She hugs me back until a gust of wind threatens to blow us off the sidewalk. “Okay. Well, I’ll still tell him sorry. And ... can we do this again? I miss seeing you. You need to move back.”
“I miss seeing you too,” I admit. “But I can’t come back. Not until ...” There’s no easy way to finish that sentence, so I don’t.
Lou nods, a shadow of sadness darkening her expression. “Yeah.”
“Let’s plan on getting lunch more often. Whenever we can both get away from our jobs, okay?”
“Promise?”
I make anXover my heart. “Cross my heart.”
“Don’t ever finish that sentence.” But Lou smiles.
The first few raindrops finally fall, splatting against the cement and landing on my nose and cheeks.
“It’s raining!” Talia announces—unnecessarily—but her excitement is understandable. Rain in Arizona is abig deal.
“I’ll call you tonight,” I say with a wave to Lou.
The sky suddenly unleashes, a deluge of water dumping over all three of us.
Lou rushes to her car with a squeal, while Talia and I jog across the lot to where she parked. We’re both half soaked by the time we sit down and slam the doors shut.
“This makes me extra glad I took the time to curl my hair this morning,” Talia comments, and we both burst out laughing.
She puts the car in reverse and heads toward Farmor’s house, her windshield wipers working furiously to clear the buckets of water off her windshield.
“This is kind of crazy,” she comments as she drives through an overflowing gutter to turn into the neighborhood where I live now.
“Maybe you should wait it out for a little while—make sure there aren’t any flash floods or anything.” I lean forward and glance up at the sky. There’s nothing to see but an expanse of slate gray. No break in the clouds, no indication of how long the downpour might last.
“I have a huge presentation that I have to finish today and get approved by Austin. I’ll have to risk it,” Talia says as she pulls into my driveway. The edges of the car windows are foggy. Water runs rivulets down the entire car. I’m already shivering a little bit from our first mad dash through the rain. I don’t really want to do it again.
“Do you remember the day you got out of the hospital?” Talia suddenly asks.
“Which time?”
“The first time—when you were able to walk away from the hospital after six months because you finally had your new heart and had healed enough to go home.” She’s looking at me, but her dark-brown eyes are far, far away. Seven years away, apparently.
“Yeah, I remember,” I say quietly.
“You were so excited to go for a walk in the sun.”
“And it was raining,” I add with a shake of my head and a small smile.
“It waspouring. You were so bummed. But then you suddenly grinned—and made me take your umbrella while you stood in the rain and looked up at the sky and shouted, ‘I’m alive! I get to be outside in the rain because I’malive!’”
I close my eyes, the memory surging up as if it were yesterday: the feel of the raindrops on my face—the first time I’d felt rain in half a year, the scent of it on the asphalt beneath my feet, the steady, sure beat of my new heart in my chest, and, best of all, being able to spin in circles right there in the middle of the parking lot without feeling faint or on the verge of collapsing. “It was the most incredible feeling. You grabbed my hands and started spinning with me while Mom recorded us. And my brothers started running from puddle to puddle to see who could make the biggest splash.”
“We were laughing so hard—until Dr. Nielsen started shouting at us from under the awning that if you caught pneumonia in the rain and undid all his hard work, he’d kill us both.”
“You blushed so hard. I guess you were too busy staring at his pretty face to realize he was a huge joker.”
“Hewasnice to look at.” Talia laughs. “But I thought he was serious, so I made you stop and get in the car and told your mom she had to blast the heat to help you dry off and keep you from getting sick.”
“I was still soaked when we got home—from sweat,” I remember, also laughing.
Talia’s smile falters. “That is one of the happiest memories of my entire life. The day I no longer had to be afraid that my best friend might die at any time.”
