by Amy Giles
His eyes dart over to Meaghan’s as he pulls a deck of cards out of his pocket. “She’s nuts. It snows there from October through May. I better get into Miami.” He puts the deck down and crosses his fingers on both hands. “As God as my witness, this is the last New York winter I’ll ever suffer through again.”
Meaghan giggles. “That’s exactly what my grandfather said right before he retired in Boca.”
It goes quiet. Too quiet, the kind of silence that’s filled with unspoken words. Finally, Meaghan clears her throat and looks over at Noah. She raises her eyebrows and nods toward me, ever so slightly.
Noah shuffles and deals. “Well, anyway, that just leaves you.”
I pick up my cards without looking up at him. “Yep.”
Meaghan picks her cards up off the table. “I have a theory. Want to hear it?”
“Not really,” I say.
Undeterred, she plows ahead. “I think you forgot the deadline on purpose to sabotage your chances of getting in.” She takes my silence as an admission. “I knew it! Hadley! You don’t have to go to Cornell just because your father wants you to.”
A different kind of flame scorches through my body.
“Why the fuck is everyone suddenly so obsessed with what college I go to?”
A few heads turn from other tables.
Meaghan and Noah stare at me with openmouthed, gobsmacked expressions.
“Sorry,” I backpedal from my outburst. “Mr. Murray was just grilling me about it too.”
Meaghan still looks startled, but she nods, letting it go.
A few more awkward seconds of silence pass. Noah exhales and shrugs, looking at his cards.
“Not for nothing, but sex really is an amazing tension reliever.” He glances up, his eyes holding on to mine, and laughs softly under his breath.
I smile in relief. Noah’s talent for turning something ugly into something funny is what I love most about him.
BRADY: Today’s date is January 10. Time 2:17 p.m. Please state your name and that I have permission to record your statement.
MM: Meaghan Maki. And yes, you have my permission . . . again.
BRADY: Meaghan, tell me about Charlie and Hadley. Were they close?
MM: Yeah. Ridiculously close.
BRADY: You don’t sound pleased. Did you think they were too serious?
MM: No . . . I mean, I don’t know. Maybe?
BRADY: There are no wrong answers.
MM: [exhales] I don’t know. I mean, I think they fell crazy in love with each other right away. Like really fast. Scary fast.
Look, I love Hadley. I wanted her to be happy. Maybe it was how intense they got. That’s what worried me.
BRADY: Worried you? How?
MM: Maybe not worried. I don’t know anymore. Everything just happened so fast after they started dating. Everything.
then
The travel lacrosse team practices at Duck Pond Park, a town park with two large playing fields and stadium lights for our night practices. Tonight, there’s a weird atmosphere on the team. Every time I turn around, girls are laughing, whispering. At one point Faith holds her fist by her mouth, snorting. When she sees me she pulls her hand away and runs off.
At the end of practice, I go to use the bathroom. Inside, by the sinks, on the cinder block wall in black Sharpie is a crude drawing of someone giving a blow job, with my name written above it. Mystery solved.
That little flame that flared up during lunch bursts into a five-alarm blaze. I tear out of the bathroom, my feet barely touching the ground.
“Who did that?” I point to the bathroom door while everyone packs up their bags for the night. Claudia and her gang giggle. It stokes the anger building inside of me.
Coach Kimmel walks over. “Did what?”
“In the bathroom. Someone wrote my name and—”
Coach Kimmel holds her hand up to silence me. My heart hammers in my ears, throbbing behind my eyes while I wait. She walks to the bathroom and comes back shaking her head.
“I’m disappointed in you girls,” she says.
“WHO DID IT?” I holler. Olivia looks at me and then her eyes chart a course over to Claudia. Something inside me detonates.
“You bitch!” I scream, and launch myself at Claudia. Fueled by adrenaline, I barely touch the ground before I land on top of her. I get two blows in before Coach Kimmel drags me off her by the back of my shirt with such force that I stumble and fall on my butt.
“HADLEY!” She screams my name in my face. It startles me out of my rage.
Pulling myself up, I look over at Claudia being yanked up off the ground by two of her friends. She takes her hand away from her mouth and there’s blood on it. The sight sobers me.
The shaking starts in my legs and travels up my body, until my teeth start to chatter. I sit on the bench before my legs give out.
Coach Kimmel breaks out the ice pack and puts it to Claudia’s face. She speaks quietly to her. Claudia glances over at me with hateful eyes. I’ve taken our feud to the next level.
Coach Kimmel sends everyone home. She saves me for last. Sitting down next to me, she exhales loudly, putting her hands on her knees.
“Hadley,” she begins, her lips a thin white line as she shakes her head.
“I don’t know what happened,” I say, on the verge of crying. “I just lost it.”
She stares at me, probing, trying to reach beneath the surface, just like Mr. Murray. Her lips tug down with the weight of her displeasure. “I can’t say I didn’t see something like this coming. You’re under too much pressure. Anyone with eyes sees it. The question is, what are you going to do about it? Because that”—she points to where the fight broke out—“is unacceptable.”
I nod, and a tear slips out. Then another.
“What’s going on, Hadley?” she asks point-blank.
I can’t meet her eye.
“You can tell me,” she says with a reassuring squeeze of my knee.
I shake my head. “Nothing. I just . . . Claudia and I have bad history together.”
Coach waits a moment, maybe for the truth.
“Well.” She puts her hands by her sides on the bench, lowering her head. “There’s going to be some fallout. I have to bench you tomorrow.”
My head snaps over to her. “I can’t miss the game.” Tomorrow is the Peer Helper retreat, the one I wasn’t allowed to go to because Dad insisted I had to play.
“Should have thought of that before you let your anger get the best of you. I’ll call the Wileys and try to smooth over at least some of it. If I bench you, maybe they won’t press any kind of charges.”
“Charges?” I cry.
“Trust me. Benching you for one game will be the lesser of the evils.”
“Yeah, but there are only two games left,” I groan.
“C’est la vie.” She shrugs, then stares off into the field, lit up like daylight by powerful stadium lights. “I should give your father a call too,” she adds softly.
“No! Don’t do that!”
She raises a silencing hand. “He’s going to want to know why I’m not playing you tomorrow. I want to try to defuse this a bit, for your sake. He’s already a hothead at these games.” She exhales. Her shoulders slump. And then she looks at me again, purposefully, allowing me another opportunity to open up to her.
“You know you can talk to me about anything. Right?”
I pretend to not understand. “Sure. Yeah.”
I get up, leaving Coach Kimmel to clean up the mess I made.
Later that night in the shower, I let the steam and scalding water soothe me. Even with Coach Kimmel calling, my father exploded and then grounded me. Which means the house would have to be engulfed in flames this weekend for me to leave. I can’t see Charlie until school on Monday.
After draining every ounce of hot water from the tank, I step out of the shower and dry myself off, quickly slipping on sweats, warm socks, and a sweatshirt before the chills kick in again. When I get to my
bedroom, I find a Tillys catalog on my bed, open to an outfit circled in grape-scented marker. A yellow sticky note is stuck to the page, written in the same purple marker:
For Xmas, I’d LOVE this outfit!
Hint, hint!
xoxo
your favorite sister
Lila. My sister. My shackle.
I was ten when my father started my lacrosse training sessions, the same age as Lila is now. When I couldn’t do one hundred crunches, my father called me a baby. When I told him it was too cold to run, he told me to suck it up. Looking back, he was taking it easy on me then. It got worse as I got older.
Three years ago, when I was fourteen, I decided to flex my backbone. Meaghan put it in my head. “I mean, seriously, it’s not like he can force you to run with him if you don’t want to.”
I was too scared to defy him openly, so I faked really bad period cramps to get out of our morning run. He was in a foul mood all that morning.
Making myself invisible had become a survival skill. I had learned to read the signs and move silently around him. But Lila hadn’t learned how to decipher his wild Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde moods yet, how to stay out of his crosshairs. Maybe I had protected her too much. That morning, Lila clamored downstairs for breakfast, too happy. Too cheery. Too much like a seven-year-old.
“What are you so happy about?” Dad snapped at her as soon as she came galloping into the kitchen.
She sat down at the table and poured herself a bowl of cereal, still singing under her breath some song she woke up to in her head. She was wearing a Hello Kitty nightgown and matching furry slippers. Her blond, wispy hair swirled dreamily around her head. She picked up the gallon of milk.
I should have seen it coming. I should have helped.
The weight of the gallon was too heavy. She lost control while pouring and dropped it on the table. Milk spilled across the table in every direction and onto the floor.
It was literally spilled milk that did it. He was across the room hauling her out of her seat by her arm in the time it took me to gasp.
“Jesus Christ!” He rattled her, her feet dangling like dead weights in the air. She howled. “You’re going to clean up every last drop, if you have to lick it up!” He shook her again by her arm.
Her face twisted with something greater than fear.
“Leave her alone!” I ran over and scooped her away from him. Her eyes were wild. Her mouth was open in a silent scream that turned into a piercing wail. She held her shoulder.
“She’s fine,” Dad said, but there was a worried flash in his eyes.
She wasn’t fine. She didn’t stop crying. And finally, she gasped, “MY ARM!”
Mom was out shopping, so Dad and I took her to the emergency room. When they asked what happened, my father played the role of concerned parent. “We were having fun. Hadley and I were swinging her. I guess Hadley pulled too hard.”
We took her home in a sling, none of us speaking. The next day, an expensive Victorian dollhouse from the toy store arrived, shipped overnight. Mom always gets flowers, or jewelry, or spa days after one of their fights. Lila got an expensive toy. Me, I never get anything. I don’t know why he never feels the same kind of remorse for riding me the hardest. Why he hates me more than everyone else combined.
But I promised myself that day I would do anything to make sure he never hurt her again.
I text Charlie.
All bets off tonight. I’m grounded.
I wait for his text. Instead he calls. I’m already standing at the precipice of completely losing it; hearing his voice would push me over the edge. I send it to voicemail and then turn the phone off.
I sneak into my parents’ master bathroom, where my mother keeps her sleeping pills in the medicine cabinet, for when she needs more help than Chardonnay to silence the world. Popping the cap off with my thumb, I spill one out into the cup of my palm, chugging it down with faucet water. Before I put the bottle away, I stare inside. It’s a full bottle. It would be so easy to make this all go away right now. Quickly, I cap it and put it back in her cabinet. I’ve hated myself plenty over my lifetime, but this is the first time I’ve ever terrified myself.
I pad silently back to my room, curl up in bed, and let the drowsiness wash it all away.
The next morning, my father drags me out of bed to go watch the lacrosse game. My head is still fuzzy, but the pill did the trick. It tuned out the noise in my head, the whirling thoughts.
I stand on the sidelines watching my team score without me, far enough away from my father’s foul mood and the Wileys’ dark looks. My father thankfully stays away from them also.
There was a gleam in his eyes when I told him I hit Claudia, a simmering approval of a side of me he related to. What he flipped out about was that I got myself benched. Hitting Claudia brought out something in me that scares me. It brought out the part of me that my father created.
Coach Kimmel walks over during halftime to check in.
“Everything okay?” She lifts her black wraparound sunglasses to get a better look. I nod.
“He didn’t give you a hard time?” she asks, jutting her chin in my father’s direction.
Digging the toe of my sneakers into the ground, I answer, “Depends what you mean by a hard time.”
Her eyes bore through me, measuring, thinking, contemplating. Before she can get any ideas in her head I reach over and grab her arm. “I was wrong to hit Claudia. I know that. I deserve this.” I gesture to the field.
She shakes her head and opens her mouth to say more.
“Coach Kimmel!” Olivia hollers, jumping up and down and waving her arms. “They want you!”
She looks over her shoulder and nods then turns back to me.
“Hadley, you have my number. You call me anytime, day or night. You hear me?” She jabs a strong finger into my shoulder to drive her point home.
When she’s out of earshot I hear him.
“Hadley!”
I pivot to my left. Charlie’s standing by the public bathrooms, waving me over. I glance over to my right; my father’s busy chewing Faith’s mom’s ear off, a huge grin on his face. Faith’s mom is as wide-eyed as she is wide-hipped, basking in his attention, giggling. My father has that effect on people, especially women. His piercing eyes have a way of making strangers feel nothing else matters but their shared moment. Too bad for Faith’s mom, their “shared moment” is complete and utter bullshit. Back home, Dad’s going to tell Mom how this woman’s “mom jeans” were screaming for mercy.
I run to Charlie, and we hide behind the public bathrooms.
“You can’t stay!” I glance around the corner, keeping an eye on my dad.
“I was worried. Why didn’t you call me back?” He holds me by my arms.
“I had a bad night.” He pushes me back gently by my shoulders to search my face.
“What happened?”
I take him by the hand to the girls’ bathroom, both of us looking around the corner to see my father still talking to Faith’s mom. Making sure no one is in the stalls, I show him Claudia’s handiwork.
“This happened.” I point to the wall.
He stares at the wall in horror. “What the fuck?” His voice bounces off the cinder block walls.
“Claudia did it.” He turns to me, his eyes growing cold and furious. “Ironic, considering I remember her telling you this was her area of expertise.”
“You’re sure?”
I shrug and tilt my head to the side, folding my arms. “Sure enough. If she didn’t, then I feel even worse about punching her.” I sigh, looking away.
“You . . . punched her?” he repeats.
I nod. “Twice. Not my proudest moment. Coach Kimmel benched me today. And I’m still not certain the Wileys won’t press charges.”
We exit the bathroom, checking on my dad again, who is still gabbing away, not like Faith’s mom looks bored or anything. Then we hide on the other side of the building, away from everyone’s view.
“You weren’t kidding about having a bad night.” His fingers weave through my hair. I stare down at my sneakers.
“And then my dad grounded me.”
“Until when?” If I get grounded, we get grounded.
“Until he forgets.” I shrug. With so little freedom to begin with, it’s hard to really take away more. I still need to go to school and lacrosse practice. Dad’s long hours at work make it impossible for him to keep tabs on me, and my mother never enforces anything after she’s into her wine.
I lean up against him. I can pretend for a little while with Charlie. He radiates heat and energy and life; I absorb it through my skin, hoping maybe it will jump-start something dying inside of me.
His hand skirts down my side, and I flinch away from it. The pain in my hip is back.
On the other side of the squat cement building, one of the teams scores. Cheers drift over to us. Two seagulls swoop over the trash can by the parking lot and squawk at each other. A girl squeals nearby, and a boy laughs.
Life goes on, with or without me.
BRADY: The date is January 12. The time 5:28 p.m. Please state your name and occupation.
DK: Dolores Kimmel. Lacrosse coach for the Freedoms.
BRADY: Do I have your permission to record your statement?
DK: Absolutely. You wanted to talk about Hadley?
BRADY: Actually, I’d like to focus on her father.
DK: [groan] Good idea.
BRADY: What can you tell me?
DK: Where do I even begin?
BRADY: Well, what was your impression of him?
DK: Not good. Not good at all.
I’ve been coaching girls’ lacrosse for over twenty years. I’ve dealt with my share of overbearing parents. But this guy . . . this guy was a real prize. He thought he was so damn charming. We had words at almost every game. Contradicting me in front of my players, yelling at the ref, yelling at the other coaches, even the other team’s players. But what really stuck in my craw was the way he yelled at his own daughter. She was just never good enough.
Look, I know the signs of abuse. I lived it myself. I just about came right out and asked Hadley if he was messing with her at home. Emotional abuse, for sure. That was plain as day. But . . . I had a feeling he might have been physically abusive too.