“Do you think maybe we should dance?” Nick asks without looking at her.
Ryan widens her eyes at him. “What about your date?”
“What about yours?” he teases her.
He sticks out his hand, and she takes it, following him out to the crowded dance floor. She can’t help looking around to see who might be watching, but once there, the song changes to something slower, and Ryan forgets about everything else but her hand inside of his. They’re unsure of themselves, bumped by couples moving to the slow beat of the music, but then Nick circles his arms around her, and they sway stiffly until they find an uncertain rhythm. The back of his neck is warm where Ryan’s hands are knotted together, and she can feel his breath on her shoulder.
She opens her mouth, trying to think of something to say, but the music is too loud anyway, so she just leans against him, resting her chin on his shoulder as they move. They turn small circles in the darkened gymnasium, their feet sliding across the wooden floor, and Ryan lets her eyes flutter shut. Here together, clinging to him in the darkened gymnasium, Ryan gets the feeling she doesn’t ever need to know him more than this, his hands on her back, her head on his shoulder.
When the song ends, they disentangle themselves, and she realizes he’s still holding her hand. Another song comes on, something faster. A few boys begin jumping straight up and down, and soon others join in until the whole building seems to be bobbing, the floor creaking beneath them.
Ryan looks around the sticky gym and the sweaty dance floor, suddenly desperate to be anywhere but here. She scans the crowd for Lucy or Robert, and when she doesn’t see either one, she turns to Nick. “Want to get away from the music for a minute?” she yells over the noise, and he nods, leading her past the DJ booth and the small group of chaperones out toward the hallway. She notices Robert sitting around the re-lit waterfall with the tech guys, and she’s happy to see that he also looks like he’s having more fun now that they’ve lost each other.
Once outside of the gym, their ears are still ringing, and when Nick leans in to say something, it sounds muffled and muted. “What?” she shouts.
“I said,” he says, laughing, “let’s go outside.”
There are a few couples sneaking cigarettes out behind the school, and Ryan and Nick see Mr. Davis fulfilling his chaperoning duties by shooing them back inside. They duck around the corner, Ryan’s heels sinking into the soft grass of the playing fields. The night is beautiful, more summer than spring, and the air feels soft against her bare legs.
“You know what we could do?” Nick says, adjusting his hand on hers.
“Stay out here all night?” Ryan suggests. Now that they’re outside, the thought of returning to the stuffiness of the dance—the rising noise still throbbing faintly in her ears and the probing eyes of their classmates—is wholly unappealing.
“Or we could go back to my house,” Nick says.
Ryan looks up at him sharply. “What about Lucy?”
He laughs. “What about Robert?”
“Not funny,” she says.
“It’s a little funny.”
Ryan looks toward the entrance to the gym. Lucy must be furious by now. She’s not the type of girl who gets left behind by her date, and Ryan hates to think of just how much more miserable she could make their lives if Nick doesn’t reappear by her side in the next few minutes. But standing here beside him, her fingers entwined with his, she’s having a hard time caring.
“The Cubs are on the West Coast tonight, so the game’s just starting,” Nick says. “We could go hang out in my basement and watch it.”
Ryan lets go of his hand, trying not to look disappointed. Maybe this is all he wants, she thinks: someone to talk shop with him, to debate over lineups and argue about strategy. She looks down, playing with the ribbon on her dress.
“We’d probably have more fun on our own,” he says, and Ryan feels somewhat better. “Unless you don’t want to leave. …”
“No,” she says after a moment. “That sounds nice.”
Nick’s house is just two blocks away, and they cut across the soccer fields behind the school, the grass already wet with dew. She stops at one point to slip off her shoes, and when she straightens, one finger hooked around the straps of her sandals, Nick is standing just beside her, watching.
“What?” she asks, but he only smiles and ducks his head.
“Nothing,” he says.
At his house, he puts a finger to his lips because his parents are already in bed. They make their way downstairs to the basement quietly, Ryan first, Nick’s hand on her waist, and once there, they collapse onto the couch. Nick passes her the phone, and she calls her mom to say she’s going to a party after the dance, that she’ll sleep over at one of the girls’ houses, so she won’t need a ride home.
Tomorrow morning, they’ll wake up early and Nick will walk her the three blocks back to her house before anyone is up. They’ll stand on her lawn in the first hours of light and things will be different. They will already be going over the night’s events in their minds, worrying over what might have changed, what the summer might bring.
But tonight they are happy to be in the cool of Nick’s basement, lying under a blanket in front of the TV as the Cubs take the lead against the Dodgers. Her head is on his chest, his arm hooked around her shoulders. Tomorrow, her dress will be wrinkled and the curls will have come loose from her hair. But tonight, she presses herself closer to him beneath the blanket, and they fall asleep together in this way, drifting off long before the game comes to an end.
Chapter Ten
* * *
ON THE LAST DAY OF SCHOOL, RYAN TIPTOES around the breakfast table in the kitchen, wary of the array of jams and jellies that all pose potential danger to the white tablecloth laid out for the occasion. She’s the first one downstairs, and so she sits alone at the table, resting her chin in her hand. It’s also Emily’s last day of third grade, and Mom is upstairs curling her hair the way she’d done Ryan’s for the dance just the week before.
Ryan was fairly old before she realized that not every family makes such a big deal out of the last day of school. But it had become a Walsh family tradition, spurred on by Dad, the great proponent of commemorations and celebrations on even the smallest of occasions. On her last day of first grade, they’d had a picnic in the backyard. After second grade, it had been a trip to the batting cages. In years past, there had been field trips of all kinds: the red trolleys in the city, a sailboat ride out on the lake, even an afternoon at a strawberry patch, where they’d eaten more than they picked, their mouths turning red from the berries.
The year he died, on the day Ryan’s fourth-grade class had let out for the summer, she’d arrived home to find Mom preparing homemade ice cream sundaes. As they filled little bowls with sprinkles and chocolate chips, Ryan asked why he’d made such a big deal of the day, when he’d always hated endings so much.
“He didn’t see it as an ending,” Mom told her. “It was the beginning of summer, his favorite season. That was always reason enough for a celebration, I guess.”
This morning, Ryan surveys the table, relieved that summer has finally arrived. There’s nothing in her that’s sad to leave freshman year behind. Even before this mostly miserable year, she’d never felt a drive to preserve these sorts of memories, all the things her classmates write about in their yearbooks. She knows enough to hope that these aren’t the best days of her life, just a middle ground, a fleeting phase between the years with her father and the years ahead. She’d always had the feeling she was just passing through—though to what, she isn’t yet sure.
If her dad were here this morning, he’d have made her wait to get dressed until after breakfast. “I’m going to put enough syrup on these pancakes that you can depend on coming out of this sticky,” he’d have said. He would have whistled on the drive over to school, said something corny about how fast she was growing up. He’d have met her afterward with an enormous grin, trying not to give away whate
ver surprise he had waiting, whatever he might have come up with to properly observe the day, the start of a new season.
Ryan swallows hard, blinking back tears. She looks at the table, and her eyes fall on an envelope sitting above her plate, half-hidden by a pitcher of orange juice. She reaches around and picks it up, turning it over in her hands. Her name is written across the front in her mom’s handwriting, and when she nudges open the flap, she sees the tops of two Cubs tickets peeking out.
Before she leaps up and shouts, before she runs up the stairs and hurtles into her mother’s arms to thank her, before she lets herself look forward to the game itself, she sits very still, alone at the kitchen table, and bows her head. She doesn’t wish that Dad were here to go to the game with her, and she doesn’t wish the day had turned out differently. What sense is there in wishing for the impossible? But she does, for the briefest of moments, allow herself to imagine that the tickets had been his to give. That sitting here on the last day of this awful year, her dad might have been the one to leave such a gift. And when she closes her eyes, she can almost believe that he has.
After the last class lets out, everyone lingers amid the explosion of locker doors. Ryan tiptoes through the torn notebook pages and empty binders that litter the hallway, keeping an eye out for Nick. She sees Sydney and Kate posing together for a picture and dodges past, hoping they haven’t seen her. In the week since the dance, neither has so much as said one word to her. Ryan senses a tiny bit of sympathy in their looks, which makes her all the more unsettled. Each time she’s run into Lucy, the girl’s mouth curls into a small smile, and Ryan can’t seem to hurry away fast enough. She suspects the last day of school doesn’t at all mean the last of Lucy, and she hates to think of when they might next cross paths.
Around the corner, Ryan spots Nick shaking hands with one of their teachers, who smiles at him in a way no teacher will ever smile at Ryan. Once she leaves, Nick puts his hands in his pockets and rocks back on his heels.
“Hey,” she calls out, and he gives her a lopsided grin.
“Hey, yourself.”
Ryan adjusts her backpack and scans the hallway before approaching him. “Listen,” she says. “My mom gave me two tickets as sort of a last-day-of-school gift.”
He folds his arms across his chest. “Tickets to what?”
“What else?”
His face brightens, just briefly, before he seems to readjust with some amount of effort. “When is it?”
“In a couple of weeks,” she tells him. “It’s against the Pirates.”
“I can’t,” he says, flicking his eyes away. “But thanks for thinking of me.”
The hallway is nearly empty now. Everyone has spilled out onto the front steps or the lawn or the parking lot, where they’re huddled together making plans for the afternoon and the summer beyond it. Nick shuffles his feet and studies the floor.
“Why not?” Ryan demands.
“My summer’s going to be kind of hectic, I think.”
She grins conspiratorially. “Too hectic for the Cubs?”
They hear the soft slap of sandals down the hall, and both look up to see Lucy. She leans over to take a sip from the water fountain, then glances over at them. Even from a distance, Ryan can see her raise her eyebrows before she spins around to march back outside. Nick stares at the place she’d been standing even once she’s gone, and when he turns back to Ryan, he seems almost surprised to find her still there.
“My family’s going up to Wisconsin for most of July,” he explains.
“The game’s at the end of June.”
“I just don’t think I can go,” he mumbles, and when she doesn’t say anything, he finally meets her eye. “Look, Ryan—”
“No, it’s fine,” she says, shaking her head. “I’m sure someone else—”
He puts a hand on her shoulder to stop her. “I’m really sorry,” he says, and she can see that he is, though for what, she isn’t entirely certain. It feels like they’re talking about more than just the game, and Ryan tries to hide her confusion as all her hopes for the summer, all the plans and possibilities, begin falling away.
Nick seems about to say something more, but instead leans down to kiss her on the cheek. “I’ll see you,” he says, though it feels less like a promise than an excuse.
He’s halfway down the hall when he turns to wave at her. Ryan lifts her shoulders in response, left alone in the empty hallway to watch this strangest of escapes, this most puzzling of disappearing acts.
Twelve days into it, Ryan’s summer has assumed an alarmingly depressing shape, each unhurried day opening into the next like rooms in a railroad apartment. In the mornings, Kevin drops Emily off at camp on his way to the office, and Mom leaves for the real estate agency where she still works part-time, while upstairs, Ryan shoves her head under her pillow to ward off the light. Once she manages to get out of bed, the balance of the day is spent trying to appear busy, something that has itself become nearly a full-time occupation.
The main audience for this—her always hectic, though never eventful one-man show—is her mother, who would surely find cause for concern if she knew how completely and utterly bored her daughter is fast becoming. Ryan’s too old for camp, but too young for most jobs, and she’d passed on every activity her mom had wanted to sign her up for—first, because she’d hoped her friends might come around, and later, because she’d been counting on hanging out with Nick. All her classmates will be whittling away their summers at the nearby beach, while Ryan—friendless and alone—is left to fend off Mom’s latest idea of summer school.
And so her days are spent flipping through newspapers with a look of utmost concentration, walking purposefully around the neighborhood, studying the flowers in their backyard garden as if there were nothing more important than the well-being of the petunias. She’s become a master loafer, a brilliant loiterer, a rambler of the first order. She spends so much time working to convince others of how busy she is, that occasionally, she manages to fool even herself.
But not often.
Since the last day of school, Ryan has left two messages with Nick’s mom and a third on his answering machine, and this isn’t counting the half dozen times she’s hung up after letting it ring. A few days ago, she’d mustered up the nerve to walk over, crossing the streets with her head down, dodging stray baseballs and scooters as the neighborhood busied itself around her so effortlessly. Standing in front of his house, she leaned with one hand on the cow-shaped mailbox and kicked at the curb, angry with herself, and with him, too, for ruining whatever it was they’d had. It wasn’t the dance she regretted, and it wasn’t just being with him that she missed. It was something bigger than that. It was something far more important.
Ryan is tough. She’s survived this type of thing before. But this hurts in a way the past year hadn’t. Being ignored by her girlfriends was a matter of gossip. Being left behind by Nick feels like being cut loose. It’s like drowning, but not quite. Like throwing a stone, letting it skip out in wide arcs, seeing it shiver across a lake, like magic, like glass, and then watching it sink.
She’s waited until today—the day before the game—to think about the second ticket, hoping that in the span of these two endless weeks, Nick might resurface. Whatever had happened between them—and truthfully, Ryan still doesn’t know—surely this must be bigger. What better truce is there, what happier peace offering, than this: a day spent in the friendly confines of Wrigley Field, perched high on their green plastic thrones, presiding over the infield as if their presence alone might be enough to change history. As if wanting something enough could make the difference.
But she still hasn’t heard from him, and she tries not to think of how much it hurts—this failure of his—as she helps Mom set the table for dinner, avoiding the question on both their minds: Who will she take to the game?
Ryan clicks off the burner on the stove and then clears her throat. “So would you want to go with me tomorrow?” she asks Mom, and withou
t turning around, Ryan can sense that she’s paused. “It’s an afternoon game, so we could be home by dinnertime.”
“I wish I could,” Mom says, putting a hand on her shoulder, which makes Ryan feel worse. “But I have my doctor’s appointment tomorrow.”
“That’s okay,” Ryan says quickly. “It’s no big deal.”
“What’s no big deal?” Kevin asks as he strolls into the kitchen, his face hidden by the business section of the newspaper.
Mom very nearly bounds over, then thumps him on the shoulder a couple of times. “Why don’t you take Kevin?”
“Take me where?” he asks, pleased to be included.
“Ryan needs a date to the Cubs game,” Mom says. “Wouldn’t it be fun if you two went together?”
If Mom were to ask, Ryan would say that Kevin is the last person she wants to take to the game with her, but “last” implies that there are many, and the sad truth is that Ryan can’t think of anybody else who might want to spend the afternoon with her.
The two tickets are beginning to seem as cursed as the team itself.
Kevin takes off his glasses and rubs the bridge of his nose. “Aren’t I supposed to go to a doctor’s appointment or something with you tomorrow?” he asks Mom, who shoots him a look.
“I’m fine on my own,” she says, beaming at Ryan. “You guys will have such a great time together.”
Ryan tries to imagine Kevin—whose favorite beverage is hot tea—with a twenty-ounce beer at the ball game. She pictures him wiping relish off a hot dog with his napkin. She knows he’ll compare batting stances to golfing alignments, and she dreads having to explain to him why the old-fashioned scoreboard at Wrigley is better than the flashy, pixilated ones used for nearly every other sport.
“Sounds like fun,” Kevin is saying, nudging her companionably with his elbow.
If they were to ask her, Ryan might say she’d rather not go at all. But nobody does, and so she just nods and grabs two water glasses, walking over to set the table, looking busy enough to fool them all.
The Comeback Season Page 7