Filed under: 400 words (of approx. 2,000 words total)
Laurie, I have to tell you something. I should have done this a long time ago. But I didn’t, and I don’t have any excuses. I hope you will forgive me.
I hope I can forgive myself.
* * *
Your mother was seventeen when she got her first boyfriend. Danny Spence. He was eighteen, also a senior, and he had a habit of answering every question in class correctly, albeit under his breath. Kate-your mother-had known of Danny for years, through mutual courses and friends, but mostly they’d stayed on the periphery of one another’s lives, faint blips in the outer ring of radar that weren’t really worth worrying about.
Then one day he showed up dead center.
Kate had been having a terrible week, and I wasn’t making it any better. She’d been waiting over an hour for me to pick her up in the old station wagon we shared, and Danny caught her sulking on the curb of the high school’s turnaround, restlessly flicking loose pebbles across the pavement.
“Do you need a ride?”
“No, my sister’s coming,” she answered hastily. She didn’t even bother to look at him.
He shrugged. “Hey, I just thought maybe you’d like to get away from here. But if you’d rather stay in the sun and pout, be my guest.”
Kate watched him walk away, strutting towards his zippy blue sports car. The word freedom flashed through her mind.
“Wait!” she called out. She scrambled to her feet and grabbed her backpack off the hot cement. “Wait, please.”
* * *
That was all it took. One afternoon, one genuine conversation in a nearby coffee shop, one spark to ignite the reservoir of feeling inside of her.
Kate came home wearing a certain soft smile, one I’d seen in the mirror on my own freckled face many times before. She and Danny had shared a connection over iced mocha lattes and a sticky table for two. They traded personal information like baseball cards, laughing at the ones they had in common. His knees knocked against hers once when he was stretching, and her heart began to pound in an unfamiliar rhythm.
She shared these details with me in an urgent whisper, sitting Indian-style on my bed with a twinkle in her eyes. I smiled at her excitement, but secretly I worried, too. As much as I wanted to share the optimism in my sister’s voice, I knew that these things don’t always work out like we hope.
