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“Hey, Ally! Come shoot around with us,” Jessica Landry shouted, waving me over.
Jessica was a Norm senior who I’d always thought was the coolest girl on the team. She was one of those girls who wore sweats practically every day but always looked good anyway. Plus, she had a smile for everyone all the time. Not once in my life had I ever felt uncomfortable around her. I jogged over to join her and her friends, slapping a few hands and feeling lighthearted and ready for a workout.
I had just hit a sweet three from the corner when Sha
Coach gave one bleat on her whistle and shouted at us to grab some water before we got started. I’d just dropped down on the bottom bleacher and was fishing in my bag for my water bottle when the toes of Sha
“Hey,” she said. Her foot twisted so that the side was to the floor for a second, then righted itself. She wore an Orchard Hill basketball T-shirt and held a ball loosely between her crossed wrists and her stomach. Her dark hair was back in a sloppy pony-tail, those long bangs half-hiding her eyes. How she expected to play ball with her hair in her face all the time, I had no idea.
“What do you want?” I asked, standing.
We were exactly the same height. Always had been. It was like God had put us on the same growth schedule when we were born, and in seventh grade we’d both shot up and started towering over all the boys in our class. By the time I left in freshman year, most of them still hadn’t caught up. Even now, we were taller than a lot of them.
“Whoa.” She held her hands up and backed up a step. “What’s with the angst?”
I rolled my eyes, laughed bitterly, and slammed her shoulder with mine as I walked by.
“Do you have a problem with me?” Sha
I whirled around on her. “What do you want, Sha
She blinked a few times, appearing legitimately surprised. Had she woken up with amnesia this morning? Did she have zero memory of the past two months?
“I just thought since we’re going to be on the same team together it might be time to call a truce, that’s all.”
“A truce,” I repeated acerbically.
“Yeah. I mean—”
I took a few steps toward her. “Okay, you want a truce? How about you start by apologizing for the lawn jockey?”
“What?” she said.
“I know it was you,” I told her. “That prank had Sha
“Wow. Look who suddenly grew a spine,” Sha
I rolled my eyes and turned away from her.
“All right, fine. I’m sorry. The lawn jockey thing was stupid,” she said.
I paused, looking down at the floor. At least we were getting somewhere. She dribbled the ball over and held it out to me on her palm. “Are we cool now?”
She had to be joking. Like one apology was going to make up for everything. For freezing me out, for insulting me over and over again, for ostracizing me for something over which I had zero control. I took a deep breath and held it, clutching onto every bit of courage in me.
“No,” I said. “I want to know why. Why have you been so awful to me since I’ve been back?”
Sha
“Don’t laugh. I’m serious.” I stole the ball with a resounding slap and held it against my chest. “What the hell did I ever do to you?”
She looked up at me, pushed her bangs out of her eyes, and clicked her teeth together twice before she answered. “I know what you and Hammond did the night you moved away. I was there.”
The edges of the room blurred, and the laughter and shouts seemed to echo between my ears.
“What?”
She crossed her arms over her chest and cocked one knee, looking off toward the scoreboard. “My parents were arguing, as usual, and I heard my mom say something about how you guys were leaving that night. I tried to call you, but it went right to voice mail, so I snuck out and rode my bike over to your house. I couldn’t let you leave without saying good-bye.”
She stared at me then, an accusation in her eyes. My heart thumped with guilt. I’d really hurt her by not calling.
“I opened the front door—your parents were fighting too, so they didn’t hear me—and when I got to your room there you two were, writhing on top of each other on your bed.”
Her lips screwed up in disgust as she looked me up and down. I felt nauseous as the memory of that night swirled through me. I’d been avoiding thinking about it since I’d been back, but now here it was, in vivid HD. Hammond’s breath on my face, his hand on my cheek, the scent of the rain on his clothes. He’d asked me to go out with him just a month earlier, and I’d said no. I’d said I thought of him as a friend. And two weeks later he and Chloe had gotten together and were all lovey-dovey and inseparable. Chloe had been in love with him forever—had always thought they were destined to be together—so everyone was happy for them, but I had felt a little . . . jealous. I mean, one minute he was saying he liked me, and the next second he was all in love with her. But even so, I never would have done anything about it. Even then I knew that my feelings were stupid—that I was just wanting what I couldn’t have. But then, everything fell apart.
“How could you do that to Chloe?” Sha
“Sha
“A very long, very horizontal kiss,” she said, snatching the ball back again.
“I know, but it was the worst night of my life,” I said. “I didn’t even know what was going on. My parents were screaming at each other, and my dad was yelling at me to pack and I didn’t even know where we were going or why. All I knew was that my dad had fucked up and he’d lost our house and everyone was mad at us and we were never coming back. That was it. And then Hammond took the shortcut over and climbed up to my room, and he was all upset and saying all this stuff about how he was going to miss me and he wished I’d said yes when he’d asked me out and all this crap, and we just . . . kissed.”
Sha
“It’s the truth, Sha
She opened her mouth to say something, but the whistle blew.
“Line it up! Let’s do some warm-ups, people! Come on!” Coach clapped her hands a few times. I felt like the real world with all its lights and sounds and colors was suddenly flooding in on me. It made me temporarily dizzy, and I had to shut my eyes. As the rest of the players lined up for drills, Sha
“Why haven’t you told her?” I asked. “Why have you kept it a secret all this time?”
“Because it would kill her,” Sha
So that explained it. The sweet sixteen confusion. Sha
“We would never have done that,” I said, my voice a croak.
“So you say.” She looked down, bounced the ball once, then caught it in both hands. “Anyway, I also figured that keeping your secret kind of made us even.”