I HOBBLE UP our driveway, afraid to look back. Dad could lecture me on any number of points and for once I’d have no excuse, with “attempting to fight vicious skinheads in the woods by myself” at the top of that list.
He unclicks his helmet and casually tugs off his gloves, as if this was simply another ride. He sets them down on the shelf, spins one pedal and frowns. The bike hums as he rolls it gently into its holder.
Just when I think he’s forgotten that I’m standing there, he says, “I’m sorry about your friend.”
I don’t know which one he means. Marcos, face down and those strong shoulders moving up and down with his breathing, but nothing more.
Cassie, the little-girl quiver of her bottom lip. The most unmotivated person I know with a rare determination in her eyes. I am not following you.
Cassie would save her own ass before she saved yours, Marcos told me. I guarantee it.
The memory makes me shake all over again. Marcos had sensed it, and I hadn’t believed him. Of course I knew Cassie better. Of course she’d never leave me.
When Mom sees me running up the stairs with tears running down my cheeks, she doesn’t try to stop me.
MY LIMBS HAVE turned to lead. I want to go to the hospital, I want to see Marcos’s eyes open and that blood wiped off his face, except I can barely do more than toy with my phone that never rings. The last message was from Andreas: They got him doped up real good for his arm.
“You dropped something.” My mother slips into the room without knocking. I managed to doze for a few minutes, jerking awake at any sound.
“Thanks,” I say without turning my head.
The bed by my feet tilts down, and I look up in surprise. Mom sits with my medals in her hand. The meet. That was this morning.
“What’d you place second on?” she says.
“Bars.”
Mom smirks, almost like Dad. “Really?”
“They probably confused me with someone else.” It feels strange to be joking when I haven’t seen Marcos yet, when I don’t know what the hell Cassie did.
“Why didn’t you tell us? I would have loved to have seen you back in action.”
“If it helps, I qualified for States.”
I expect Mom to hug me and say something about how she’s glad I had a safe competition, and isn’t it nice that I’m doing gymnastics again? Instead she has the look in her eye that she usually reserves for mapping out Richard’s current location. “When is States? How about Regionals? I’m taking off from work.”
Regionals. Now we’re getting ahead of ourselves. I’m smiling, though, just a crack.
“What happened with you and Cassie?” she says.
I turn back onto my elbow, ignoring the stab of pins and needles. “Nothing.”
“You came home covered in dirt and I expected Cassie to show up behind you, lying through her teeth about whatever you guys were up to. Trying to fight guys in the woods seems like a Cassie thing to do.”
That’s what I had thought when I’d asked her to come with me. Apparently I was wrong.
Mom rolls the medal in her hands. Strong hands. She’s never been a pusher, like Dad. She doesn’t need to know every one of my test grades. She didn’t care who my competitors were. As long as she knew I’d landed on two feet, she was happy.
“You were always on Cassie’s side, no matter what,” she says. “I’d started to think you couldn’t make your own decisions.”
A Cassie decision. As if there are two kinds of decisions: the ones that Cassie makes, spontaneous and making for a good story, and the ones that I make. The kind that stir no ripples.
Today, I made a Cassie decision, except she didn’t back me up the way she’s always expected me to follow her. She didn’t do anything.
I’M DREAMING IN dirt and leaves and voices that sneak up behind me, until they start singing and I realize it’s my phone.
Cassie, it has to be, and I pick up without looking.
“Hey, it’s me.” A female voice, clipped and familiar.
“Who?”
“Juliana.”
Wow.
“Thank God you answered,” she says. “Freakin’ Cassie won’t pick up her phone. I thought you guys were still out there doing your vigilante thing.”
Cassie wouldn’t admit that she backed down. That she walked out of the story at the best part. I take a breath. “Yeah, about that.”
“You guys found him?”
“Well, I found him. And his friend.” My free hand clenches the blanket. “By myself.”
A long silence. In the background, water runs and dishes clank. Then she swears under her breath. “She left you out there?”
I pluck at a thread sticking out from my comforter. “I thought she was going to get help. Except I haven’t heard from her since, and her car is in her driveway, so she obviously made it back.”
She falls into a silence so deep that I wonder if she put the phone down and walked away. “Shit,” she says finally. “That’s…terrible, Savannah. I’m sorry.”
It feels uncomfortable to accept sympathy from Juliana, the girl of steel. It only solidifies the sinking pit in my stomach.
I assume the next ping of my phone is from Cassie. Making sure that I’m alive, perhaps even, I don’t know, apologizing. It could happen. Instead, it’s Emery. What are you up to tonight, champ?
Before I can stop myself, I write, My boyfriend’s in the hospital and my best friend ditched me, so…crying in my bedroom.
Emo-gency! she replies. Be there in fifteen.
FOURTEEN MINUTES LATER, Emery walks in with a plastic container of chocolate chip cookies and says, “Hey, Mr. Gregory, what do you think about our state qualifier here?”
My father turns off the sink. “Who?”
“That floor routine was a revelation.” Emery tosses me the container. “Did your boyfriend’s friends film it? I bet it’ll go viral.”
“Who?” Dad says again.
“Savannah,” Emery says through a mouthful of cookie. So graceful, she is, the crumbs trickling down her chin. “She made her comeback this morning.”