The Upside of Falling

“Sit down.”
He held his hands up in surrender and took a seat. Sliding his laptop across
the table, Brett pulled up his essay and let me read it. I could understand why
Miss Copper gave him an F. It was terrible. The ideas were all over the place and
the quotes weren’t even properly cited.
I looked up at him. “How long did it take you to write this?”
He thought about it for a second. “An hour?”
“It shows. This makes zero sense, Brett. You don’t even have a thesis.”
He shifted in his seat, drew up the hood of his sweater until it covered half
his face. “I kind of forgot it was due. And I was up all night with my mom so I
didn’t have time to write it.”
Then I felt like a complete jerk. “Right, of course. Sorry. Forget I said that.”
I kept scrolling through the essay, noticing how Brett was really quiet. I snuck a
peek at him. He was staring at his hands on the table. I shut the laptop and
pushed it aside. “We don’t need to study right now,” I said. “We can talk about
your family if you want.”
Brett lifted his eyes to mine. “I’d actually rather study,” he said.
So we did. I printed out Brett’s essay and we went through it line by line. I
started to highlight the parts he needed to change and suddenly three-quarters of
the pages were yellow. We came up with a new thesis, found good quotes, and
outlined his arguments. An hour later he had rewritten the introduction while I
watched over his shoulder. I could tell he was starting to get antsy; he was
writing slower and slower. His attention kept slipping and eventually he opened
a new browser tab for a pizza place nearby.
“I’m starving,” he declared. “You in?”
We spent the next ten minutes concocting the perfect pizza. Brett was a
meat-lover’s kind of guy, which, for some reason, was not all that surprising. All
I cared about was pineapple being on it.
“Do we want garlic sticks?” he asked. I gave him a what-kind-of-insane-
question-is-that look. He changed the quantity to two.
After the order was placed, we went back to studying. I was flipping through
my English notebook absent-mindedly while Brett continued typing out his
essay. Then something caught my eye. There were numbers written on the back
cover. It was my countdown to graduation. Only I had stopped counting one day
without realizing it. When did I stop keeping track?
Brett slid the laptop over to me. “Does this make sense?” he asked.
He was the answer, the reason I stopped counting the days. Brett gave me

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something better to look forward to.
“Why are you smiling at me like that?”
I cleared my throat, quickly shoved the notebook into my bag. “What?
Nothing. Let me see.” I scanned the paragraph and told him that yes, it made
sense.
We kept working in silence for another few minutes before Brett’s mind was
officially elsewhere. He had deleted and retyped the same sentence five times.
Thankfully the doorbell rang, the pizza arrived, and we both took a break. I
chewed on a slice, watching suspiciously as Brett picked off all the pineapple
pieces.
“If you don’t like pineapple, why agree to order it?” I asked.
“Because you like it,” he said easily.
“You wouldn’t eat the cotton candy ice cream,” I pointed out.
“That happens to be where I draw the line, Becca.”
“Right.”
The smallest of smiles began to crack through his unnaturally stony face.
“I’m wondering,” he said, grabbing another slice, “where you’ve been eating
lunch this past week. I looked around the entire school and couldn’t find you.”
I narrowed my eyes. “You were looking for me?”
“I was.”
“But you said you wanted space.”
“That,” he said, taking another bite, “was a mistake. Coincidentally, you
happen to be the one person I don’t want space from. So, where were you
eating?”
I forced myself to swallow. “Behind the football field.”
He raised his eyebrows. “You walked that far to get away from me?”
“As I said, you wanted space. Not me. I was simply obliging.”
“Do me a favor, Hart. Next time I tell you I want space, ignore me.”
“Noted.”
Brett stood up and walked to the fridge. “Hey, where’s your mom?” I asked.
“She’s staying with my aunt for the night,” he said, walking back with two
water bottles.
“And your dad?” I asked slowly, not wanting to push too hard.
“He’s been staying at a hotel for the week.” Brett sat back down, this time in
the chair directly beside me, and handed me one of the bottles. “We’ve been
going to family counseling.”
“Wow. What was that like?”
“Other than a waste of two hundred dollars? Pointless. My mom cries the
whole time. My dad talks about how sorry he is. But it doesn’t count if he’s only

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sorry after he got caught.” Brett paused, drank half the water bottle. “I sit there
and wait for the hour to pass by.”
I grabbed the last corner slice of pizza. “My mom never tried the therapy
route. I did see her reading one of those self-help books once. It was called