Chapter Text
The crowd roared, and I smiled, even though I knew I shouldn’t. PCM had just lost the first semifinal we’d made it to in years, allowing Bolton to claim a smooth, undefeated path to regionals. Disappointment should have had me struggling to keep that too-bright cheerleader grin plastered on my face.
But I couldn’t help it. The save had been spectacular, the kind even someone like me could appreciate. With seconds left on the clock, a PCM Panther, trapped and desperate, had flung the ball out at an impossible angle. Todd, moving like a miracle, had caught it and ripped a brutal shot toward the undefended side of Bolton’s net. For a second, it had looked like we were saved.
But then the Bolton goalie dove for it, managing to hook the ball back to his teammates even as the momentum took him to the ground. Faster than I had been able to follow, the Lions had carried the ball back across the field in a series of ping-pong hops, sinking it into our net a breath before the whistle blew. Truly, the stuff of high school lacrosse legend.
The look on Todd’s face, incredulous fury oozing out through the guard of his helmet, had also been legendary. But until the field cleared, I was supposed to be on his side.
I turned away from Todd, who was standing dumbly where he’d landed after making the last shot of his high school career. My eyes skated past Bolton’s goalie, who looked baffled and pleased while his ecstatic teammates knocked him around.
The field was still decently crowded. Some of the Panthers were being better sports than others, making attempts at camaraderie instead of storming off for the showers. It took me a moment to spot Becca winding her way through the mass of spectators pouring out to console or congratulate. My best friend was tall enough to stand out, but inconspicuous in her street clothes. Her season had ended two weeks prior, leaving her stranded on the sidelines like any other fan.
I dropped my pompoms into a pile of discarded gear and took a breath before diving into the rush of people. I had never understood why so many people came to these games, much less stuck it out until the end. Becca had tried to explain the appeal more than once, but it hadn’t stuck. Her enthusiasm was endearing, but not contagious.
I caught up to her standing alone at the quiet edge of the chaos, looking out onto the field with her arms crossed. As I drew up beside her, she ducked her head to mutter in my ear: “That was an embarrassment. If it had happened to anyone else, I almost wouldn’t have laughed.”
I hid a snort behind my hand. Becca wasn’t laughing now, but her grin was wicked and conspiratorial. If there was anything she valued more than PCM’s athletic honor, it was the dishonor of Todd Fox.
The too-tall senior was a recent transfer. His junior year, our sophomore, Mooreland High had asked him not to return, and PCM had only admitted him on academic probation. He disrespected teachers, leered at cheerleaders, fought his teammates, and always reeked of some awful combination of Axe and skunk. To hear Becca tell it, his disruptive presence had almost single-handedly knocked PCM’s men’s team down about three spots in the bracket.
But he was also, unfortunately, a damn good lacrosse player. Normally, Becca could excuse anything for that. The problem, she’d explained, was dynamics. The Panthers had never been able to coast on raw talent, but they’d historically gotten by with dedication and teamwork. Todd’s ability to score from across the green meant nothing if the other players refused to pass to him because he’d insulted their girlfriends, or earned them extra laps with his mouthing off.
I’d never been able to see dynamics in the chaotic clashes that took place on a lacrosse field, but I didn’t hesitate to take Becca’s word for it. Her strategic analyses tended to fly over my head, but I was always down for trash talk. Hating Todd made the games interesting.
So I was almost sad that this would be our last time watching him crash and burn. Graduation was in two weeks. Next year, we’d be seniors, finally the ones running things, and Todd would be gone. Becca would have to find someone or something new to rail against.
I didn’t think it would take her long.
As if on cue, she sighed. “God help us. What’s he doing now?”
I followed her line of sight downfield. Todd had come unstuck and was stalking through the already much-reduced crowd, straight towards Bolton’s goalie. The rest of the Lions had dispersed, and he sat alone on a bench at the edge of the field, his stick and one thick glove discarded at his feet. His head was down has he typed something on his phone, but he looked up as Todd approached.
Whatever Todd was saying to him was unintelligible at a distance, but I could guess it was vile.
The goalie stood. He was almost as tall as Todd, but more substantial, especially in his bulky gear. The way he cringed away from Todd’s tirade, though, left him looking small. Taking in the rumpled blond hair barely visible under his helmet and the last name—Taylor—stretched across the back of his jersey, I realized I knew him.
Not well, but—we’d been in middle school together. I would have taken a stranger’s side over Todd’s any day, in any conflict, but the vague connection made me feel that much worse for the goalie. Bolton had a reputation for good sportsmanship, and I remembered him being a nice kid. I doubted he was prepared to be the subject of Todd’s undivided negative attention.
Sam Taylor said something I couldn’t make out, and took a step back. His hands lifted, placating. Todd took a step forward and made an exaggerated, aggressive gesture with his stick.
On instinct, I reached out and fisted my hand in the sleeve of Becca’s shirt. This proved to be the right decision when the next words out of her mouth, reaching to bat me away, were, “This is ridiculous. I’m going over there.”
“No you’re not,” I said. This, too, was instinct. It wasn’t the first time we’d had this conversation. We both hated Todd. But while my hate made me want to avoid him, Becca’s made her want to ruin his day.
She’d wanted to report him for cheating on every single assignment in their one shared class. She’d wanted to ask him, in front of God and everybody, why he only dated girls half his height. She’d wanted to petition the local lacrosse conference to get him booted from the team based on his disciplinary record. I’d had more success talking her out of some of these schemes than others.
Everyone knew Todd was awful. Nobody cared. It was not a problem that Becca, I thought privately, would be the one to solve. And all her attempts at confrontation ever seemed to do was draw his attention. The way he looked at her, equal parts mocking and genuinely pissed, made my skin crawl.
But Becca didn’t care. She didn’t think he was worth being afraid of. “He’ll end up a used car salesman at best,” she’d say, because she knew it would make me laugh. “Meanwhile, I actually have things going for me, like principles, and a spine.”
I didn’t have much in the way of a spine, and most of my principles were borrowed from Becca. The thing was, Becca was usually right. No matter how much I predicted disaster, the world bent for her in a way it didn’t for most people. Becca knew how to make things happen, and she graciously dragged me, kicking and screaming, into the bold new future she was forging.
There was no point in telling her I have a bad feeling about this; I had bad feelings about almost everything. And Becca always won in the end, because as much as I wished it didn’t have to be my best friend, I couldn’t deny that someone needed to put Todd in his place.
I told her anyway. But her eyes didn’t stray from the approaching conflict, even as I tugged her back. She didn’t see danger—she never did. She only saw someone she hated picking on someone who didn’t deserve it, and a chance to stop it. I loved that about her, and it made me want to bash my head against a wall.
“It’s the last game of the year,” I said, a little pleading. “You promised me snow cones.”
Becca wavered. It was a manipulative trick. It might have even worked, had Todd’s voice not at that moment shot up to a yell. I couldn’t help the way my eyes jerked towards the noise, taking in Sam Taylor cornered by the bleachers as Todd crowded him.
Other people looked over, just as startled, but quickly turned away. Everyone knew how Todd was. Everyone knew this had been his last chance at glory, and it had flopped. Nobody wanted to get involved.
Becca smiled as she unhooked my fingers from her sleeve. My heart sank, somewhere between anxious and exhausted. “I will get you snow cones,” she said. “Just let me take out the trash first. Last game of the year—last chance for me to tell him to fuck off.”
Which wasn’t even true. We had two more weeks of class. Two more weeks of walking a little faster to avoid crossing paths with Todd in the hall, two more weeks of Todd cutting dirty looks at Becca that nobody but me seemed to notice.
But she had made up her mind. She took off in the direction of trouble, and after a beat, I rushed to follow.
The problem was that Becca was not afraid of anything. Not of getting another referral, not of getting scolded by her father, not of pissing off someone twice her size. Sometimes I wanted nothing more than to be like her. Others, she made me sick to my stomach.
I kept as much distance as I could without losing her, slipping through clumps of people where Becca shouldered her way past. I stayed back several paces as she came up beside Todd and Sam, trying to keep her in sight without drawing attention to myself.
Becca, of course, didn’t escape notice. Todd finished his sentence—from this close, I could now hear him saying something along the lines of that was a bullshit, no-technique move, and you should be fucking ashamed—before rounding on her.
“And what the fuck do you want?” he said.
“For you to eat shit and die?” Becca responded, tone almost pleasant. “Just curious if you’re planning to berate everyone who outplayed you, or if he’s getting special treatment. If not, you should probably get a move on. Lots of people to get through.”
Todd rolled his eyes and made a show of turning his back towards her. “When this bitch comes to defend you,” he said to Sam, voice suddenly jovial, “You know you’re beyond help.”
My mouth screwed up with indignant rage even as my heart jumped into my throat. Behind the grill of his helmet, Sam made a face and cut an uneasy glance at Becca like she was as much of a wildcard as the boy jumping down his throat. But her face stayed cool, as if she had not heard a thing Todd had said.
She set a hand on the butt of Todd’s stick and tugged it until he swung around to look at her. “It’s not his fault you were a mile off,” she said. “You act like if you shoot hard enough, the laws of physics will forget you can’t aim for shit. But if you haven’t figured that out by now, I guess it’s too late.”
Her voice dripped with gleeful malice, but this was not particularly brutal, as far as call-outs from Becca went. Though she did so sparingly, Becca had the guts to be caustic in a way I simply wasn’t creative enough for. That she wasn’t doing it now spoke to how much of a joke she considered this whole confrontation to be.
There had been a brief, terrifying moment, when Todd had first transferred, before Becca had taken up her crusade against him, where I had worried that they’d somehow end up friends. In some regards, they weren’t as different as they liked to pretend. If Todd had had the barest shred of good humor, the tiniest grain of humility in him, Becca would have found a way to respect him, however begrudgingly.
But he didn’t. And he didn’t have any patience for girls. It didn’t matter that Becca was by all means his equal on the field, ten times smarter, and at least sometimes capable of conducting herself in polite society. He looked at her like mud on his cleats on a good day.
At some point, another figure had joined our ragged circle, hovering behind Todd the same way I hovered behind Becca. Tiny, blonde, face like a porcelain doll with an attitude problem: his girlfriend, a ghost of a girl I had half-believed didn’t exist until Lily had pointed her out at a game. She was a cheerleader too, for Mooreland. Becca hated her on principle, of course. I had never heard her speak, and almost hadn’t noticed her presence on the field.
I wondered why she was lurking—had she come to back Todd up, add to the chaos? Or, like me, was she waiting to clean up the carnage?
Todd rolled his eyes, but didn’t respond to Becca’s jab. He stepped in closer towards Sam, who again retreated, until his calves brushed the bleachers. Todd opened his mouth to say something, but Sam beat him to it.
“It was luck.”
The goalie’s voice was softer than I expected. He didn’t look at Todd as he spoke, or Becca, or anywhere but his own shoes. His hands, one gloved, one not, clenched into loose fists as he continued: “Good luck for me, bad luck for you. It could have gone the other way.”
To me, it sounded like a good peace offering, but Todd was quick to snarl, “Should have,” and Becca, looking incredulously at Sam, spoke up at the same time, saying “Don’t apologize for being halfway decent at your game, Taylor, if he ever took his head out of his ass long enough to practice then maybe we wouldn’t be arguing about luck—”
Todd whirled on Becca, giving her his full attention for the first time since she’d approached. “Do you ever stop talking?” he hissed.
I flinched back on instinct, but Becca just rolled her eyes, looking almost bored. Sam blinked and seemed to register his surroundings for the first time: Becca, standing at his side with her arms crossed, the girlfriend and I observing from the outskirts, and the few stragglers on the field who were politely pretending not to listen.
Something in him seemed to shake loose, and he barked, “Back off, okay? Drop it. Just drop it.”
He still wasn’t looking at anyone in particular. I couldn’t tell if he meant Todd or Becca. Both of them seemed to take it personally, because suddenly everyone was speaking at once, fast and aggressive.
Todd slashed his stick through the air around him as he gestured wildly, forcing Sam and Becca both to lean away. A little of the levity slipped off Becca’s face, like she finally saw a little of the danger I had read into this situation from the beginning. But she kept arguing back, words difficult to make out. Sam’s face, what I could see of it through the helmet he still wore, only got redder.
His voice was the one to ring out loud enough to be intelligible, saying, “I don’t want to do this. You already lost, okay? That’s it, it’s over. Just leave it.”
Todd went quiet, his face twisting into something awful. Then he laughed. “That’s it, Taylor? Really? You finally learn some self-restraint?”
He raised his hand and let his stick slide down through his fist, catching it with a choking grip up by its head. He rounded on Sam, who, seeming to only realize the weight of what he’d said once the words were out of his mouth, stumbled back. Todd followed without pause. He was snarling again, but it was hard to follow what he was saying, because Becca was moving too, shoving her way between them, voice climbing up into a yell.
What happened next seemed to happen slowly, disjointed. Todd raised his stick in a wild, overhand arc, and I cringed, imagining him sending Sam sprawling.
Sam lurched backwards, again hit the bleachers, and wobbled. Becca’s head swiveled, like she couldn’t decide whether she wanted to steady him or knock Todd back. At the last moment, she shoved her way between them, hand extended in Sam’s direction, scowling face turned towards Todd.
When Todd swung, Sam lost his balance and tipped backwards into the bleachers with a thud. The girlfriend dropped her phone. I heard myself make a noise, one that rivaled the one Becca made when the stick came down, reckless and heavy, and instead of striking Sam’s shoulder, smashed into her temple.
Watching her hit the ground felt like I was the one who was falling. The dizzy swoop in my gut wasn’t unlike being tossed in the air for a stunt, that moment of weightlessness before hitting waiting arms or a soft mat. This time, though, it went on and on, even though my feet stayed on the ground.
Todd stood stock-still, arm outstretched, a parody of the way he’d stood frozen at the end of the game. His face looked more perplexed than anything, like he couldn’t follow the sequence of events. Like he didn’t understand why Becca wasn’t getting up.
His eyes flicked from the girl crumpled at his feet, to Sam’s white face, rattled but fine in the bleachers, to his girlfriend, who seemed to recoil when their eyes met. Finally, he looked at me and flinched, as if noticing me for the first time.
He didn’t look away until Sam yanked him back. I hadn’t even noticed him climbing out of the bleachers—how had he gotten around—?
With a hand fisted in the back of Todd’s jersey, Sam hauled Todd back with more force than seemed necessary—he wasn’t resisting, just staring. Sam’s mouth opened like he would say something—he looked on the verge of screaming—but no words came out.
Todd said, a little frantic, “Wait.”
It kicked time back into motion. I dropped and finally felt the ground as it hit my knees. I didn’t look at Becca, not squarely, just in pieces: Her arm where I gripped her sleeve, like I had earlier, and pulled her closer, away from Todd. Her screwed-shut eyes, her mouth as she gave a weak groan. Her hair as the long braids dragged through the dirt—she’d spent hours getting them done last weekend, she was going to be furious—
A crowd materialized around us in an instant, an array of adults both familiar and not. Suddenly, there were people kneeling beside me, and a hand hooked the back of my shirt, tugging me up and back. I turned to snarl at whoever had pulled me away from Becca, but faltered when I saw my own face reflected back at me, terrified instead of angry.
Lily was saying, “Get back, give them some space,” was demanding to know, “What happened, are you okay, why is Becca—”, but the meaning of the words wasn’t registering. I stared at my twin, dumbly.
With a muttered curse, she dragged me to the bleachers and sat in front of me, blocking my view. “Don’t look at them,” she was saying, “Look at me, talk to me,” but my eyes stayed pinned over her shoulder, watching as our mother approached.
She met my eyes for a moment, but she didn’t look like Mom; she looked like Coach Hart, so it wasn’t all that comforting. With a solemn nod in our direction, she joined the fray, shooing away some of the bystanders.
“What the hell?” Lily said, mostly to herself.
In the distance, I could already hear faint sirens. When the flashing lights became visible in the parking lot beside the field, Lily turned around and made a face at whatever she saw. She grabbed my wrist and pulled me behind the bleachers, to the field shack that passed for a locker room.
It was disorientingly quiet and dim in there, beyond the sound of Lily digging in a locker for her purse. When she found it, she didn’t let me drift back towards the field, but led us the long way around to the parking lot. I followed, like walking through a dream.
The ambulance was already gone, sirens receding. The cops, though, were just getting started. There were so many people, but I couldn’t see Todd or Sam.
Mom’s car appeared in front of us. Lily opened the passenger side door and tried to push me in.
“I can’t leave,” I said. “I need to—”
“You don’t need to see that,” she replied, flat. “We’re leaving. Get in the car.”
I opened my mouth, but I couldn’t think of a single thing to say. I fell into the seat and let Lily close the door behind me.
She immediately pulled out her phone and called someone. An animated look of upset wrote itself on her face, her mouth curling the way it did when she was really hamming it up. I wondered who she was talking to—Mom, still out there on the field somewhere? Her best friend Holly, who was out with mono and had missed all the drama?
I could imagine it so clearly in my sister’s voice: You’re never going to believe this. Todd Fox finally snapped! Tried to kill my sister’s best friend and everything—
As the thought ran through my mind, I made a sound like the beginnings of a sob. Lily shot me a concerned glance through the window, then stalked off—our mother’s silhouette had appeared in the distance.
Suddenly alone, I dug my phone out of Lily’s purse. On autopilot, I pulled up Becca’s contact, and then blinked.
Becca was the one I always texted when things got weird, when I was scared and needed talking down. It was muscle memory.
Hands shaking, I pressed the call button. Of course, nobody answered. I forced a steady breath and waited for my hands to still enough to type. It took another eternity to figure out what to say.
Let me know you’re okay, I settled on. When you get a chance. And, on impulse, knowing she only tolerated such sappiness sparingly: Love you.
My phone stayed silent the whole drive home.
That night, lying in bed, I just wanted a snow cone.
Becca and I had only started getting treats after games recently, but I was already attached to the tradition. It had been dead winter when she’d gotten her car, and there hadn’t been any games anyway. But when the season started back up in March, she’d dangled her keys in front of my face, and it had taken no convincing to leave the field with her instead of Mom and Lily.
We normally picked the snow cone stand Becca had grown up frequenting, halfway between her house and school. It was just a little shack, sandwiched between a gas station and an abandoned video store, but something like fifty syrups gleamed in colorful bottles behind the grimy window. Becca always got blackberry, but I had been working my way through the more bizarre flavors, loving some and hating most.
The treat wasn’t really the point. Especially after the women’s games when we were both exhausted, it was just nice to sit on a rickety picnic bench under a half-dead tree and pretend the rest of the world didn’t matter for a while.
I had a car now, too, a dull gray Altima half as old as me. But I shared it with Lily, and she always seemed to have much more compelling reasons to use it. It was a rare treat to get to go anywhere—well, not alone. Becca’s presence was an important part of it. But without my sister, or my mother, or the other cheerleaders, or the classmates I barely knew, all the background noise of daily life.
The last time we’d gone, Becca had just played (and lost) her last game of the season. The women’s team had played fiercely this year, not weighed down by the drama that plagued the boys, but Mooreland’s Knights had been fiercer. The quarterfinal game had been long and brutal, and Becca had lain out across our picnic table, only occasionally sitting up to spoon violently purple shaved ice into her mouth. I’d sat on the bench up by her head, slowly eating my Tiger’s Blood, trying to decide if I even liked it.
Normally, after a game, Becca would have launched into a detailed postmortem, soliciting opinions I barely knew how to form. It didn’t matter how little I had to contribute, she always asked. But that day, we’d barely spoken. The afternoon had been hot and sleepy, and the shade from the tree had fallen like a blanket over us.
We’d had almost an hour of peace before the notifications had started coming in: Mom asking me about dinner, Becca’s dad reminding her of curfew, the endless list of homework and projects looming. When they got too grating to ignore, Becca had sat up, rolled her shoulders, and said in a tone too bright to be sincere: “Well, we’ll get ‘em next year.”
And I had laughed, because I’d never known Becca to be gracious in defeat. If that was all she had to say, the Knights must have truly been beyond reproach. But I’d agreed, “They won’t even know what hit them,” and thrown away my cup, half-full of sticky red water, as we headed for the car.
Once we reached it, though, Becca had paused and said very casually, “I don’t actually think I’ll play next year. Thoughts?”
I’d stopped dead, but she had kept moving—not to get in the car, but to lean against it, folding her arms across the roof. Her brow had quirked in expectation as she waited for a response, gauging my reaction.
Chewing on my red-stained lower lip, I had mirrored her and gone up on my tiptoes to lean against the car even as it smeared pollen across my shirt. What I had wanted to say was, “No.”
Not because I liked lacrosse. I absolutely did not. But I liked that Becca liked it. On the field, people couldn’t help but see her the way I did: brilliant and bold, not just harsh and pedantic or whatever other stupid things our peers liked to whisper.
More than that, I hadn’t wanted anything to change. Senior year was already going to be full of too many lasts. If that night had been my last chance to watch Becca play, it wasn’t fair that I’d spent it bored out of my mind, counting dandelions. She’d played the entire time I’d known her; I couldn’t imagine her doing anything else.
Which was exactly why I wished she wouldn’t ask me things like that. Becca was always the first to tell me that I had no vision, no tolerance for risk. She should have known that putting a piece of her future into my hands—however small, however easily she could have ignored me entirely—would gum up my mind with dread and what-ifs.
I had tried to be rational. There were logical arguments I could have made, about scholarships and lines on a resume, but Becca would have considered all the trivial details already. Obviously, she had reasons for quitting. If she’d articulated them, I would have understood and agreed instantly. But that was probably exactly why she hadn’t said anything: she’d wanted my opinion, for whatever reason.
But my opinion was wrong. So I’d just stared at her, put-out and pitiful, hoping her serious expression would break and she’d say, “Just kidding.”
Which, of course, hadn’t happened. But eventually, I’d found something familiar in the set of her features that made me relax.
“You’ve already made up your mind.”
Becca had rolled her eyes and grinned. “Well, if anybody was going to change my mind, it would be you.”
But I hadn’t tried to. I had just laughed, relieved to have figured it out. “Why, though? You love it.”
“I do,” she’d admitted. “But there will be new things to love. Better things, surely. I have no intentions of peaking in high school, unlike some people. Why would I spend my last year doing the same thing I’ve been doing for the first three? And it’s not like I was going to play in college, anyway.”
Knowing her reasons had made me feel better and worse. It was so stereotypically her to get sick of the thing she was a prodigy at. The team would mourn her loss, but she’d be too busy infiltrating the ranks of the art club or undertaking a massive independent research project to notice.
And she hadn’t been wrong about college, though I didn’t like to think about it. We both had plans. Good plans, even—the only problem was that they diverged. Our short lists only had one school in common: the one in-state school I’d convinced her to apply to.
I didn’t know what I would do a year from now when she was across the country. I didn’t even know what I would do if we weren’t on the same lunch shift next semester.
But we had a while before I had to worry about that. And as much as my gut hated the idea, I could acknowledge that Becca quitting lacrosse wasn’t that serious. “Fair enough. I mean, I’m certainly not going to stop you. It’ll be nice to finally stop pretending I know what a ground ball is.”
Becca had snorted, her smile turning sharp as she reached across the car to poke me. “You complain a lot for someone who comes to every game.”
I could have said, “Why do you think that is?” But instead, I’d just laughed, because she already knew.
Now, I turned over in bed, wrapped an arm over my face, and tried to imagine myself there: back against half-rotted wood, the smell of syrup mixing with dirt and gasoline.
In the first few hours after coming home, I’d almost managed to convince myself that my anxiety was overblown. It was a nasty bump on the head, but people got injured all the time. ER wait times were ridiculous, but they probably wouldn’t keep her overnight. A lack of response was easy to explain if she was sleeping off a concussion. If I could just make myself sleep, I’d wake up to reassuring news.
But by midnight, Lily still hadn’t come to bed. From the living room, I could occasionally hear murmured conversation: my sister, my mother, gaps of quiet that implied someone on a phone was weighing in.
They didn’t come to get me. I didn’t feel awake enough to join them. I wasn’t sure I’d ever sleep again.
At some point, though, sleep must have taken me, because when I lifted my arm, sunlight seeped through the gaps in my curtains. The clock flashed 8:16, hours past when I should’ve been up for school. Across the room, Lily’s bed was still, or newly, empty.
Worse, Mom sat at the foot of my bed, looking at me in that inscrutable way she always did when she wanted to be kinder than she thought I would tolerate.
I knew, already, taking it all in, but I closed my eyes and let myself pretend for a moment that I didn’t.