“Me too,” I said.
“Good. I like a worthy competitor.” Then he grinned at me and took off.
I managed to keep going until he finally slowed and then flopped down unceremoniously beneath a tall tree with thick branches. I planted myself on a stretch of grass nearby, my lungs burning.
“Running around on the court is going to be nothing after all this,” he said, shaking his head in mock wonderment. “At this rate, I’ll never sit on the bench again.”
I took in a deep breath. “You sit on the bench often?”
“Not really. But it’s awful when I do—not only because I’m not playing, but also because that’s where the coach hangs out for most of the game.”
“That’s a bad thing?”
“It’s definitely not a good thing. The guy yells himself hoarse, and he has one of the worst cases of body odor ever.”
I wasn’t sure I smelled exactly amazing myself, so I clamped my arms tightly to my sides and made a mental note to put on extra deodorant next time. Next time. Funny how I was already assuming (hoping?) there would be a next time. “That’s too bad,” I said.
“Oh, it could be worse,” he said. “He’s all bark and no bite, really. Also, while I could do without all the yelling, it’s hard not to kind of like the guy after you’ve heard him on the phone with his four-year-old daughter. He once read her a bedtime story on the bus when we were coming back late from an away game—did all the voices and everything. Plus, he wears a bracelet she gave him at all the big games—it’s his lucky thing.”
“Lucky thing?”
“Oh yeah, most of the guys on the team have something like that. Eric wears the same bandanna every game and doesn’t wash it all season. Brian, he eats like fifty red hots because one time last year he did that and it was our best game ever. And Charlie won’t drink a thing for forty-eight hours before a game.”
“He doesn’t drink anything? Isn’t that dangerous?”
He laughed. “Oh, I mean he won’t drink drink. He’ll have nonalcoholic stuff. But for a guy who’s always got not one but two flasks in his car, that’s a big deal.”
“Two flasks? Seems like he should just get one big one,” I said. “More efficient. Unless he has different kinds of liquor in each?”
He shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe he has the super-good stuff in one. Or maybe it’s just easier to be discreet if you have two small ones.”
“So what’s your thing?” I asked. “What weird thing do you do before a game?”
“Me?” He shrugged again. “I don’t believe in that stuff. I believe whatever’s going to happen will happen, that there isn’t any point in trying to shape the future.”
I looked out at the fields and wondered about what I believed. I wasn’t sure what I thought about shaping the future, yet perhaps I did believe, deep down, that there was a chance I could reshape the past. That if I found out what, or even who, had come between me and Anna so I could fix it. Reset time.
I rolled onto my side and looked at Nick.
“What did you like about her?”
He blinked. “About who?”
“About Anna.” Please tell me something good, I thought. Something that mattered.
The pause stretched out until I thought he wasn’t going to answer.
Then he did. Slowly, thoughtfully.
“I liked a lot of things about her,” he said. “I liked how kind she was to people. I liked how I’d see her chewing on her pen all secretive-like when she thought no one was looking. I liked how she once tried to save a crow that was hit by one of the buses—even though it was scared and kept trying to peck at her.”
Then his tone changed, going lower and deeper. “But honestly, I only noticed those things after I already knew I liked her.” He closed his eyes. “She held my hand once, did you know that? Just saw I looked upset about something and came up beside me and held my hand. That was years ago, and I don’t even remember what I was upset about anymore, but I liked her from then on. It just built. More and more reasons to like her, and no reasons not to.”
His eyes were still closed, but around the edges there was a thin line of moisture. The sun was bright, I thought; that was all. Incredibly bright.
So I closed my eyes as well. He’d risen to the challenge, remembered things that mattered. Yet there was also a weird feeling in my chest. A feeling someone who didn’t know better might have labeled jealousy.
After I moved away, leaving his fingers flexed in midair, neither of us said anything. We brushed it off as if it were an accident, something that would never happen again.
Yet I felt branded by it—like the weight of his fingers on my thigh had turned me into a different person.
ALL THE TIMES THAT I’D followed Mr. Matthews home, watched him from his window, I’d never gotten caught. Hadn’t even come close.
Which meant I started to get sloppy. Didn’t leave as much room between us as I had at first. Didn’t bother stretching as much as I used to. In a way, I’d come to feel that we were simply spending time together, getting to know each other. The fact that it wasn’t actually a mutual relationship was something I mostly skimmed over in my mind.
And one day, it seemed like he was walking more slowly than usual. As there’s a limit to how slowly you can jog, I kept getting closer and closer to him.
Less than a block away from his house, there was the sharp cracking sound of a car backfiring behind us. He swiveled around and there I was, less than fifteen feet behind him, smack in the middle of open, empty pavement.
“Jess?” He cocked his head, staring at me like he barely recognized
