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Back 3 a.m.
Chapters (67)
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  67. 3:46 a.m.

My cell phone chirps and I quickly respond to my father's “are-you-still-alive?” texts and know that he will finally be able to sleep knowing his baby boy is alive and well. My mother left when I was six, unable to cope with my disease, leaving my father to care for me. He worked two jobs, sixteen hour days, but he was there every night when I woke up at 3 a.m. He tried to make my life as normal as possible. When I was young, I had twenty minutes of school each morning with Professor Bins. Math, science, spelling – he covered everything. My father was adamant that I develop social skills and would pay parents, literally pay them, to get their kids to come play video games or tag or ping-pong with me for a half hour. (I actually still keep in touch with a couple of them on Facebook.) My dad would call in favors or shell out grand sums of money for establishments to make special arrangements for me. On my tenth birthday I woke up at an amusement park. For an hour the two of us had the whole park to ourselves. When I was eighteen he set up a prom for me. The girl was the daughter of a woman he worked with, and she wasn't all that cute, but it had been exciting nonetheless and I did get a quick kiss out of it. He administered my SATs to me over the course of ten nights, standing over me with a stopwatch (I got a 1420 by the way). On my twenty-first birthday I woke up and my dad had turned the house into a bar and it was full of coeds. I later found out he paid a University of Virginia sorority a couple thousand dollars to pack the place.

I contemplate calling him and telling him about his favorite president, but my father would bury me in a thousand questions and my hour would dissolve like sugar in water.

I grab a sandwich from the fridge and try to shake last night from my mind. Last night was the past. I don't deal in the past. I deal in the present. And presently, I'd wasted eighteen minutes of my day.

I grab my phone, slip on my Asics, remember to grab a beanie, and run out the door.

It is 3:26 a.m.

I will have to cut my run short. I do a seven-minute mile out, then a six-minute mile back. By the time I stand beneath the streetlight, the same streetlight Connor Sullivan parked his car under a day earlier, it is 3:39.

Twenty-one minutes.