The Possible

by Tara Altebrando

“I thought you’d be more excited,” she said.

  “Oh, I am.” I smiled, and I held up a fist for a bump. “Looks like I’ll be going to junior prom after all.”

  •••

  When my shift was done I found Aiden in a chair by the shuffleboard courts with his baseball hat over his face. His T-shirt said That Petrol Emotion in paint-splatter letters. Probably a band I’d never heard of—a band nobody I knew besides Aiden had heard of. He was a little bit annoying like that.

  I sat down next to him. “What’s shaking?”

  He sat up and put his hat back on his head. “Nothing much.”

  I stretched my legs out on the lounger.

  “Guess you heard the big news,” he said.

  “Yep.” He’d probably heard it from Chiara, too.

  “So you can stop making fun of me now,” he said.

  “Wait,” I said. “What news are you talking about?”

  “I asked Kathryn Barlett-Austin to prom.”

  “Oh,” I said. “That’s not the news I was talking about.”

  “What’s your news, then?” he asked.

  “Princess Bubblegum and Bennett broke up.”

  “Ah.” He nodded but didn’t look at me. “So you’re in the clear now.”

  “Yup,” I said.

  He said, “Good luck with that,” and even though he was being sarcastic I brightly said, “Thanks!”

  I got up and said, “So wait. Kathryn Barlett-Austin, she said yes? Did she have to consult the rest of the Rachels first, maybe get Rachel Platten on the line to approve?”

  “Of course she said yes.” He put his cap back over his face. “Only an idiot would say no to me.”

  I walked off singing, “This is my fight song,” and he threw a towel at me.

  •••

  When the bonfire got going down by the lake I threw on a hoodie and kicked off my flip-flops at the top of the stairs and headed down to the sand. A small crowd was gathered while club staff stoked the fire. My parents had gone home with my grandmother, so I was on my own.

  Bennett was talking to a guy I didn’t know. I positioned nearby without being too obvious, purposely staying on the opposite side of the fire to Aiden and Kathryn. She was nice enough, but I didn’t need to be near it if they were all giddy about prom.

  I kept looking over at Bennett, hoping to make eye contact, but he and his friend were obviously seriously into whatever it was they were talking about.

  I watched the fire while I waited—longer this time, before trying to catch his gaze again—and watched the sparks pop up into the air. I wondered about how long each one would burn, where each one would land. Whether any of them would singe some woman’s white linen tunic or leave a fleeting burn on someone’s nose. It seemed strange, all of a sudden, that bonfires were a thing that people actually enjoyed. All those little fire starters with malice on their minds.

  My phone dinged and as much as I didn’t want to be the kind of person who checked their phone at a bonfire on one of the first truly beautiful nights of the year, I couldn’t resist.

  It was a text from Coach Stacey that I didn’t bother reading because I had a better idea. I pulled up the Paperless Post invite.

  I took a few steps toward Bennett and said, “Check this out.”

  He looked at me funny, like noticing something new about me, then he read from my screen. “That’s awesome,” he said.

  “Right?” I slid my phone into my front hoodie pocket. “I did my interview on Saturday.”

  “How’d it go?”

  “Good, I think.” I nodded. “You ever try it?”

  He sort of laughed. “Try what?”

  I wagged my phone. “Bending a spoon.”

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “I mean, I’ve tried moving stuff. And controlling dice rolls and stuff. I think I moved this little plastic ninja thing once.”

  “Seriously?” I said.

  He nodded.

  “That’s awesome,” I said. “I’ve been watching a lot of stuff on YouTube about TK.”

  “My girlfriend”—he stopped suddenly—“I mean, my ex-girlfriend, thought maybe you used your TK to clobber her with a branch.”

  “That would be pretty crazy,” I said. Then I smiled and said, “Why would I do that?”

  “Beats me,” he said, then he seemed to be running me through some kind of scanner, checking me out.

  There was no point in backtracking now. I said, “Do you still have it? The ninja?”

  “I think so, yeah.”

  “Maybe you could try to do it again?”

  He seemed to be studying my chest when he said, “You going to help?”

  Chiara came over and hooked my arm and said, “Hey. Come on. Everyone’s over here.”

  I let her pull me away but said, “I was with Bennett, you idiot. We were talking. We’re going to, like, hang out.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Oooops.”

  But it felt good to be with her and Aiden and even Rachel, or, um, Kathryn, and some of the other lifeguards. I saw how awesome summer was going to be. Everything was going according to plan.

  I said, “I think it’s safe to say we can go dress shopping.”

  Chiara gave me a skeptical face, her mouth curled up to one side.

  “I’m telling you,” I said. “I got this.”

  •••

  I dreamed about Jack.

  We were on Fire Island together. We had no idea how we’d gotten there or how to get around. I’d never actually been to Fire Island; had only heard about it—like how you had to bring everything you needed to survive your visit, basically, like it was some uninhabited new frontier before you got there.

  We asked a woman for directions to the beach and she pointed down a long path between rows of crooked houses, like it should have been obvious, and really, it was.

  We found a stand selling lemonade and ice cream and got one cup and one cone and sat until the ice cream started to melt all over Jack’s hand—it was some red flavor that looked like blood—and he cried.

  I said, “I’ll get us home. Don’t worry.”

  I handed him some napkins.

  BENNETT WAS LEANING ON MY locker with one foot braced up against it. It was a scene I’d imagined a thousand times, probably—him waiting for me, me going to him—and now that I was in it, living it, I felt like someone else. An imposter in my own life.

  “Hey,” he said, pushing off the locker wall.

  “Hey.” My throat dried right up again.

  “So you want to like, hang out after school today? Ninja thing? My parents won’t be home.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Definitely.”

  “Cool.” He took out his phone and said, “Give me your number.”

  So I did, then he said, “Texting you now.”

  I dug through my bag for my own phone, woke it up. “Got it,” I said.

  He nodded—“I’ll text you later”—and walked off.

  I whispered, “Yes, you will,” to myself when he was gone.

  •••

  •••

  Easy with the caps, Liana.

  I wrote back to ask her if I could bring someone.

  I could ask Bennett. That would make it easier for him to ask me to junior prom. Things were coming together perfectly.

  •••

  •••

  Helen stopped at my desk on her way to her desk in chemistry. “Missed you at practice Saturday.”

  “Yeah, I had this bug or something.”

  “That’s not what I heard,” she said. “I heard you were in the city being interviewed for a podcast. And anyway, I saw you at the bonfire last night. You seemed fine.” She huffed. “Just because you’re the best person on the team doesn’t mean you don’t have to practice.” She tilted her head. “Unless, you don’t actually have to practice.” She gave me a meaningful look.

  I said, “Of course I do.”

  “That no-hitter was pretty incredible,” she said. “I
never saw anything like it.”

  “I’ve been doing a lot of drills in my backyard,” I lied. “It’s finally starting to show.”

  Tests were being handed out. She drifted away. Words swam on the page. I blinked and blinked again. Maybe I needed glasses.

  •••

  “How’d you do?” Aiden asked on our way out of the room when the bell rang.

  “Okay, I think. You?”

  “Good,” he said, which was what he always said.

  “Oh, hey,” I said. “I have this thing after school. Can you get a ride from someone else?”

  He tilted his head, and his eyes focused on mine in a way they never did in casual conversation. He said, “Sure. No problem.”

  “There you are!” Coach Stacey was coming at me. “Feeling better?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Finally.”

  “Can we talk?” She nodded down the hall toward her office.

  “Sure.”

  •••

  “I’ve been hearing things I don’t like,” she said, as soon as she was seated at her desk. “Like how you weren’t actually sick. And now there’s some podcast you’re involved in. Something paranormal?”

  “Yes, my birth mother is the subject of an FPR podcast,” I said. “I’ve been interviewed.”

  “I didn’t know you were adopted.”

  “No reason you would,” I said.

  “Listen, Kaylee. All I really wanted to do was check in and make sure you’re okay. We need you to be all in for this tournament.”

  “I know,” I said. “I am.”

  “Okay, then I’ll see you later at practice.”

  “Wait. What?”

  “I e-mailed everyone a reminder? It’s on the schedule I handed out?”

  “Oh,” I said. I made a wincing face. “I’m so sorry but I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s complicated,” I said, thinking up a lie. “It has to do with meeting my birth mother and it’s sort of, well, private.”

  “I’m going to e-mail you the schedule again,” she said. “Now go; I don’t want to make you late. But I’ll tell you this. I’ve got my eye on you.”

  •••

  What did that mean?

  •••

  In the second-floor girls’ bathroom right before dismissal I overheard two girls:

  “What a freak. I heard she once slashed all the pages in someone’s notebook with just her mind but she never admitted it. In like third grade or something.”

  “Seriously?”

  “That’s what I heard!”

  “When does it start?”

  “Next week, I think? We have to listen.”

  “Totally.” The door squeaked open.

  When they’d gone I went out to wash my hands. I looked at myself in the mirror. I smiled. I’d never been the kind of person people talked about. Turned out I liked it.

  •••

  I met Bennett in the parking lot and we both got in our cars so I could follow him home. My parents wouldn’t like that I was going home with a boy they didn’t know—he’d said his parents wouldn’t be home—but the list of things they didn’t like about me and my behavior was only going to get longer anyway. Because I was going to go to the party on Friday, and I probably wasn’t going to tell them for fear they’d forbid me.

  •••

  The walls of his room were dark blue and covered with posters for movies or bands I’d never heard of. It was a blur of melting faces and shiny blades and words like “Evil” and “Return” and “Slaughter.” For a second I thought there was no window but it was just that it was covered with heavy drapes. He turned a light on and it lit the corner, but the rest of the room resisted. I slipped into the desk chair, still with my backpack on. I let it slide down to the carpet at my feet. “It’s dark in here.” I laughed awkwardly and tried to shut it down.

  “I like it like this,” he said, then he pulled a plastic ninja out of a small drawer on his desk. He held it out in his palm and I took it, studied it.

  “This is the one?” I said. It was a run-of-the-mill toy, like something from inside a Cracker Jack box. I handed it back.

  “Do you think it’s possible you inherited some TK?”

  “Maybe,” I said, and it felt like a victory to have admitted even that small thing. I liked the feeling. I kept talking. “I mean, I’ve had some weird things happen in my life. Like once my parents were fighting about a light and I was mad at them for fighting about something so dumb and the light, like, exploded.”

  “No way.”

  I nodded, feeling powerful, brave.

  “Let’s try now,” he said. “Together.”

  We stared at the ninja for a good long while but it didn’t move.

  He stood up quickly. “I have dice around here somewhere. We can try that.”

  I watched him move around his room, opening drawers.

  I was alone with Bennett Laurie.

  In his bedroom.

  It hardly seemed possible. My fingers twitched in my pocket. I wanted to tell someone. Chiara, I guess. To make it feel more real. I pinched my arm instead.

  “Found them.” He held the dice up in his hands, then came toward me and sat on the floor. I slid down to join him on the black-and-white shag carpet. I was wearing a skirt so had to sit sidesaddle. The rug’s coarse hairs scratched my legs.

  Bennett grabbed a game board from a box and put it on the rug upside down, its surface shiny and black.

  “You first.” He held out the dice and I took them. “Try for two sixes.”

  I closed my eyes and took my time with it, imagining him taking advantage of the chance to study me—admire me, even—up close. If I sat there long enough, even better if I rolled sixes, he’d want me.

  I let the dice fly.

  A two and a three.

  Not even something interesting, like snake eyes. Disappointment flashed in his eyes but he shook it off and collected the dice. “I’ll try for the same.”

  He closed his eyes and I took him all in, unabashedly. I locked eyes on his lips, noting the lines of them, their slight gloss. I shifted to his eyelashes, thick and clumpy like after a good cry. His cheekbones were hard and rounded like hammerheads under his skin. He rolled, opened his eyes. We both looked down. A pair of twos.

  “My turn.” I wanted to prolong this time together, draw out the game. “I’m going for sixes again.”

  I concentrated so very hard. I used every part of my brain that I could access, but I still had to try to block out the noise of his breathing and the scratching of the rug on my leg, and it was so very hard to think about one thing. Dice. Sixes.

  I rolled.

  Two sixes.

  “You did it!” He shifted, knelt. Picked up the dice. “What’d you do differently that time?”

  “I have no idea. I think I was, like, super focused. In the zone.”

  “Okay, okay.” He tossed the dice back and forth in his hands a few times, then cupped them to roll. “I’m going to try again.”

  And it seemed on the one hand sort of silly, that we were here together, trying this, but it also felt real.

  What if I really had done it?

  What else could I do?

  He rolled a pair of fours and exhaled disappointment. “I’ll have to practice.”

  “You’ll get there,” I said. Like I was some guru? He didn’t seem to mind.

  When the silence was too much for my nerves, I said, “I’m going to go visit her. In prison.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yeah. Well, I mean. I applied to get approved. There’s this whole process. I don’t even know if or when it’ll happen.”

  “It’s pretty crazy when you think about it,” he said. “Your mom. In prison. Murder.”

  “Yeah, I don’t really think of her as my mom.” I felt a sudden surge of wanting to cry.

  •••

  He grabbed me by the arm and pulled me toward him as I was stepping out of the
front door of his house a while later.

  “Not so fast,” he said, moving closer still, pushing a piece of my hair behind my ear. “That was cool,” he said. “We should do it again.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Definitely.”

  Then he leaned in and kissed me and I regretted having tuna for lunch and thought how I should carry mints or gum or something for exactly this kind of moment.

  “I was watching you all weekend,” he said, his lips up against mine. “Up there swinging your whistle.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.” He kissed me again and then pulled me back inside and pushed me up against a wall, and we stayed that way, making out, for a good long while, and his chin was perfectly stubbly and coarse and his lips were soft but firm and his hips were the right height and then he said, “My mother’s going to be home soon. You should probably go.”

  He pulled away like having to stop was torture.

  •••

  I sat in the car for a minute, waiting for my breathing to return to normal. I’d kissed exactly two guys before: after a movie, once, with Kevin Landis, but when he asked me out again I’d said no and felt bad about it but not that bad. Another time, last summer, Chiara and I had met these guys when we were on a shore vacation with my parents.

  But it had been nothing like this.

  It had happened.

  I had made it happen.

  •••

  •••

  What did she think I was going to do? Turn up in jeans?

  What wasn’t I allowed to say?

  •••

  I’d forgotten to invite Bennett.

  •••

  •••

  I had forgotten. Or blocked it. My grandmother had agreed to spend a night in the granny pod to test it out.

  I texted Mom that I was on my way.

  •••

  She was in the kitchen, making turkey sliders. “Wash up and come help,” she said, so I dropped my bag and went to the sink.

  “Where were you?” She tried to hide the irritation in her voice in a cloud of cheer but I could still see its edges.

  “Studying with Aiden. I thought I’d told you.”

  “Wrong answer.”

  I looked up.

  “He came by looking for you.”