I had missed three Saturdays in a row. Tournaments were on Saturdays, and they went all day—there was no time to visit my dad during the season. Since he had gone to prison, our weekly talks had been like oxygen to me. I felt a piercing pain in my stomach from missing the visiting sessions.
“I have to skip this tournament,” I said to Sparks after school, swallowing my fear of him. He’s going to tear you apart now, whispered the voice in my head.
His mouth was a slim line of disappointment. He didn’t say anything.
“I have a family emergency, and I need to take care of it.”
“You know if you miss this tournament the only chance you have of going to Nationals is to win the State Championship,” he said calmly. I said a little prayer of thanks that he seemed calm.
“I know that.”
“So you think you’re going to win State.”
“I mean, I could.”
“You haven’t finaled in a single tournament since the first one and you’re going to win State.” The very idea of it was preposterous.
“I hope so.”
“Because you have a family emergency.”
“Right.”
“That you haven’t mentioned before now.”
“It’s an emergency, like a sudden thing.”
He lifted an eyebrow. “Right.” He put both hands under his chin, thinking. “So I moved you up to varsity because I saw something special in you. After the very first meet I said, ‘That girl has something.’ I believed in you. I believed that maybe you had the drive to do this. I think I believed in you more than you believed in you.”
My whole body tensed. I almost preferred it when he was screaming at me.
“So after all that, after all this time we spent counting on you, you’re gonna come up with an ‘emergency.’ What is it, by the way?”
“I can’t really tell you.”
“You didn’t have time to think of a lie?”
My face started buzzing.
“That’s okay, you don’t have to deny it,” he said. “I just want to know where I stand with you. Whether you think it’s okay to lie to me or not. Have I lied to you? I don’t lie to you because I respect you, Sydney. Look at me.” Involuntarily, I looked up into his gray eyes. “You could be so much better than what you are,” he whispered. “But I guess we won’t find out, will we?”
“I can’t make it Saturday.”
“Can’t or won’t?”
It felt like my skull was being crushed. Tears started springing to my eyes.
“I gotta go,” I said, fleeing the scene.
Lakshmi didn’t support my decision, either. “Dude. What are you doing?”
“I miss my dad,” I said as she drove me home after practice. The weather had warmed to the point where some of the elephant-sized snowbanks, now gray with weeks of street dirt, were melting. Rivers of cold water splashed down the streets.
“Okay, but there’s only two tournaments left—if you don’t go to this one, you’ll have to win State just to qualify.”
“I know that.”
“Yeah? And?”
“And I haven’t seen my dad for almost a month, and it’s killing me. Isn’t that the whole point? What we’re doing? That winning isn’t the most important thing in your life? We’re fighting that entire idea, right?”
“And how does not going to Nationals make your point? There’s a ton of people counting on you. You’re not the only one involved in this.”
“Really? ’Cause right now it seems like it’s just me, all right? I’m the person taking all the risks. I’m the person making all the sacrifices. And you guys, if this thing succeeds or not, you just go on living your lives and go to college, and I get to be assistant manager at the fucking Cookie Factory.”
Lakshmi dropped her hands off the steering wheel. “First of all: Fuck that feeling sorry for yourself shit. You’re better than that. Second: You think you’re the only person risking something here? I gotta watch my little sister turn into a goddamn varsity clone for the past two months and you haven’t done shit to stop that.”
“I’ve tried—”
“Yeah, you’ve talked to her—”
“She doesn’t listen to me—”
“Of course she doesn’t listen to you; she’s fourteen! And in case you missed it, that was the entire fucking point of taking down Sparks in the first place. So people like my little sister, who used to be decent, nice human beings, don’t become overly competitive fuckwads. That’s WHY we’re taking him out, right? So we don’t have to just rely on telling someone like Rani not to follow that ass clown, we get to SHOW what a toxic scrotal mess he is. Okay? Right? I believe I wrote that down?
“You know she’s taking Adderall? I found it the other day. She’s taking Adderall so she can cram for tournaments. I hear her at night, all right? She barely sleeps. She’s gonna have a fucking ulcer at fifteen if we don’t do something to stop it. And I can’t talk to her… I can’t…” Lakshmi shook her head, fighting back tears. “I don’t want to lose her.”
“I hear what you’re saying,” I said. “But I gotta see my dad. And I promise you, I promise you, I will do everything I can to win State. All right?”
“I hope so.”
Luke offered to give me a ride to the prison on Saturday morning. “I always figured white-collar criminals go to like a country club,” he said as he hunched over the wheel in his Honda Fit.
“I mean, it’s not like Les Mis or anything,” I said, staring out the window.
“Yeah, I wouldn’t say that it was. Like Lay Miz.” I could almost hear the hamster wheel that powered Luke’s brain activate and search for what “Lay Miz” was.
“It’s a musical about the French Revolution. Based on a book about the French Revolution.”
“Sweet.”
“They basically dig trenches. It’s probably like great cardio.”
“You’d be surprised that physical labor isn’t necessarily great for your body,” opined Luke. “When done incorrectly, a repeated action can cause a lot of stress on joints and muscles.”
“Yeah, that was probably the worst part of the French Revolution. The joint stress.”
He laughed. “No doubt.” We came to a stop in the parking lot. “You want me to wait while you’re inside?”
“I’ll catch the bus back, thanks.”
“Sure thing.” He rapped his knuckles on the steering wheel and scratched his scraggly beard. “You know, when I was six, my dad went to jail.”
I turned to look at him. “No shit?”
“Yeah, he got in a bar fight. This was in Brainerd, so everybody knew everybody—somebody mouthed off, and my dad was kind of an angry drunk, so he ended up slashing the guy with a broken beer bottle. It was… really bad.”
“Oh man.”
“Yeah… he was kind of an awful piece of shit.” Luke smiled. “I’m not saying your dad’s a piece of shit, but I’m saying… I know what you’re going through. If you ever want to talk about it.”
I sat there for a moment, feeling the warm air blasting from the vent.
“No pressure or anything,” he added.
“Thanks,” I said quietly, opening the door.
Dad was paler than usual when he hugged me. He was essentially snow-colored.
“Hey there, Squidney!” He held on longer than he needed to. “Gosh, I was wondering what you were up to!”
“Conquering the world,” I said, releasing him and sitting down.
He chortled and adjusted his glasses. “I bet you are.” He sniffed, then scratched his knee. I smiled at him. What was there to say? What could I talk about that wasn’t going to hurt?
“So, what are you up to?” he asked again.
“Um…” A complicated revenge strategy against the motivational speaker that convinced you to take on too much debt, same old, same old. “I’ve got a speech tournament coming up, so that’s interesting.”
“Oh, really?”
“Yeah, State finals.”
“Wow. I wish I could be there.”
Yeah, me too. But you’re not going to be there.
“It’s okay,” I said. “Probably be kind of boring. It’s like twelve hours of sitting down. For the parents. Like, people are recording it with their phones, but it’s like, how often are you gonna watch that, right?”
“I think people watch them. I mean, if I had videos of you, I’d watch them.”
I leaned back. “Sure.”
“I would.”
He was looking at me earnestly, believing what he said. Believing that lie. Did I believe the lies I was telling him, too? Something twinged inside of me.
“But you didn’t take videos of me when you had the chance,” I said. “So why would you watch them now?”
He seemed confused. “What are you talking about?”
“From like, age twelve on, you were barely there, so you don’t have videos of me as a teenager—”
“You didn’t want me to take videos of you then; you were embarrassed.”
“No, don’t turn this around on me. You weren’t there—”
“I was working, honey—”
“Yeah, tax fraud takes a lot of time and effort, I guess.”
He looked pained. He had shrunk into his chair; you could really tell that he had lost weight over the past few months. He had seemed enormous when I was a little kid, a larger-than-life personality from my vantage point on the floor of his office. And now here he was, a fragile thing. I could snap him in two with the right words.
“I’m sorry,” he said, shakily. “I wish things had happened differently. I was trying to take care of you and your mother.”
The urge to tell him the truth surged up in me. I pushed it down.
“I need to go,” I said, not looking at him.
“Okay. I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
I thought about Thomas on the bus ride home. I thought about watching his speech.
I only have the right to tell my story.
When I got home, I started working on something new.