He pulls back. He drags his hand through his hair. I see the movement in his throat when he swallows. He shakes his head and says, “You don’t know what you’re doing.”
I hold his eye. I say, “I think I do.”
He goes completely still.
“You think this is funny,” he says. “You think this is a damn game.”
I don’t know why I do it. It’s not him I’m mad at. It’s Daniel.Daniel’s the one who hurt me. But for whatever reason, I take my rage out on him and say, “I don’t think there’s anything funny about child predators,” before turning and trotting off ahead without him, leaving him standing open-mouthed behind me. I meet up with everyone else. My heart is beating harder now, and I can’t focus because I can still feel his hand on my arm, and every time I blink, I see Daniel staring at that girl. I see him wave, I see her wave back, and then he waves again. It plays back over and over again in my mind. Daniel stares. She opens her eyes, catches him staring. He waves. She waves. He waves again and she laughs. Over and over again until I want to scream.
It takes a minute for Uncle Elliott to come.
“What’s wrong?” Aunt Courtney asks when he does, going to him. “Is it your migraine again?”
He presses the space between his eyes, says, “Yeah. I think so.”
There isn’t an actual baseball field for us to play on. It’s just grass. We don’t have any bases, and so I stand, watching as Emily lays down random things like a frisbee and paper plates, weighing them down with rocks, but even as I do, I’m still thinking about Daniel and something Skylar told me once about how, when you give guys what they want, they don’t want you anymore.
“Earth to Reese...” someone says, and I come to. Everyone is watching me now, waiting on me to begin.
“This is so stupid,” I mutter under my breath. “Why do I have to play?”
“Because we’re all playing,” Emily says, as if that’s an actual answer.
There are eight of us here, which means four on each team. Emily assigns teams lest anyone’s feelings get hurt—which means Mae, because Mae would have no doubt been last to get pickedand she would have cried. I wind up on a team with Nolan, Uncle Elliott and Mae, and though Emily claims she tried to be fair, she takes Wyatt—high school all-star—for herself. He has a batting average of something like .500, which means that when Wyatt swings, he doesn’t miss.
Wyatt is up to bat first. Within a few seconds, we’re losing. The next three batters strike out and then our team is up. Nolan gets on base first. When it’s my turn, I can’t hold or swing a bat to save my life, though I don’t even try, not really, because I don’t care about something as stupid as baseball. I can’t stop thinking about Daniel. About that girl and about Skylar’s words.When you give guys what they want, they don’t want you anymore.I should have listened to her. I should have known better.
Wyatt stands on the mound, sneering at me, saying, “Imagine not even being able to swing a bat,” and Emily tells him to be nice, that we can’t all be as good at baseball as him.
I feel Uncle Elliott’s eyes on me the whole time. When I look over, his jaw is clenched, his feet are spread wide apart and his arms are crossed, like he’s silently raging.
There is a part of me that almost feels guilty for threatening him. Though, if I’m being objective, he’s the one who started it, I think, looking down at the red mark from his hand still on my wrist.
He’s the one who threatened to tell.
It’s after eight now and people are hungry. The game went longer than expected and we haven’t had any dinner yet. Mae is whiny. She says that her stomach hurts, and Emily coddles her, saying she’ll cut her an apple while Dad puts something on the grill, as if she can’t just cut her own stupid apple. But I’m not complaining. Because when Emily is hyperfocused on Mae,then she can’t pay any attention to me, which means that I drop back. I lose them. I take my time getting back to the cottage, going my own way.
I take the path through the woods. It’s the golden hour now, which used to be Skylar’s and my favorite time of day, when we’d go out into the field by her house and take turns posing for pictures. The world is gold. The sunlight is soft and dreamy. It creates long shadows in the woods while the temperatures drop and bugs come out, fireflies creating light. I think of all the pictures I have of Skylar and me posing in the golden hour. Once they covered her Instagram page. Now she’s taken them all down. The only pictures she has on there anymore are of her and Gracie.
As I walk through the woods alone, I hear voices carrying from the other side of the trees.
I draw in a breath.
Daniel.
My breath is shaky. I creep out from the trees, staying far enough back that they can’t see me. I find Daniel and the new girl standing face-to-face beside a cottage. As I watch—not breathing and anchored in place like a ship—she asks, “When did you get this?” running her hand up his arm, over his tattoo. She traces it, a king cobra, which is long and coiled around his forearm and up his bicep, its mouth open, fangs and forked tongue jutting out. He tells her how he and a couple buddies got them, and she asks, “Did it hurt?”
“If it did, I don’t remember,” he says. “I have something for you,” he tells her, reaching into his pocket. “Close your eyes and hold out your hand.” She does. He lays something in the palm of her hand, and I don’t have to see it to know. “Open your eyes,” he says. When she does, she lifts a bracelet from her hand, and I watch him clasp it onto her thin little wrist, asking, “Do you like it?” She nods.
“How long are you here for?” he asks, leaning in.
She sinks back against the cottage, letting it bear her weight, and says, “A week.”
“That’s all?” he asks, coming closer, closing the gap, thinking they’re alone, that no one can see them.
“Yeah,” she says, her face turning pouty. “That’s all.”
He strokes her cheek with the back of a finger, says, “Then we have to make the most of it,” and it feels like time slows down. Like it stops. My vision blurs, a feeling of vertigo rushing me. The world spins. I set my hand on a tree for balance, feeling the rough bark beneath my palm, telling myself he didn’t say what I think I heard, but he did. It’s exactly what he said. I bite my lower lip hard so I don’t cry, tasting blood.
