She smiles. “A pie picnic! Awesome.”
I grab the sheet and the pie while Lauren carries the grocery bag. We walk around to the back of the school and stand there, scanning the place for a good place to sit.
“Over here,” she says. I follow her like she asked, all the way to the top of the play structure.
I point to a steering wheel that juts out from one side. “Who’s gonna fly the spaceship? Or whatever this is we’re on.”
“Don’t worry,” Lauren says as she takes the sheet tucked under my arm and spreads it out. “The driver’s there; you just can’t see him. We’re in good hands.”
“Oh. Right. An invisible driver. I forgot that’s a possibility on playground spaceships. What’s his name?”
She opens the bag and takes out the paper plates and plastic silverware I bought at the store. “Uh, how about Rain Man? After all, he’s an excellent driver.”
“Rain Man?”
“Yeah. You’ve never seen that movie?”
I take a seat on the sheet and set the pie down in the middle. “No. I haven’t. What’s it about?”
Lauren sits across from me. “Two brothers who didn’t know each other existed until their father died. One of them is autistic with lots of quirks. The other is kind of a selfish jerk. They go on a road trip together, and the asshole brother becomes less so, and really comes to love his quirky brother.” She picks up a knife and starts slicing the pie. “In the end, these two people, who were pretty lonely before they met, end up with something they didn’t even know they were missing.” She looks at me. “It’s sweet, right? It won a bunch of Oscars. It’s one of my mom’s favorites.”
I nod. “I’ll have to check it out. You know, you haven’t said much about your mom. If you want to talk about her, about what happened or whatever, I hope you know you can.”
She puts a piece of pie on a plate and passes it to me. “Thanks, but there isn’t a whole lot to say.”
I fish a fork out of the box of utensils. “Do you miss her?”
Another piece of pie goes on a plate. “Not really,” she says too quickly. Her eyes float up to meet mine. “Well … maybe once in a while.”
I’m not sure what to say to that. If she isn’t ready to tell me more, I don’t want to push her. I simply say, “Yeah. I get that. It sneaks up on you sometimes. The missing, I mean.”
She’s pushing her pie around on her plate with her fork, and I want so much to lean over and take her face in my hands so I can kiss her. Make her feel better. Because whatever happened, I can tell she’s hurting. Maybe she doesn’t want to admit it, maybe she doesn’t want to talk about it, and yeah, maybe she wants to forget it ever happened, whatever “it” is. But I see it in her eyes — she’s having a hard time.
“You know, Benny said something to me recently,” I tell her. “He said we gotta take the bad stuff with the good. That it’s just how life is. If you think about it, no one has it good all the time. You don’t, I don’t, Benny certainly doesn’t. So maybe we have to just hold on and believe that eventually good stuff will come out of the bad stuff. Somehow. Some way.”
She tilts her head just a little. Her eyes narrow. It’s like she’s studying me. “Do you think something good will come out of Benny getting hurt?”
I think of all the people, an entire town, coming together to help one guy.
I think of Lauren and me, sitting here, talking and eating pie together.
I think of Benny. Everything he’s been through. His unknown future.
“If I want to get out of bed every morning, I have to believe something good will come of it.”
I pick up my plate and take a bite of the pie Lauren and I made together last night.
“And who knows,” I add. “Maybe something already has.”
I IMAGINE Rain Man
standing at the wheel,
taking us up,
higher and higher.
We travel,
through stardust
and moonbeams,
to a galaxy
all our own.
A million miles
away from here.
From the land
of regrets and
of missing
and of longing to fit in.
We’ll belong
to the universe,
and the universe
will belong to us.
It’s a long way
to go.
I wonder,
how far
do you have to go
to really leave
the past
behind?
“I WISH it’d been me,” I tell her.
Her head shoots up, like a rocket, eyes glaring at me. “Don’t say that.”
“It’s true, though. Football might have been Benny’s ticket to college. I know I’m supposed to think positive. I’m supposed to believe that he can come out of this better and stronger than before. And I’m trying, Lauren. I’m really trying. But if it’d been me, I wouldn’t miss football that much.” I swallow. “But with Benny, it’s, like, all he thinks about.”
She sets her pie down and gets to her feet. She goes to the railing and stands there, looking out toward the soccer field. “You just said you have to believe something good will come out of it. Maybe something will. For Benny, I mean. We don’t know. Maybe he’ll meet the girl of his dreams down in Atlanta. Maybe someday he’ll get married and have beautiful babies. Maybe he’ll become a politician. A good one, you know? One who works to make the world a better place.” She turns her head toward me. “You don’t know what comes next. No one knows, really, but anything’s possible. Isn’t it?”
The way she’s fighting for him, fighting for his happiness, when she’s never even met the guy, makes my heart feel like it’s just doubled in size. I stand up and go over to where she’s standing. I lean on the railing and look out at the playground.
“Benny and me,” I say. “We’d run around out there, chasing balls or chasing girls or, half the time, chasing each other. Since high school, it feels like all we’ve done is chase that damn championship football title.”
“That’s a lot of chasing,” she says.
“And here I am, feeling like I should be chasing something and instead all I’m doing is running away from everything.” I shake my head. “Is that messed up or what?”
She touches my arm. I can feel her looking at me. “So stop running. Just stand still for a while, and see what happens.”
I rise, straight and tall, and turn so I’m facing Lauren. She’s right there. I could take her in my arms. I could lean down and kiss her. I could stop running away from my feelings, from my father, from Benny even.
I could.
But I don’t.
Not so much because of my dad or the team or any of that, but because Lauren and I made an agreement. I don’t want to mess this up. How comfortable we are. How easy it is. And maybe, right now, I need a friend more than I need anything else. Who knows — with everything she’s not telling me, maybe she does too.
So I quickly turn and point at our abandoned plates. “Hey, check it out. You’ve hardly eaten any of our pie. Are you trying to tell me something? Does it suck? God, did we sell a bunch of awful pies to people? They’re going to hate us.”
“They’re not going to hate us.”
I reach down, pick up her plate and fork, and hand it to her. She takes a bite. “It’s really good, you know,” she says.
“I’m curious. Do you still like bake sales after all that work?”
“Yep.” She smiles. “Maybe even more than I did before.”
I could say the same thing about my feelings for Lauren. Instead, I eat my pie.
AS WE’RE preparing to leave,
six or seven crows
fly in and land in a tree
across the field.
They are beautiful
and spooky
all at the same time.
“A murder of crows,” I tell Colby.
“Some view the appearance
of them as an omen of death.”
They sit in the tree, cawing.
“Not the death of a person,” he says.
“Let’s say the death of …”
“Despair,” I reply.
“Yeah,” he says.
“And fear.”
I start to ask
what he’s afraid of,
exactly.
But ironically,
I’m afraid
to ask.
WHEN I get home, Gram and Grandpa are watching the news.
“You just missed it,” Gram says. “They had a short piece on your bake sale today.”
“It sounds like it was a huge success,” Grandpa says. “Sure were a lot of people there when we stopped by.”
I take a seat on the sofa, suddenly realizing how tired I feel. “Yeah, it went really well. Thanks for coming.”
Gram smiles. “Our pleasure. Your dad was there too. Did you see him?”
“Yeah, I did. He said he made a nice-size donation.”
“So Benny will go to Atlanta, then?” Gram asks.
I swallow hard. “Yeah. Not sure when. Soon, I guess.”
Gram stands up. “I’ll get dinner ready.” She looks at me. “I’m proud of you, Colby. We all are. This has been a difficult time, and you’ve really shown the community what a fine young man you are.”
“We’re going to have pie to celebrate, right, Judith?” Grandpa says.
Gram smiles. “You bet. I bought a beautiful berry pie for us to have tonight. Doesn’t that sound good?”
Of all the things she could have bought. It makes me laugh. “Sounds great.”
AT HOME,
there is pizza
and bowls of Bugles
and sparkling cider
and cake.
Three cakes, actually.
“I couldn’t resist,” Erica says
when I see them and laugh.
Uncle Josh
pours the cider
into champagne flutes.
Little hands hold
fancy glasses, and
their eyes are big
and bright, as if they’ve
been given magic
to sip on.
“To Lauren,” Josh says.
“You did an amazing thing today.”
“To Lauren,” Erica says.
Clink,
clink,
clink.
The sound of our glasses.
Love,
love,
love.
The sound of my heart.
AFTER DINNER, I grab the laptop and go to my room.
I’ve got emails from the teams trying to recruit me, but I delete them, unread.
Coach has sent me a link, with a note:
I know I’ve told you boys to stay away from news articles and the like. That it doesn’t do you any good to be reading about what others think about you, because the most important thing is what you think of yourself. I truly believe that worrying about what other people think will only mess with your head in the worst possible way. But I’m making an exception this one time. This article is one you should read. Great game last night, Pynes. Keep it up! Coach Sperry
I click on the link. And then I start reading.
The name of the article is “The Power of Believing.”
When I woke up yesterday morning and saw the weather report, my first thought was, “It’ll be a good night for some high school football.” But it was my second thought that surprised me: “You should go watch the Willow High Eagles play.” Why did it surprise me? Because it’s a two-hour drive from where I live, and I have my pick of at least a dozen games here in the Greater Portland area on any given Friday night during football season.
But I’d read about the accident that almost killed their guard Benjamin Lewis. And I’d read about how the team keeps fighting, week after week, to keep their playoff dreams alive. And I’d read specifically about Lewis’s best friend, Colby Pynes, and his struggle on and off the field to keep going without his friend by his side.
Something pulled me to Willow last night, and while the thought initially surprised me, I’ve learned to follow those callings. They usually happen for a reason, and I’m often rewarded in ways I don’t expect. And so it was as I found myself sitting in the bleachers at the Willow Eagles football field.
The story here is not the game, which was good, but not spectacular. The Eagles beat the Panthers, 24–17. The Eagles clearly have talent. They also have drive and ambition, and anyone watching them knows they work hard.
But it was the two words they said before they took the field that caught my attention. “I believe,” they yelled.
I turned to the person sitting next to me and asked what it was all about. The older gentleman smiled and said, “It’s the team’s motto. They carry around cards that say I BELIEVE. It’s on a sign in their locker room. And they say it before every game.”
“Are you related to one of the players?” I asked him.
He told me he was. He was Colby Pynes’s grandfather. We talked about the accident involving his best friend and how Pynes has spent every spare minute at the hospital in the weeks that have followed. “But he never let his team down,” Mr. Pynes told me. “He didn’t let anyone down.”
As I sat there, I tried to imagine what that must be like. To have your best friend and teammate suddenly ripped away from you, in the blink of an eye. I wondered where you find the strength to keep going, at the ripe young age of seventeen.
I had one more question for Mr. Pynes. “Do you think those two words have helped him through this? I mean, does he truly believe?”
When Mr. Pynes looked at me this time, he had tears in his eyes. He said, “Yes. I think Colby’s learned that the most important thing is to keep the faith. To believe the impossible can become possible. Every time the Eagles win a game this season, it’s against all odds, really. Hearts are broken, and anyone who has tried to play a sport, all in, with a broken heart, knows how hard it is. But that’s the thing. Every time this team wins a game, they’re reminded that anything is possible. And they realize it applies to their friend and teammate, Benny Lewis, as well. With each game, the belief grows even stronger.”
At that point, I told Mr. Pynes who I was and got his permission to quote him. On the two-hour drive home, I thought about what he’d said. And I thought about what I had witnessed on and off the field.
I’ve come to the conclusion that I saw a power last night that cannot really be described in words. The power of believing. But more than that, the power of love, for a teammate and a friend. When you combine the two, well, I’ll just say it — anything is possible. And I fully expect to see the Willow High Eagles playing in the state championship game.
I left that game last night a believer. One hundred percent.
LATER,
when I’m in bed,
Erica comes in.
I’m reading a book
about a girl who
learns her mother
was once
a mermaid.
Erica sits down.
Smiles.
One of those
I’m-trying-to-look-
happy-but-I’m-really-not
kind of smiles.
Something’s up.
I know it.
There’s bad news.
Everything’s been
going so well,
and it feels like
right now,
in this moment,
everything is
about to change.
“Your mom called earlier today.
While you were out.”
I don’t say anything.
I know there’s more.
“I told her you’re doing really well.
Then I asked if maybe she’d like
to come down and see you.
I told her that she and Matthew
&nbs
p; are welcome to stay here.”
I run my fingers
back and forth
across the smooth
and shiny book cover,
staring at it.
Maybe if I stare at it
long enough, I can
become the girl in the story.
The girl who has
a mermaid for a mother.
Her mother is beautiful
and loves the sea,
but she loves her family more.
More than anything
else in the world.
She is kind and
caring and chooses her
children above all else.
“Lauren, she’s moving.
She’s going to North Carolina.”
My head snaps up.
“North Carolina?
That’s so far.
Why there?”
“She didn’t say.
She simply said she needs a change.
In a month or two, she’ll be going.”
“Did she ask if I want to go with them?
I mean, it’s a long way and —”
My aunt reaches over
and puts her hand on mine.
Holds it there.
Tears fill her eyes
as she shakes her head
ever so slightly.
My mother is not a mermaid.
My mother is not kind
or caring.
My mother doesn’t
choose her children
above all else.
And yet
day after
day after
day,
I keep wishing
she’d change.
It’s hard to
stop believing