I’ll make a conscious effort not to look different or walk funny in the morning. Because, after tonight, I plan to erase this.
I try to imagine my mother, playing with my hair or tickling my back. But tonight my mother is far away in New Mexico, under the stars, because that’s where she decided to move when I was twelve years old to clean up her act. To sober up. To live in a little low-pressure community in the desert. To take life One Day at a Time, her favorite sober catchphrase, as she always reminds me before we hang up the phone. Little does she know what happened to her baby girl tonight.
I wish she was here to rub the knot out of my spine. Do X Marks the Spot. What would she have said?
Nothing. Nothing that my father can’t say.
That is, if I’d bother to tell him.
And I don’t even know where to begin.
So I curl up in bed, hold my legs tight, and scrunch the cool sheet between my thighs. Alone. I know I’ll stop crying once this night is over. I know I’ll be stronger once I can pull myself together. But in this moment, I want my mother.
5
BLYTHE
After we drop Sean off, after all those tears that he spilled as we practically carried him to his front steps, Dev and I drive home in silence.
“Do you believe him? I think he’s just beyond wasted,” I say when we park.
But I don’t want to know.
Dev and Sean have been tied together since kindergarten. Dev’s always been Sean’s head cheerleader. His hype man. The guy who makes Sean look better than he actually is. Because Dev truly sees Sean as a sweet, vulnerable guy, who, despite the rotation of girls, can still get his heart broken. A guy who still wants to know how to act. Sometimes he asks Dev about sex. What it’s like between us.
“Are her legs supposed to shake like that after?” Sean asked him just two weeks ago.
“Oh my God, what did you tell him?” I said.
“I told him the truth because he looks up to us, B,” Dev said. “‘Yeah, bro, they should shake.’”
It seemed sweet. Like he cared.
I’m no one’s hype man. I have my own team to do that for me. The Core Four. They would lay everything on the line for me. Have I talked to girls for Sean, reassured them, coddled them? Sure. What kind of monster would I be if I just left these girls crying after he decided they weren’t worth his time? But for Sean to beg me to talk to someone like he did tonight? This is new.
Dev places his hand on my thigh, nothing more. He’s as stupefied as I am.
The truth is that I have no memories of my life before Sean Nessel was in it. There was my father always commenting how he handled the soccer ball. We’d watch him from the top of my street when he lived near me, before his parents got divorced. My father would say things like, “Kid has a natural talent.” Or “Kid has a great foot.” We’d walk up there—this was in fourth grade—just so my dad could talk to Mr. Nessel. Just to compliment him on his son’s foot.
Before that, Sean Nessel was the kid who chased me around the playground during recess. I’d be out of breath, hiding from him under the slide, but he’d always come for me. Even when the other boys, boys like Dev, would be throwing a tennis ball against the school wall. They wanted to play Pegs. Sean wanted to chase me. And I let him chase me for at least the first half of recess. I loved it. I loved the thrill of being wanted by him, even though I couldn’t explain that in my little silver leggings and my pink T-shirts and my boots or my high-tops with all the studs on them.
“I’m gonna get you tomorrow, Jensen,” Sean would yell to me with a huge smile, his face streaked with red before he went over to join his friends at the wall.
I didn’t meet Donnie until sixth grade when we got to middle school. Back then it was just me, Cate, and Suki. Cate would say to me, “I can stop him, B. I’m bigger than him.” And she was bigger than him for a while—her round body didn’t get muscular until we got to middle school and all stretched out. Sean was wiry then, lean with popping muscles, but not a monster, before he shot up to whatever tall height he’s at now.
Did I want him to stop chasing me? I lived for him to chase me. But I didn’t know how to say that to Cate. To anyone. So I went home that night and demanded that my father take me to the mall to get running sneakers.
“You have sneakers,” he said, looking down at my high-tops. With their gold glitter laces.
“Not ones like these. Sneakers that’ll make me run fast.”
“Okay, but is there a reason?”
“Because I need to outrun someone.”
My father was concerned. He looked at me, serious. “A bully?”
“Bully, no! Sean Nessel is chasing me all over during recess.”
My father’s face. Like a proud papa. Sean Nessel, the kid with the foot, chasing his baby girl.
“You know what it means when a boy chases a girl, don’t you, Blythe? It means that he likes you.”
When I went to school the next day, I hid my new sneakers in my backpack like a secret weapon. I didn’t want Sean to know what I had. It would be a surprise. A sneak attack. A sneak-ers attack.
In class, during a small break, he walked by my desk on his way to the water fountain. He bent down, whispering to me, “I’m going to get you today, Jensen.”
I gazed up at his face. No hesitation. “I’ll be waiting,” I said.
He smiled so big that I thought his face would explode. I couldn’t even sit in my seat right, I was so excited. Cate turned around, her pudgy face desperate. “What’s going on?” she mouthed.
I shrugged. It was my thing with Sean. Our game of chase. I didn’t want her or anyone else part of it.
Later, when the bell rang, I told Suki and Cate not to wait for me because I had to go to the bathroom. I ran over there, sat in the stall, and changed into my new sneakers. Teal and purple. Shoved my boots in my backpack. Hung it up in my locker, then walked to the school door. My heart racing. My body pounding. I opened the door and stood at the top of the steps, searching for Sean until I found him playing Pegs at the wall.
I strode over slowly, so out of breath already, my body throbbing. I wanted to scream his name, holler for him. Come and get me. But I didn’t have to. Because he spotted me through everyone. His face beamed. Then he looked down at my feet, and his mouth dropped open wide. He laughed, rested his hands on his hips, nodded, and without any warning, rocketed toward me.
I pivoted and ran, faster than I ever had before, zooming between kids, not stopping for a second. I could hear him catching up, behind me, grunting. Then I just felt him all of a sudden, his body tackling me into the mulch near the tire swing. My face skidded across the wood chips and then a thud of both our bodies, together and then hitting the ground. There was a moment or two that the air completely escaped me and maybe the same happened to Sean because he rolled off me and we both wriggled on the ground, gasping.