“Look, I know this doesn’t mean as much to you—either of you—as it does to me.” Claire glanced in my direction. “But I know we can be better. I can be better.”
Sean’s irritation slipped away as he moved to stand in front of her. “In case you haven’t noticed, Claire, you’re already awesome. I mean, look at you. You’ve worked really hard to get healthy and you’re doing great—”
She was. It was more than all the weight she’d lost. Claire thrived on working out.
“Jill and I look likeThe Walking Deadafter running—”
“Thanks,” I said.
“—but you, you barely get winded. Maybe you can do more, bleachers and biking and all that, but this is my limit. Neither the flesh nor the spirit are willing.” That earned him a small smile. “Hey, you need to do more? Go for it. But, Claire, and hear me when I say this…” Sean lightly gripped her shoulders and widened his stance so she wouldn’t have to look up to meet his eyes. “I will never, never, run those bleachers with you.”
Another smile, slightly bigger than the one before it, crossed Claire’s face. “Yeah, I guess. I mean, I didn’t really expect you guys to agree.”
“This is just me talking. Jill is probably totally up for it.”
They both looked at me and I froze, a water bottle halfway to my mouth. Sean winked.
“What? No, my flesh is way weaker than his.”
Claire spent our first mile once we moved on to the canals trying to convince me, but fortunately I had the perfect thing to distract her.
Sprinting ahead, I turned to jog backward so I could face them both. “I committed an act of vandalism last night that heroically ended a fight between my new neighbors.” I relayed what happened, omitting the mom’s more violent outbursts. I wouldn’t have wanted those details shared if they were about me.
“Were you scared?” Claire asked.
“Well, yeah, that’s why I threw the can.”
Claire matched her pace to mine, letting me face forward again while Sean hung a few strides behind us. “I mean when he caught you. A potential criminal goes psycho on a…a…”
“Shed.”
“—and then turns on you? I’d be scared.”
Sean came up along my other side, close enough that our arms brushed a few times. “Claire, you get scared watching animated kid movies with your brothers,” he said.
I shot him a tentative smile while pressing closer to Claire. “Besides, he wasn’t the scary one. He was…normal, nice. He wouldn’t even let me pay for the window.”
Claire had tried and failed to defend herself on the movie front several times, and wisely chose not to renew her case. Instead she said something equally asinine. “Are you sure you’re not maybe overidentifying with him because of your mom?”
I came to a sudden halt. So did Sean. I bent forward, resting my hands on my knees and panting while sweat dripped into my eyes, making them sting. All my physical responses were eerily similar to that last night I saw Mom. I looked at Sean, and that immediately made it worse.
Claire stopped several feet away and turned back to us with wide eyes. “That came out wrong. I just meant maybe—”
“Seriously, Claire?” Sean shook his head, and then placed a hand on my back.
“Don’t.” My voice came out harsher than I’d intended, but it wiped the sympathetic look off Sean’s face, so I didn’t regret it. How could he, of all people, look at me like that?
Claire walked back to us, slowly, hesitantly. Unlike me, she was barely out of breath. “I’m sorry. I completely turned off my friend brain.”
“Yeah, you did.”
Claire’s stepdad was a psychiatrist and she used to spout analytical stuff like that constantly. It got so bad that we came up with our own way of identifying it, “turning off her friend brain.” She’d gotten a lot better about it but still sometimes slipped. Her psychoanalyzing me was usually only mildly irritating or something I could tease her about, but when it involved my mom…it was a lot harder to shrug off.
“For the record, I’m not identifying with him because of my mom. I saw something I could fix, so I did, okay?”
Claire was quick to nod. “Okay.”
“Is your friend brain back on?”
