“You play at home tomorrow, right?” My aunt places a kiss on the back of my hand one more time before letting it go.
“Yeah,” I mumble.
“Please stay,” she whispers, with big, hopeful eyes. “We were about to watch a movie. You can get changed. You’ve got clothes upstairs still ... we’ll make you breakfast.”
“I’ll drive you to the stadium,” my uncle offers, like there’s nothing he’d rather do on a Sunday than drive me thirty minutes back downtown in bumper-to-bumper traffic. But when I look at him and all that same hopefulness is written across his face, I think there might not actually be anything he’d like to do more.
“Oh! It’ll be just like Little League all over again.” My aunt claps.
I give her a look. “We didn’t play in Little League very long.”
“We know. Such prodigies, both of you.” She rolls her eyes fondly.
It hurts a lot less than I thought it would to sit here with them and start talking about Matty in any way at all, but especially this way—almost happy—and I think, even though my chest is all cracked open again, it’s all because Ren cleared away all this debris and baggage and guilt and she carefully crafted a safe space for him again. Maybe she constructed it all with hands that hold really delicate things every day, and she shaped it like a baseball diamond so eventually, I’d remember there were a lot of things worth running home for.
“Yeah, okay. That sounds ... good. Nice.” I nod. “But can you, uh, take me early? I want to talk to Olson.”
Ren
My best friend finds me, suffocating under all that dust and debris of an almost life with Miller Colson-Burke.
“Ren?” Imani asks gently, gathering the silk skirt of her navy dress to step over the exhibit wall so she can sit beside me. “What are you doing?”
I sniff, pointing towards the triceratops. “Remember how we said we hoped they weren’t alone when they went extinct?”
She nods, folding down beside me.
“I don’t know about them, but turns out it was just me here, all alone at the end of the world.” My thumbs move across the already-worn paper—Miller’s list of reasons I should always be me—and I wipe my cheek with my shoulder when I hand it to her.
“Oh. What’s ...” she trails off as her eyes move down the page, a quiver to her bottom lip. Her mouth shifts into a soft smile before she blinks, brows knit. “Wait. Where is Miller?”
“He left.” I dig my thumb into the back of my hand, shame pinching along my skin.
Imani folds the paper carefully, setting it down between us. “What happened?”
“Scott happened.” I drop my head against the fake rock wall of the exhibit, and my heart hurts, infinitely and forever heavy in my chest. “Actually, no.” I shake my head, dragging a knuckle under my eyes, and I hear Miller.
When are you finally just ... going to be you?
Turning to look at my best friend, my voice cracks with a whisper. “I ... I happened.”
Her blinks turn gentle, permission in the soft angles of her cheeks. It might be the end of the world, but I’m safe here with her.
“He was looking at me and I felt like her again. Eighteen-year-old me, with all her flaws and all her baggage that became too much and not enough. And I didn’t want ... I didn’t want Scott to have Miller, too. I didn’t want him to take something else good, so I pretended and—”
“Ren, Scott can only take Miller if you let him.”
And I did let him.
“I got that ... job,” I say through a wet laugh. “But I didn’t ... I don’t want it, Imani.” My voice drops to a whisper, and I think, after all this time, all this work I tried to do, I’m still so scared of me and the person I used to be. But this thing in my heart—Miller—and all the oxygen and sunlight and photosynthesis he gave me? He’s not the scary thing. “I want ... him.”
She gathers my hands in hers. “And what’s so bad about that?”
“I don’t want to be the me from before ... I worked so hard and tried to be so different. I wanted to prove to myself I could ... dream and do things for me, and I’m just ... right back where I started, I think.” That same shame climbing across my skin drags my voice down into nothing, too.
Imani shakes her head, brows furrowed with a frown and the usual happy line of her mouth so, so sad when she says, “What was so bad about her, Ren? The person you used to be.”
“I—she—made so many mistakes and gave so much of herself up. People never chose her. Not really. She’s ... hard to love.”
