My Skylar (2 page)

“Is everything okay out here?”

My body froze. My back was toward her. I had a hood on, so she couldn’t see my face to identify

me. I was almost mad at her for coming out because for all she knew, I could have been a serial

killer. But Skylar always had balls too big for her own good.

I had two options: run with my head down or turn around and face her. But how would I

explain this?

It felt like my heart was in my mouth when I turned around and removed my hood. “Skylar…

it’s me.”

FIFTEEN YEARS EARLIER

CHAPTER 1

MITCH

I really hadn’t wanted to go to the playground that day. Gram thought it would be a good idea

for me to get out of the house because I had done nothing but play video games since I arrived

yesterday.

I was staying with my grandmother for the summer because my parents were fighting all of the

time, and my mother didn’t want me around to witness it anymore. The excuse she gave me was

that my grandmother had been lonely and asked for me to live with her, but I knew better.

Things back home were really bad. Some nights, Dad didn’t come home, and I was scared that

there would be nothing left to go back to.

“Come on, Mitch. Maybe meeting some new kids will brighten your mood.”

I begrudgingly slid into the backseat of my grandmother’s older, beige Camry. “Gram, I love

you. But I just don’t want to be here all summer. I want to go home in a couple of weeks.”

“Sweetheart, I know. But your folks…they have some things to sort out. Besides, I have been

waiting all year to spend quality time with my most handsome grandson.” She smiled at me

through the rearview mirror.

“I’m your
only
grandson.” I offered her a half smile before staring out the window for the rest of the ride.

Gram pulled into the playground parking lot. “You go on and play. I’ll be sitting right here in

the car knitting if you need me.”

I had already made up my mind that I was going to remain miserable. So, while the other kids

chased each other around, played ball or climbed the rock wall, I walked across the park and

planted myself on the bench farthest away from the action. I had snuck my portable video game

player into my shirt before we left the house, so I took it out, trying to drown out the screams and whistles of the other kids.

I felt a whack on my arm. “Tag! You’re it!”

My head rose slowly in annoyance. A scrawny girl with two long braids was running away from

me, egging me on to chase her. She looked back with a silly smile that soon faded when she

realized I still hadn’t moved from my spot to play along.

She walked back to where I continued playing the video game. “I said you’re it. You’re

supposed to chase me.”

I stared at her for a few seconds. “I’m really not in the mood for this today.”

She looked down then sat next to me and whispered, “Then, now would not be a good time to

tell you that you have dookey on your shoe.” She flashed a shit-eating grin and covered her mouth

in laughter.

I lifted my foot. “Shit.”

“You shouldn’t use that language.”

“Excuse me:
crap
,” I shouted sarcastically as I rubbed my foot on the grass to remove the dog poop.

She tilted her head. “Why are you such an asshole anyway?”

“Oh, you can say ‘asshole,’ but I can’t say ‘shit?’”

She ignored my question. “You should go over there. There’s a sprinkler you can turn on to

clean your shoe.”

I groaned in frustration, walked over to the sprinkler and ran the bottom of my shoe under

water, careful not to get the rest of me wet. When I turned around and walked back, the girl had

disappeared. So had my video game device.

“Shit!” I mean…
Crap
! Where was she?

“Looking for this?”

I turned around to see the girl waving it in front of me with a teasing expression.

“Give that back to me!”

“See if you can get it from me.”

I lunged forward to grab it, and she started running away…fast.

She was giggling. “A-ha! You want to play tag all of a sudden, huh?”

I chased after her and yelled, “Give it to me now!”

She taunted me in a sing-songy voice. “Bet you can’t catch me!”

We ran in circles around the park for minutes on end. Her braids were flailing in the air. She

was too fast for me, and I couldn’t catch up to her. At one point, I sprinted, tackling her to the

ground. “Oof!”

She held the device in a death grip as I tugged at it. “Come on. Give it up!”

She just continued to laugh, enjoying this a little too much. I had to think of something, so I

started to tickle her. She became hysterical and begged me to stop. Eventually, I started to laugh, too. Before now, I couldn’t even remember the last time something had truly made me laugh.

After she couldn’t take anymore, she handed me the device out of exasperation. “You win. You

win.”

We both lay on the ground, huffing and puffing. “That was fun,” she said. Her smile lit up her

whole face, and it was contagious.

“Yeah…actually, it was.”

She smelled like candy, and her tongue was red, probably from a lollipop. “I’m Skylar.”

“I’m Mitch.”

Then, I heard a woman’s voice. “Skylar! Come on, honey. We have to get home. I have soup

simmering on the stove.”

She hopped up from the ground. “Well…bye, Mitch.”

“Hey—” I started to say something, but she ran off before I could. I watched her until she was

out of sight.

Skylar. Huh.

She had made me forget about my worries, made me feel alive for just a few moments, and

then she was gone. I felt a strange sense of loss. Would I ever see her again? Why did it matter so much?

Why was I still smiling?

I stayed on the ground for a while then noticed that the sun was starting to set. I walked back

over to Gram’s car where she was looking down at the sweater she was knitting.

“Hey, Gram.”

“Did you have fun, honey?”

I thought about it before answering. “Yeah.”

“Good. I saw you met Skylar Seymour.”

“Huh? Yeah…what…you…you know her?”

“Of course. She lives right across the street from me.”

Jackpot.

CHAPTER 2

SKYLAR

What I loved about Mitch Nichols: He had pointy ears like Dr. Spock from Dad’s favorite show,

Star Trek. He liked to suck on ketchup packets as a snack. And he called me Skylar, not Sky.

What I hated about Mitch Nichols: At the end of August, he would be gone.

That summer, in two short months, he became the best friend I ever had.

The day after our playground chase, I found a piece of paper that had been slipped under the

front door.
You can run, but let’s see how you shoot hoops. Meet me out front at three.

His grandmother, Mrs. Mazza, had a basketball hoop in her driveway that used to belong to

her son when he was young. At 2:45, I sat by the window waiting for Mitch to walk outside.

He emerged right on time, bouncing the ball on the pavement, and I ran across the street.

Mitch didn’t say anything, just kept dribbling the ball with a smirk on his face as I ran around

him. The ball nearly knocked me down as he suddenly passed it to me. I shot, and it missed, much

to his amusement. He took the ball, bounced it all the way to the farthest end of the driveway then turned and shot it into the basket.

“Impressive,” I said.

“Thank you.”

After about twenty minutes of Mitch bouncing the ball while I ran around him, I decided to

shake things up a little. “Let’s play a game.”

He approached me with the ball tucked under his arm. His shaggy brown hair blew in the

wind. “I thought that’s what we were doing.”

“No. This is you showing off. I get it. You can play basketball better than me. Big whoop.”

He chuckled. “Okay. What do you want to do, then?”

I thought about it for several seconds and came up with the perfect way to find out more about

him, specifically what was eating him yesterday. I was willing to bet it had something to do with

why he was here for the summer. There was definitely a story there. Many summers had passed

without so much as a visit to his grandmother. I would have noticed him.

“We’ll start here close to the hoop and each take turns shooting. If I miss, you can ask me

anything you want, and I have to answer truthfully. If you miss, I get to do the same. Then we’ll

step back further each time to make it harder.”

“But I’m gonna get it in every time,” he said.

“Well, then you should have no problem with this game, cocky.”

I was banking on him missing the shot at least once. I had nothing to hide, and it was a win-

win situation for me, so long as he flubbed up a single time so that I could ask that one question.

He shrugged his shoulders. “Alright.”

I shot first, and the ball went right into the hoop.

Mitch followed suit.

We kept taking turns, successfully hitting the baskets until I became the first one to miss.

“Aha!” Mitch laughed. “Let’s see…what do I want to know?” He scratched his chin and

scrunched his lips. “Oh! Yesterday at the park…did you know who I was?”

I nodded. “I knew you were Mrs. Mazza’s grandson from the pictures hanging in her house.

That’s why I left like that. I knew I would see you again anyway.”

He nodded in understanding. “Cool.”

I passed the ball to him and backed up a step further away from the hoop, gesturing for him to

do the same. “Go.”

Of course, he made it and passed the ball to me.

I missed again.

“Alright, Skylar…hmm. What was your most embarrassing moment?”

I looked up at the cloudless, blue sky. “I once started laughing at my friend Angie in class and

accidentally passed gas out loud in front of everyone.”

Mitch’s mouth dropped. “I can’t believe you just admitted that!”

“We told each other we’d be honest! That was
honestly
the most embarrassing moment of my

life.”

“That’s pretty bad.”

“No. What’s bad is that everyone thought it was Angie, and I let them believe it.”

We laughed at my admission until I passed the ball to Mitch who proceeded to shoot…and

miss.

I giddily jumped up and down. “Yes!”

“That fart story threw me off track!” Mitch licked his lips and looked down at the ground

shaking his head in defeat. “Okay, give it to me.”

I looked into his big, blue eyes and asked, “Why are you really here this summer, and why were

you so angry yesterday?”

“That’s two questions.”

“But the answer is the same?”

Mitch didn’t say anything right away, just looked at me.

“Things aren’t going well back home right now. I’m pretty sure my parents are getting a

divorce. They didn’t want me around anymore to witness all the fighting. So…yeah.”

“My parents are divorced, too.”

His eyes widened. “Really?”

“Yeah. For two years now.”

Mitch seemed to be thinking hard about something. Then, he turned to me. “Did you ever

feel…” He hesitated. “Never mind.”

“What? Did I feel what?”

“When you found out about your parents, did you feel like your world was ending…like you

couldn’t picture the future anymore?”

It seemed Mitch and I had a lot more in common than I originally thought. “Yeah. I did feel

like that sometimes. It was hard. I’m an only child, and my parents are my only family, you

know?”

“I’m an only child, too. I guess that’s why I feel like it’s my responsibility to keep them

together. Or worse, I think sometimes maybe if I didn’t exist, they wouldn’t be having these

problems.”

The game we had been playing was no longer significant. Now, we were just talking as we

made our way to Mitch’s front steps. The basketball rolled away onto the grass.

“You didn’t ask to be born, Mitch. You know this isn’t your fault, right? I used to think like you

in the beginning with my parents. But after a while, I figured out that it really had nothing to do with me. And honestly, they both seem happier now.”

“Why did they get divorced?”

I chuckled. “Well, I overheard my Mom telling my Aunt Diane that my dad couldn’t keep it in

his pants. But I still haven’t figured out what ‘it’ is. Do you know, Mitch?”

His face turned red. “You’re kidding, right?”

I nudged him. “Yeah.”

We both started cracking up.

“I can’t tell with you.” He sighed, picking mindlessly at the shrubs at the side of the stairs

before turning back toward me. “Did I really look that miserable yesterday? It was that obvious?”

“Sort of…yeah.”

“How old are you anyway?” he asked.

“Ten. How old are you?”

“Eleven. You seem way older than ten.”

“My mom says I’m an old soul. I also kind of have this thing. It’s like an ESP. With certain

people, it’s as if I can feel their emotions. It’s hard sometimes because I don’t always want to. But when I saw you, I just sensed something was wrong, and I felt your sadness, too.”

“Wow. What am I feeling right now?”

“Right now, you’re not sad.”

He stared at me for a while before his mouth spread into a wide smile. “You’re right. I’m not

anymore.”

***

for a while afterward, and he showed me these comic books he made. He did all of the

illustrations and captions himself.

We hung out every day that summer.

Each afternoon at exactly three, we would meet at the hoop and play our game. After hundreds