“You didn’t miss shit,” I say. “Just a bunch of parties you would have hated. No one practiced much except Raven Tannenbaum. Saw her running the trails by Ellacoya basically every day. But she doesn’t even register with the scouts. You know that.”
Stella chuckles. “Obviously. That poor girl’s got no mental game. Too scared of everything.” She bobs up and down in the water. “Any word from Bethany? How’s she doing in Michigan?”
I bristle at the mention of my former best friend’s name and shake my head. “Dunno. Good, I guess.”
Stella doesn’t say anything. She never liked Bethany that much anyway. Would probably be thrilled to know that she basically ignored me all summer after moving away.
“What time’s practice tomorrow?” I ask.
“Seven.”
We’re both quiet for a second and I tilt my face up to the sun and wonder what Stella’s thinking. If she’s running through drills in her head. It may be her junior year, her last chance to shine brighter than anyone else and land that spot at Georgetown once and for all, but I have to fight for myself. If I’m lucky, I’ll have a spot guaranteed by the end of the season. That’s the goal. That’s the dream. Especially after this summer, when I saw what life would be like if I let my future slip away.
“Wanna go for a quickie tonight?” I ask, trying not to sound too desperate. “A few miles up by Ellacoya?”
“Nah,” Stella says, flipping onto her back to float in the pool. “Gotta rest up.”
I lean back, too, wondering what kind of game Stella is playing and just how much she improved while at Breakbridge. But that’s the thing about Stella. She keeps her cards so close to her chest, sometimes I wonder if even she knows what she’ll play.
3
STELLA
“Well, if it isn’t the Steckler sisters.” Coach Gary crosses his arms over his broad chest and widens his stance. He’s wearing a blue Edgewater hat over his bald head and his legs are bronze, as if he’s been outside every day for the past three months. When a breeze rustles his shorts, I glimpse his pearly white thighs where his tan line makes a hard stop.
“Miss us, Coach?” Ellie teases. But as soon as she says it, her face turns red, like she forgot she was greeting the dude who earned the nickname Coach Scary after he made a whole bunch of freshmen cry last year. But he gets results. And that’s what everyone cares about. That’s what I care about.
“You two? Nah,” he says, playing along. His dark eyes narrow and he tilts his head toward me. “Breakbridge do you right?”
I nod.
“It better have,” he says. “You’ve got a lot to prove this year.”
I straighten my spine and don’t look away. “I know.”
He snaps a piece of gum. “Looking forward to seeing what you’ve got.” His eyes move over my shoulder and I turn to follow his gaze toward the bleachers. There, sitting in the front row, is a small white woman with gray hair and sunglasses, holding a clipboard. She’s wearing a polo shirt and hiking shorts. I don’t recognize her from the college recruiter lists.
“What school is she from?” I ask, fear building in my stomach. Scouts aren’t supposed to come to practices. Hell, we’re lucky when they show up to meets.
“Ours,” he says, his voice gruff and frustrated. “School board oversight. They just wanted to keep an eye on things after last year.”
Ellie lets out a groan.
“Shut it, Baby Steckler,” Coach snaps. “I don’t have time for this. You’re my squad. My girls. Just have to show ’em I still have a handle on you lot.”
Ellie clamps her mouth shut and looks to the ground. Before we can say anything else, we’re interrupted by whooping and hollering. I turn to the parking lot to see Tamara Johnson, Raven Tannenbaum, and Julia Heller tumbling out of a rose-gold SUV branded with a bumper sticker for the Ellacoya Mountain Resort. They pose for a selfie in their practice uniforms and break into a fit of laughter about some inside joke we’ll never understand. They start to walk toward us and Tamara smiles, her box braids swinging behind her. Raven’s pale, freckled arms hang by her sides like ropes and she glances at Tamara, hungry for approval. Julia’s straight, dirty-blonde hair is gathered into a tight high ponytail that looks like it’s pulling at her scalp.
This goddamn threesome. Julia and Tamara have been best friends since kindergarten when the Hellers moved to Edgewater to open another location of their fancy sporting goods chain. They became tight with Raven a few years later, which was a good thing, considering that when her sister Shira pulled that ridiculous stunt, no one wanted to go anywhere near the Tannenbaums. Well, no one except Tamara and Julia. They stuck by her side. It was pretty nice, I guess. Doesn’t make up for the fact that Julia still calls me Sterile and continues to just be a straight-up asshole. She and Tamara aren’t that fast. Raven, though. She could be good but she chokes all the time.
Coach ignores them. “Stella, stretching,” he commands. “You are co-captain, after all.” He flashes a menacing smile and raises his eyebrows. The school board almost took the title away from me last year, after I got suspended. But Coach got the administration to let me stay on as long as there was a co-captain for the girls’ squad. It was no surprise the team voted for Tamara.
I jog onto the patch of grass in the middle of the track and stand tall, waiting for the rest of the team to circle up around me. We’re fifteen deep this year, counting the few freshmen who are trying out this week, and the group looks good and lithe. It’s obvious I’ll make it to State, but if these dummies can get it together, we might have a shot at placing as a team, too.
“Hi, Stella,” Tamara says, tossing her braids over one shoulder. “Should we give the girls a pep talk?”
“After stretching, maybe,” I say. “You can do that part.”
She smiles so wide her molars show, then nods to Raven and Julia off to the side. “Circle up, ladies!” she calls.
I hop up and down and drop to the earth as the others follow. “Left leg out,” I call and thrust my leg long. My muscles tense and acquiesce, a familiar feeling of strain and release.
“Switch!” I yell.
But when I lift my head to swap my legs, I see everyone has stopped paying attention. Their gaze has shifted. Their heads are turned to the parking lot, where Coach Gary bounces on the balls of his feet. He taps his clipboard nervously with a pen. A tall girl with high cheekbones stands before him in gray spandex shorts and a black racerback running shirt. An Edgewater-blue bow is tied around her dark, wavy ponytail, which hangs long down her back.
“Who is that?” Tamara asks. She pulls on one of her braids, a nervous tic.
“No clue,” Julia says.
“Oh, shit, I know,” Raven says softly. Of course she does. Her mom, Mrs. Tannenbaum, is the school secretary, so she knows everything.
“Who?” Julia asks.
“That’s Mila Keene. I think she moved here over the summer,” Raven says.
“Who?” Julia asks again.
My heart sinks. I’ve heard of Mila. Everyone who is competitive in the greater northeast has. She won the Connecticut State championship last year as a sophomore and was rumored to have been talking to the scouts at Harvard. Why the hell is she here? And why the hell is she walking toward us?
“I said switch,” I call out, suddenly annoyed and flushed. When I bring my left ankle in to my thigh I realize it’s shaking.
“Her parents split up,” Raven continues, dropping her voice to a whisper. “I think her mom got a job at the hospital, so they moved here from one of those suburbs close to Manhattan. Her dad’s back in Connecticut.” She bends down over her knee. “At least that’s what my mom said.”
“Why didn’t she just stay there?” Julia asks.
“Who knows?” Raven says softly. She twists the ends of her red hair around one finger, exposing a swath of freckles trailing down her
neck.
“Shh,” Tamara says. “They’re coming this way.”
I look up to see Coach and Mila jogging toward us. He snaps his gum loudly as he lugs Mila’s practice bag over his shoulder. She follows behind him, her gait elegant and graceful. Shit, she’s wearing shiny lilac Nikes—the lilac Nikes. Even from here, I can see her initials are embroidered on the flat end of each shoelace. My heart drops. I have that pair, too. All the best high school track stars do since Nike gifted them to the top five runners in each state last year. I’m furious I didn’t wear mine today. Just these dumb practice ASICS. They don’t even come with spikes.
Coach Gary clears his throat. “Girls,” he bellows. “This is Mila Keene.”
The others raise their heads and offer sweet smiles, saccharine and fake. If Mila senses the charade, she doesn’t let on. She just stands there grinning, her arms loose and relaxed by her sides. She doesn’t fidget or shift her weight from one foot to the other. She’s just happy to be here. How, though?
“Hey!” Mila says. She even gives a little wave.
“Mila just moved here from Hadbury, Connecticut, but you girls are smart; you probably already knew that. She will be joining the junior class and our squad. If you don’t watch out, she’ll kick your ass.” Coach looks directly at me and smirks. “Make her feel at home, will ya?”
Heads bob up and down. Raven stands up first and offers Mila her hand. “Welcome to the team!” she says. I have to suppress an eye roll. Raven has always been nice, in the same way vanilla ice cream is nice but you’d rather have cookie dough.
Tamara follows suit, and pretty soon, almost all the girls surround Mila, asking her questions and complimenting her Nikes.
But I stay put on the ground. I stick both my legs out in front of me and lower my head to meet my knees, breathing deeply and leaning into the tugging sensation on the back of my calves.
When I finally lift my head, I squint. The sun is bright, and if we don’t get our heart rates up soon, the heat will destroy us.
When the rest of the circle comes into focus, I see only Ellie is left stretching on the ground. She’s looking directly at me and our eyes lock in a state of fury.
We’re ready for war.
4
ELLIE
Even under the covers, I can hear Stella grunting from her bedroom. Doing squats or push-ups or something that’s not required but highly encouraged. I pull a pillow over my face, blocking out the sun, and fumble around for my phone, thumbing through my texts to find the ones Noah sent last night.
Wish I could pick you up and drive you tomorrow, he said. Like a real couple.
A dull ache pounds in my chest and I force myself to remember that he does want me. He does care for me. We’ll be together soon.
Without thinking, I run my pointer finger over the thin red bracelet around my wrist. It’s made of just a few pieces of thread braided together and tied in a circle. Noah gave it to me on a rainy day in July when we were stuck inside the lifeguarding shack, waiting out a storm. He retrieved it from his backpack and tied it tightly around my wrist.
“I made it,” he said, sheepish. I tried to picture him, brow furrowed in concentration, braiding a friendship bracelet in his spare time.
“I love it,” I said, turning my wrist around to admire his clumsy work. And I did. It was perfect.
“I want you to look at this when you think I don’t care, when you think I’ve forgotten all about you and that my heart is somewhere else,” he said. “Know that I want to be with you.”
Before I could say anything he kissed my palm, my fingers, the underside of my arm. Then he pressed his lips to mine, firmly, with intention.
The little bracelet is my only reminder that what I went through this summer was worth it. That we will be together in the end, after he gets into Princeton and lets Tamara down easy. I just know that if I try hard enough, I can make this relationship work, even if it means being the other girl for a few months. Otherwise, what was it all for?
I sigh heavily and throw the covers off my bed, knowing that the first day of school is only an hour away. I pull on jean shorts and a white flowy top, and shake out my hair so it falls in waves around my shoulders. I look at myself closely in the mirror and wonder if I’ve changed as much on the outside as I have on the inside since June. Last year I was so excited to go back to school. I had new notebooks, a fresh haircut, and Bethany. This year, all I have is a secret Noah told me I had to keep and the fear that rises in my throat when I think about sharing it with anyone.
But now I push the thought away and head downstairs to make myself a green juice. Thank god Stella convinced Mom we really did need that four-hundred-dollar monstrosity that pulverizes kale into neon-colored liquid. All she had to do was dangle that scholarship over their heads and they were ready to get her anything she wanted. I have to scream to be heard. Or at least I had to, until Stella lost her chance at Georgetown. Now Mom and Dad are asking more questions about my times, my stats, my chances. It started with a few innocent comments about reaching out to college coaches over the summer, but by the time Mom started grilling me on my PR, I just wanted to curl inside myself and shut them out. Maybe it’s easier being out of focus.
The blender shrieks as I throw ginger, celery, half a carrot, and a handful of kale into its bowels. Soon I’m left with a muddy green liquid that tastes like dirt.
“Ready?” Stella appears at the top of the staircase. Her hair is wet and slicked back in a ponytail, and she’s wearing an Edgewater tracksuit that makes swooshing sounds when she walks. Dork.
“You can’t put on something slightly cute for the first day of school?” I ask.
There it is. That stare.
“Did you make any for me?” she asks.
I’ve learned by now. What’s mine is Stella’s and what’s Stella’s is also Stella’s. I nod and hand her a to-go thermos. She takes it with a grunt and we head out the door into the beat-up navy Subaru Outback Grandma and Grandpa gifted to us when Stella got her license. They shipped it all the way from Arizona, where they moved just before the Dark Years. That’s what Dad calls them, when he and Mom were trying to get their lives together, holed up in an Airstream they thought was “cool” over in Bethel.
At first glance, they seemed like everyone else, just trying to get a piece of the mountain-life pie before the yuppies from Brooklyn bought up all the property. But the winter months were long and cold, and the artisanal gin was cheap, since they were friends with all the small-batch providers. They made money by leading brewery tours, taking tourists around, and schmoozing for tips. It was perfect for them, until Mom got pregnant with Stella and they started fighting about money, and Mom’s drinking, and their future, and . . . everything.
That’s as much as they would tell me now about that time. I had to learn about the totaled car, the one that carried Stella in the back seat, from an old newspaper clipping. That happened sometime in the fourteen months before I was born.
I don’t remember much about the way things were before Mom went to rehab. Only that whenever things got bad, Stella would shut the door to our tiny shared room and read to me from picture books. She’d blast the oldies station from our handheld radio. I didn’t know we were on the brink of disaster. But Stella did. And for her, those memories turned into a suit of armor.
When I was four, though, Grandma Jane and Grandpa Hal came in from Sedona to stay with us while they forced Mom into treatment. Dad quit partying, too, and hung around as our grandparents basically taught him how to be a parent—how to steam vegetables for dinner and detangle our hair and sing us to sleep. I blocked out a lot of that, too. All I know is that’s when the night terrors started. Sleepwalking out into the yard. Screaming in the dark. Most nights, I’d end up in Stella’s bed, curled up next to her as she soothed me back to sleep with her steady breath. Everything else, though, I tried to forget.
&
nbsp; Mom came back, tan and refreshed, spouting mantras and dancing around the yard. Dad was lighter, too. More hopeful and focused, in love like we’d never seen. They both got back into Judaism, after shunning their faith for years. Soon we were regulars at the local synagogue, where services featured acoustic guitars and all the rabbis wore tie-dyed tallit. We attended weekly Hebrew school and studied for our bat mitzvahs. Mom and Dad got their real estate licenses and sold their first million-dollar house within a year. It was clear they were natural salespeople, with faces you wanted to trust. That’s what everyone said. There was even a small article about them in the New York Times travel section a few years back, about how Edgewater had finally ditched its awful nickname, Deadwater, and was becoming an actual tourist destination.
A TOWN ONCE KNOWN FOR ITS GRUESOME COLD CASES BECOMES A SUMMER HOTSPOT! the headline screamed, pasted just above a slick photo of Mom and Dad laughing in front of a refurbished farmhouse over by Ellacoya.
And yeah, Mom relapsed again when I was in fifth grade, but that was minor. She got through it. And no one knew. We Stecklers keep each other’s secrets.
At Grandma Jane’s funeral a few years ago, Mom cried desperately at the shiva, rocking back and forth, refusing to eat anything from the platters of deli meat. When I hugged her, she held me so tight I thought my chest might explode.
“She saved you,” Mom whispered, her voice warbling. “She saved you.”
I thought she meant Grandma Jane, how her mother’s presence in our lives was what kept us together as a family during the Dark Years. But Mom’s eyes were open wide and when I followed her gaze, I could see she was looking straight at Stella.
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