My fingers fidgeted in my pockets, wanting to touch him but not wanting to pry. If he wouldn’t tell me, then touching him skin to skin was the only way to know for sure what he was feeling. But it felt wrong, like sneaking around in someone’s room, or taking something away from them that wasn’t mine to take. I’d feel his emotions, taste them like they were some tangible thing I’d consumed.
The first time I touched Jeremy, we were twelve. It was an accident, our fingers grazing as we both reached for the last cookie on the silver tray in Jeremy’s kitchen during our dads’ poker game. Up until that night, we hadn’t really spoken on those Friday nights when my dad dragged me to Belle Green with him so he could play cards with Mr. Fowler. I’d felt out of place in his house. It was filled with delicate and breakable things. Things I shouldn’t want to touch, but did, because they were so different from my own. But when I’d touched Jeremy, we felt the same. Alone. He was in his own house, in his own neighborhood, and still didn’t fit. I recognized that kind of loneliness, because it was mine too.
We split the last cookie that night, and everything else since. Being together didn’t get rid of the loneliness, but somehow, it made it sweeter, because we shared it.
I pulled my hands out of my pockets, and gently took his, letting a painful lump of his emotions swell in my throat. His depression tasted like a dry salt paste. It would have been choking and hard to breathe through if it weren’t muted by the antidepressants Dr. Matthews prescribed. Still, my eyes burned like I’d been crying, and I swallowed the knot until it was a clenched fist inside my chest. “What’s going on? You can tell me.”
Jeremy shook his head. “It’s nothing.”
But it wasn’t. It was strong, with a bitter after bite that I could feel trying to claw its way up. He was angry, and burying it deep. It seemed to burrow under my own skin.
“It’s something.”
He shrugged it off and didn’t look me in the eyes. “I got into it with my mom again this morning. That’s all.”
I gave his hand a squeeze. Whatever it was, he would tell me when he was ready. “I’ll pay you back the rent money, I promise. I don’t want to get you in trouble.”
He squeezed back, and the brief pulse of affection was laced with doubt. I let go of his hand, and pushed my glasses up my nose, bringing his tight smile back in focus, knowing I’d seen him more clearly a moment ago and wishing I hadn’t.
“It’s fine. Don’t worry about it,” he said, as if he could see through me too.
We neared the gym, and the hall erupted with clapping hands and the steady stomp of feet against the bleachers. West River High’s varsity soccer team had made the championship playoffs. The athletes gathered by the trophy cabinet to check their reflections in the glass and worship at their own altar before rushing the gym floor. I skirted around the clog of blue uniforms, trying not to touch them.
“Heads up!”
I ducked and held my breath as a soccer ball soared low over Jeremy and smacked into the wall. The rebound caught the side of his head.
“Relax, man. It’s just Fowler.” Vince DiMorello recovered his lost ball and dribbled it back through the crowd.
“Do you mind?” I hollered.
“Blow me, Boswell,” Vince called back, following it up with the finger. I bit back a mouthful of choice insults that would have been completely wasted on Vince’s stunted vocabulary and pathetic IQ, and watched as a manicured hand smacked the back of Vince’s head. Hard. To anyone else, it might have seemed like a casual flirtation, but I knew this particular cheerleader, and the look on Emily Reinnert’s face wasn’t romantic.
“Don’t be such a dick,” she muttered as she stepped out from behind him to head toward the gym.
She didn’t look at me when she passed. Not directly. Instead, the corner of her mouth turned up, curling the Wild Cats logo on her cheek. The throng of people narrowed around us and pressed into the wide gym doors. She discreetly slipped a note into my hand and I shuddered at the unexpected contact. A wave of her complex emotions rippled through me. A nauseating prickle I attributed to stage fright. Then the cool wash of gratitude that followed.
I crumpled the note and pulled my hands inside my sleeves while Jeremy watched the hem of her cheerleading skirt disappear into the gym. “Is it just me, or is it shorter than usual?”
“Jeremy!” I tugged on his camera strap. “Why don’t you take a picture? It’ll last longer.”
“I plan to take a few dozen,” he said. “You know, for the school paper. Think she’d give me an interview?”
I snorted. “Sure, if you can get past her boyfriend. For your next reckless act of rebellion, you can ask TJ’s girlfriend out on a date. Then we can see how long it takes him to beat you to death with his leg brace.”
“You wouldn’t let that happen.”
He said it quickly. Easily. Like he didn’t have to think about it. Jeremy was a pacifist—the opposite of his dad— where I tended to react for both of us. When we were fourteen, I’d stood in his kitchen, holding his phone, waiting for social services to answer. Jeremy’s hand was on mine, his wrist ringed in bruises, tasting remorseful and uncertain, like maybe he’d deserved it. Drowning out my own feelings and making me uncertain too. I hung up the phone, and Jeremy let go, and I still hated myself for it.
“Are you coming?” he asked, shaking me from the memory. Music and shouts blared behind him, a sea of blue-andwhite jerseys and pom-poms.
“No, it’s not my thing. Anh’s working the store for her brother after school. I wish we could hang out. Just the two of us,” I said hopefully. Maybe if it we hung out like we used to, then he’d open up and tell me what was wrong.
“I can’t. I’m covering the game at North Hampton.” He held up his camera case and waved an apologetic good-bye. People crested around him in blue-and-white waves, and his blond head bobbed over them like the sun. I squeezed my hand where I’d held his a moment ago, and hoped he’d be okay without me for a while. I waved back, walking backward as the gym swallowed him up.
Emily’s note crinkled against my palm. I ducked into the nearest girls’ bathroom and opened it. Everything about it bubbled, from her loopy letters to the obnoxious circles under multiple exclamation points.
79% on my algebra test. I passed!!!
I sighed, crumpled her note, and tossed it in the trash. It was almost a thank-you. A passing grade meant she could keep her place on the squad, her seat in the social pyramid. Unfortunately, her passing score would do nothing for mine, even though I had been the one to tutor her after school.
Every week.
For three months.
Community service. Five days a week. One hour a day. A mandatory requirement of all scholarship candidates. Students with cars and bus money got to volunteer in labs, or hospitals, or at the Smithsonian. Oleksa’s dad hooked him up cracking math codes for some government agency. Meanwhile, we who were vehicularly challenged had to tutor students after school.
Of course, it would all have been worth it if they’d paid me. If I didn’t have to slip money from my mother’s tip jar for my newspaper and depend on Jeremy’s Twinkie donations for my junk food fix