Page 91 of This is Me

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“Jesus Christ, Pete!” Blaire yelled as the car jolted forward, and the engine stalled.

“I’m sorry!” I quickly said, scrambling to get the engine going again as to not hold traffic up too much. “I thought I was getting the hang of it,” I mumbled.

Clearing my mind of what was to come, Leroy, and everything else, was proving much more complicated than I had hoped, and it seemed to be impacting my driving. Not that I was the best at driving a manual to start with, but I wasn’t usually this bad.

Sometimes.

“Clearly not.” Blaire laughed, holding her hand over her heart. “Scared the shit out of me.”

“Me, too,” I said with an incredibly forced chuckled.

The constant spinning of all of the thoughts in my mind was dizzying, and the rhythmic pumping of my heart sending pulses of blood to thump in my ears was not helping.

As a horn came from behind me, my car came to life and I quickly, but carefully, began driving again, making sure to pay a lot of attention on changing the gears.

“Anyway, now that I know we aren’t going to die, let’s continue,” Blaire said, resting back into her chair.

“Well, there’s still time,” I smirked, shaking the wheel slightly.

“Peter, I swear to God!”

“Don’t be so dramatic then.”

“Back on to the topic,” Blaire said, crossing her arms in a huff, and I smiled to myself, keeping my eyes trained on the road.

“You mean the topic of me hopefully being still welcome at home?” I questioned, slumping in my chair.

Blaire had been making a point of trying to get me to talk about how I was feeling about going home since the distraction of her talking about Cooper hadn’t worked.

I wasn’t sure how she knew that talking about her flirting with Cooper was making me uneasy, but she seemed to pick up on it.

Sadly, she did not take that as a hint to stop talking about everything and brought my family up.

“I’m sure you are. I mean, last time you heard from them, they were worried, right? In that message, asking if you were okay?” Blaire asked, and I nodded.

“Yeah. It’s probably all in my head. I never even tried before. To stay, I mean.”

“I’ll miss having you at my house,” Blaire said. “I know Jordan will.”

“It has been pretty cool staying with you.” I chuckled as I came to a stop in front of Blaire’s house and killed my car's engine before a new realisation came over me.

The Friday afternoon I spent at Leroy’s—when everything had gone wrong—I had missed the football game.

Sure, I may not have been in the headspace to go or enjoy it, but I couldn’t believe it had taken me this long to realise that I missed it.

“I missed the game,” I muttered, past Blaire and up at her house.

“Oh, yeah. But, so did I,” Blaire said, patting me on the shoulder and giving me a solemn smile.

“But it was last game before the finals. Did we win?” I asked, tilting my head toward Blaire as she shook her head.

“No. No, we got our ass kicked, apparently.”

This week just kept getting worse.

Sadness started to bubble up inside of me, replacing the worry I had been feeling. I had no idea why I was getting so emotional over missing the last game of football our team would be playing, but I couldn’t seem to stop my emotions.