KEVIN ROSSI: Can you answer your phone please?
After rubbing the sleep out of my eyes, I nearly dropped my phone on my face as the text message came into blaring view.
Kevin had mostly kept his word and left me alone when I moved out of Georgia, but boys have "you thought so" radar. Finally done thinking about them? Assured that they've gone away, never to return? You thought so. They pop out of the ground like whack-a-moles the second they're out of your head. Gone forever? You thought so.
My thumb hovered over the "reply" button for a split second, but I fought the urge and pressed my phone face down into my chest. I didn't need the guilt he was going to throw at me.
I rolled over in bed and felt a knot twist and turn in the pit of my stomach. Sometimes I woke up and thought I was back in my room in Coatesville, with the sound of the horses and chickens from the farm down the road carrying through my open window. Nikki being sick and moving to this tiny speck of a town on the coast had all just been one bad dream. But then the empty, eggshell white walls of my new bedroom and my dull, threadbare high school comforter from Pottery Barn brought me back to reality. It was still a bad dream, I was just very much awake.
My phone buzzed again, and Kevin's name popped back up on the screen.
KEVIN ROSSI: Please don't ignore me. You're breaking my heart Natalie.
I let out an aggravated groan and chucked my phone across the room, hitting a picture frame on my dresser and sending it clattering to the floor.
"Woah there, girlfriend."
Nikki stood in the doorway to my room, her eyes wide at my sudden outburst, and arms shot up in an "I come in peace" fashion. She padded across the shag carpet and gingerly picked up my phone.
"Is Kevin still texting you?" She shook the phone at me. "Don't entertain him Nat, you can't give that idiot any more attention."
I rubbed my hand along the side of my face. "I'm not, I'm not."
"He has some nerve still messaging you like this," she continued. "I have half a mind to go back to Coatesville and knock his head clear off."
I rolled my eyes. "How? You're about as threatening as a Chihuahua."
Nikki scrunched her face up and looked like she was ready to hit me back with another stinger, but she slumped her shoulders and let out a sigh. She walked over and sat down on the edge of my bed, running her hands along the fuzzy blanket I had kicked aside.
"I just want you to move on from all this, Nat." She kept her head down when she spoke. "We're here now. It's time to leave all that shit behind."
I groaned and rubbed my temples with my fingers. "I have moved on, Nikki."
"Lying in bed until noon every day is not moving on."
I gave her a sideways glance before snatching my phone out of her hands and deleting Kevin's text.
"There. See? It's gone. Moving on." I flopped back onto the bed and pulled my comforter over my face, but Nikki yanked it back immediately.
"No way," she huffed and aggressively shook my shoulders. "Get up. Get yourself together. We have an hour until my appointment. You should use that time for something other than wallowing in self-pity."
She turned and waltzed out before I had a chance to snap back at her.
I was not wallowing in self-pity. I was simply assessing my current life situation. The fact that the highlights of my day were watching reruns of Law & Order SVU and going to the barren Northwoods Mall for Chick-Fil-A was somewhere in between dismal and pathetic. Even on days when sunlight snuck through the blinds on my windows, I still felt like a cloud followed me everywhere. Dark, heavy, and ready to burst. The absolute last thing I needed was to drag myself to a stuffy hospital room that smelled like death and Pine Sol.
But I was going to. Because if I didn't, had I really moved on?
Taylor Swift came blaring down the hall from Nikki's room, and I knew that meant she was picking from her collection of cute cropped t-shirts and bubblegum shades of lip gloss, just to go sit in a chair for three hours with who knows what pumping through her body. I could have gotten up and started to get ready, but I watched my ceiling fan spin instead.
"What are you doing?" Nikki exclaimed. She was back in my doorway, this time in a shrunken tie-dyed t-shirt that looked like a box of crayons had thrown up on it and a pair of loose-fitting, torn up jeans.
"Not wallowing in self-pity." Sarcasm dripped off of every word I spoke.
Nikki stormed over to my bed and started pulling at my arm. "Let's go, let's go, let's go." She gritted her teeth, and with every pull a grunt came from her petite frame. Eventually I stopped resisting, sliding off the bed and landing on the floor with a thump. I tilted my head at her figure standing over me.
"Are those my jeans?" I quirked an eyebrow at her.
She replied with a scoff and a casual wave of her hand. "If they've been left in my room, they're no longer yours. Besides, you're avoiding the issue at hand here."
I chuckled and shook my head. "Enlighten me then, dear sister. What is the issue at hand?"
"You," she said in a pointed tone. "The hair, the sweatpants, the bags under your eyes. It's all gotta go. I can't be seen in public with this."
The world spun around me as Nikki hoisted me to my feet too fast, sending blood rushing to my head.
"You really know how to make a girl feel good, don't you?" I mumbled.
"Look good, feel good." Nikki shrugged. When the disdained expression on my face didn't change, she sighed. "I'm not trying to be malicious, Nat. I'm trying to help you out. I'm tired of you moping around this room all day, and wearing your hair in that stupid ponytail."
I groaned and rubbed my face, trying to shake away the little stars that still flashed in the corners of my eyes. I couldn't argue with her - just like I couldn't argue against the growing pit of angst in my stomach. It showed on my face, in my glassy eyes and blotchy cheeks. My sister had cancer, but I was the one who looked like my insides were eating me alive.
So, I let Nikki have her way. After three outfit changes (and a few more additions to the chair), concealer, and a ponytail that somehow turned into a wonky side braid, Nikki shoved me out the front door, insisting that we had enough time to stop at Starbucks before her appointment. If the doctors drew any blood from Nikki, they'd probably find coffee in her veins instead.
This time when we ventured back to the hospital, it was so empty that every step I took echoed off the pristine white walls. Nikki looped her arm through mine as we strolled through the sixth floor, and she greeted some of the nurses like she had known them for years. Always the sunshine on a cloudy day.
When Nikki was first diagnosed a few years ago, I spent countless hours combing through every article I could find on her variation of non-hodgkin's lymphoma. She was so normal the first few weeks. Getting up early, eating whatever she wanted, dancing and singing through the living room. I was convinced my sister was misdiagnosed.
But then the symptoms started coming. The chest pain, fevers, the irritability and the crying. They say when it rains it pours, but in Nikki's world, it was more like a Category 5 hurricane.
"I'm bored," she whined, blowing a piece of blonde hair out of her face. She scrunched her face up into a stubborn pout, but her eyes were bleary with fatigue.
I knew how much effort she put into trying to disguise how sick she felt, but there were things even her attitude couldn't hide. Her skin lacked its usual glow, and I started finding little clumps of long, blonde hair in the bathroom after Nikki would shower. She wore her hair up so often the past few weeks, it was hard to catch the thinning spots on her scalp, but they were there if I squinted hard enough.
"You could try a book," I suggested, flicking through another page of my own book.
"Ew no," she continued to pout. "You're the only person I know who reads."
The word reads came flicking off her tongue, as if the act of reading books spread the plague.
"Then keep being bored," I shrugged. "Don't say I didn't try to help."
The room fell silent, and for a moment or two I let myself unwind just a little. I managed to get through another 20 pages of my book before Nikki spoke up again.
"You know what I keep thinking about?" She glanced up at me with hazy eyes. "If Mom and Dad were here. Like I'm a little kid again. Dad can fix it. You know?"
Dad can fix it were Nikki's only memories. She was barely five years old when our parents died, and little things like Mom putting Band-Aids on scraped knees and Dad sneaking her ice cream after dinner were the only tangible recollections she had of them.
After moving in with Aunt Mel, Nikki's only means of gathering information on them were from fading, discarded photographs and old trinkets. She knew Dad collected dusty old keyboards and worked in computer software, and she knew Mom coached my 8-year-old travel softball team to the county finals. To her, they were almost fictional - people who only existed in photos and newspaper clippings.
"Well, they're not here," I huffed out. "And for the record, Dad was never good at fixing anything. One time we had a leaky faucet and he somehow managed to flood the entire kitchen."
Nikki sighed. "How do you even remember that?"
I glanced at my sandals and gave her a quick shrug. "I don't know Nikki. I just do."
It was always the weird little things we remembered about people when they were gone. Memories that didn't make us feel one way or another, but simply reminded us that this person was real. I didn't remember their funeral. But I remembered driving home from that county finals softball game with Mom and getting a burger from Sonic for the first time, and throwing up because there was too much mayonnaise on it. To this day, I still didn't eat mayonnaise.
It didn't occur to me until the following week when we were leaving Nikki's appointment that I had actually been looking for Brooklyn, but the way my heart careened into my throat when I finally saw him told me all the things I wouldn't admit. There he stood, tall and imposing on the corner where the sidewalk met the parking lot. A cigarette dangled from his lips, and he was having an animated conversation with another guy.
I realized I had already been staring at him longer than I wanted to. I needed to make an exit, and fast, before he noticed us and opened up the floodgates of Nikki. The moment I turned my back to the hospital, I heard footsteps quickly approaching.
"Hey! Wait up!"
By now I knew his voice, deep and rough and sent my nerves in a tizzy. When I turned back around, he was so close to me that I felt the heat coming off his body. At least he finally changed his clothes, although his orange sweatshirt was so bright I had to squint.
"Hey Nat," he breathed out, and turned to Nikki. "And Nat's sister."
"Um, do you know him?" Nikki whispered under her breath through clenched teeth.
Before Nikki could insert her foot in my mouth, I did it myself and blurted out, "Were you waiting for me again?"
If my total lack of tact caught Brooklyn off guard, he didn't show it. "Maybe."
Even with smoke clouding his eyes, they still glinted like sunlight on the ocean. For a moment I actually forgot to breathe, which in hindsight was a good thing seeing as I didn't want to inhale any of that cigarette smoke.
"I was actually hoping I'd run into you." He dropped his cigarette and stomped it into the ground with the toe of his sneaker.
I raised an eyebrow at him. "You were?"
A chunk of black hair flopped onto his forehead, and even after he raked it away with his fingers it was still a mess. All I wanted to do was steady his hands and fix him up. I could handle him better when he looked more like other guys, instead of being so unruly and unpredictable.
"Well yeah," he shrugged. "You see...I'm going home in five days. And, uh...well, I was wondering if maybe you'd want to hang out or something...like, outside of a hospital."
A knot formed in my throat. There were a lot of uncertainties in my life, but one thing I was certain of was that Brooklyn didn't need a girl like me, and I didn't need a guy like him. But despite all that, the kindness in his voice and the odd fluttering I felt in my stomach when he smiled at me made me second guess myself with every passing moment. I was inexplicably drawn to him, the way a light draws in insects in the dark, and my dumb ass was about to get zapped.
I felt Nikki subtly pinch my elbow, trying to will something out of me.
My silence must have unnerved him, because the red in his cheeks deepened and darkened the freckles on his cheeks. "I-I mean...unless you don't want to. It's totally fine, I just...figured I'd shoot my shot, ya know?"
"She'd love to," Nikki blurted out and nudged me in the side. "In fact, she's going to give you her phone number right now."
It felt like I'd been swept up in a whirlwind, and my body moved on its own as I pulled a pen and a scrap of paper from my bag and scribbled my number down. When I handed it to him our fingers brushed ever so slightly, and he smiled wide, white teeth and all. I thought my heart was close to bursting.
"I guess I'll...see you when I see you?" I said softly, echoing his words from when we first met.
"I guess so." He turned on his heel to leave, but just as quickly spun back around to face me again. He twirled a cigarette between his fingers. "Oh and Nat... you should smile like that more often. It looks good on you."
He turned again and walked away, thankfully before he could see me blush more intensely than I ever had in my life.
With jittery legs, I walked to the parking garage and to my car. Nikki pressed the car keys in my hands, then sauntered off with a bounce in her step, her blonde hair swinging behind her. As good of an actress as my sister was, sometimes it made me wonder how much she pretended to be okay, just for my sake.
"You have some major explaining to do." Nikki practically jumped in the passenger seat of the car as we drove away from the hospital. "Who was that guy? How did you know him? What were you guys even talking about-"
"Stop." I held my hand up to her. "This is exactly why I didn't say anything to you. He's just a boy."
"Um, no," Nikki slapped her hands down on her thighs. "That wasn't a boy, that was a man. Where did he even come from?"
I let out a heavy sigh, knowing there was no way I was getting out of this one. "The day I went to get us all coffee, he knocked me over and the coffee spilled everywhere. That's why I didn't have it. Then last week he actually waited in the coffee shop downstairs and bought me coffee because he said he owed me." I scoffed. "I really couldn't tell if it was creepy or flattering, and-"
"Well, I'm flattered," Nikki interjected and flipped her hair over her shoulder. "So what else?"
"Well now thanks to you, he has my phone number," I chirped. "And here we are."
I didn't need her smothering me over a guy I had just met...even if he was sweet, and kind of good looking, and had eyes I could see myself drowning in.
"You like him," Nikki said with a grin. A bold statement, not a question, as it often was with Nikki.
I sighed and rolled my eyes. "You're being ridiculous. I don't even know him."
"You know what I do know?" Nikki asked. I ignored her and shifted in my seat, but she continued. "You turned bright red when he came up to us. You couldn't even get a sentence out without me pinching you, and you of all people are never at a loss for words. Besides, you'll get to know him. That's how relationships work, ya know."
"Relationship?" I scoffed. "We're not even friends. I don't even know his last name."
"All in due time, my dear sister."
I turned the volume up on the car stereo and clenched my hands tighter on the steering wheel until my knuckles turned white. At this point in my life, every day felt like a battle between self-preservation and self-destruction. Brooklyn seemed hellbent on making sure self-preservation lost.
✗✗✗