“I should get to my math,” she said.
Once in her room, Fiona plopped down on her bed and picked up Dr. Connelly’s shiny pamphlet of promises. She squinted her eyes so the photos morphed into colored blobs. She didn’t understand most of it—what was “debridement” anyway? But the numbers seemed good. Seventy-eight percent. Eighty-six percent. Ninety-two percent. She was still clueless—but with better odds.
The odds look good / Though I got no clue.
Fiona picked up the closest Moleskine, scribbling the rest of the thought:
Would it make me / Enough for you?
Yet another set of lyrics—poems, whatever you called them—that she’d never share. Ryan, Lucy, not even Mr. Hernandez, her guitar teacher, had never heard a note written here.
Everything she played for others belonged to someone else. Someone else’s songs, someone else’s words, someone else’s fears and hopes.
Her great irony: the pull to create her own music versus the push to hide it.
There was an “outside” part of her music she couldn’t hide—her songs filled a dozen notebooks; guitar-string calluses covered her fingertips. But the “inside” part? It was like her music was stitched through her system, like tendons or blood cells. All of it—the rhymes, the chords—performed a vital function.
Revealing those very truest bits, opening herself up to others’ opinions and criticisms, would be like going inside out. She might break apart completely.
She eyed the pamphlet’s “Before” and “After” shots.
Split me down the middle / And I only come halfway.
But I could take your pieces / ’Cause everything’s stolen anyway.
Without squinting, she read the material, trying to understand what the procedure could do—and what it couldn’t.
It could give her new, smooth skin. It could fix her other Push-Pull—the battle of tight skin and frustrated muscles. It could erase the scars on her face, though the brochure made no promises about the scars on her confidence.
Even using all her dad’s tricks for seeing the downside, she couldn’t shake it. The upside still looked pretty good.
There was just one problem.
If she was going to be fixed, someone needed to die.
FI
At lunch, Trent smacked his tray on the table and sat across from Fi. “She’ll be at the game today, right?”
Having just bitten into her tuna sandwich—and having at least some manners, though her mother might not believe it—Fi simply nodded.
“Think she’ll check me out, too?” Trent asked. “While she’s here?”
Fi swallowed, shaking her head. “She’s the assistant coach from Northwestern’s women’s program. Are you planning on some life-altering surgeries?”
Trent snorted his Coke, nearly spewing it on Fi. “Think of all the time we could spend together.”
She laughed. “I already get about as much of you as I can take.”
Truthfully, Fi was relieved there was no way Trent would make it to Northwestern. First, for all the talk of grades, Trent made Fi look like a National Merit Scholar. Second, at heart he was just a good old southern boy; she couldn’t picture him in cold, fast-paced Chicago. And lastly, if she couldn’t manage the boundaries of their friendship here, what chance would she have if he was the only person she knew?
He rolled his eyes—then took another enormous bite of hamburger. “So what happens? After she watches you?”
“She falls madly in love with my transcendent style, runs onto the field after my last-second goal, and offers me a starting position and full ride.” Trent snatched some apple slices from her lunch and she confessed, “I’m kind of nervous. What if I suck?”
He waved her off. “You don’t have it in you.”
She smacked his hand as he went for another slice, eating it herself. “Seriously. It’s, like, huge that she’s here.”
“You’ve gone to their camps the past three years. The head coach has seen you before. The scout wouldn’t be here if they weren’t already going to make an offer.”
“That Vanderbilt recruiter came last year for Mary Benton. Remember? She totally choked. No Maryland offer.”
He paused to consider this before shaking his head. “Nope. It’s utterly impossible. Even on your worst day, you’re the best in this city.”
“Yeah, well, this is Memphis. We’re not exactly a lacrosse hotbed.”
“Will you stop?” He scowled at her. “You’ll psych yourself out.”
“You’re right. Deep breath.” She sucked in a huge gulp of air. And another. And maybe four more, all really close together.
He reached across the table for her brown paper lunch bag, like she might need emergency hyperventilation assistance. “You all right?”
Once her nerves got under control, she nodded. “Little freaked out.”
“That’s even worse than how you get after kissing.”
She glared across the table at Trent. “You don’t have a gentlemanly bone in your body.”
“Sure, I do,” he said with a wink.
“Is this supposed to be helping?”
“I’m distracting you from your worries.”
“By making me cringe?”
Trent balled up his hamburger wrapper, tossing it onto his tray. “Whatever.”
He slumped into his chair, and the two studied each other over the table. Both had their eyes narrowed and arms crossed over their chests when Ryan walked past. He paused, looking from one to the other. “What are y’all bickering about now?”
“We’re not bickering,” Trent and Fi answered simultaneously, still staring each other down.
Ryan walked away, muttering, “Wonder what getting along looks like.”
The day crawled and flew by all at once. Teachers snapped at her to pay attention, but Fi could only focus on the playbook in her head and the game tape of the other team that she watched at practice yesterday.
There were two girls who couldn’t play with their left hands, no matter how pinned they got. One with true speed—she could move the ball fast, but her shot accuracy was unpredictable. There was a goalie who favored her right side. The defenders made messy stick checks—Fi could rack up some good foul calls from them.
By the time she got on the field, Fi felt calmer. Coach Dunn smacked her on the back, cast a knowing look toward the bleachers, and asked how she felt.
“Good,” she said.
After warm-up drills, when she’d spied on the team a little, he asked again, and she answered, “Great.”
“You’re on draw,” he said.
She grinned.
At the beginning of the season, Coach Dunn had told her, “I’m moving you to midfield, Fi.”
“What?” she’d practically yelled at him. “I’m attack!”
“My center moved this summer. I need you there.”
“But I’m the leading scorer!”
“So score,” he’d said, “while playing center.”
Annoyed her game was getting screwed up because some senior’s dad got transferred, she had played the position begrudgingly at first. Once she reached her stride as middie, though, she never wanted to go back. She got the best of both worlds—defense and attack—and more space on the field to run, to muscle out plays, to go head-to-head. She got the draw, too—the two-girl standoff in the center circle that left one with the ball and the other chasing after it. Seventy-four percent of the time she was the one with the ball. She’d checked the stats.
The ref blew the whistle. Fi and the other team’s center leaned into each other, stick head pressed against stick head, the small hard yellow ball sandwiched in the middle. Another whistle and both girls pressed out and up, flinging the ball skyward.
Fi netted it.
Blowing past the other team’s midfielders, she tore up the field, switching to her left hand as a defender tried to check. Three defenders in front of her blocked all her options, so she passed to the attack behind the crease
. The play went on a while—all the attacks and midfielders sliding in front of the goal, looking for a shot, while the attack behind the crease kept dodging her defenders. Fi saw an opening and pivoted around her distracted defender. Three steps to the goal, a pretty assisting pass by the attack behind the crease, and there it was—an easy fling into goal.
That would be One.
Another draw. Fi flipped it toward her left middie, and once again her team was on offense. But half were running one play while the other half ran another.
“Set up!” Fi was yelling, trying to pull them into some kind of pattern.
“Somebody set a pick,” called the attack behind the crease, and a teammate cut to the goal.
“Midfields!” Coach Dunn was screaming from the sidelines. “Get up top!”
Even though Dunn was yelling at her to shift away, Fi knew the girl setting up was out of position. Sure enough, at the pass, the girl reached out her stick an inch short of making any difference.
The ball rolled as Fi and an opposing defender charged for it.
Their bodies collided less than a second after their sticks. There was a series of unpleasant snapping sounds, and for an instant, Fi felt a giddy pleasure—I’ve finally broken someone’s stick! Both girls hit the ground. It wasn’t until the ref blew the whistle that she processed the pain.
Grabbing her right ankle, Fi screamed obscenities she didn’t realize she knew. Still, she had the ball.
The ref and Coach Dunn ran over. Despite the pain—it was like she’d been stabbed, from the inside out—she wondered why her hands felt sticky. When Dunn pried them from her ankle, they were covered in blood. She dragged her eyes away from her hands, looked toward her foot, and saw bone.
It hurt so, so bad.
Dunn carried her bodily off the field. Ryan and Trent ran over from where they stood on the sidelines, and in minutes, her dad was across the field, too, barking into his cell phone, then taking her from the coach’s arms. Yelling at Ryan to open the damn back door already, he slid Fi across the backseat and wrapped an old gym towel under her foot to soak up the blood.
“Hold on, sweetie,” he said, tearing out of the parking lot. “We’ll be in the ER in ten minutes.”
Fi felt like she was frothing at the mouth. In between groans, she cursed like a sailor. Her father didn’t scold her even once, which made everything even more terrifying, because that meant he already knew what she was just now figuring out. They could see her bone. This was bad. This was very, very bad.
She’d been quiet thirty seconds, letting her head loll against the door and watching the trees whip by as her father sped to the hospital in rush hour traffic, when Ryan turned around from the front passenger seat. He looked gray. “Are you okay?”
“What the hell play were they running?” she barked back.
“Um—”
“They were out of position! Did you see that?” Fi knocked her head backward against the door, hoping a new pain would distract her from the red-hot, searing pain of ripped skin and snapped bone.
If only she’d listened to Dunn and shifted back.
If only she’d stopped a few steps before she hit the defender.
If only the defender hadn’t made that weird pivot right.
Her dad hit a bump pulling into the parking lot, making Fi groan louder. “Sorry, baby,” he said. “We’re here.”
He pulled in front of the ER doors and sprinted into the building, while Fi lay moaning in the backseat. A few minutes later, he emerged from the sliding glass doors with the biggest man Fi had ever seen. He had to hunch over the wheelchair handlebars to reach them. He picked Fi up like she weighed nothing.
“Had a little accident, I hear,” he said, a row of perfect white teeth sparkling against his dark skin.
“Well . . .” Fi trailed off, pointing to the blood-smeared backseat. The ginormous nurse peered into the car and frowned. “Hmm. We’ll have to take care of that.”
Despite the blood everywhere, it felt like forever before she was admitted. Finally, someone hoisted her onto a gurney, popped the metal side rails up, and wheeled her back. Her dad walked beside her, but he’d sent Ryan home with the car. Fi wasn’t sure she needed all the things her father demanded that Ryan fetch. Maybe he was just getting rid of her brother before he passed out.
Trying to distract herself, Fi counted fluorescent lights as they proceeded down the hallway. She got wheeled into a room, and the nurses and doctors consulted with her dad, who seemed to lose a little more color with each conversation. Then a nurse came over to her, smiled, and said, “This’ll just hurt a little.”
After flicking the soft spot inside Fi’s elbow a few times, the nurse pushed a tiny needle, strapped to a clear tube, into the vein.
After that, Fi lost track of everything.
FIONA
For years, Fiona had daydreamed about this—through circumstances beyond their control, she and Trent would be thrown together, forced to work side by side. Trent would be smart, clever, witty, and kind. Gradually, he would realize Fiona was the girl of his dreams. They would fall in love, for happily ever after.
Now, at this very moment, he sat directly across the library table from her, so no time like the present.
“Mr. Phillips said we could pick from all the books we’ve read so far this year. So I was thinking this one,” Fiona said, sliding the packet between them and pointing to number four. Please don’t let him see my hands shake.
Trent leaned closer, and Fiona pulled in a deep breath. Outside of spearmint gum, he had no noticeable smell. It was a little unfortunate—she was kind of hoping for a little cantaloupe.
“‘In The Sun Also Rises, show how Hemingway used conflict to establish the identities of Brett and Jake,’” he read—then looked to her with a shrug. “I got no clue what that means.”
“Well, you read it, right?”
“I’m a dumb jock, remember?”
Crap. “Sorry about that. Bad day.”
“It’s cool,” he said, with just the prettiest smile ever.
“Well, we still have time.”
She went through a quick outline—thesis statement, supporting quotations, historical relevance. Just in case, Fiona gave herself the meatier parts of the paper, like the section on the Lost Generation of World War I.
“Wow. You really thought this out,” Trent said, flipping through her notes. “Wait, what’s an expatriate?”
“Someone who doesn’t live in his home country.”
“Oh. I thought you meant, like, Randy Moss.”
“Who?”
“He was a wide receiver, for New England. He’s an ex-Patriot,” he said, stressing different syllables.
“No.” She decided not to overanalyze. “The main characters were mostly Americans living in Paris.”
“I was wondering how the football thing fit in,” he said. “Everyone living in Paris, huh? Doesn’t sound so bad.”
“It’s a really sad story, actually.”
“You’re not a very good salesman.”
“They’re drunk a lot. It’s kind of amusing.”
“Awesome,” he said in a lighthearted way.
She leafed through her book, finding the highlighted section that explained it better. “Here,” she said, handing it over.
Trent took the book and read out loud. “‘You’re an expatriate. You’ve lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you.’” He looked up at her. “You’ve lost touch with the soil? What the heck does that mean?”
“The characters have all lived through World War I, and they’re pretty battered by it. Morally lost, that’s what Mr. Phillips said. They’re struggling to find meaning.”
“Good thing you’re my partner,” Trent said, dropping her book on the table. “I’d totally fail this on my own.”
He wants to be my partner! “I need to keep up my GPA, too. Northwestern’s my first choice.”
“They have the best women’s lacrosse
team in the country.” His blue eyes widened, showing off those flecks of green.
“Maybe I’ll try out,” she said, a little giddy from his gaze.
Trent laughed. “I don’t think they take walk-ons.”
Fiona snapped in a well-shucks kind of way. “They probably wouldn’t like all my don’t-throw-a-ball-near-my-face restrictions, anyway.”
What insanity made me say that?
“Do you mind if I ask?” Trent said. “How it happened?”
Fiona shrugged. She was used to answering this question like it didn’t bother her. “A disastrous run-in with a popcorn cart. I was five. We were at the zoo, in the snack bar. The machine got knocked over—I ran into it, I think. The oil flew out of it and landed on me.” She shook her head. “It’s pretty ridiculous.”
“That sucks.”
“It is what it is.”
Even though that might not be true anymore.
Fiona still hadn’t agreed to the surgery, though the lobbying was fierce. Her mom’s main argument: “This will make your life better.” Which was just code for this will make you better.
Her main fear: the horror of cutting out a sizable piece of herself, and—this was the kicker—sewing in bits of someone else. For the rest of her life, she’d be less than when she started. She felt like less than enough already, thankyouverymuch.
But God, the results did look good. Which was just as bad, really. Deep down, a little part of her agreed with her mom. She should throw this part of herself away.
Trent was watching her. “So why Northwestern?”
Fiona’s heart fluttered. “They’ve got a great creative writing school. And music program.”
“And that’s what you want to do?”
Absolutely. “I think so.”
“Like I said, good thing you’re my partner, then.”
The two spent the rest of lunch hour going through the book. Fiona pointed out passages Trent could use for his half. When the bell rang, they walked down the hallway. Side by side. Together.
Everything That Makes You Page 3