“Look,” he says. “Remember that day at the Reds game? When I got into that fight?” Ryan nods, and he hurries on. “It’s like that.”
“What is?”
“This,” he says, waving a hand in the direction from which they’d come. “You losing it because of Lucy. It’s not just that. It’s all of it. How it all just builds up until you can’t help being so angry. It’s a little bit of everything.”
“It’s a lot of everything,” Ryan agrees.
“It is,” he says, his face heartbreakingly earnest. “But it’s okay. You’re okay.”
Her throat is tight again, and he puts his arms around her and pulls her close, her face mashed against his shirt, her tears leaving streaks across the Cubs logo. She leans back to look at him. “So you don’t think I’m awful?”
“I’ve told you,” he says with a smile. “I think you’re okay.”
Ryan grins and wipes her eyes. A ripple of noise moves through the crowd, and they both look off toward the field.
“We should go back,” Nick says, tweaking her ponytail. “The team needs us.”
“I think they’ll probably survive if we don’t make it.”
“Ah,” he says. “You think. But you’re not sure. It’s like the whole tree-falling-in-a-forest thing. If the Cubs win and we’re not there to watch, do they still make a sound?”
He grabs a napkin from the nearest snack stand, and Ryan uses it to blow her nose. Nick leans against the counter and watches the game on the screen while she collects herself, and once she’s ready, they walk back up together.
Ryan knows that Lucy has every right to be angry with her, and that she, in turn, should also be fuming at the things that were said. But there’s nothing left in her that wants to fight. All that she wishes is that the truths behind the statements weren’t quite so true.
When they find the spot where they’d been standing, a tall man with glasses directs his foam finger at them. “You the kids who were with those girls?” he asks. “The ones who were just up here?”
Nick nods. “Yeah,” he says. “Where’d they go?”
“Back to their seats,” the man tells them. “But they asked me to be sure to give you the message that they’re sorry.”
“For leaving?” Ryan asks.
He shrugs. “Maybe. But it felt like a bigger sorry than that to me.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
* * *
IT WAS ESTABLISHED THE PREVIOUS NIGHT THAT THIS morning—the first day of school for both Ryan and Emily—would go a certain way. Mom would drop Emily off on her way to an early doctor’s appointment, Kevin would make sure Ryan was up before leaving for work, and Ryan would meet Nick at his house so they could bike over to school together.
But almost immediately after Kevin knocks on her bedroom door—first at the prearranged time and then twice more—Ryan falls back asleep. She’s still tangled in her sheets, one foot hanging off the bed, when she hears Kevin’s car start in the driveway. And when she opens her eyes again forty minutes later to look warily at her alarm clock, it seems impossible that so much time could have passed.
She knows she should have laid her clothes out the night before and packed her lunch and arranged her books in her backpack. But that kind of organization isn’t Ryan’s strong suit, and so now she scrambles around her room collecting her things, cramming stuff into her bag, trying to locate articles of clothing. Down in the kitchen, she rips two brown paper lunch bags because she’s not paying attention, her eyes on the oven clock, which says she should have been at Nick’s a half hour ago. She reaches for the phone to call, but then decides there’s no time, so instead packs an extra cookie for him, by way of apology.
Outside, the garage door refuses to close, stubbornly stopping at half-mast, and Ryan stands impatiently jabbing at the button until it finally lurches shut with a loud bang. The wheels of her bike make sharp skidding noises as she flies down her driveway and takes off toward Nick’s.
When she reaches his house, she drops her bike on the lawn and half-jogs up to the front door to ring the bell. She peers through the little front windows, but it soon becomes clear that nobody’s home, and though she hadn’t expected him to wait, she’s still angry with herself for running so late on the first day.
By the time she reaches the school, it’s clear by the emptiness of the front lawn and the stillness of the corridors inside that first period has already begun. Ryan pulls the schedule from her pocket, then slinks guiltily toward her history class, sliding red-faced into her seat while the teacher makes a note of her name.
Once the bell rings—only a few minutes after her arrival—she steps out into the hallway and takes a deep breath, feeling flustered and out of sorts already. She looks up and down the long hallway, dismayed that despite the beginning of a new year, despite being a sophomore and therefore supposedly no longer the youngest, the smallest, the most picked on—all things that have always seemed to define her—nothing seems to have changed. She’s still dodging Lucy and her friends, still keeping a hopeful eye out for Nick. It doesn’t matter that she feels different, because nobody else can see that. She’s still just the girl clutching her notebook, her back pressed against the lockers, her brow furrowed as she contemplates her next move.
By lunchtime, Ryan still hasn’t seen Nick. This wasn’t supposed to be how the day unfolded. He was supposed to walk her to math class, teasing her about how she couldn’t possibly pass this year without him as a partner. They were supposed to linger at the water fountain between classes, walk to the cafeteria at lunchtime together. But she knows it’s her fault for being so late this morning, for throwing the entire course of the day off-track, and so, as usual, she heads to lunch alone.
In the brightly lit cafeteria, it’s not so very different from last year; it’s not such a great departure as Ryan stands by herself, scanning the cavernous room. Her stomach wobbles when she sees Kate and Sydney, sitting at a table with their backs to her. She’d known this would happen, of course. It was inevitable that she’d see them today, and Lucy, too. But she’d been counting on having Nick at her side, and right now, alone in a sea of tables, she can’t help feeling abandoned.
The girls look up as Lucy joins them, setting down her tray and then dropping her bag on the table before she slides in beside Sydney. They’re all sophomores now, no longer cast as lowly and unsure, elevated to new locations and better tables during the lunch hour. But Ryan—always a step behind—is still rooted in the middle of the room, sweeping her eyes around in a final effort to locate Nick.
When she doesn’t see him, she squares her shoulders and lifts her chin. She refuses to begin another year the way she did the last. The point was never for Nick to become a safety net. She shouldn’t need to be rescued, and she shouldn’t want to be saved. And if she has the urge to run, then it should be only because it is them that she doubts. Not herself.
Lucy half-stands to reach for a napkin, and as she does, her eyes land on Ryan. For a brief moment, they study each other across the heads of their classmates, the room widening between them. It feels to Ryan like all eyes are on her, though it’s really only Lucy’s; it feels like minutes, though it’s actually only seconds.
In the end, the gesture is a small one. Lucy tips her head toward the empty seat at the table—not beside her, not a place of honor or any great significance—but a few seats down, where there’s an unclaimed chair. Ryan doesn’t hesitate. There’s no big scene, no great homecoming, though when Sydney and Kate turn around and smile, both are—she can tell—surprised and relieved to see her joining them.
Lucy only looks her way once, and even then, the expression on her face could barely be called warm. But then, Ryan doesn’t expect much more. There are things that should be said. There are apologies required and mending to be done, and all this only to get back to even, to where they were before. All this, only to make up for what happened this past weekend at the game. Ryan is under no illusion about her friendship with Lucy
Barrett. Certain people are meant to be friends as surely as others are not, and Ryan isn’t sure she and Lucy will ever see their way there exactly. But it seems now that a quiet truce is on its way to being established, and for the moment, this feels like progress enough.
Sydney leans forward, her fork dangling in the air. “Where’s Nick?” she asks, but not as she’s asked in the past. She says it so casually, so conversationally, that it takes Ryan a moment to respond. There seems, in the small span of such a short question, to be both a welcome and an apology.
“Probably working out his schedule,” she answers firmly, mostly to convince herself that it’s true. “He’s still catching up from when he switched schools last year.”
But when she opens her brown bag and sees the cookie she’d brought for him, Ryan’s face falls. Her eyes move to Will’s table, where he sits with a few other junior guys, all friends of Nick’s. Though she cranes her neck to look for his blue cap, she knows somehow that he’s still not there. But each time her thoughts dip too low, veer too close to the darker possibilities running through her head—the ever-present worries that crop up whenever he’s late, whenever he’s pale, whenever he’s tired—she simply shuts them off.
Nobody ever walks into a disaster expecting it to happen. Nobody ever counts on trouble, and nobody expects the worst, despite what they might say. There’s too big a part of us that relies on the smaller odds, the outside chance that—however unlikely—when the clouds break, we’ll be spared the storm that is so often predicted.
Ryan looks up. “Anyone want a cookie?”
A few of the girls she doesn’t know glance over from the far end of the table, arching their eyebrows and smirking. But Lucy says nothing, and through the simple act of ignoring them, they fall silent once again.
“I’ll take it,” Kate says from a few seats down.
Ryan places two fingers on top of the cookie, then slides it forward across the table as if it were a poker chip. As if she were, by nature, a gambler: bold and brave and not at all worried about her missing friend.
When she knocks on the front door of Nick’s house after school, a woman in jeans and a red sweatshirt—a taller version of Mrs. Crowley—opens the door.
“You must be Ryan,” she says immediately, stepping out onto the front stoop to join her. “My sister said you might be coming by too.”
Ryan nods. “Is Nick—?”
“I drove down as soon as I heard,” his aunt says, before Ryan has a chance to finish. “The last time around was so hard on them, and I figure it’ll be even harder now, being so far away from the rest of the family.”
It takes Ryan a moment to find her voice. “That last time around?”
“All the tests, the waiting,” she says, then stops abruptly, her face changing. “You’ve heard, right? I just assumed, since my sister said you might be stopping by. …”
“Heard what?” Ryan asks, though she knows just exactly what and isn’t sure she’s prepared to hear the answer spoken aloud. She takes a step backward, balancing on the edge of the last stair.
“They found another tumor, honey,” she says. “His arm was sore earlier in the weekend, and so they took him down to the hospital for some tests.”
Ryan’s chin is trembling just slightly. “Okay,” she says dumbly. “Okay.”
“He’s downtown now,” she says, then looks at her watch. “He’s getting a biopsy today, probably right around now, actually. To see how bad it is and whether it’s spread.”
“And when will they—?”
“In a couple days,” she says. “He’ll have to stay over tonight, maybe tomorrow, too. It takes a toll.” She steps aside to make room in the doorway. “Do you want to come in? I know this must be a bit of a shock.”
But it’s not, in fact, a shock at all. It feels instead like something she’s been waiting for without even knowing it, an inevitable end to the guessing game that has plagued them all summer. In some small and unfortunate way, it’s a relief: now, rather than being angry at the world at large, rather than doubting and worrying and waiting, there will be a plan of attack, a course of action. The opponent is no longer invisible, no longer just a possibility, no longer simply a ghost. Now, finally, again, there is something to fight against.
“Do you think I could go down and see him?” she asks, her voice wavering.
His aunt nods. “I think he’d like that very much.”
On the train, Ryan holds her backpack in her lap and rests her head on top of it, letting herself be swayed by the motion of the car. It’s late afternoon, and the sun sits low in the windows. When the doors open at the Wrigleyville stop, the stadium beyond is empty and quiet, the flags still. For the first time in her memory, Ryan has the urge to look away. She can hardly bear seeing the curved wall of the ballpark, the giant Cubs sign casting a shadow over the outfield. If there’s blame to be had for Nick’s illness, then here must be its root: a team that has caused nothing but heartbreak, a stadium heavy beneath so many years of disappointment.
When she thinks of the energy she’d wasted, the bargains she’d made, all that she’d staked so fruitlessly on this team, she wants nothing more than to forget it all, though she knows it’s not easy to shed a lifetime of allegiance, especially with a team like the Cubs, a team that gets inside of you, stubborn and unshakable.
She glares hard out the window as the doors snap shut, the train lurching forward again while the stadium disappears from view. By the time she gets downtown, the sun has slid behind the buildings to the west, and Ryan walks quickly from the train stop to the hospital after asking directions at a newsstand. The sidewalks are filled with people heading home from work, their feet dragging, their ties loosened. She hurries purposefully toward the blue signs for the hospital, where white arrows give directions to various buildings.
At the front desk of the oncology center, Ryan waits while the receptionist finishes a phone call. Now that she’s here, standing amid the orange plastic chairs and the too-bright lights, she can feel a growing knot of worry in her chest. She wonders if Nick’s aunt called ahead to let them know she was coming. She wonders if she should have called first. She wonders whether Nick will want to see her at all.
“Can you tell me what room Nick Crowley’s in?” Ryan asks when the receptionist hangs up the phone, and she punches a few keys to pull up the information on her computer, then points a finger down a long, grayish hallway. Ryan’s sandals squeak on the linoleum as she makes her way to the elevator, then jabs the button for the sixth floor and lowers her head. At the second floor, a woman walks in holding the hand of a small boy—probably no more than six or seven—whose head is completely bald. His eyes are large and round, and he watches Ryan until they reach her floor.
“Have a good night,” she murmurs as she steps around them, her heart beating fast. She’s imagining what Nick must have gone through before, what so many kids here are trying so desperately to beat. How many times can you battle this thing? she wonders. How much of you does it claim each time around?
There’s a smaller waiting area at the end of the hallway on the sixth floor, and Ryan can see Mr. and Mrs. Crowley conferring with a doctor in a white coat. She stands still, frozen in place, unsure whether to interrupt or just dodge back into the elevator and hurry up the street toward home. It’s embarrassing to lose your nerve in a place of so much strength and courage, but Ryan feels suddenly weak-kneed at the reality of the situation. A nurse brushes by, her eyes focused on a clipboard, and when she nears the little group at the end of the hall, the Crowleys look up.
“He’ll be so happy you’re here,” Mrs. Crowley says once the doctor has moved on. She folds her into a long hug, and Ryan stifles the tiny feeling of guilt that works its way through her, the sense that she’s the one who landed their son here in the first place. Her and her stupid team, and the regrettable impulse to bargain against them, an ill-advised trading of something too important for words.
“Is he okay?” she asks, then
immediately wishes she hadn’t. She opens and closes her mouth but can’t figure a way to remedy the question.
Mr. Crowley rescues her. “He’s an old pro at biopsies,” he says with a small smile. “Now it’s just a waiting game.”
“And will he be … ?”
“It depends on how the tests come back,” he says, an edge to his voice.
“You should go in.” Mrs. Crowley turns to Ryan with red-rimmed eyes. “He’s awake now, and he’ll want to see you before visiting hours are over.”
Mr. Crowley walks her to the room and gives her arm a little pat before leaving her standing alone in the doorway. Nick’s head is turned to the side, and she can’t tell whether he’s awake or not. He looks no different, maybe a little pale, maybe a little thin, but this is as much the setting as anything else. She can see the edge of his bandage beneath the sleeve of his gown, where it covers the stitches from the biopsy. Ryan clears her throat, and he smiles when he notices her.
“Let me guess,” he says. “You need me to bail you out in math class already.”
“Very funny,” she says, taking a few hesitant steps toward him.
“Sorry I wasn’t there when you came this morning.”
“I think you have a pretty good alibi,” she says, moving to the edge of the bed. “Besides, if you must know, I overslept anyway.”
“I should have guessed,” he says, the last words slowed by a yawn.
“If you’re tired, I can go,” Ryan says, already inching backward, but Nick curls a finger toward him, and she steps forward obediently, sitting down in the chair beside the bed so that their faces are level.
“Hi,” he says.
“Hi,” she says back, and then to her great surprise, she begins to cry.
“You know,” Nick says as he hands her a tissue from the bedside table, “for all this talk about how you don’t ever cry, you sure are spouting a lot of water.”
The Comeback Season Page 17
