Twenty-Four

Chris and Mark were playing basketball. Chris was getting beaten so badly. So badly. It was ridiculously cold out. Dribbling the ball hurt his fingers. Mark didn't seem to have any such issues.

Things were starting to go back to normal. Chris was possibly (probably) the only one who was still clinging on to the scandal.

Nobody else wanted to talk about it, anymore. Even Chloe was a little too absorbed with her new boyfriend to think about her missing friend too often. And so Chris couldn't talk about it, either.

"Hey, Mark," he gasped. Chris was not an athlete. Cold air hurt his lungs. Chris missed summer.



And Mark looked at him. Don't say it. Don't say it. Don't say it. Chris wondered if perhaps he was going quite insane. "What'd you get your sister for Christmas?" he asked.

Mark shrugged, perhaps relieved. "I don't know, some book that she wanted." He gently lobbed the ball into the basket above Chris' head. Chris was losing, dismally. "She dragged me over to the bookstore, put it in my hand, and made me pay. It's not like it's a surprise, or anything."

Chris managed to get the ball, and made in a shot. The problem wasn't that he couldn't get the shots in, the problem was that he couldn't get his hands on the darn ball. Mark snatched it out before it even hit the ground. "What'd you get for your mom?"

Mark scored his fifteenth point. Game over. Chris had scored five times. They sat down on the driveway; Chris was panting. "You know I never have any idea what to get my mom. And you know that I'm going to go out on Christmas Eve and get her something heinous and that she'll like it anyway because she's my mom and she has to."

"You do try. You just suck at buying presents."

"Thanks for that."

"Any time."

Chris laid back on the driveway. Running sort of sucked. He got sports--he liked basketball and baseball and everything. But why did running have to suck so hard? It would be much easier just to do the newspaper for the rest of his life. There really wasn't any reason for so much running, particularly in such cold weather.

Mark, who was wearing only shorts and a sweatshirt, laughed at Chris' panting. "You are ridiculously out of shape," he informed his friend. "You are one skinny-ass kid."

Jokingly, teasingly, Chris made a very rude, one-fingered gesture. "I am good at math," he told Mark. "I have to either be really skinny or really fat, so don't mess."

It was one of those moments where Chris would later realize that he hadn't thought about Lena for two hours, three hours, four hours. And then he'd be shocked, again. How could he possibly forget her?

Because even though he prided himself as being the only one to not forget, the only one to hang on, and (if he was being honest) the only one with something of a psychosis about the whole issue, things were even returning to normal for Chris Mathis, whether he wanted them to or not.