Winner Take All

by Laurie Devore

  The boys’ state championship game is a week away and it’s our last good workout before. I don’t mention the pinch in my shoulder to anyone. It’ll go away eventually—it always does. I’m stretching out after, purposely not making eye contact with the guys, when someone clears his throat behind me.

  I turn around and Jackson is standing there.

  “Go away,” I say, reaching down to touch my toes somewhat self-consciously.

  “I’m feeling not done,” he tells me matter-of-factly.

  I don’t look up. “I don’t know what that means.”

  “You want to go for a run?”

  I do look up. “Now?”

  He nods. “Yeah. Come on, it’ll be fun. I’ll tell you all my secrets.”

  His face is set like he really is serious. I have a couple of seconds to consider it before I am obligated to give a response. And I’m thinking about how it’s the strangest thing ever and if I say no, I’ll never know what it’s about.

  “Okay.”

  “Sweet.”

  “Let me just…” I glance back at him as if he’s going to change his mind. “Grab my phone.”

  He waits while I do. I meet him at the door and stick an earbud in. Together, we walk down the hall, our arms practically brushing against each other.

  “What are you listening to?” he asks me.

  It’s something poppy and frothy—the song of the summer. A song I would never admit to. “Something good,” I say instead.

  His lip quirks, but he doesn’t answer as we open the double doors.

  We hit the sidewalk winding through the school athletic complex and find the cross-country trail through the woods behind the school. Our sneakers strike the dirt path in unison. The truth is, my body is exhausted, and this is past the point it wants to go. But right now, it’s a nice thing. It means my brain is at least not spinning out in circles, creating imaginary scenarios where my whole life falls apart—usually from one mistake I make. Ruining my grades or breaking my leg or watching Dad pack up all his belongings.

  Besides, what does Jackson want?

  The path takes a downward turn. “You’re wondering,” he says to me.

  I look over at him, leaping past a rock in my path. “What?”

  “Why I asked you.”

  I put my eyes back on the trail. “I’m not.”

  “’Cause I knew you would. You’re the only one who would still go running after that brutal workout.”

  I lift my ponytail away from my neck, a new layer of sweat forming on top of the current one on my forehead. Summer is settling in, making itself at home. “You shouldn’t be doing this, you know? During the playoffs. You said it yourself, if we get hurt now we’re out of commission. Twist your ankle and you screw everyone.”

  “Wouldn’t screw me.”

  “Not you? You’re the offensive MVP.” I throw my hands up. “Why are you such a selfish jackass?”

  “Why does it bother you so much that baseball isn’t everything to me? It’s like you feel like you’re good so you owe them something. I don’t owe anybody shit.”

  I open my mouth and close it. He’s trying to project his own thing onto me and that isn’t going to work.

  “No.” He keeps his head down, charging forward. “Say it.”

  “You’re making some existential point about how I have terrible priorities because I think that goals and commitment are important.”

  “I’m not even going to read into how much you just read into that.”

  I hit my stride a little harder, subconsciously at first but then I lean into it. I’d never admit it, that I love the way volleyball makes me feel about myself. Like I was made for something, like I have a purpose. It’s something I’m the best at, and when other people see me play, they can’t deny it.

  I spend so much time trying to prove my worth, trying to climb to the top, but that’s the only time I feel truly acknowledged. Seen.

  Middle school was the first time someone told me how good I was. Mom had smiled when I told her what my coach had said. “You’re not just good,” she’d told me. “You’re better than anyone else.” I’ve held on to that memory forever, nurtured it. That memory is me.

  “You like it, don’t you?” he asks after a moment. “That it hurts. I saw you favoring your shoulder during the workout. You should lay off it for a while.”

  “Dude.” I pop my other headphone in so I don’t have to talk to him anymore. But I feel him tug on the cord until it falls out of my ear.

  “Look … I need to talk to someone, if that’s okay. Someone who doesn’t know or care about me and my family or anything else.”

  I’m instantly more suspicious about why Jackson is choosing me to be his confidante, but this is what I came to hear so I don’t make a move to put the earbud back in. I can’t help it; I want to know. And more than anything, I want to know if I can use it to beat him at his own game.

  “I like it, too,” he continues, working a little harder to talk with the new pace. “Pain helps me think. It reminds me that I’m not controlled by my body. That my mind puts me in control of any situation. So when things are really fucked up, I can find my center.” He spits then. “Slow down, for God’s sake.”

  I pull up, placing my hands on top of my head and sucking in a breath. He slows to a walk, keeping pace beside me. “So, tell me,” because how can I not ask, “what unsettles the most secure person in Cedar Woods?”

  He glances up at the sky, a smile on his face as if he can’t believe what he’s going to say. “My dad,” he says, still watching the clouds.

  I knew his dad from name alone—Atticus Hart. Super-rich businessman, travels all the time, has that asshole “I’m not really into whatever you’re saying” look. Recent indiscreet fight with his wife. This is an easy solve.

  “Cheater?” I say, and immediately internally cringe. There was probably a more delicate way to put that.

  Our eyes meet, and then he turns his head. He nods in the other direction. “You ever been to the old tennis court?”

  “I’ve heard rumors,” I say, which is only kind of true. What I do know is that somewhere around here, there used to be a tennis court and that somewhere along the way, the carefully planned vegetation of Cedar Woods Prep grew up around it. It’s popular with smokers, drinkers, and stoners alike.

  “Becker,” he says. “I am the rumors.”

  I roll my eyes at that.

  “C’mon,” he says, and abandons the cross-country trail, stepping over a fallen branch. I look at the bramble all over the ground and then back at him. It’s a twisted ankle waiting to happen. But he holds out his hand and against my better judgment, I take it and allow him to pull me over.

  We walk through, farther out. Finally, I see a fence, ivy winding through it, pulling the mesh of chain links away from the poles holding it up.

  “What’re you doing this summer?” Jackson asks me.

  I walk up and grab on to the rusty steel of the gate. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

  He kicks a piece of trash off the crumbling edge of the court. When I look closer, I see it’s a ripped condom wrapper. God. “Don’t take offense, but I can’t imagine it would be that exciting.”

  “Close your eyes and imagine I have hidden depths, Hart.”

  And he actually does. He closes his eyes. Then he grins. “I like it.”

  “Stop trying so hard. I know you don’t like me. In case you haven’t noticed, a lot of people don’t like me very much. I’m too ‘intense.’” I put air quotes around the word.

  “I do like you. Why do you insist I don’t?”

  I roll my eyes again and work hard not to smile, pulling open the gate and walking inside. A persistent flower is pushing up through the clay. I turn all the way around, taking it in. “This is it, huh? Charming.”

  He leans back against the fence, facing me. “‘This is it?’ This is where I’ve made all my best, most cherished high school memories.”

  “Gross.”
He wants me to ask for details, so I don’t. “Is that what you’re doing this summer? Making more ‘cherished high school memories’?” I tilt my face back, the sun warming it. When I look down, he’s looking at me.

  “We’ll see.”

  “Don’t try to pull your shit on me.”

  “You can’t blame a guy for trying,” he says.

  “So. Your dad?”

  “Oh. That.” Looping his fingers through the fence, he rocks back and forth; it shakes in a metallic wave, making a rattling sound. I watch him without speaking, a useful trick for getting people to talk that I learned in a journalism class last year. “I mean, even you know his deal. It’s literally that obvious.”

  “But why do you care now? This isn’t, like, brand-new information to you, is it?” I ask, crossing my arms. Stupidly getting invested.

  “You.” He points at me. “You’re charming, you know that?”

  I shrug.

  “He really doesn’t care, though,” Jackson goes on. “When we were younger, my sister would always make comments, like, ‘Dad’s had a lot of overtime this week’ or ‘He always did have a soft spot for brunettes,’ but at least some part of him tried to be subtle then. He doesn’t hide it at all now. Coming in with this horrible perfume all over him. Leaving me to deal with Mom.” He breathes out deeply. “She can’t fucking stand it. She’s always angry or depressed or some toxic mix of both. But she lets him. She just lets him.” He embraces his anger, gripping the fence tighter even though the metal has to be hurting his hands, almost as if they are no longer in his control. “I lost my temper with her last night. Completely. And now I feel like shit, like I only ever make everything worse exactly the way Dad says I do.”

  “Why?”

  “What do you mean, ‘why?’”

  “Why should you feel bad? For once in your life, you probably did the right thing. She allows herself to be disrespected by some … some”—I search around as if for a word bad enough, and then one comes to me, as if from the sky—“dickhead. And that’s why she gets treated like shit. Why should you have to keep acting like it’s okay?”

  His head tilts to the side like a confused, miffed puppy. Then he shakes it and walks out of the tennis court.

  “Jackson.” I say it in the shape of an apology, following him. He holds up a hand, still moving away from me.

  “I don’t want anything from you, Becker.”

  “You wanted to talk to me,” I say. “Remember?”

  He stops, facing me, frustration pouring off him. “You can’t blame my mom for him. Maybe she doesn’t stand up to him, but it’s not her fault. She can’t just turn her emotions off like you can. Most people aren’t like you, you know?”

  A miraculous breeze gives me goose bumps from the sweat dripping off my skin. I hold my ponytail up off my neck. “I do.”

  “I really do hate her sometimes. Because she sits back and watches when she should be doing something, hurting him. But she can’t help how she feels, so what kind of person am I if I blame it on her?”

  I want to say, Why are you telling me this? But I don’t want him to stop telling me this. So I bite my tongue and watch watch watch.

  “You ever hated anyone, Nell?”

  I’m so busy watching, I almost forget to answer. “Not a lot of room for hate when you’ve got so much to do,” I equivocate, not wanting to admit I hate him. Then I think a little bit more and find my answer changing, shifting into something else. “Maybe. I guess. Not one person, but, like, everyone.”

  He looks briefly amused as he barks out a laugh. “Everyone?”

  I shrug. “People here. With all their money and fake talk about meritocracy. I know I’m not badly off, but I hate the way you—the way they look at me and people like me, like we’re just pieces to be moved around. I never want to be like them, but I feel like I need to impress them? Always trying to climb to the next rung of something.

  “So I don’t really specifically hate them, but I hate what they are, what I feel myself becoming sometimes. Sorry.” I shake my head. “I know that’s not what you meant.”

  But he looks interested. “That completely makes sense, actually.” His tone is almost warm for a moment.

  I skip right past it, though, because I’m obligated to ask the part that comes next—it’s what he’s waiting for. “You ever hate anyone, Jackson?”

  His face kind of clouds over. I imagine it’s what he looks like when he decides to hurt someone. Like he can’t be bothered to be charming because he’s got a mission. “Him. My dad. I hate him.”

  It was the answer I was expecting, so I’m not sure what to say.

  “It’s all a game to him. These other women. Win them over. Play with them for a while. Leave and move on.”

  I swallow. Try to swallow it back. Don’t say the thought pounding into my brain, demanding to be heard. Except I don’t swallow it back at all. “Like you,” I say.

  He goes, if anything, darker. “Really, Becker?”

  His incredulity doesn’t calm me down; it wakes me up to him. To the fact he’s still dangerous. “You can’t tell me you don’t see it.”

  “See what?”

  “That you act just like him,” I spell out.

  “I’m not cheating,” he tells me, defiant.

  I bark out a humorless laugh. “So that’s the only part you have a problem with? Treating girls like objects doesn’t bother you? You’re a hypocrite, Hart,” I tell him.

  “That pedestal is pretty high, isn’t it?”

  “You’re good at deflecting.” I can’t stop looking at him, waiting for him to see it. “But you can’t be that oblivious. You’ve seen those girls you mess with cry. You’ve seen their hearts get broken. You hate your dad so much? I think you hate yourself.”

  I’m not sure what I expect him to do when the words leave my mouth. Wildly, I think he might hit me, but no, that’s not what Jackson is like. That’s not how he retaliates. But I won’t absolve him.

  His eyes are ice-cold when he says, “You can find your way back from here?”

  I set my jaw. “You didn’t want my pity. I gave you what you came for,” I remind him.

  He turns and walks in the opposite direction from the trail, pushing his way through the vegetation that grows wilder the deeper he goes. I head the other way.

  That was not what I was expecting.

  13

  The next week, the baseball team wins their Monday night game and loses when they travel upstate for the Wednesday game. Everything comes down to Friday.

  Coach Montoya canceled conditioning for the week so the team could stay focused, which means I haven’t spoken to Jackson and he hasn’t had any trouble ignoring me, either. I wish it wasn’t bugging me so much. I spend my time running drills and studying with Lia.

  On the Thursday before the game, Taylor catches me at the end of sixth period.

  “Hey, Coach canceled practice today. He said, and I believe these were his exact words, he ‘figures we suck now about as much as we’re ever going to so we might as well have the afternoon.’ Some of us are going to go down to the riverbank to unwind. You want to come?”

  I consider the offer. “I should really be studying.”

  “You need a break worse than we do. Come on, I know you have volleyball at four. It’s just a couple of hours.”

  I think about it for another minute, decide he’s not wrong, and then say, “Fine.”

  Twenty minutes later, Taylor is pulling his SUV up to the riverbank park on my side of town. It’s a long sandy beach, divided off from the wooded area around the river. Out in the water are some prime floating docks. Taylor points his finger out at one of the docks just in time for us to see a brown-skinned boy pushed into the water by a white boy. I hear Columbus scream.

  “I’m not going out there,” I tell Taylor.

  He laughs, spreading out two beach towels that he keeps in the back of his car for us to sit on. I prop my arms back behind me and watch as Columbus makes the
dock rock precipitously, acting as if he’s climbing back on but really sending the other eight boys out there holding on for their lives.

  “You’re pitching tomorrow?” I ask him.

  He flicks at his fingernails as if he’s not nervous. “Can we not talk about it?”

  “Fair enough. How’s Amanda?” I say instead.

  “Great!” he tells me, his word laced with what sounds like forced enthusiasm. “They think Joe can come home next month. Things are looking really, really good. Which is awesome because Amanda has been such a mess lately. I know you don’t like all her over-the-top optimism, but it’s honestly a cover-up.”

  I can’t believe he said that. “What are you talking about?” I ask in painfully fake confusion.

  He half smiles at me. “Oh, come on, Nell, you think I can’t read your facial expressions? She acts bubbly like that because she’s doing the best she can. Really. She’s a wreck most of the time. But things are on the upswing. It’s going to be great for her.”

  “I don’t dislike her or anything,” I tell him honestly. “It’s just, I know she’s so sad. I don’t know what to do. But I’m happy to hear there’s good news. Really happy, Taylor. Honestly, I mean that.”

  He nods, and I can’t make out his eyes behind his sunglasses. “I know you do.”

  Columbus and one of the other boys are swimming back to shore right then. I watch, a curious arrhythmic thumping coming from my chest area, until I realize the other boy is Jackson. They shove each other as they get out of water, fighting like preschoolers, and walk over to us.

  “Making a beer run,” Jackson says to Taylor. “You want in?”

  “Are you shitting me?” Taylor demands. “We have the state championship game tomorrow. And you two are going to go get beer? Do you know what Coach Montoya would do if he found out?”

  “Hold on to your shorts, Reagan,” Columbus says, laughing. “Just like one or two.”

  Taylor stands up, and I can tell he is really getting pissed now. “Do you two care about anything?”

  Columbus and Jackson exchange a look and snicker.

  “Abso-fucking-lutely not,” Taylor says, grabbing up the towel in a huff. “I am not staying out here if you’re going to be like that. And I swear to God, if you look so much as one percent off your games tomorrow, I will kill you. We’ve worked all season for this.” His face is going steadily redder. “I’m done.” At that, he starts walking up the sand, back in the direction of his car. It takes a moment before he turns back around and says, “Nell, you can stay if you want, but I’m leaving.”