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“Hey!” Jay calls, and I hear his feet coming across the drive to where I am getting ready to swing my leg over the bar of my bike and take off. “Where are you going?” I glance at him and back down. My anger seething, clenching in my jaws and all down the synapses of my body, making my muscles flex and jerk with tension.
His brows are drawn. His hand lands on the handlebar, and I jerk the bike free. He lifts his hand off, in surprise. “Hey. Hey.” He is shocked, and I feel like a total shit, but I can’t speak. My teeth are clenched so tight against each other that I may need a crowbar to break them free. My backpack drops down my arm, and it throws the swing of my leg over the seat out of sync. My leg bumps against the seat and knocks the bike out of my hands. My vision blurs and goes dark, and I drop the backpack and kick the bike, heading down the drive for a walk back to town. Fuck it. Fuck it all.
I get to the end of the long drive before the darkness around the edges of my vision begins to ebb and my blood stops chugging, hard and fast, through my veins. I breathe. Just breathe. The synapses in my head stop misfiring, and I stop at the end of the drive and turn back. I can see that Jay is no longer standing there; my bike is leaning against the bike racks, but my backpack is gone. If I leave now, I will never be able to come back. This will be done. This bubble of happy I have known will pop if I walk away.
I swallow hard, embarrassed for acting like such a bitch and make my way back along the drive, past the pool, past the waterslide, and into the hut, where I find Jay standing with Tommy, leaning against the counter. My backpack is sitting on the floor at his feet, and Tommy nods in my direction when he sees me. Jay turns to look at me, and his face is open but hurt. I put one finger up asking for just a second, because I cannot speak, not if I don’t want to just start crying. I pass by them and make my way into the changing room, reaching into the trash for the wadded-up report card. I take it out to him, hand the crumpled mass over, letting him figure out how to handle it. Then, because I can’t stand here and watch him look at my unsatisfactory performance, I go to one of the tables and sit down.
The paper uncrumples. I hear him smoothing the sheet, ingesting the information, reading the words scrawled in red on the bottom. I hear his feet shift. He and Tommy come to join me at the table, and I swallow hard. “I’m sorry I acted like a brat.” I want to say “bitch,” but Jay and Tommy don’t talk like that, and the few times I have cussed around them they’ve looked at me like they wished I hadn’t.
“P-shaw,” he says, waving it away. “I do a better brat than you do.”
“Way,” says Tommy, and they spin chairs to sit with their arms folded over the backs. I smile and fold my hands on the table in front of me.
“You okay?”
“Yeah.” I nod, just wanting to move on. I don’t want to talk to them about it. “I’m just not doing this year over again.” I did sixth grade twice, and I am not doing it again. I am not walking back into that school to be looked at like the stupid kid.
“Okay,” Jay says. “So let’s look at your other options.”
I love that he thinks, that he doesn’t just start talking about how screwed up that is, about how unfair it is. He thinks and he asks me to think, too. Do I have options? I have never had an option in my life, and I feel completely unequipped to cope with the idea of them.
“I don’t know.” I don’t. My mind is completely blank. I hadn’t thought about how to deal with the letter and the reality heading my way, I just reacted, and badly at that. My life has not been brimming with choices thus far; how am I supposed to know how to recognize them? How am I supposed to know how to make good ones?
“You sixteen?”
I shake my head.
“Seventeen?”
I nod.
“So don’t go. Keith dropped out at sixteen. You don't have to go to school,” Tommy says.
“Keith didn't graduate?” I ask and suddenly understand that maybe that’s why he still lives in Leslie’s basement.
“He got his GED. He has a job,” Tommy isn’t really defending his brother, but clearly he saw the judgment in my eyes. The shock that he saw judgment in my eyes makes me blush. Who am I to judge anybody? Seriously. I just thought of Keith exactly the way I think others think about me.
“I didn’t mean it like that,” I say, feeling kind of shitty because I did, and they both know it. “How did he do that?”
“I don’t know. They have classes or something. Ask Mom. She’ll help you.”
I drag my hand up over my face and through my hair, feeling dizzy with the whirlwind of emotions that have rocketed through me in the past hour, grief, guilt, frustration, rage, shame, embarrassment, and finally hope. I feel a hand over mine, still resting on the table, and I let my thumb rise up over his.
“You guys are great.” I laugh out loud. “I'm so glad I met you.”
“We’re glad we met you, too.” Jay’s smile is back as he draws his hand out of mine. All the turmoil is settled, and his face is calm, easy and relaxed. “You’re going to be just fine.”
“Yes I am.” I hear conviction in my voice, and I hope they do, too.
“You should get emancipated, too,” Tommy says.
I have a vague concept of what emancipated means, but no clear understanding of what it means for me. Jay must see my confusion, my hesitation, my trying to process something out of my grasp, because he asks Tommy what it means for me, so I don’t have to. If anybody has an amazing vocabulary it is Jay, and he probably knows and could explain, but this is Tommy’s comment, and Jay is generous because he is confident and doesn’t have anything he needs to prove to me or anybody else. “Emancipated minor. You go before a judge, and he says you can take care of yourself. Charlotte did it. You have a job, you’re going to get your GED. You have a place to live.”
“I don’t really have a place to live,” I say. The keys to the apartment were with Mr. Billups now. At the moment, that doesn’t really seem insurmountable. I could lie about having a place to live. I am not above a little lying.
“Of course you do,” Tommy says. “What’s wrong with staying with us?”
There is nothing wrong with staying with them, nothing at all. “But how does that work? If I’m not a ward of the State?” I ask, the words prickling across my tongue, making me feel strange, like I’ve just learned that I am a creature from another planet and finally have a title.
“I don’t think you are, officially, a ward of the State. We’re still waiting on the State to figure out where to put you; that’s why you’re with us. You should ask Mom.” He shrugs, dismissing all things he doesn’t know because somebody else will take care of that part. “I don’t know how all of it works, but we sometimes get kids who either are close to aging out or have family that needs to be contacted somewhere else. They just stay with us until the State figures out where they need to go.”
“Oh.” I’m disappointed and surprised, “I thought I was like your foster sister or something.”
“Naw,” he says. “Just sister. You’re part of the family. Just like Charlotte.” I feel my cheeks flush a little pink, because he’s a pretty good little brother to have.
I ruffle his hair, even though he’s as tall as I am. “Thanks little brother.” But we all hear it, the catch in my voice that takes away the joke. He shifts his head away, but there is a little pink creeping into his cheeks as well.
“Talk to Mom. She’ll work it all out for you.”
We are wandering back toward my bike, and I catch myself swaying into Jay as he walks beside me. He’s not prepared, and since we are nearly the same size, it throws him off balance. He rights himself without missing a beat and sways back into me. Just like that, these boys have replaced Dylan, whom I lost when I decided I wanted to love him more than I wanted to be his friend. Stupid me. I’ll never make that mistake again. These two are friends only.