“Lucky thing?”
“Oh yeah, most of the guys on the team have something like that. Eric wears the same bandanna every game and doesn’t wash it all season. Brian, he eats like fifty red hots because one time last year he did that and it was our best game ever. And Charlie won’t drink a thing for forty-eight hours before a game.”
“He doesn’t drink anything? Isn’t that dangerous?”
He laughed. “Oh, I mean he won’t drink drink. He’ll have nonalcoholic stuff. But for a guy who’s always got not one but two flasks in his car, that’s a big deal.”
“Two flasks? Seems like he should just get one big one,” I said. “More efficient. Unless he has different kinds of liquor in each?”
He shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe he has the super-good stuff in one. Or maybe it’s just easier to be discreet if you have two small ones.”
“So what’s your thing?” I asked. “What weird thing do you do before a game?”
“Me?” He shrugged again. “I don’t believe in that stuff. I believe whatever’s going to happen will happen, that there isn’t any point in trying to shape the future.”
I looked out at the fields and wondered about what I believed. I wasn’t sure what I thought about shaping the future, yet perhaps I did believe, deep down, that there was a chance I could reshape the past. That if I found out what, or even who, had come between me and Anna so I could fix it. Reset time.
I rolled onto my side and looked at Nick.
“What did you like about her?”
He blinked. “About who?”
“About Anna.” Please tell me something good, I thought. Something that mattered.
The pause stretched out until I thought he wasn’t going to answer.
Then he did. Slowly, thoughtfully.
“I liked a lot of things about her,” he said. “I liked how kind she was to people. I liked how I’d see her chewing on her pen all secretive-like when she thought no one was looking. I liked how she once tried to save a crow that was hit by one of the buses—even though it was scared and kept trying to peck at her.”
Then his tone changed, going lower and deeper. “But honestly, I only noticed those things after I already knew I liked her.” He closed his eyes. “She held my hand once, did you know that? Just saw I looked upset about something and came up beside me and held my hand. That was years ago, and I don’t even remember what I was upset about anymore, but I liked her from then on. It just built. More and more reasons to like her, and no reasons not to.”
His eyes were still closed, but around the edges there was a thin line of moisture. The sun was bright, I thought; that was all. Incredibly bright.
So I closed my eyes as well. He’d risen to the challenge, remembered things that mattered. Yet there was also a weird feeling in my chest. A feeling someone who didn’t know better might have labeled jealousy.
After I moved away, leaving his fingers flexed in midair, neither of us said anything. We brushed it off as if it were an accident, something that would never happen again.
Yet I felt branded by it—like the weight of his fingers on my thigh had turned me into a different person.
ALL THE TIMES THAT I’D followed Mr. Matthews home, watched him from his window, I’d never gotten caught. Hadn’t even come close.
Which meant I started to get sloppy. Didn’t leave as much room between us as I had at first. Didn’t bother stretching as much as I used to. In a way, I’d come to feel that we were simply spending time together, getting to know each other. The fact that it wasn’t actually a mutual relationship was something I mostly skimmed over in my mind.
And one day, it seemed like he was walking more slowly than usual. As there’s a limit to how slowly you can jog, I kept getting closer and closer to him.
Less than a block away from his house, there was the sharp cracking sound of a car backfiring behind us. He swiveled around and there I was, less than fifteen feet behind him, smack in the middle of open, empty pavement.
“Jess?” He cocked his head, staring at me like he barely recognized me out of context.
I froze. Act natural, my brain commanded. Act natural. Unfortunately, I could not remember what on earth that might look like.
He started to walk toward me.
I opened my mouth. No words came out, just an odd, scratchy noise from the back of my throat. I feigned a coughing fit to cover it up.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
I nodded as I continued to cough, trying to extend it as long as I could. Once I’d bought as much time as I could without permanently damaging my throat, I made my eyes go wide. “You surprised me,” I said.
He furrowed his eyebrows. “How did I surprise you? You were running right behind me.”
I edited myself. “I meant that the noise surprised me.”
“Oh, sure,” he said. “It was pretty loud.”
“Yes, it was.”
He continued to look at me strangely, so I seized on the first thing that seemed faintly plausible.
“I was actually trying to catch up with you. I was about to call out to get your attention when the car backfired.”
“Okay,” he said. “What did you want to tell me?”
Oh. Right. I hadn’t gotten that far. I considered faking another coughing fit, but that seemed a bit much. I looked down at my gym shoes and then back up.
“Track,” I said. “I wanted to tell you that I appreciate you letting me on the team even though the sign-up period was over. I’m enjoying it.”
I prayed he wouldn’t ask why I suddenly wanted to talk to him about that now. Because I had no answer.
Fortunately, he seemed to accept the comment at face value. “That’s great,” he said. “It seems like you’re really taking to it.”
“Thanks.”
I wondered if we could leave it at that, but I wasn’t sure how to make an easy retreat, so I decided to keep talking—bury the awkwardness of it all with more inane chatter.
“I’ve heard good things about your English class,” I offered. Lay it on thick, I thought. Compliment him into a stupor and then head for the hills.
“I’m glad,” he said. “You should sign up for it next year.” He said it more like he thought he should say it rather than like he genuinely meant it. Still, I was surprised that he was tactless enough to say it at all.
“Yeah, I guess I could do that, now.”
“Now?”
I flushed, annoyed that he was making me spell it out. “Anna was in your class before. So I had to go in another section. Because of the policy.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” he said.
“The policy about siblings. About them not being in the same class.”
He shook his head slowly. “There isn’t a policy about that.”
“Yes, there is.”
“No, there isn’t. There are two brothers in one of my AP classes right now.”
“That’s against the rules, then. Because there’s a policy. It’s new—they rolled it out last summer. That’s why Anna and I didn’t take classes together this year. I distinctly remember her telling me….”
His face fell, taking on a look of sad embarrassment. I recognized that look, had seen many variations of it over the years. It meant I hadn’t understood something someone had said and they weren’t sure how to explain it to me.
I traced back. He’d said there was no policy. That he currently had siblings in one of his classes. Anna had been so clear on that point, telling me that if we didn’t pick different classes one of us would be forced to select again later.
Had she been lying?
I looked at Mr. Matthews’s face, his eyes filled with pity.
She had been lying.
He started to backtrack. “I mean, I could be wrong—maybe they made an exception for
the kids in my class….”
He fell silent again. Because he wasn’t wrong. We both knew that.
I tried to make my voice even; instead, it crackled with hysteria. “Sure. I really should get going.”
“Jess—”
I shook my head. Hard and fast. Hard and fast. “No, I should head home.”
He reached out toward my arm. I jerked away. No touching. No, no, no touching. Especially not by him. Especially not like this.
I turned and started to run, to put as much space as possible between us.
Because I needed to process this alone.
Alone.
Apparently, that was what I had been for a long time. Had been even before Anna fell.
MRS. HAYES LOOKED AT ME steadily, her fingers loosely laced together on her desk. I stared back, trying to keep my face as neutral as possible.
We had been sitting in silence for over five minutes and she’d only blinked a handful of times. If this had been a staring content, she’d have won it. Under normal circumstances, I might have been impressed. But she was a counselor, and I did not wish to be counseled.
“I don’t understand why I’m here,” I said eventually. “I told you I’m fine.”
“Your teachers are worried about you.”
“I don’t know why.”
“Okay,” she said. Then she flipped through a small notebook and consulted one of the pages. “So you don’t understand why they might be worried about you repeatedly running out of class with no explanation? About you handing in a blank sheet of paper for your English exam?”
It felt unfair to have the running-out-of-class part flung in my face, particularly since most recently I’d done that to check on Mona—a perfectly reasonable thing to do that should not have been counted against me. A reasonable thing that I didn’t feel like was mine to talk about.
“I was getting up to use the restroom,” I said. “And the English exam was a mistake.”
“Mistake” felt like a justifiable description of it. Because I had studied for that exam, had studied for it for weeks—stockpiling a rich supply of examples and opinions to use to answer questions posed in the exam. Sitting at my desk, though, my thoughts had left their tracks. Because Anna had lied to me. Not just not told me things, actively lied. Lied to get away from me.
“What do you mean, it was a mistake?”
“I wasn’t feeling well. I’m going to ask to retake it. My other grades are fine—it’s not like I’m failing any of my classes.”
She leaned forward. “This isn’t really about your academic performance. It’s about checking in with you, seeing if there’s anything we can do to make things easier. Everyone understands how hard this must be for you.”
“I’m doing fine. I just didn’t feel well yesterday. I should have gone home instead of trying to make it through the day.” I paused. “I’ve had a fragile stomach recently. That’s why I left abruptly for the bathroom too. I thought I was going to be sick.” I was proud of myself for thinking of that.
Mrs. Hayes looked at me for a long moment. And then she nodded to herself and wrote something in her notebook. Something quite long.
“What did you just write?”
“I wrote that you said you weren’t feeling well.”
“And that’s it?”
“What else do you think I wrote?”
“I don’t know, that’s why I asked.”
Her smile wavered. “Jess, did something happen? It makes sense that you’ll have ups and downs, but it had really seemed like you were finding a good path forward—joining track, hanging out with Sarah. Turning in a blank test—that’s so unlike you.”
Joining track, hanging out with Sarah. Finding a path. It hadn’t occurred to me that my behavior was being judged and monitored, that my teachers and Mrs. Hayes were grading my progress, even as they watched for cracks to form underneath the surface. I wondered if Mr. Matthews was part of this, if he’d told them about our encounter. Maybe that was what this was really about, not the English exam, not leaving class at all. Maybe that was what Mrs. Hayes was trying to get me to tell her, how my own sister hadn’t liked me, hadn’t wanted me around. If so, too bad. She could try all she liked, but I was never going to talk to her about that.
I tried to calm myself down, yet my hands itched to snatch the notebook from her hands so I could see what she’d written, see if Mr. Matthews was the one who had thrown me into this mess.
“Nothing happened,” I said.
“Nothing?”
“Nothing.”
She continued to stare at me. It was unnerving how good she was at it. Most people weren’t. She was good enough to unsettle me. Make me want to tell her something, anything to get her to stop staring.
Then I remembered it. The completely reasonable thing that I could tell her—that she might even already know about. Something that had upset me, quite deeply.
“There was some graffiti,” I said. “In the boys’ bathroom. About Anna. Someone mentioned it to me recently. I didn’t know about it before. It was…” I closed my eyes and saw it again, the faint image of it on the wall. “It threw me off. That someone would write something like that about her.”
Her stare softened, like it had done its job, forcing me to finally admit to a feeling she could cleanly parse and address. “I’m so sorry. Of course that upset you. Boys can be so…Well, that definitely shouldn’t have happened.”
“I don’t understand why someone would write that about her.”
“It’s hard to say. Boys’ minds can be an ugly place. There may well not be a reason. People are just cruel sometimes—lash out because they’re frustrated or jealous or because things ended badly. I wouldn’t put any stock in it.” She sighed. “I really wish no one had told you about it.”
“They didn’t mean to,” I said.
“Well, good. Some things only hurt to learn about, and they don’t change anything.”
Her phone buzzed on her desk, vibrating harshly against the wooden surface.
She glanced at it and her eyebrows went up. “I’m sorry, it’s my son’s school. Just a second.”
She picked up her phone and walked over to the window, turning her back to me. Her notebook lay on the desk, only a few feet away.
“Hello,” she said into her phone. “Is everything okay?”
I laid my hands on the desk. I wanted to know what she’d written about me. I wanted to know if Mr. Matthews had said anything about me.
“What? Peanuts? No, I don’t think…Oh, I’m so sorry.”
I slid my arms forward on the desk, as if I were stretching. My fingertips brushed against the notebook. I paused and then looked over at Mrs. Hayes. She was braced against the window, her fingers against her forehead.
“Yes,” she said, “his grandmother brought some cookies over and I didn’t think to ask. I thought they were chocolate chip.”
I leaned farther forward and I pulled her notebook back toward me, flipping it around so I could read it more easily.
Her handwriting was neat, precise.
Jess claims to have been sick. Obviously not true—already talked to parents. Denial? Depression? Compulsive lying? Recommend that she be referred to a psychologist? Psychiatrist?
Psychiatrist. Parents. I didn’t know she’d talked to them. I wondered for the first time if they hadn’t stopped believing that there was something wrong with me, if they’d just given up figuring out what. The thought stung. No, I thought, that’s not right. They know me. They know there’s nothing wrong with me. Then I thought about the coasters, about how nervous I seemed to make Mom and Dad sometimes now that Anna wasn’t there as a buffer between us.
I leafed through the previous pages, looking to see who else she’d been talking to, if Mr. Matthews had mentioned our encounter to her. She’d seemed to bu
y that the graffiti was the main issue, but perhaps she was socking away additional intel.
I couldn’t find anything, though. Everything else appeared to be about other students.
Then, from the corner of my eye, I saw Mrs. Hayes turning away from the window.
“Thanks,” she said, still talking into the phone. “I appreciate that. I’ll definitely be more careful in the future. I’m so glad no one got hurt.”
I thumbed back to the page she’d left off on, the page about me, and slid the notebook back across the table, retracting my hands to my lap right as she ended the call.
“I’m so sorry about that,” she said as she sat back down. “It seems I accidentally almost killed half of my son’s kindergarten class.”
“Not a problem,” I said. “I’m glad everyone is okay.”
“Me too,” she said. Then she reached for her notebook. As she did so, I realized that I’d left it oriented facing me. I watched her notice it, saw her eyes flick back to me. She opened her mouth, as if to ask me about it. I kept my face as blank as possible. Then she shook herself a little, like a dog coming in from the rain, and closed her mouth again.
“Is there anything else you’d like to tell me about, Jess?”
“No,” I said. “That’s the only thing that comes to mind.”
That first time, we’d been alone, inside—contained by walls.
The second time, it was out in the open. His hands on me on the bleachers as I waited for Lily to come out of the locker room. The risk of it, the audacity, made it seem like he’d lost control, like we’d both lost control.
Lost control. It feels good to phrase it like that. Like control is something that fell through my fingers, leaving me blameless.
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