By the time we started our junior year in high school, I was eating, breathing and sleeping football. And I loved it. I never complained about the day-long practices in a hundred-degree heat or about the games where they had to clear snow from the ground so that we could see the yard markers. As long as I was out on the field, I was in heaven.
The rest of my life wasn’t so bad, either. I had a pretty cool group of friends. Most of them were football players, too, because it was easier to hang with guys who knew what I was talking about. And the girls were usually cheerleaders or the girlfriends of the football players. They understood the game and the commitment.
I still saw Nate and Quinn pretty often, although they weren’t part of my main crowd. Nate had gotten involved in rowing crew, and he spent long hours down at the river, practicing and competing. It was beginning to show, too. Although he was still smaller than the rest of us and still had that sort of scrawny look to his face, his arms and chest had filled out, and he seemed to have found some kind of quiet confidence that he’d never had before.
Quinn was a different story. She had grown, too, until she was among the tallest girls in our class. She had long legs and arms, but she carried herself with a sort of grace I didn’t notice in the other girls. Her face had slimmed and softened, too. The only thing that hadn’t really changed was her hair, which was still long and curly and always in her way. I knew that she had made friends with a few girls who worked on the high school newspaper, and when I asked her about it, she went on and on about the joys of writing. I didn’t get it myself, but since she helped me sometimes with my essays and term papers, I kept my mouth shut.
Other boys in school had begun to notice Quinn, too. Some of them asked me about her, what she was really like, and I knew a few tried to ask her out. Whenever that happened, my chest got tight, and I wanted to punch something, which I knew made no sense. I didn’t want to admit to myself that my feelings toward the girl who’d gone skinny-dipping with me in our baby pool were ... complicated. Yeah, I dreamed about her sometimes. Yeah, there were times when she turned a certain way, looked at me or smiled when I felt like I couldn’t breathe. But she wasQuinn, the same perfect, innocent girl who’d been almost part of me our whole lives. And I’d made choices that meant I wasn’t good for her. Not anymore.
To my secret relief, Quinn never seemed interested in the guys who asked her out. She was always nice enough to everyone, but she just didn’t date. I couldn’t figure out why. She didn’t seem to want the same popularity that I had, and there were times I wondered if she thought less of me because I did want it.
I was doing okay in the girl department. I didn’t have a steady girlfriend, but I dated. I hooked up. I liked to hang around with all of my friends most of the time, but a movie or a dance with a pretty girl was okay, too. Whenever my mom or my brothers teased me about having a date though, I had to remind them that for me, football came first. If a girl didn’t get that, she didn’t get me.
I asked Nate once if Quinn liked any particular boy. He got the funniest look on his face and shrugged.
“Maybe she just doesn’t want to date,” he mumbled. “Maybe she doesn’t feel like she needs to.”
I saw that his face had turned red, and right away I got it. Nate didn’t want Quinn to be interested in any boy—not in any boy other than him, that is. I kind of felt sorry for him, because although I knew that Quinn loved Nate as her best friend and would always be loyal to him, I didn’t think she cared about him that way. I wondered if Nate realized that.
A few weeks into school that year, I passed Quinn in the hallway right after the last bell. She was clutching a pile of notebooks to her chest and walking with her head down. Behind her a bunch of cheerleaders, dressed for the pep rally that day, were giggling.
Before I could say hello, one of the cheerleaders, Trish, reached deftly around Quinn and knocked a book out of her arms. I started to smile, thinking it was the kind of thing a guy would do to a buddy, but then I saw Quinn’s reaction. Her face flushed, and she jerked away before leaning down to retrieve her book.
“What’s the matter, queen? Clumsy today?” The girls surrounded her, hemming her in.
Quinn pressed her lips together tightly and didn’t answer. She began to stand up, and another cheerleader shoved her back down.
“We didn’t like what you wrote about the squad. You need to stop saying stuff like that.”
“It’s an editorial. Opinion. Look it up. It means I can write what I want.”
I winced. That wasn’t what these girls wanted to hear. I knew them all from parties and from away games, when we traveled together on the bus, but these three weren’t people I generally hung around with. They tended toward meanness, and I didn’t have time for that shit.
“Leave her alone.” I stepped forward and stood in front of Quinn. “What the hell’s wrong with you?”
One of the cheerleaders smirked at me. “This isn’t your business, Leo. We’ve got it. Run along.”
“She’s a friend of mine, and she didn’t do anything to you. So it’s my business.” I grabbed Quinn’s hand and hauled her up. Trish looked as though she wanted to say something else, but one of the other girls snagged her arm and pulled her away. She threw one more poisonous glare over her shoulder as they headed down the hallway.
I glanced down at Quinn. “What was that all about?”
She was standing frozen, and I realized that she was staring at our still-joined hands. I released hers, and she looked away.
“It was nothing,” Quinn mumbled. “Stupid cheerleaders.”
“What were they talking about? What did you write to set them off?” I persisted.
She looked me full in the face for the first time. “I guess this means you don’t make it a priority to read my editorials.” There was something in her voice that wasn’t quite humor mixed with a little bit of hurt, and guilt made me snap back.
“I don’t read anything but school stuff and play books during football season. No time. So what did you do?”
“I didn’tdoanything. I wrote an opinion piece about the special treatment the cheerleaders get, nothing that everyone else in the school isn’t thinking. And some of them obviously didn’t like it. No big deal.”
I gritted my teeth and ran a hand through my hair. “Mia, are you crazy? That’s not exactly the way to make friends.”
There it was again, that flare of pain in her eyes. “Thanks. I didn’t know I needed help making friends. I used to have some really good ones.”
I ignored the sarcasm. “I’m still your friend, Quinn, you know that. But couldn’t you try a little harder? I mean, with other people?”
“The people I want for friends wouldn’t expect me to be a phony. They would accept me for who I am.”
“You don’t think I do?” That stung, maybe because it felt a little bit true.
“I don’t know, Leo. Do you even know who I am anymore?” She jerked her arms away and stalked off down the hall. I didn’t try to follow her.
