“Why?”
“The fresh ones aren’t ripe.”
The radio reporter asks a few more questions, which Macey answers with complete sentences before the reporter closes off with, “This is Clementine Radmore reporting for KDRS 88.8, The Edge.”
After the reporter leaves, Macey hugs the clipboard to her chest and nods her head at the empty pie plates, and I can hear her think, Well done, little pies, well done. If I can talk to a dead girl, Macey can certainly talk to her pies. After we clean the pie table, I walk with Macey to the cafeteria door, and Nate waves me over.
“I can clean up,” Macey says. “There’s not much, and we have plenty of time until the bell rings.”
Which means I have plenty of time to sit with Nate, who sits in his little corner of the cafeteria universe with the people he calls friends. I dig my toes into my flip-flops. This is what I asked for yesterday in the sea cave when I told him I didn’t regret the kiss. I like being with Nate. My world feels right with Nate. And I don’t care who knows it.
I slide onto the seat next to him at a lunch table populated by heavenly bodies, the Del Rey School’s superstars. Across from me is the football player Pen dated all winter. He gives me a strange look, and I blow him a kiss. The Cupcake who went to homecoming last year with Nate stares at me with her mouth agape. I wave. Cousin Pen sits two tables down, and, despite the distance, I hear her groan.
“How were the pies?” Nate asks.
“Peaches with sugared blueberries is the early favorite.”
“How about some flan? My brother Mateo said he wanted you to try his raspberry sauce.” Nate opens a small bowl and hands me a spoon. I take a bite of the puddinglike dessert and let it slide along my tongue. Sweet.
Voices rumble around me. The people to my right talk of division rankings for the track team, and to my left a few others talk about elections for next year’s student body council. Nate, of course, is thinking about running for school president. His shoulder nudges mine. It’s as hard as marble but warm and has that nice, clean Nate smell. “What do you think, Reb?”
“I think being school president sounds like a boatload of work.”
“But it will look good on college apps.”
“And you’ll do a good job,” one of the Cupcakes says.
“But do you have time?” I ask. Nate could join a support group for High School Students Who Do Too Much.
“I’ll have time if I choose to make time,” Nate says.
“Exactly. It all comes down to choices. You have limits on your time, and you have to ask yourself if being class president—running meetings, organizing a trip to Disneyland, and listening to people argue about the senior gift—is really how you want to spend it.”
“There could be worse ways to spend time than beefing up on leadership skills and helping others.”
“Forget about others for a moment.” I point my spoon at the center of Nate’s chest. “If you knew you’d die in a year, would you really run for class president?”
Nate’s gaze grows thoughtful. “No, I guess I wouldn’t.”
“Because …” At this section of the lunch table, the chatter dies.
“Because I’d be doing other things, things that are more important and meaningful to me.”
I smile around another bite of flan. “Exactly.”
“But last time I checked,” says the girl who went to homecoming last year with Nate, “Nate’s heart was very much beating.”
The guy on his right pops him on the shoulder. “You’re not going all cancer on us, are you, Nate-O?”
Nate shakes his head, and his former homecoming date holds up both hands. “Do we really need to talk about death and cancer while we’re eating?” She looks at me and wrinkles her nose. “This really does seem inappropriate.”
I open my mouth and choose to cram in another bite of flan. It’s good. Probably made with fresh raspberries.
The guy next to Nate drags him into a conversation about this week’s baseball game, while the girl on my right points a celery stick at the messenger bag hanging across my chest. “That’s such an interesting … uh … fashion accessory. Where’d you get it? The bottom of the sea?”
Time for another choice. I can sling snark as usual, but these are Nate’s friends, and, contrary to what Cousin Pen thinks, I’m not a bulldozer. I don’t want to cause damage and leave destruction in my wake. “It was my mother’s. She bought it years ago at a thrift store and used it to hold her camera and lenses. It’s been all over the world.”
“A thrift store? Do you get your clothes there, too?” Nate’s former homecoming date pinches her lips into a little O. “Like those undershirts. Um, nice stuff.”
“Yeah, actually. They come from a thrift store off Calle Bonita.”
The first girl shudders. “I don’t think I’d be too comfortable with other people’s used underwear.”
I take another bite of flan, even though I want to take a bite out of Bitchy and Bitchier. All of a sudden I’m back in middle school. I remember eating lunch with a group of fellow unpopulars in the seventh grade—I’d already been ostracized by Cousin Pen and the in-crowd by that time—when one of my friends asked if the new shirt she was wearing made her look fat. It was one of those trendy, scrunchy shirts that hugged every inch of flesh. The shirt bit into her arms and didn’t cover the last roll of pudge of her stomach, even though she kept tugging the hem. Every girl at our table oohed and aahed, offering various versions of “No, it looks fantastic!” I was so confused, I stopped eating. Girls at other lunch tables were snickering and pointing at my friend, who looked not just overweight, but uncomfortable. When my friend asked, “Honestly, Rebel, does this make me look fat?” I simply said, “Yes.” I spent the rest of the year eating alone in the school courtyard because I didn’t understand the language of girls. Now I do, or at least bits and pieces. Nate’s friends at the lunch table want to irritate me, to set me off, to prove to Nate that I don’t belong.
Morons. I take a bite of flan, keep my mouth shut, and scoot closer to Nate.
THE DEL REY TRACK TEAM PRACTICE JERSEY IS orange and yellow and clashes with my hair. Nate’s sister, Gabby, would not be impressed, and she’d have a fit over the shorts, two funky polyester tubes hanging awkwardly around my legs. The shorts are only moderately heinous on the other track team members with their buff legs and golden tans.
I jog to the center of the field, where the championship Del Rey School women’s track-and-field team gathers in a circle and stares at me. I am a curiosity, a standout. Normally I’d take pleasure in that, but this afternoon I feel oddly naked. Maybe it’s because I had to leave my shark-teeth bag in my gym locker.
Pen jogs over, her eyebrows raised. I need a cigarette. Unfortunately, they’re with the shark teeth. “You made it,” Pen says.
“Just show up?”
“Yeah, just show up.” Pen’s eagle eyes roam over me. “Here, you’ll need this.” She slips a ponytail holder from around her wrist. I picture Kennedy’s ponytail, bouncing as she darted to her car in the parking lot after detention. The image is so clear, so bright, along with the realization that she should be here on this track with these people, not me.
People are exactly where they need to be when they need to be there.
A breeze rushes by me, heavy with sunshine and citrus.
I spin in a circle, a crazy part of me searching for a bobbing ponytail.
Pen waves a hand in my face. “Earth to Reb.” My cousin forces the ponytail holder into my clenched fist. “Use this to keep your hair out of your face so you don’t trip and hurt yourself. I swear, sometimes you’re clueless.”
My hand trembles as I tie back my hair with the ponytail holder, and I remind myself that Kennedy is dead. She is not here, and I am here because I made the choice to be here.
Captain Pen leads the group through a series of stretches that involve my nose getting intimate with my kneecap way too many times. After the warm-up, one of the assistant
coaches announces she’s going to put me “through the events” to learn my various base times. I run sprints, and with a perplexed frown she records my times. Her disposition remains far from sunny as we head to the field, where I perform dismally on the long jump and high jump. At the throwing circle, I drop a shot-put on her toe and bang myself in the head with a discus. The coach doesn’t let me near the javelin.
“Let’s try the hurdles,” she says. “You’re pretty short, but we’re down a leaper.” That would be Kennedy. “You’re not jumping over the hurdle so much as using your forward momentum to glide over the bar. You want your lead leg at a ninety-degree angle as you approach the hurdle, driving with the knee, not the toe. On your trail leg, you want your calf parallel with the bar. Got it?”
I get that this sounds like math. At the first hurdle, I have no problem because I sprint around it. A team member standing near the bench folding towels giggles. The assistant coach does not. When I finally get the nerve to leap over the hurdle, my feet tangle in the bar, and I fall, scraping my knee along the rough track surface.
“I think we’ve had enough today,” the coach says. “Why don’t you get the trainer to fix that, and you can call it quits?”
“I’d love to.”
The girl folding towels introduces herself as Liia, the team’s trainer. She directs me to a bench and pulls out a first-aid kit. “Pretty ugly.”
“Are you referring to my knee or my future on the Del Rey School’s track-and-field team?”
With a chuckle, she cleans the dirt and gravel from my skin. As she pulls a bandage from the first-aid kit, I notice a bag of cut-up oranges on her supply table, and for the first time since my pink running shoes landed on the track, I smile. This is the source of the citrus smell, not the spirit of Kennedy Green.
With the bandage in place, I head for the locker room to get my things. I want nothing more than to crawl into my attic and watch the light bounce off jars of sea glass and maybe think about Nate. As I make my way past the baseball practice field, Nate jogs over to the chain-link fence surrounding the field.
“How’d it go?” Nate asks.
“There was blood.”
He rests his forearms on the top of the fence and widens his stance, so we’re eye level. “It’ll get easier, Reb. The first few days of any workout are always the toughest. Coaches need to know where you’re at physically and mentally.”
“It’s not a good place, Nate, so not a good place.”
Nate kneads my shoulders. “Bucket list?”
“Do you need to ask?”
In addition to a megawatt smile that makes me forget about skinned knees and mean girls, today Nate wears baseball pants, stained at the knees and calves, and a DRS varsity baseball shirt.
“Nate!” Some guy near the batting cage waves. “In the box! You’re up!”
His fingers do marvelous things to the muscles along my shoulders. “You should go,” I say, which is clearly not the same as I want you to go.
His hands slide to the back of my neck, and the magic continues. “Yeah,” he says, sighing. “College scouts are coming to next week’s game.”
“And you will duly impress?” Because that’s what Nate does, impresses the world, me included.
“That’s The Plan.”
“The Plan?” I angle my head and look up at him out of the corner of my eye. “Sounds rather impressive.”
“Sixteen years in the making. I’ll be the first in my family to go to college.”
Nate’s dad said something about Nate using his head, not his hands, to make a living. “It’s important to your dad, isn’t it?”
Nate laughs. “Just a little. He bought a file cabinet my freshman year so I could organize all my college planning stuff. This year he spent his Christmas bonus taking me on a college visit to Stanford.”
It must be nice to have so much family support. When I told the residents of the bungalow that I wanted to go to art school, Penelope laughed, practical Uncle Bob suggested I get a teaching degree, and Aunt Evelyn grew uncharacteristically silent.
“Nate!” The guy at the batting cage swings his arm in an angry arc. “Get in gear!”
“Gotta go before Coach has a coronary.” Nate leans against the fence, the chain-link groaning, and pulls me toward him. He brushes a kiss on my lips, feathery soft, sweetly cool. The pains in my knee and neck disappear.
Someone in the dugout lets out a catcall. Nate pulls away and heads for the batting cage while I head for the locker room and another bucket-list item.
The list. It’s all about the list, and when I’m done with Kennedy’s list, when I’m no longer living out her dreams and desires, she’ll be gone, and I’ll be back to myself, to my old life, which means no more track team, no more ugly turtles, no more skinned knees.
In the locker room, I shower and change and wonder if the new version of my old life will include Nate. Once I’m no longer channeling do-gooder Kennedy, he may no longer want to rub the tension from my neck and warm me to the tips of my toes. He may realize I’m not the girl for him.
I shove my sporto stuff into my messenger bag and hurry out of the locker room. I don’t have time to worry about Nate. The bucket list beckons. I check the time and start to jog as fast as my wounded knee will allow. I need to be at the mall in twenty minutes, so I take a shortcut under the stadium bleachers.
“Hey, Reb!” One of the guys from the baseball team runs toward me. “You dropped something.” Afternoon light slants through the bleachers, striping everything, including the pink tennis shoe dangling from his fingertips.
I toss the shoe into my bag. “Thanks.”
“Is that all I get?” He hooks a hairy knuckle around the strap of my bag. “I heard you’re giving Nate a little more than thanks.”
I unhook his finger. “I need to go.”
He edges closer, his entire body striped with shadow. “Come on, Reb, give a little.”
“Give me a break, ass-wipe.” I sling my bag across my chest and hurry through the striped light.
He jumps in front of me and walks backward. “We both know a guy like Nate is with you for one reason.” He runs a Neanderthal knuckle along my arm. “How about—”
I swat away his hand and duck under his armpit, gagging on the putrid stench.
“I get it. A girl like you likes it a little rough.” He grabs both of my shoulders, his hands chilling manacles, and jerks me back toward him.
Something cold and sharp twists in my stomach as he grins, one hairy hand groping my tank. The striped shadows deepen, sending slashes of black across his face.
I bend my knee, as if I’m about to bolt over a hurdle, and kick. He grunts and doubles over. My heart thundering against the shark teeth, I lean over his folded body and whisper in his ear, “A girl like me isn’t afraid to kick a guy like you in the balls.”
I grab a handful of napkins from The Pretzel Man cart in the Del Rey Fashion Mall food court and rub my arm, trying to wipe off Neanderthal Boy’s touch. I rub harder, but there’s no heat. My skin is cold, my blood colder.
With a hard toss, I throw the napkins into the trash and search for a man in a Star Wars T-shirt. From my vantage point in front of the pretzel cart, I spot one guy in a Star Trek T-shirt and two Doctor Whos. The guy in the Star Trek T-shirt stands on his chair.
“Star Trek?” I say. “The instructions in the e-mail said he’d be wearing a Star Wars T-shirt.”
Next to me a lady hands each of the toddlers in a double stroller a soft pretzel stick and stands. “Mine, too. Maybe he got tired of doing laundry. I could see that. I’m so tired of laundry.” Her voice is low and raspy, like the gasp of air from a deflating balloon. “Everyone told me to use disposable diapers: my sisters, the women in my mom’s group, my husband, but I wanted to do things right, for the twins, for the environment. You know?” She stands close to me, and our shoulders touch.
“Uh … sure.”
“But there are some days when I can’t stand it. The sme
ll of bleach. The snowy white piles.” Her head spins in a dizzy circle. “They’re like mountains.”
“Snow-covered mountains,” I say, my head spinning in tandem with hers.
She closes her eyes and tilts her head back as if her neck can no longer support the weight of her thoughts. “Some days the diaper mountains are too steep to climb.”
“So let them go without diapers,” I say. “My mom did.”
The woman’s eyes burst open. “Really?”
“She hated housework.” Which is one of the reasons we never had a house.
One of the toddlers fusses, and the woman hands him the entire carton of pretzel sticks. “And you survived.”
I laugh. “Yeah, I did.”
The woman squeezes my hand. “I can’t wait. Are you ready?”
For another bucket-list item: Participate in a flash mob. Um, yeah, I can wait, especially with my bandaged knee, which still throbs from my intimate encounter with the track hurdle. And I’m still feeling chilled from the jerk groping me under the bleachers, because for half a heartbeat, I was afraid he was going to take something I’d chosen not to freely give. For a moment I was powerless.
The overcrowded food court buzzes with voices. Light pours in from the skylights over the central atrium, and all around us food pops and sizzles and steams. This place should be hot. Even in my tank, I should be sweating, but I can’t shake the cold.
Mr. Star Trek raises his arm.
“Time to get into position.” The woman with diaper issues giggles and squeezes my hand. “This is so exciting.”
People pour into the food court like ants, spilling out of shops and sliding away from tables. I picture Mr. Phillips’s ants from biology, the ones that build bridges with their bodies, locked together, a mass of tiny creatures capable of big feats. Laundry Mom and I stand near the stroller as people gather around us. A guy my age with a shaved head and a gray-haired woman with practical shoes stand in front of us.
Goodbye, Rebel Blue Page 12
