Still Life by Christa Parrish

Author:Christa Parrish
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2014-11-01T04:00:00+00:00

PART THREE

EVAN

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Hey, Evan. Hey. Wait up.”

Evan stops in the stream of teenagers; they bump around him, textbooks and elbows and sneakers, as if the hallways of high school are a rock tumbler, and he thinks, I’ll have no edges left by graduation. Evan Smooth. That’s me. Then Grace hooks her arm through his and pulls him from the bodies and against the lockers, which are painted that peculiar blue only found in schools and stadiums, too vibrant to be royal, too bruised to be aqua. She snaps a sheet of paper open with a flick of her wrist. “They’ve released some of the names of the Flight 207 victims.”

“So?”

“That photographer you like is on there.”

“Let me see that,” Evan says, snatching the list from his friend. He drops his binder and copy of Brave New World onto his feet and holds the paper with both hands, as if it will keep him from falling. The names are in alphabetical order; his eyes dive into them, catching the eighth one. Goetz, Julian. “Maybe it’s someone with the same name.”

Grace shakes her head, silky hair dancing, and he gets a rare glimpse of her ears. She wears her hair parted in the center, straight over her cheeks, only the center third of her face visible. “It’s him.”

“How do you know?”

“I saw the story. It’s online, all over.”

He bangs his head softly against the locker behind him. He’s been avoiding the crash news altogether; it only reminds him of how close his mother came to getting on the flight. “I don’t look at that stuff.”

“I get it,” Grace says. She leans back onto the adjacent locker.

Their arms touch.

He’s known Grace since they were in diapers, their mothers best friends and partners in the real estate business. Maybe he’d have a crush on her if she wasn’t four inches taller than him. His father insists Evan has one good growth spurt left, but his cardiologist told him not to get his hopes up; he may be five-and-a-half feet tall forever. It isn’t only the height difference. She knows so many of his most personal secrets. How he wet the bed until he was nine. How he still can’t watch Toy Story because it reminds him of the time he was in the hospital after his fifth heart surgery and the little girl in the room next to him died while his mother kept turning up the volume of that stupid movie to distract him from the frantic code team rushing past his door. Or how he isn’t circumcised. “Oh, we never had it done when he was a baby because of everything else,” his mother told Miss Robin while he and Grace played Nintendo in the next room. They were eleven years old. “Now he says he doesn’t want to. Will tried to convince him, but I guess he’s been through enough so I suppose he can do something about it on his own when he’s an adult, when some girl gets a look at him and comments.

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