Chapter 261
Chapter 253. The Other Boy.
NICK
I met Drew last Tuesday morning. Meeting him wasn’t supposed to be a big thing. Mum was at the family centre for our visit, that’s what Mrs. Peterson called it. The family center was like a place where families happened, rather than a beige room with bad chairs.
Drew came with his Dad. I just walked into the lobby part with Mrs. Peterson, and there was a boy about my age or younger than me by a year or two at most sitting on the bench with a notebook in his lap. Our eyes met, and a smile played on my lips.
He wasn’t loud. It was an annoying kind of quiet, either, the kind where you can tell someone’s thinking about something and doesn’t want to lose it. Like if he talked too fast, it would slip away.
He said hi to me. I said hi back.
Mrs. Peterson told me his name was Drew, and his dad’s name was Dante. I already knew that name. Mum had said it on the phone a few times. Carefully. The way she said new things, like she was checking each word before she let it out.
I didn’t know about Drew.
Nobody had said his name to me. Not once. I thought about it the whole car ride home. Mrs. Peterson asked if I’d had a good visit, and I said yes, because the visit part actually was good. It was the other part stuck in my head. The waiting room part. The boy-with-the-notebook part.
Drew lived with my mum.
Not all the time, probably. I didn’t actually know the real rules of any of it, same as I didn’t know a lot of the grown-up rules around lawyers and visits and why some things needed two hours and a lady watching from a chair in the corner. But he’d been there. In the building. With his dad. On a day that was supposed to be mine. And on the way out, I’d heard Mrs. Peterson say something to the other lady at the desk about Drew staying at “the Lincoln Park house too,” the big one, the one with the garden and the grandparents who were apparently mine now, even though I’d only ever met them through a car window, waving at a school gate.
Drew got the big house.
I got two hours.
I didn’t tell anyone what I had in mid. Mostly because I didn’t actually have the words for it. I’m almost seven now, and I still sometimes don’t have words for things. So back then, at six, it was basically impossible.
There was a feeling sitting in my chest. It didn’t come with a label attached. It wasn’t sad exactly. It wasn’t mad exactly. It was something underneath both. Something that made me feel smaller than I was supposed to be. Like someone had taken a normal-sized version of me and squashed it down a size.
Catherine asked at dinner if something was wrong. I said no.
1/3
Clam Dad didn’t ask. Dad had been weird lately, quiet in a different way than Drew’s quiet, the bad kind, where he was looking at me but somehow not actually looking at me. I didn’t think about that too hard. I already had enough stuff to think about. I went to bed and stared up at Gerald the Boot and the rest of my glow stars and thought about Drew’s notebook. He probably had a whole page in there about birds he’d seen at the Lincoln Park house. Birds I didn’t know about. Because I didn’t live there. Because I only visited, if the lawyers said I was allowed to, while Drew got to just be there. Every day Eating breakfast there. Falling asleep there. Not needing anybody’s permission. Lying there in the dark, I decided Drew was replacing me. It made a horrible kind of sense once I thought it all the way through. Mum had a whole new family now. New grandparents who were nice, even though I’d basically only met them through a phone screen and a car window, they already felt like they belonged to her in a way that made my stomach hurt to think about. She had Dante. She had a whole house full of people who got to see her face whenever they wanted. On the next phone call, I didn’t say much. From then on, Drew got to be there for every single bit of it. I was the one who left them behind. Mum asked how school was. I said fine. She asked about the bird notebook. The one Drew told me to start keeping. Back before I knew Drew was the actual reason, I should probably stop. I said I hadn’t added anything new to it. “Is everything okay, bug p> “Yeah p> She went quiet for a second. The kind of quiet that means someone doesn’t believe you but is deciding not to push. “You sound a little far away today p> “I’m just tired p> But I wasn’t actually tired. I had a different challenge. I didn’t tell her about Drew. I didn’t tell her what I’d decided, lying there looking at Gerald the Boot. I didn’t know how to say it without sounding stupid. I didn’t know she would feel before she explained why a kid is wrong about something. I didn’t want to be told I was wrong. I prayed it would not be true. ľ I asked if I could go before we hung up. She said okay, but it sounded like she wanted to ask more questions first and was choosing not to, which, looking back now, was probably the exact same choice was making about Drew. Neither of us said the thing. We both just let the silence sit there instead. I went to my room and got out paper. I drew Mum first. That part was easy, I’d drawn her a hundred times by then, round head, stick arms, the same way I drew everyone. Then I drew the Lincoln Park house, the big one from the photos she’d sent, all the windows as well. Then I drew a stick figure standing in the garden. Not me. The other boy. I gave him a notebook. I thought that was what he needed. I looked at it for a long time. Then I drew myself off to the side. Outside the garden. Past the fence. Small, 2/3 The Other Bay… smaller than the other figures, smaller than I’d drawn myself in any picture before that one. Clai Hlooked at that part even longer. Then I tore it up. Into small pieces that nobody could ever put back together. Not even if they really tried. I hid the pieces at the bottom of my wastebasket. Inside the wastebasket, I placed them underneath some tissues and a candy wrapper from the snack Mrs. Peterson had given me after school. She knocked on my door a minute later. Is anything the matter there, Nick p> “Yeah, just doing homework p> I didn’t have homework. She didn’t check. I sat on my bed and looked up at Gerald the Boot and didn’t say one single word to anybody about the other boy, or the fence, or the version of myself I’d drawn standing outside it, too small, I guess, to be let in. Comments LUCK DRAW > す Vote 551 3/3 Florence A passionate storyteller who brings emotions to life through her words. When she’s not writing, she finds peace nurturing her garden.