Tell Me Something Real Read Online Free PDF

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    We sit in the middle of the crowded theater. I realize that I haven’t seen a movie in months, since before Christmas, maybe Thanksgiving. Struggling to focus on the plot, I think more about the sound of her breathing. I drink a Coke as Mom sips a small 7-Up. I watch her more than the screen. She sits engrossed with the blood-soaked prom scene, raising the straw to her lips, swallowing slowly. All of her movements are delicate. I wonder if she’ll fall asleep, but the pillow remains in her lap.
    Last year, this would have been unremarkable. On a whim, usually when Dad was out of town, Mom would drive us to school, only to turn around midway and take us on a day trip to feed giraffes at the Wild Animal Park, ride roller coasters at Magic Mountain, or pick apples in Julian. Random and spontaneous and completely unexpected.
    We emerge from the theater, squinting in the bright sunlight. I’d forgotten it was still daytime. Mom drapes an arm around my shoulders, tucking her pillow under the other, and looks at me. “One more surprise,” she says.
    We drive with the radio turned up. Mom sings along, her voice quiet compared to the jangly guitar of a Beatles song. At one point, she reaches for my hand. I look at our overlapping fingers, how mine are longer than hers. Soon, Iwill be taller, all of my limbs longer than my mother’s, if she lives that long.
    I don’t ask where we’re going.
    I gaze out the window at the long stretch of beach, flanked by an endless concrete sea wall and strip malls. An ugly cousin compared to the hills near our house, perched above the ocean, covered with Torrey pines, their twisted branches distorted by decades of wind. Mom slows when we reach the modest pier, a shaky wooden structure that I expect to fall apart like pick-up sticks, planks tumbling into the cresting waves. She parks in front of the concession stand.
    â€œYou pick,” she says. Clam strips or soft serve ice cream, our guilty pleasures. They serve the best ones here. Dad, Adrienne, and Marie insist that clams taste like deep-fried fingers. When running errands, just the two of us, Mom and I stop here. Like the movies, I haven’t been in months.
    â€œCan you eat more?” I ask, skeptical after the pizza.
    â€œI just want a bite. Come on, you love it as much as I do.”
    When Mom is happy, her Southern drawl emerges, elongating vowels, her words blending together. The voice of bedtime stories and lullabies—almost forgotten.
    I order one of each from the man who has staffed the counter my entire life, regardless of the weather or height of the waves. Fishermen, he says, are always hungry.
    Mom accepts the cone, and I blow on the crispy clams, too hot to touch. She turns down the music. “Wait for me, Vanessa,” she says. “I’m trying. I’m scared too. Wait for me to feel better.”
    â€œYou’re not going to get better,” I say.
    She doesn’t look away. “I’m not giving up, Nessie. We’ll have more days like this.”
    She nicknamed me Nessie when I was a baby, and used it until I came to her as a teary-eyed second-grader and begged her to stop. Adrienne had told me that my pet name was shared with the Loch Ness Monster, a name for nightmares and beasts. Mom couldn’t convince me otherwise, and she never said it again, not until now.
    â€œJust wait for me.”

Three
    The boy stands in the shadow of a bougainvillea climbing the arch of the courtyard entrance. The sun diffuses through paper-thin leaves and casts a ruby hue on his Hawaiian print shirt and long, below-the-knee surfer shorts. It’s as though he stands in the center of a pink spotlight. He looks healthy, sunburned, and rosy cheeked like me. It isn’t until he steps through the entryway—away from the protection of the flowers—that I recognize he is one of them.
    In the clear light, he is sick and gray-skinned, with half-moon shadows