Page 20 of Room to Breathe

“Fine?” he asked, as though he didn’t expect me to agree so quickly. Maybe not at all.

“Yes, fine,” I said.

“Great,” he said. “Should we establish some rules for this truce?”

“Seriously?” I asked, not surprised he would need rules.

“Yes, we each get to have…three?”

“So specific. Can’t wait to hear them,” I said.

He spouted his off like he’d been thinking about this for the past hour. “Okay, my three: One, no more sarcastic put-downs. Two, we accept help from the other person if we need it. Three, we entertain each other.”

My eyebrows popped up. “Entertain each other?”

“You know what I mean, Indy. I’m out of my mind from boredom. We use crap in your bag to draw or play a game or something.”

There was a different kind of desperation in his eyes. One I’d never seen there before. “I can agree to the last two,” I said. “The first one might be hard for me. I was the queen of sarcastic put-downs even when I liked you.”

He let out a single laugh. “Fair. What are yours?”

“My put-downs?”

“No, your three rules.”

We talk!I wanted to scream.We get everything out on the table andfigure out where it all went wrong.But that wasn’t exactly a rule, and I actually wasn’t sure that’s what I really wanted. Especially when there was no place to run to if what we said was too much. And it would be.

“Your rules are a good start,” I said. “I reserve the right to interject mine as I deem necessary.”

“Of course you do.”

“Are you already breaking the first rule?”

“You said the first rule was impossible.”

“I said it would be hard, not impossible.”

He held up his hands in surrender. “You’re right, we’re good athard but not impossible.”

I didn’t think I was anymore. I was really bad at hard now. I seemed to let everything that sat on my shoulders collapse me under the pressure these days. My eyes went to the bag with my locked-up phone that contained the main thing I’d been avoiding lately—the notes I was supposed to turn into a character letter. My mom was waiting on that letter. It was due tomorrow. It was tomorrow or never. And if it was never, she might not forgive me if things went even more sideways. Already she was going to think I’d blown it off again. I had. My plan was to do it today. Or at least try. I wasn’t sure what was stopping me. Well, aside from that crushing pressure.

“So…” he said. “What’s in your backpack?”

Chapter 8

Then

It was the first timein a while that we were eating dinner together as a family. My mom had gotten takeout from a local Mexican restaurant that we loved—enchiladas and rice and beans. She was telling us about a patient at work whose ear had been itching for days.

“What was it?” I asked. “Something bad? It was something bad, wasn’t it?”

Dad laughed. “A spider? An earwig?”

“Is that why they’re called earwigs?” I asked. “Because they like to crawl in people’s ears?”

“That’s a wives’ tale,” Mom said.

Dad pointed at her with his fork. “I think the wives’ tale is that they would lay eggs in the ear and the babies would eat your brains.”