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Winner Take All

Page 2

by Laurie Devore


  He doesn’t look at me, but I think he sees me when he sends one way over his catcher’s head.

  “What was that, Reagan?” I call with a grin, goading him.

  “He doesn’t perform well under pressure,” Jackson, who is of course the star catcher, calls out, fetching the ball. He sheds his mask before throwing the ball back to Taylor.

  Lia catches my eye, smiling. “You gonna be done anytime soon?” she asks Taylor. He catches the ball from Jackson, looking annoyed.

  “Give me fifteen,” he says.

  “Okay,” she says just to me. “In that case, I’m going to go see if I can catch Andrea before she leaves. She said she’d lend me her history notes.”

  I nod. She runs off, and I sit back on a hill leading down to the baseball field, admiring the grass, which is perfectly maintained by the Prep grounds crew. I watch Taylor throw a couple more pitches before I pull out my bio textbook and start reading that night’s assignment.

  “We’re done,” someone says around the time I hit the third page. I look up to see Jackson, walking up the hill with a bat bag over his shoulder. “You look pretty transfixed,” he goes on. “Most exciting thing that’s happened to you all week?”

  “Yeah. Totally.” I slam the book shut.

  “Do you ever stop studying?” he asks, nudging my book with his foot. I yank it away and slide it back into my bag. “That’s cute. Almost as cute as it’s going to be when I take valedictorian.”

  I push myself up from the ground, putting my bag over my shoulder. “Sorry,” I tell him. “My time spent engaging with you for the day has officially run out.”

  He grins. “I had a chance to speak to the illustrious Mrs. Becker today.”

  “Right.”

  He goes to leave, but then turns all the way around, talking to me while walking backward with an amused look on his face. “She says I’m a compelling young man.”

  “I’m sure she didn’t mean it as a compliment.”

  “Probably not,” he concedes. Then, with a smile like poison: “Bye, Nell.”

  I go the other way down the hill, annoyed again. I hate that he knows how to get under my skin.

  Taylor is coming through the gate as I reach it. “You look pissed,” he says.

  “Jackson,” I reply. That’s enough. As Lia’s twin, Taylor’s known me long enough to know the way I feel about Jackson. Our lives have always intersected at sleepovers at the Reagan house, long trips to volleyball tournaments, and questionable bouts of teenage rebellion. To Taylor, I’m another one of Lia’s extremities. He gives me a half smile as we walk toward his car.

  “Did you hear he broke up with Shauna?” Taylor asks.

  Shauna Meyers is a cute junior with a huge house on the river. Her family has something like two boats and three Jet Skis, and she’d been latched on to Jackson like a parasite for the past three months. “Can’t believe that didn’t work out,” I say, like I absolutely can believe that.

  Taylor chuckles. “I can’t help but wonder how he does it. How he gets away with it.”

  “With what?”

  “Shauna’s, what? His third girlfriend of the school year?”

  Fourth. But I’m not going to admit I know that.

  Taylor continues on. “He treats girls like they’re disposable and yet there’s always one waiting to be next in line. You know he’s not good to them. He’s way too self-involved.”

  “That’s psychology I can’t even imagine digging into,” I return. I hear the arrogance in my own voice, judging those girls. “But I kind of do know how he does it. He sees through people to what they want and gives it to them. They need to believe him. You should have heard the interpretation of The Scarlet Letter he gave in class today. It was complete nonsense but he had Mrs. Wesley eating out of his hand.” I actually have spent a lot of time thinking about it. Too much, clearly.

  Taylor laughs, running his hand through his hair. “Oh my God, are you still on about that?”

  “Don’t be an asshole.”

  “I heard a phenomenal retelling of the whole incident from Doug Rivera earlier.”

  “This school is too small,” I say as we get to Taylor’s SUV. He hits the Unlock button.

  “You’re right, though,” Taylor says. “Everyone at this school fawns all over Jackson like he’s the Second Coming—and, like, just because he’s good at stuff, we’re all supposed to worship him?”

  I step up onto the passenger’s-side floorboard, watching Taylor over the car. “I thought you liked him.”

  “I guess he’s fine,” Taylor says, hedging. It’s so aggressively Taylor—he’s the definition of nice, which will get you run over in this world. He’s all floppy hair and easygoing smiles and he wants to like everyone.

  What a waste of time.

  Finally, Taylor sums it up. “But he gets whatever he wants. He does whatever he wants.”

  To be honest, that’s pretty rich coming from Taylor. The Reagans may not have as much money as the Harts, but they’re on the “rolling in it” side of well-off. Their house had its own spread in Charleston Home + Design last year. Before his dad started making headlines for other reasons.

  “I think it’s pretty simple. He believes he deserves whatever he gets, so everyone else believes it, too,” I explain to him. “I keep trying to use that strategy myself, only everyone thinks I’m an overeager bitch.”

  “You’re not, though,” Taylor says sincerely, as if I wasn’t just deflecting my jealousy. “You’re smart. You can see through him and most people can’t. Even people I really like.”

  I can’t help but think it then. That I want to pry underneath the surface of Jackson and tear him apart, examine the pieces. Find what makes him weak and use it. I want to beat him.

  I’m going to beat him.

  “Can you imagine that kind of power?” I ask him, hearing the longing in my own voice.

  “You’ll have all the power you want one day,” he answers me confidently.

  “Taylor!” Lia yells in the distance, and we both look up as she comes running from the fields. “Are you leaving me?”

  I give him a smile as if Jackson doesn’t matter at all and slide into the front seat.

  3

  Mom’s still at work when I get home, and Dad’s grilling burgers on the back porch. Already changed into gym shorts and a T-shirt, with a beer in one hand, he looks more like himself than he ever does in the suits he wears to work. I dump my backpack and gym bag on the kitchen floor and go out to join him.

  “There she is,” Dad says as I lean over his shoulder to check out the burgers. “Don’t sweat on the goods.”

  I laugh, falling into a chair at the table on the screened-in porch. “How was your day?”

  “Finally got an offer on this house I’ve had on the market for the last month,” Dad tells me as he flips a burger. Well. That explains the good mood.

  “Congrats,” I say as he chugs his beer. He’s built tall and stocky, like me but with lighter hair, a rounder face. I look sharp; he looks kind.

  “I think it’s the worst stretch I’ve had since I started,” he goes on, explaining himself to me like I’ve questioned his commitment. “Even during the recession, I was making my numbers, but with the way everyone’s using the Internet now, it’s different.” He sighs. “But enough about me. How was school, kid?”

  I start to answer him, but the sound of the door opening as Mom joins us on the porch distracts me. She’s still in her Head of School Mary Becker pantsuit with a crisp white sleeveless blouse and stockinged feet, only missing her jacket and shoes. Mom’s back is always straight. She doesn’t need to ask for respect—everything about her demands it.

  “Nell, can you please not throw your bags in the middle of the floor when you come in? I almost tripped over them.” She goes to Dad and grabs the beer from his hand, taking a swig, and gives it back to him. She turns to me. “Oh, honey, you look exhausted.”

  I wilt under her gaze. That doesn’t sound like a compl
iment.

  She falls in the chair opposite me but I can feel her scrutiny all over me. “Your mascara’s running,” she says after a minute.

  I wipe it away with the pad of my thumb, black streaks rubbing off onto my skin. “So it is. Thank you for pointing that out.” My words are flat.

  Mom’s eyes flick back and forth over the rest of me, looking for imperfections, no doubt. She leans against the rocking chair, sliding her feet onto the seat so that it sways with her shift. “I got a text ten minutes ago. Coach Madison went into premature labor. She told me earlier that she thought it would be a good idea to give you girls the rest of the spring off, and with so little of the semester left, I tend to agree.”

  I blow out a long, loud breath, tugging at the roots of my hair. “I’m going to have to figure out another way to keep in shape until club season starts.”

  She levels a look at me, and I can tell I said the right thing. “I can ask Coach Montoya if you could work out with the baseball team during seventh period. I heard his conditioning is tough. And you can keep up drilling with Lia. It’s not like you’ve got anything useful to do after school now that the yearbook’s done, right?”

  It’s not like whatever it was would meet her definition of useful if I did. Besides, working out with the boys will be a good challenge for me. “Do you think he’ll mind?” I ask, noncommittal. I don’t completely love the idea that I could potentially make a fool of myself in front of them, either.

  “I don’t care if he minds,” she says. “It’s my school and despite what anyone in this community thinks, girls get the same opportunities as boys.” She shrugs. “Being in charge has its advantages.”

  Dad snickers, but I watch her. It’s strange, but I teeter right on the edge so much of the time. Of whether I want to please her or be her.

  Dad comes to stand over Mom’s chair. “I don’t know. It might not be a bad idea if Nell took a break from constant training for a couple of weeks with exams coming up. She could use the study time. And the break, to be honest.”

  “Hmm.” Mom frowns. “Is that what you’d prefer?”

  My eyes move back and forth between the two of them, feeling like I’m caught in some game. I grapple with the suddenly too intense feeling that I don’t know what I’m supposed to want at all, and that feeling weighs on me, my mind racing away. Breathe. Nell. Think. Nell. “I shouldn’t take a break this close to club season,” I say at last, and I see the way Mom’s eyes shift ever so slightly. I breathe. But Dad watches me steadily, and I almost hear what he doesn’t say.

  “There’s something else I heard,” Mom continues, grabbing Dad’s beer again. “I think they’re adding another charge to Arnold Reagan’s trial.”

  I try not to react. “Where did you hear that from?”

  “One of the teachers. And if it’s reached them, God knows how long it’s been buzzing around.”

  “How are Lia and Taylor doing?” Dad asks. I can tell he feels as uncomfortable as I do.

  “I guess the good news is that rich people never have to go to prison for very long,” I say.

  “Don’t be callous,” Mom says, and then I can’t stand feeling like I’m not doing right by either of them. Sometimes I don’t know how else to be but callous, to force my emotions off.

  “I need to go study,” I tell them, pushing through the door back into the house.

  4

  When one of the richest families in town is prosecuting one of the most established families in town, school functions get complicated fast. Lia and I are at Taylor’s baseball game the next night, seated on the opposing team’s side to avoid the Proctors. Columbus Proctor is Cedar Woods’ starting shortstop, six and a half feet tall with a smile that could break your heart. The Proctors are one of the few black families at Prep, but we aren’t supposed to talk about it. Besides Michonne, who is mixed race, there’s only one other black student in the entire junior class, and I’d heard white classmates make jokes in front of all three of them that they wouldn’t dare make in polite company. The lack of diversity was old, ingrained into the walls, and chipped away only little by little. Columbus’s dad, Everett, is a retired NFL lineman and current motivational speaker, twice as big as most of the parents in Cedar Woods, with a laugh to match. I’d seen so many of the other parents suck up to him to his face, reliving his best college and professional plays, and then mock his rags-to-riches story and family barbecues behind his back, as if he wasn’t as smart as them, despite the fact he’d graduated cum laude from Georgia. Columbus’s mom, Carla Proctor, is the lead solicitor for our district—the lead solicitor who brought corruption charges against the mayor two months ago.

  That would be Mayor Arnold Reagan. Lia and Taylor’s dad.

  The truth is, these little soapy family dramas aren’t exactly uncommon in Cedar Woods. Mom jokes that she has to track shifting allegiances and newly formed enemies among the parents like a list of dramatis personae in the front of a fantasy novel. But this one had shaken the community—the Reagan family had always had a pristine reputation; Lia and Taylor’s dad had followed in the footsteps of Reagan mayors before him, an upstanding rich man who still cared about the little people.

  And there, on the other side of the field, fiercely independent Carla Proctor, dressed in her Cedar Woods Knights best. I can still remember her election commercials—her smiling, someone who actually felt like a real person, like you or me, who’d married into money and was going to use that influence to take down the self-satisfied Cedar Woods government. The Cedar Woods electorate—who, up to that point, had always been smart enough to do what they’d been told—had rebelled and elected her, and she’d done exactly what she promised.

  I’d never tell Lia, but I so admired her.

  Mom would say it was a low goal to aspire to: to marry into your wealth and then choose to be a public servant. I guess that’s true. But, I think, as I so often do, that the chance to bring down these people who’ve had the world handed to them on a platter would be worth it. Especially boys like Jackson. There had been a scandal in Cedar Woods when I was in middle school—a hazing by the now-defunct Cedar Woods Prep lacrosse team that had left a scholarship student named Bryce McCabe dead, with no one sure exactly what had happened. His teammates said Bryce had been walking along the railing of the bridge across the river and fallen in, hitting his head on the way down. His family said he’d never have been on the railing if he wasn’t forced.

  Tensions had been high at the time, but the boys were never charged with anything, despite the family’s pleas. I saw one of them had been hired at a prominent tech company recently.

  Prep hired Mom the next year, mostly to get the town off its back, to look like they were cleaning up the toxic-masculinity culture that had permeated the school for years. She was the first ever female head of school. Since Prep had gone coed only twenty years earlier, it was an even bigger deal.

  I still think about Bryce sometimes when I’m driving over the river, crossing that divide. I wonder if Carla Proctor does, too.

  I wonder if she was thinking of Bryce when she filed the charges against Mr. Reagan.

  I pull myself back into the present as Taylor throws the final pitch of the game—I could tell it would be from the way it left his hand. The batter swings desperately but the ball is already hitting Jackson’s glove. Jackson throws off his helmet, running forward and giving Taylor a high five before literally jumping into Columbus’s arms. Of course, Jackson has to display his best friendship like he’s performing in an exceptionally entertaining movie about himself. Taylor and Columbus avoid each other as the rest of the boys congratulate one another on their natural winner genes and superiority. I glance at Lia and catch her watching everyone cheering on the Cedar Woods side of the field with longing. Without thinking about it, I reach my hand across to hers and grab it. She looks down gratefully.

  “It’s fine,” she tells me. It’s her common refrain.

  Normally, Taylor’s girlfriend, Amanda Yee, w
ould at least come over during the game and sit with us for a couple of innings, but she’s already left for the weekend to visit her little brother, who has been in the hospital in Charleston for the past two weeks, receiving treatment for leukemia. Somehow, without her bubbliness around, the whole thing feels even more miserable.

  As the team exits the dugout, Lia and I hang back waiting for Taylor. I haven’t seen either of their parents at a game this season. Mr. Reagan is still for all intents and purposes the mayor, but completely out of the public eye. Annie Reagan, on the other hand, has fallen back into her worst habit. Namely, the project of replacing her entire bloodstream with white wine.

  But still, there are plenty of Cedar Woods residents on the Reagans’ side because well-off and white doesn’t fold easily—they weren’t likely to say it out loud, but Mom told me many of the Prep parents implied to her that they thought Carla Proctor had taken it “too far”. I tried not to take sides, here more for Lia’s emotional support.

  The boys file out slowly. It’s the usual crowd of parents; I’ve been to enough games to have a pretty good idea about exactly who is too checked into their kids’ lives, who isn’t at all, and the small few with good sense. But tonight there are two I don’t recognize: a tiny little waif of a woman with salon bottle–blond hair, her skin still a little pallid under makeup, and her tall, dark, and handsome husband. He’d been on his phone for the entire game.

  Jackson and Columbus come out of the dugout together. I find myself studying the easy way Jackson carries happiness on his shoulders, always seeming so carefree. Columbus’s parents go over to them, Mrs. Proctor giving Jackson a hug. Then I see Jackson notice the other couple, and shake the Proctors off in the nicest, easiest way before approaching the other two. Of course, now that they are next to one another, the relationship comes into stark focus. He’s an older version of Jackson, the way his mouth moves, his gestures. His hair is graying slightly, and he’s wearing a jacket with no tie. Jackson stands straighter in front of his dad than I’ve ever seen him.

 

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