by Amy Giles
“Right. Boxing,” she says with so much distaste, she may as well have said, “Right. Sewage.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I ask.
Pink blotches bloom on her cheeks. She backpedals. “No, nothing. Sorry. I mean, I heard people talking about it, how you’re a boxer. That’s all.”
“I train. But I’ve never competed.”
“Makes sense,” she says.
“Why’s that?”
She lays her phone on the table, screen down. “I don’t really get boxing. It’s so brutal.”
I try not to let it bug me. But it does.
“You ever hear of Sugar Ray Leonard?”
“Yes. I’ve heard of him,” she says defensively.
I ignore the bite in her voice. “He said boxing is the ultimate challenge. Nothing tests you the way you test yourself in the ring.”
She glances over her soda can at me. “Why do you need to test yourself?”
I take a bite of my pizza. “Because it sucks to go through life feeling helpless.”
She hesitates a moment then nods. “Okay, I get that. Sorry for all the questions.”
Hunching over my food, I shrug it off. “It’s okay. I just hear it a lot. There are guys at my gym that were in gangs. Leo—he’s the owner of the gym—he tells every guy that comes in to choose: streets or ring. You can’t have both.”
She pauses. “Doesn’t it hurt though?” Her hand reaches out, pointing to my mouth. My mind wanders, picturing her hand making contact with my lip, grazing it gently.
“You get used to it,” I say, my voice a little huskier. “Knowing you can handle the pain is part of why I do it. If I can handle that, I can handle anything.”
She’s quiet for a second before answering. I like that she’s giving my words room to breathe, to settle in, that she’s not quick to judge like everyone else. “I guess that makes sense.”
She takes a last bite of her slice and throws the crust back in the box. “I’m still bummed I guessed twenty-seven. A paid week off would’ve been nice.”
“You monster!” I point to the crust in the box. “The bones are the best part!”
“Says who?” she asks, laughing.
“Says everyone!” I retrieve her crust and fold it in half before shoving it in my mouth.
She watches me chew, shaking her head slowly. “All right, then. From now on I’ll have to keep all my crusts—”
“Bones,” I correct her.
“Bones for you. It’ll be the biggest bone collection you’ve ever seen.”
Most days, Jess seems guarded, like she’s hiding behind a steel storefront gate wrapped in barbed wire. She’s friendly enough, but pretty much keeps to herself. But right now, her guard slips and she smiles. Really smiles. A blinding, solar flare of a smile. And all I can think about is what it would be like to kiss her.
Jess
Didn’t Lucas used to go out with Krista G? The cheerleader. Not Krista V, the stoner. Asking for a friend. HA! As if.
I HAVE no friends, except you and you’re 1,822 miles away! (I checked.)
Wondering if he has a type. Because if it’s Krista G, his type is so not me. I’d have more luck if his type was Krista V!
On the way home from work, I stop at an ATM to withdraw twenty dollars, then I head to Key Food.
Starting around the perimeter of the store, I add eggs, bread, and cold cuts to my basket, checking for sales so I don’t go over what’s in my pocket. Soon, the weight of the basket digs into the flesh of my forearm.
It’s been a while since I had a salad. I pick up a head of lettuce, a cucumber, and a tomato. When I pass the towering rows of apples, my mouth waters. On a whim, I pick up the biggest, reddest one I can find. I’m definitely going to eat it on the walk home.
As I turn the corner of an aisle, I almost walk right into Lucas.
“What are you doing here?”
He looks down at me in amusement and lifts his basket.
“Speed dating.”
“Ha-ha.” I walk around him and he follows. “But you were talking to Reggie when I left. How’d you get here so fast?”
“It’s not that I’m fast; you’re just slow. You were taking your time analyzing every item on every shelf.” He mimes holding something up close to his face to scrutinize it, then puts it back on its imaginary shelf.
“Were you watching me?”
“You weren’t hard to miss.” He points to my red hair. Mom used to call me her beacon for the same reason; she could always pick me out of a crowd of children. “Salad?” He glances in my basket. “And one lone apple. Are you going home to feed your rabbit?”
“I can see why you’d deduce that, Sherlock,” I say. “But . . . no. No rabbit.” I glance in his basket: a box of pasta, a bag of frozen meatballs, and a jar of sauce. A loaf of Italian bread juts out. Dammit, now I want spaghetti and meatballs! “Shawarma?”
He lifts a jar of sauce from his basket. “Reggie’s making dinner to thank me for helping her move into her new place. Except somehow I’m buying all the food.” He puts the jar back in his basket. “You should come.”
His invitation comes out of nowhere. I shift my basket to my left arm. “Oh . . . no . . . that’s okay. Thanks anyway.” I let him off the hook since he’s obviously just being polite, even if my stomach is growling now just imagining a plate of spaghetti.
“Why not?” He looks down at my basket. “You could throw that stuff in her fridge.”
“Still stuffed from the pizza,” I lie, holding my stomach before it grumbles.
“Come hang out at least.” He starts walking toward the checkout and I find myself moving alongside him.
“It’s kind of obnoxious to show up at someone’s house uninvited, don’t you think?” I resist, just barely. I’m not fully invested in this protest.
“I’ll text Reggie now to make sure it’s cool. Which it will be.”
We get to the express ten-items-or-less checkout. I recognize the cashier, Sherri, from when Ethan worked here.
“You go first,” I tell him, buying myself a few more minutes to add up everything in my basket a second time.
Lucas puts all his items on the conveyor belt. When he’s done, I put my groceries on the belt. Lucas waits next to me, texting. “Reg says great. She’s glad you’re coming.”
A smile emerges. I’m actually going to hang out with people who might be friends tonight. I haven’t let myself miss being around people. I’ve been so busy with Mom and babysitting. But now . . . now I let myself get swept up in the excitement.
I hand Sherri a twenty without even looking at the total, still grinning like an idiot at Lucas.
“You’re short,” Sherri announces in a booming voice, looking around to make sure everyone heard her.
“What? No. I can’t be. I added everything up.”
She nods to the amount on her screen. Twenty dollars and seventy-eight cents.
“Don’t you have seventy-eight cents?” she says in the same loud voice. Heads turn to look at me.
“No,” I mumble under my breath, refusing to make eye contact with anyone. I take the apple out of the bag. “Take this off.”
As Sherri goes to take the apple from me, Lucas shoves a dollar in her hand instead. “Here.”
I mutter a weak protest. “It’s okay. It’s just an apple.” Just the one thing I wanted for myself. A crisp, sweet, juicy apple.
“Stop. For a dollar? Let’s go.” He grabs my bag and turns to leave. Sherri finishes ringing me up. With an apple in one hand and the twenty-two cents in change she shoved in my other, I rush to catch up to Lucas.
“Thank you. I’ll pay you back tomorrow, okay?”
“It’s just a dollar, Jess.” He looks over at me, then says, “Fine, buy me a soda at work if you want.”
With his bag in one hand, mine in the other, he leads the way out of the parking lot and I fall in step with him.
“So she was a piece of work, huh?” Lucas jerks his head behind
him.
“Sherri the Shamer.” I wipe the apple on the front of my shirt and start munching on it. “Ethan worked with her. She’s a sadist. He told me she got her kicks yelling ‘DECLINED!’ whenever someone’s credit card was maxed out. Humiliating people is her happy.”
“I forgot Ethan worked here. I think he was one of the first ones in our grade to get a job.”
“Yeah. As soon as he turned sixteen. Right after my dad moved out.” I choose my words carefully, making it sound like Dad moving out was something that we all mutually agreed upon in a family meeting, instead of my father deciding we were a gangrened limb in his life that he needed to amputate if he was ever going to stop drinking.
“Which way is Reggie’s?” I ask as we reach the intersection.
He turns left in the direction of my house.
“Not far from you, actually. She has a basement apartment on Gipson.”
I side-eye him. “And how do you know where I live?”
He snorts. “Paranoid much?”
I don’t let him off the hook. “It’s not paranoid if you’re stalking me around the store while I shop then tracking down where I live.” I smile just enough to let him know I’m teasing. Kind of. I take another bite of my apple.
“Yeah, well, Sherlock, you’re the one who filled out employment papers at Enzo’s with your address on it. Remember?”
“Oh right,” I say, feeling a little silly, and maybe a teensy bit disappointed. I kind of liked the idea of him trying to find out more about me.
On the corner of Mott and Redfern, Shu steps out of his fish store holding a large white bucket. Lucas stretches an arm out to block me from taking another step just as Shu dumps the water on the sidewalk. We both hop back as the stench of day-old fish fills the air.
“Whoa. That was close,” I say. I turn to Lucas. “What was that? A sixth sense?”
He shakes his head ruefully. “Nah. Just learned my lesson the hard way once. And once was more than enough.”
The main road narrows as we walk, nail salons, “We Buy Gold” stores, and street vendors giving way to my neighborhood. A few families adorned their front yards with kitschy lawn ornaments, lawn gnomes, and Blessed Mother garden statues (or, as Ethan called them, Marys on the Half Shell), or the perennial favorite, all-season Christmas lights.
“So, are we okay now?” I ask. The orange globe of the sun is setting behind him. Angling my head to see him without suffering permanent damage to my retinas, his face becomes backlit. He notices me battling the sun and scoots around me to walk on my right side. I glance up at him, really noticing his eyes for the first time. Enzo’s lighting doesn’t do them justice. They’re not brown. They’re slate, somewhere between blue and brown. A little hard to figure out. Just like him.
“Now?” he asks.
“I mean . . . at work . . . I could tell you weren’t all that excited about me being there.”
He grimaces. “Sorry. I hope you didn’t take that personally.”
“Oh, no, of course not. How could I ever take ‘last chance to change your mind’ personally?”
A car alarm starts whooping next to us at the curb. Lucas shouts over it, which is kind of funny because it makes it seem like he’s trying really hard to convince me it wasn’t hate at first sight. “It wasn’t about you, I swear! More about stuff I’m still dealing with!”
Maybe to avoid straining his vocal cords, he goes silent, even after we’re far enough away from the car alarm to talk normally again. I figure that’s the end of that conversation. Then he says, “I’ve been having a hard time being around other people who were there that night.”
I throw my apple core in the nearest garbage can and wipe the juice off my hands on my jeans. “I get it. For me, the worst part is when people say, ‘That’s Ethan’s sister.’ It used to mean something totally different than it does now. I didn’t mind it, then. Now . . . when people say it, I know what they’re really saying. When they look at me, I know what they’re really seeing. I wish I could go back to just being Jess.”
Lucas’s throat bobs and he nods. He doesn’t answer me right away. Maybe I shouldn’t have been so honest.
His voice is hoarse when he finally speaks. “Being Jason’s younger brother was great most of the time. Everyone loved him and looked up to him. And because I was his younger brother, I kinda got to bask in his glory, you know?” He laughs softly, almost embarrassed. “I was always in his shadow, but it wasn’t bad. Now, though . . . it’s like I’m always standing in the shadow of his ghost.”
He stares at the sidewalk. “So, after . . . you know . . . I made a deal with myself . . . to try to put out as much good into the universe as I can. Like, maybe my purpose for still being here is to give back?” He scratches the back of his head with the grocery bag still in his hand. His bicep and tricep flex under his T-shirt sleeve. I tear my eyes away.
“Like, pay it forward?” I ask.
He chews on the inside of his lip. “Kinda? I try to do at least one good thing a day, even if it’s small. It makes me feel less . . . useless.”
I nod.
“I should shut up now,” he says, laughing nervously.
“Why?”
He taps his ear. “’Cause I hear myself and it sounds stupid.”
I smile. “No, it doesn’t sound stupid. It . . .” I stop to try and find the words. “It’s trying to make sense out of what happened.”
“Yeah. Exactly.” He smiles at me, almost looking relieved.
Sometimes when I’m trying to open my locker in a hurry, it won’t budge. I have to ease into all the numbers of the combination carefully. When all the numbers line up, I hear it, feel it fall into place with a satisfying click.
Right now, with that smile, I can hear the sound of Lucas Rossi opening up to me.
Click.
Lucas
There was no pity in her eyes. No X-ray look, like she was scanning me for leaks or hairline fractures.
Jess just got it.
The random-acts-of-kindness thing was something I hadn’t told anyone. Not even Pete. But Jess seemed to understand how it helped me, every day.
Okay, so maybe there is some benefit to hanging around other people who shared the same experience. We don’t have to always explain ourselves, that’s for sure. We’re both trying to figure out how to piece our broken selves back into the world.
But what if we’re just that, two broken pieces that end up jabbing and hurting each other and everyone around us?
Jess
“Here, give me that.” I go to take my bag out of his hand; he lifts it out of my reach.
“I got it,” he says, twisting his entire body away from me.
I lean around him to grab it and he dodges me, bobbing around on the sidewalk like we’re in a boxing ring.
“Too slow,” he teases, weaving back and forth.
I give up. “Fine. Knock yourself out.”
“I actually did once.” He lifts his bangs and bends down to show me a scar on his forehead. “Jason and I were playing football in the house. I was five. I was running to catch it, focusing on the ball when I should have been keeping an eye on the wall coming at me. Knocked myself out. Woke up to my mom running with me in her arms to the car to take me to the hospital.”
What compels me, I don’t even know, but I trace the bumpy scar with my fingers. His eyes widen in surprise, just enough that I jerk my hand back. God, Jess . . . boundaries!
“How about you?” he blurts out, but it comes out like one word. “Howboutyou?”
I raise one hand in a scout’s honor salute. “No, never knocked myself out trying to catch a football. Honest.”
He laughs. “Scars?”
I lift my chin and point. He has to duck again to see it. “I’d like to say I was doing something really cool when I got this, but no. I tripped on the sidewalk outside of White Castle.”
This time he reaches his finger out to trace it. I brace myself so I don’t pull away or, worse, lean into
his hand.
“Impressive,” he says, his finger running along my scar. “We can always embellish.”
“Embellish?” I try to laugh but it comes out more like a nervous shriek. He removes his finger but I can still feel the warmth of his touch lingering there. “How?”
“You used to play softball, right?” he asks.
I nod. How’d he know that?
“I used to see your team play at the park,” he answers as if reading my mind, but then he adds, “Did you know your eyes squint when you’re suspicious?” He pitches his head forward and narrows his eyes, pinching up his face to imitate me.
Am I that obvious? Does he also know that I check him out all the time when I think he’s not looking?
Lucas holds both hands up in the air, painting a picture, the grocery bags dangling off his thumbs. “So replace White Castle with Little League. Bases were loaded . . . two outs . . . bottom of the ninth. You were at bat. You hit a line drive way into left field. You ran to first, then second . . . oh my God, you headed for third! The outfielder picked up the ball, but no, wait! She fumbled! The crowd went wild! You ran for home! The shortstop scooped up the ball, threw it to the pitcher, who then threw a wild pitch home. You dove headfirst for the plate. The umpire called it. Safe! Game over! Your team won! But your chin had a little run-in with the catcher’s cleats.”
I’m silent for a moment. Then I laugh, ticking off on my fingers everything he got wrong. “You obviously know nothing about softball. First, there are only seven innings. Second, a pitcher would never throw the ball in midplay to the catcher. Third, the shortstop—”
He interrupts me. “Hey, I’m just trying to help you save face. Go ahead, feel free to tell everyone you tripped over your own two feet outside of White Castle.”
I giggle. “Okay, you’re right. I’m awesome. I earned this scar.”
Lucas bounces up and down on the balls of his feet like he’s just warming up. “Okay, so what else. We covered scars. Let’s move on to the bonus round. Each answer is worth ten points. Say the first thing that comes to mind. What’s your favorite color?”