window. Was he watching? During the rest of the
afternoon, I checked more often than I'd like to admit. And I'm afraid Chet noticed, too,
because when we were all done and we'd congratulated
each other on what was sure to be a fine-looking yard, he said, “He may be acting like a
coward now, but I do hold out hope for the boy.”
A coward? What on earth could I say to that? I just stood there with the hose in one hand
and the spigot valve beneath the other.
And with that, Chet waved so long and walked across the street.
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A few minutes later I saw Bryce coming down the sidewalk toward his house. I did a double
take. All this time I'd thought he was inside the house
watching, and he was really outside walking around? I was embarrassed all over again.
I turned my back on him and concentrated on watering the yard. What a fool I was! What a
complete idiot! And I had just built up a nice head of
angry steam when I heard, “It's looking good, Juli. Nice job.”
It was Bryce, standing right there on our driveway. And suddenly I wasn't mad at me
anymore. I was mad at him. How could he stand there like my
supervisor and tell me, Nice job? He had no business saying anything after what he'd done.
I was about to hose him down when he said, “I'm sorry for what I did, Juli. It was, you know…
wrong.”
I looked at him—into those brilliant blue eyes. And I tried to do what Chet had said—I tried to
look past them. What was behind them? What was
he thinking? Was he really sorry? Or was he just feeling bad about the things he'd said?
It was like looking into the sun, though, and I had to turn away.
I couldn't tell you what we talked about after that, except that he was nice to me and he made
me laugh. And after he left, I shut off the water and
went inside feeling very, very strange.
The rest of the evening I bounced back and forth between upset and uneasy. The worst part
being, I couldn't really put my finger on what exactly I
was upset or uneasy about. Of course it was Bryce, but why wasn't I just mad? He'd been
such a … scoundrel. Or happy? Why wasn't I just happy?
He'd come over to our house. He'd stood on our driveway. He'd said nice things. We'd
laughed.
But I wasn't mad or happy. And as I lay in bed trying to read, I realized that upset had been
overshadowed by uneasy. I felt as though someone
was watching me. I got so spooked I even got up and checked out the window and in the
closet and under the bed, but still the feeling didn't go
away.
It took me until nearly midnight to understand what it was.
It was me. Watching me.
Looming Large and Smelly
Sunday I woke up feeling like I'd been sick with the flu. Like I'd had one of those bad,
convoluted, unexplainable fever dreams.
And what I've figured out about bad, convoluted, unexplainable dreams of any kind is that
you've just got to shake them off. Try to forget that they
ever happened.
I shook it off, all right, and got out of bed early 'cause I had eaten almost nothing the night
before and I was starving! But as I was trucking into the
kitchen, I glanced into the family room and noticed that my dad was sacked out on the couch.
This was not good. This was a sign of battles still in progress, and it made me feel like an
