I soften my own voice, preparing to go to a place I know is touchy. “I know you can handle it, and I know you’re absolutely tough as nails, but as your friend, I hate having to watch you work through so much pain in your knee. And yes, I know your pain is flaring up because I saw you favoring your right leg during our jog today.” Reflexively, I hold up my hands. “Don’t pinch me, please. I’m only trying to make sure you take care of yourself while you’re out there taking care of everyone else.”
Her eyes dart away. “I’m fine.”
“Are you? You’d tell me if you weren’t fine?”
She narrows her eyes. “You’re being overly dramatic about this, Nathan.”
She says my name in a way that’s meant to cause me pain but instead just makes me want to smile. Bree is one of the strongest human beings I know, but she’s also somehow the softest. She can never fully bring herself to snap at me or anyone else in her life.
“My knee is not going to fall off if I use it too much, and I can push through a little pain. You know I don’t control my rent, so if I want to be able to keep my tuition low for the kids, I have to add an extra class until I can find a different solution. End of story. And—AH!” She holds up her finger to press against my lips when she sees me about to argue. “I won’t take money from you. We’ve been over this a thousand times, and I need to do this on my own.”
My shoulders sink. The only consolation for continuously losing this argument is the fact that her skin is pressed against my mouth right now. I’ll stay silent forever if she will promise to never move. And with her finger pinned over my lips like this, I don’t have to feel guilty about not telling her I’ve been secretly paying part of her studio’s rent for years. （Not true—I still feel guilty about going behind her back.）
Bree’s landlord raised the rent on her once before when she first took over the studio from the old owner. She cried on my couch that night because she wouldn’t be able to afford it anymore （much like what’s happening again） and thought she was going to have to find a cheaper location outside of the city, which would completely negate her purpose of providing a dance studio for the kids in the city.
Let’s just say her landlord had a magical change of heart and called her the next day to say he’d moved things around and didn’t need to raise the rent after all. We can also safely say that if Bree ever finds out I’ve been paying a few hundred dollars toward her rent each month, I will be relieved of my favorite dangly parts. I probably shouldn’t have done it, but I couldn’t bear to watch her lose her dream like that. Not again.
Bree was accepted to the dance program at The Juilliard School just before high school graduation, and I’ve still never seen a person more excited about anything in their life. I was the first person she told. I picked her up and spun her around as we both laughed—internally a little scared about what our separating lives would mean for our friendship. She would be moving to New York, and I would be off to UT on a football scholarship. I wasn’t about to leave town without telling Bree how I felt about her, though, and hopefully making things official between us. We’d only ever been friends, but I was over it and ready to be more.
And then it happened.
She got T-boned by a guy running a stoplight one day after school. Thankfully, the crash did not take her life, but it did take away Bree’s future as a professional ballerina. Her knee was shattered, and I’ll never forget her words over the phone when she called from the hospital sobbing. “It’s all over for me, Nathan. I won’t be able to come back from this.”
The reconstructive surgery was hard on her, but the physical therapy that summer was the most brutal. Her spark was gone, and there was nothing I could do to bring it back for her. I didn’t want to leave her once fall rolled around—it didn’t feel right to go on with my dreams when she was stuck at home without hers. Even more than that, I just wanted to be with her. Football didn’t matter as much to me as she did.