Free Eye Contact by Cammie McGovern Page B

class project, she leaned forward in her seat, to a girl named Yolanda, and said to herself, It’s kinder this way. I’m thinking of him. And it was, presumably. Scott, the one football player in the class, who, owing to his size and his prematurely deep voice, seemed as out of place in the room as Kevin, leaned across two desks and said in the surprising voice they rarely heard: “Kevin, dude, you and me.” Cara exhaled in relief. He’s not my responsibility, she thought.
    Suzette was the one who pointed out, weeks later, after Cara thought the whole business behind her, “Have you ever noticed how Kevin Barrows stares at you?”
    Cara flushed, swiveled around in her seat. “No he doesn’t,” she said, feeling her stomach turn to rock. She’d done this herself, created something terrible.
    After that, Cara stopped talking to him completely.
    At the semester break, when Mrs. Green suggested changing their seats to break up the monotony, Cara took one across the room and left Kevin to sit in behemoth Scott’s hulking shadow. She focused all her attention on her new crush, Peter, who she’d met working props on Guys and Dolls , the musical he was the star of. Before this, Cara had only dated one boy, Robbie, who had never been a particularly dutiful or attentive boyfriend. Some weekends went by without any calls, and when they were together, Robbie was often restless, wishing their town had more to offer, which left her scrambling for ideas: “My parents will be gone. You could come over,” she’d offer, her voice suggestive of things he never picked up on. Sex wasn’t nearly as interesting to him as it was to her.
    â€œThat’s because he’s gay,” Suzette declared after Cara and Robbie had been dating for three months. “I’m sorry, but it’s true.”
    Cara blinked, dumbfounded by the possibility. “Robbie’s not gay, ” she said, new doubt opening a vortex of worry in her stomach.
    Robbie was gay, as it turned out, a fact revealed six months after they broke up and he came to school one day in a dress polo shirt and a pink triangle sticker on his backpack. Cara had learned her lesson: she tried to hold back this time, let the boy make the effort, come to her, and from the start this one felt different. Peter flirted with her all through rehearsals, until their last performance, when he whispered backstage, “So what are you going to do after this? Go back to being Cara, pretty girl with one friend?” She blinked up at him, shocked that he’d noticed the one defining truth of her life so far—she only had one friend. That night they kissed in the darkened back row of the auditorium seats, and a week later they became the couple that surprised everybody. She saw it on their faces: Why’s Peter with her? Props girl and star? A month later, she understood the answer when he broke down and confessed, with teary uncertainty, about a friend he’d met at tennis summer camp. “He’s just a friend,” Peter said, but she was old enough now to recognize these tears and know she’d heard enough.
    The weekend after she broke up with Peter, Kevin went into the hospital. His kidney was failing, they were told; he was flying up the organ donor lists. “I think anyone who knows him ought to visit him in the hospital,” Mrs. Green told the class. “In these situations, you want to make sure you’ve done everything you can.”
    Cara felt as if the whole class were staring at her.
    â€œLook, I’ll go with you,” Suzette said later. “I think our insane teacher might be right, actually.”
    Cara hoped the visit would resolve the terrible guilt she felt, that she would stand alone with Kevin in the room, hold his good hand, and whisper apologies as his eyes opened and closed peacefully. Instead, his mother stood in the doorway when they walked up, her forehead