How to Break a Heart (26 page)

I feel like the world has come to a sudden stop. “Jeez, I wish I knew what the problem is right now.”

“I hate.
Questions like that
!
” he says.

“Fine,” I say, offended by his sharp tone. “That’s the last chimi-changa
I’ll
offer you.”

“No, I mean…” He takes a breath and says in a mocking tone, “‘How’s your family? How’s your mom?’”

I can understand why it would be hard to answer questions about how his dad is, but—“Why do you hate when people ask about your mom?”

He shakes his head again, still bobbing up and down.

“What?”

“You know what, Collins?” There are no zoo animals in his sarcastic laugh. “If your
La Vida Rica
people could come and rewrite my whole life, I would totally be on board, okay?”

“Is your mom—?” I don’t want to ask this, and thankfully he cuts me off.

“She’s alive, yeah,” he says.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean—”

He looks down at the table. I hear him exhale. His shoulders drop away from his ears. “She was in the accident with my dad. Part of her spine got injured. She’s alive, but she—she still can’t walk. Which is one of the reasons I’m not back in school yet. We live with my aunt now, but sometimes they need me around, you know?”

“Oh,” I say, feeling like the biggest idiot who ever breathed. “Thad, I’m—”

“I know, I know, you’re sorry. Everyone’s sorry. It sucks.” He finally looks at me. “I’m sorry, too, okay?”

I nod.

“No, for, like, snapping like that. At you, all right?”

“All right,” I say.

He picks at his cuticle. I press the tips of my fingers in the metal mesh of the table.

“My mom’s only been able to leave the house twice since we moved into my aunt’s house.”

“Twice?” I say, shocked. “Does she have a wheelchair?”

“Well, yeah, but it’s hard to get her in and out of it. And then there’s like seven steps up from the sidewalk to the front door. Have you ever carried someone up and down seven steps?”

Of course not,
I want to say, but I just shake my head.

“Well, it’s not easy,” he says. “It takes two people, and my aunt has a bad back.”

“So your mom’s, like,
trapped
?” I think of Graciela, when she was living in the cave and a boulder fell down the hill and trapped her inside. She lived off cave water, moss, and the memories of her love for Marcos for six episodes. It was harrowing.

“I guess, sort of, in a way,” he says. “We’re hoping to get one of those ramps soon, or move somewhere that’s easier for her—”

“Wait. Move?” I ask.

“I don’t know.” He shrugs. “Not anytime really soon, though.”

Don’t move.

He looks up at the skylight. “But even with a ramp, that’s only half the story. You don’t think about it much if you don’t need them, but it’s hard to get around on wheels.”

And then it hits me. “That’s why you started skating? To see what it’s like on wheels?”

“Yeah.” He looks at me. “You don’t realize where you can go—or not go—until you’re on them.”

Wow. So all this skating around. He’s not trying to be cool. He’s trying to be—
helpful
. To map out the world for his mom. To give her a sense of freedom.

“Okay, Collins, stop looking at me like that,” he says. “It doesn’t make me a saint or anything.
Don’t
feel sorry for me, or for her, okay? Just
don’t
.”

I nod. I breathe a little, just enough to say, “Okay.” Although I’m not even sure what I do feel. I’m aware that if I were on
La Vida Rica
, I’d start making out with him. But that’s not what I feel like doing. My arms want to wrap around him, and yet they also want to stay glued protectively at my sides. I feel like I’m a marshmallow burnt a little on the inside, if that’s even somehow possible.

“Anyway,” he says. “Can you see now why I don’t like questions?”

“Oh,” I say. “Yeah.”

I wish all those things hadn’t happened to you,
I think, but saying such a thing out loud makes it seem ridiculously obvious. Like when people say
I’m against crime
, or
Drugs are bad
.

He shrugs. “It’s kind of a strange situation, you know?”

“Yeah,” I say.

After a few minutes of wordlessness, I say, “I guess I have a strange situation, too.”

“Regale me,” he says, smirking. Finally.

I laugh, kind of. “Well, my mom’s pretty normal. Boringly normal, actually. But my dad? I have no idea. I never even met him. My
mom
never even met him.”

“So, what—?” He seems confused. “You were hatched from an egg?” Then his eyes get wide, and he starts to grin. “That would actually explain
a lot
.”

I grin back, but I also punch him in the bicep—or what passes as a bicep. “No, dummy, one of those fertility clinics. My mom only knows my dad from a piece of paper—his resume or something. We call him Flat Stanley. Well, Aaron and I do. Secretly, sort of.”

He tries to keep a serious look on his face, but he can’t. He breaks into a laugh. “Flat
Stanley
?”

“I’m
serious
,” I say, but I’m sort of laughing, too.

He leans back on the bench and takes a breath. “Wow. Aren’t you worried?”

I stop laughing. “About what?”

He shakes his head.

“What?”

“Well, it means that your dad could be anyone! I mean, what if he’s—I don’t know—what if you and Nick are actually brother and sister?”

Oh. My. God.
He’s right! What if?
What if??
I start to feel a panic surge. I could be in love with my brother!
Gag! Retch! Puke!

But Thad breaks into a big laugh. “I’m joking, doofus. You’re not related to him.”

“How do you know?”

“I mean, you definitely have your flaws, but you’re not a
total
wad.”

“Oh,” I say, exhaling, coming back to reality. “
Ha-ha
.”

He lets out one of his trademark safari guffaws.

“Come on, I’ll buy you a taco,” I say.

“You said burrito earlier,” he tells me.

“And you said no.”

He smiles. “And you and I both know that tacos are two-for-one right now,” he says.

I shrug. “So let me buy you a free taco.”

“Be my guest,” he says.

And then I open up my wallet and find that I have no cash.
Drat.

He sees me rummaging through my bag. “Relax, Collins. I’ll spot you the cash to buy me the free taco, and we’ll call it even.”

Thank god. Because oddly enough, I’m craving one bad enough to pull a Rafael. When he was homeless, he would earn meals by dancing in the street. That’s where he met Elia, who turned out to be a fugitive princess from the island country of Isla Mola. But I also remember that my dancing couldn’t so much as earn me a package of ketchup.

He smirks. “One condition.” Thad and his
conditions
. “You have some hot sauce.”

I grimace. But I am hungry. And it’s free. So I agree. And you know what? Hot sauce isn’t that bad, now that I respect my limits. In fact, it’s not bad at all. Especially now that I know the chip trick.

Nick calls me that night.

“Hi,” I say. I think he’s calling about the sketch artist, who he’s meeting with tomorrow, but instead he wants to talk about Thad.

“So,” he says. “That was weird. Thad Bell.”

“Yeah,” I say.

“Are you seeing him or anything?”

“Thad?
Nooo.
Way,” I say, maybe too quickly. Perhaps he was going to challenge him to a duel or something equally as romantic. “Why?”

“Just wondering,” Nick says. “He seems different.”

“Maybe. A little,” I say. “Well, for one, he’s not nine anymore. And his father died, so that’s kind of an issue.”

“What? He
died
?” Nick asks.

“Yeah, in a car accident. And his mom was hurt in it, too. A spinal injury, I think. She has to use a wheelchair. That’s why they moved back.”

“Oh. Wow,” Nick says.

And then he gets quiet.

“Nick?”

“Sorry, I’m just—
Wow
. That’s—I didn’t know—that’s rough.”

“Yeah. I would think.”

He’s quiet again. I’m about to ask him about the jeans that he tried on today at the mall, just because I don’t know what else to ask about, but he says he needs to go, so we just say good-bye.

“D
o you have any nines?”

“Maay-bee,”
Thad says.

“Hand ’em over,” his mom says, putting her palm out.

He gives her two of his remaining cards. She puts down another set, leaving three cards in her “hand,” which is technically on her lap, covered with a dish towel, since her actual hand still gets tired sometimes.

He crunches up his face. “Any threes?”

A funky Jamaican tune starts playing suddenly in the other room. Thad’s mom looks around. “What’s that?”

“Oh, Aunt Nora changed her ringtone again,” he says, grinning.

She laughs. “Okay, go fish,” she says.

He picks up a queen from the top of the pile and tucks it into his hand. And then it’s her turn again.

“Do you have any queens?” she asks.

“What? Seriously?” He gives her a disbelieving smile.

She just smiles at him and holds her hand out again. He hands it over. “When did you start reading my mind?” he jokes. He’s glad she can’t really.

She puts her cards down, a set of queens.

“Sorry, sweetheart,” she says to him.

He makes a sound like
agh
. “Next time, we play blackjack or something.”

“Blackjack? No thanks. You’re brutal,” she says. She reaches toward him and he holds on to her hands, pulling her slightly forward. Then he restacks the pillows so she can lie down in a more reclined position. “But you know what I was thinking? Origami or something. The therapist today suggested it, to keep my fingers exercised, and it sounded kind of fun.”

But origami doesn’t sound all that fun to him. He pictures himself making angels and butterflies.
Ugh.
Sounds like Mabry’s in charge or something
.

She rolls to her side, and he pulls the blanket up to her chin.

She yawns. “Wake me up in an hour or so, okay? I don’t want to sleep too long.”

“Okay. Good night,” he says—even though it’s
not
night, and
good
seems like a stretch—and he walks quietly out of her room, shutting the door behind him.

Aunt Nora is sitting at the kitchen table in front of her open laptop. “Hey, hon?” she calls to him without looking up.

“Yeah?” he says on his way to the pantry. He’s craving a Little Debbie.

“That was Mrs. Vander-Pecker. The principal from the school.”

Thad pauses mid-step. He feels like he’s had a sudden injection of ice water into his veins. It’s the worried look in her eyes that makes him think,
this
.
This
is the moment that he’s been dreading. Those visits by Officer Dirk?
Recon.
And Nick must have had that moment of recognition, and ran and told his mommy. Who told the school. Of course. He’d do that.
She’d
do that.

“Okay.” He sits down and takes a big breath. He studies the corner of the table. He’ll start with an apology, that’s always the best thing to do, and then he’ll explain how upset he was that day—what he overheard Nick say. At least Aunt Nora would understand why it upset him so much.

“Well, she’s really concerned. She said you haven’t been keeping up too well with your online classes.”

It takes Thad a second to realize that the worst thing—okay, the second or
third
worst thing—hasn’t happened. Yet.

“Oh,” he says, finally relaxing a little. He gets up and walks over to the pantry, because yes, he wanted that Little Debbie all along.

“Well, is that right?”

“It’s pretty right, I guess.” He opens the Swiss Roll and starts peeling the outer chocolate part off. He likes the cake and filling, not the fake waxy coating.

She’s staring at him like she’s disappointed—like he’s done something wrong. Which he has, but she actually doesn’t know that.
Does she?

“I’ll do better.”