Duffy:It was kind of what we expected. He’s got to face the reality that he’s going to be on oxygen forever even though he hates it.
I didn’t want to pry, but I texted:Is it COPD? My grandma had that.
Duffy:It’s similar. The hard thing is knowing that there’s no repairing the damage to his lungs, so it’s just amatter of trying to find ways for him to have the best quality of life.
I wondered what the prognosis was. If they had an idea of how long he had. We hadn’t with my grandma, we’d known only that it was going to get worse.
I rubbed the back of my neck and pushed those thoughts away. Thinking about my grandma made me think about my grandpa, and I couldn’t handle all the guilt and stress that came along with his situation when I was this tired.
Duffy:So how was practice?
I felt grateful for the subject change.
I texted:You got in my head and now I’m terrified of dropping passes because my girlfriend might lecture me.
Duffy:And I will because your hands are 9.63 inches. You shouldn’t drop ANYTHING.
Me:Just because my hands are big enough to catch the ball it doesn’t mean the pass is always perfect, for the record.
Duffy:A whiner says what?
Me:You’re mean.
Duffy:Exactly what a whiner would say.
16
Duffy
This was getting ridiculous.
“More flowers? This guy,” my dad said, grinning as he closed the front door. “He’s in deep.”
“Oh, he is not,” I said, taking the stunning arrangement from his hands. “And I’m not a flower person anyway, so it’s a waste.”
In my opinion, flowers were a silly waste of money. I could buy a new shirt or multiple books for the price of flowers that were dead already and only getting more dead.
That being said, the flowers that Connor kept sending—one huge bouquet yesterday, this human-sized arrangement to start off my morning—were stunning. They weren’t the typical carnation-and-roses combo that people I knew picked up at the grocery store. No, these were big arrangements of lilies and flowers of multiple colors that I didn’t even have names for, sent in big, gorgeous vases that made the entire house smell heavenly.
If this was Connor pretending to be my boyfriend, I couldn’t imagine what he was like for real.
It actually consumed me, the notion of what that might look like.
So much so that last night, I pulled up the idiotic article Ellie had sent me.
“How to Avoid the Friend Zone.”
It was absurd, a silly piece of clickbait that I couldn’t believe was posted on an actual psychological website.
I mean, one of the bullet points was actually “Be Attractive.”
Wow, this is deeply scientific.
Their logic was, if you didn’t make an effort on your appearance, the other person might fail to see you as a romantic option because you only presented yourself as a friend.
Which sucked,because in my opinion, the perfect relationship meant youcouldforget all about things like makeup and blowouts.
But I supposed when I looked in the rearview mirror of my dating life, itwasall bare face and hoodies.
