Touch Read Free Page B

watching some honeybees fly around, Shakes said you could watch them singing to each other and thanking the flowers for their nectar. In grade school, he was elected class president more often than anyone else—not because the other kids felt sorry for him, but because even people who hardly knew him could see what a model human being he was.
    Unfortunately, his health problems weren’t limitedto tics and twitches. Shakes missed school a lot. Not weeks or months or anything, but he spent more time out than most kids. And I knew he spent a lot of that time going to see various doctors and specialists.
    But when he came back to school after being away, you weren’t supposed to notice that he’d been gone. You didn’t ask Shakes how he was. Somehow you knew not to do that. You always took up exactly where you’d left off before he was out sick, as if you were finishing a sentence that had been interrupted in the middle.
    Because we weren’t allowed to ask him how he was feeling, I got used to looking closely at him, to see how he was. I’d stare at him especially hard when he’d come back from being absent, as if to reassure myself that he was still okay. So maybe the fact that I looked at him longer and more carefully than I looked at the others was also why I felt I knew him better than I knew Chris and Kevin. And I knew them really well.
    Sometimes I wondered if Shakes had developed other abilities—extrasensory powers—to make up for his physical troubles. We all thought he was psychic. He often called or emailed or text-messaged me at theexact moment I was thinking about calling or emailing or text-messaging him. And lots of times I’d think of some song, and Shakes would start to hum it. Kevin and Chris and I joked that we’d better not have any negative thoughts about Shakes, because he would know. Actually, we never thought anything negative about Shakes, so it was never a problem.
    And what about me? Who was I in the group? Before my mom and dad split up, I was just another kid. But after that, I was the angry one—which translated into the nervy one, the daredevil, the one who acted first and thought about it later.
    On Halloween, I was the one who went up to the scary house on our street and rang the doorbell. I was the one who climbed the fence and got our ball when someone hit it into the yard whose owners had the snarly dog. And when a teacher announced that anyone who said one more word would get detention, I was the one who said that fatal one more word. Maybe it would have seemed strange to someone else—someone who wasn’t one of us—that I, the girl, was the one who took all the biggest dares and ran the biggest risks. But wedidn’t think like that, we didn’t think about being a boy or a girl. At least not yet, not then.
     
    I used to have friends who were fun to hang out with. Friends I cared about, and who cared about me. And now I’ve lost that. I’ve lost all of that. It’s true that some bad stuff happened, but maybe we could have forgotten it if not for the TV show inside Joan’s head, the lawyer-courtroom drama in which she gets to play the brave, heroic stepmom of the girl who’s been assaulted—no, molested , no, inappropriately touched —by her three best friends.
    I’m still thinking about the dream, and about Doctor Atwood asking me what it means—isn’t the answer obvious?—as Joan slides the tray of chocolate chip cookies into the oven. Under her apron she’s wearing a skirt that’s way shorter than what I would wear if I were a mother and a professional psychotherapist Joan’s age.
    Because if we’re talking about inappropriate , what about the way Joan dresses! And what about her wanting me to dress like that, too! Joan keeps trying to do all sorts of mother-daughter bonding stuff, like shoppingtrips to the mall. It always creeps me out, because Joan insists on trying on—and buying—outfits you’d expect to see on some slutty high school girl. She always