by Amy Giles
Was. That’s why she made that comment about the ceremonies.
“He was at the Balcony too. Jason Rossi.”
Now I know why he looked familiar. Jason Rossi was a senior when I was a freshman. Homecoming king. Star quarterback. Marissa and I went to all the football games just to watch him play, even though we had zero school spirit and even less interest in football. He was that big of a legend.
She tears her eyes off the frame. I recognize her look of pain. No one from the Rockaways is completely immune.
“His brother goes to school with me,” I say.
She picks up her pencil and taps it again. There’s a shift in her mood, a brightening in her voice at the mention of Jason’s brother, Lucas. “You guys know each other? Lucas works here too.”
I lean back in my chair, picturing him. A senior. Quiet. Also built like a skyscraper. “Don’t mess with Lucas” is a golden rule at school.
He’s kind of cute too. Maybe this job won’t suck so much after all.
Reggie drops her pencil on the desk. “We pay eleven dollars an hour. Shifts fluctuate week to week, depending on how busy or slow we are. Any problems with that?”
I shake my head no.
“Okay to start next Monday . . .” She squints at a calendar hanging on her wall. “April third? Just come straight after school.”
I smile, feeling ridiculously proud of myself for landing this probably pretty crappy job.
“Sounds great.”
Halp! What’s the answer to ? #3 on the math hw?
I don’t know. I haven’t gotten to it yet. Ask Siri.
Siri’s a jerk.
Bet you didn’t know her favorite color is green?
You asked her?!!!
I’m awesome that way.
Your awesomeness never ceases to amaze me.
Shmanks.
I’ve been rereading my and Marissa’s old text messages. I could scroll for hours and still not reach the end. They make my chest ache, but these Marissa fixes keep me going, like the oxygen masks that come down in the airplane when the cabin pressure fails.
I haven’t heard from Marissa in months. Boulder Academy for Children and Adolescents with Social and Emotional Challenges doesn’t allow their students to have cell phones or any kind of communication with the outside world. Mrs. Connell told me that they have weekly family therapy sessions over Skype with Marissa, but that’s limited to immediate family only. Being “practically family” doesn’t count for much it turns out.
A lot of kids never came back after that night, like Marissa. The school brought in grief counselors to help the rest of us. The hallways were clogged with people hugging and crying on each other’s shoulders. I didn’t have a shoulder left to cry on.
I squeeze the hard pebble-sized knot inside my earlobe, the second piercing that I had to let close after it got infected. Marissa said that putting the needle in the lighter flame would sterilize it. It didn’t.
I reach in my locker for my biology text, just as Sarah Ochtera’s and Andrew Sarro’s bickering escalates across the hall from me. They’ve been dating for a year now. It got all around school when they first did it, about a month into their relationship. A cautionary tale of the perils of popularity. People really don’t care what I do or don’t do, or who I do or don’t do it with.
“No, please, enlighten me. What wouldn’t I understand?” Andrew throws his arms out by his sides. Andrew wears too much hair product in his thick curly hair. It looks both crispy and greasy, which is only a great combo if you’re an egg roll.
Sarah rolls her eyes but won’t answer him. When she reaches for a textbook from her locker, Andrew grabs her wrist.
“I’m talking to you!”
A few heads turn to watch.
“Get off of me!” she yells back at him, wrenching her wrist away. He slams a hand on either side of the locker, trapping her. There’s a bunch of “oh shits” muttered, but no one does anything.
Except for one person.
Lucas Rossi swoops in, grabbing Andrew by the back of his shirt and yanking him away from Sarah, lifting him off the ground and throwing him back several feet.
“She said get off of her,” Lucas warns.
Andrew cranes his neck to stare up at him, his anger replaced so quickly by fear I expect to see a puddle of pee pooling around his feet. Lucas is maybe the tallest guy at school. Everything about him, from his nose to his feet, seems enlarged 70 percent to fit his enormous scale.
“It’s none of your business,” Andrew says, a statement, not a threat; he doesn’t sound as ballsy as when he was harassing his girlfriend.
“I’m making it my business.”
Andrew holds his hands up in surrender and backs away. He looks at Sarah one last time. “We’ll talk later.”
“Much later,” Lucas adds.
Lucas pivots and turns away, and as he does, our eyes connect through the crowd. He looks at me for a beat, long enough that I feel like he’s placing me in some catalog of his memories. A smile works its way across my cheeks. My hand goes up to wave. I mean, we’re going to work together. I open my mouth to tell him.
“Hey . . .”
Lucas’s expression changes, from anger to mild panic. Because of me?
I abort my wave and pretend I was just pushing my hair behind my ear. But he’s already speeding down the hallway away from me.
The tingling starts in my fingertips. It’s a familiar feeling by now. Everything is too tight: the hallway, my clothes, my throat. I race to the bathroom by the cafeteria. If I’m lucky, Domie or Charmaine will be in there with their stash of weed. A few hits will get me through this. It always does.
Lucas
I meet Pete at his locker seventh period. “I’m heading out early,” I say, swinging my backpack over my shoulder.
“How come?”
Before I can answer, Gwen Welch runs between us and tickles Pete under his armpits. He squeals and folds into himself, giggling as she runs away. He points at her retreating back. “When you least expect it . . . expect it!”
“What was that?” I ask.
“A tickle streak,” he says as if it’s so obvious.
“Between you and Gwen?”
Gwen’s not someone we usually hang out with, but you wouldn’t know it from that tickle. She really got up there.
Pete grabs a sweatshirt from his locker and sniffs. Gagging, he throws it back in. “The whole school.”
“No girl’s ever come up to me to try and tickle me.” I can’t believe I’m jealous of Pete for getting his armpits tickled.
“They’d need a stepladder to reach your rank pits.”
Maybe it’s not just that my pits are so inaccessible though. Maybe I’m putting off some kind of “do not trespass” vibe.
All around me, everyone’s moving on with their lives. A year ago, this place was a war zone. People crying everywhere, all the time. Just walking by someone’s abandoned locker would be a trigger. For me, walking by the gym, the trophy case, destroys me. Their name . . . my name . . . engraved onto plaques, trophies. Photos of my dad in the late eighties, star football player. Then Jason just a few years ago. They were both a big deal here.
People are bouncing back now. Prom was canceled last year, so this year everyone’s even more excited about it. Every time I turn around there’s another promposal going on. Across the hall, Jim Barnes waits on his unicycle by Grace McCurdy’s locker holding up a piece of poster board that says:
WHAT’S MORE FUN THAN RIDING A UNICYCLE?
U*N*I @ PROM!
I heard Aisha Malik is making a fortune coming up with promposal ideas for people; she’s charging fifteen dollars for each one.
Pete taps me on the shoulder. “Hey. I’m supposed to ask you something.”
“What?”
Pete shrugs. “Molly Kane wanted to know if she promposed to you, would you go with her?”
Molly. Long brown hair, blue eyes. Smart, funny, cute.
I wince, a
s if Pete can convey my apologetic look to Molly. “No, sorry. I’m not doing prom.”
Not everyone’s moved on just yet. Definitely not me.
I think about Ethan’s sister waving to me this morning. Pretty girl smiles at you and waves and you run away? Smooth, Lucas. Real smooth.
It’s not like I thought it through. If I could do it over, I would have at least nodded or said hi back before taking off. But every time I turn around there’s another reminder. And sometimes there are just too many of those in one day. Jess Nolan just happened to wave at me when I’d already hit my daily quota.
Pete nods, understanding. “Yeah, that’s what I figured.” He turns away from me and grabs his econ book from his locker. “So where’re you going now anyway?”
My phone buzzes in my back pocket. I know it’s Mom even before I check.
I’m here.
“My mom made a doctor’s appointment for me. Took the first opening they had available.”
“Are you sick?” Pete leans not so subtly away from me.
“No. But she thinks I am, sooo . . .”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah.”
He gets it. Pete’s been my closest friend since we were kids. Everyone acted differently around me after that night. Not Pete. I could always count on him to be himself. He never pumped me for information or tried to get me to talk about my feelings . . . that was Dr. Engel’s job. Pete didn’t hover to make sure I wasn’t springing any new leaks . . . that was my mother’s job. He just showed up, sometimes to just drive around aimlessly with the music blasting at ear-bleeding decibels.
Pete was even the one who got me into boxing last June.
“Hear me out,” he said after suggesting it. His fingers gripped the steering wheel as he tried to explain himself. “I was reading up on this, okay? There’s a boxer who had PTSD after coming out of Iraq. During the day, he had all this anger and anxiety. At night, he couldn’t sleep; every little noise, he’d be hopping out of bed. He said boxing helped him deal with it.”
He may as well have been describing me.
“You read up on it?” I was a little surprised to hear this coming from Pete. My mom, sure. Not Pete.
His ears turned a shade of Got Caught Caring pink, but he laughed it off. “Our bromance is strong.”
I snorted, but I went along with it. “Yeah, okay, sure. Why not?”
The boxing academy Pete found on Seagirt Boulevard was hard-core. The stench of unwashed socks and cheap cologne assaulted us as soon as we walked in. Pete was more direct.
“Smells like ass in here,” he whispered to me behind a hand. “Ass splashed with eau de toilette.”
Around the walls were posters of past and upcoming tournaments and framed signed headshots of Golden Gloves winners and welterweight champions. I recognized one guy by his headshot; he was our local boxing champ, Sergey Aminev.
The gym was packed with determined, focused faces. In the ring, a trainer held up oversized mitts while a girl, solid muscle and shimmering in sweat, threw split-second punches at them as he waved his arms up and down, side to side, their motions choreographed, as if their minds were melded together. A couple of guys were hitting the heavy bag and speed bag tirelessly. In the corner, one brick wall of a dude was jumping rope so fast, the blurred rope was nothing more than an illusion whistling and whipping through the air.
A bell buzzed and all the noise and action stopped.
An older guy in a gray tracksuit that matched his gray hair and goatee was leaning against a wall with folded arms, one leg crossed over the other. He had the kind of smirk that seemed permanently tattooed on his face.
“You looking for someone?”
Intimidated by everything about this guy and this place, I turned to Pete for help.
“Um . . .” I rubbed at my mouth, then my jaw. “I was looking into maybe taking up boxing?”
The guy’s smirk deepened; dimples appeared on either side of his carefully manscaped goatee.
“Taking up boxing?” He threw my words back at me. I could feel my cheeks go thermonuclear. “This isn’t Zumba, kid.”
I grabbed Pete’s arm. “Come on, let’s just go.” But Pete stared this guy down, then gestured skyward to my height.
“Look at him. Do you seriously think he’s cut out for Zumba?”
The guy ran his fingers down his beard. “I hear Zumba’s for everyone. At least that’s what my mother-in-law tells me. Helps with her rheumatoid arthritis.” He was messing with me, I could tell by the crinkle around his eyes.
“Look,” I said. “I came here because . . . I heard it could help me, that’s all.”
“Help you with what?”
“Forget it.” I stopped myself from explaining. Every word I’d uttered since I walked in made me feel like a total idiot.
The bell buzzed and everyone was back in motion, the thwunk thwunk of the jump rope, the thudding smacks of gloves hitting the heavy bag, the dribbling of the speed bag.
Pete huffed a stream of exasperated air. “He was at the Balcony, okay? He’s dealing with stuff. I’m the one who talked him into trying this out.”
The smirk wasn’t as permanent as I thought; it wiped clean off the guy’s face. His skin, already pretty pale, practically turned as gray as his goatee. He rubbed the back of his neck, then looked up at me. “Sorry about that.” In an about-face, he jutted his hand out. “Leo. Leo Springer. This is my gym. And you’re?”
I took his hand and we shook. “Lucas.”
“Lucas? Lucas what?”
“Rossi.”
He looked me up and down, and I could practically hear the information click into place.
Guys like Leo, they knew all about the Rossi family, especially Jason, what he should have been, the hope so many people in the Rockaways had for him to go on and make it big, make a name for all of them. Like Sergey Aminev did.
But then it was over and Leo moved on.
“You run, Lucas?”
“Not really,” I said.
“You’re gonna start.” He waved me to follow him. “Work up to five miles.”
“Five miles?”
Leo stopped and glared at me. “You already giving me lip?”
I shook my head. “No . . . uh . . . how often?”
“Every day, if you’re serious about this. Got it?” I nodded. I was serious, I thought. Was I? I wasn’t sure anymore. I mean . . . five miles!
Leo handed me a jump rope. “Just give me a couple of minutes of this so I can see where we’re starting.” I tripped over the rope, my own feet, before it ever had a fighting chance to whistle and whip through the air.
Leo grabbed the rope from me. “Square one. That’s where we’re starting. That’s fine. You’ll get it. Orthodox or southpaw?”
I tried to remember which was which. “Uhhh . . . ?”
He explained, slowly, like I was having a hard time keeping up . . . which I was. “Do you punch with your right hand or your left hand?” He lifted one fist, then the other, illustrating.
I don’t punch, I wanted to say, but that wasn’t the answer that would get me in. “Right.” I held up my right hand up.
He folded his arms. “Show me your orthodox stance.”
I lifted both fists up in front of my face; he shook his head.
“You’re a righty. So put your left foot forward and left fist up.” He demonstrated for me. “You’re gonna jab with your left, then come out hard with your right.” I got into what I thought would be the proper stance. Leo shook his head again.
“Move your shoulder so it faces your opponent. Legs wider, shoulder width apart. Not so stiff, bend your knees a little, left foot toward your opponent. Loose fists, not so tight. Hold your right hand up here, by your chin. Left hand down in front of your face. Chin down. Eyes up. Okay, hold that.”
I felt stupid, but I held my stance as he stepped back, narrowed his eyes. When my elbows started to slip, Leo’s hand came up, fast, stopping just short of hitting me. I flinche
d. “Hands down, man down. Always keep your hands up.”
While I was still in stance, he smacked me in the gut with the back of his hand. I wasn’t quite ready for this attack either but I managed not to flinch this time. “Not bad. But we want them to be as hard as a stack of cinder blocks.”
He folded his arms again. “You’re obviously a strong kid, but to be a boxer you’re gonna have to bleed for me.” He nodded his head once. “Million-dollar question: Why are you here?”
I knew what he meant, but it didn’t stop that swampy pit in my stomach from swirling. I’d been asking myself that same question since that night. Why am I here? Why me and not Jason?
“I told you . . .” I stumbled.
“Nah. For real. What’s gonna make you get up at five in the morning to run?” He tapped his head. “What’s going to keep you going when you think you got nothing left?”
I didn’t have an answer.
“You ask anyone here and they’ll all have something different to tell you.” He ticked off his fingers. “Money, fame, fitness.” He jutted his hand out to me, as if that might be my answer, and I could borrow it if I liked.
“Ladies!” the guy at the speed bag with the shaved head called out with a big grin.
“Ha, you wish,” Leo hollered back. He thumbed over his shoulder. “Honor’s stepfather told him he’d never amount to nothing. So every time he gets in the ring he’s proving something to himself. ‘I’m somebody.’” Leo jabbed his thumb into his chest.
I took a deep breath, sucking in all the pungent air, waiting for him to kick me out for not having a real purpose yet.
“Follow me.” Apparently not. Then he turned and pointed to Pete. “What about you?”
Pete shook his head with a panicked expression.
Leo held his palm up. “Fine. Stay here, then.”
I followed Leo to his cramped office. Sitting down behind his desk, he pulled out a piece of paper and started writing. “I’ll write you down a bunch of exercises you should start doing right away, okay? How old are you?”
“Seventeen,” I said. “Eighteen in January,” I added.
