“What do you think, Penny?”
I hobble to the showers and rinse off, watching the water turn pink before swirling down the drain. I get a better view of my torn skin. It does look bad enough for the nurse’s office. I finish up and get dressed, carefully edging my shorts up past my knees, trying not to stain them with blood.
I’m pulling my shirt over my head when the faint trilling of girl reaches my ear. The door swings open a minute after that. Tina leads the pack. When she sees me, she gives me the kind of look everyone else is glad they’re not getting.
“Brock tripped you?” The other girls quiet as they begin undressing because everyone always gets quiet when they’re about to witness something worth repeating later. “Jesus, what boy don’t you lie about?”
The stupid thing is, I used to like Tina. Coveted her whole who gives a fuck? attitude more than I did her breasts, even though I wanted those too. I admired her, for the longest time, because she seemed so above it all. She’s not—she was waiting for her moment to be right at the center of it. She took my place as well as she could. She’s not Penny’s best friend by a long shot, but she’s the girl Penny calls when Penny needs a girl. Sometimes, I think Alek chose her for Penny, after the disaster that was me. Tina’s father owns the Grebe Golf Club and damn, if that isn’t Sheriff Turner’s favorite way to spend his free time.
“Seriously, why is she still here?” Tina turns to Penny. “She lies, right? She lies and Kellan—” My body is an alarm gone off. My body is not my body. My skin tightens enough to suffocate, keeping me in this moment where I stop and she doesn’t. “—has to leave. How is that fair? ‘I want him.’” She does the kind of vocal gymnastics that make her sound like a breathy, love-struck girl and I want to be the violence in her life. “‘I dream about him.’”
Because teenage girls don’t pray to God, they pray to each other. They clasp their hands over a keyboard and then they let it all out, a (stupid) girl’s heart tucked into another girl’s heart. Penny, I want him. I dream about him. I needed someone to hear my prayers and did Penny ever make sure of that when she forwarded my fucking e-mail to everyone in school.
“Tina,” Penny says. The way she says it makes the room still. Her voice has this admonishing tinge to it, like she’s defending me with inflection alone.
But that can’t be right.
“What?” Tina must hear it too, for the edge it puts in her own voice.
“Stop talking and help me get my necklace untangled from my hair.”
That I deflate is the only way I know I wanted it—for her to defend me. And then I’m ashamed of the part of me that still wants that.
“You’re supposed to take your jewelry off before we run…”
“Yeah, well, I forgot. Help me.”
I push out of the locker room on wasted legs. They’re bleeding again. There’s a name in my head and I want it out of my head. It’s amazing what a certain combination of letters can do, how it can string itself around your heart and squeeze.
Nurse DeWitt takes one look at my knees and says to me what he says to everyone: I’m old enough to take care of myself now. So that’s what I do. I sit in the corner of the room and pick at my wounds, painting my nails even redder before finally slapping a Band-Aid on every part of me that needs it.
When I’m done, I turn my phone on. A missed text from Leon, asking if I know whether I can come to his sister’s yet. I debate texting him back just to tell him parts of me are covered in blood because maybe he’d forget about the part of him that likes me. But I don’t. Instead, I text I DON’T WANT TO IMPOSE, which feels weirdly formal but I can’t think of another way to put it. It only takes a minute for him to reply.
CAN I CALL YOU NOW?
SURE.
Why did I say that? I run my thumb lightly over the side of my phone until it buzzes. I glance at DeWitt. He doesn’t care. I’m not breaking any rules, but I wish I was, so this could be stopped. I bring the phone to my ear. “Hi.”
“I keep telling my sister, Caro, about this girl I like at Swan’s and how I think maybe she likes me too.” I twist, hunching my shoulders. If DeWitt looks, I don’t want him to see what Leon’s voice does to me. “Anyway, she doesn’t believe it.”
“Is it that hard for her to believe?” I sound steadier than I feel.
“Yeah. So even if you don’t come … you like me too, right?” He pauses. “Because then I could at least go with that in my head.”
“Maybe,” I say and I can almost hear him smile.
“If you did come, I asked her before I asked you and it doesn’t bother her. You wouldn’t be imposing. You’d be welcome. It’s a party. We’d have fun.”
I close my eyes and I see a quiet house waiting at the end of a long stretch of driveway and soft, golden lights shining through every window, a hint of music behind their glass. A pickup truck parked in the driveway and it’s so clear and ugly in my head, I forget who I’m talking to and I wonder who Leon thinks he’s talking to.
“What do you say?” he asks.
I open my eyes. I need Leon to tell me who he is in a different kind of language because really, if he’s safe, there’s only one way to find out. It’s not through talking.
i find the pink-and-black lace push-up bra on my bed like it’s meant to be there, a natural part of the landscape. I pick it up. Mom. She thinks she’s doing a nice thing for me.