“You look so hot,” he said. “I want to kiss you.”
Did he think he had to ask? “OK,” I laughed. Saying it felt lame.
I leaned toward him, which seemed like the thing to do. Like showing him my test paper. His lips tasted like chocolate ice cream. The kiss reminded me of when I was ten and I kissed a boy who liked me at a birthday party. What I remembered most was metal touching metal as our braces hit.
“Sweet,” Aidan said, leaning away. He kissed me again, faster. We both laughed because I probably tasted like chocolate too. He looked at me as though he wasn’t sure what his next move should be. I didn’t know either, so I opened the car door and slid out.
“Good night, thanks.” I took baby steps in my backless heels as I walked toward the house, trying not to turn my ankle. Sari had the same shoes, only she had more practice walking in them. She called them her “sex” pumps.
Had she gone that far?
I didn’t think so …
RIVER
A tall window bursts, sending a blizzard of glass shards spraying the floor, covering it like gravel. We jerk to attention, covering our heads with our arms. More explosions, like artillery fire, followed by what sounds like a tree toppling over and slamming the building. I jump up and run toward the window, scattering glass around me. The sky is so dark I can’t see anything. “It’s like a bombing raid.” I go back to the mat and reach for the orange bottle.
Last pill. I drop it into the back of my throat. Another bandwidth of sanity, but then what? Worse panic, the shakes? I know what that’s like.
She stares at me. I freak her out. Better. She’ll keep her distance.
“How long do hurricanes last?” she asks.
“You won’t be locked up with me forever, don’t worry.”
“That’s not what I meant, River. Why are you like that?”
“I’m not like anything,” I say, suddenly pissed off. I manage to get up, the pain shooting through me whenever I move now. I head down the hallway. I’m trapped inside my head and out. There’s no way out of this. No escaping my life, or who I am. I’m scared too, only I’m not sure of what. And it won’t get better. Why should it?
“Come back,” she shouts.
I need to wall her out. Us together, here. Another day or two and life will start over again—if we don’t drown. Me alone. Blinders on. No attempts to fill the emptiness. It’s who I am now. Everything I’ve been through ruined me. My body, my brain. I have nothing to give her, nothing to give anybody. A few more days … I can hold onto that. I’m good at waiting now. I walk down the corridor past the display cases with the trophies and the cheerleader pictures.
Lexie.
I wasn’t looking for a girlfriend. I left LA, and I left Carla. I called her every few days for a month after getting to Houston, but then life interfered. The calls got further apart. So did the texts. When I found out from a friend that she started seeing someone else, I didn’t care. She was fun and hot, but something wasn’t there.
When we moved I was getting used to a new school and a new world, and football took up so much of my life that there wasn’t much time for anything else.
But the picnic changed everything.
Lexie was the head of the cheerleaders. She seemed to turn up everywhere I went. She was hard to miss—long dark hair and a nearly perfect body from a lifetime of gymnastics. She knew how to walk and how to dress, everything either tight or loose in all the right spots. She liked me, I knew it, but I pretended not to notice at first. Maybe on some frequency I picked up something from her that made me wary. Anyway, football seems to put you out there for girls, and sometimes you pay more attention to your dick than your brain.
After the fight with Aidan, she ran up to me with ice and a first-aid kit. She cleaned my face and bandaged my jaw, hovering over me. No one else was around. No one else seemed to care, and I felt like crap. When it was time to leave, she told me about the party.
“Come out with me, we’ll have fun,” she said. “Don’t go home alone and feel sorry for yourself.” She smiled and looked into my eyes. “I’ll take care of you.”
I didn’t feel like going home anyway, and I wanted to be with someone. Getting the crap kicked out of you does that, and she was hot enough, so why not?
We got on my bike, and if I had any doubts about where things were going, they disappeared as soon as she wrapped herself around me. Beers, an empty upstairs bedroom, and by the end of the party, I was her new boyfriend. We were this power couple to her. It was easier to go along with it than not, which says something about where my head was.
I couldn’t claim to be a victim. I got what I wanted too. But there’s a big difference between sex and love, and I was definitely in it for the former. Lexie didn’t see the divide though. She wanted to do the boyfriend-girlfriend thing 24/7. If I even talked to other girls she had jealous fits that led to make-up sex, even in school. I should have drawn the line at the locker room.
That was a mistake that I paid for. One of many.
I keep walking in the dark. The kitchen. Food, water. Staying alive, that’s my focus. If there was other food stored away somewhere, I hadn’t found it yet. When the damn hurricane ends, it’s not like we can fling open the doors and run free. The outside is already a disaster area. Power lines will be on the ground, floodwater and filth everywhere. That’s if we get out. It might take days before someone finds us, if anyone cares enough to look.
There’s power left on my phone, and I use the flashlight sparingly to find the cabinet handles, drawers, and the refrigerator. I find sliced cheese and crackers and head back to the gym.
“Eat,” I say, putting it in front of her.
“Do you think we’ll see our parents or our friends again?”
Friends? What are those? “Just eat.”
“Why are you so mad at me?”
I stare back at her and don’t answer.
JILLIAN
Why is he like that? What did I do? It gets later, but neither of us turns to go to sleep. I’m too wired to close my eyes.
“Do you think the showers work—the ones in the locker room?”
He gets to his feet. “One way to find out.”
We make our way to the girls’ locker room. No memories there for him. I go into a shower stall and try the water. “They’re working,” I yell out. I never imagined the thought of showering would make me ecstatic. There are half a dozen shower stalls, and River goes into another one. “Hell, yes!” he yells, as the water pours down.
The cold water makes me feel alive again. There’s even soap in the dispensers, so I wash my hair and then my clothes, putting them on soaking wet.
Showering, eating, sleeping, surviving. Life is stripped down to the essentials now.
“Man,” River says, coming out of the shower stall, his T-shirt bandages soaking, his wet hair glistening. “I feel human again.” He steps closer, and I reach out and touch his shoulder.
“How does it feel now?”
He steps back. “Doesn’t matter … you still hungry?”
Denial. That’s one way to cope. I nod.
“Me too. Let’s go back to the kitchen. A thousand kids go here, there has to be stuff we missed.”
We search together this time, but it’s hard to tell what’s there in the dark. The refrigerator is getting warm. We use our noses like dogs to sniff out what’s inside containers. Milk that’s turning bad. Cartons of cottage cheese that still smell OK. There’s a storage closet, but it’s locked. We grab what we can and walk down the dark corridor, devouring crackers like they’re prime ribs and scooping out cottage cheese with plastic spoons.
My eyes dart across the room when I hear a scratching sound and make out movement. “Looks like we have company,” I say. River flicks on his flashlight and swivels around suddenly.
A mouse scampers ac
ross a shelf on the wall. He laughs, relieved, shaking his head. “Let’s go into the principal’s office. There’s a couch in there.”
“It’s probably locked.”
“The lock was broken,” River says. “I bet it still is.”
He’s right. We step through the doorway and I stop. There’s a light on over the principal’s desk. How can that be? I step closer and realize it’s a battery-operated picture light over a poster.
“Any fact facing us is not as important as our attitude toward it, for that determines our success or failure.”
Norman Vincent Peale
I plunk down on one side of the couch and River stretches out on the other, leaning his head back on the cushion.
“Can I tell you something?”
“What?” he says, guardedly.
“When you were … away, I … missed you.”
I’m not sure how to go on. He wasn’t a boyfriend or even really a close friend, but still … I liked knowing he was next door, that I’d run into him. I felt a connection, aside from being neighbors. He was easygoing and fun to be around. Before, anyway.
He looks back at me, and for the briefest moment he becomes the River with the pale green flirty eyes and the private smile again. Then his face hardens.
“Then you were the only one who did.”
“What about your dad?”
“He didn’t lose sleep over it.”
“How can you say that?”
He shifts and throws a leg over the back of the couch. “Aside from his job, football was his life, like everyone in this place. When I didn’t play anymore, I didn’t exist.”
RIVER
I shouldn’t have started. But once I start I can’t shut up. Talking doesn’t change anything, but something about the way she’s listening …
“There was so much I hated about football,” I say, putting it into words for the first time. “The endless practice, the expectations, to fight, to do better, never to coast, the vise that the game puts on your life. And the bullshit cheering from everyone like you were some kind of …”
“God?” she asked.
“Yeah, until you weren’t, a game later or a week later, or whenever you screwed up and lost or broke your neck. But you know what the worst was?”
“What?”
“Having a coach who thought he had to rip you to shreds before he could build you up.”
“What do you mean?”
“Sports are supposed to build character and teach you about camaraderie, right? But the Briggs way was to shove your face into the ground and make you eat dirt until you manned up and played better. To him, it’s a blood sport about winning, no matter the cost.”
“If you could start all over again, what else would you do? What else was important to you?”
“I used to fantasize about doing nothing, total inertia. How pathetic is that? Do you know how it feels never to have time to yourself? To have every minute of your day planned out for you, with no time to just screw around and have fun? With barely enough time to sleep? In my other school I was in the drama club.”
“I remember.”
“My mom was an actress before she met my dad. She kept scripts at home for the movies she tried out for. She was starting to become successful, but then she gave it all up.”
“Why?”
“My dad convinced her it was more important to stay home with me, plus he wanted her there for him when he got home—dinner waiting and all that crap—”
She rolls her eyes.
“That’s probably why she got cancer. He gave it to her.” I punch the cushion with my fist. I’m shaking again. I reach for a pill. I’m out. Shit, I forgot. I open the bottle and lick the inside for any powder left, something, anything. She looks at me in shock, pity, whatever, but I don’t care. I start to throw the bottle across the room, and then stop. Not with my name on it.
If I was never born, she could have had the life she wanted.
“Why didn’t you make time to join drama?”
“Briggs wouldn’t hear of it.”
“Why was it up to him?”
“Why talk about it now?” I ask. “It’s over.” She reaches for my hand, but I pull back. “I’m not the same person I was two years ago.”
“Everyone changes.”
“You don’t understand. No one does.”
There’s a crash outside, then another like the building is getting slammed by a battering ram. What’s next, the roof over our heads?
“Let me look.” I start to get up.
“Stay River, please.”
Things die down, at least for the next few minutes, and I sit back.
“You know what I read?” Jillian says.
“What?”
“You can’t find peace by avoiding life.”
“I’m not looking for peace,” I say. Maybe justice. “I’m looking to be left alone.”
Chapter 20
JILLIAN
There’s a loud banging outside. “River … what—”
“Quiet,” he says, his face close to mine. He gets up and pulls the knife out of his back pocket. I sit up, fear spreading through me.
“Where are you going?”
“I saw a light somewhere,” he says.
“It was lightning, what else?”
“Go into the girls’ room. Don’t leave until I come for you.”
“Why?”
“I want to look around.”
“Who could it be?”
He shrugs.
“Briggs?”
“I hope not.”
“So what if he sees you?”
“He has an order of protection against me, OK?”
So it was true. “Why?”
He doesn’t answer.
I enter the dark, airless bathroom. It smells of disinfectant. The black-and-white penny-tile floor is damp and slippery. The steel door slams, and I press my ear against it, which makes no sense.
I don’t know much about Briggs, but I remember when Chris Jones, one of the players, told us about the time Briggs took the team out for steak dinners.
“He let us order one-pound rib eyes, double lobsters, anything we wanted,” he said. “As a joke, Clint Hagel asked Briggs if he could order a filet mignon to take home for his dog, and Briggs said yes! He promised us another steak dinner in three months, any restaurant we picked, if we kept it going.”
Coach Briggs had worked at top prep schools on the East Coast, but moved to Harrison when our coach retired. He hit the ground running from day one, changing the way the school thought about football.
Hustle, hit, and never quit.
Our blood, our sweat, your tears.
All it takes is all you’ve got.
We knew the familiar slogans, but Briggs’s mantra was short and concise: “We play to win.” Since he started, more than half of the players had been on track for full scholarships to top schools.
The principal wanted a story on Briggs, so I remember stopping River in the corridor one day to get a quote from him.
“Red,” he said, tugging at my ponytail. He was flirty with everyone. I knew better than to take it personally.
“I prefer, ‘Jillian,’ actually,” I said, leaning away.
“OK, Jillian Actually,” he said, straight-faced. “What can I do you for?”
Do me for? I tried to stifle a smile. “Seriously, I’m writing a story on Coach Briggs. What do you think of him?” The smile faded as he glanced away, lost in thought for a moment.
“He’s in a ‘league of his own,’” he said, making quote marks with his fingers.
“Want to expand on that?”
He shook his head and walked off.
Another player agreed. “There’s no one like Briggs. His whole world is fo
otball.” He paused, “Only there’s too much practice.” I jotted down what he said and started walking to class, but he caught up to me. “Whatever you do, don’t use my name.”
“Why?”
“He’ll freak.”
I did name the dad of a player who emailed the school paper after his son left the team due to a knee injury.
“Practice should be limited to no more than two-and-a-half hours a day and twelve-and-a-half hours per week with time off during the summer,” he said. “The demands a coach makes have to be realistic.”
Briggs’s response?
“Our ranking speaks for itself.”
The principal was more effusive. “It’s an honor and privilege to play for our team,” he said. “No one is forced to. It takes time and commitment. If a player feels the demands are excessive, he’s free to step down at any time. I don’t think I have to remind anyone that for the first time we’re heading toward the finals, and we couldn’t be prouder.”
Why were the players so nervous talking about Briggs? Why did Briggs need protection against River? I had heard of orders of protection, but I thought they were for violent boyfriends or husbands. I’d never heard about River getting in trouble, except for the fight with Aidan. Did he threaten Briggs? Fight with him? That would be crazy and hard to imagine. But as Kelly said, maybe he snapped. Maybe the pressure got to be too much for him.
I try to think of what else happened before he left. The only thing I can think of is the fire. Kids talked about it, but it wasn’t suspicious. It started in Briggs’s office, just before River was sent away. Aside from the smell of smoke, the only damage was to some filing cabinets and the walls around them. It was probably electrical, someone said, because workers had been fixing the lights.
Did River start it? Why would he jeopardize everything to vandalize Briggs’s office? We lived next door to each other. I saw him in school and with other people. I trusted him. He wasn’t crazy. He didn’t seem dangerous.
At least before.
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