Free Just One Day by Gayle Forman

happily well managed. Except when I pause for a second and think about how
     I feel, at home, at the dinner table with Mom and Dad talking at me, not to me, at
     school with a bunch of people who never really became my friends, I understand that
     even if he didn’t mean to, he got it right.
    “Yes,” I say.
    “Me too.”
    “Our parents quit while they were ahead,” I say, repeating the line Mom and Dad always
     use when people ask if I’m an only child.
We quit while we were ahead.
    “I never understand some English sayings,” Willem replies. “If you’re ahead, why would
     you quit?”
    “I think it’s a gambling term.”
    But Willem is shaking his head. “I think it’s human nature to keep going when you’re
     ahead, no matter what. You quit while you’re behind.” Then he looks at me again, and
     as if realizing that he has maybe insulted me, he hastily adds, “I’m sure with you
     it was different.”
    When I was little, my parents had tried to have more children. First they went the
     natural route, then they went the fertility route, Mom going through a bunch of horrible
     procedures that never worked. Then they looked into adoption and were in the process
     of filling out all the paperwork when Mom got pregnant. She was so happy. I was in
     first grade at the time, and she’d worked since I was a baby, but when the baby came,
     she was going to go on an extended leave from her job at a pharmaceutical company,
     then maybe only go back half time. But then in her fifth month, she lost the baby.
     That’s when she and Dad decided to quit while they were ahead. That’s what they told
     me. Except even back then, I think I’d recognized it as a lie. They’d wanted more,
     but they’d had to settle with just me, and I had to be good enough so that we could
     all pretend that we weren’t actually settling.
    “Maybe you’re right,” I tell Willem now. “Maybe nobody quits while they’re really
     ahead. My parents always say that, but the truth is, they only stopped with me because
     they couldn’t have any more. Not because I was enough.”
    “I’m sure
you
were enough.”
    “Were
you
?” I ask.
    “Maybe more than enough,” he says cryptically. It almost sounds like he’s bragging,
     except it doesn’t look like he’s bragging.
    He starts doing the thing with the coin again. As we sit silently, I watch the coin,
     feeling something like suspense build in my stomach, wondering if he’ll let it fall.
     But he doesn’t. He just keeps spinning it. When he finishes, he flips it in the air
     and tosses it to me, just like he did last night.
    “Can I ask you something?” I say after a minute.
    “Yes.”
    “Was it part of the show?”
    He cocks his head.
    “I mean, do you throw a coin to a girl at every performance, or was I special?”
    Last night after I got back to the hotel, I spent a long time examining the coin he’d
     tossed me. It was a Czech koruna, worth about a nickel. But still, I’d put it in a
     separate corner of my wallet, away from all the other foreign coins. I pull it out
     now. It glints in the bright afternoon sun.
    Willem looks at it too. I’m not sure if his answer is true or just maddeningly ambiguous,
     or maybe both. Because that’s exactly what he says: “Maybe both.”

Seven
    ----
    W hen we leave the restaurant, Willem asks me the time. I twist the watch around my
     wrist. It feels heavier than ever, the skin underneath itchy and pale from being stuck
     under the piece of chunky metal for the past three weeks. I haven’t taken it off once.
    It was a present, from my parents, though it was Mom who’d given it to me on graduation
     night, after the party at the Italian restaurant with Melanie’s family, where they
     told us about the tour.
    “What’s this?” I’d asked. We were sitting at the kitchen table, decompressing from
     the day. “You already gave me a graduation present.”
    She’d smiled. “I got you another.”
    I’d opened the box,