we’ll be late for your brother’s game.”
“But I can’t find my black boot,” Rose yelled back. The distress weighing down the fourteen-year-old’s syllables sounded as real as if she’d lost something really important. Like her homework.
“Wear your brown shoes, then,” Keri shouted.
“I can’t wear brown with black,” Rose exclaimed, sounding horrified.
Keri ran lightly up the stairs and down the narrow hall. She longed to believe it was a healthy sign that Rose strived to look good.
Keri rounded the corner to Rose’s bedroom. Clothes, books and piles of paper littered every surface, as though a strong wind had swept through the room, which was pretty much the way Rose’s room always looked.
Rose stood at her closet door, wearing a black top, chunky necklace and belted, low-waisted blue jeans on her tall, thin body. Her long golden-brown hair was brushed to a shine and streamed down her back. She’d obviously taken pains with her appearance, but her shoulders were slightly hunched, her body language giving away her lack of confidence. The same as always.
The girl glanced at Keri, her large brown eyes mirroring her distress. “I don’t know where it is.”
Rose knelt somewhat awkwardly in front of her closet and haphazardly rummaged through it, her jeans drawing up to reveal the difference between her two legs.
The left one was covered with smooth plastic instead of skin.
“Did you try under the bed?” Keri asked.
Rose got to her feet, moved to the bed, then carefully lowered herself before continuing the search. The prosthesis slowed her down even though it had been three years since a car accident had claimed her leg—and her mother.
Keri swallowed the sadness that always rose inside her when she thought of Maddy Charleton.
She could still picture the way Maddy had looked in the break room at the Springhill Gazette on Keri’s first day of work nearly four years ago. A shocking head of dyed red hair. A voice a few decibels too loud. An infectious laugh.
“What are you waiting for, girl?” Maddy had demanded from her seat amid a group of their advertising department coworkers. “Get some caffeine and get your butt over here.”
Their friendship had blossomed from there. It didn’t matter that Maddy was nearly fifteen years Keri’s senior. With her blunt manner and outrageous sense of humor, Maddy breathed life into every gathering.
So much had changed, Keri thought. Maddy was gone, the victim of a patch of ice that had sent her compact car sliding into a tree. Keri had adopted her two children. And the original reason for Keri’s move to western Pennsylvania had married someone else.
“You were right. It was under the bed.” Rose held up a black leather boot with a two-inch heel, her young, unlined face lit by one of her too-rare smiles.
“Then put it on, girl, and let’s go before we miss the entire first quarter. You know Bryan likes to see us in the stands.”
Rose sat down on the bed and yanked on the half boot over her prosthetic foot, which she’d covered with a black sock dotted with gray stars.
“I don’t know what your rush is,” Rose said. “Bryan’s not even playing tonight.”
“Of course he’s playing,” Keri refuted. Chances were a couple of college recruiters would be in the stands to watch him. “Why would you say that?”
“I heard at school that new coach suspended him.” Rose, two and a half years younger than her brother, was a freshman at Springhill High.
“Heard from whom?”
Rose shrugged her thin shoulders. “Some senior girls. They weren’t even talking to me.”
“Then maybe you misunderstood,” Keri said. If the team’s new coach had suspended Bryan, which seemed far-fetched to say the least, Bryan would have told her.
“Come on. Let’s get going.”
Rose kept pace with Keri as they hurried down the hall, a testament to how far the girl had come since the accident. Sometimes it was hard to tell her left leg had been amputated from above the knee, but Keri wasn’t so sure Rose believed that.
“Is it okay if I sit with you at the game?” Rose asked in a small voice when they stopped at the hall closet. She pulled out a black pea coat and put it on.
“Sure.” Keri tried not to let it show she was worried about Rose’s lack of friends. “I like having you with me anytime I can get you.”
Turning this way and that to view herself from different angles, Rose gazed into the full-length mirror on the back of the closet door. “Do I look all right?”
She sounded so unsure of herself that Keri ached for her. Why couldn’t Rose see what Keri saw? A lovely, sweet girl who looked even better on the inside?
“You’re beautiful.” Keri tucked a hand under Rose’s arm. “Let’s get to the gym where everybody can see you.”
Rose didn’t speak again until they were in the driveway on opposite sides of the ten-year-old Volvo Keri had bought because of its superior safety record. Her words were so soft Keri almost didn’t hear her. “You didn’t have to say I was beautiful.”
“I said it because I believe it,” Keri assured her over the roof of the car. “But this taking an hour to get ready thing is driving me nuts.”
Rose cracked a grin. “Teenagers are supposed to drive adults nuts. Bryan doesn’t do it, so it’s my job.”
Headlights lit a swath of road in front of the house as a two-door Honda Civic pulled up to the curb. Keri’s reply died on her lips. It was the same Civic Bryan had gotten a fabulous deal on from a local used-car dealer.
The car’s engine cut off, and the driver’s-side door opened. Bryan unfolded his tall, lanky frame from inside the car and slammed the door. Hard.
Keri went to meet him at the foot of the driveway, concern compelling her forward. “Bryan, what are you doing here?”
He moved away from his car with jerky steps, the glow from a nearby streetlight shining on his face and revealing the glisten of…tears?
“Coach Quinlan suspended me until further notice,” he said gruffly, his eyelids blinking rapidly.
The gossip Rose had heard at school had been right.
“Why?” Keri asked.
“Something about my grades,” he said in the same uneven voice.
“I just got your report card,” Keri said. “Your grades are fine.”
“I know,” Bryan replied.
“Then what’s going on?”
“You’ll have to ask Coach Quinlan.” Bryan trudged past her up the sidewalk to the front door and
