“Listen to me. Listen good. He’s after something. And if he gets it, I’ll snap off his—”
“Hassan.”
Apparently it wasn’t the right thing to say, as Edy’s face turned like the clouds on thunder’s approach. “Go. Away. Find someone else to babysit,” she said.
She started for the house. Hassan took after. Edy wasn’t listening. She wasn’t even trying to listen. Instead, she wanted to scramble everything he said.
Well, he’d make her listen. “Edy—”
She whirled on him, eyes wide, nostrils flared. “Let me guess. He’s using me. Because no one could actually want me, right? I’m not some redhead with humongous boobs and kissable lips!”
“Edy,” Hassan said. “Would you stop that, please? You don’t know . . . ”
But the truth was, he didn’t know. He didn’t know what he was feeling or what his next words would be.
“Forget it,” she said, face suddenly slacked with fatigue. “It’s nothing. I just—” She turned away from him, “you should leave me alone right now.”
Hassan stared at her back, rigid with resolve. And yet . . . he had this overwhelming urge to say some- -thing, do something, to connect with her so that the ice and the freeze evaporated between them.
“Cake—”
She slipped into the house, silent; no longer interested in anything he had to say.
~~~
Wyatt crossed the street to the Phelps’ house at the exact moment that Hassan exploded from the front door. Hassan stalked down Edy’s walkway, burst through the fence, and made it halfway down the sidewalk when he stopped, taking note of Wyatt.
She chose me, Wyatt reminded himself. Hassan was there to walk her, but she chose me.
Be steady. Be steady, despite Hassan’s caustic glare. No ass kicking will actually commence.
The front door flung open again, and Edy stormed out, stopping to kick it closed behind her. She slung a backpack on and threw up her hood before charging from the yard onward, in the direction of practice. Without Wyatt.
So much for victories.
He took off at a trot to catch her. “Hey, wait! Did you forget about me?”
He didn’t see how she could, when he took so much care to ensure she didn’t: lunch every day, walks home from school and to practice, text messages, phone calls, emails. Wyatt not only had Edy’s schedule memorized but knew every nook and cranny of it that he could exploit.
She shot him an impatient look.
“I have to get to practice, okay? So, if you’re not ready to go—”
She glanced down at his hooded sweatshirt, no doubt looking for a coat he didn’t own.
“I was standing right here, ready,” Wyatt said. “Here before you.”
Hassan called out to her from his place on the sidewalk. Wyatt hesitated.
“Edy,” Wyatt said. “You don’t have time to—”
She headed back.
Wyatt backtracked, too, staying just close enough to be in hearing range but just out of arm’s reach. Since the moment he had taken to being Edy’s constant companion, Hassan’s brooding glares had registered as adequate warning. Wyatt treaded near him with care.
Edy went to Hassan, who stood with hands burrowed in his pockets, eyes weary and thoughtful.
He pulled her into his arms.
Long seconds passed, maybe even a minute, where he held her. Only held her. His chin brushed against her forehead—maybe even his lips, before he murmured something, too soft for Wyatt’s ears. When they parted again, their hands were the last to separate. Edy turned back to Wyatt, eyes brimming with the threat of tears.
“What?” he whispered the second she stood close enough. “What’s happened?”
Wyatt verified that Hassan was out of hearing range before speaking his next words. While he had no means to punish Hassan for any form of maltreatment, it seemed that implying he could or would, would only help his cause.
“Tell me what he said,” Wyatt insisted. “Now.”
She looked up with eyes way too beautiful, brimming with intensity, more alive than ever.
“He asked me if I still knew he’d run away with me,” Edy whispered. “That he’d take it, if that were ever an option.”
She choked out a hiccupping laugh, wiped her face on her sleeve, and took off, leaving Wyatt to look from one of them to the other, desperate to understand a message never meant for him.
~~~
Wyatt supposed that coming to South End qualified as a raw deal. After all, he’d been jettisoned over the course of a week from the known to the unknown, and the unknown had been about as receptive of him as the bars in Charterdee were of his dad. When the pressing need came for Wyatt and his family to get out of town, South End became their first and only option. But it wasn’t the roll of the die it appeared to be. Wyatt’s mom, who had once been as beautiful as her one-time supermodel sister, called on that sister to bail them from yet another nightmare. She did so with a caveat, as everything came from Cecily Jacobs with a tangle of strings attached. Wyatt’s aunt, who lived in Milan, wanted property in Sci-Sci, though real estate was rare there. One house sat on the market and it had done so for close to a decade. Since Wyatt’s dad was something of a handyman, Cecily agreed to buy the property and rent it out to them at a significant discount, should the Greens fix it up while there. While no one liked to be indebted to Cecily for anything, it was a solution at a time when no others appeared.
Not every face was unfamiliar to Wyatt at South End High. After all, his mother’s roots came back there, even if her downtrodden state didn’t show it. Still, those were his mother’s memories, not his own, and at a time when he could only grin and bear conditions he’d brought on, Wyatt looked forward with breath-stealing trepidation to his new start. How could he not? He spent every free moment thinking of the girl he’d met on his first day. He anticipated every brush with her in the hall, only to replay it in his mind, like a game changer at the Super Bowl. The walks home, the ballet, he longed for the days when he could do more than watch her, when he could reach out and hold her, when his lips could demand hers, when she trembled for his touch. It was all he thought about, every day, without end.
Wyatt pushed through the press of a bustling hall at lunchtime, eyes keen in their search for Edy. They met at the space between his locker and hers, every day since the first meal they’d shared. Three minutes from math to the meeting place for her, fifteen seconds from world history there for him.
But he was only a little late that day, held up by a bumbling and hulking black guy in a football jersey who had a ton of questions and no clue how to get out the way. An awkward shift left and an awkward shift right and finally Wyatt resigned himself to explaining what they’d just been tested on. What was the point, he wondered. But the boy said he’d wanted to know for future reference.
Wyatt made it to the place where the lockers met the fountains at the exact same moment that he spotted Hassan. Hassan draped an arm around Edy and wheeled her in the direction of the cafeteria. She tossed a look back only to have their field of vision split by two copies of the same person.
Four hands seized Wyatt by the shirt and pitched him headfirst into a pile of people. Everyone scattered, shrugging away from his outstretched hands, backs at the wall in an instant. The crowd’s density saved him for a second, keeping him from a fall before hands pawed him again. Matthew and Mason, Mason and Matthew, Wyatt couldn’t tell one from the other. No matter, both held him, gripping him by the shirt, wrenching it up to his throat and exposing his back to the masses.
They laughed, expectation painting everyone’s faces.
“Bathroom,” one twin said and they hurled Wyatt toward it. The first paused to open the door, the second to fling him in. “You’ve got two minutes to convince us you’re not trying to get your pogo stick in Edy.”
“What? No!” Wyatt didn’t even know which twin had spoken. Mouth dry, throat closed, he looked from one to the other, pulse shallow, bre
ath absent.
Lawrence slipped in, closed the door behind him, and leaned against it. One of his older brothers took a seat on the sink’s ledge; the other hovered over Wyatt.
“Jesus,” Wyatt said, cheeks flushed with the shame of their words. “I just got to this school. I just met her.”
“Wrong answer,” Lawrence said from his place at the door.
Wyatt glanced at him, then back at the twins. God, did his stomach burn. Acid simmered in his gut like a cauldron, bubbling straight up to his throat. He needed a defense. Yet, one wouldn’t come.
“Losing time,” the twin on the sink warned.
“We’re friends,” Wyatt said. “Please.”
The bathroom door jarred. Lawrence barreled into it, stilling whoever had been on the other side.
Wyatt stiffened. “We eat lunch together,” he blurted. “And walk home. We talk on the phone sometimes. But that’s all. I swear.”
“Sounds like a man expecting something to me,” said the sink twin.
“Just punch him,” said the other.
“No! Please. We’re not doing anything,” Wyatt cried. “We just hang. Come along and see if you want.”
Sink twin rose; smile broad when he clapped Wyatt on the shoulder.
“Now that’s more like it,” he said. “Start inviting us. Or find something better to do.”
That afternoon Edy texted him in study hall, asking what happened at lunch. It was then that Wyatt saw the black guy who’d blocked his exit from class before the Dyson twin run in. This time, he could recall the boy’s name. Kyle Lawson. One of Hassan’s boys.
How had he forgotten?
Wyatt turned back to his phone, all the while considering. He thought of Edy’s eyes, sweet, brown, enchanting. He thought of her mouth, full, lush, and tempting. He thought of her touch and wanted it, in his hand, on his skin. He thought of Kyle, looked over, and thought again.
Wyatt deleted the text message, concentrated on facing front, and avoided Edy’s questioning stare.
~~~
Days passed. Edy with Wyatt, Edy with Wyatt, EdywithWyatt. Hassan knew because people were so eager to tell him.
But why did it bother him so?
Hassan ventured over to his bedroom drawer and pulled out a weathered, well creased world map. Blue markings delineated every place he and Edy had been by land, sea, or air in every time zone on earth. Copenhagen. Cape Town. Cairo. Kolkata. Bangkok. His parents’ hometowns of Delhi and Chandigarh. Back when their fathers fled the city limits at the slightest promise of research, Hassan and Edy hadn’t been far behind, wide-eyed, pitiful, and determined to go. They’d get lost in cities others saved pennies to go to. As a boy, Hassan swore that he and Edy would turn his battered map blue, visiting every place that man inhabited and maybe one or two places that man didn’t.
He hadn’t counted on growing up.
Hassan folded the map away without looking at it and ventured to the window. Edy’s window faced back, eclipsed in darkness, swallowed in the still of the night.
He wasn’t jealous.
He absolutely wasn’t jealous.
Hassan shut his eyes and pressed the flat of his forehead hard against iced and unforgiving glass. Redirect. Redirect to a big play, to the adoration of all those girls, to tossing the pigskin with Nathan. Edy. Edy and Wyatt. Edy.
Damnit.
Hassan lifted his head. He imagined Edy calling her new friend on a night she couldn’t sleep, a night like this one. She wouldn’t know that Hassan stood there, watching, willing to come if only she’d call.
He imagined Edy wanting Wyatt for company after some fitful sleep, welcoming him as if he were Hassan. And Wyatt, Wyatt skulking across the yard and up their tree before yanking open her bedroom window. And Hassan knew what he would do, what he would do when the doors were shut and the windows were shut, and only the two of them were alone.
The corners of his mouth snatched down and hands clenched into merciless fists.
Wyatt would slip into her bedroom and lace his fingers with hers. He’d draw her in close, hand at the little dip above her backside. But would she tilt for him and welcome him? Would she want him? Because that was the question, wasn’t it?
Hassan turned from the window with a groan.
Wyatt would kiss, touch her, and would slip underneath Hassan’s window to do it.
Never.
Hassan pulled on jeans over pajama pants, slipped into a hooded sweatshirt and crept downstairs, careful to avoid the creaking third stair. Once out, he ventured to the edge of the yard and became the silhouette facing Edy’s house.
What did he hope to see? Or learn?
He squinted at her window. Frost slicked the tree he’d need to climb to get in, though it was a feat he’d accomplished before. Carefulness and a steady hand would bring him to her.
But then what?
Once, invitations had been unnecessary, and he could have yanked her window open at any hour of any day and she’d have been there for him, for whatever he needed.
Wyatt had changed that.
Except he hadn’t. And he had.
Hassan’s wanting to protect Edy had begun like all things good: pure and unsullied with the mark of selfishness.
But then it changed, warping from the inside out till the nasty workings of its interior revealed their true selves.
Rain began to fall. It pelted in freezing needles, demanding his attention. What was happening to him? What was happening to them?
The answers he sought were right there, beneath his nose, if only he could focus.
He didn’t want Edy with Wyatt Green. It ate at every good thing in him, till only the nastiness remained.
He wanted to call her name, if only to know that she’d still answer, that she still felt the connection that always drew them near.
He wanted to tell her about how little he trusted Wyatt and how it blistered to be replaced. Those feelings had him standing beneath her window in the rain at night. He imagined himself gaining courage, scaling the tree and telling her the truth, whatever that meant.
No.
Don’t even think.
Sports kept him disciplined and discipline was a gift.
He redirected and considered the options.
He didn’t want Edy with Wyatt. There were ways to address that. As for everything else . . . he wondered how much things had truly changed.
They still saw each other every day at school and for dinner most nights. They still whispered across the dinner table and had covert conversations with their eyes at school, around their parents, everywhere. And she still visited him on the sidelines after every game, albeit with the pale one in tow. Each time Hassan saw him, he had an irrepressible urge to bury him under the earth, take Edy by the hand, and . . .
He envied Wyatt. Not for the time he spent with her, but for the unhindered way he looked at her. As if loving her were the most natural thing in the world.
Hassan’s head began to throb.
Girls called him. All the time. Girls who liked the idea of a guy who could strong-arm on the field, who could take an everything or nothing moment and come out victorious every single time. He thought of the redhead whose name he couldn’t recall. He thought of other girls, too.
The week after her, some strange girl had sauntered up to his locker and planted her mouth on his, right in front of the guys. At a party the following weekend, an older girl with beer-laced breath had pinned him to a wall and asked why he hadn’t taken advantage of her yet. He’d stared, at a loss for comebacks that usually came easy. At another party, one where he’d rushed too many beers, the blonde cheerleader Sandra Jacobs had offered to dance with him, only to grind so rough and rugged his hard-on sprung like a jack-in-the-box. A whisper in his ear said she wanted to go upstairs and liberate him. She had been easier to get rid of. Another week and another party brought a girl named Adelita, also keen on freeing the rod. The easies came faster than he could count, faces a blur, with temptation lasting th
e length of a lit match before revulsion settled deep.
He would make himself enjoy them. Girls who wanted to kiss and touch and make him their first, all because of what he did on the field.
He tried to imagine wanting to talk, to open up, to share the strangeness of this new life with one of them. He tried to imagine his moments of weakness before games: the vomiting, the trembling, the uncertainty. He couldn’t do it.
Hassan pictured a girl among them that could switch from English to Hindi and Hindi to Punjabi on a whim. They would leap from the technicalities of football to the jumbled thoughts that waded in his head: on politics, religion, philosophy, or what it meant to be American and the child of immigrants. He tried to imagine a girl not laughing when he pondered the likelihood of reincarnation and figured out how to link even that to football. Then he tried to imagine her not being Edy.
It wasn’t the first time he’d had the thought, only the first time it weighed so heavy, and shoved so insistent. Still, he rejected it, buried it, and managed a laughed for being absurd.
Girls called him all the time. Tall ones, short ones, smart ones, dumb ones—a lot of girls who weren’t Edy. It was time he called them back.
It was time Hassan proved to himself what his parents insisted all along: that there was someone out there for him. Someone other than Edy Phelps.
Eight
Winter ripped in harsh. Stark, snow blinding, arctic glacial days bled to mind numbing nights, resolute in unyielding bleakness. Even the thin, scattered clouds seemed iced, a mirror of the permafrost blanketing the city. Keeping warm became a perpetual task of diligence, with thickly layered clothes, puffy coats, hats, scarves, mittens and lumberjack boots the only things keeping Edy alive.
Thanksgiving loomed, and along with it, her birthday. Early Monday morning, the Phelps’ phone shrieked. At a wink past six, Edy stumbled from bathroom to hall, grasping for bearings as no one but her seemed able to hear it. Slippered feet dragging, fist rubbing her eye, she got to the call, mumbled a hello, and received word that the secretary of state would be put on the line.
She tore out for her father, yelling for him as she went. Seconds later, she stood in the doorway of her parents’ bedroom with her father’s back to her as he picked up the phone in his room. Her mother, ill content to sit on the edge of the bed, paced before Edy’s father, arms crossed, body rigid with the tenseness of the moment.
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