Free The Truth About You & Me by Amanda Grace

amazing weekend. I lost count of how many times my fingers hovered over the Add Friend button.
    I knew I couldn’t do it. Knew we had to hide whatever we were becoming, but God I wanted some kind of contact with you and we still hadn’t swapped phone numbers, so all I could do was wait out that agonizing day of dreaming and thinking and wishing I could see you.
    I thought about sitting at the foot of Mt. Peak all day long just in hopes of catching a glimpse of you, but I knew you wouldn’t go, knew that High Rock was your big hike of the weekend.
    So, after Facebook stalking you, I just lay on my bed and stared upward at the silly posters I’d tacked to the ceiling before freshman year, day-dreaming of you and frowning at the immaturity of the boy band featured on the poster.
    And after three hours, I could no longer stand looking at their six packs, at their silly fireman costumes. So I grabbed my computer chair and stood precariously on the turning, rolling thing, yanking out the pins and watching as the first poster fluttered to the floor. It made a satisfying whooshing noise as it hit the ground.
    Then I rolled my chair right over top of it, crumpling it, and climbed back on, pulling down the next poster.
    And then the next.
    And then I went around the room and took down the dried-up homecoming corsage I’d received sophomore year, when I went with my lab partner and it was the most epically boring evening of my life. That was just last year . And then I pulled down the little movie stubs dating back five years, back to when I saw Cars 2 with my brother.
    Cars 2 , Bennett. It seems weird to think of it now, but it wasn’t so long ago that I’d gone to an animated movie targeted at kids not that much younger than me.
    I dashed out of my room, took the stairs two by two, fished a garbage bag out from under the sink, and returned. I stuffed all those silly childhood things into the bag, one shred at a time. I wasn’t a kid anymore, and this room was like a museum to my childhood. It didn’t match who I was becoming. Who I was with you.
    Then I turned to my closet. I still had my hoodie from sixth grade camp, even though it barely fit me, shoved into the back somewhere. And my middle-school PE uniform. Three pairs of too-small sneakers, one set of them with pink glitter and light-ups. Yeah, I’d been too old for those even when Mom bought them for me, but the fact that they were still buried in my closet was somehow even more embarrassing than it had felt when I wore them.
    By the time I was done, I was sweaty and dirty.
    Sweaty and dirty and free. Free to become who I wanted to be when you were around. I still didn’t know how to be that person, outside of my time with you, but somehow I had to figure it out.
    I shuffled the boxes around on the new, more spacious closet shelves, but one of them slid over too far and tumbled to the ground, bursting open and revealing stacks of photos.
    I groaned, sunk to my knees, and righted the box, reaching for the first stack of pictures. I paused, my fingers leaving oily smudges on the sheen of the top photo. It was of me and my brother, both of us squinting into the harsh light reflecting from the snow all around us. I was eight, my hair in two long braids over my shoulders, a stocking cap with one of those big fluffy balls on the top pulled low over my ears, my cheeks pink with the cold, or maybe it was from the exhilaration of sledding.
    We were at the golf course and a sled was shooting behind us in a colorful blur of red and blue. My brother’s arm was draped casually over my shoulder, his other hand fisted to teasingly punch me in the stomach, something he’d do in a goofy way, never for real.
    I was about to put the picture back into the box when something else caught my attention and I leaned in farther, my finger sliding over the spot below his eye.
    The spot where a dark cloud seemed to hang, grow.
    I swallowed, blinking,