Free Things We Didn't Say by Kristina Riggle Page A

pulls me close to her, and the stomach pinching relaxes a little because her breath doesn’t smell like drunk.
    “I want to go lay down a minute,” I tell them. I stand up, and my mom’s hands cling to me for a bit, like when you walk through a spiderweb and all those little threads hang on.
    I go upstairs to my room and curl up on my bed, still wearing my shoes.
    For a while I liked the funny smell of Mom’s breath—though sometimes she chewed a lot of mints, which covered it up—because my mom was calmer when I smelled it. She wasn’t so likely to yell. I didn’t know what it was.
    Then there was that day at school. My stomach started pinching me because I couldn’t remember to write my numbers not-backward. It was only kindergarten, and I wasn’t good at school yet. I guess I made my tummy sound worse than it really was and got sent to the school nurse. So they called my mom to come get me.
    I couldn’t smell her breath, but I could tell she was feeling pretty good. She joked with the school secretary. I do remember she wasn’t wearing a coat for some reason, even though it was winter. And she forgot to wait for me to buckle my seat belt, because I was still fiddling around with it when the car went spinning all crazy.
    The memory of it still makes me dizzy.
    I hear the front door downstairs open and close and I sit up in my bed, listening for Dylan. Must be Casey, though, because everyone would be real happy if Dylan was down there. I can only hear some quiet talking.
    I turn over to face the other wall, where my “vision board” is, which I read about in a book that the librarian said had too many big words for me, but she’s new and doesn’t know that I’m a very good reader. Everyone says so. I have a certificate and everything.
    When the car stopped spinning that day I ended up on the floor of the backseat, and I think something bopped my head because I touched my head and I was bleeding. This scared me, but what scared me worse was that Mom was leaning back on the seat like dead people do on the TV shows she likes to watch. The air bag was all empty in front of her like a pillowcase. People were already running up, though, and pretty soon there were sirens and Mom was sitting up in the front seat and talking and holding me in her lap. She called my grandpa because my dad didn’t answer his phone.
    Then the police officer and my mom had an argument. Then she blew into a little machine and by then Grandpa Turner was there and he’s a doctor so he looked at my head and told me it wasn’t deep and I’d be fine, but I didn’t care about that.
    On my bed, I wrap my arms around my stomach and curl up tighter. I kinda wish I’d been hurt bad in the crash so that I’d been at the hospital and not there to see the next part. It’s the part I keep thinking of when I can’t sleep.
    I saw the policeman put handcuffs on my mom, and put her in the back of the police car. She was cussing him. She didn’t even look back at me. My grandpa said the police just had to talk to my mom, but I’ve watched enough shows to know that she got arrested. I shouted “Mommy!” but she didn’t hear me, and my grandpa told me it would be okay and not to worry.
    But every time grown-ups say that, there’s always reason to worry. Always.
    My grandpa took me back to his house, where Grandma made me cookies and let me watch all the SpongeBob I wanted until Daddy got there, and he looked like a zombie, he was so greeny-white.
    And there were lots of grown-ups whispering. And I learned what “drunk” meant.
    And then Mommy moved out, and we don’t see her very much.
    I used to wish really hard to rewind time back to that kindergarten day. And in the movie that plays in my head, this time I just write my numbers backward, and maybe the teacher frowns at me but my mom is still home and everyone’s together.
    But I know that can’t really happen. So instead I put our family picture on the vision board and maybe if I hope