Mr. Vaughn comes after us, warning Jesse that he’d better get to class and I’d better get back in his office so he can formalize my suspension. We ignore him until he threatens to call security. Then Jesse says, “Call my parents, too, please. I’d like to tell them that I confessed —”
Mr. Vaughn cuts him off with a cough and says, “I expect you both to go to the library and wait for me there.” Then he retreats to the office.
Jesse mutters under his breath, “If we actually went to the library, how long would it take him to show up?”
“Monday,” I say.
Jesse shakes his head, and we continue out of the school.
Jesse walks to the bus stop. He doesn’t seem to realize he’s still holding my hand, but he’s clutching it hard. I don’t say a word. I hold on just as tightly.
We’ve just reached the bus stop when he spots a taxi and hails that instead.
It’s a silent ride. Jesse stares out the window. He hasn’t even put on his seat belt, and he jumps when I place the metal end on his leg. Then he nods and clicks it into place.
The car stops at Fletcher Park: the playground where we used to hang out and pretend we were still children.
Except we were children. In so many ways.
Jesse leads me through the gate. Then he stops. The swings are gone. The spiral slide is gone. So is the teeter-totter. Instead, there’s a bright red plastic climbing contraption with short slides and walking rails barely a foot over the ground, so even a toddler couldn’t get hurt falling into the bed of shredded rubber below.
Jesse squares his shoulders, as if he’s going to make the best of it. He turns toward the wall…
They’ve put plastic shielding along the base, so no one can climb it.
Jesse’s shoulders slump. “I didn’t know they redid it. I haven’t been here since…”
“Neither have I,” I say, and I smile, but he just keeps looking around for something – anything – familiar.
“It changed,” he says.
Everything’s changed.
Everything’s changed, and we can’t go back.
I squeeze away the prickle of tears. He doesn’t need that. Neither of us does. I tug his hand, and he follows as I lead him to the picnic shelter. He sits on a tabletop, but I say, “Uh-uh. Too easy.”
I climb onto the table, grab the shelter roofline and hoist myself up. He follows. We crawl to the opposite edge and sit looking out at the ball diamond, a new housing development under construction behind it.
“It’s true,” he says after a few minutes of silence. “About the steroids.”
“I figured it must be.”
“I cheated. All those awards…” He swallows. “My parents keep them in the living room. With Jamil’s. I won’t go in there. I didn’t earn any of them. I cheated. Every last race, I cheated.”
“Your trainer gave you steroids for weight training in the off-season. You didn’t take them at race time.”
“Don’t.”
“I’m just —”
“Please.” He looks over at me. “I know what you’re trying to say, but I cheated, and I don’t want excuses.”
“Okay.”
“I just…” He pulls his legs up, sitting cross-legged, like we used to do on his garage roof. “With Jamil gone, my parents missed going to his games. Being in the stands. Cheering him on. You can’t do that at a spelling bee.”
“They did.”
“It wasn’t the same. They acted like it was, for my sake, but I knew they missed sitting in the bleachers. I’d always been a good runner, so I tried out for track and made the team. When I started high school, my parents got me that trainer. He suggested —” He takes a deep breath. “I’m not blaming anyone. I figured I’d use the steroids for one season to jump-start my training. But then I started winning, and it was the one thing…” His breath catches. “The one thing…”
He can’t finish. I take his hand and squeeze it. He just stares out at the ball diamond.
“That’s why I was a jerk to you the first couple of days,” he says. “I didn’t want you to see —” He inhales. “I’m not the kid you knew, and I was ashamed of that.”
I open my mouth, but he’s still talking. “Everything you liked about me, everything we shared, it’s gone. The shows we used to watch, I haven’t seen in years. The music we listened to, I don’t even have on my phone.”
“That’s —”
“That’s little stuff. I know. Tastes change. But I didn’t replace the shows or the music. I just… I just did nothing. I’ll watch whatever’s on TV. Listen to whatever’s streaming. I cut class, and I’m not even skipping to do something fun. My grades have tanked, and it isn’t because I don’t have time to study. I just don’t do anything. Except run. I run, and I run, and I run and…”
His hand trembles in mine. “Jamil used to call me a loser, and as much as that hurt, I knew he was wrong. I was smart, and I had hobbies, and I had friends. But now? I’m exactly what he said…”
His voice cracks, and his eyes fill, and then they widen in horror as the first tear falls. He releases my hand to wipe it away quickly. “Damn it. Sorry. I —” More frantic wiping as he turns his head, mumbling apologies.
“Jamil was an asshole,” I say.
His shoulders tense.
“I know I shouldn’t speak ill of the dead,” I say. “And he was your brother, so if you want me to shut up, just say so.”
Silence.
“You were smart, and I think he knew, in the long run, that would count more than being good at football. Now he’s gone, and I’m pretty sure I’m the only person who knows how he treated you. You never told your parents, did you?”
“I can’t. Not now. It’s too late.”
“So you’re stuck with it. Stuck pretending you miss this guy that everyone thought was so great. Except he wasn’t great to you. He made your life hell, and you’re trapped with that secret. I can’t imagine how hard that was, and I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you.”
He smiles, a sad twist of a smile. “You haven’t changed at all, have you? No matter what’s happening to you, you’re thinking of others. You were a lot closer to Luka than I was to Jamil, and the circumstances…”
He inhales. “It was worse for you. Much worse. Your brother was dead, and I went to your house because I was hurting, and when you couldn’t be there for me, I turned my back on you. I felt rejected so I abandoned you when you really needed a friend. I was a selfish brat.”
“When did you go to my house?”
“I threw pebbles at your window, remember? You looked out, but… It was lousy timing. You weren’t ready to see me. And I never tried again. I told myself…” He throws up his hands. “I don’t even know what I told myself. I felt rejected. I sulked and waited for you to come to me, and the next thing I knew, you’d moved away.”
“I…” I stare at him. “I thought you were angry.”
“Angry?”
“That night. At my window. You looked angry. Really angry, and I didn’t blame you. My brother was part of the shooting that killed your brother.”
“But that had nothing to do with you.”
My mouth opens. I can’t find words. I think of all the time I’ve spent agonizing over that moment. All the pain it caused me. All the outrage that my best friend had let me down. Even if I told myself I understood, I didn’t really.
All it would have taken was a few words. A text. An email. A phone call.
Are you okay?
Three words would have solved everything.
Three words. Three years lost because we hadn’t said them. Now my eyes are filling, and Jesse’s look of confusion changes to horror, and he’s patting his pockets and pulling out a half-shredded paper napkin and shoving it at me.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m so, so sorry. I was upset, and when you didn’t come to the window, I did get mad, and if you saw that, of course you’d think I was angry. I should have —”
“I should have —” I say at the exact moment he does, and we sit there, unfinished regret hanging between us.
I should have…
Should have. Could have. Didn’t.
Finally, I break the silence with, “You say I haven’t changed. But I have. That’s why I brushed you off yesterday. I didn’t want you to be disappointed.”
“I could never be disappointed, Skye. Not with you.”
My cheeks heat, and he says, “You might think you’ve changed, but I don’t see it.”
“I have. My goals… What I wanted to do with my life… It’s all gone.”
“So you don’t want to be an astronaut anymore?” he says.
His lips curve in a gentle smile, but I burst into tears, which he scrambles to fix with the napkin while tripping over himself to apologize for making me cry. And I apologize for crying. And then he has to say no, it’s okay.
A vicious cycle of apologies and embarrassment, ending with me drying my tears and pulling back and saying, “See? Not the girl you remember.”
I smile when I say it, but he gives me a hard look and says, “Just because I never saw you cry doesn’t mean you never did.”
“Not as much as I do now.”
“And I curse more than I used to. People change.”
I choke on a laugh at that, and the tears threaten again as I say, “I’m so far from becoming an astronaut it isn’t even funny, Jesse. I’m not even sure I’ll go to college, because I have no idea what I’d do. I quit everything I loved, and I didn’t find anything to replace it. I just… am. I exist. I get through my days, and I thought that was enough, and then I came back here and remembered what I used to be, the dreams I had and…”
He hugs me. Puts his arms around me and hugs me tight. When he lets go, he says, “We kinda both lost our way, huh?”
“Kinda.”
He puts his fingers on my chin and tilts my face up, and his lips are parting to say something… or I think he’s going to say something, but there’s this little bit of me that hopes —
My phone vibrates. It’s been vibrating for a while, and I’ve been ignoring it, but he hears it now and says, “Your phone?”
I want to tell him to forget that. What was he going to say? What was he going to do? But there’s no returning to that moment, not while he’s waiting expectantly.
I check the string of texts and wince. “It’s Mae. She’s heard about the suspension, and she’s freaking.” I hold my phone over the edge of the pavilion. “Think I can accidentally drop it?”
“Drop it, yes. Accidentally, no. And having already read her messages…”
I sigh. “Sure, be all mature about it.”
“One of us has to be.”
I start a retort, but I move too fast and teeter. He grabs me and hauls me back onto the roof, saying, “Careful.”
“I was being careful. Which means if my phone fell, it would totally have been an accident. Which you ruined. Spoilsport.”
“Next time I should let you break your neck?”
“Yep, teach me a lesson.”
“Never has before.”
“Um, pretty sure I’ve never broken my neck before.”
“Just your wrist. And your arm. And sprained both ankles.”
“Not all at the same time. I need to try harder.”
I look over the edge.
He laughs and grabs me. “Don’t even think about it.”
“Can’t stop someone from thinking.”
“Can sure try.”
I pretend to settle on the roof. Then I spring and leap over the edge as Jesse lets out a curse behind me. I hit the grass in a crouch and turn, grinning.
“See? Nothing broken. It’s not nearly high enough. Next time? Top of the school.”
He gives a deep sigh. “Believe me, Skye, you have not changed nearly as much as you think you have.”
I make a face and wave for him to jump. He crab-crawls sideways along the edge, tensing for a leap, and then changing his mind and trying a new spot.
“And apparently, neither have you,” I say. “Get your ass down here.”
He moves to the edge over the grass and jumps. He hits the ground and hisses in pain, dropping to a crouch, hands going to his ankle.
I hurry over and drop beside him. “Are you —?”
He tackles me, too fast for me to see it coming, and the next thing I know, I’m flat on my back, and he’s beside me, laughing.
“Too slow,” he says. “Still way too slow.”
I rise to sit. “I saw it coming.”
“Liar.”
“I was humoring you.”
“Such a liar.”
A phone sounds. It’s not mine. Jesse takes his out and curses.
“Let me guess,” I say. “Mae isn’t the only one who got a call.”
“Yeah.” He scrolls through texts. “Vaughn phoned my mom to report an ‘incident.’ He didn’t tell her what it was, only that I’d ‘gotten upset’ and cut my last class.”
“And she’s freaking?”
“Nah. Mom doesn’t freak. She’s just concerned. She wants to talk.” He sighs. “Vaughn won’t tell her about the steroids. But I have to. Get it over with.”
“Best thing.”
“I know.”
“She’ll understand.”
Another sigh. “That’s the problem. They’ve been so careful since… Jamil. Giving me space. Letting me work it through. Which seems great, but sometimes, what I really need is less handholding.”
“As someone with parents who aren’t there for me – can’t be or won’t be – I can tell you, it’s not any better. Whether it’s unwavering support or a kick in the ass, I think the only people who can give it to us are ourselves.”
“Or each other.”
I give him a quick hug. “Definitely each other. So let’s put out these fires and reconvene in cyberspace.”