The pyramid was Maya's least favorite part of the routine.
Not because it was hard, it wasn't, not anymore, not after three years of doing it until the muscle memory was so deep it had stopped feeling like memory and started feeling like instinct. Not because she was afraid of heights, which she wasn't, or afraid of falling, which she also wasn't, or not exactly. She was afraid of the split second at the top before the dismount, the half-beat where everything was committed, and nothing was yet resolved, and the only available action was to trust that the people below her were where they were supposed to be.
She was not, currently, confident that the people below her were where they were supposed to be.
Specifically: Jordyn.
Jordyn who had been her co-captain since sophomore year, who knew every formation, every count, every backup plan for every backup plan, who had smiled at her in the locker room forty minutes ago with the exact smile of someone who had already done the thing they were about to deny doing, and who had told Maya was ninety percent certain, working from available evidence had told at least three members of the squad something that Maya had said to her in confidence in October. Something small. Something hers. The kind of thing you only said out loud once, to one person, because it needed to exist somewhere outside your own head, and then you immediately regretted the moment it left your mouth. The evidence was the way those three girls had been looking at her all week. not cruel, which would have been easier, just aware that sideways awareness of people who know something you haven't said they know.
She dismounted.
Stuck it. Just like always. Her body did what it was trained to do, regardless of what her brain was doing, which was one of the things she'd always appreciated about training hard enough that the body became reliable in a way that everything else wasn't.
The crowd applauded. She smiled at them.
The smile was the right shape. It was always the right shape. She'd built it over years to be the right shape to carry the right warmth, to travel all the way to the eyes on the correct delay, to do its job without requiring anything from her. It did its job now while she was thinking about Jordyn three feet to her left doing the exact same smile at the exact same crowd, and the things Maya would never say to her, and the fact that she wouldn't say them, and how much she hated that she wouldn't say them, and how little that hatred would change anything.
After the season.
This was where she put things. In a queue, in order, behind the current obligation. The queue was long. She knew exactly how long it was and had decided that knowing was sufficient and examining was optional.
The band took the field.
She pulled out her phone.
Connor had texted during the second quarter: You good?
Two words. Eight months of dating and that was his follow-up to their last conversation, which had ended the way their conversations kept ending lately not in a fight, not in anything as clean as a fight, just draining away, finding the low point and staying there. She'd said she was tired. He'd said okay in the tone that meant it wasn't. She'd said she'd call him later.
She hadn't called him.
You good.
She was good. She was always good. Good was practically load-bearing at this point. If she stopped being good, she wasn't sure what was underneath it, and she'd made a private decision sometime around age fourteen not to find out in public. The alternative was a conversation she didn't have time for, questions she couldn't answer cleanly, a version of herself that existed somewhere below the schedule and the smile and the captain's bearing and that she visited occasionally, late at night, alone, the way you checked on something you'd locked in a room just making sure it was still there, then closing the door again.
She put the phone away without responding.
Her shoulder sent its signal.
She rerouted it. Same as she'd been doing for three months; acknowledge, log, defer. It wasn't nothing. She knew it wasn't nothing. But it was six weeks to regionals and she was not going to be the captain who fell apart over a shoulder that still worked, that was still functioning, that just had feelings about things. Lots of things had feelings. That was not, in Maya's experience, a sufficient reason to stop.
After Regionals.
She rolled her right shoulder experimentally. The signal repeated itself, slightly louder; the way ignored things tended to escalate. She rolled it again. Smiled at nothing. Pulled her hair back tighter and felt the familiar compression of the ponytail and thought about the physics of the pyramid, the weight distribution, how much load was moving through that shoulder joint on the dismount.
She was very good at doing things correctly while quietly protecting one side of herself.
Four weeks, she told it.
She saw him during the halftime routine.
Not clearly, she was working, which meant her vision was organized around the formation, the counts, the spacing, the crowd as a single responsive entity rather than a collection of individuals. She didn't look at faces during performances.
But he was in the upper deck, which was almost empty at halftime, which made him visible the way solitary things were visible by contrast, by the negative space around them. A kid sitting alone with his head bent over something in his hand. Something about the stillness of him.
She didn't know why she noticed him.
She noticed him.
And then her palm went hot.
Heat, sudden and sourceless, the way you'd feel it if you'd been holding something warm and then set it down and the warmth stayed in your skin anyway. She looked down at her hand without meaning to. Open at her side. Nothing in it. She closed her fingers, opened them. The heat faded after a few seconds, slow and deliberate, like something releasing her.
She stood very still for one count. Two.
Then the formation called her back and she went.
Filed it. Finished the routine. Smiled at the crowd. Jordyn appeared at her shoulder, beaming at nothing, and Maya thought after the season and moved on.
The second half was when things got worse. Not on the field, the team was doing fine, they were up by two touchdowns, the crowd was happy, and the night was doing what Friday nights were supposed to do. But Connor found her at the ten-minute mark of the third quarter, which he knew better than to do, which he had always known better than to do, which he kept doing anyway, standing just far enough inside the boundary of her attention that she couldn't pretend she hadn't seen him. She had a theory about this, that Connor's greatest skill was making himself impossible to ignore without ever doing anything that could be called a scene. She'd never told him she'd developed this theory. She'd stopped telling him things she'd developed theories about, somewhere around month four, without quite deciding to.
"You didn't text back," he said.
"I'm working," she said.
"You're standing still."
"I'm working," she said again, which was true in the sense that standing still on a sideline during a game was an intentional action and not merely the absence of motion.
Connor did the thing where he looked at the field for a moment before saying what he was going to say. She'd clocked this tell eight months ago and had never told him she'd clocked it because some information was more useful kept private. This was another thing she'd stopped examining: how much of her relationship with Connor had become the management of information asymmetry.
"You've been different," he said.
"I'm fine."
"I didn't say you weren't fine. I said you were different."
She kept her eyes on the field. "Quarter's almost over."
"Maya."
"Connor." Same tone. Same register. She'd learned this from him the name as punctuation, the name as a door closing politely but firmly and he didn't seem to recognize it coming back at him, which said something she was tired of not having time to examine.
He left before the fourth quarter. She watched him go with a feeling she couldn't immediately identify, not relief exactly, it was more like the sensation of having been holding her breath and only noticing when she stopped. She made a note to call him tomorrow. She owed him that. She knew she owed him that and she also knew, with honesty, she only allowed herself when no one was watching, that she'd been owing him that for two months and kept finding reasons why tomorrow was better.
She added it to the queue.
After the game she stood in the tunnel exit with her gear bag over her good shoulder and didn't move. She was supposed to go to Tyler Marsh's party. The squad was going, Connor would be there, and she'd been to enough of Tyler Marsh's parties to know exactly how the night would go: in the basement, a playlist she didn't choose, Connor finding her in a corner and trying to have the conversation they kept not having, and her smiling in the right shape until it was late enough to leave. The full Friday night. The whole thing.
She could not make herself move toward it.
Her shoulder was at a volume she couldn't reroute anymore.
Jordyn passed her with a look that was either sympathy or a very good performance of it. Maya genuinely couldn't tell anymore, and the fact that she couldn't tell anymore was the part that actually hurt, more than the thing in October, more than the looks from the other girls, because she and Jordyn had been friends since seventh grade and somewhere in the last year Maya had lost the ability to read her, and she didn't know if that meant Jordyn had changed or she had and said, "You coming?" and Maya said, "In a minute," and Jordyn moved on, which meant the squad moved on, and Maya stood alone in the tunnel exit in the cold and the November dark and just didn't follow.
The crowd was dispersing around her. Post-game traffic, the particular organized randomness of several hundred people simultaneously deciding to be elsewhere. She let it move around her and looked up at where the stadium lights met the dark above the field and thought about the queue.
Connor, Jordyn, the shoulder, regionals. The college applications open in seventeen tabs on her laptop at home, none of them finished, all of them asking some version of the same question who are you, describe yourself, what do you want and her having nothing to put in the box that felt true. the thing beneath the thing beneath the thing.
I want to be someone else for a while, she thought.
Not dramatically. Not as a crisis. The way you thought it at the end of a very long day when you'd been performing the correct version of yourself for so many hours that you'd lost track of whether there was another version. Just: anyone else. Anyone with a lighter load. Someone whose shoulder worked, whose co-captain could be trusted, whose boyfriend she actually knew how to talk to anymore. She wasn't being ungrateful. She knew how it looked from the outside. She just wanted, for one night, to put it all down and walk away from it.
She would have taken a stranger's life. She would have taken almost anyone's.
Her palm went hot again the same heat as on the field at halftime, not gradual this time but immediate, like a camera flash from one of those old bulbs.
She looked down at her hand, which was open at her side for no reason. She hadn't made a fist, hadn't reached for anything; it was just open, palm up, the way hands sometimes were.
The heat pulsed once. Stronger than before.
She stood very still.
The feeling faded.
She looked up, and the crowd was still moving, and the lights were still orange, and the cold was still cold, and nothing had changed, and she thought: that was strange, and then, because she was Maya Sorensen and strange things got filed the same as everything else: okay, and picked up her gear bag and turned toward the party she didn't want to go to and saw him.
The kid from the upper deck.
She knew it was him immediately, the jacket, the slight build, something about the way he moved through the dispersing crowd without quite being part of it, the same quality she'd clocked during the halftime routine, like he'd had a lot of practice being present in spaces without expecting anything from them. Three steps past the tunnel exit, moving, and she grabbed his arm before she fully decided to.
He turned.
She looked at his face ordinary, careful, the face of someone who had learned to keep the front of it neutral while the back did whatever it needed to do. She'd seen that face in her own bathroom mirror often enough to know what it cost. And then she looked at his hand, which was reaching into his jacket pocket, and she knew before she saw it.
"Did you find something tonight," she said.
He reached into his pocket.
He held up the coin.
Old. Wrong-faced. Heavier-looking than it should be for its size. She felt the heat move through her palm the moment she saw it, the same heat from halftime answering itself.
Something moved through her expression that she couldn't control, which didn't happen often. Relief and dread at the same time, which she would have said were opposites until right now.
"Okay," he said.
She looked at him. It was Drew's friend. She knew his face from the edges of things picking Drew up, dropping Drew off, the peripheral figure of her brother's life that she'd never had reason to look at directly until right now.
"Okay," she said.
"We need to talk," she said.
The crowd moved around them in both directions, hundreds of people going to their cars and their homes and their Friday nights, and neither of them moved with it.
"There's a space under the bleachers," she said. "I used to hide there after practice my freshman year."
She didn't know why she told him that. It came out before she decided to say it, the same way grabbing his arm had her body making decisions slightly ahead of her, the way it did on a dismount, trusting something she hadn't consciously identified yet.
He looked at the coin. He looked at her.
"Okay," he said.
She took him to the under the east bleachers, the one she'd found in sixth grade when she'd needed somewhere to not be found, which was a need she'd had more often than people probably assumed. It was still there, the gap between the support struts, the concrete floor, the way the crowd noise filtered through the aluminum above them into something almost musical, almost bearable. She hadn't been back here in years. She hadn't needed it in years or had needed it and talked herself out of needing it, which was not the same thing.
They stood facing each other in the low light from the field and the coin sat on his outstretched palm between them and neither of them said anything for a moment.
"I felt it," she said. "Whatever you did with it."
"I didn't do anything with it," he said. "I just held it."
"What were you thinking about?"
He looked at the coin. A long pause the kind that wasn't hesitation but actual consideration, someone choosing whether to say the true thing. She respected that pause. She didn't encounter it often enough.
"Being seen," he said.
She looked at him.
"Not by everyone," he said quickly, like he was correcting a misimpression. "Just in general. By people who are supposed to."
She was quiet for a moment.
"What were you thinking about," he said. Not aggressive just even. Returning the question with the same weight she'd given it.
She looked at the coin.
I just want to be someone else for a while.
"Similar things," she said.
Above them the aluminum bleachers creaked with the last of the departing crowd. The field lights were still on, that sodium orange seeping through the gaps, striping the concrete between them. She could hear her own shoulder the low persistent signal she'd been rerouting all night, louder now in the quiet, insistent in the way of things that had been patient long enough.
She reached out and took the coin from his palm.
It was warm. Both sides uniformly, impossibly warm, the warmth of a living thing.
She looked at the face on it and the face looked back and she had the brief, distinct, unnerving sensation of something paying attention to her not the coin, not exactly, but something that was using the coin the way you used a door.
Something that had been waiting, with the patience of things that understood time differently than she did, for exactly this configuration of two people in exactly this quality of wanting.
"My name is Maya," she said, which was unnecessary he knew exactly who she was, and she knew he knew, and saying it anyway was just her needing something to hold onto while the ground rearranged itself under her feet.
"I know," he said. "Ethan."
"I know," she said.
She turned the coin over. The compass rose on the back seemed to shift slightly in the light or maybe she moved, maybe the light moved. "Do you believe in things you can't explain?"
He thought about it. Actual consideration again, that same weighted pause.
"I believe in things that happen whether you explain them or not," he said.
She looked at him.
He looked at her.
The coin pulsed once in her hand deep, final, the feeling of a held breath released and the light from the field seemed to brighten for a half second, too bright, wrong-bright, the kind of bright that wasn't about light at all, and Maya Sorensen had exactly enough time to think oh before the world went sideways in a way that had nothing to do with direction.
Then it was dark.
Then it wasn't.