But Walker looked at me and shook his head. “I said,” he corrected, “‘I’m the last guy on earth who’d go to junior prom with you.’”
“Walker!” His mother was appalled.
But Walker held up his hand. “And then, for good measure, I added, ‘Not with you and your weird eye.’”
There. He’d said it.
The whole kitchen went quiet.
The moms understood, of course, the particular cruelty of that comment. My mom, who had spent years taking me to Dr. Mason, the ophthalmologist. And a full year making me do an eye-training computer program every day after school. And who’d had to endlessly remind me tofocus, because if you stop using the eye that wants to drift, your brain might forget about it—and then might never be able to remember.
Taffy had been there for all of it, too. Everyone in that room knew what a long struggle it had been.
After a long silence, Taffy looked at her son and asked, “Why?”
Walker nodded, like this was the question he’d been waiting for. “I knew that she liked me. And I wanted her to stop liking me. And it was the meanest thing I could think of to say.”
Wow. Okay. And with that, I was done here.
My brain was at a standstill, but my body shifted into fight-or-flight—and it decisively chose flight.
I charged over to the kitchen table and picked up one of the sandwich bags full of ashes. “Which dad is this?” I demanded.
Taffy blinked at the bag I was holding. “That’s your dad.”
“Okay then,” I said.
I stuffed the bag of ashes in my pocket and walked out the door.
“Put on your columbine shirt first!” my mom called after me.
I weirdly happened to know—because Walker’s dad had once told us on a fly-fishing trip—that columbines symbolized both loveandfoolishness.
Perfect. I had the rest of my life to wear that shirt.
But right now, I had ashes to scatter.
It was a three-mile hike to the base of Turnaround Pass from the cabin, and the pass itself was so rocky that the only way to get to the top was to take, of all things, an open-air gondola. We rode it all the time with our dads as kids—until the day, the summer before I started fifth grade, we’d gotten stuck halfway up during a windstorm. I threw up three times before they got us back down, and the experience had left me with a lifelong fear of open-air gondolas.
All to say: I hadn’t ridden it again since.
Until today. When I would have no choice.
Thanks, Dad.
In a way, Walker’s big confession was useful in this moment.
I’d felt nothing when he apologized—but I felteverythingwhen he’d confessed.
Hearing it all again—seeing it, feeling it, watching flashes of it light up my memories—brought it all back up to the surface. I felt raw, and shaky, and enraged. Enraged at Walker—and wildly, fiercely, animalistically protective of my younger self.
He’dknown. He’d known what I was going to ask him. He’d had time to prepare his answer—to think about it—and that was what he’d chosen to say.
“I’m the last guy on earth who’d go to junior prom with you. Not with you and your weird eye.”
Never mind that my eye was 95 percent corrected by then. He had known how ostracized I was for the patch. He had seen how humiliated I felt every time my mom noticed it drifting and told me to fix it, and he’d step in as my rescuer. Throw a dinner roll at me or something and get me laughing.
Of all the things he could have said to me that day—in front of a whole study hall full of kids who quoted him ad nauseam for weeks—he picked the one heknewwould hurt the most.
