The Size of Your Dreams - - (large screen ebook reader .txt) 📗
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By 2 am I was hot in my blankets and restless. I decided to slip into the kitchen to grab my favorite late night snack. I cut up two bananas into slices and sprinkled them with cinnamon like Mom always did when I was little. Just as I was dribbling peanut butter on the bananas, Dad walked in.
“Can’t sleep either?” he said.
I shook my head.
Dad pulled two more bananas from the bunch. “Could you make me one too?”
“Sure.”
“You got a big exam or something?”
“Nah,” I said and sliced up his bananas.
“Something upsetting you?”
I shrugged.
“Want to talk about it?” He heaped a dollop of peanut butter onto his plate.
“I’m fine, Dad.”
And that’s when I noticed it. As Dad turned to leave, his head sank ever so slightly, just like mine did every time Monica Gray had blown me off. Was I doing that?
It’s funny. He was asking me the kinds of questions that led Monica to believe I was a nice guy. I looked up at Dad and studied him as if for the first time. Yeah, his hair was all over the place, and his glasses were super thick, but he really cared about me. And I was too busy chasing after the People-Magazine-reading crew to notice.
“Hey, Dad,” I said, “Want to play chess?” He and I used to play all the time when I was a kid, but sometime during middle school I stopped.
Dad’s face lit up like a kid walking into Disney World. “Yeah?”
My chest ached when I realized I’d given up chess because it wasn’t “cool.” Funny thing was, no one liked me any more for my lack of chess, but I lost time with one of the only people who liked me no matter what. “Yeah.”
Some ten bananas and a dozen games later, I still hadn’t gotten a leg up on him. But I didn’t care.
The sky glowed that indigo hue it always does before sunrise.
“Lemme show you something.” Dad grabbed a blanket off his easy chair.
We quietly climbed the stairs to the attic and up the ladder to the roof. We sat down and leaned against the chimney, the blanket wrapped around us to break the early morning chill, and watched the sunrise.
“When we first got this house, Mom and I would come up here to watch the sunrise all the time,” Dad said.
Somehow I just couldn’t picture my parents young and watching sunrises together. “Mom told me how you met at the museum…”
“Oh, yeah,” Dad grinned. “She was something. I never thought I’d have a chance at a girl like her.”
“How come?”
“She was so beautiful and always dressed just right. Look at me, I can’t even button my shirts correctly. What chance did I have?”
“So what happened?”
“I wish I knew. If I could duplicate the formula for men attracting women out of their league, I’d make a fortune.” Dad laughed. “Mostly, I followed her around like a puppy and hung on her every word.”
Dad might not know his secret formula, but combining his version with Mom’s, I roughly pieced it together. Dad had been present and attentive, he’d listened and cared. I guess I’d done that for Monica yesterday. Maybe that’s why she thought I was a really nice guy. “And you liked what you heard?” I asked. “Your mother’s passion for art is contagious. She didn’t just know the name of every painter at the museum, she knew their whole life stories, had studied their techniques, had visited many of their studios.” Dad gazed far into the distance as the sun peeked over the horizon. “I wouldn’t know what to do with a paintbrush if my life depended on it, but listening to her talk about art, I became a lover of the craft.”
That wasn’t my experience with Monica at all. The more I heard her speak, the less beautiful she became.
“No one knows this,” Dad said, “but I even keep one of Mom’s prints in my wallet.” Dad had a secret, and he was sharing it with me? “I like to keep her with me everywhere I go.”
We sat in silence, basking in the sun’s pink-orange glow as it lit up the sky.
“I have to get ready for school,” I said, “But, Dad?”
“Yes, Kelvin?”
“Thanks for bringing me up here. It’s stunning.”
Queen of the Losers
I walked through the town of Grissom with Amanda following along at my heels. This was not a date—I knew that much—but I was still trying to get my head around how we’d arrived here together and what it was we were supposed to do.
It had started a couple of days earlier when I told my math class about my interview with Monica Grey, and how surprised I’d been to find out how much she struggled despite looking like she had everything together.
Mr. Griffin, who was taking Jarod’s request for more homework way too seriously in my opinion, immediately jumped on my case. “You must learn to see less through your eyes and feel more through your heart,” he said.
“What does that mean?”
“It means that the face that people put out to the world does not always reflect what they’re feeling inside. Kelvin, you led us in the work on the Identity Cards because your primary challenge this year was to truly see yourself. Now that you’ve made some strides in that arena, it’s time that you came to see others as well. Here’s your assignment.”
I was to go to a town where I knew no one and to take pictures of strangers. For each picture, I needed to provide a caption saying what emotion that person was feeling. I had to come back with at least five people who were happy, five angry, etc.
Christy had her first swim meet since the accident that Saturday in Grissom, so I decided to go to the meet and do the assignment afterward. The team’s spirits were sky high with Christy’s return, and we won the meet easily. Christy swam with her cast on and was barely competitive, but Amanda was a terror. She won every race she entered. Christy cheered her on the entire time, and when Amanda, as anchor, came from behind to win the 4 x 100 relay, Christy was the first to envelop her in a giant hug.
I congratulated them both, and Amanda asked me why I’d come all the way out here just to watch a swim meet. When I explained about the assignment, she thought it sounded fun and asked to come along.
So here we were, but it was definitely not a date. It was a sunny day, so we walked into the main park in town and sat outside a coffee shop where there was plenty of foot traffic. I kept my phone at the ready.
“Happy people should be the easiest,” I said. “We might as well get that out of the way first.”
“You think so? That’s not my experience,” Amanda said.
That didn’t surprise me coming from Amanda, the awkward homeschooler. Fortunately, we weren’t in a town full of Amandas. There were plenty of people around, having a good time.
I picked up my phone, ready to snap a photo of a girl who looked around fifteen or sixteen, chatting with a bunch of guys.
Amanda looked over my shoulder. “You’re not seriously taking a picture of her, are you?”
“Why not? Look at that smile on her face.”
Amanda shook her head. “Forget the smiles. Look at that thick, black eyeliner. And see the way her hand is twisting the straps of her purse?”
“OK, so you find someone.”
“What about that guy over there?”
“The one sitting by himself, reading a book?”
“He looks content.”
I pulled out my phone and snapped his photo. “I’ll put him down under lonely.”
“Why, because he’s alone? That doesn’t make someone lonely.”
I sighed. “I guess it’s hard to tell what people are feeling.”
“It’s not so hard. Get your camera ready.” Amanda walked toward a guy taking a picture of his kids. I thought she was going to ask him something, but she didn’t stop and walked right into him.
“Watch where you’re going, will you?” the man said.
“I’m so sorry.” She ran back to me, a big smile drawn across her face. “See, it’s not so hard to tell what people are feeling. That guy was angry.”
I burst out laughing. “Of course he was angry—you walked right into him. But I don’t think that was the assignment.”
“The assignment was to take pictures of angry people. You did take the picture, right?”
“Yes, I did, but I can’t count it. Our job was to identify emotions, not create them.”
“Oh? And who do you think made him angry?”
“You did, obviously.”
“Oh, it’s obvious, is it? You want to bet? Loser takes the winner out to dinner tonight. Deal?”
Out to dinner? This was definitely starting to feel more like a date. Still, I was having fun. “Deal. But how are you…”
I never got to the end of my question. Amanda ran off again until Bam, she smashed into a light-skinned black girl laughing with her friends, and both of them went down. Amanda scrambled to her feet and said, “Oh, I’m so sorry, I didn’t see you.”
Remarkably, the girl kept laughing. “That’s alright,” she said. “Give me a hand up.”
Amanda pulled her to her feet. “Are you OK?”
“I’m fine,” the girl said, though she winced and rubbed her shoulder. “You?”
“I’m okay. So sorry again.”
The girl waved to her as Amanda ran back toward me. “I’m in the mood for Italian,” she said. “There’s a great new place off route 89.”
“What are you talking about? We were betting on whether you’d made the guy angry, not on whether you could beat up on some helpless girl. I figured we’d go ask him.”
“Well, of course, he’d say I made him angry. It’s that kind of thinking that made him angry in the first place.”
“What kind of thinking?”
“The thinking that says that other people are in control of your feelings. But I just proved to you that you can’t make anyone feel anything. If you could, then all of the cliquey brats on the swim team would make me feel like crap every day.”
I’d wondered if Amanda knew the other girls were talking about her. “So you know what they say about you?”
“Of course. The more riled up they get, the more fun I have irking them. Yesterday, I intentionally put my shirt on backward after practice just to send them into little hissy fits.”
“But I thought you said you can’t make anyone feel anything?”
“I can’t. The girls on the team are already feeling jealous and spiteful, I simply amplify it. Look at what just happened. If running into someone automatically made them feel angry, then that girl I just bowled over should have felt livid. The fact is, that guy was already angry, he was just bottling it in. All I had to do was let the cork out of the bottle. But I ran into that girl much harder and still couldn’t make her angry.”
“I’m not so sure I’m buying this.”
“No? Want to go
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