Page 16 of Campus Crush
He nodded, and then started to turn around like that was the end of our conversation.
“Hey, how are you doing?” I asked before he could escape to his room.
He shrugged his shoulders again in that way that seventeen-year-old boys do. “Fine.”
I knew that wasn’t true. I wasn’t sure anyone in this house had been fine since my mom’s accident, least of all my brother.
I grabbed his hand before he could walk away. “Hey, I love you,” I told him.
My mom had said “I love you” to us every day. She had said it was important that we always felt her words and knew how proud of us she was. I knew she would never want a day to go by where her baby boy didn’t know that he was loved. And so I tried to carry on the tradition, even if it was via text message.
It wasn’t lost on me that the little boy who had once giggled “I love you” every time she said it hadn’t uttered those three words since the day of her accident.
He didn’t utter them now, either. He simply gave me another nod and then disappeared down the hall to his room.
With a heavy sigh, I went up to the attic.
Gram lived in an old farmhouse on twenty acres of land that had been passed down from her mother and her parents before them.
“Gram, you up here?”
There was a narrow staircase that led up to the attic, and I climbed it until I could peek up into the large open space. The attic wasn’t cramped like most attics I was aware of and instead could have been its own room. It had six-foot ceilings and spanned the entire top of the nearly two-thousand-square-foot house. It was mostly cluttered with boxes that had black scrawl on them to give an idea of what wasstored in each box. Along the right wall was an old wooden rocking chair that I knew from stories and pictures had been used when my mom was a baby and Gram would rock her to sleep.
That was where I found Gram rocking gently as she looked at a photo album on her lap.
I quietly made my way up the rest of the stairs until I was in the room with her and approached her slowly.
“Gram, are you okay?” My breath caught when I looked down at the photo album on her lap. It was the last photo that had ever been taken of us as a full family before we’d lost my grandpa, then my dad, and then my mom.
Dad had a heart attack in his sleep and was gone before any of us could have ever done anything. I’d been seven and Mason had been only three years old. It was the first horrible memory I had, and sometimes I wondered if I only remembered it so vividly because Mom had been devastated. She’d tried her best to hold it together for us, but he’d been her soulmate, and his loss carved a hole in her heart that left a permanent mark.
Gram looked up, tears glistening in her eyes. She reached for me, and without hesitation, I slipped my hand into hers. Her frail hands were cold, and I held them just a little tighter as anxious worry knotted in my stomach.
“What’s going on?”
“Just missing everyone today,” she said.
“Are you sure that’s all?”
Her smile was soft and sad, and the burn of tears threatened behind my eyes.
“Gram,” I repeated, my voice choked. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
She squeezed my hand and stood up. “I’m just fine.”
Her voice was steady, but I was sure it was a lie becausethere was something in her eyes, a sadness that I hadn’t seen there before that made me think fine was the opposite of what she was feeling right now.
But my grandmother was a stubborn woman, and if she didn’t want to tell me what was going on, I knew she wouldn’t.
She set the album down on the rocking chair and said, “Are you staying for dinner?” Her voice was light again as if she didn’t have a care in the world.
“Yeah, I can,” I said. Staying for dinner sounded like a good idea given how out of character she was acting.
She smiled fondly at me. “I think Mason would appreciate that.”
“Is something else going on with him?” He was the hardest to read of my family members.
Her brows furrowed. “It’s hard to tell these days if it’s new or old pain that he’s carrying. I can’t seem to break through to him, and I only hope his coach is having better luck than I am.”
