She had kept the phone where she could see it all evening, in case. It had been three days, and the first three were the ones that mattered; everyone had said so, and she was not there for any of them, so she watched the phone, which was the only part of it she had.
The house went on without her. The furnace cycling, the refrigerator somewhere below, Marcus's voice through the floor, Becca's same four songs through the wall. None of it was addressed to her, and she had stopped, at some point in December, waiting for it to be. Across the room, the lacrosse stick leaned against the wall where it had leaned since Christmas, the one Drew had bought without waiting to be told yes.
Connor had started texting her after Nate's party. Not her. Ethan. They'd talked there, the two of them, Drew's friend and Maya's boyfriend, and somewhere in it Drew had let slip that the Calloway kid might come out for the lacrosse team in the spring. Connor, who left a door open with everyone he met, had taken the number and run with it, the way he ran with everything, no agenda she could find. Since New Year's, he'd sent things about the team, about practice, about nothing. coach is unhinged in the best way. you'd hate the conditioning, everyone hates the conditioning. She answered the way Ethan would, short, which was easy, because Ethan was short. What she could never get used to was that her boyfriend was being kind to a boy he'd decided to like. The boy was her, and he had no idea he was talking to the person he kept not hearing back from on the other line.
The phone lit, and it was Connor. A photo, a flyer in the science wing with every tear-off tab gone but one. down to our last believer. Nothing under it. He wasn't waiting for an answer. He never seemed to be. She looked at it longer than the joke needed, and didn't answer, and set the phone down.
It lit again before her hand had left it. Drew.
you decide about thursday yet coach takes walk-ons. just come you don't have to be good lol
She looked at you don't have to be good for a second. Then she got up.
The ball was in the net of the stick, scuffed, somebody's already. She took both and went out into the cold and down toward Clement, to the park she knew, the small municipal one with the broken swing where she and Ethan had divided up their lives in the fall. It was empty at this hour, blue-dark, the slide and the benches holding their cold, and at the back of it the wall ran along the edge of the lot, the flat face of it pocked from a hundred summers of balls. She did not let herself think about why this was the park she'd come to, six blocks from Drew's door.
She set herself in front of the wall and threw the ball at it.
It came back wrong, high and to the left, and she stabbed the head at it and missed, and it skipped past her into the dark grass. She went and got it. She tried again. The ball hit the wall, dropped straight to the dirt, and rolled under the near bench, and she had to crouch and fish it out by the rim of the head, and when she stood up, she said, out loud, to no one, "Okay," in a voice that meant the opposite.
She tried it the way she thought she remembered Drew doing it, the wrist doing the work, and the ball sailed clean over the wall, and she heard it land somewhere in the lot beyond. She stood in the cold and looked at the empty head and laughed once, short, surprised out of her.
She got the ball. She slowed everything down. She thought about Drew's hands, the way the top one stayed loose, the way he didn't seem to throw it so much as let it go. She did that, smaller, almost not trying, and the ball hit the wall flat and came back on a line and dropped into the head and stayed.
She looked at it sitting there. She did it again. It worked again. The third one she dropped, and the fourth one stuck, and the broken swing moved a little in the wind behind her, the chain on the good side ticking, and she was grinning by then, and there was no one to see it.
A bike came up the path out of the dark, no lights, and slowed, and bumped up over the curb into the park, and she had the ball in the head and nowhere to put her face. It was Drew, breathing hard, his ears red from the six cold blocks between his door and here.
He clocked the stick. He clocked the ball in it. He did a thing with his face that was supposed to be nothing, looking off across the lot like he'd come for some unrelated reason, and it held for about a second and a half.
"Your hands are too close together," he said.
"Hi to you too."
"No, like." He dropped the bike in the grass, took the stick out of her hands without asking, and showed her, his top hand sliding up the shaft.
"Here. And you're strangling it. Loose."
He gave it back. "Again."
She threw it. It stuck. Drew said, "Hey," like she'd done it to embarrass him, and made her do it four more times. On the ones she missed, he said nothing, and on the ones she got, he said "There" each time, like it was news. After a while, he stopped having her throw at the wall and started lobbing them to her instead, soft, underhand, so she'd have to catch, and she caught about one in three, and he kept the count to himself.
"How long have you been out here?" he said.
"Ten minutes."
"You've been out here way longer than ten minutes." He had his own stick with him, the one she hadn't clocked across his back when he rode up, and he pulled it around and fell in beside her with it and put one off the wall himself, easy, the ball home before she'd seen it move. He didn't make a thing of that either. He just stood next to her in the cold and threw, and waited for her to throw, and threw again.
He didn't say his sister's name. He hadn't said it out loud in two months, not where anyone could hear. Somewhere in the rhythm of it, he went quiet, his eyes on her a beat longer than the throwing needed, and then he shook it off and said, "Bend your knees, you throw like a cheerleader."
She said, "I was a cheerleader," and he laughed before he could stop himself, the two of them laughing at the one true thing he was allowed to say out loud.
"Thursday," he said, when his breath was back. Not a question this time.
"I have to ask Ethan."
Drew looked at her. Whatever he thought about her asking, he kept it. "Ask him," he said.
"Then come." He slung the stick across his back and picked the bike up out of the grass.
"Four o'clock. Don't be good. Just be there." He pushed off down the path and stood on the pedals at the street and was gone into the dark he'd come out of, and she stood there by the broken swing with the cold all the way into her hands and the stick still warm where his grip had been.
She went home and picked up the phone.
The lacrosse thing. Would that be okay with you? Me joining as you?
The reply took a while. The replies had been slow all week, her body somewhere across the city, learning the brace and the hours between the pills, Ethan inside it, taking the time he took with things.
Yeah. Do it if you want to. Not because of me.
She read it twice. He had left the wanting with her. She sat with that, and then she typed the next thing.
Connor keeps sending things.
I know. I've been doing minimal.
How are you handling it?
He sends something most days. I answer maybe twice a week. Short.
She waited. The dots came and went and came back.
He texted before the surgery. And after, to see if you were okay.
What did you tell him?
That you were.
She looked at it for a long time, didn't type anything, and then the dots appeared on their own.
You don't have to figure it out tonight.
He hadn't made her decide. She set the phone down, the question still open.
A knock, and the door opened before she'd answered, which was the house she lived in now. Karen came in with a mug and set it on the corner of the desk without asking. "Renee called. The three-day check went fine, everything's healing the way it should. He's off the strong stuff. Asking about the pool already." A pause. "He's okay. I thought you'd want it from a person and not off your phone."
"Thank you," she said, in Ethan's voice, and meant it in her own.
Karen didn't leave. Her eyes had gone to the stick, propped by the door now, the head still cold from outside. "You went out with that."
"To the park. My brother— I mean Drew showed up."
"You're going to play," Karen said.
"Thinking about it."
Karen sat down on the end of the too-high bed, which she had not done in a while, and looked at the stick. "We put him in T-ball when he was six," she said.
"It was Tom's idea. He spent the whole first game out in right field looking for four-leaf clovers. Found one, too. Brought it to me in the stands in the middle of an inning, real proud, while the ball rolled right past where he was supposed to be."
She smiled, a small, worn smile with many years in it. "Coach tried everything. Tom tried everything. He'd just drift off to wherever it was quiet and look at the grass."
She looked up at her son's face and didn't finish the thought out loud. "Never once wanted to be where people were looking at him."
Maya didn't say anything.
"And now there's a stick by the door," Karen said, and stood, and that was as far as she took it.
The phone lit on the desk between them. Connor's name. Maya didn't reach for it. Karen saw and didn't say whatever it was she might have said.
"Eat something before you sleep," she said instead, which was where she put it, and on her way out, she squared the loose papers at the edge of the desk without seeming to know she'd done it, and the house took her footsteps back down the stairs.
The phone was still lit. Maya turned it over.
mr. b has now claimed he once opened for smash mouth
She didn't answer. She watched the next one come in.
Wow
Then, a few seconds later:
abandoned in my hour of need
Then:
this is how legends die
Her thumb hovered over the keys. She had three answers before she'd finished reading the last one. None of them went down. After a while, the messages stopped coming, which was its own kind of answer, the one she'd given by giving none.
She put the phone face down, opened the notebook, and tried to write him. She got a sentence. Connor texts like he's leaving the door open. It was the kind of sentence that knew it was being clever, and she lined it out. The pen came to rest where it had rested in December, on the small dot the ink had pooled into the last time she'd stalled here, and the rest of it did not come.
She picked the phone back up, because if the page wouldn't give her the present one, she would go find what was there. She scrolled up his thread, the short one, past the flyers and the practice jokes to the top of it, to the first thing he'd ever sent her as Ethan. good talking to you at nate's. drew says you might come out in the spring. you should. She looked at it for a while, you should, sent to a stranger he'd decided to like, and it put her back in a place from before any of this thread existed, before he knew the stranger's name was worth anything to him.
The gym.
Regionals, the seventh of December. She'd taken two buses in Ethan's body to watch her own team because she couldn't not. The only seats left in the supporters' end had put her one over from a kid she didn't place until he turned, and it was Connor. He hadn't known her. Why would he? Drew's friend, the Calloway kid, a face from the edge of things. He'd given her the half-nod you give a stranger you've maybe seen once, and gone back to the floor.
They hadn't talked. He'd had a program rolled tight in one hand. He'd kept his eyes down on the warmups the way you do when the thing you came for hasn't started yet, and once, not to her, not to anyone, looking at nobody, he'd said it low, like it had been sitting in him all afternoon. "Come on. The shoulder's fine. The shoulder's fine." A thing he was telling himself. She'd sat a seat away in the wrong body and heard her boyfriend will her shoulder whole from the stands, and he hadn't known the person he was sitting beside was the one he was worried about.