by Alexis Nedd
My phone rings through my car speakers as soon as I put the car in park. Penny’s name and all-American photo from her campaign poster pops up on the screen (unlike Connor’s photo, I put that one in myself). This is the second time she’s called me in two weeks, and I gotta say, as much as talking on the phone is the realm of the elderly, it’s actually a pretty good way to quickly communicate information. Go figure.
“Pen! It’s 6:45 in the morning.”
“Hi to you too.” She sounds grumpy, which I read as tired. I’d sympathize if I hadn’t been up past midnight every day this week.
“Sorry, hi. Good morning. What’s up?”
“I”—she doesn’t bother to stifle her yawn—“got up early because I’m a fantastic person and wanted to say break a leg. Or wish you good luck? Smash a . . . controller thing. I don’t know what you people say.”
Her delivery could use some work. I’m still touched.
“Thank you. I think it’s good luck? No one’s ever said it to me before, about this kind of stuff.”
“Like I said, fantastic person.”
“You really, really are.”
“Are you alone?”
That’s ominous. “Yeah, I’m waiting to pick up Jake at the location.”
“Aha. Can’t forget Jake. Like any of us could forget Jake,” she replies. Her sarcastic tone is duly noted. I may have developed a teeny, tiny case of the mentions about Jake in the latter half of this week. Only around Penny and Matt, of course, but they were curious about the tournament and I couldn’t not bring him up. Especially since I’ve been good about not looking or talking to him during school hours.
Okay, I maybe look at him a little during school hours.
And I have been talking to him after practice for the past three days.
And that might be the reason I’m even more sleep-deprived than usual because Fury stuff wraps at 11:30, but the Jake stuff wraps whenever one of us is about to fall asleep. Or whenever one of us does fall asleep, like I did Thursday night and Jake had to sing the “Funkytown” beeps over voice chat to scare me awake.
“I can’t forget Jake because he doesn’t have a ride without me.” The defense is crappier than this Dunkin’, and I know it. Penny apparently knows it too.
“I hope you know what you’re doing,” she says warily.
“I’m driving one of my competitors to the GLO tournament. It’s good sportsmanship.”
“Yeah, no.”
“It’s good sportswomanship?”
“Lia. I’m talking about Jake, not GROW.”
“It’s GLO, and it’s fine. I also know what I’m doing with Jake.” Nope, that didn’t sound right. “I’m not doing anything with Jake. I know what I’m doing because it’s nothing. Everyone knows how to do nothing.”
I feel Penny’s sigh reverberate in my spine.
“It’s too early for this. I’m gonna do it, though: did you lock it down with Connor just to get him on my ticket? ’Cause if you did and you really like Jake, you need to break up with him.”
On any other day I would appreciate, no, count on Penny’s annoyingly clear-minded assessment of my actions. Any other day that is not today. Did I throw the boyfriend word at Connor to get him on the ticket? Yes, but it was more complicated than that. Maybe if I had more time and more dates with him, I would have gotten there anyway. I don’t want Penny to feel guilty about my romantic choices—and it’s not like Jake was an option anyway. My choices at the moment were to not date the hot guy who likes me or watch Audra drag Connor out of the cafeteria. I took the prize behind door number one. Simple as that.
“That’s not even close to what’s happening here. Jake is a friend, a secret nerd friend.”
“With big puppy dog eyes that follow you everywhere, and who you sacrifice sleep to talk to, and who you have managed to work into every conversation with me and Matt for a week.”
“Part of that was because of the ice cream thing.”
“Sure. It only took two days of you flipping out about that before you could talk to him. You, who could talk to a mailbox if you felt it needed to hear you out.”
“I don’t need to break up with Connor.”
“And you’re not dating him just because of the campaign?”
I look across the parking lot and see Jake nudge the Dunkin’ door open butt-first to avoid dropping the doughnut box and coffees he’s carrying. I know I just saw him at school yesterday, but seeing him this early on a weekend snaps my brain back to our car ride last week, to picking him up in the rain and almost definitely not kissing him in front of his apartment building. He looks more awake than I do this morning, brighter and happier around his dark eyes than I do even with concealer. He spots my car across the lot and awkwardly shimmies his shoulders since his hands are too full to wave, and he looks so silly I kind of want to throw up? Or laugh? I don’t know, man. My stomach feels weird. I slide down in my seat instinctively. Ninja mode: reactivated.
“Lia, are you there?”
Right, Penny is still on the line. “Still here, sorry. Jake’s here too, though, so I gotta go. I’m definitely not dating Connor because of the campaign.” Jake’s Saga voice from last week echoes in my head. Lying. “Please don’t worry about that.”
“What do you mean he’s here? Is he in your car? Hi, Jake, I’m Penny! We should talk. Vote Darwin.”
“Oh my god, Penny, no. Bad! He’s not in the car.” But he will be soon. “Thanks for wishing me good luck. Love you, bye!”
“I’m going back to sleep.” She hangs up. She can’t do it on her cell, but I know Penny would want me to imagine the dramatic sound of a phone slamming down on its . . . phone-holder. No idea what that’s actually called. I imagine the slamming noise anyway in her honor.
I jump when I hear the knock on the passenger side window. Jake must have sneaked around the back of my car, which is impressive considering he’s balancing the coffee cups on top of the doughnut box and holding them like a fancy butler.
“Hi!” I say before realizing my windows are up and he can’t hear a thing I’m saying. I reach over to pop the passenger side open. All of my height, of which there is not much, is in my legs and not my torso, so it’s an incredibly awkward position for me to be in. When Jake hip checks the rest of the door open, I’m staring somewhere at the bottom of the black cross on his Unity jersey. He couldn’t have covered up his team affiliation with a sweatshirt or something? Jake, you’re terrible at this game.
“Good morning?” he asks, looking down at me sprawled across the car seat. It takes me more time than I wish to core strength my way into a sitting position.
“Hey,” I reply when I’m finally upright. Through the door, Jake holds out one of the coffees.
“It’s not matcha,” he says reassuringly. “It’s black, and I have sugar packets in my pocket. Unless they exploded ’cause my jeans are too tight, then I just have sugar in my pocket. These pants are clean, though, so we can just like . . .” He mimes emptying his pocket out carefully into a cup and makes a pshhh sound.
“A lint latte. Sounds great.”
“A lint-te.”
“Get in the car.” I take my coffee with a smile and set it in one of the cupholders, then hold my hand out for the doughnut box. “I thought you said you’d get me a doughnut.”
“I did. Well, I got four. Two for you, and two for me. I’ll probably still be hungry, though. These things are delicious, but is it just me, or do they barely exist?”
“Empty calories, dude. Hits your stomach like a cotton ball.”
Jake snorts and climbs into my car. “I’m going to have to figure something else out for real breakfast.”
“We can stop on the way; we have plenty of time before By—before our teams arrive.”
For all the time Jake and I have spent talking over the past few days, we’ve managed to avoid the topic of competing. After that first night in freestyle mode, we moved on to playing a few five-by-fives and a battle royale or two, bu
t even playing alongside each other in the tournament’s match style didn’t bring the topic up. It wasn’t as if we were avoiding it, but we just had other things to talk about—GLO itself, his first few weeks at Hillford West, catching up on the years since we last saw each other—and it simply hadn’t come up.
Sitting in a car on our way to duking it out for a shot at playing each other in the finals makes that a little harder to avoid. I put the car in gear and swivel around to make sure no one’s behind me before pulling out of the lot and pointing us east toward Philly. Jake keeps busy getting the doughnut box open and taking a sip of his coffee. From the look of pain on his face, it’s too hot for him to keep using it as an excuse not to talk.
“Hey, uh, how’s your friend Penny? I convinced a few of the guys at my lunch table to vote for her on Friday.”
“She’s fine. I was just talking to her, actually. She”—kind of accused me of having a thing for you—“really wants to beat Audra Hastings. Thanks for the votes.”
“Is it weird that Audra’s running now? Wasn’t she, like, not running a few days ago?”
“Don’t get me started on that. It’s a whole thing. Can I have a doughnut?”
Hopefully Jake doesn’t mind being my breakfast concierge while I’m driving. I may be reckless enough to put on mascara at stoplights, but I don’t mess around with multitasking. I’ve seen way too many Grand Theft Auto stunt compilations not to know how quickly a car can flip over, or knock down a bunch of pedestrians, or zoom off a highway ramp and knock a helicopter out of the sky in a totally awesome but definitely fatal explosion.
“Sure. You want your coffee too? How many sugars?”
“Is this packet sugar or pocket sugar?”
Jake grabs at his pants to double-check. “Packet sugar, we’re good.”
“Four, if you have that many.”
He twists around in his seat to dig around in his sugar pocket and pulls out exactly four. “Perfect, that’s what I got.”
“What about your coffee?”
“I drink it black,” he replies. “I don’t want to like it too much or I’ll start seeing it as a beverage instead of a utility. Anxiety, you know. And ADHD.”
“It’s definitely a utility after the week we’ve had.”
“For sure.”
Jake passes me a doughnut (chocolate frosting, good choice), and we both sit in somewhat happy silence while we eat. I pass the street that leads to Jake’s apartment, which brings us closer to Hillford West. It occurs to me that I don’t know how Jake got to the Dunkin’ Donuts from his place; it has to be a few miles even if the drive is a relatively straight shot.
“Jake, did you walk to meet me this morning?”
He takes a few moments to answer since his mouth is full of doughnut. Connor would have just talked around it. “Yup. It’s like two and a half miles.”
I didn’t even think about what picking him up away from his apartment would have meant. I just didn’t want his parents to see me and ask questions, and didn’t know if anyone else from school lived in his building.
“What! I’m so sorry. I would have picked you up closer if I knew you were going to walk. I thought your mom or dad would drop you off.”
“My dad doesn’t really know I’m competing either. I mean I definitely told him, but I don’t think he listened to my half of that conversation. My half of any conversation, really.”
Suddenly Jake’s issues with feeling invisible seem like a lot more than having issues at a new high school. I’ve never met his dad; his mom was always the one who would pick him up from parties. She seemed like a nice lady, kind of distracted, but Jake never mentioned having any issues with her. Not like that’s a normal thing a thirteen-year-old brings up between Pokémon battles with a girl he sees once a year.
“What about your mom, though? I thought maybe she’d drive you.”
Instead of an answer, Jake offers me another doughnut. It’s chocolate again, so I look back at the box and see he really only bought four chocolate doughnuts. That was a gamble, but his consistency impresses me again. Jake likes what he likes, and I like it too.
“My mom, uh. She’s not around anymore.”
I swear to god, I should eat this doughnut with a side of my own foot.
“I’m so sorry, I didn’t know. Is she . . . ?”
“Jesus, your face.” Jake laughs, which is a good sign. “I just realized how that sounded; my mom’s not dead. She doesn’t have custody. My parents divorced last year. That’s why I had to transfer schools. They sold the house, and she lives in Jackson; I stayed with my dad, and we moved into the apartment in Hillford West’s district.”
That story, while not exactly happy, is a whole lot better than his mom dying and me bringing it up like an asshole.
“Oh, right. I was kind of wondering how you just showed up when you weren’t here for freshman year.”
“Yeah, that’s why.” Something seems off about Jake’s voice. He tucks into doughnut number two. “You should drink your coffee before it gets cold. I put the sugars in.”
“Thank you. Can you open it for me? Driving, hands.”
“Yup.” Whatever Jake’s feeling, he’s still down to be my breakfast concierge.
I don’t taste any sugar in my first sip, which means all of it has floated to the bottom and will be waiting for me there in a gross brown sludge. I don’t think I have any space to complain; it’s still better than a bright green matcha monstrosity.
“Actually,” Jake says after I put the coffee back in the cupholder, “that’s sort of the thing I blew up. The one I was talking about on Wednesday.”
I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t been thinking about that since we met in Crystal Cathedral. Jake hadn’t brought it up again, so I assumed it was something small that he felt outsized guilt over (I may have been projecting on that), but knowing he’d narced on someone before did bother me a little. I still trusted him with my secret—didn’t have much of a choice—but I had wondered what the deal with that was. Now that he seems ready to talk about it, do I really want to know?
“You blew up something with your parents? You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”
“Eh, may as well. We have a long ride.”
“It’s, like, half an hour.”
“I talk fast.”
“Well, I’m listening.”
“Okay,” Jake starts, then takes a sip of his black coffee to steel himself for the telling. “You know how you, like, never ever want to see your parents having sex?”
Sweet Christmas, where is this going? I turn to give him a frightened look, but he’s deadass about this being the way he wants to start this story. I swap to a more neutral expression. I don’t want to make him think that I’m laughing at something he doesn’t think is funny.
“I do . . . know that.”
“Yeah, so the only thing you maybe want to see less than your parents having sex is see one parent having sex with someone who is not your dad.”
Now I see where this is going.
“I was fourteen, so this is early last year. Came home sick from school one day. And to be fair, I didn’t, like, see anything, but I heard it from the front door, and when I walked into the living room there was, you know. Not Dad and Definitely Mom kind of . . .”
“You don’t have to paint the whole picture.”
“Yeah, you get it. She told me not to tell my dad. And I didn’t want to tell him because, honestly, my dad is kind of a dick? He hates me.”
“I’m sure your dad doesn’t—”
“He doesn’t like me. He thinks I’m weird and not smart . . . A lot of it is gaming stuff.”
I pile Jake’s constant self-deprecating comments about how “dumb” he is on top of his issues with being ignored. Maybe every TV therapist is right, and everything really does start with our childhoods.
There’s room in the conversation for me to come out with another “you’re not dumb, Jake,” but at this point I thin
k he knows it’s implied.
“I sat on it for a while, like a month. It started feeling really weird and wrong in the house, though. My dad was being an asshole, and I knew she was cheating on him. I didn’t even blame her for cheating, but the lies and stuff kind of messed me up.”
“Keep going. I just want to say it’s insanely fucked up that your mom put that on you. Like, beyond.”
“I know. Anyway, long story short, I told my dad what I saw. He flipped out, threatened to bury her—”
“Whoa.”
“In court. Not, like, the backyard. She lost custody on all kinds of technical stuff; I don’t know. We lost the house. And my dad hates me even more now for telling him. Or maybe for keeping it from him? Probably both.”
We’re on the highway by now, and a siren from somewhere behind my car begins to whoop its way through to the fast lane, getting closer and louder as Jake finishes his story. That’s not a metaphor, but it sure feels like one.
“So yeah, he wasn’t going to give me a ride to the tournament or the parking lot. I walk everywhere.”
I genuinely don’t know what to say to any of that besides what I’ve already said (because, wow, that’s fuuucked up), so instead of being smart or comforting, I just tell Jake that next time, I’ll pick him up at home.
“Next time?” he asks. “There’s only a next time if we win today. Both of us.”
“Right, and I’ll pick you up in front of your place.”
“And then play me in the finals?”
Yes. No? Shit. I was so focused on Jake being Jake that I once again forgot that he’s right. If we both win, we’re going up against each other in the finals. Byunki seems sure that we’ll beat Chronic today. Unity has as good a shot as anyone at beating Beast Mode after their payload win last week. I want to win today more than anything, but would that make it impossible to keep talking to Jake?