Free Eye Contact by Cammie McGovern

claim. In December, he got pneumonia and was out of school for four weeks, only to return in January so thin his clothes looked empty, his face creased with new age lines. In tenth grade, the one kidney he had left after the accident began failing. She knew this from Kevin’s aunt, who was still a secretary for Suzette’s father. From this same woman, she also learned that Kevin struggled with depression, that winters tended to be hard for him, sometimes requiring medication. This was the first time Cara ever heard the word antidepressant, and she thought of it every time she saw him at school, laughing with his friends, standing by his locker, thumbing through a guitar magazine, balanced on his forearm, his bad hand hanging uselessly below. She was fifteen by then, and, in all that time, strangely, they’d never spoken to each other since that last fifth-grade lunch.
    Perhaps it wasn’t that odd. Each new school they moved into had been double the size of the school they left. Though Kevin talked now, his words came slowly, weighted, like an old person with an immigrant’s accent. Because Kevin had learning disabilities, his courses were a scattershot of special ed and regular classes. Surprisingly, he took and dressed for regular gym, then sat beside the teacher recording statistics, a role he must have liked, because in eleventh grade he became the unlikely football statistician.
    Cara watched Kevin, thought about him, privately cheered his progress, but never, in all that time, expected what happened the first day of their senior year in high school: to walk into her English class and find him sitting there. They stared at each other for so long it would be impossible not to speak, or pretend they didn’t recognize each other. “Oh my God,” she finally said. “Hi.”
    He looked down, and blushed. “Hi,” he whispered.
    That morning, Cara had made a conscious effort to change her look from the baggy shirts and overalls she’d come to school in all her life, to a tight spaghetti-strap T-shirt and tiny shorts. “Jesus, Cara, I can read your bra label,” Suzette told her—and did, to prove it. Over the years, they had stayed friends in spite of their differences. While Cara still pined for nods of approval and party invitations from the popular table, Suzette floated obliviously, above it all, her bank account stuffed with the money she made babysitting every weekend. More and more, Suzette cared little about the classes she so easily aced, and instead spent hours in the school art studio, painting canvases Cara had a hard time thinking what to say in response to. Suzette was obviously a good artist—she won awards, everyone said so—but her primary interest was abstract expressionism, which always left Cara nervously trying to guess what the pictures were of: “Wow,” she’d say. “I love this one. Is it flowers?”
    Suzette would roll her eyes. “It’s Teddy,” she’d say, her younger brother and frequent subject of her paintings. Three years ago, Suzette’s life had been turned inside out when her father fell in love with another woman, leaving her mother to fall apart in the privacy of her bedroom, spending most days in her nightgown, sleeping and flipping through the magazines she kept scattered across his side of the bed. “I don’t even want to talk about my mother,” Suzette would say, shaking her head. And she wouldn’t. Instead she took over the lion’s share of the cooking and other household chores, packing Teddy’s lunch every morning, and, even though he was eight years old, waiting with him at the bus stop so he wouldn’t be alone with the fifth-graders who scared him.
    â€œTeddy is a sensitive soul,” she said to explain constructing their after-school schedule around Teddy and his bus drop-offs. “I don’t want his life to be any harder.”
    That was the