The Friday before the boys wrecked Mrs. Kimbrough’s car, Charlie Hughes had made a scene at the boys’ baseball game.
Riley didn’t play, but since Alls and Greg did, Grace and Riley were there, hanging out with some other kids under the bleachers. In the third inning, they had heard Charlie hollering, “How’s my boy doing?” as he ambled from the parking lot. He struggled up into the bleachers and began to loudly speculate about why Bradley Cobb, the third baseman, was still so small at fourteen. Grace and Riley scooted out from under the bleachers to watch Charlie. He made Grace nervous. Riley loathed him, bitter on his friend’s behalf.
“Got a weak chin too. Must have been a preemie,” Charlie Hughes said to no one in particular. The Cobbs were sitting two rows down.
“Come on, Charlie,” Mr. Kimbrough said. “Let’s just watch the game, okay?”
“Maybe his daddy didn’t get a good toehold.” Cackling, Charlie lurched forward, clapping the woman in front of him on the shoulder. “What do you say, Cobb?”
Grace couldn’t see the Cobbs, but no one laughed. Charlie rummaged in his pants pocket and a bottle slipped out, clanging against the bleachers and then falling through the gap until it broke on the asphalt below.
“Whoops,” Charlie said, looking down through his legs. “Careful, kids.”
Grace looked out to Alls at first base. He was focused on the batter, his jaw tensed, and she couldn’t tell if he’d seen. The broken vodka bottle hadn’t been much bigger than a flask. That Alls’s father was a vodka drunk was worse in Garland, where men drank beer or whiskey, and they drank it at home, jiggling squat glasses of ice on their porches, not at their kids’ baseball games. Alls’s father was usually working on Friday evenings. He shouldn’t have been there anyway.
Charlie left silently after the next inning, and Grace and Riley cleaned up the broken glass before Alls came out of the dugout. Grace felt newly grateful for her own parents’ disinterest.
When Riley, Greg, and Alls wrecked Tracy Kimbrough’s car a week later, Grace was sure the episode at the baseball game was connected to the Kimbroughs’ treatment of Alls. Mrs. Kimbrough, whose every surface was always affluently packaged, was in no hurry to have her car fixed. She ran the crumpled car all over town for weeks, telling anyone who asked that Alls Hughes had stolen her car and driven it around at night smoking marijuana. She omitted Riley’s involvement as readily as she did her own son’s, and this seemed to be her preferred form of compensation. Shortly thereafter, Alls was kicked off the baseball team for failing a surprise drug test administered to no one else.
“You have to tell them,” Grace begged Riley. “This is all happening because of Greg’s crazy mom. She can’t tell when he lies to her because he always lies to her. She’s ruining Alls’s life.”
“His life? This isn’t that big a deal. Everybody’ll forget about it in a couple weeks, and next time it’ll be Greg’s turn. You take turns getting the shit—you have to.”
It’s not like that for us, she wanted to tell Riley. People would forget about Riley’s mistakes and Greg’s mistakes because of their nice families in the background, but Grace and Alls didn’t have backup. She didn’t know how to explain this to Riley.
He put his arm over her shoulder. “Don’t worry so much.”
The cost of this mistake had ballooned, and Grace knew Alls couldn’t afford it. She understood then how tenuous her own position was. If some grown-up decided that Grace didn’t belong with Riley, her life could be gossiped right down the toilet.
Years later, when Greg ratted out his friends for a plea bargain, Grace was probably least surprised of anyone. She knew the rules.
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While Riley practiced his chiaroscuro, his depth of field, his achievement of photorealism, Grace practiced the craft of love: cupcakes, mix CDs, impassioned encouragement, her fingers against the inside of his biceps, doubled joy at his victories and indignation at any slight. She loved the roaring crackle of his laugh and how it seemed to raise the temperature in the room. She loved that he was kind to his mother and kissed her on the cheek when he came and left, that he and his father talked at length, like old friends. She loved that his father gave him money to take Grace out to dinner. She loved the red-gold hairs on his arms and that he drove a stick shift. The way his body jerked right as he fell asleep and how he always woke up looking cross and petulant. She loved how people waved to him from down the block and called his name. And the sound of his name in her mouth, and his signature, how the R seemed to be kicking the rest of it off the page. She loved when he drew her. She loved when he left his friends to be with her. Even at fourteen she knew that she had him locked down and she loved that too. She had won—everything.
Only once had Grace worried about losing Riley. When she was sixteen, a bored blond nightmare named Madison Grimes showed up at Garland High as a senior, kicked out of her Virginia boarding school, and scared the devil out of Grace when she made it clear that she wanted Riley. Deanna Passerini and Colby Strote told her in biology, and not out of kindness. Then Grace heard it herself, approaching Riley’s locker: Madison’s low, husky laugh at something Riley had said.
“Can’t take her home to Mother,” Greg muttered within her earshot. Grace knew he didn’t mean to threaten her—he was never that specific—but goose bumps prickled down her limbs.
By then Grace was often sleeping over at the Grahams’ whenever Mrs. Graham decided it had gotten too late for Grace to go home. Mrs. Graham had fixed up the small guest bedroom in the attic for Grace with flowered quilts from her own childhood and a toile-shaded lamp. Riley snuck up the stairs at night, delighted at the creepiness of sex in that little rosebudded room. He sometimes grew frustrated at Grace’s relationship with his mother and needed reminding that their closeness was exactly the thing that enabled his comfortable and unobstructed sex life.
Grace was lying awake in this bed one morning at dawn, Riley asleep next to her, when she felt a space open up in her imagination: What if Riley stopped loving her? What if she lost her room in this house? When she was at home, she was always waiting to come back here; her parents and brothers were strangers milling around while she sat watching the clock, looking for a reason to go. And if there were no reason for her? She felt suddenly haunted, the ghost the threat of becoming a ghost herself.
She watched Madison at school. It was the matter-of-factness in her demeanor—she never crossed her legs; she smoked at lunch—that Grace, in her yellow sundress, found particularly menacing. Grace had been challenged not by someone she could best, but by her opposite.
Grace contemplated anal sex, which she hadn’t done and didn’t want to do. Had she unconsciously saved it for a time like this? But then, late on a Friday night when Grace, Riley, Greg, and Alls were drinking amiably in the woods behind the Kimbroughs’ house, Riley erupted with laughter. He handed his phone to Grace. There was Madison, tits out, begging for his attention from the screen.
“Christ,” Riley said. “Some people have no manners.”
Grace peered closely at the picture, comparing Madison’s breasts to her own until she felt Greg’s breath on her neck.
“The Kimbroner likes her,” he said.