“Where else have you been recruited?” I ask, not just Julia but Trent and Chris, too, since schools have been scouting them about the same time they’ve been scouting us.
“Oklahoma, Clemson, Duke,” Julia says, at the same time that Trent and Chris say, “Chapel Hill.”
“Oh God,” I say. Because that was the first thing I learned when I moved down here, that people will put aside whatever differences you have as long as you root for the right shade of blue come football or basketball season.
Dad pulls for East Carolina, out of spite and because he knows nothing about football. I root for whoever’s winning.
“I’ll still love you even if you go to the wrong school,” Chris says to Julia, and he leans across the table and kisses her on the cheek while Trent and I look on awkwardly.
I stare down at my cafeteria tray. Maggie and I talked about school a few times, about the possibility of us ending up in the same place, somewhere big we could be out and no one cared.
But now she’s gone and I have to make all my decisions alone.
Three Months Before.
We’re snuggled under the covers on her bed, in just T-shirts and underwear even though it’s cold in her room, the air-conditioning blasting. Her parents are out at a dinner party; Dad thinks I’m with Julia.
“How was your visit?” I ask, kissing her. She had an official visit at Clemson this past weekend, even though senior year hasn’t even started. It’s the first we’ve spoken of it since we got back, not because we spent too much time kissing (we did) but because I haven’t wanted to hear that she loved it.
“It was good,” she says. She moves, and my head falls back on the bed. I watch as she stands, pulls her bra on. I’ve always been amazed she can clasp it from the back; I have to twist mine around to the front to fasten it.
“Actually, it was great. I really liked it,” she says, and she turns back around to face me. “Like, the team was good and the coach was really nice and I could see myself fitting in there.”
“That’s great,” I say. Then, “Why’d you downplay it?”
She shrugs. “I’m just worried about how you’ll react.”
I push myself up in bed. “Seriously?”
“I just . . . I don’t know, Corinne,” she says, her brow knitted. “My times are better than yours, and I just—I don’t want you to worry if we end up at different schools.”
But she’s the one who wants us to go to the same place. It’s all she talks about, and I wonder if she’s trying to reassure herself, or me.
“I mean . . . I don’t want you to waste your potential because of me,” I say, and I try to make it sound like a joke, but it doesn’t, because she just frowns and turns away, and I lie back down in her bed.
She curls back up next to me after a minute.
“You could be really good, you know?” she says softly, her fingers tracing the dip of my collarbone. “I could train with you.”
“Really?”
“Mm-hmm,” she says sleepily, and kisses my cheek.
“I’d like that,” I say.
And then it’s like her energy comes back, because she rolls over, her eyes bright.
“You would?”
“Yeah,” I say, smiling up at her. “I would.”
“Then let’s go!”
She leans in to kiss me, tantalizingly close, then pulls back, laughing, going to her closet and pulling her tennis shoes out of the box of her running stuff she keeps in there.
I sit up. “You’re not serious,” I say, but there’s laughter in my voice because I know that she is, because that’s just how she is—she sees something she wants, and she goes after it. She doesn’t wait.
“I am!” She chucks a pair of socks at my head. “Come on, sleepy butt.”
“I’d better be getting a reward for this when I get back,” I grumble, moving so I’m sitting on the edge of the bed.
Maggie comes over to me then, in just her bra and shorts, the expression on her face a challenge.
“If you beat me,” she says, moving so she’s straddling me, “I promise it’ll be worth your while.”
Her face is inches from mine. I tilt mine up to hers, closer, close my eyes . . .
And then feel something wet on my nose.
“Did you just—did you just lick my nose?”
Her weight is gone, and I open my eyes to see her laughing.
“Oh, I’m totally going to get you for that,” I say, standing up, and she sticks her tongue out at me.
“You’re going to have to catch me first.”
Four Days G O N E.
I pull up to my mother’s, and the second I get out of the car her chihuahuas, Linda and Lovelace, start barking behind the screen door.
Leave it to my mother to name her dogs after a porn star.
Dry fall grass brushes against my ankles as I walk up the sidewalk to her front door. She hasn’t had anyone mow since July, and now September’s bringing that first cold wave that’ll turn green patches of grass to brown, overgrown ones. Guess she figured since it would all die soon she didn’t need anyone to care for it, but it looks terrible, and I wish I could tell her so.
She’s outlined through the screen door, my mother, Linda barking at her heels. Even through the mesh I can see she’s in a tank top and shorts and clutching a glass of something.
“Corey!” she says, her voice loud and grating. My mother is not from here, but she adopted the Southern accent faster than either Dad or I did. She thinks it makes her sound more trustworthy, more fun. I think it makes her sound like a woman who’s trying too hard. “Oh, I’ve missed you so much, come inside.”
Her long nails dig into my shoulder as she steers me into the kitchen. I can remember a time she wasn’t like this, but it’s hazy, like looking back through a dirty glass. I can remember when I was in middle school and we lived in Colorado and she only drank for fun and she smelled like soap, not whatever was in her glass.
We got along then, even more than me and Dad. Mom would indulge me in the girly things I love, taking me for manicures, or shopping, and we’d actually talk. I’d tell her about school, about boys, about what I was reading or who I wanted to be when I grew up.
But when she started drinking when I was in middle school, we stopped going anywhere. Not all at once, not at first, more of a gradual trickling off, until it was just normal for her to be curled up with a bottle and me to be upstairs with homework.
I stopped talking. She stopped listening. Moving to North Carolina just exacerbated the problem. When we moved, she barely brought any of her stuff with her, like she already had one foot out the door. Before I even started my junior year, she left, and Dad and I were on our own.
It’s a wonder we stayed in the same state, let alone a few miles from each other. But Dad didn’t want to uproot me from school and agreed it would be easier for me to visit Mom if we all lived in the same area, at least until I go to college. So even though I know Mom misses her old friends and her old life and our old house she can’t go back, not yet.
Part of me wonders if she resents me for that.