So, instead, I’ll think about the pizza I was passionate about and figure out a way to fulfill her ask. Because there is no way in hell I’m ever discussing that day in the desert.
* * *
I’m sitting out on the patio in my backyard, hours later, when my dad walks out.
“Oh, Ev, I didn’t, uh, didn’t see you there.” He’s jumpy, as he has been since the second I returned home.
“Yeah,” I answer, though he didn’t ask a question and my response hasn’t furthered the conversation.
I’ve been sitting here thinking about what I could possibly do to satisfy Dr. Liu’s request. I could get a menial job, sling pizzas or drive a fucking Uber. That is, if my parents ever give me driving privileges back. Not that I’ve even asked, but they’ve kept me bubble wrapped and I can pin blame on anyone these days without having to point a finger at myself.
There is also the possibility of college, since my military benefits would pay for it. But am I really going to sit in a classroom again? I hated learning through high school, why would I want to do it now?
“You had therapy today?” He nods, in a way that indicates he’s trying to start conversation with me but doesn’t know how.
Dad was my little league coach, the one who taught me how to throw a spiral. We went on camping trips; he taught me how to drive, bought me my first box of condoms which no, I haven’t used but he probably thinks I have. My point is, he and I were as close as a father and son could be, especially since I was his only child. And now he has no idea how to treat me.
That’s fair, I guess because I have no idea how to treat me. Or my parents, for that matter.
“Yes. You saw Mom drive me there.” My voice conveys the duh unmistakably.
Dad nods again, and I really wish he’d stop doing that. “Are you hungry? We could go get sandwiches from The Delicious Delight.”
The place used to be my favorite; we’d split a turkey sub and an Italian sub, with extra sour and cream and onion chips on the side.
“Not hungry.” I don’t even look at him.
I don’t know why I’m being such an asshole. Maybe it’s Dr. Liu in my head, taunting me for not knowing that next direction my life will go in.
“I don’t know what to say to you, Everett.” His voice is reed thin and desperate.
“Don’t worry, Dad, no one does,” I assure him in a cynical way.
Hanging his head, a defeated man, my father doesn’t lash out with an angry barb. I wonder, idly, if he and Mom have done coping therapy of their own. Maybe even before I got home.
When he begins to walk off, dejected, a twinge of guilt flicks me in the heart.
“Dad?”
He halts his progress, turning to look at me. There is so much hope in his eyes, and I want to tell him that he’s not the type of man I’ve turned into. He hasn’t seen the things I have; he hasn’t felt real pain. The loss of his child, when he thought I was dead, is nothing in comparison to the raw, unfiltered agony I’ve felt to the core of my bones.
But I can’t say that. The brand of honesty I brought back from war with me would slay people, completely gut them until they can’t even breathe.
“Yes?” Dad waits patiently.
“I think I’m going to ask Coach Rott if I can help out with the football team at the high school.”
It’s an olive branch, one I’m extending because some tiny shred of my dilapidated heart feels fucking awful for all I’ve put my parents through.
His face lights up, every wrinkle I’ve caused on his face creasing. “I think that’s a wonderful idea.”
12
Kennedy
The entire football stadium is abuzz with activity immediately after the last bell of the day.
My cheerleaders are busy on one side of the turf, stretching and pulling on their sneakers, adjusting hair into ponytails, sneakily flirting with the other athletes jogging around the track.
The football team comes out of the locker room in their pads just as the track team starts their laps, and the field hockey girls are over on the far end practicing shooting drills into a goal. It’s high school personified, you can practically smell the teen spirit.
I join my friends, working my way from bicep stretches across my chest to dropping down into all three splits, my muscles fighting me each way. I haven’t been as diligent this season with keeping up my stretches or strength conditioning. As one of the three flyers on the team, it’s imperative that my body be strong and capable. But with college looming around the corner, and the admissions process sapping my energy, it’s hard to focus on anything else.
“Oh my God, what is he doing here?”
At the shocked words of my best tumbler, Maya, half the team turns their heads. I’m slow on the uptake, focusing on getting our routine music cued up on my phone and connected to the Bluetooth speaker I brought.
So it isn’t until a few minutes after everyone else that my sights land on Everett Brock, standing on the sideline with a Brentwick hat covering his sandy blond hair and a whistle dangling from those full, red lips.
“What is he doing here?” I hiss to Rachel, who is close enough to me that no one else hears.
“I have no clue,” she mutters. “He might be watching practice?”
That one’s loud enough for the other squad members to hear, and one of our fliers, Georgia, volunteers an answer. “My dad is like, b-f-f’s with Coach Rott, and he said that Everett Brock is going to be an assistant coach this season.”
Panic fills my chest cavity, and I think my stomach just dropped into the balls of my feet.
Bianca rushes over, not so subtly, and presses a hand to my arm. “You okay?”
It takes me a minute to collect myself, but I steel my spine and tip my chin up. “Yeah, let’s warm up.”
Rachel eyes me for another second, and I give a slight shake of my head, warning her off. I promised myself, and them, that I was done with this school girl crush. But the urge to turn and stare at him, when he’s this close, is so difficult to stave off.
“Just focus on Logan.” Bianca wiggles her eyebrows.
Since I told them I’d be open to talking to other guys a couple of days ago, my two besties have been hard at work selecting the perfect candidate. Logan Myers is a senior on the football team, tall with the perfect athlete’s body and a head full of dark curls. He’s supposedly pretty nice, and though we haven’t been in the same classes, he’s smart enough to be in the same AP level as I am.
And apparently, Rachel has already found out he’s interested in me, if I’m game.
Turning to look at him, I do have to admire how well he fills out the practice uniform. A moment later, as if he feels me staring at him, he turns and smiles, offering up a little wave. I smile shyly.
“Myers! Get back to work. What do you think this is, fucking Daydream Land?” Everett barks at the top of his lungs.
I can feel the ire of his tone all the way across the field, and when my mouth falls open slightly, he returns my shocked gaze with a stony grimace.
“Well, if he wasn’t trying to pee all over his territory …” Rachel snorts.
“Yeah, Kenny, I don’t think you need to worry whether he likes you or not.” Bianca pats me on the shoulder.
Shaking my head, because I need to lead my team right now, I instruct my squad to stretch, and start working on their tumbling skills for the first half of practice.
As the afternoon sun twinkles into early dusk, it’s hard not to feel his presence. To feel my skin prickle every time my vision turns his way. There is an electric current running across the stadium, connecting the two of us like poles on opposite ends of the earth. I wonder if Everett feels this, too.
From tumbling, we move into cheer work, and then stunt work. One of the girls almost falls out of her liberty pose, and we can’t seem to get our basket tosses right today. But we are getting stronger in terms of having four girls on the team who can do full twisting back flips, so there is a plus.
Before I know it, practice is over, and most of the athletes are heading to the locker room to shower and change. Here’s the thing about being a cheerleader, we don’t get a designated locker room space. I, and a rotation of the other girls on the squad, have to unload and load a tiny closet designated for our things before and after every practice.
I’m sweating and panting by the time I make it back out to the turf to collect my things and finally head home.
“Kennedy.” His shadow falls over me as I hurry to collect my things.
I haven’t spoken to him since the night of the barn party. He hasn’t apologized, hasn’t even bothered to peek out of his curtains, and hasn’t shown up in town anywhere. And even though I told Rachel and Bianca I was done being hung up on my Everett fantasies, it’s hard to stick to that resolve when he’s standing in front of me, on my turf. Technically, I guess this was his turf first. And he doesn’t even know that I’m peeved, well, not that I’ve explicitly told him. But still, I can be angry in my mind.
“What are you doing here?” I ask, standing as I strap my backpack over one shoulder, an equipment bag over the other, and juggle the Bluetooth speaker and choreography binder in my arms.
As if he hasn’t verbally accosted me, told me off, and generally wanted nothing to do with his next-door neighbor, Everett slides the equipment bag off my shoulder and onto his while transferring the items in my arms to his own.
He’s wearing a ball cap, which is so hometown sexy I can’t help but bite my lip. Those green eyes look a little more lively than I’ve seen them, and somehow in October, his cheekbones are still dusted with a healthy tan. He looks like everything you hear in a country song, and I want to melt into him.
“You don’t have to do that.” My tone is all snotty annoyance.
“I know I don’t.” No other explanation than that, those eyes searing into mine.
We awkwardly stand there, because I know I’m supposed to direct him to my car where he can drop my things. But I don’t know if I actually want him too. Or maybe I want him to do that too much, and that’s why I hesitate.
“Just tell me where your car is, Kennedy.” He rolls his eyes as he uses my full name.
I walk a fraction of a step in front of him as we both turn in the familiar direction of the parking lot. “So, why are you here?”
“I’m going to be a volunteer coach this season.” Everett confirms what the other girls told me before practice.
It’s the practical answer, but my question was deeper. Why even come over to me at all? Why are you carrying my things to the car?
Why hasn’t my heartbeat returned to a normal rate since the moment I glimpsed you across the turf?
Homecoming is next weekend. The idea pops into my head as we walk under the banner hanging outside the stadium and our feet hit the parking lot pavement.
Now, I know he’ll be at the game, that he’ll watch as I walk out onto the field on the arm of one of the boys in the court. I found out three days ago that the voting swayed my way, that I am one of the four girls up for the honor of senior homecoming queen. I’m not modest enough to say I don’t want it; deep down, every little girl dreams of wearing that tiara on her head.
Part of me foolishly hopes, is clinging to the idea, that he might ask me. No matter that Everett isn’t even a student anymore, or that he’s told me he basically wants nothing to do with me. I’ve dreamed for a long time about Everett Brock taking me to a school dance as his date. It never happened when he attended school here, and I spent both his junior and senior prom nights crying into my pillow. Like a moron.
Guess I’m still that same moron, because there’s a lump in my throat imagining him slipping a corsage around my wrist. Of all the things I could be thinking right now, why does it have to be this?
“Homecoming seems like a fitting game for you to come home for. Local football legend back to coach our boys to victory?” The awkward giggle passes my lips before I can stop it. “I’m sure everyone will love having you back.”
We brush up alongside my car, and I awkwardly fumble my keys out of my backpack. I can’t make out the furrow in his brow as I turn to face him.
“You really shouldn’t let yourself get so drunk at those barn parties. Anyone could have taken advantage of you.” Everett’s tone is snide, with a side of know-it-all.
There is so much to unpack as his advice blasts me in the face, I’m not sure where to start. When he first approached me at the end of practice, I thought maybe he was going to deliver an apology. For how he’d been treating me. Silly Kennedy, he just wants to further make you feel like shit.
All thoughts of sugarplums and kisses to a slow song on the cafeteria dance floor vanish.
My temper wins, getting the first word.
“Oh, because you’re a choirboy,” I sneer, rolling my eyes.
It’s a terrible comeback, and I sound like a seven-year-old, but his prickly words caught me off guard and my first imperative is to protect my wounded heart.
“I’m not, but at least I don’t pretend to be. I’m not running around here like the teacher’s pet and everyone’s best friends, then tossing back shots and trying to come out of my clothes.”
I swear, if you looked at my cheek right now, it might bear Everett’s handprint. That’s how hard his words smack me.
My voice shakes with anger as I wrench my things away from him, my binder clattering to the ground. “You’re a jerk! A really shitty, disgusting jerk!”
I can’t even get a more coherent thought out there. One second, I’m thinking that Everett is coming to mend fences, to put us on a path back to friendship and maybe even something more. This is what I always do with him. I allow myself to get carried away with the Everett of my fantasies, rather than focus on the real guy standing right in front of me.
He shrugs, a smug grin on his lips. “I’m just trying to prevent you from being assaulted in the woods. Or becoming the next girl with a naked picture texted around the school.”
Pain spreads through my heart like a rapidly moving bruise, and my fingernails dig into my palms. I’m always so quick to give him a chance, to forgive, to bend to the golden boy face and my damsel in distress thoughts. Everett’s not going to save me, please, he barely wants to look at me. He doesn’t now, and he didn’t back then. If he really wanted me, he could have had me at any point. Even before he left for deployment, he kept me dangling on a string as a prospect, while I guarded my chastity like a warrior so that one day it could be his.
The things I wrote in that last letter, the one I should destroy after this encounter, my true feelings … I’m so grateful he never saw it. That he was taken before it could get to him. I remember receiving it back, with Return to Sender stamped in big red letters on the envelope. It would only give him more fodder, more daggers to hurt me with.
I know better now. There was no us. There was no hope. I saw how easily he could turn on me. Finally, some common sense seems to have filtered through the trap he’d set up around my brain.
“You don’t need to worry about me. In fact, I’m not even sure why you’re talking to me. You’ve made it clear you have no interest in anything I do, Everett. So leave me alone.”
“Leave you alone? Sheesh, that’s what I’ve been trying to get you to do to me since I got here.” He cracks, like we’re having some kind of sarcastic rapport instead of his epic rejection of me.
“Just walk away. I’m done with this.” Finally, I unlock my car and begin furiously shoving things in the back seat.
But Everett apparently hasn’t drawn enough blood. “I just wouldn’t want the future homecoming queen to end up puking her guts out on some guy’s lap while—”
“ENOUGH!” I scream louder than the entire band practicing on an adjacent field.
Poking my finger into his chest, wishing it were a dagger, my voice takes on a scary low tone. “You may think you had me on some sort of string back in the day, but we’re done with that now. You can’t
control me, drag me along like your puppet, and expect me to put up with all of this. I understand you’ve been through a lot, Everett. Honestly, I probably don’t understand, which is why you hate me so much, right? It’s my fault you were taken prisoner? Is that what you’re going to blame me for next? Go ahead. I’m done caring what you think. You’re the one who showed up where you knew I’d be. You’re the one who followed me out here. What does that say about you?”
Blood whooshes in my ears, tears prick at the corner of my eyes, and my heart is going haywire. I barely register the look of shock on Everett’s face, because I’m too busy scrambling my way into the driver’s seat of my car.
Wrenching my seatbelt on and pushing the damn ignition button, I slam the door without waiting for him to speak.
What I told him is the truth. The strings he wrapped around my heart have finally snapped, tethering me to Everett no more.
13
Everett
I watch from the window as Kennedy and her girlfriends, and their dates, cheese away for the cameras.
Hands on each other’s hips, making kissy faces for the photos, singing along to whatever god-awful pop song one of them is blaring from their phone speaker.
Just looking down on them, I feel myself glowering. I’m so far removed from the juvenile events of high school life that this all seems so trivial. And useless. And fucking fun. Just remembering my senior homecoming dance brings back some of the fondest memories—
Okay, fine. I’m jealous. But just a smidge. While I’m up here in my tower of solace, she’s down there ready to have a fun night with friends and possibly drink some spiked punch.
Kennedy is also going to be crowned homecoming queen and dance with some dickhead. He’ll wrap his hands around her waist, pull her close, all of that swishy maroon material bunching in his fingers …
Fuck. That should be me.
Hometown Heartless Page 7