I handed him the paper slip. Our fingers touched.
“Huh,” he said, staring down at it. “I’ve never seen that happen before.”
“Me neither.” It was hot. I lifted my hair from my neck, wishing I had a ponytail holder.
“The air-conditioning in this place is crap,” Sam said. “Here.” He stood up and went to the window to open it. The air that came in wasn’t much cooler than inside, but it had motion to it, and smelled like summer. I got up so that I could look out, too. Sam’s room was on the top floor of the dorm, so I could see all the way to the gorge that cut through campus, the rock and water in shadows at this time of dusk. I could see the town sparkling in the distance, past the summer-green of old trees waving at us. The stars were coming. The bell in the Howell University clock tower tolled, eight times.
I felt a kind of deep satisfaction, a sense of arrival. Ahere I am, on the inside of a place that has kept me out.
It wasn’t like my parents could afford a place like Howell. Even if I decided to try and get in. If you’re inside these dorms, that means you made it. You just have to hang in there and not throw yourself into one of the gorges. Every year, a couple of desperate students did that, usually during winter when the gray began to get to them.
I tucked the slip of fortune paper into my bra, and Sam raised his eyebrows. “What?” I asked. “I don’t want to lose it.” The running shorts I was wearing didn’t have pockets.
I’d decided that the blank fortune meant good luck. That I could write whatever I wanted on it.
Sam wrapped his arms around me from behind and I leaned into him.
So many ways to fall in this town.
54.
—Written on a blank fortune cookie slip in July Fielding’s handwriting.
55.
now
This has to be the right spot.
I’m sitting in the baseball dugout, where Syd and I hid that night when Ella went out and took the fall for us. I left Yolo curled up asleep in the back seat of the car, a window cracked for air.
The only thing in the dugout is a red-painted bench, flakes of the paint coming away in shards and splinters.
It’s getting dusky, but I can still see well enough to know that there’s nothing in here besides the bench, the dirt on the ground, the tramped-down bits of litter. I’ve run them through my fingers. I even crawled under the bench and looked up to see if there was anything taped there or left underneath. Just chewed gum, a variety of colors and shapes that looked strangely beautiful in the evening light.
So I’ve got dirty hands and dirty hair.
But no clue. No idea of where to go. I lean back for a moment, tired, my head against the concrete wall of the dugout. I close my eyes, remembering how it felt that night, to be in here. With other people. With Syd, and Ella.
I breathe in deep.
56.
Mom
Dad
Jack
Sydney
Sam
Alex
Ella
Yolo
