Mr. Connelly looks up from his desk when I push the door open to his classroom.
“Oh, good, you’re here,” he says. “I was beginning to worry you wouldn’t show.”
I slide my backpack off my shoulder and take a seat in the front row. Of course I’d show. This is for Yale, for my future. I take out my cue cards and ask if we can get started, and Mr. Connelly, for the most part, keeps it professional. He listens attentively to my speech, giving me feedback and suggestions. There are no weird comments about “Junior” or digs at my focus level—thank goodness.
When we’re done, I sit down and unscrew my water bottle, thirsty from speaking nonstop for forty-five minutes.
Mr. Connelly walks over from his desk and slides into the seat next to mine. “Hey, I’m sorry again for what I said the other day,” he says. “I guess I can get a little overprotective.”
I muster a smile and say it’s okay.
His face brightens, and he claps his hands. “Let me make it up to you. There’s an Italian restaurant—”
“No,” I say. I think about Ming and what she said about establishing boundaries. She’s right. I have to do it, even if it’s with the guy I most admire.
Mr. Connelly looks down, hurt, and I vacuum in his disappointment.
“Hey, but maybe we can all have lunch as a team, before the tournament on Saturday,” I offer. I can’t believe I’m suggesting dining with Heather as an alternative.
Mr. Connelly nods as I reach for my backpack and get up out of the seat.
“I’ll see you at training later,” I say to him as I leave.
At lunch, Ming is talking excitedly about her new part-time gig at the host agency. They’re paying her $11 an hour, and while she doesn’t get to screen potential host families, she does get to call up parachutes and remind them to pay their rent, since she speaks Mandarin.
“Most of them are okay with their host families,” Ming says. “But I talked to two girls yesterday who wanted to switch.”
“Really? How come?”
“They wouldn’t say,” she says. “But they’re coming in to talk to me this weekend. I hope it’s nothing like what I have with Underwear Kevin.” Ming sighs. “If only I had my own place like Florence . . .”
At the mention of Florence’s place, I chew my lip. Ming still doesn’t know about Florence’s house party this weekend.
“You should see it, her house is incredible,” Ming continues. “She even said the other day if things ever got really bad with Kevin, maybe I could move into her place. . . .”
I don’t know about that. She can’t even invite Ming to her party.
“What is it?” Ming asks.
I look up at Ming. I so don’t want to tell her, don’t want to hurt her, but I also hate seeing my best friend get played. Florence never walks with her to class. Never sits next to her at lunch. Never so much as waves to her!
Gently I tell Ming about the party.
Ming doesn’t say anything for a long time. She reaches up and touches her necklace with her fingers. She has a gold necklace with a small violin on it that her mom gave her before she left. Whenever she’s nervous, she touches it. As she strokes the tiny violin, I look down. I should have just kept my big mouth shut.
“Whatever,” Ming says. “I wouldn’t have gone anyway. I had to practice for my solo for the spring concert.”
“Totally,” I say.
As Ming takes her tray and stands up, I peer at her face. She’s looking over at Florence, sitting with Claire and laughing. For a second Ming looks like she’s going to march over there, but then she puts her head down and walks over to empty her tray instead.
Later that afternoon in debate training, I shift my weight, leaning against the podium, as I squint into the light. Mr. Connelly has just cut me off and told me to start over for the third time. I don’t get it. He was fine with my speech in our private session. It’s the same speech. Word for word.
“I don’t know, it’s just not doing it for me,” he says, shaking his head. He turns to my teammates and asks them, “Is it working for you guys?”
“No!” Heather hollers, sitting up, her forehead glistening like a sugar-sprinkled ensaymada.
“It doesn’t feel authentic!” another one of my teammates, Gloria, calls out.
Oh, please.
“That’s it,” Mr. Connelly says, nodding. “It doesn’t feel authentic. I need to feel your words with your every move.”
On or off the stage? I wonder. I pull my cardigan closed and cross my arms, staring down at my cue cards. I speak into the microphone and ask him to give me one more chance—I can do this, I know I can do this! But Mr. Connelly motions for me to get down.
“You’ve had enough tries for one day,” he says.
As my weak legs carry me off the stage, I breathe into my fist, wondering, What did I do wrong?
Later that day, the bus drops me off in front of Sun Grove Mobile Park. I’m holding Zach’s economics book in my arms, which he had accidentally left when we were studying. But really I’m here because I need to talk to him. Ming’s at practice with Mr. Rufus for her solo. And I don’t know how to deal.
The mobile park is a lot bigger than I thought. There are, like, two hundred RVs in the lot. I ask some boys sitting on an old picnic table whether they know where I can find Zach, showing them a pic of him from the school online portal. They point to an RV parked three lanes down, laughing as they ask, “What you want with that fool?”
Zach answers the door in a tank top and shorts. His face sort of panics when he sees me, the way my mom’s does whenever the property tax accessor comes around. His eyes jump from the empty beer bottles outside to the plastic bucket over which he’s drying his swim trunks, and I immediately feel bad for not calling before I came.
“I’m sorry, I came to give you this.” I hand him the textbook.
I hear his mom’s voice from the trailer.
“Zaaaccchharrry,” she slurs.
Zach holds up a finger to me. “Just a minute,” he says.
I hear banging and footsteps inside the small trailer. What’s going on in there?
“Is everything all right?” I ask.
“Fine, fine,” Zach calls out.
The front door swings open. Zach reappears, sweat beads collecting on his face.
“Actually, no,” he says. “It’s my mom. I think she’s really high.”
He goes back inside the trailer, and I follow him. I see his mom, arms and legs spread out on the floor. She’s rail-thin. Her eyes are bloodshot, her skin full of rashes and ghastly white. Next to her is a trash can that she’s been puking into. The stench hits me in the face; I temporarily forget all about Mr. Connelly and rush over to help.
“Can you get her up?” Zach asks. He pours water from the tap into a glass and wets a rag.
I bend down and lift his mother with my arms.
“Whoooo’ss she?” his mother asks.
“This is my friend Dani, Ma. We’re going to help you sober up,” Zach says. I hold up his mother’s head in my hands while Zach gently pours water into her mouth. “C’mon, we need you to drink.”
“What did she have?” I ask.
Zach shakes his head. “No idea.”
He wets her face with the rag while his mom mumbles incoherently. “I didn’t do nothing . . .”
My eyes slide down her arms to the needle spots near her veins.
“She’s been getting better, honest,” Zach insists. “She’s been holding down a job, going to meetings. But . . .” He wipes the corners of her mouth. “She relapses sometimes.”
Zach’s mom closes her eyes. We lift her onto the bed so she can sleep it off. When she’s quietly dozing, I ask Zach whether they’ve thought about rehab.
“You know how much rehab costs?” he balks at the suggestion. “We don’t have the kind of money for that.”
He tells me they have no family nearby, and as I look around the trailer, it’s bare, save for a few swimming medals and a poster of Michael Phelps on the wall.
We leave Zach’s mother in the trailer and go outside. I sit on the curb next to Zach, staring at the sky above us shifting and changing colors. Zach takes a rock and throws it on the ground. “I didn’t want you to see me like this . . . ,” he mutters. He looks so naked sitting there, his pain exposed, I want to wrap a blanket around him.
“So what’s going on?” he turns to me and asks.
Suddenly, I don’t feel like telling him. My issues seem so small compared to his.
Zach bumps his shoulder lightly against mine. “C’mon, out with it,” he says.
I look down at the dirt, stalling, not knowing where to begin. I don’t want to tell Zach that it started with him coming to see me at training, because then he won’t come see me at training. And I liked that.
“I’m just having a rough day. My debate coach was crazy harsh to me at training,” I say. Then quickly shake my head. “It’s nothing.”
“No, that’s real,” Zach says. “I get that. My coach can be an ass too. Once, he said, if I don’t swim faster, he’s going to kick my poor ass back to the trailer park.”
I turn to Zach. He said that? I tell him I’m sorry his coach is such a douche. Though at least with swimming, there’s a clear winner, unlike debate, where it’s up to the judge.
“I don’t know how Mr. Connelly can go from loving my speech to hating it, in the span of less than four hours. What happened? What’d I do?”
“I wouldn’t overanalyze it. Guys can be dicks sometimes.”
I chuckle and nod, though I don’t want to believe it. Mr. Connelly is not a dick.
“I’m sorry,” Zach says, putting an arm around me. He looks up at the red and gold rays in the sky and all the trailers parked beside us, and I lean against his shoulder. “I promise, one day, we’re both gonna get out of this godforsaken place.”