Chapter 15

The only problem was that I barely got a chance to see Derek. This was before cell phones, so I couldn’t call to chat or text whenever I had a little downtime. To make matters worse, he found a summer job at the record store in the mall—it was still called a record store, though it didn’t actually sell any records that I could see, just CDs and cassettes. His usual shift was five to close, which meant nine during the week and ten on weekends. By the time I was getting home from work, he was just going in. Sometimes I’d head over to the mall to hang out with him on his break, but suddenly our nonstop friendship was relegated to catching up with each other fifteen minutes here, a half hour there. At times I’d see him through the store window, laughing with a customer or giving a coworker that sunny smile I thought he reserved for me, and my steps would falter, my breath would catch, my blood would pound in my temples.

I was losing him, I knew it. We were drifting apart.