She rolled her eyes. “I knew you weren’t listening! Did you hear about the part where I told you to lick—”
“What were you just asking me?” I interrupted. “Have I heard something? From who?”
“Nothing. Can’t you pull around these cars?” She fanned herself. “I want to get out.”
Eventually we were able to pull up close to the building, using the disability placard that my sister hated but needed, because we were going to have to walk a lot today and the public parking lots seemed to stretch all the way into another country. But Willow was actually doing better, and I hated to admit the cause but…
Ok, fine, it was Boyd. Due to his apparent lack of a job, he had plenty of time to work out, and he had convinced my sister to go with him to the gym and had gotten her a membership. I had been worried about it, like that she’d jump on a treadmill and try to go too fast, but she’d explained the routine he’d made up for her and it was reasonable—it was mostly the same stuff that the physical therapists had been trying to get her to do for years, and it was helping her. She seemed to have more energy and she was already able to walk farther than before, without as much pain.
But it was still better to park close, and I still offered my arm. It was for her but also for me, because I felt very unsettled about seeing Everett again. Since I was interested in his activities, I’d followed his social media. He mostly posted pictures of himself working out (a lot of times shirtless) to get ready for this tryoutwith the Woodsmen. He had a lot of followers and most of them seemed to be women.
“This is so much nicer than the Junior Woodsmen place,” my sister noted. She had signed the petition but she hadn’t known about the stark contrast between the two teams’ facilities before now. “What should we do first?”
Everett was still in his meeting because we’d left way too early. We went to watch the Woodsmen Wonderwomen cheerleaders perform and they were very good, but I thought that the full stadium tour would be too hard on my sister so we skipped that. We waited forever and got a chance to enter the huge room where the football players were signing autographs, but we didn’t really know any of them except for the two quarterbacks.
And one seemed to be missing: the Woodsmen starting quarterback, Kayden Matthews. There was an empty table right at the front of the room and I overheard several fans say that Kayden should have been sitting behind it. “Where is he?” I asked my sister, and she asked one of the people in an orange polo shirt, a team employee.
“Kayden had a personal commitment today,” he answered, smiling. “His backup, Dallas Laforet, has a table at the rear of the room and our starting tight end is at the booth to your left. Would you like to meet Tyler Hennessy?”
Not really, but I did want to see Laforet in person. We got in his line, which wasn’t very long, and waited our turn to get to the front. I wanted to hate the guy that Everett might have been competing against but he seemed normal—maybe boringin comparison, but fine. He signed a picture of himself since we hadn’t brought anything with us, like a jersey or a football. Many of the fans here seemed to have orange autograph books, too, and I felt unprepared.
As we had waited, I’d been checking the time on my phone a lot, enough that my sister told me to stop and I was being annoying. I considered it prudent, not annoying, and I was looking at my phone again when I saw something important.
“We finished early. Where are you?” Everett had written.
I was trying to get on my way, immediately, in order to meet him as quickly as I could, but I was also trying not to rush my sister. She was checking her own phone and as we finally exited the autograph room, she stopped dead and then dug in her heels.
“I need to meet Boyd right now,” she said, and tugged her arm out of the lock I had on it. “Don’t look at me like that! You don’t need me there when you see Everett again. You keep telling me that you’re only friends, right?”
Right. I stood still and let her mess with my hair, then wipe something off my upper lip. “We’re friends,” I repeated, and she rolled her eyes.
“That’s why you have a headache, because you’re so not-tense about seeing your ‘friend’ again,” she said. I hadn’t been rubbing above my eyes at all so I had no idea how she knew that my brain was throbbing.
At that moment, Boyd made his appearance and nodded hello to me. I nodded back. We had maintained a détente since last winter, with neither of us too happy with the other but also notcausing issues for Willow. It wasn’t like I didn’t have my eye on him, though. I was keeping careful watch because I didn’t trust him as far as I could throw him—which could have happened, because he was very slight and I had been going to the gym a lot. That would end when the fall semester started at the college, but they let us recent graduates have a grace period over the summer.
I had muscles in many places where I had never noticed any before (I didn’t have the body of Eris, but who did?) Now my hair was also improved (still brown and straight, but it was shiny and styled due to my sister). I was looking better than I had in years, probably, and it was time to go meet Everett. I said bye to those two, mostly to her, and walked off through the crowd. I moved against the flow of people and toward one of the practice fields where he had directed me. It was an area that we hadn’t seen on our tour when I’d come with Mrs. Pauker’s first graders. A fence, a nicer one than the rusted chain link around the Junior Woodsmen field, separated the large, grassy area from the paved concourse that was open for fans.
And there, leaning against one of the posts, I spotted Everett. He saw me, too, and he held up his hand like Boyd had. But then he also smiled, and I realized that I’d been grinning at him. I also realized that I was running a little, and since I wasn’t a runner at all, it was more of a sideways jog with lots of arm movement. It wasn’t the way that I’d planned to see him for the first time after so many months, but he didn’t seem to notice. He kept smiling and he started walking towards me, and then I jerked myself to astop before I did something totally batshit whacko and threw my arms around his neck.
“Hi!” I said instead, and grabbed his hands. “Hi, Everett!”
“Hi, Zoey. How’s your Fan Day going?”
I shook my head, not bothering with that. “How was your meeting? Is there any news?”
“Yeah, they were impressed by my haircut, so I made the team,” he said. But his hair really did look nice, a little shorter and still a little messy, and the chocolate brown color that I remembered. He still had the dimple in his left cheek, which I saw because he kept on smiling at me, and he still had the same full lips, not a girly pout…
Oh. I had forgotten that I was supposed to be pouting right now, acting angry because he hadn’t written enough, or called, or come to see me. He had said “congratulations” when I’d graduated and “happy birthday” when I’d told him that I was celebrating with my sister by getting tacos, but that was it. And I was supposed to pretend to be mad about those things but not tell him directly so he would have to guess what was wrong.
The problem was, I couldn’t act like that right now. I wasn’t nervous anymore, because I was just so happy to see him. “I’m really glad that you’re back,” I said, and his smile got bigger.
“Me too. I got a good feeling at the meeting.”
“Oh. Yes, that’s great,” I answered. “Tell me all about it.”
We walked through the booths of vendors hawking their team-centric wares, like orange and white cutting boards, dog scarveswith the Woodsmen axe logo, honey in jars with football helmet caps, and anything else they could think of that combined football with their goods. The official team shop sold clothing with the players’ names, like T-shirts and jerseys, and as we passed, I saw Everett looking over. I wondered if he was thinking of a Woodsmen jersey with “Ford” on it.
But he said something different. “They’re going to have to put away everything with the number four.”
