Weren’t they?
I look down at my phone.
Still nothing.
From anyone.
7.
Therapist:You should make a list.
July:Of what?
Therapist:Of ways to calm yourself. To settle the weather pattern in your head.
July:I don’t—
July:
Therapist:You don’t what?
July:See how that’s going to help.
Therapist:You don’t have to do it now. That can be your homework, okay? Bring it with you next time.
8.
now
Think.
In the event of a disaster, our neighborhood’s designated meeting place is supposed to be the high school. Maybe that’s where everyone went, and they just forgot me.
Back when we were little, my parents did that to Jack once; they forgot him at a picnic table in Hopkins Glen State Park. We turned the car around, my dad on the phone to 911 and my mom crying. When we got back to the park, Jack was exactly where we’d left him, except surrounded by people and eating a piece of chocolate cake with buttercream frosting from someone’s birthday party that they’d been celebrating at a nearby table.
Both my parents’ cars are in the garage.
Maybe they walked,I tell myself.
My car waits out front. When I turn it on, the radio is nothing but static.
9.
now
The parking lot at Lithia High School is empty. Every door is locked. I tried them all. Front doors, back doors, gym doors, doors I’ve never noticed before. I peer in through the windows: vacant rooms. I circle back to the front of the building again, to the marquee out on the main lawn.
This is where we always met for our cross-country training runs. In the summer mornings, after school when classes started up again.
Technically, the cross-country teams have Fridays off in the summers. But the runners who really want to be good, they come anyway.
We do this long run called the Fall Creek Run on Fridays. Eight miles. It’s a monster. You start here at the high school, and then you run up a huge hill, through the gorge. Then out past the farms, up another hill, circle back and come down past the Howell University horse pastures, and then down Fall Creek Road. About a mile before we get back to the high school, we cut through the wildflower preserve to the pond above the spillway on Fall Creek.
And that’s where we jump.
Someone on the girls’ team started the tradition years ago. Then the guys joined in. College kids do it, too, but not early inthe morning like us. One of them died at the jump a few years ago. You can see the white cross his friends made for him when you’re coming along the path. He was drunk.
Other people have died there, but not everyone gets a cross.
