“Come on.” Chloe grabbed Sawyer’s arm and dragged her toward the back of the house.
“Where are your parents?”
Chloe shrugged. “You mean Stepford mom and new daddy? Hell if I know. Let me just get my purse.” She grabbed a wide leather bag, stuffed a black sweatshirt into it, and began fiddling with something on the top of her bureau.
Sawyer studied Chloe’s wall, plastered with photographs—mostly of the two of them, mugging for the camera, cheering at Hawthorne games. She pointed to one. “What’s this one from?” It was a glossy photo of Sawyer in a windbreaker. She was in mid-run, her face contorted with effort, misted with sweat. Her ponytail sailed behind her, and the strain on her face was evident. The shot was so close up that there was very little in the background except a mottled gray blur.
Chloe squinted. “I don’t know. One of your million track practices. One of the million times you blew everyone else out of the water.” She smiled.
Sawyer squinted. “How’d you get it, though? It’s super close. I don’t even remember it being taken.”
“That’s probably because you were running like your life depended on it—you know how you are.” She held her forefinger and thumb a quarter inch apart. “Just the tiniest bit competitive. And I don’t know when it was taken; it’s been on my wall forever.”
Sawyer shrugged. “I guess I never noticed it.”
Chloe mirrored her shrug. “Guess not. So”—she held up two long green ribbons—“are we ready to root, root, root for the home team?”
“Okay first of all, that’s baseball.”
“And second of all?”
“Shut up and turn around so I can put this in your hair.”
Chloe handed Sawyer her hairbrush, and Sawyer brushed Chloe’s short hair into a thin ponytail, wrapping the green ribbon around it. Then they switched places and finished off with some Fighting Hornet temporary tattoos and a set of matching school tees.
“Oh, wow, we need to get going—we’re going to miss kickoff!”
Sawyer glanced up at the clock, surprised that she had been at Chloe’s house for over an hour. She was even more surprised at the sudden excitement she felt about going to the football game—she had forgotten how good it felt to be the old, school-spirited Sawyer.
“Let’s go!”
Chloe pulled her bulging bag over her shoulder and pushed Sawyer out of her room.
“Where are you two off to?” Chloe’s mom stopped the girls in the hallway, and Chloe flinched. Chloe and her mother were roughly the same size, but where Chloe’s blond hair was thin and fine, her mother’s was a constant yellow-orange nest of peroxide and oversleeping. Sawyer knew that Ms. Coulter wasn’t particularly old, but her skin had the papery-thin look of a woman much older, her milky blue eyes gave way to crow’s feet, and her lips were constantly wrinkled as she sucked desperately on a Marlboro light.
“When did you get home?” Chloe asked.
“About a minute ago. Where are you going?”
Chloe flicked the green ribbon on her ponytail. “To the White House, Mom.”
Her mother rolled her eyes, and Chloe pushed past her—a bit roughly, Sawyer thought—and beelined for the front door.
“I’ll be back in a couple of hours, Nana,” Chloe called over her shoulder.
Sawyer noticed that the woman in the chair did nothing but blink at the television screen as her granddaughter sailed out the front door.
The girls pulled into the Hawthorne High parking lot in record time. Sawyer had managed to hang on to that one surge of excitement by cranking up the radio, her and Chloe singing like tone-deaf maniacs to every car on the highway. But once she killed the engine and saw the lights flooding the football field, her heart started to pound. Chloe noticed the nuanced change in Sawyer and threaded her arm through Sawyer’s.
“Don’t worry, S. It’s going to be okay. And if it’s not, we’ll leave. Simple as that.”
Sawyer wanted to respond, but there were no words. She nodded mutely and let Chloe lead her toward the bleachers.
“Oh look, how truly fabulous. There’s Maggie, shaking her pom-poms.”
“She’s not—oh, you’re horrible, Chloe. And totally right.”
Maggie had her pompons in hand but wasn’t lined up on the track with the other cheerleaders. She was bent over the metal railing, batting her eyelashes and shaking her Fighting Hornet to a group of senior guys sitting on the front bench.
“Didn’t I tell you this would be a fabulous night?”
Chloe and Sawyer found a spot halfway up the bleachers. The view was obstructed by students randomly getting up to dance or hug a newcomer or shimmying out toward the aisles. Sawyer liked it that way.