Chapter Twenty-Five

Alex

The game doesn’t start until seven, but when I got home, I sat in my room staring at that Reese’s and Sprite for a long fucking time. I started fifty thousand texts to her.

Finally, I settled on, Good luck to you too.

Which wasn’t even close to what I wanted to say, but you can’t take back a text. I spent the next couple of hours flipping through TV and playing Call of Duty. I even took out the trash.

The whole time, I thought about her, and what she was doing, and going totally insane. Finally, I went upstairs and fell asleep, and just to make my life even more perfect, I forgot to set an alarm.

Now I’ll get to school late, and I know Coach will be pissed. Already I’m blowing this game, but when I pull into a parking spot, I check my phone and my spirits rise a little. There’s a text from Bailey.

Thanks.

My heart pounds through my chest. I’m so damn happy about that one word. Why? I don’t know. Maybe I’m still letting myself think things—like that she’ll change her mind, show up at the locker room after the game and say she couldn’t go through with it, throw her arms around me, and then we’ll be kissing again.

I’ve got to send something back, but before I can think, another text pops up from her.

It’s that fucking cow emoji.

I turn off the engine, grip the steering wheel, and growl. I guess growling is my main form of communication now. I hope the world can handle it.

It’s okay, I tell myself, you’ve only completely lost your mind, asshole.

When I get in the locker room, I’m greeted by Coach Johnston’s glare.

My heart’s still doing it’s crazy beating thing. I’m trying to breathe through my toes, but I’m pretty sure that’s making me hyperventilate. “Sorry, Coach,” I manage not to growl, but I shout louder than I need to across the open space. “Car trouble!”

“Yeah!” he yells back so everyone can hear. “Those brand new Jeeps are totally unreliable.”

I swallow hard and go to my locker.

The whole team is in here, which means Caleb is in here too, somewhere. His locker is on the next aisle, though, so it’s easy to avoid him. A few of the guys with lockers near me greet me with the usual grunts. I pull on my pads and my jersey and see Eli coming toward me on crutches, wearing a tie and jacket and dress pants. He’s dressed for Senior Night. Somehow, he also manages to carry a clipboard in his right hand.

“Oh, look, it’s the team secretary,” I say and immediately regret it. It’s a shit thing to say. You don’t talk trash about your best friend’s season-ending injury. I can’t seem to shut up, though. First, I lie to Coach, now this. My mouth filter seems to be turned off.

Fortunately, Eli knows me well enough not to care. “Shut up, asshole. Where the hell have you been? I texted you like four times.”

“Oh, yeah.” I didn’t read any other texts that came through today. I was only waiting for one. “Yeah. Sorry about that. You need something?”

“Dude.” He sorta gets in my face and whispers. “What’s up with you?”

Heat rushes to my face. I glare at him. “Nothing. I’m here. Let’s do this.”

He stares at me. “Don’t bullshit me, man.”

I turn to my locker. “Whatever. There’s nothing up. Everything is perfect.”

He closes in, as far as he can with those crutches. “Whatever it is, you need to focus it into killing it out there. We need to win this game.”

I dig in my duffel. There’s nothing in there that I need, but I don’t want to look him in the eye. “I know that, Eli.”

I sit down to put on my shoes. He’s quiet.

“Yeah. Good.” He adjusts his crutches and clipboard and walks away.

“Fuck off,” I say under my breath. To my best friend.

What the hell is wrong with me?

Do I wish that I had told him about Bailey at any point in the last two months? Yes. Does it even matter now?

Tex, fully dressed for the game, walks down the center aisle and passes by my row of lockers. I can’t fault him. Dude hasn’t done anything wrong. He’s a good guy, the opposite of me. She deserves someone like him, I know that, but tonight, I don’t care about what’s right or what should be. I can’t stand the sight of him.

When we get to the field, I scan the bleachers. They’re packed in for Senior Night. The parents all sit together in one section so they can come down during the ceremony at halftime. Each player will give their mom a rose and shake their father’s hand. There will be pictures and probably tears. The moms always break down.

I see Miriam, smiling and waving. She holds up her iPad, and I’m guessing Mom and Dad are watching all of this via FaceTime.

Miriam doesn’t care much for lacrosse and hates all technology and is probably only here to make sure I don’t go off the deep end because of my shit parents. She doesn’t realize how close I am to diving in, not just because of Mom and Dad, but because of a girl about to be on a cow right outside the gates.

My eyes scan the rest of the stands. There’s Nora, with her friend Abby. There’s Devon and her friends. I keep scanning for her, of course, because I’m an idiot. She might not come into the stadium. She’s got other things on her mind tonight and O’Dell to meet at halftime. She works so much that she’s not usually at our games.

But tonight—wow. My heart does that thing again where it feels like it’s trying to beat me to death. She’s here. Talking to the girl next to her, smiling, laughing. God, she looks so good, that dark hair in two braids like a sexy farm girl, her red lipstick matched to her red plaid shirt. She looks so happy. She looks so beautiful.

She turns my way, and I stand there staring at her for way too long before I realize she’s staring back.

Her nose twitches like she’s wondering what the hell I’m doing, watching her like this, so I lift a hand and smile, and she waves and raises her eyebrows. She doesn’t smile back.

It doesn’t matter. That look on her face—is she sad?—is almost as beautiful as Bailey smiling. That’s when my heart officially stops, and I am a walking dead man. Oh my God, why is she so pretty?

A whistle blows, and Coach yells, and I turn my back to the stands so I can play these motherfuckers. I do what Eli said; I focus on the game—push all the want and need for her into my arms and legs and up into that ball. We march and I score, twice, before the end of the first quarter. I’m a warrior on the field, always, because I love to win, but tonight darker forces drive me. I don’t know if it’s seeing her in the stands or my frustration at the fact that someone else gets to go to prom with her, but whatever it is, it’s winning us the game.

At halftime, all the Seniors take the field for the ceremony, escorted by their parents. The roses get handed out, one by one. Eli’s out here; Caleb is here.

I walk out by myself, hands on my hips, not really giving a shit. I do get a big-ass cheer from the stands—they shout KOV! KOV! KOV! I raise my hands in time to the chant and try to enjoy it. I catch sight of Miriam still holding up the iPad so my virtual parents can witness this. Then I look for Bailey again. She’s gone.

Gone to meet O’Dell, so that she can go to the prom with her dream dude.

In that moment, with the crowd still on its feet with my name on their lips, something in me breaks.

I can’t let this happen. I don’t want to say good-bye to us. I want to keep opening the door to her face. I love that. I love the way she calls me on my shit. I love watching that crazy movie list with her. I love that she eats more than I do. I love how there’s a depression the size of her butt on my sofa and how her broke-ass car rattles up the driveway so loud I can hear it from everywhere in the house. I love how that sound makes me feel. Which is: better than anything else in my life. It means Bailey is here.

The faces in the stands blur, and this fire lights inside of me. Not a fire. A fucking conflagration. I don’t want this to be the end. I don’t want her to go to the prom with Tex. I don’t want to be a sail with a goddamn hole in it. I’m not ready to let go of her, and I want her to be more than a friend.

In the locker room at halftime, Coach reams our asses even though we’re killing our opponent. I stare across the open space at Tex, who’s sitting on a bench watching Coach. There’s a reason someone came up with that phrase “the devil made me do it”—it’s what people say when they do something that is at best totally uncool and at worst just plain evil. Maybe sometimes a little evil can’t be helped, especially when there are zero other options to get what you want.

And what I want, right now, is for Bailey’s promposal to fail.

I want it to fail in the most spectacular fashion, so there’s no chance in hell that he gets to go to the prom with her. And I’m prepared to do whatever it takes to make that happen.