When she’s gone, I blink hard and try to clear the confusion. “Are you sick again, Aaron?”
“Cancer’s a bitch,” he replies.
I suddenly feel like it’s hard to breathe. “I thought you were in remission.”
“I was,” he says. “Now I’m not.”
“And you’re only telling me this now?” I feel like someone just let the air out of me. “How long have you known?”
“I found out a little while before Lynda died.” He stares hard into my eyes.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Honestly, I didn’t want to face it.” He shakes his head. “Cancer a second time is a little scary, Bess.” He looks into my eyes. “And I’m telling you now.”
“What’s your prognosis?”
He shrugs. “What’s anybody’s prognosis? None of us are promised tomorrow, Bess. Lynda is proof of that. One stupid drunk driver and she was gone. One minute she was yelling at me about the kids’ lunches, and the next my kitchen was empty and my life had changed. It is what it is, but still…”
He picks up a photo album and I can tell he’s done talking about that. He starts to flip through the photos, pointing out pictures of me and him.
“Do you remember the day we met, Bess?” he asks.
I think back. I can’t remember the day we met. He was a fixture in my life from the early days. Our moms said we were in diapers together. Every summer we came back together, and it always felt like no time had passed during the months we hadn’t seen one another. “I don’t remember when we met. You were just always there.”
“You were like a rock in my shoe,” he teases. He used to tell me that all the time.
“And you were like a bee in my soda can.”
He laughs. “God, I have missed you.” He lays his head back and flips through the albums, one by one, sometimes showing me pictures. I sit, still somewhat shell-shocked by his cancer news.
“Do you remember the day you met Eli?” he asks. He has gotten to the album that has mine and Eli’s early pictures.
“Yes, I remember it.” I don’t say more than that.
“Tell me about it.” He closes the album and leans his chair back, his eyelids growing heavy. “They give you an antihistamine in case you have a reaction to the meds,” he explains. “It always makes me tired.” He passes me the album. “Tell me about the day you met Eli,” he commands.
“I don’t want to talk about Eli.” I cross my arms over my chest.
He glares at me. “I’m sitting here getting chemo. So what you want doesn’t matter. Talk.”
I sigh. “We were fifteen,” I say slowly, searching my memory.
“Keep going.”
“And it was early June. You and Lynda had just started kissing one another, and it made me want to puke every time I looked at you two.” I make a pretend gagging noise.
He chuckles. “And then Eli showed up and made everything right.”
I scoff, but more with amusement than disdain. “I wouldn’t go that far.”
“Tell me about the first time you saw him. I can’t remember when that was.”
“We went to go play skee ball at the arcade,” I say.
“Ah yes, and he had knocked your top score off the leader board.” He laughs. “You were so mad.”
“I hated him at first sight. He was such a cocky bastard.”
“Tell me about that day…”
6
Bess
Every Saturday evening during summer, if it was raining, Mr. Jacobson would open up the game room. It seemed like it was a magical room, and everyone loved it. He only opened it during bad weather because he said that children needed to be outside where they couldn’t “bug the shit out of people.” Yet he still opened up the game room during rainstorms.
It was a small building, with lights that fell from metal beams that corded the ceiling. The walls were bare corrugated metal, and the floor was hard cement. That never seemed to matter since most of the kids went barefoot anyway.
He had a few arcade games like Pac Man, Tempest, and Centipede, and there was a big pool table and a ping pong table that took up the center of the building. But my personal favorite was the skee ball game. It was kind of like bowling, but you had to roll the ball into a series of holes that were worth points. I’d been on the top of the leader board for the game for the past two years. I was the champion, and everyone knew it. Even Aaron couldn’t beat me, and he had certainly tried. He’d spent his entire allowance on rolls of quarters so he could play. But I was still the best.
Until he showed up.
Aaron and I were playing each other at the ping pong table while Lynda cheered for Aaron, who was terrible at ping pong anyway. I didn’t know why he even tried. Other people waited in line for a turn, but we’d refused to give up the table.
Until the lights on the top of the skee ball game went off. I heard the peal of the bells and saw the flashing strobes and looked around. Then I realized what had happened.
Someone had beaten my top score. Someone had knocked me off the leader board.
I laid my ping pong paddle on the table and Aaron discarded his too, trapping the ball beneath the paddle. He and I walked slowly toward the group of kids who were all clapping around the skee ball game. I shouldered my way through the crowd until I stood at the front of the machine.
And then I saw him.
He stood tall and lanky, almost like his arms and legs were too long for his body. His hair was dark and a lock of it fell over one eye. He tossed his head to move it out of the way so he could see, and his startling brown gaze met mine. He grinned. The cocky bastard had the nerve to grin.
I looked at the scoreboard. “You must have cheated,” I said, my voice as crisp and cool as an autumn morning.
His eyebrows crashed together, and he stood up a little taller. “You take that back,” he said.
“No takebacks,” I retorted and squared my shoulders.
He’d beaten me by thirty points. Thirty! No one had come close to my score in two years, and he had just beaten me by thirty points.
He took a step toward me. “Take it back,” he said again.
“Go to hell,” I said, and I tossed my hair over my shoulder as I spun away from him.
Lynda threaded her arm through mine and leaned close as we walked toward the other side of the room. “He’s hot,” she said.
“He’s stupid,” I replied.
She rocked her head from side to side. “And hot,” she finally replied with a giggle. “He’s watching you.” I turned to look in his direction. “Don’t look!” she hissed. “He’s staring.” She nudged me with her elbow. “I think he likes you.”
“He’s still stupid,” I replied again. But my heart was thudding, and my palms were already suspiciously damp.
“He’s coming over here,” Lynda nearly squealed in my ear. I reached up and rubbed at it. “He’s coming to talk to you!”
But he didn’t come and talk to me. He came and talked to Aaron. They high-fived.
“Do you know who he is?” I asked Lynda.