by Kieran Scott
“No. There’s nothing between me and Ally Ryan,” I confirmed.
“Good,” she said, her expression serious. “Because you deserve better.”
Whatever that meant. “Thanks.”
I switched the TV to one of the movie channels, looking for something familiar for us to watch. Something to distract me from the images of Hammond and Ally half-dressed and sweating that kept flipping through my mind.
“So . . . how was Florida?” I asked as she sat down next to me again.
“It was all right. Waterskiing, lying out, a lot of drunken reminiscing, but luckily everyone managed not to mention Charlie,” she said, fiddling with her hair now. “My dad was actually pretty cool. On Christmas he even smiled.”
“That’s good.”
“But then we got back home, and it was right back to the den and the Jack bottle,” she said.
“Sorry.” I put my arm around her and gave her shoulder a quick squeeze. “You can hang out here till you think it’s safe to go back.”
She put her head on my shoulder. “Thanks. You’re the best, you know that?”
“I’m aware.”
She laughed, and I got back to channel surfing. When I landed on Forgetting Sarah Marshall, one of our favorites, Shannen yanked the remote away so I couldn’t change it. We settled in on the bed, sitting next to each other against the headrest.
But all I could think about was Hammond and Ally. Hammond and Ally on a bed. Hammond and Ally undressing each other. Hammond and Ally with their tongues in each other’s mouths.
And as much as I liked Shannen, I wished she’d never come over.
ally
Five thirty in the morning in January may as well be midnight. It’s so freaking dark out that it should be illegal for anyone to be up, let alone working. And it’s freezingly, frigidly, bitingly cold. By the time I’d walked up the hill to the school and around to the service entrance—located directly across from the annex of infamy—my nostrils were frozen together.
But as I knocked on the door, I was actually trembling more from excitement than the cold. Excited for ass-crack-of-dawn detention. What was wrong with me?
A rotund man with red hair and a matching moustache opened the door for me. He was wearing perfectly clean, pressed coveralls. Color: paper bag brown.
“Good morning! So. You must be Ally!” he said brightly.
“Yep.”
“I’m Barry,” he said, offering a meaty hand. “So. Nice to meet you.”
“Thanks. You too.”
We stepped just inside the door. He stood there for a prolonged moment and just smiled at me. Jake was clearly not here yet.
“So. Got yourself into some shenanigans, did ya?” he said.
The “so” thing was going to get old really fast. “Apparently,” I replied.
“So. Should we wait for your friend, then?” he asked. “Or would you like to just get started?”
“Uh, I guess we should—”
There was a bang on the door. One loud bang. My heart skipped a nervous beat. I hadn’t seen Jake since the morning our punishment had been handed down. My mouth went dry as Barry leaned by me to open the door.
“Jake Graydon?” he said.
“Yeah.”
His voice sent a shiver down my spine. This was very not good. In a deliciously forbidden way. Jake slipped inside, hands in his jacket pockets. He’d gotten a haircut. It was all buzzed short on the sides. He looked hot. He gave me a quick sideways glance and I started to smile, but he quickly averted his eyes.
Ouch. What was that about? Was I wrong when I thought he’d be looking forward to this, too? Hadn’t he smiled at me that morning as he was walking out? I’d thought that had meant something. I’d been counting on it, actually.
Barry introduced himself and they shook hands.
“So. Let’s get to it then.”
Barry led us down the dimly lit hall, past the science labs, and into one of those rarely visited corners of the school where there were random offices and a bathroom no one ever used. Jake and I fell into step behind him, only about two feet apart, but it felt like there was a wall between us.
Barry shoved open the door of a closet marked CUSTODIAN ONLY and went inside. It wasn’t big enough for all of us, so Jake and I waited on either side of the door, facing each other but not talking to each other.
I had no idea what was going on, but I was not going to be the first to speak.
“So. Here you go!”
Barry reemerged and handed us each a putty knife and a plastic bucket. They looked as if they had seen better days.
“What’re these for?” Jake asked.
“They’re for scraping!” Barry announced happily, walking past us. He was like a Disney World ice cream hawker. On speed. “Come on!”
Scraping. Why did I not like the sound of this? Barry led us down the main hallway, which was quiet as a church on Friday night, and into the cafeteria. The lights were ablaze, and every single table in the place was turned upside down. Instantly, I knew what we were going to be scraping. The tables’ undersides were all pimpled with a disgustingly colorful array of gum wads.
“We didn’t get a chance to clear away all the gum over break,” Barry said, putting his hands on his hips and sticking his gut out as he surveyed the tables with what seemed like pride. “I got ’em all turned over before you got here, so I saved you that.” He whipped out two pairs of plastic gloves as if from nowhere and handed them to me. Then he slapped us on our backs. “So. Enjoy!”
The cafeteria door let out a loud squeal as he shut us in together. Jake and I looked at each another. It was almost like he was seeing me for the first time and he didn’t like what he saw.
“Is something wrong?” I asked, unable to take the silence any longer.
“No. What could be wrong?” he asked, dropping to the floor next to the first table. His vibe was so cold I was turning into a Popsicle.
“I don’t know. You tell me.” I sat down next to him, my bucket clunking against the floor. “Are you mad at me? Because it’s not like it’s my fault we’re here.”
“I know that,” he said through his teeth.
“Then, what?” I asked, my voice small.
Jake looked up at me. He did a sort of double take and rubbed his forehead with his hand. “It’s nothing. Sorry. I just . . . I guess I’m not a morning person.”
I snorted a laugh, relaxing a little. “Maybe tomorrow I’ll bring coffee.”
“Yeah. Good idea.”
There was a long moment of silence. I fiddled with my putty knife and bit my lip, trying to think of what to say next.
“Listen, I’m sorry about all this,” Jake said finally.
I handed him a pair of gloves. “I should have figured out they were setting me up. You were just trying to help.”
Jake looked down at the gloves and blushed.
“So, really I should be thanking you,” I rambled on, “for, you know, swooping in and trying to save me.”
Jake smiled for the first time. “I thought you didn’t need a knight in shining armor.”
I was pulling on a glove as he said this, and it snapped against my wrist. Ow. But I couldn’t believe he’d actually remembered something I said back in September.
“Yeah, well . . . I guess sometimes I do,” I said, tugging the other glove over my fingers. “But in the future, try saving me before the cops show.”
Jake’s laugh filled the cafeteria and melted my insides like s’mores over a flame. He had this deep, uninhibited laugh. I could listen to it all day.
And then I realized that I would be listening to it—to his laugh, his voice—for two hours every day for the next ten school days. Who ever said detention was a bad thing?
ally
“Heads up!”
I looked up just in time to stop the basketball that was hurtling toward my head. I batted it down with my forearm and glared at Shannen as she strolled across the gym toward me.
; “Nice reflexes.” She picked up the ball and cradled it between her wrist and hip. “Wanna warm up?”
She had to be kidding me. I got up and walked past her, grabbing a ball from the rack near the wall and shooting it over her head. It swished through the hoop, and I grabbed another.
“Oh. So, what? You’re not talking to me now?” she teased, tossing her ball from hand to hand.
I glared at her and shot another perfect, arcing shot over her head.
“Come on, Ally. It was just a joke. God, you’re as bad as Jake,” she said, grabbing my third ball out of my hands.
“A joke?” I blurted. “I thought we called a truce. What the hell, Shannen?” I jogged over to the corner, picked up my ball, and shot a layup, then got out of the way as some of our teammates started to take their warm-up shots.
“Calm down,” Shannen said, looking me up and down. “It wasn’t even my idea.”
“Oh, please. Don’t talk to me like I don’t know you,” I said, unzipping my hoodie and tossing it onto the ground. “You’re always the mastermind of these things.”
“Not this time! This one was all Faith,” Shannen protested.
I looked at her doubtfully. “Okay, fine. Let’s say I believe you. That means you had nothing to do with it? What is Faith, the Megatron of the crest or something? She’s so freaking unstoppable? You can’t talk her out of doing something intensely mean and stupid to people you supposedly like?”
“I didn’t know Jake was going to be there,” she said.
“Right. So if you did, then you would have stopped her,” I said, turning away as my face started to burn. “Thanks a lot.”
“I didn’t mean that,” Shannen said, the eye roll obvious in her voice. “Come on, Ally, take a joke.” She bounced her ball off the center of my back, right between my shoulder blades.
“It’s not a joke,” I said through my teeth, turning to face her. “And you can take your truce and choke on it.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked.
I stepped up and squared off with her. “It means unless we’re on the court, don’t talk to me. Don’t come near me. Just leave me alone.”
Shannen took a step back, shoving her tongue into her cheek. “Fine.”
“Fine.”
“Are you sure about this?” Shannen said, her tone growing darker.
“Sure about what?”
“About making an enemy of me, knowing what I know?” she said.
My cheeks colored. She was threatening me now? My adrenaline took over, even as fear sliced through my heart. “I’m pretty sure you won’t say anything about that, knowing what I know.”
She gaped at me, stunned. It was a low blow, considering how much more personal and potentially devastating the secrets were that I held. What she didn’t know was, I would never tell anyone about them, even if she called my bluff.
Which was why it was called a bluff.
Then Shannen’s eyes flashed with ire, and for a moment I felt uncertain. She looked like she was about to say something—something devastating—and my stomach hollowed out. What? What horribleness was hanging on the tip of her tongue?
Coach blew her whistle to start practice, and I turned around, acting casual. Trying not to let her see that I was shaking. I grabbed a ball off the floor and shot one last three, which bounced off the rim and flew toward the bleachers. As we lined up for drills, I made sure to avoid any and all eye contact with Shannen and tried not to think about what we’d just done. What she’d been about to say. What it might actually mean.
jake
It turned out I didn’t care. That was the thing. I didn’t care that Hammond and Ally had hooked up. I thought that every time I looked at her I was going to see him, but I didn’t. All I saw was her.
And I couldn’t stop staring.
“What? Do I have something on my face?” Ally lifted her rubber-gloved hands toward her nose.
Snagged. “No. Sorry. I just zoned out for a second,” I said.
It was our third morning of detention, and we were still scraping gum. I never knew the people at my school chewed this much gum.
“Oh. Okay.” She got back to scraping. “So, Jake Graydon, tell me about yourself.”
My brain went completely blank. I picked up my putty knife and went to work on a wad of pink gum. “Tell you about myself?”
“Yeah. I mean, we’re gonna be here every day for the next seven days.” She smiled over her shoulder at me. “May as well talk.”
We’d talked yesterday. And the day before. About basketball and soccer and lacrosse and swimming and the shore and the city and Baltimore, where she’d lived before moving back. But I guess we hadn’t talked about anything real, really. The way girls seemed to love to do.
“What do you want to know?”
“I don’t know. What’d you do for Christmas?” Ally asked. She tossed her ponytail over her shoulder as she bent over the table.
“Visited my grandparents in Philly,” I said. “It’s the only time all year I get to see all my cousins at the same time, so it was pretty cool.”
“Really? How many cousins do you have?” she asked.
“Twenty-three.”
Her jaw dropped. “Shut up!’
“Why? How many do you have?” I asked, sitting up straight.
“Um, five,” she said. “And they all live in California, so I never see them. Can you, like, name them all?”
“Sure,” I said. I recited the list from oldest to youngest. Told her all about how everyone was excited to see my crazy cousin Devon, who’d spent the past year studying art in Italy and then come back and acted so superior we’d all ended up throwing canapés at him until he finally broke and launched a counterattack. I told her about Leanna, who had sent in applications to be on The Bachelor for five years in a row and had finally made the cut, so she refused to consume anything other than celery and water. When I told the story of how the toddlers had tried to use my uncle’s old waterbed as a trampoline she laughed so hard coffee came out her nose.
“Omigod!” she said, lifting a paper towel to her face. “I’m so gross!”
That was it. She didn’t squeal, scream, run for the bathroom, or leave the school never to return. She sniffled and got back to work, telling me all about her chill Christmas and how her mom had loved her present.
This girl was effing awesome. As I listened to her relate the details of the Christmas tree and the dinner and the presents, I realized I wasn’t bored.
“Then, of course, we spent the day after Christmas with the Nathansons,” she said, shaking her head. “This is a new tradition, apparently. Day-after dinner with le boyfriend. Except this time it was at their place, so I got the full tour of Quinn’s very pink, very huge bedroom suite. Not that she wanted to show it to me.”
“What do you mean?”
“Let’s just say I’m not so sure Princess Quinn is too psyched about having to hang out with a Crestie reject like me,” Ally said, then blushed.
I felt hot all of a sudden, too. Since it was my friends who had made her a reject. I sat back on my butt and fiddled with the putty knife. “Is that weird, your mom dating someone?”
“Everything’s weird,” she replied, sitting back as well.
“What do you mean?”
She dropped her knife and leaned back on her hands. Her gloves made squishy, squeaky noises on the floor. “I don’t know . . . it’s like I’m back but I’m not back. I’m here . . . I’m home . . . but nothing’s the same. My friends are here but they’re not my friends. My house is here but it’s not my house.”
I looked down at my hands, feeling responsible somehow. I would’ve given her her room back if I could.
“And my family . . . it’s just weird being here without my dad. Everywhere I go it’s like I expect to see him there waiting for me. There are all these memories, but he’s not here.”
Her voice broke, and she stopped. My heart did this weird clenching thing at the mention o
f her father. But I couldn’t tell her what I knew. Because I didn’t really know anything for sure. And it also was none of my business. Wouldn’t it freak her that someone she barely knew kind of knew where her dad was?
I wished my friends were here listening to this. They’d never be able to blame her for all the crap her dad did if they knew what it was doing to her. And they also wouldn’t be able to laugh about where her dad was now. Or about the fact that they all knew and she didn’t. Not that there weren’t other reasons for them not to like her, but only Shannen and Hammond knew about those.
“You know that box score?” she said suddenly. “The one from the JV championship?”
“Yeah.”
“That was the night we left. I wrote that in while my dad was yelling at me to get in the car,” I said. “I had this, like, need to record it there before we left. Like it would somehow mean something if it was there. It should have been the best night of my life, but instead it was the worst. I never got to go to the banquet and get my championship ring. I never even got to go over the play by play with Shannen and Hammond like we always did. Instead it was all just over. My life as I knew it was just over.”
“Wow. That sucks,” I said. “You never even got your ring?”
She cracked a sad smile. “Nope. I figured they’d mail it to me, but . . .” She shrugged and looked down at her hands.
“Sorry. I shouldn’t have asked,” I said.
“No. It’s okay. Maybe we should just change the subject.” She quickly reached for her putty knife, but it slipped out of her hand. We both grabbed for it, and my gloved fingers closed over hers. We froze. I stared down at our plastic hands, my heart pounding.
“Well,” Ally said. “That’s romantic.”
And we laughed. Suddenly my palms were sweating under my gloves. I slid my hand away and we got back to work, but I felt as if my whole body was on high alert. There was no getting around it anymore. I was falling for this girl.
Big-time.
ally
“What about this? You’d look hot!” I sang, holding out a brown suede jacket to David in the middle of the men’s section at Macy’s. “Your groupies would be all over you.”