You have one life and you are going to live it,she said.
I agreed. I’m going to rein it in. That’s the deal.
Mila wakes me up at eight-thirty by sitting on my chest.
“Get up.”
“Mila,” I groan.
“Up.”
“Off.”
“We’re going through with our plans at the YMCA. Get dressed.”
She climbs off me. She pulls the comforter off my body in one clean motion and drops it in a heap on the floor.
“Up.”
I get up and get ready.
The local YMCA has the kind of pool that smells like chlorine in your teeth and is forty percent retirees doing water aerobics, forty percent toddlers in those little inflatable rings that have a duck head poking out of the front, and twenty percent serious lap swimmers who don’t appreciate me or Mila or anyone else not currently committed to the sport of swimming. We do six laps. Mila says we did twelve. I say we did six. She says six counted twice still counts.
Afterward, we play racquetball. I have never played racquetball in my entire life. Mila has played it exactly once, with her dad, when she was twelve. We rent the goggles and the racquets. We close ourselves inside the small white room that smells like rubber and lemon disinfectant, and a single hard blue ball ricochets off four walls at an unbelievable speed, and within about three minutes, Mila hits me in the calf, I hit her in theshoulder blade, and we have both ducked simultaneously from a ricochet neither of us made. By the end of it, I’m laughing so hard I have to sit down on the floor against the wall.
Mila is bent at the waist with her hands on her knees, wheezing. “I think I broke a rib.”
I throw my head and laugh. “You did not break a rib.”
“I broke a rib, sis.”
I shake my head. “You did not.”
“Tell my mother I died doing what I loved.”
I shoot a look at her. “Pestering me?”
“Yes.”
I lie back on the gym floor. The fluorescents hum above us. My hair is wet against the cement under my head. My lungs hurt in the good way, and I let myself listen to Mila complain about her ribs. I realize that I haven’t thought about Chase in forty minutes. This, I understand, is the point.
Mila lies down next to me with her arms thrown over her face.
“Lunch?”
I nod. “Yes, lunch. I want a burger.”
“A burger and one of those terrible milkshakes.”
“Yes.” I groan. That sounds great.
“A burger, a terrible milkshake, and fries.”
“All three. Whole menu.”
We find the nearest diner — a place two blocks off campus — and we order everything we said we were going to. The burgers come fast. The milkshakes come faster. Mila has chocolate. I have strawberry. The cherry on top of mine is the kind of bright red that isn’t found in nature.
“I would be lost without you,” she says.
