The Summer I Learned to Fly by Dana Reinhardt

Author:Dana Reinhardt [Reinhardt, Dana]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-375-89787-0
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2011-07-11T16:00:00+00:00

done

Swoozie ran the shop for the next few days, and I helped her out. It was better than sitting in the hospital waiting for updates on Nick’s surgeries. I tried my best to make pasta. I summoned up everything Nick had taught me. I replayed his lessons. I thought of his patience, his smile, the way he’d make a crater with the flour and crack the eggs into it, the way he took hold of what the pasta machine spat out to check for firmness and width before cutting it to size. While my pasta came out more or less looking right, I knew that it couldn’t possibly taste as good as Nick’s.

Mom picked up groceries on her way back from the hospital and cooked dinner every night. We didn’t say much to each other. Mom was tired. I didn’t want to know the details. I couldn’t bear the thought of his leg. What do you do with a lost leg? Where does a leg go that is all done living?

Luckily, Mom didn’t seem to want to talk much either, so we ate in silence, with only the melancholy sounds of her favored Irish folk record in the background.

At night in my room I held Hum in my lap and I reread Dad’s Book of Lists. I knew it by heart, yet somehow I hoped I’d find a new list somewhere in its pages. A list of ways to fight back, or grab on tighter, when it felt like everything was slipping away.

I started the project of removing my wallpaper. I peeled it slowly and only in the spots behind my dresser or the headboard of my bed so that Mom couldn’t see what I was up to.

And while I was alone in my room at night, I began my own list.

A list of Things That Are Suddenly Clear:

Mom is dating somebody.

Whoever drove that silver car was close enough to Mom to be there when she was too upset to drive herself. Who does this for you but someone who loves you? Someone who you love back?

I don’t know Emmett Crane.

Or at least, he wasn’t who he claimed to be, not that he claimed much about himself. The boy I thought I knew would have come back to check on me. He wouldn’t let so much time go by.

I’d watched enough TV in the lonely afternoons after school, before there was a cheese shop to go to, to know that there were boys who lied, who knew how to say just the right thing or give you just the right look. Boys who could make you feel a way you thought you didn’t deserve to feel.

So I was done.

Done with him. Done with feeling. Done with the beating of my heart.

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