Page 30 of Anything But Lonely

I had silenced the alarm I had set for when Mateo said Crew usually wakes up, wanting to stay in the darkness just a little bit longer. But when I heard Crew and Mateo moving around in the kitchen, I knew I had to get up. And I tried. Hard. But it was like there were weights pushing down on my body, burying me into the mattress, causing me to sink deeper and deeper every time I tried to move.

Under the covers, I can pretend that I’m in this in-between, where nothing matters.

And there’s safety in that nothingness.

My mom’s not dead.

My friends aren’t wasting their time worrying about me.

I don’t feel guilty. I don’t feel sad. I don’t feel angry.

I don’t feel anything.

But I know I can’t do that anymore. No matter how much I want to. People will begin to notice, and when I’m not drowning in the numbness, I can think more logically. If I don’t want people to worry about me—Jack, Rumi, Ava, Anderson—then I need this distraction.

And this distraction is a cute kid who likes Halloween better than Christmas and says I remind him of his black cat.

“Ems!” Crew’s voice chirps in my ears. I blink a few times, my surroundings coming back into focus.

And calls me Ems.

“It’s your turn,” he repeats, moving onto his knees as he comes to sit a little closer to me.

“Sorry, champ,” I apologize, stacking my blocks one by one as Crew hands them to me. He says the color of each one before placing it in my hand and asks some sort of question every few blocks.

Why is the sun yellow?

Why is the sun so far away?

Why does the sun go away at nighttime?

I answer each question as best I can, trying to find the pattern and path of thinking his little brain takes with each one he asks.

Why is grass green?

Why do cows eat grass?

Why do cows live on farms?

“Pink,” he announces, handing me the silicone block, and my heart squeezes.

It’s stupid, really. It’s just a stupid kids’ toy, one of many in the set scattered around us. But it has stupid emotion clogging my throat, taking my breath away for a moment.

My mom loved the color pink. She always said my eyes looked the greenest when I wore it. She would smile wide, her tired eyes and the oxygen mask the only tell that she was struggling as much as she was. Pink is your color, Emmy, she’d tell me, so I always made sure to wear it when I was with her, especially near the end.

The memory of her voice steals the air from my lungs, and suddenly it feels like I can't get a full breath.

Am I going to forget what her voice sounded like?

It’s only been four days since her funeral, only just over a week since she died, and already her voice sounds softer, like it’s beginning to fade—my mind slowly sanding down the edges of the memories until eventually there will be nothing left to remember.

Is this how it's always going to be?

Every little reminder of my mother threatening the coffin I've buried my grief inside. Every thought of her striking like a match, daring to catch on the gasoline that's been soaking the wood all these years.

One spark, and everything I’ve buried will be able to claw its way back out.

“Why are you staring at the block?” Crew asks, but I barely hear it. It takes me a second to remember where I am, what I’m doing. I look down at the pink block in my hand as the world around me comes back into focus, the loud thumping of my heartbeat in my ears fading.