Game On (6 page)

Instead,
I swallow my own and head to my truck. I open the passenger door, offering Bri my free hand to help her inside. But she stays put in the middle of the lot, facing Matt. “We are so, so done,” she finally says. “We're done here, and we're just—we're
done
.” She shakes her head, backing toward me. “Leave me alone, Matt.”

I'm slack-jawed when her hand does slide into mine, which is still outstretched. My pulse slows the slightest bit. It's not perfect, but it's better. Which feels really, really weird. Good. But weird.

I climb into my own seat, my brain whirling with what I just saw. That's not something I thought I'd get to witness
.
Hell, that's like seeing Derek Jeter smack a home run up close. It's a freakin'
privilege.

Clearing my throat, I hold the bag out for Bri. “Could you—?”

Sighing, she pulls it into her lap and fixes her eyes on the windshield.

I mean, she
is
sitting where the bag's supposed to go.

I let the windows down, the cool evening air pouring into the cab. Bri closes her eyes and relaxes back against the headrest, which I take as my cue to get the heck out of here.

Bri's silent for the entire ride. It isn't until I turn onto our road that she says, so quietly I can barely hear, “Thanks.”

I pull into my driveway, parking behind Momma's van. Bri still won't look at me—she just stares out her window at her own driveway, which is empty except for her car. With her dad being a truck driver and on the road for half the year, her driveway is almost always empty.

“Don't mention it,” I say, repeating her words from this morning. “You okay?”

Her face scrunches. She bites her lip, something my sister does when she's trying not to cry. “No.” She looks at me out the corner of her eye. “I will be. But not right now.”

Before
I can second-guess myself, I tell her, “You did the right thing,” and it's the truth. Because if I'd heard him call her stupid or anything like it one more time, she wouldn't have had the chance to break up with him—I would've broken him myself.

Never in my life have I heard someone talk to a girl like that. If I'd even tried, both my dad and brother would have smacked the hell out of me. But it's not only that—this is
Bri
. This is the girl whose laugh is one of those that makes you grin and just watch—watch her eyes brighten and her smile widen and her cheeks flush. She gives everything all she's got, even something as small as a laugh. Someone stealing that from her is downright criminal.

“What happened?” I ask. “What started all that?”

She looks away again, at her house. Silence hangs in the air, thick as a wool blanket. As seconds tick by, and those seconds turn into minutes, it's clear my question's not going to be answered.

I'm not gonna lie: I used to have a thing for the neighbor girl. But when people talk about the girls who are way out of your league, they don't always mean the rich girls, or the ones who act like their crap doesn't stink. There really are girls out there who are too good for you, the ones you'd bring down if you got too close. The ones who've built themselves up so damn high that you can't even imagine bringing them down, because if you do, it'd be like shattering the monuments at Yankee Stadium. Which is why I haven't pushed that friend-neighbor-whatever thing we've got. It's why I've stomped those feelings down every time they've crept up over the past few years, and there've been more than a few times.

It's also why Matt Harris is even more of a bastard for stealing her laugh.

“He'll call tonight,” she says, I think more to herself than to me. “I'm surprised he hasn't yet. I just hope he doesn't show up here. He's not a good loser.”

She
doesn't have to tell me twice; I've seen the guy throw plenty of batting helmets and bats on the field. Coach got all over him once last season for bailing on a post-game handshake. I unbuckle my seatbelt and shove my keys into my pocket. “Know what I think?” I ask. “If he does call you after that, you need to tell him to go fuck himself. And if he shows up, tell him to pay me a visit. I'll straighten his ass out real quick.”

“You really kiss girls with that mouth?”

“I kiss girls very, very well with this mouth.”

She sighs, shaking her head as she hops down from the truck. I do the same, the gravel crunching beneath my boots. The slamming of her door is like a shotgun piercing the Sunday evening silence. She passes me the paper bag, still not quite meeting my eyes.

I nod toward her house. “When's your dad coming back?”

She tucks a piece of hair behind her ear. “A few days. No big deal.”

No big deal.
Practically living by yourself seems like a pretty big deal. “I know it's been a while, but you're still welcome at our house anytime. Momma loves feeding people. It might be mac and cheese three nights a week, but it's food.” Ever since she went back to teaching last year, Momma's favorite things are blue box mac and cheese and pre-packaged lasagna. These are also my favorite things.

For the first time tonight, Bri smiles. It's tiny, but it's there. “I do love mac and cheese.”

“I'll even share with you.”

“That's so considerate.”

“I'm a considerate guy. Mi casa es su casa.”

And
finally, finally, I get a laugh out of her, one with bright eyes and a full smile, and I can't hold back my own.
Thank you, Spanish class.
“That's the twangiest Spanish I've ever heard,” she says. “Señora Hernandez would be ashamed.”

Don't care. If it makes her laugh like that, I'll embarrass myself every day of the week.

She backs away, toward her yard. “Thanks for the ride.”

I shrug. “It's the least I could do. You rescued my chicken.”

And add that to the list of things I never thought I'd say.

Chapter
Four

Bri

Every Sunday night for the past five months, Matt and I have eaten dinner at Joyner's. He picks me up and we fly through town in his massive beast of a truck, as predictable as an old married couple. You know, the old married couples who drive lifted Chevys.

Tonight, I went to Joyner's to break up with him.

Heck, Becca even took me there this afternoon to
rehearse
, for crying out loud. I was prepared. Psyched. Ready to cut the cord and move on with the rest of senior year in relative peace. I felt like I was on top of the world, which is essential when you break up with someone. Because for those few moments, those moments you're taking back control of your life, you sort of do own the world. You own
your
world.

But in a not-so-surprising turn of events, his clingy, leech of a best friend crashed our “date” and completely threw me off my game. And I was pushed to the side and ignored, which, whatever—I'm used to it. I just needed a new game plan.

Then Eric Perry walked in. Matt caught me glancing at him, and it was all downhill from there. The rest, as they say, is history.

As much I hate myself for it, for the briefest of seconds, I actually felt guilty. I felt guilty for looking at another human being. If Matt is good at anything, it's laying on a guilt trip worthy of courtroom dramatics. And I can still hear his whisper in my ear while we were sitting in that booth, the smirk I heard in his voice as he said, “You're positive that you're the one who gave
him
a ride last night?”

So
I stormed out. Screamed at him in the middle of the parking lot. Further transformed into this person he's turned me into, someone who yells at her boyfriend outside of a crappy barbecue joint, for Christ's sake. We might as well have been in some freaking Lifetime movie.

I was this close to walking home—three miles be damned—when Eric showed up in the parking lot. And somehow, for some reason, I knew I'd be okay. And the words finally spilled out, like poison purging from my gut, and it felt really,
really
good. I wanted to say them again, and again, and again.

We're done.
I should have that tattooed somewhere
.

I feel Eric's eyes on me as I head across my yard, arms crossed tightly as my boots sink into the grass. I thanked him for giving me a ride tonight, but I don't think he realizes how it was so much more than a lift home. If I'd have walked away from that parking lot, I don't know if I would've worked up the nerve to do what had to be done.

My house is dark when I walk inside, like always. Quiet, like always.

Lifeless. Like always.

My dad became a truck driver two years ago. The longest stretch I've seen him in those two years is three weeks, if that. And while I can't blame him for wanting to get the heck away from this town, it'd be nice if he remembered me on his way out.

I hang my keys on the hook beside the door. Unzip my boots and leave them on the entry rug. Toss my purse onto the couch.

We're done.

My heart stutters, my steps faltering to match. I shake my head. Take a deep breath. Keep going.

Despite
my socks, the cold hardwood chills my feet as I turn down the hall; crappy insulation and even crappier heat tends to do that. I head into the bathroom. Squeeze makeup remover onto a tissue. Pretend I don't notice the shake in my hand. I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror, of bloodshot eyes that are red from crying way too much over someone who doesn't deserve a single tear.

We're so, so done.

They're my words—I actually said them out loud instead of daydreaming them—but they sound foreign as they play over and over and over in my head.

Routine, Bri. Stick to the routine.
Routine is safe. Routine will keep me from collapsing.

I'm not allowed to collapse. Collapsing leads to tears, and I'm so tired of tears it's not even funny.

Makeup: off. Yoga pants and hoodie: on. In my room, I fall back onto my bed, my head sinking into the cool pillow. It's not even seven o'clock, but exhaustion hits like a ton of bricks.

Here's the thing no one knows about me: I was four the first time my mom called me stupid. Some people get all huffy and insist there's no way I can remember something from that long ago, that I was only a kid and I've probably just made it up over time, but stuff like that sticks with a girl more strongly than Krazy Glue.

My first memory is my mother calling me stupid. And that wasn't the last time.

She left when I was seven, in the middle of the night. That's actually why Dad and I eventually moved into this house; it was cheaper and Mom left him with a metric ton of debt. Dad said she was someone who never wanted to be a mom in the first place, which didn't exactly make me feel better. Seriously, what kid wants to hear that? But the more I think about it, the
more
time passes, the more I realize Dad was right. And now I know that life has been better without her.

Matt and I had been dating for two months when he told me he loved me. The next week, he called me stupid for the first time. It wasn't the playful “You're so stupid” kind of thing—it was the “stupid” that sinks to your core, the one that makes you second-guess everything you think you know. If one person says something, it hits you hard. If someone else chimes in with the same thing, even if it's years later, you start to wonder if it's true.

Tonight wasn't the first time he called me stupid. But it'll most definitely be the last.

An engine cranks outside. I glance out my window right as Mrs. Perry's van pulls onto the road. They leave at the same time every Sunday night, on their way to church. And now, I really am alone on our tiny stretch of back road.

Eric invited me over, but being around people increases the chance of them seeing you break. I hate being alone. I hate people seeing me break even more.

My phone buzzes from the nightstand. I glance over, at the picture of Matt filling the screen. He's shirtless, grinning that grin that gets him out of everything under the sun. I took that picture on his parents' boat, when we went to the lake for Labor Day weekend. Right before he told me that my hips looked huge in my bikini. He said it with that grin. I wore a cover-up for the rest of the weekend.

This is the same guy who's sat beside me during National Honor Society meetings for the past two years. He brought me tulips on the first day of senior year. Told me that he'd been working up the guts to ask me out for months, ever since we worked on Habitat for Humanity together last spring.

I grinned like an idiot. I should've run like hell.

He
had Honor Society and baseball; I had Honor Society and soccer. He had his friends; I had mine. We partnered in Biology and dissected cow eyeballs together. We danced at Homecoming and spent vacations at his parents' lake house. For a while, things between us were absolutely, positively, mind-blowingly perfect.

Until they weren't.

That's when the dream guy turned into someone who ignores you when you do better on a test than he does. Who gets annoyed when you're voted president of National Honor Society, and he gets vice president. Who gets royally pissed when you're told that you're at the top of the class, and he's second.

He's the one who grabs your wrist when you try to walk away from a fight during Christmas vacation. Who wouldn't dare grab you hard enough to leave a bruise, because dear God, he's not a
monster
, but who also won't let you get the last word. Who convinces you that you deserved it.

And now tears are streaming down my cheeks. Dang it.

In the silence of our old, drafty house, my sniffling sounds more like a race horse. The phone buzzes again. And again. And again. Out of habit, I reach for the stupid phone. Texts and a voicemail already cover my lock screen. But instead of answering, I press the button until it switches off. And for the briefest of brief seconds, my heart relaxes the slightest bit.