“You excited about the win?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said.
He glanced over. “You don’t sound excited.”
I shrugged without feeling. “I guess I thought I would be.”
“What’s on your mind?”
I held my tongue until the hush pressed in on both of us. “Do you ever feel like everything’s changing? Or it’s about to? And you don’t know if it’s good or bad?”
His brow furrowed. “What’s changing?”
Everything! Next year we’d be teenagers.I twisted to face him, appreciating how the lava lamp lit his face in a warm golden hue.
“I don’t know,” I said. “That girl Lauren likes me.”
Tru blinked. “You don’t like her back?”
“Not really.”Not the way my Dad wants me to.I laughed under my breath. “She kissed my cheek at lunch, and everyone freaked out like we were engaged or something.”
Tru grinned. “Gross.”
“Exactly.” I tugged at a loose thread on my sleeve, jaw tight. “Now my dad keeps asking if she’s my girlfriend. If I’m finally interested in someone. He says it every night at dinner, like it’s some kind of scoreboard he’s waiting for me to put points on.”
I hesitated. “And… the coach from the high school team came to my last game. Said he wants me to play junior varsity next year. He already called my dad.”
“That’s great,” Tru gasped, eyes going wide. “Right? That’s huge!”
“Yeah,” I said. “Except…”
“Except what?”
“You’re not gonna be on the team,” I told him. “You don’t even like soccer. What if we get pulled into different circles?” Tru had quit the team last year, and he didn’t seem sad about it.
Tru sat up a little. “We won’t.”
“You don’t know that.”
His blue eyes bored through me. “Do you want that to happen?”
“No,” I uttered way too fast. “I want this. All of this… forever.”
He went quiet. I rolled onto my back again, arms crossed behind my head.
“I just have this weird feeling,” I muttered. “Like everything’s already shifting. And I don’t know how to stop it.”
Tru whispered, “You don’t have to.”
I turned toward him.
“Maybe some things change,” he said, “but not us.”
I wanted to believe him. God, I wanted to believe him.
But part of me already knew… not everything was going to survive the change.
I used to think my house felt empty because my parents didn’t talk. Now I know better. It feels empty because it is. Becauseeveryone keeps leaving. First, my mother. Now, my brother’s gone.
