Page 58 of Uncoachable

11:32 PM

Leo: Boys, why am I already tired?

Cash: Because you skate like a baby deer and think cardio is a type of pasta.

Me: Shut up and sleep. We have a flight at noon.

Nico: Captain’s cranky. Someone get him a snickers and a cold shower.

15

Callahan Eli

I wake to silence.

It’s not the good, peaceful, earned quiet that follows a long night of celebration or a hard-fought win. This is the hollow kind of silence—the sort that presses in on your eardrums until you start to notice the absence of noise, until it feels like something vital is missing from the room.

Then my phone dings on the nightstand.

7:02 AM

Cash: hope you’re well, Callie.

Cash: text me if you want me to make up an excuse why you’re not in today.

Cash: or come in and I won’t mention it.

I stare at Cash’s messages longer than I should.

He is the only one who remembers the date besides me, mostly because he was the only one there.

Today is the eighth anniversary of my mother’s death.

It’s a number that sounds like a lifetime, yet somehow my body still remembers every detail my mind tries to dull.

I can still feel the sterile bite of hospital disinfectant that never quite washed off my skin, no matter how hard I scrubbed. I can hear the constant, rhythmic beeping of machines measuring things no one could fix.

Most of all, I remember the way her fingers felt thinner every time I held them, as if she were slowly slipping out of the world, piece by piece, until there was nothing left but the memory of her.

Finn had been sitting in the plastic chair next to me in that room for eighteen hours straight. He hadn’t said a word, hadn’t tried to fill the space with his usual nonsense. He’d just sat there, anchored to the floor, holding a cup of lukewarm coffee he never drank.

When the long, flat tone finally sounded on the monitor, he was the one who caught me before my knees hit the linoleum.

He didn’t ask what I needed; he just knew.

That is the thing about a best friend—they don’t just witness your life, they help you carry the weight of the parts that are too heavy to hold alone.

Grief is a phantom ache.

Doctors will tell you that the body doesn’t store memories, but they’re wrong.

My lungs feel heavier today, as if the air in Boston has been replaced by the stagnant, recycled oxygen of the oncology ward.

My mom was a woman of music and noise; she always had a radio playing or a wooden spoon banging against a pot in the kitchen. Seeing her reduced to a series of silent, rhythmic blips on a monitor was a theft I still haven’t forgiven the universe for.

I go through the motions of my morning—the shower, the shave, the coffee—but I’m watching myself from a distance.

I’m a ghost in my own kitchen.