Side by side in the chairs that spin halfway and then send you back, we work our way through Owego’s roster. “This girl was the North Carolina state champion on beam.”
Cassie would laugh, call me a stalker with a teasing grin, but this is the kind of sleuthing that I loved to do. Emery doesn’t get bored, either; she finds videos of the Ocean State girls with their stone-faced assistant standing in the background, not reacting to anything the athletes do. She replays one of the videos until it becomes hilarious, adding her own commentary, and as we laugh I realize that my ankle hasn’t so much as twinged in the past half hour.
“This was fun,” she says when we pull up in front of my house. “We should get food tomorrow night, too.”
“Perhaps we should add a leafy green to our meal next time.”
High beams flash twice.
“That sad-ass pickle was totally a leafy green.” Emery flashes her high beams in response. “It looks like you’ve got a stalker out here.”
“Oh, that’s Cassie.”
“Cass! Tell her I say hi,” Emery says heartily. “Is she really friends with that kid Nick from my school?”
“Always Late Nick?” I say automatically. “We know him from working at the beach.”
“He’s the biggest douchecanoe I know. Text me about your ankle tomorrow, okay?”
As I limp over to Cassie’s window, she leaps out of the car. “What’d you do?”
I roll up the leg of my sweatpants to show her the damage. “The usual.”
“Holy crap, Savs!” She squats down and pokes at the swelling, withdrawing her hand when I flinch. Her fingernails are bitten down to the quick. “It looks like a freakin’ softball.”
Irritation mixed with despair rises up in me. It’s true that my ankle’s huge, but it’s a sprain; it’s just how they work.
“You need to stop doing this to yourself.” Her voice drops, becoming soothing. “You don’t have to prove anything.”
I do have something to prove–that I’m better than, braver than what happened at Regionals.
“You’re going too far again,” she says when I don’t answer. I don’t want to talk about this. I want to wake up tomorrow and have all of these aches and warning cracks be a memory. “Like when you’d research those girls from all over the country. You were so worked up over things you can’t control. It took over your life.”
“I know.”
She rubs my shoulder. While it’s a gesture I feel stupid offering up, she does it expertly. I’ve required a lot of shoulder rubbing in our years of friendship. “All I’m saying is, if you want to stop, nobody will judge you.”
I will, a tiny voice says. She’s right, though. She’s cheered for me when I won the all-around and sat beside me in the emergency room. If anyone has a well-rounded outside perspective, it’s her. Emery’s biased– her body hasn’t turned against her–and Marcos, well, he encourages me but does he really get it?
“What are you doing here?” I bite down on my bottom lip to fight off the radiating pain that increases with each step.
She wraps an arm around my back, hoisting me up. “I had a craving for lab reports and Slurpees. Mostly Slurpees.”
Once we’re inside, my mom rushes over with an ice pack. “We can take you for an x-ray tomorrow,” she says, eying my foot like it’ll display a list of what’s wrong if she stares long enough. I grit my teeth.
“It’ll be okay, Mrs. Gregory,” Cassie says. “Savannah said it’s already feeling much better.” I shoot her a grateful look as my mother, with a final concerned glance, leaves the room.
Cass sits next to me with her laptop, analyzing the data we collected during lab. “These things are pointless,” she says while typing approximately three thousand words a minute, all correctly spelled. “It’s so obvious what results they want you to find.”
Deep within the recesses of my gym bag, buried under chalk, grips, and the limbs of the Beast, I dimly hear “Stairway to Heaven” playing. I take a peek. Marcos.
It feels right to sit here with Cassie without bickering or cold words. If I answer, Cass is going to get worked up all over again.
So I let it go to voicemail.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
“HERE COMES THE hero,” Juliana says dryly as we stand by Cassie’s locker.
Marcos arrives with Andreas, Rena trailing not far behind. I see an apology in his eyes. Then he sees Cassie, and the look hardens.
A ball of tension settles in my stomach. No better feeling than to have a boyfriend who doesn’t get along with your best friend, despite the fact that he saved her life. I expect him to stay where he is, safely across from our semicircle, making sure that Andreas doesn’t fall over. Andreas is clearly hurting this morning; he has a swollen jaw that makes his smile look like he’s been injected with Novocain. “Mornin’, ladies,” he manages. Rena whacks him gently without missing a beat.
Marcos crosses the circle, leans his chin on my shoulder, and wraps his arms around my waist. I’m immediately engulfed by the warmth of his embrace, the feeling of his heart beating through his thin navy-blue shirt against my back. At the same time, nerves shoot through me. Cassie was right. He didn’t listen to me in the hallway, when I cautioned that jumping in after Andreas could ruin his shot at a scholarship.
Cassie’s eyebrows shoot up. Andreas’s lips twist in a painful smile. Juliana, however, is all business. “You shouldn’t have gone in there yesterday,” she chastises Marcos. “One of these days, somebody’s gonna get into real trouble, and at this rate, it’ll be you.”
His Adam’s apple moves against my shoulder. “Tell Andreas to stop getting in over his head.”
“It’s not just his fault. We all remember your black eye.”
“I already apologized.” Andreas presses an ice pack to his face, shoulders slumped. “Hey, Savannah, can I come flip around in your gym?”
“No,” Rena and Juliana say in unison.