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Chapter 16

Charlotte O'Brien

"Those glasses are so cute, Ric. Why don't you keep anything for me in your pockets? Why are you only a boy scout when it comes to our dear Lottie?" Braylynn's voice was loud and overly chipper, as if to push past the somber feelings of the morning, and get all of our minds onto more simple matters. I heard the crunch of her biting into her celery that she always ate with peanut butter and crushed up Oreos because it made it feel both healthy but incredibly fattening. She repositioned in her seat, I could hear the friction of the fabric on the hard plastic chair, and twisted open her water bottle.

Ric chuckled beside me, and I felt his body shake slightly through his hand on my knee. "I've been doing it since fourth grade, when I was actually in boy scouts." His hand tightened and so did my stomach. I pulled away from him slightly, bending as if checking to see that my laces were tied. I was not unaware that my relationship with Ric may seem like it was bordering on something more than friendship, that the way we cared for each other was different from the way other best friends cared for each other, and usually I didn't care. Ric and I were different from other people; we faced different obstacles and needed each other in different ways than most people. It was just in these moments, these moments where Ric seemed to be pushing and pressing evermore at the border between friendship and dating that made me uncomfortable. I had no intentions of dating Ric; he had been my brother figure for far too long for me to consider him in a romantic light. But sometimes, it almost seemed that Ric just assumed we were dating, that we were so close and knew each other so well, it was a shame not to date. Those were the moments I hated.

Braylynn gleefully clapped her hands, her bracelets clanking together melodically. "Lottie and Ric story time! Tell me how it started. How you became her personal boy scout monkey boy." Her voice was demanding, but also sweet and alive, like her mother's. It was a voice that you wanted to keep listening to, even if it were just reading aloud grocery lists. Braylynn had that way about her, one that demanded you acknowledge her presence, but not in a way that made you jealous or angry at her, just one that made you feel lucky.

Ric chuckled again, sounding warm and like a camp fire. "It was fourth grade and Charlotte and I were on the swings. It was the only thing she didn't need her cane to do, she was still really scared with it back then, so we always ended up there. That particular day, Charlotte was getting higher and higher than I was because she was already going through her growth spurt, and I was so jealous. I challenged her to a contest: who could jump off the farthest, knowing that even if she won, I could cheat and she would never know." His finger touched my knee again, and my stomach tightened slightly, but I decided to let it go. I only had so many friends, two to be exact, and I couldn't put my relationship with Ric in jeopardy over something as silly as his hand on my knee.

Everything in my life felt tenuous, as if hanging from a fraying string that was likely to break at any second. I felt it, it was apparent in every second I sat there at the lunch table, my stomach rejecting all food and my head still swimming with unshed tears, but I was pretty sure Braylynn and Ric were oblivious to it. Which is what I wanted, why I hadn't told them that there was a very real, almost inevitable, possibility that I would be leaving for Maryland School of the Blind incredibly soon. This was my burden to bear, not Ric and Braylynn's.

My head turned almost imperceptibly as Ric went on and on about how I rolled across the ground after jumping off the swing, about how he didn't even get to make his jump because he was so scared about me, about how my glasses fell off in the jump and he stepped on them in his haste to get to me. I had lived through the story, had felt the fear that I was going to die as the air rushed around me and the pain as I fell on my ankle wrong. I had experienced the prick of the woodchips as I tumbled forward, no depth perception to keep my head focused. It was a whirlwind of limbs and pain, confusion and fear. To Braylynn it was an exciting story, to Ric an act of heroism, but to me, it was a painful memory I didn't want to readily think about.