Ten Minutes from Home by Beth Greenfield

Author:Beth Greenfield [Greenfield, Beth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307462077
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2010-03-14T06:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

I SAW him appear out of the corner of my eye about halfway through my Congorilla game, but I had to keep playing or lose my turn. It was only my third or fourth time back to the beach club since the accident, and the kid I noticed was Peter, the older kid who had taken Adam under his wing last summer. He was about fourteen, really tall and tawny-skinned and kind of flabby around his middle, always wearing Hawaiian-print swim trunks, and he’d liked hanging out with my little brother. They’d play catch and go bellyboarding or play Congorilla here in the snack bar. I was trying to get back to the high score I’d gotten last year, but I was out of practice, and when GAME OVER flashed across the screen I felt a jolt of panic because now I would have to deal with Peter.

“Hey, Beth! I haven’t seen you all summer,” he said when I looked up from the console. He looked sweetly confused, and I knew then for sure that he didn’t know. My small clutch of beach pals—acquaintances who had glommed on to me since my crutch-wielding return as if I were a superstar—tightened around me.

“Hi.” I was unsure of how to answer.

“I was wondering, where’s your brother been? The little redheaded dude …” He held his hand out, palm down and about chest high, as if he had to illustrate exactly which little guy he was searching for. I felt like I could faint. How could he not know? I thought. Didn’t everybody know? And the only thing I could think to do in my panic was to turn and bolt like the gorilla on the screen.

I hadn’t run in a long time because my cast had come off recently so it was more of a limping run and it hurt. But as I flew out of the snack bar and into the early August evening I could feel the warm air on my atrophied calf and the cooling sand under each slap of sore toes and it felt good, inexplicably good, even as fresh tears spilled down my face and I felt a white-hot pain spread wide across my gut. All around me, as I ran, were ghosts—I saw Adam in the ocean to my left, splashing in the pool to my right. There was Kristin, flirting with Scott on her beach blanket, swimming laps, laughing, singing. I couldn’t pretend anymore not to see them.

My mom had warned me that it would be too hard. It was back in late July, when we hadn’t yet returned to the beach club. That meant only a month had passed, but it was the peak of summer and I was desperate for normalcy. I wanted to put on my swimsuit—a pink-and-white-striped stretchy cotton maillot with a white cinch belt around the waist, purchased at the mall during the last weeks of sixth grade. I wanted to see my friends and sit on the blanket

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