“You weren’t kidding, about not singing your own stuff?”
“Nope. I have a serious hang-up about it in public.”
“Because?”
“I don’t know, just because. But my grade—and scholarship—depend on it, not to mention Lucy won’t talk to me until I do it.”
Jackson wagged his eyebrows. “So I’d be your first?”
Oh my. “Forget it.”
“No. No. I want to. Please. Please let me be your first.” He knelt right in front of her, clutching his hands together in front of his heart.
“Let’s get this over with,” she mumbled and led him into her room.
Pointing to the chair by her desk, Fiona assumed her usual guitar-playing position—cross-legged on the bed. She took a few moments—longer than she needed, really—to tune, humming herself into pitch. She took a deep breath, hit the first chord, and sang.
If I’m inside out / And upside down
When I’m piece by piece / And pound by pound
How do I measure the melted?
How do I know what’s left is enough for you?
Now came the instrumental part. As her fingers picked out the melody, she glanced up. Jackson was watching her with an intensity that made blood thrum in her ears. She looked back to her fingers and promised herself she wouldn’t look back up again. She even closed her eyes, for extra security.
When I’m inside out / And upside down
When I’m piece by piece / And pound by pound
After the stitches have faded.
How will I know what’s left is enough for you?
She kept her eyes closed nearly a full thirty seconds after she finished. Slowly, she opened one eye then the other, too stressed out to glory in the fact that she’d done it. Finally done it.
Jackson leaned forward in his chair, elbows on knees, hands joined in front of him. “You wrote that?” he asked, quietly.
Fiona nodded.
“Is it about that guy in the coffee shop?”
Ugh, this was why she didn’t sing. “No, it’s not about him.” It was about her, damn it.
“It was really good,” he said.
“You don’t have to do that.”
“Do what?”
She pulled her hair from its ponytail, dragging it over her face out of habit, and studied the pattern of her bedspread. “Compliment me or whatever.”
“I’m not really a false praise kind of guy.”
The lump in her throat made it impossible to speak. She felt like a biology frog, flayed out and pinned down, all her insides open for inspection. She swiped her hands over her eyes, hoping he hadn’t noticed the tears welling up.
He sat beside her. “I get the feeling I’m handling this wrong.”
“It’s not you,” she said, shaking her head. “I don’t think I was ready.”
“You did just launch into it. No foreplay at all.”
She looked sideways at him. “Why does it always feel like a double entendre with you?”
“Well, I’m not that subtle.” He sat up and tucked her curtain of hair behind her ears, left side, then right. His fingers lingered on the skin of her neck while his eyes lingered on the scar.
“Seriously, let me make it up to you,” he said. “Play something else. I’ll be better this time.” He leaned in and whispered dramatically, “More attentive to your needs.”
Performance jitters flowed away, like someone had opened a tap—but stomach flutters immediately took their place. Her heart pounded like it might break through her ribs.
Surprising herself, she picked up the guitar and smirked right back at him. “They say it’s never good the first time, anyway.”
FEBRUARY
FI
Fi knocked on her advisor’s door. The loose glass pane in the chipped, wooden door rattled. The door swung open, and Fi faced Brenda Lyon, cochair of the English department and Fi’s assigned freshman advisor.
“We said four.” Professor Lyon glanced at her watch.
“Right. Sorry, lacrosse practice went a little long.”
Fi sat down on an unforgiving wood chair on the “guest” side of the desk. Lyon settled into a plush, leather one on hers.
This would be their fourth meeting—one each for first and second semester course selection, one in between to discuss Fi’s uninspiring academic performance. Lyon always looked exactly the same—tightly pulled back graying hair, starched blue button-down, black skirt.
For the next three to four minutes, Lyon clicked through her computer. Fi eyed it from the back, as it coughed up her secrets like a traitor.
Finally, Lyon looked away from the screen. “I thought we’d come to an understanding about this semester, Fi.”
“I’m sorry?” Fi asked, playing innocent.
“We’re almost to midterms, and you’re barely keeping your head above 2.0.”
“Spanish and sociology should be Bs.”
Lyon glanced back to the screen and raised an eyebrow. “How do you figure that math?”
“Well, I mean I’ll get there by the end of the semester. Not immediately.”
“It’ll take an incredible amount of work. Dedicated work.” Lyon looked back to the screen, shaking her head. “You’ll forgive my skepticism.”
“It’s been a hard year,” Fi muttered.
“Fi, every freshman has issues with transition. It’s tough to adjust to the independence and responsibility. But you still have to.”
“My issues are a little different.”
“How so?”
“My boyfriend died nine months ago.” She felt a wave of nausea the second the words were out of her mouth. Why did she keep using Marcus as a bargaining chip?
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Lyon said, considering her a moment. “Have you thought about taking some time off?”
“Um, no.” She only needed a second to mull over the idea. “But I don’t want to do that.”
“I can’t give you another chance, Fi. You have to buckle down here.”
She looked Lyon in the eyes. “I can work.”
Lyon drummed her fingers against the desk, watching Fi. “Okay. But it’s going to be hard.” She angled back to the computer, clicking on a few screens. “You’re on academic probation.”
“Oh. Okay.” After a moment, she added, “What’s that mean, exactly?”
“You have until the end of this semester to get a minimum of 2.25 in all your courses. If you skip any classes or fail to complete assigned work, your professors will be required to notify me. And you cannot participate in any extracurricular activities until the probation period ends.”
Fi nodded as Lyon went through the rules. A little extra work, a tighter rein on her schedule—she could do that. She would do that. But at that last bit, Fi held up a hand. “Wait—um, what qualifies as an extracurricular activity?”
“Any school-sanctioned groups that aren’t linked to your academics. Student government, academic organizations, service clubs.”
“Does that include the lacrosse team?” she asked as calmly as she could manage.
“Yes.”
“Can we come up with other terms? So I can stay on the team?”
“There are no other terms. Probation is the only option you’ve got left.”
“Right, I just think I can handle the work and the team.”
“If you’re on probation, your coach cannot allow you to play. It would violate a handful of school rules—and jeopardize the team’s standing within their athletic league.”
Fi dug what was left of her fingernails into her palm. She could feel skin peel into them. “And if I fail probation?”
“The fact that you’re considering that as an option isn’t giving me a lot of confidence, Fi.”
“Lacrosse is all I have right now.”
“So finish probation and get it back. But if you fail probation,” Lyon said, leaning forward, “you won’t have Milton either.”
Fi closed her Spanish book with a s
mack. Both her and Jackson’s coffee mugs trembled on the table. “I’m done.”
“Are you fluent yet?” he asked, frowning at the coffee puddle under his mug.
“Only if you need directions to the library—or to buy cheese.” She stretched, speaking through a yawn.
“Is it totally pathetic I want to go to bed”—Jackson yawned back, looking at his watch—“and it’s only four?”
She had gone to bed at four for weeks after the funeral. Thankfully, it’d been a while since she’d been that bad off.
She stood, throwing her books into her bag. “I feel like a slug. I need to work out or something.”
Even though she was teamless, Fi had started running ladders and throwing against brick walls. All the parts of her that had softened were slowly hardening. It was kind of lonely, though—no other girls, no Ryan, no Trent.
Jackson was still leaning like a lump over his chair. “Want to learn lacrosse?” she asked him.
Jackson raised his eyebrows. “Why not?” he said, and piled his things together.
In the coffee shop parking lot, Fi tossed her bag in the trunk and fished through the pile of lacrosse gear. After grabbing one of her sticks, an old one of Ryan’s, and a few balls, Fi and Jackson walked in perfectly parallel paths to the neighborhood park across the street. Good thing it had lights, because it was already getting dark.
“So this is a stick.” She handed him Ryan’s, pointing to the different parts. “The shaft. The head. The ball goes in the pocket. See how your pocket is bigger than mine?” Jackson’s eyes raised, and Fi shook her head. “No jokes I haven’t heard. Grow up.”
He smirked. “The guys have big balls?”
She groaned. “We use the same ball. But you’re allowed to check in the men’s game and not in the women’s. The deeper pocket helps.”
Taking a ball and her stick, she walked a few feet away. “Put your hands here and here. Bend your knees as you catch.” She tossed the ball lightly. Jackson caught it. “Now shift your hands to here and here to throw. Like this.”
He watched her and did a fairly good imitation. They tossed back and forth a few minutes, and as he looked more comfortable, she showed him how to cradle so he could run without losing the ball, and how to reach out and catch with one hand. They talked rules, teams, leagues, the differences between the men’s and women’s games.
“You’re not bad,” she said. “It’s awkward at first for a lot of people.”
“How was Marcus?”
“I never taught Marcus.”
He looked surprised. “He wasn’t interested?”
“He never seemed up to it.”
Jackson sighed, shaking his head. “He never got to do anything.”
“Because of y’all.” Fi was only half-surprised when this blatant challenge came out of her mouth.
“We didn’t have much choice,” Jackson said, narrowing his eyes.
Fi frowned slightly. “I keep waiting for a hateful comment.”
“Believe me, I’m biting my tongue.”
“Why?”
Jackson studied her for a long moment. Then he took a deep breath and slowly lowered the head of his stick to the ground. The ball rolled out of it, resting at his feet. “The day before he died, he wanted me to read to him. We’d gone through everything in the house, so Mom had to scrounge up some old poetry book for us.”
“Okay.” She had no idea what this had to do with anything.
“So there was this poem. I can’t remember much of it, but I’ll remember those last two lines the rest of my life. He made me read them over and over.”
“What were they?” she asked, a little terrified of the answer.
“The winter of love is a cellar of empty bins / In an orchard soft with rot.”
The soft with rot part sounded so familiar, but it took a few moments before she made the connection as to why. “He was mumbling that to me,” she said. A clear image of Marcus, gaunt and pale in his dining room deathbed, lit up her brain. She hadn’t thought of him like that in so long. “The last time I saw him.”
“He said it was you,” Jackson said, suddenly looking as somber as she felt. “You were going to be those empty bins, once he died. And it was maybe the saddest thing I had ever heard.”
“The poem?”
“No, his voice. How he sounded. Like—like, all the joy he always felt just got sucked out of him all at once. It was tragic.” He looked at her now. “It was the same way you looked, at the funeral. You looked just as tragic as he sounded.”
She swayed on the spot, either because she might faint—or the earth was actually shifting beneath her.
How could her heart keep breaking? It was the most fragile, delicate thing. Why wasn’t it more like her broken ankle—stronger when it healed? “I don’t need your pity, Jackson.”
“It’s not pity,” he said. “It’s guilt.”
“Is that supposed to be better?”
He shrugged. “It’s the best I can do by way of apology.”
As backward as their friendship seemed, she thought they’d been drawn together because each understood the other. “So being friendly now is just an apology for how mean you were to me before?”
He sighed, spinning his lacrosse stick where it rested on the ground. “You’re right, we did keep him on a pretty tight leash. He bitched, complained, tried to find loopholes, but three able-bodied control freaks versus one guy who gets out of breath eating cereal—not a fair fight.” He shook his head. “But, no, it’s an apology to him—not you.”
“Do you even like me?”
“You’re fine. I mean, I don’t really know you.” He held up the stick with a shrug. “Besides your obsession with this weird sport.”
Fi looked from her stick to his and back. She remembered sitting in Ryan’s room years ago, asking him what she was good at, what defined her. The list was just as pathetic now as it was then. After all this time and all this pain, she added up to nothing more than Marcus and lacrosse. The two things she loved. The two things she’d lost.
For no reason she could explain, she spontaneously let out a cry—a guttural yell—and hurled her stick as far away from her as she could. She even took a few steps for momentum, like she was throwing a javelin.
She sank down to the grass, pulling her knees into her chest and wrapping her arms around them. She saw Jackson’s feet in her peripheral vision—how they turned away from her, hesitated, then turned back and walked over.
He sat down a few feet away, kicked his legs out straight, and leaned backward against his elbows. He didn’t speak, so Fi didn’t know if this was one of those coffee-shop-comfortable-silences, or if he was waiting for her to say something first.
“If I never met Marcus, I’d be at Northwestern. I’d still have it,” she said.
“Have what?”
She pointed in the general area of her thrown stick. “I couldn’t love them both at the same time. I had to pick one.”
“Looks like you picked wrong.”
Fi groaned and buried her head in her knees. “Do you really think so?”
“God, I don’t know.” He sighed. “He was happy. I was furious. Now you’re miserable, and I feel guilty. Flip side—what? Y’all never met? He and me, we’d have been the same we always were. You’d have been the same as you were before you met him. You and I could have avoided this weird . . . friendship or whatever.”
“I’d have been the same,” Fi repeated. She wished she knew which was better.
Since May, it had felt like horrible, cancerous thoughts had been eating her from the inside out. “A few months ago, you said that everywhere you looked, you saw some connection to him.”
“Yeah,” he said cautiously. “So?”
“Do you think anyone, you know, got his organs?”
“I know Mom and Dad signed the papers, after. I don’t know what actually got donated, though.”
“Do you think it would have hurt him?”
Jackson exhal
ed. “He was dead.”
“Do you think he’s happier now?”
“I don’t know.”
She looked at the sky, like she could squint out the view past the clouds. “Do you think he can see us?”
“Jesus, Fi.” Jackson flopped backward in the grass with a groan. “What do you want from me here?”
Marcus would have answered. He would have talked for hours about all of this with her, analyzing all the philosophical angles. “I want you to be him.”
“Well, he’s dead.” Jackson stood up from the grass. Bits of it stuck to his holey, worn jeans. “I’m not a substitute.”
That’s obvious. “What are you then?”
Jackson shook his head and turned. He spoke over his shoulder as he walked away. “Just a bitter, alive guy without his freaking twin.”
FIONA
Fiona was looking out the common room window. The sky was a smooth, cloudless blue, and the trees stood perfectly upright. Usually, the wind blew them around so wildly, they might javelin themselves through the window.
“You’re not coming home?” her mother was asking, over the phone.
“Everyone else has a different spring break. No one will be in town.”
“Your father and I will be here.”
As tempting as that sounds . . .
A few weeks ago, she’d had the same conversation with David, only he was asking her to visit UT. “I can’t afford a ticket,” she’d said. If she wasn’t going home, her dad sure wasn’t going to fly her to Knoxville to see her boyfriend.
“I could come to Chicago,” he’d said. “During my break. We could see a Cubs game. Try that stuffed pizza you talked about over Christmas.”
“Yeah, you’d like it.”
“Great. So, should I buy the ticket?”
“Sure,” she’d said, wishing she felt more enthusiastic about the idea. “That’d be fun.”
She hadn’t shared David’s travel plans with her mother, who was still complaining, long distance. “You’re just going to stay up there, alone?”
“Lots of people are staying on campus,” Fiona said. Jackson, for example.
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