wouldn’t hurt so bad anymore?
I’d work. I’d work like I never had before. Starting with counting the jars of mustard in Pike’s.
“Sure you’re okay?” the twelve-year-old’s dad says again.
I pull myself back to the hiking trail. Everybody’s looking at me with that awful worried look.
Suck it up, I tell myself.
“Of course,” I answer, smiling at the entire group. “Fine.” By now, I’ve said it so many times over the past two years it’s practically a mantra. What’s done is done.
I hate that being here, remembering, has suddenly made me as tattooed as that tree. I figure I’ve got disaster and heartache written all over my face.
“Just feeling for the poor tree, you know?” I say.
“Yeah,” the dad agrees, snorting a chuckle as he glances back to the carved-up trunk.
His daughter cocks her head at me. When she catches my eye, she blushes again. Her thumbs jab her phone. She lets out a squeal of frustration when she realizes her reception sucks. I cringe as I lead the group up the hill.
We press forward. The sun shines down on us like she’s completely oblivious that anything bad could ever happen on the beautiful planet she lights every single morning.
Chelsea
air pass
The entire senior class is packed into Hill Toppers’ Pizza, which, in Fair Grove, is pretty much the only place to celebrate commencement. Like every single year on graduation night, one of the pretty corn-fed girls in camisoles and tight jeans (sitting on the laps of the more-than-willing boys) will turn up pregnant. One of the football players who passes a bottle of Wild Turkey under their table and spikes their Cokes will be rushed to a Springfield hospital to get his stomach pumped. And five or so kids from the honor roll, who were never so much as tardy to a single class, will find themselves suddenly aching for a splash of wildness and decide to take a cue from the name of the town’s only pizzeria; they will, in fact, go hilltopping after midnight, cars racing eighty miles an hour down some rolling back road.
We’re at a table in the back, me and Gabe and the team, orange smears of grease making abstract art of our empty plates. Everyone has gotten so rowdy at this point that the radio might as well be dead. And Hank, the sweaty-faced owner of the pizzeria, keeps glancing up from the pale circles of dough he smears with blood-red sauce, anxious about what all this screaming and toasting and carrying on will mean for him.
“Better not be a bottle out there,” he shouts, wiping his wet forehead with the back of a hand. Which makes laughter roar out with the force and volume of a V-8 engine revving to life.
At my table, Theresa and Megan, our starting point guard and power forward, are acting out a scene from last season. Lily, our small forward, whose skinny frame has always made her look like a tetherball pole no matter how many all-you-can-eat rib dinners she’s consumed, joins in, shooting an imaginary basketball the same way Brandon plays air bass to his favorite songs on the radio. Hannah, our center, who’s built like a highway billboard, launches into belly laughter so fierce her chestnut hair starts to work loose from its ponytail.
While the rest of the team rehashes all the highlights of the season, my eyes zip across the newspaper articles pasted on the Hill Toppers’ walls. I stop when I find the picture of me, number twenty-three, fists pumping the air victoriously after a game back in the spring of my junior year. As I stare at the bold black print of the title that hangs above my picture (FINAL FOUR, HERE WE COME!), I swear I can feel my Tin Man metal plate and screws scraping against my hipbone.
The team could have gone this year, too, without me. But for all their laughing and joyous recapping tonight, we all know it was the worst season in eighteen years of FGH Lady Eagles basketball. And it didn’t matter how many pep talks Tindell barked out in the locker room; the team ran onto the court defeated. Without their star player, they visualized losses rather than wins. They weren’t even present during the last game of the season; Lily pulled a history study sheet out of her gym bag, and Hannah put an iPod bud in one ear. Theresa and Megan wore glassy, distant looks—the kind of expression that usually fills classrooms during long lectures on