of them. Ronni stood, and I stood, and she gave me a supportive smack on the butt.
“It’ll all work out, Q.”
“Yeah, I know,” I said, thinking: How could anyone possibly know that?
All I wanted was more information. But I knew there was something else I had to do first. So I ran to my bag and dug out my phone, ignoring my coach’s increasingly irritated whistle blowing. When she saw my phone she dropped the whistle and barked my name, which meant I was about ten seconds from getting the lecture of a lifetime. “One sec!” I yelled, texting Ruby to ask her to the game on Saturday. I hit send, threw my phone back in my bag, and ran out to join my team. “Family stuff,” I explained to Coach, the lie rolling easily off my tongue. She gave me a curt nod, and to make up for letting her down I played the best scrimmage of my life.
* * *
—
There was a reason I was especially mad about the prospect of Jamie talking to Natalie Reid. Beyond how much Natalie Reid sucked, I mean. And that reason had to do with what Jamie had told me when she dumped me.
She’d biked over on a weeknight, after texting me to ask if she could stop by. I had no idea something was wrong until I kissed her in the doorway and she pulled away. After that, it was like watching someone else being dumped in slow motion—like I was floating above us, powerless to help the me below. I watched myself sit down and Jamie hover, then sit as far down at the other end of the couch as possible. I watched myself tilt my head, then pull my legs in to my chest. I could barely hear what she was saying to me, and at the time I wasn’t sure how much it mattered. The gist was that it was all too much too fast, and she thought it better if we went back to being friends. Anyway, the end result was obvious. It was clear her mind was made up, and nobody convinces Jamie to change her mind.
But I remembered one thing she’d said with perfect clarity, now. I could hear her voice, her exact delivery: “I don’t think anyone makes it through their freshman year together, and I don’t want that to be us.” The implication was that we would break up once college started, so we might as well break up now and save ourselves the time. The implication was that senior year was about friendship, about being single and unattached and free, savoring the easiest versions of everything and everyone you loved before you left them.
But if she really believed that, what was she doing with number-three, formerly presumed straight girl Natalie Reid? Was what she’d said just bullshit, meant only as it applied to me?
I spent all night thinking about it, always somewhere between asleep and awake, madder and madder the closer it got to morning. By the time my alarm went off I was practically radiating resentment. I grabbed my phone to silence it and saw that Ruby had texted me back overnight, a little after eleven-thirty, and I’d missed it. I read it and reread it, breathing in deeply and blowing air out. I didn’t need to care so much about Jamie and Natalie. I had my own thing going on. Here she was, on my phone screen, having written Yes! I’m there. She liked me enough to come watch me play soccer on a Saturday night, and that wasn’t nothing. I closed my eyes and held my phone to my chest, forcing the endless breakup replay out of my head, replacing it with Ruby with heart eyes, watching me score from the stands, shouting my name. I fell asleep that way, for eleven perfect minutes, until my mom knocked on my door and ruined it. I couldn’t believe I still had to go to school under these conditions.
* * *
—
Frankly, I thought I deserved a medal for not interrogating Alexis about Jamie and Natalie the moment I saw her at lunch. It was excruciating to see her smile at me, knowing she knew something so relevant to my interests