how true it is, but sometimes I think I absorbed more of the blow than he did.”
I nod. I knew Lucy in a way my mom never did, and it’s hard not to feel like I carry the heavier burden because of that. “I’m sorry,” I say as we’re buckling our seat belts. It’s like a hot potato that I’ve been holding on to for days. “For what I said about you going to private school.”
He grips the steering wheel and cranes his neck back while he reverses out. “It’s fine.”
We sit at the stoplight in silence until it turns green. “What happened then? You were on a scholarship, I guess?”
“Yeah.” I love the way he drives with one hand anchored to the bottom of the wheel as he uses his palm to spin it when he turns, like he’s driving an eighteen-wheeler or something.
“Left on Rowlett,” I say.
“I was in eighth grade when one of the Holy Cross dads saw me playing. I don’t want to say I was really good, but I guess I was. I just didn’t know it because no one gives two shits about basketball in this town.”
“Except at Holy Cross,” I say. Holy Cross is too small for a football team, but their basketball team always wins district and sometimes state.
“Yeah, so I guess a bunch of the dads got together and talked to my dad about me going there. But we couldn’t afford it. Not with everything that had happened with my mom. You can’t give high school kids sports scholarships. At least not according to the athletic association they compete in. They put together this academic scholarship for me. And for my brother, too. My dad said I couldn’t go unless he went.”
“But you said it was your fault that y’all had to leave, right?” I point to my driveway a few houses down. “This is me up here on the left.”
“I blew my knee out at the end of the season last year. We didn’t have insurance then, so I’m not really sure how everything got paid for. More of those rich dads, probably. But I wasn’t going to be playing anytime soon.”
The car idles in front of my house. I wish the drive home were three times as long. “But you were on an academic scholarship? They wouldn’t take that away from you.”
He crosses his arms. “After my injury I got in a fight with a guy on my team. Collin, that kid who swung by Harpy’s over the summer.”
“Over what?”
He shakes his head. “What every guy gets in a fight over. A girl.”
The air in his truck is dense, and I can feel it all the way down to my bones. “The girl who was with him?”
“Amber. We dated for two years. But I was a shitty boyfriend to her anyway.”
I want to ask him how, but I don’t know if I want to know the answer yet.
“I broke Collin’s collarbone. He broke my nose. When we went to enroll for the next year, they said funds had dried up. The donor had to pull their donation. And now my little brother hates me.”
“He misses it?”
He smirks. “Yeah, that kid was a king there. He’d been dating the same girl since seventh grade. Who does that?” He shakes his head, still smiling. I can see what he doesn’t say: that he loves his little brother more than is healthy and would probably play on a busted-up knee to make him happy. “He’s a freshman now. He took the whole thing worse than I did. And then because he’s fifteen and everything’s shit when you’re fifteen, his girlfriend broke up with him. Said she couldn’t do long distance.”
“Long distance?”
“Yeah, the place is about a ten-minute walk from our house.”
“Wow.” My hand hovers over the door handle.
“Let me walk you to the front door,” he says.
“No, it’s fine.”
He persists. “Really.”
“We actually use the back door.”
“Why?”
“The front door’s jammed. It’s been like that for a long time.”
“So why don’t you fix it?” he asks.
“I don’t know. Just one of those things we never got around to. And now we’re so used to it that it doesn’t matter.”
His lips twitch like he’s got something to say, but he stays quiet.
I let myself out of the truck and hold the door open a second as a thought forms in my mind. “Why have you been sitting next to me these last two days? In class. You can talk to me at work.”
He does that