As I ran along the uneven pavement, I kept seeing the two men standing together. And I felt so foolish. Because I couldn’t have been more wrong about Mr. Matthews and Anna. All the arrows that I thought pointed toward him were noise, not signal, all representing something different entirely. And I felt like the pervert for having seriously considered the idea of him and Anna in the first place.
But I was sad and confused for all the obvious reasons, all the logical fallout.
I was also sad for another reason. Sad that I would never again have an excuse to sit outside Mr. Matthews’s window and watch him wait for his tea, his cat curled up beside him. No reason to immerse myself in someone else’s quiet life for an hour, feeling connected without being asked for anything in return.
—
SARAH SAT BESIDE ME ON the bus, her eyes partway closed as she listened to her music.
I’d decided not to tell her. I’d wondered about it all the previous night, and in the end, I’d decided it was simply not my secret to tell.
Still, now that I knew for sure that Mr. Matthews and Anna hadn’t been involved, I wondered if Sarah might be able to shed light on part of the puzzle—why Lauren might have thought they were.
I tapped the back of the seat in front of her, my signal to get her to take off her headphones, something she seemed to tolerate, if not necessarily appreciate.
“When you were in cross-country, did Mr. Matthews ever give Anna special treatment?” I asked her.
She blinked, cradling her headphones in her arms. “Special treatment?”
“Yeah, someone said something about him treating her differently from the other girls.”
Sarah shrugged. “Not really.” She began to lift her headphones back up, and then she paused. “Well, actually I guess he did, a little.”
“How so?”
“I don’t know, Anna started pretty strong in cross-country, but after a while she began struggling.”
“Struggling?”
“She seemed tired, and once in a while she missed practice. A lot of people miss the occasional one, so that’s not all that unusual, but I don’t know, he wasn’t as hard on Anna as everyone else. I mean, he likes me plenty, but if my times started to dip, he wouldn’t sugarcoat it—he’d tell me to cut it out and get back in gear. Tough love all the way.”
“Is that what he did for Lauren too? Tough love?”
“Oh Lord, Lauren. Was she the one spouting off about ‘special treatment’?”
I nodded.
“Yeah, well—he and Lauren never hit it off, and it didn’t exactly help when he reamed her out once when he found out she’d been skipping practice to serve on the prom committee. He apologized later, said he’d been too harsh, but Lauren is hardly the forgive and forget type, so she probably wasn’t pleased to see Anna get off so lightly. Probably thought it was a sign of favoritism or whatever.”
“God,” I said. “She made it sound—” I took a deep breath. “Whatever. Even for Lauren, that’s petty.”
“Yeah, it is.” Then she paused. “I don’t know if she was totally wrong about the favoritism, though. I think he was having a bad week when he yelled at Lauren, but I think he did have a soft spot for Anna. Sometimes they’d sit together and talk about books or poetry or whatever. And not even stuff he assigned in class. I think they just really liked each other.”
Mr. Matthews and Anna. Talking. Poetry. So easy to twist into something it wasn’t. So much easier to think there had been something inappropriate, something romantic, between them than to think that, in their own way, they’d been friends.
—
I WENT TO PRACTICE THAT afternoon. Mr. Matthews looked surprised when I rejoined the team, but he didn’t say anything. I was briefly hopeful that he would let the whole thing go, pretend I’d never accused him of having a relationship with Anna, that I’d never mentioned listening in on his call. It would be so great to never, ever talk about any of it.
That hope lasted until the end of practice.
“Hey, Jess,” he called out as I began to walk off the field. “Can I talk to you for a minute?”
I looked longingly toward the rest of the team as they left. “I’m in a bit of hurry, so maybe—”
“Jess,” he said. He stood looking at me, his arms wrapped tightly around his chest. He looked deeply uncomfortable but filled with resolve. “I’m glad your knee is feeling better, but we really need to talk about what happened.” He looked around and then pointed to the bleachers. “So let’s sit down.”
There wasn’t a question mark at the end of that. So, reluctantly, I nodded.
We trudged over to the bleachers. I noticed that he waited for me to sit down first and that when he sat, he left a notably large space between us. I couldn’t blame him.
“So,” he said. “I think you have some pretty confused ideas about me and your sister.”
“Not anymore,” I said.
“Oh. Good.” His shoulders relaxed a fraction. “You understand now there was absolutely nothing like that between us?”
“Yes. I was…confused.”
“All right,” he said.
I wondered if we could leave it at that. I really hoped we could. I hoped he’d get up and walk away and that would be it.
But then he took a deep breath, and I knew it wasn’t going to play out like that.
“I’m really glad you understand that there wasn’t anything between me and Anna. And I could let it go at that if you hadn’t referenced a phone call you had no right to listen to. A phone call that there is no way you could’ve overheard by accident.”
He took another deep breath and I braced myself for him to raise his voice, to yell. Instead, his voice grew quieter, more distant.
“I’m not going to ask whether that was the only time you eavesdropped
