Jesse lies on his bed and stares at the empty walls. His shelves are almost as bare – he prefers to keep his belongings in drawers.
He remembers the first time he walked into Skye’s old bedroom. It looked like the set of a teen movie. Every wall was papered with posters and dog-eared comic-book sketches. Every shelf crammed with books. Even the perimeter space on those shelves was lined with figurines and toys and shells and rocks and whatever else had caught her eye.
That’s what it seemed like to him – that she’d just dumped all this stuff and forgotten it. Which wasn’t the case at all. The comic-book sketches were Luka’s, rescued from the trash when he wasn’t looking. The toys had been childhood favorites. The shells and rocks came from vacations. The figurines were from her favorite TV shows and movies. Even the posters had significance, not just “an ATF poster” but one from a performance in Australia that she and friends had stayed up all night to watch live.
Skye’s room said, “This is me.” And he loved poking around and asking about stuff. She had stories for everything, right down to a shell the size of her pinky nail.
While he envied her crazy room, he didn’t try to emulate it. He liked to store his things away, neatly. But he declared he might hang a poster or two. Yes, he might do that.
He didn’t, of course. Then came December, and Skye asked if they celebrated any holidays, and he said that, besides Eid, his parents recognized the secular side of Christmas, with Santa and gifts and a family meal. So on Christmas Eve, she gave him a present. Two posters. One from the first ATF album they’d listened to together and one from their favorite Doctor Who episode. He put them up that night.
Three days later, Jamil barged into his room to take his deodorant, saying, “Not like you need it yet anyway.”
As Jamil was walking out, he spotted the posters. “What the hell are those?”
“All-Time Five and Doctor Who. Skye gave them to me.”
“A boy band and a geek show? Tell me you just put them up to score points with her.”
Jesse could have said yes. Ended the conversation there. But that wasn’t true, so he said, “I put them up because I like them.”
His brother’s face screwed up in disgust. “You don’t even try, do you? Just keep this door closed when I have friends over.”
Jesse walks to his closet, opens it, reaches into the back corner and pulls out the posters.
They made him happy. He liked seeing them neatly displayed on his wall. He took time with that, measuring the distance from the room corners and using a level to get them just right. Then he lay in bed and admired his work and thought about Skye, and remembered listening to the album and watching the TV show, and her giving him the posters, and how she lit up when he was pleased.
He tugs off one rubber band, and he’s just about to unroll the poster when his phone beeps. A polite beep. Quiet and unobtrusive, but he’s been listening for it.
It’s a text. Just one word: talk?
Jesse: here.
Silence. Silence. He checks his signal, but of course it’s fine.
Skye: that sounds ominous.
Jesse rereads his text and realizes she misinterpreted the single word as terse. He forgot that about Skye. Her own communication is so expressive – her face, her gestures – that she flounders when she doesn’t get that from others.
He remembers that as kids, even after they’d been hanging out for weeks, Skye was still wary, as if she expected him to stop talking to her at any moment. Finally, she gave in to her blunt side and said, “If you’re not okay hanging out with me, just say so. You don’t have to do it to be nice.”
He asked what made her think that, and she said, “I can’t tell with you, Jesse. You seem to like talking to me, but… I just can’t tell.” Which made him laugh, because he’d been worrying he was giving too much away, making a fool of himself.
Skye: Jesse?
He snaps out of his thoughts and sends: here. Then he curses under his breath, and quickly types: everything’s fine. well, not fine, but ok. i think they’re disappointed in me and —
Skye: if it’s a bad time, just say so.
That’s the problem with not using text-speak. It takes so long to type a message that the other person thinks you aren’t answering.
He switches to video chat. It pings Skye, and when she picks up, at first all he sees is… well, boobs. She’s holding the phone at chest height, and his screen fills with her T-shirt, stretched tight across —
“Whoops,” she says, and then starts raising the camera. “Better?”
“Uh…” He starts to laugh, except it’s more of a snicker, a completely embarrassing thirteen-year-old-boy snicker.
“Okay, bad choice of words,” she says, laughing. “It’d be kinda weird if you said, ‘Yes, the view of your neck is much better, Skye.’” The camera continues shifting until he has her face. “There. Perhaps not better, but more appropriate.”
The camera moves again as she flips onto her back, holding the phone over her face. She’s lying atop bedcovers, hair out of her ponytail, fanning around her face, and he’s close enough to see her freckled nose and the birthmark just over her lips, those wide lips parted in the ghost of a smile, green eyes still dancing with her laugh.
He swallows and sits up, cross-legged on the bed. “So, as I was trying to text – very slowly, in full words, because someone is eighty and can’t read text-talk – I spoke to my parents. It went… pretty much as one would expect. Confusion. Disbelief. Quickly disguised disappointment. More confusion.”
“It’ll be okay.”
He has braced for her to offer some meaningless platitudes, tell him his parents weren’t disappointed. Lie to him. Which only proves that he’s still adjusting to having her back.
“Feel better now?” she says softly as she tucks stray hair behind her ear.
He smiles. “Yep. Ripped off the Band-Aid. Hurts like hell. Wish I’d done it long ago.”
“And… exhale.”
He chuckles. “Exactly.” Which is true. That’s how he felt. Like he could finally breathe again. “So how about you? Glad to get it all in the open with Mae?”
Dismay and regret flash, and then she blinks. “Oh, you mean telling her what’s happening.”
“Uh-huh. But that’s not all you got in the open, apparently.”
“Yeah. I… I tried not to. I went into it totally calm. But what I expected was hurt and confusion, like with your parents.”
“What happened?”
“She didn’t believe me.”
“Huh?” He stretches on his stomach, phone in front of him. “Which part?”
“All of it.”
“What?”
“She thinks I set the fire and made that video. I’m clearly in need of attention, having been neglected by my entire family, including her.”
“Her?”
“She’s had to work late. I’ve been traumatized.”
He snorts. “More like relieved.”
“Kind of what I said. Which was, yes, rude. Now I feel bad, but if I go out there to explain, it’ll start all over again. I’m calm now. I’d like to stay calm.”
“Have you had dinner?”
“Not exactly my priority at the moment.”
“Your growling stomach begs to differ.”
She rolls out of sight. When she returns, she’s opening a Hershey bar.
“That’s not dinner,” he says.
She smiles. “You sound like…” The smile falters, and she trails off, and Jesse remembers Luka giving her crap for not eating right.
“I’ll bring you pizza,” he says quickly.
“Is that any better than this?” She waves the bar.
“Sure. Meat, veggies, cheese, bread. All the food groups. I’ll sneak it to you through the window.”
“Did you forget I’m on the twelfth floor?”
“My parents got me a drone for my birthday. I could fly it up.”
“I don’t think it’ll carry a whole pizza.”
“Slice by slice.”
He has her laughing now, and he closes his eyes, just to listen to the sound. When he opens them again, she’s smiling at him, her expression softer, wistful.
“Missed you,” she says.
“Missed you, too.”
Her eyes glisten, as if she’s going to cry, and he quickly says, “Can you sneak out?”
“What?”
“Sneak out and grab dinner with me. Put on music or something so Mae thinks you’re in bed.”
“Wow. That’s downright devious.”
“I’ve changed, remember? Just leave her a note, in case she figures it out, so she doesn’t worry.”
She smiles. “You haven’t changed that much. Yes, of course, I’ll leave a note. Can you get away?”
He nods. “I didn’t storm off. I just retreated.”
“Naturally.”
“I’ll see if I can get the car and text you in a few.”
Jesse walks into the kitchen, where his mother is baking bread. That’s what she does when she’s stressed. For months after Jamil died, Jesse’s dad would make daily food bank runs to donate fresh loaves. Now, when Jesse walks in, his dad is at the table, silently watching as she kneads.
He spots Jesse, nods and goes to leave the kitchen. Jesse motions for him to stay, but he shakes his head and squeezes Jesse’s shoulder as he passes. It’s only then, as his dad leaves, that his mom notices Jesse’s there.
“Oh,” she says.
“Hey, I —”
“I want to talk to you,” she says, and wipes flour from her hands. “About the steroids.”
He stiffens, and then he reminds himself that he’s the one who wanted to come clean. That means he’s going to have to talk about it.
“You said you took them for training,” Mom says. “During the off-season.”
“Yes, but if you’re going to argue that that makes it okay —”
“Did you know what kind you were on?”
He tells her, and she wants to know the dose, and when he finishes explaining, she says, “That’s a common one, and at that dose, it’s hardly going to —”
“Mom…”
More towel wiping, though he doesn’t see a speck of flour on her brown hands. “Steroids serve medical purposes, too, so I’m familiar with them. The one you were on is widespread among recreational weight lifters, and to them, it’s not much different than protein shakes and egg whites.”
“If it wasn’t a problem, my trainer would have asked you to get them for me.”
“Yes, but on a scale —”
“I don’t want to judge this on a scale.”
“Using them for training is very different from using them on the field. Even a drug test wouldn’t have shown any trace. They’d be out of your system.”
“Great. So if I announce that I used steroids for training, no one will care? The coach won’t get in trouble? No one will demand I return my awards?”
She stops the hand wiping. “I’m not sure you’d want to go that far.”
“Exactly. What I did was wrong. I knew it was wrong. I kept doing it.” Jesse leans against the counter. “I made a mistake, and I’m going to ask you to let me own that mistake. I’m not going to publicly announce that I juiced – but only because it would cause problems for the team. I’m just going to quit, okay? But between you and me, we know what happened and that those trophies belong in the trash. Keep the ones I earned. My academic ones. I want to get back to earning more of them.”
She throws her arms around him. “I’m so proud of you.”
He sighs. “I know. Just… don’t be afraid to let me stumble, okay, Mom? I appreciate the support, but these days I really need a kick in the butt more than a pat on the head. Anyway, I was coming in to say that I’m going to visit Skye. She’s dealing with some stuff —”
“That’s right. What happened at school?”
“Stuff.”
“More specifically?”
He checks the microwave clock.
“You can spare two minutes to tell me what’s going on, Jasser.”
“She’s being hassled, and she’s being blamed for it.”
“Blamed for being hassled?” His mother straightens to her full five foot two. “That is unacceptable. Even to suggest that someone is responsible for being bullied —”
“They don’t think she is being bullied. They think she’s making stuff up for attention.”
“It’s that VP, isn’t it? Mr. Vaughn. I don’t know what’s happening in his personal life, but lately he seems to view his job as an inconvenience. I tried to talk to him about your attendance record, and he made excuses for you.”
“Okay, but —”
“Accusing Skye of orchestrating a campaign of bullying against herself is preposterous. It’s an excuse for the school not to dig deeper. I presume Mae is handling it.”
“She’s siding with Vaughn.”
“What?”
“I don’t know what’s going on there. Maybe she’s just confused. Skye’s upset, though, and I want to get her out of the house for a while.”
His mother nods. “Good idea. If you’d like me to talk to her aunt —”
“Mom? No.”
“I just want —”
“You want to help. I know. If things reach that point, then sure. But for now, just let us handle it, okay? We’ll ask for help if we need it.”
When he checks the clock again, she says, “Go. Take my car. Just be home by eleven, please.”