Tell Me Something Real by Calla Devlin

“When did you get better?”
    â€œA couple of months later. I finished chemo and then my tests came back. I couldn’t believe it. Chemo was actually worth it. My mom used that to tell me that I need to finish Laetrile.”
    â€œHow do you feel now? Not your health but what you said, as a person? You’re not who you used to be.”
    He shakes his head. “That guy died during chemo.”
    â€œBut you can skate again. You can read. I know it’s not the same, but you’ll be able to surf and maybe even play water polo. You’re getting better every day.”
    â€œI’m not talking about sports and books. I know what it’s like to be okay with dying. I lost a lot when I got sick. There’s no way I’m going back to high school. I haven’t told my mom, but I’m going to get my GED and then decide what I want to do after that. As soon as I turn eighteen, I’m going to make the decisions. I love her. She’s an amazing mom. But now that I’m going to have a post-chemo life, I want to be the one who decides what I’m going to do next. My whole life was blown apart and I’m going to put the pieces back together. I’m not going to do it alone or anything, but I need to be the one who puts everything back.” He taps his chest with his finger. “No one can do that for me. No one can tell me who I am going to be now that I’m better. I don’t know what’s going to happen—just that every decision matters.”
    â€œWhich is why everything needs to be real.”
    â€œYeah,” he says. “And you’re as real as it gets.”
    He shifts his attention to the skateboard. “Get back on.”
    Caleb pulls me toward him and adjusts my feet so they are between his, his left foot on the rear of the board and the right in front. He wraps his arms around my waist, pulling me so close that I feel his heart beat into my shoulderblade. “Just stand and lean next to me. Don’t move your feet unless I tell you to.”
    He pumps his leg against the sidewalk, and we cruise, hopping over the grooves in the concrete, the board’s even rhythm slow compared to the rapid beating in my chest. I don’t want to think about the future, just the present, this moment. I concentrate on the movement, on his touch. He moves the board in a figure-eight pattern, slow loops up and down the street over and over again with me leaning against the length of his body. His hands inch down my waist, stopping right below my bellybutton, right at the top of my jeans. We ride until Barb bellows for us to come inside and eat dinner.

Seven
    Marie and I judge the straightness of the lines as Dad and Adrienne hang enormous sheets of paper—Dad’s sketches of the university arts and letters hall. His jackass of a boss tortured him for weeks, scrapping design after design. Columns versus skylights. Even a futuristic glass dome. Beneath each sketch, Adrienne tapes signs written in elegant script:
    Neoclassical Columns per Richard the Dickwad
    Glass Castle per Richard the Livestock Fornicator
    Golden Rotunda per Richard the Asswipe
    Eleven designs in all. Dad stands before the most recent and final one, just approved that day. It resembles his very first—a stately building, beautiful in a cathedral way, making the very act of learning sacred. Classes in epistemology and Shakespearean drama and the French Revolution. A wingdevoted to music, a refuge of small practice rooms housing pianos and music stands.
    This is it. After two months working on the building, he’s done. He just has to finish out the week. Two more days before he starts his leave of absence.
    Giddy, he points to one of Adrienne’s labels. “That’s not neoclassical.” He taps another sketch. “This one is.”
    I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen him smile like this, with such relief, unburdened. Pérez Prado, King of