’m trying to get over it. I’m trying to accept it gracefully. Losing my vision isn’t the worst thing in the world,” he continued. “I know that there’s a lot of stuff even more terrible.”
“But it’s still awful. We don’t need to rank life’s tragedies.”
He nodded. “I’m standing here, shaking my fists at the sky because there’s nothing I can do about it. I’m seething with anger because I can’t be the person I planned to be, and I can’t have the person I want.”
