I stood, large globs of mud splatting back to their home. “Who needs a spa treatment when I have disc golf mud therapy?” I ran a hand from my shoulder to my wrist, scraping off more mud, and then did the same on the other arm. When I exited I went straight for Gage, ready to give him a big hug. He knew that game and took off running. In my pursuit of Gage, I managed to catch Braden off guard by doubling back. I wrapped my arms around him from behind. “Whose car did we drive today?” I said, my cheek pressed against his back. “Oh, that’s right. I call shotgun.” I felt him groan.

“Your trunk is pretty big,” Nathan spoke up.

I gasped and let go of Braden. “Nathan!”

His cheeks colored. “I wasn’t serious.”

I smiled. As if he needed to clarify that. Gage came slinking back, keeping a good distance between us.

The players on the course behind us laughed as they took in the scene, then asked, “Uh, can we play through?”

“Yes,” I said, water still squishing between my toes as I walked. “Feel free. We’re leaving.”

“Leaving?” Braden said, faking incredulity. “But we only have two holes left. Come on, Charlie, we can’t stop now.”

I knew he was making fun of me and what I had done to Dave a few weeks ago in football, when he got the call about his grandma. The veiled rebuke stung. “Okay, let’s keep playing.”

“I was just kidding.” He put his arm around my shoulder.

I shrugged it off. “No, I want to play. You’re right, we’re almost done.”

“But you have mud dropping out of your shorts,” Braden said. “And the image isn’t a good one.”

“Shut up. Who’s up?” I asked as the players now ahead of us finished the hole. I picked up a Frisbee and marched to the throwing point.

At the car when we were finished, Braden opened the trunk.

“Don’t be a jerk,” I said. “I’m not getting in there.”

He shot me angry eyes and pulled out a blanket. “I was just getting something for you to sit on.” He handed me the blanket.

“Oh. Thanks.” I took it and wrapped it around my entire backside. “Sorry.” I shouldn’t have called him a jerk, even playfully. I knew that word bugged him.

The guys piled into the car, but Jerom stopped me, nodding his head toward where Braden sat in the driver’s seat. “How hard is it to let a guy feel useful every once in a while?”

“What?”

“Would it have killed you to listen to his pointers back there?”

I looked at Braden, then back to Jerom. Why would Braden need to feel useful? Had something made him feel un-useful? Was something going on with him that he’d talked to Jerom, the “really good listener,” about? A surge of jealousy that Jerom might know something about Braden that I didn’t coursed through me. “Yes. It might’ve killed me.”

He rolled his eyes and headed for the passenger seat.

Chapter 12

When I got to work the next Tuesday, Linda’s face was beaming with a smile of giddy anticipation.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“Go change and I’ll tell you when you get done.”

She probably thought it was weird that I brought my work clothes in my backpack and came in wearing my sloppy T-shirts. But I still cared more about what my brothers thought than what she did. And I didn’t live in my mind . . . or whatever she had said. I lived in a house full of guys who loved to make fun of me. I walked out after changing and looked at her expectantly.

“Okay, close your eyes,” she said.

Playing along, I closed my eyes.

“Ready? Open them.”

I did, and she held up a check for a hundred and fifteen dollars. It was made out to me. “What’s this?”

“Your cut of the makeup session we did the other day.”

I took the check and stared at the number. And here I thought I was going to tell Linda I didn’t want to do it anymore. But if I could make over a hundred bucks just sitting there, I could handle it. It meant I’d be able to pay off my dad quicker.

“We did so well, we’re going to hold at least two more classes and see how it goes.” She pulled a flyer out from under the cupboard and handed it to me. On the upper right-hand corner of the flyer was a picture of me in full makeup.

“Whoa. What’s that?”

“Your picture. I thought you were okay with it. It’s the one we took the other day.”

“I just thought you printed off a few for my . . . family . . .” I would not mention my mom again. It really was eating me up. “. . . to see.”

“Did she like them?”

“Yeah. They were great.” That wasn’t a lie, right?

“I apologize. I should’ve asked you. It just turned out so well, I offered it to Amber.”

I stared at the picture again. It was just a dumb flyer. Hopefully no one would recognize me. My friends and brothers weren’t exactly in the market for makeup.

That night I couldn’t sleep. My brain kept spinning. It was only midnight, earlier than my normal middle-of-the-night waking, so when I looked out the window and saw the light on in Braden’s room, I texted: Up?

Yeah, see you in one minute, he texted back almost immediately.

I heard his back door shut right after mine. We arrived at the fence together. He leaned his shoulder against the board and I could smell his deodorant. It was a sharp, clean scent.

“What’s up?” he asked.

“Feeling restless.” I sat down, back to the fence, and listened as he did the same.

“No run again today?”

“No.”

“Are you out here every night you don’t run?”

“No. Aside from the two nights with you, I’ve only been out here one other time.”

“You should’ve texted me.”

“It was two in the morning.”

“So?”

“I may be selfish, but even I felt bad about that.”

He laughed.

I didn’t know why I texted him to come out here. It wasn’t like I had anything important to discuss. In a way it was nice to know I wasn’t alone in my middle-of-the-night world. My brothers slept like the dead. How was it that my brain wouldn’t shut off? I felt guilty asking my brothers about my mom. I didn’t want to be the one to make everyone else miserable when they had moved on. Maybe they’d moved on because they had real memories to hang on to while my brain had to make up its own. Why did my brain have to be so morbid about it?

“Why do you run so much, anyway?”

“I need to stay in shape for basketball or I’m in pain those first several weeks of practice.”

“So you run, what, six . . . seven miles a day to save yourself from two weeks of pain? It seems like you’re training for a marathon, not a basketball game.”

“Well, it helps me sleep, too.”

“Most people don’t need to exhaust themselves in order to sleep.”

“True. A lot of people just take sleeping pills.”

He let out a single laugh, the way he always did when something someone said surprised him. “Yes. I guess your way is more natural.” There was a long pause. “You’re good at avoiding questions, but what I’m asking is why you can’t sleep.”

He was just a disembodied voice, I told myself. I could talk to a disembodied voice. Or the moon. I could always talk to the moon. I found it in the sky, minding its own business, only half lit.

Finally, I said, “I have nightmares.” He must’ve sensed it was better to talk as little as possible, because he just waited. “About my mom and the night she died. My brain seems to think it’s fun to give me every scenario, even impossible ones. It’s pretty much the only memory I have from when I was little . . . that night. I don’t even know if any of it is real or if my mind has made all of it up.” I had never told anyone about my nightmares, not even Gage, who knew more than most about the inner workings of my brain. It felt strangely freeing, like I was putting it out there for the moon to deal with.

“What happens in them?”

“Different things—rain and breaking windows and cars. And my mom, of course.”