Page 32 of Unfix Me

Smiling, he uncapped a sharpie. “Write the date on the back.”

When I did, he handed me the lighter. I hesitated, but when he moved it closer, I took it.

“Burn it.”

“Uh…” I looked at the coin, then at him. “Really?”

“Yeah. I’ll explain, just do it.”

Shaking my head, I flicked the lighter and held the flame to the wood. It lit surprisingly quickly. Kai flipped over a bottle of water and poured it in a small circle. I dropped the coin in the middle of it and we both watched it continue to burn.

“The wood’s dry,” he explained. “It’ll burn quickly.”

“And what’s the point?”

“It’s something my dad started doing with me after my first game. We lost and I was completely devastated. Blubbering, crying, saying I wanted to quit.”

“Not surprised.”

He breathed a laugh and started to drum his fingers on his knee. “I may have been a little dramatic and sensitive. Instead of trying to tell me we’d do better next time, he brought me onto the field the next day and lit a wooden coin.”

Grabbing the jar, he pointed to the coin inside of it. That one wasn’t burned and it had been marked with a date.

“You savor the wins and you let the losses go. Every time I win a game, I create a token. When I lose, I accept it and release the negative energy back into the universe, so to speak. The tokens give me something to look forward to and, after a while, I learned to accept that loss is a natural part of life.”

“I wish I would’ve seen it that way when I played. I beat myself up for every loss, trying to think of reasons it was my fault.”

“I still do that, but this helps me to remember that it isn’t important. We can’t change it and I don’t want to carry around a token of negative energy.”

“Why did you show me this?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted slowly. “It seemed like something you should see. Maybe there are things you need to let go of. That, or I’m extremely worn out and need to sleep.”

“Thank you.”

His head cocked. “For making you burn a coin?”

“No, I…” Dragging my teeth over my bottom lip, I tried to resist blurting out everything going on in my head. “This is surprisingly beautiful. It’s wholesome. I think I needed something positive like this.”

“Oh. Well, you’re welcome. It’s nice that another person gets to have a piece of something my dad instilled in me.”

We kept our eyes on the coin as it slowly became ash. The grass in the circle was mostly burned by that point, but it didn’t breach the border of water. I stared at it a moment longer, thinking about the strange but meaningful ritual. I thought about how it might apply to my own life, but when I tried to separate the negatives from the positives that I wanted to keep, I found them interlaced by an intricate knot.

Was I holding onto negative energy and if so, what effect was it having on me every day? How would I even know?

What Kai had just shown me was personal. That fact wasn’t lost on me. I felt warm and it wasn’t from the tiny fire fizzling out between us.

Chapter 12

Sen

Is it wrong to like a man?

The results Google gave me were all over the place. I came upon a religious site offering me advice similar to what I’d heard from my parents and Derek. There were even more articles telling me that it was okay. Apparently, there was a hotline I could call.

Even just looking it up made me feel like I was doing something wrong. I was getting paranoid, looking around as if my dad was going to appear over my shoulder. Maybe he’d be levitating outside my window with a look of scathing disapproval.

With a deep breath, I clicked on one of the links. There was a rainbow banner at the top of the site, which didn’t help. It was one of the things they demonized at Camp Dumont.

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