“It’s okay,” he said. “You did good, and you know it. I fuck up, but you never do.”
Grace laughed, out of both habit and self-defense, and Alls nodded, looking at her in a way she did not want to be seen.
“Stop it,” she said, standing to reach for the icy doorknob. She could hear the opening chords of “Deacon Blues,” and she wanted to join the dancing.
? ? ?
The next week, Alls quit the basketball team, right in the middle of the season. He couldn’t see faking it through February, he said, with all those people pitying him. “I don’t owe anybody anything,” he told his coach.
Shortly after that, he started going to the college after school for fencing practice.
“Of all the sports that could get you a scholarship, you’re going for one you’ve never done before,” Riley said. “Makes sense.”
“Like, with the mask and shit?” Greg asked.
“Yeah,” Alls said. “And shit.”
“What about track?” Riley asked. “You can run.”
“No, you don’t get it,” Alls said. “See, they have a full track team. They have a full basketball team. GC has one available scholarship, and it’s for fencing, so I’m going after it. They had a junior transfer up north midyear. Your dad’s the one who told me.”
“I didn’t even know they had a fencing team,” Greg said.
Alls nodded once. “Now you get it.”
? ? ?
Alls won the scholarship, possibly with a quiet assist from Dr. Graham, and would begin college only a semester behind Riley and Greg. In August, the boys rented the falling-down house on Orange Street. Riley gave her a key, and Grace made herself at home in his room upstairs, Alls in the room below and Greg down the hall.
At first, they all basked in the freedom the house afforded them. No one had to smoke out in the woods anymore; no one hurried to push the empties under the couch at the sound of footsteps on the stairs; no one needed to wear proper clothes, buttoned and zipped. Grace lived with her parents only technically now. She spent most nights at the house on Orange Street, and though her parents didn’t like this arrangement, they were too late to intercede with any meaningful authority. When her mother protested that Grace spending the night with Riley all the time didn’t “look right,” Grace feigned confusion: to whom? The Grahams didn’t mind that she stayed over, she said. She had her own room in their house. Mrs. Graham was only grumpy that she saw less of them now. Grace dragged Riley home for dinner once a week, and she sometimes visited on her own, too.
“Whose opinion are you worried about, Mother?” Grace asked with airy chill.
In the house on Orange Street, Greg ambled around stoned in his shorts, not even bothering to hide his morning Kimbroner. Alls left his pipe on the kitchen table and made out with Jenna from Ginny’s Ice Cream on the sofa, not caring who saw them. Riley and Grace were as loud as they pleased. For the past four years they had been sneaking around together, and now there was no sneaking to do.
Grace planned to start at Garland College the next year. She was graduating second in her class and she’d scored very well on the SAT, and she was confident that she would get a scholarship. She would major in art history, a complement to Riley’s talent. After college, they would get married. That was the plan.
At night she looked through Riley’s coursework, greedy to learn something, anything. With the boys graduated, there was nothing left for Grace in high school. She’d already read Beowulf and 1984; she’d read them last year, when Riley had, and now she had to listen to her peers’ slow-motion jawing—“it’s like our world, but not”—as if they were underwater. She should have petitioned to graduate early, she knew, but she hadn’t, and now there was nothing to do but stare at the horizon and wait, both for graduation and for the three o’clock bell.
? ? ?
In December, Grace came back to the house one day after school, wheeled her bicycle into the shed, and went inside thinking that no one was home. She took a can of High Life from the refrigerator and flopped down on the green plaid couch in front of the picture window with Macbeth and a highlighter. She unzipped her jeans to get comfortable and flexed and pointed her bare feet in the sun. It was warm for December, warmer on the sun-soaked couch, and she drifted off with her highlighter in her hand. She woke suddenly, and she didn’t know why until she saw, through the doorway, Alls in the kitchen on the floor, cleaning up the aftermath of a dropped take-out container. Sticky brown food was strewn across the vinyl.
“I was trying to be quiet,” he said. “I spilled some on your book.”
Macbeth was still resting on her stomach. Now she moved it to cover her undone fly. “What book?”
“Uh, What Work Is?” he asked, if it were a question. He nodded toward the paperback. “I don’t know; it was on the microwave.”
“It was?” She thought it had been on the floor at the top of the stairs. “Do you like it?”
“It’s all right,” he said. He came in and dropped the book on the couch next to her. “I didn’t realize it was going to be poetry.” But they were both looking at the cover as he said this. What Work Is, it read. Philip Levine. Poems.
“It’s fine to read poetry on purpose,” she teased him. “I won’t tell on you.”
He rolled his eyes. “I just read whatever’s laying around.”
“So, lots of poetry,” she said. “Because all the books are mine.”
She thought he would laugh then, but he didn’t, and she felt that she had made a misstep. “I shouldn’t be sleeping right now,” Grace yawned, trying to help him. “How was work?”
“Fine. Smelly. Found a bat in a bakery oven,” he said on his way back to the mess on the kitchen floor.
Alls helped two men out of Pitchfield repair commercial bakery equipment. He’d had the job since he’d gotten his driver’s license.
“Gross! How long had it been there?”
“No eyeballs.”
“Yikes,” she said, but then she must have drifted off again, because when she awoke to a wet thumb wiping at her cheek, she thought at first that it belonged to Alls.
“You have a pink stripe here,” Riley said. “Like a neon scar.” She stretched out her arms and he groaned, happy to collapse in the sun with her. “You smell like sleep,” he said, and she closed her eyes again.
That night, restless from napping, Grace woke up and watched the headlights from the street sweeping across the wall, only half-conscious of the noise from downstairs. Riley was stretched out next to her, flat on his back like a dead man, with his feet splayed out under the blanket. The highlighter hadn’t come off when she’d washed her face. She reached for the stripe with her tongue, as far up her cheek as it would reach, and she thought she could still taste the ink. The noise was right under them, in Alls’s room, a slow, insistent thud, and at first she wondered, blearily, if he was practicing, doing drills or something. Not until she heard a quick, shrill coo did she realize what she was hearing.
Alls had certainly heard them before; he must have.
Suddenly conscious of her own breath, embarrassed at the sound of Riley’s gentle snoring, as though Alls might hear that, Grace swallowed and closed her eyes, trying to force herself back to sleep. But now she was holding her breath to listen. She heard his cursing laugh as his bare mattress slid across the floor, and she slid her hand beneath her underwear’s elastic. In a minute she was silently flipping onto her stomach, already groping for an explanation should Riley wake as she shifted, but he didn’t, and when they finished in the room beneath her, she was soon after, face hidden in her pillow, not quite deaf.
She left for school the next morning before anyone else was awake, stealing out of the house ashamed for the first time. That evening she and Riley went to dinner at his family’s, and then she told Riley she would go home, sleep at her parents’.