Chapter SIXTEEN
There were snakes, golden, glowing snakes, and they were writh-ing, morphing from beast to human and back again. The snake faces started to look like Ty and her cousins. They were laughing, the way the girls did—high, silvery, with abandon. Ty was moving closer, holding out a white feather. “Fly away,” she whispered. Chase took the feather, turning it and spinning it between his fingers. And then it was in his mouth, scratching against his tongue and lips. It was in his throat. It was choking him. He gasped for breath; the plumes stuck together, blocking the air, catching his saliva. He coughed and coughed and . . .
Chase woke thrashing and hacking. He struggled to make his breath come naturally. He shuddered, recalling with vivid postdream clarity how Ty had seemed to step from the snake’s skin, the same way she’d stepped out of her clothes that day at her house. He lay there for a moment, stretching his feet, yawning, and scratching his stomach.
Bang. As usual, he stubbed his toe on the bedframe. For once, it came as a relief. But even away from his dreams, he felt
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strangled—today was the Football Feast, and he had no one to go with. He cleared his throat. He couldn’t get rid of the little tickle at the back of it.
It was six fifteen a.m., and he had half an hour to get to school. Their first day back. Zach had called an early-morning meeting to take care of last-minute Football Feast preparations.
Coach wanted to go over some talking points, in case the media or any college scouts were in attendance. Chase didn’t even want to go to the damn dinner anymore, but skipping it was not really an option. As he threw his legs over the side of the bed, Chase vowed to make the best of the day and night. He and Zach might be fighting, and his life might be in shambles, but he was the star quarterback of Ascension, and this was his night to shine.
Chase knew no matter how screwed up stuff was between them, Zach would never let it interfere with tonight’s event.
There was some small comfort in that, in Zach’s public-relations finesse. None of the invited guests, no one outside the small circle of witnesses at the pond, would have the slightest inkling that the best friends were fighting. He wouldn’t have to worry about watching his back, at least not while there were TV cameras around.
He looked in the mirror to see if his eye looked any better.
That cream Emily had rubbed on helped a little: The stormy blue it had been the day before had morphed into a still visible but less sprawling bruise, tinged in yellow and black. He touched it delicately. Still hurt like hell, though. He’d have to steal a little of his mother’s makeup later to try to cover it. He 212
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couldn’t have reporters asking questions about this. For now he’d wear sunglasses.
In the car, he cranked up the music—loud. He drummed along on the steering wheel as he drove through the dim morning streets. He took some deep, rib-filling breaths and talked to himself a little. It’s a new year. Fresh start. Here we go.
But when he pulled into the Ascension parking lot—past the banners heralding the team and tonight’s event, past the pep squadders already wearing their uniforms—he immediately felt that something was off. And it was more than the fact that Coach Baldwin had foregone his gleaming silver whistle for a classy red and blue tie. Yeah, he was a few minutes late to the meeting, but not enough to warrant the complete lack of eye contact, the palpable discomfort when he entered the room.
None of the guys even looked at him as they began discussing who would sit where and who would give what speech. Had Zach talked shit about him after all?
“The thing to emphasize is teamwork,” Coach was saying.
“We work as a team, supporting Singer—” Here, he was cut off by random snickers from around the room. “Something funny, gentlemen? Brewer?” Coach glared at Tom Brewer, who was sitting in the front of the room, trying in vain to keep a straight face.
“No, sir. We’re all here to support Singer, that’s for sure.”
More muffled laughter.
Chase shifted uncomfortably in his seat. What was going on? He stared at Zach, willing him to look up, but Zach was studying the floor with undistracted focus, his hair hanging in 213
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front of his eyes. Chase could see that his top lip was still a bit swollen.
When the meeting let out, the halls were full of students hugging, loading up lockers, eating bagels, and checking their second-semester schedules. As he walked toward the cafeteria—
he really needed coffee, and luckily the AHS caf starting serving it a couple of years ago, though it tasted worse than the stuff from the Kwik Mart—Chase felt the strange sensation of eyes following him, and not in a good way. He waved to a group of girls but they only smiled awkwardly back at him before pretending to be deep in conversation. What the . . . ?
Chase felt cold all over. This was literally his worst nightmare—one he used to have as a child, all the way through middle school: In the dream, he would show up at school and suddenly realize that his clothes were ripped, tattered, and covered in stains, and his friends would make fun of him. But this was worse—his clothes were clean. The dirt was invisible.
And then he walked into the cafeteria. That’s when he saw them, and it all became clear. Pictures of him were everywhere: naked, exposed, blown up to life-size and plastered above the cash register. Words from Emily’s poems in a speech bubble coming from his mouth, like a cartoon.
There in the Gazebo was one of him standing awkwardly below the dim lightbulb in Ty’s living room. And another of him lying down on the floor, the red wall pulsing behind him even on film, his pale thighs like they had a spotlight on them.
So close you could almost see the goose pimples.
The room got hushed as he walked in. Everyone looked 214
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at him expectantly, waiting to see his reaction. He stood there shaking. His mind was full of flashes of light and sound, miniature explosions. He couldn’t hold on to a single thought. He was going to have a stroke or something. A janitor was circulat-ing too slowly—removing the pictures one by one.
“They’ve been up all morning,” he heard Drea Feiffer say with a hint of sympathy in her voice as she brushed by him.
“The janitor’s cleared most of them from the hall already.” He turned to watch her walk down the hall, her Doc Martens and black jeans like a life raft floating away after a shipwreck. And then she was gone, and he was alone again.
He took a couple of unsteady steps backward. He felt like the biggest freak Ascension had ever seen.
Then, racing down the hall, he thought only of where he could go, where he could hide. He ducked into the boys’ bathroom by the science wing, only to run into Wagner and Barton.
They were laughing hysterically as he walked in, examining a different picture of him that hung above the sink.
“Wow, you’re a real queer, huh, Singer?”
Chase was speechless. It felt, now, as though the feather from his dream had expanded in his throat; he really was choking.
Wagner banged into him as he walked by. “When did you turn into such a freak, dude?”
“Maybe we should show these to the TV cameras tonight, huh? Then everyone will know that Ascension’s star quarterback is a faggot.”
“You guys don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said weakly.
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“We know exactly what we’re talking about. Who do you think you are, some Calvin Klein model?” Wagner looked pleased with himself.
“Nice poems,” Barton muttered. “What is it that you’re ‘so scared to tell’? That you’re totally gay?”
With the line from Emily’s poem echoing in his head—
Some truths you just can’t tell—Chase wheeled around and stumbled out, back into the hallway, which felt hot and narrow and crowded. Like a scene from a horror movie, where he could see everything that was going wrong but wasn’t able to do anything about it.
There was only one place to go—the old gym, a sweaty-smelling building down by the teacher parking lot. It had been replaced three years ago and was only used these days if it was raining and more than one team needed a place to practice.
Sometimes smokers hid in the old locker rooms when it was too cold to hunch down by the tennis courts’ broken fence. It was bound to be demolished or renovated sooner or later, but right now it was the empty refuge Chase was seeking.
He burst through the doors, dizzy and confused. This was not supposed to happen. Not to him. He was too careful to let shit like this happen. . . . But he hadn’t been careful enough, not with Ty.
He took a few deep breaths in the chalky air and coughed out the smell of smoke and rubber mats and varnished floors.
His cough echoed in the empty room, but there was another sound, too. A sniffle, a sob.
Chase looked around. At the top corner of the bleachers, 216
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her shoulders skimming an old felt champion banner, was Em.
She was staring at him, wiping her nose and smoothing a hand through her long, tangled hair. She was wearing only jeans and a tank top that showed her bra straps.
“What are you doing here?” Em called out from across the room, her voice sounding small in the big space.
“I could ask you the same question,” he responded, still standing in the doorway.
Like a crab, Em moved down a few rows in the bleachers, but didn’t get up. Chase took a few steps toward her.
“God, it’s freezing in here,” he said, rubbing his arms. She didn’t answer immediately, and he felt the silence yawn between them. He felt the urge to talk, to fill the space, to write over everything that had gone so wrong for him. He came a little closer to her. She flicked her eyes to him once, then dropped them again. “Remember how hot it used to get during assemblies?”
Em nodded. Her face was all red.
“There was that one, during freshman year, when Gabby was running for social vice president—” He didn’t even get to finish his thought before Em hunched over and started shaking.
Jesus. Now he’d made her cry. Chase held still for a moment, squinting into the light filtering through the dusty windows along the top of the gym. He hoped the moment would pass.
“She won,” she said with a gasp. He inched closer, barely able to make out what she was saying. “She won because she’s so great. And I’m so terrible.” She was doing this sad little thing, picking at tiny threads in her jeans, not looking at him.
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“What’s up with you, Winters?” He slid into a seat next to her. He didn’t really want to deal with Emily’s drama—he didn’t have the energy for it—but he had nowhere else to go, anyway.
“Gabby. Gabby. ” She wailed it the second time. And then she started talking and she wouldn’t stop, except to cough and sniff and swallow. “We were going to meet this morning, before school, like usual. We meet at Dunkin’ Donuts and we get half coffee, half hot chocolate.”
Chase nodded. At least hearing about someone else’s problems was better than thinking about his own.
“And so I walk up to her this morning and I’m all smiling and holding out this gift I got her, this great present—I really wanted to make things right, Chase, really—” Here, Em held out her hands to him, gripping his knee, like she was begging him to believe her. “And she . . . she . . . she threw her drink in my face!” Em recoiled as if she were feeling the hot liquid for a second time.
“She threw coffee at you?”
“Yes! You don’t even get it. She’s usually the one who offers me clothes if I stain mine—she has a whole extra wardrobe of outfits in her gym locker!” Em wailed, pointing at her ruined sweater, tucked haphazardly into her bag. “And . . .
and it hurt, Chase,” she said now, quieter. “It hurt so much.
She . . . she called me a slut. A liar, a slut, a traitor.” Em took a deep, haggard breath. She kept tugging at her hair and picking the cuticles around her nails, which were already shredded and chewed bloody. She was a mess.
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“She was saying that I hit on Zach and that it was all my fault,” she went on, not even letting Chase respond, “and that I was a deceitful slut who tried to steal people’s boyfriends. Like, as if Zach had no part in it. As if I had just been lying in wait, you know?”
“Were you?” Chase blurted out bluntly.
“No! And then she said she was going to tell everyone at Ascension about what a terrible person I am. She said she had some kind of text message that proved it. She drove off and I was just standing there. With coffee all over me.”
Chase rubbed his forehead. A monster headache was brew-ing just behind his eyes. “How did she find out already? Didn’t she only get home last night?”
Em shrugged and laid her head across her knees. “When she got home from the airport last night she realized she’d left her contact stuff at the hotel, so she went to buy some more. Apparently some pixie girl walked up to her at CVS, right in the aisle, and told her. I didn’t even have time to ask what, exactly, she was told, but it seems that Zach got clean off the hook. And the worst part is that she’d believe some ‘red-ribbon-wearing fashion victim’”—here, Em used air quotes—“over me, her best friend.”
“Red-ribbon-wearing fashion victim?” Chase repeated.
Weirdly, the description rang a bell, though he couldn’t place it. Em shrugged again.
“Gabby’s words,” she said, able this time to crack at least a small smile. “I have no idea how some random stranger even knew about it. Or what Zach said. He was clearly not going 219
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to incriminate himself. . . . I guess everyone must know. But that’s not the worst part. The worst part is that this happened at all. That I let this happen. That I deserve this.” She was crying again, but more softly now. More desperately.
“Emily . . .” Chase threw his hands up. He wasn’t very good at comforting anyone, much less a crying girl. But after a moment’s hesitation, he put his hand on her back. She stiff-ened for a moment, then relaxed into his touch. He knew how she felt—to plummet from safety and security to nothingness, social-outcast status, overnight. “It’s okay. I know you didn’t mean to hurt Gabby. You just . . . got in over your head.”
She turned her head a little, and he could see a drop of snot running down her lip. “Really?”
“Yeah. I mean, sometimes you think you know what you want, and then shit just spins out of your control and you can’t do anything about it. It’s beyond you. Unstoppable.” His voice caught a little at his own words. At the things in his own life that he couldn’t take back.
They sat in silence for a few minutes, Chase rubbing Emily’s back, surprised at its boniness. Surprised to be touching her.
Surprised to give a shit about her at all, really. They heard the bell for second period ring, but neither of them moved.
“I saw those pictures,” she said quietly. “I’m sorry.”
Chase got hot all over and removed his hand from her back.
He thought about the photos and how he’d never be able to live them down. He shuddered involuntarily, remembering the way his face looked in one of them, thrown back, laughing, totally out of control. Not one person at Ascension had ever seen him 220
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like that. For a moment they sat in silence. And suddenly Chase had the desperate urge to tell Emily, to confess everything, to figure out how and why his life had gotten so screwed.
Without intending to, he blurted out: “You ever think about karma?”
“Karma?” Em wrinkled her nose.
Chase could feel heat spreading through him. “Yeah . . . like, what goes around comes around. You ever think that could be true?”
“What do you mean?” Em asked.
Chase hesitated. It was all on the tip of his tongue.
“Well, like how my dad was such a dick to me and my mom, like he would get drunk and just wail on her, and then one day he got bashed in the head by a machine and that’s what killed him. It just seems like . . . everything comes full circle.
Like maybe that a*shole deserved to die. Ya know?”
He could see his story had only upset Em more, and he wished he could take it back. Everyone already knew about his dad—it was old history. Chase didn’t usually like to bring it up.
Em looked at him with pity.
Chase elbowed her. “Don’t listen to me. I’m just the naked guy who writes poems.”
Em smiled a little then. “Good poems,” Em said, elbowing him back.
“Yeah, you know, I got a friend who can really write.”
“Oh, so we’re friends now?” Em said it sarcastically, but her eyes were wide and hopeful.
He thought about Zach. What their friendship had been.
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How it had soured so easily. “I’m not sure I have many other options,” he said, smirking. “I don’t think I even had many friends to begin with.” And then, as if saying that had flipped a light switch in his head, Chase smacked his forehead.
“Oh, shit. Shit shit shit.”
“What? What’s wrong?”
“The freaking Football Feast is tonight.” Chase fidgeted with the cords that hung from his sweatshirt hood, then shook his head determinedly. “There is no way in hell that I am stepping foot in that room with those people. No chance.”
“No, you can’t not go, Chase. You’re going to be captain of the team.”
Chase thought about his teammates, about how everyone had looked at him in the cafeteria. “I’m not sure I even have a team anymore.”
“You can’t just not go,” Em repeated. “It’s too important. It would be total defeat.”
The idea came to Chase in an instant: “Why don’t you come with me?”
Em stared at him, incredulous. “Me?”
“Yeah.” The more he thought about it, the more perfect it seemed. “We’ll make a great couple, the freak and the slut.” He smiled at her with closed lips, not sure if he’d gone too far. But she looked like she was really thinking about it.
“Gabby will be there. With Zach . . .” Em bit her lip.
Chase shrugged. “Maybe you’ll get another chance to talk to her. Either way, you don’t have to worry—they don’t serve coffee at the Feast.”
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Em cracked a small smile, nodding slowly, thinking about it. She took a deep breath. “You’re sure?”
“Why not? Things couldn’t get worse.”
“Fine. Yes. Okay.” Em smiled gingerly. Chase smiled back.
They were two pariahs, sitting on a bleacher, going to the Feast together. It felt good. Like a big ol’ F*ck You to the rest of Ascension.
Beep-beep-beep. That was his phone. It sounded like it was far away, but it was right by his feet, in his backpack. He knew who it was going to be from, and he didn’t want to look. Em nodded toward his bag.
“You gonna get that?”
With a sigh, Chase leaned over and grabbed his cell. Sure enough: one new message from Ty. Plz plz plz, it said. I need to explain. I must see you. ASAP. All a mistake. In a second, Chase was on his feet. All the confusion, sadness, and anger came rushing back to him, rattling his whole body.
“I gotta go,” he said abruptly, his heart racing.
“So I’ll see you later, right?” She was looking up at him, concerned. The same way she’d looked at him the other night, when he’d come home bloody and bruised.
“Yeah.” He was distracted now. “Um, I’ll pick you . . . I’ll meet you there. I’ll wait for you right inside the doors, okay?”
He didn’t wait for her answer. He shoved his hands in his pockets and squared his shoulders like he was gearing up for a tackle. He was going to meet Ty, and he had a feeling this would be their last play.
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