This was a moment when Regina might have offered some encouragement. But that wasn’t her style.
“I used to love physics,” she said. “I won a prize for a paper I wrote one time.” I could tell she was thinking about something precious and wonderful then. Wonderful and gone. The look that passed over her face was about more than the smell of Cinnabon filling the food court. “But the truth is, a lot of things you hope in life aren’t going to happen.”
“I’ve been playing some tennis,” I told her. It was the first time I’d spoken of this to anyone other than Jonathan. “I’m going to be in a tournament at the club this weekend. I’ll probably lose.”
“You never know,” she said. “Unlike me, you just might be the kind of person who can hang in there. How’s anybody else supposed to believe in you if you don’t believe in yourself?”
“All those kids at the club have been taking lessons for ages,” I said. For just a moment, it was almost as if she were my mother, and I was confiding in her. Something I never did with my actual mother.
Regina looked at me closely. Here was that same intense focus that seemed to have revealed itself only since she’d stopped taking all those pills. “I can picture you smashing a ball hard,” she told me. “You probably have some anger in you, and if so, fair enough. Maybe a tennis court is a good place to let it out.”
Or alone, hitting against the backboard at midnight. She didn’t know that part.
“You’re holding on to some things. If you aren’t careful, you could explode. It’s unhealthy keeping everything inside.”
“I’m not—” I started. But her words had opened a door. Maybe Regina was right about me.
“I know what I’m talking about,” she said. “I know all about anger. How do you think it’s been for me, dealing with this business between my husband and that redhead?”
My head hurt. This was what I had come to hate about life with the Emersons. The way all the mess going on between the two of them always ended up spilling over into my life and becoming my mess too. I looked at the shopping bags on the floor by my chair—a few hundred dollars’ worth of clothes, including the skirt I’d longed for. Three of them, actually. I wished we’d never come to this mall.
“Wear the yellow sweater with the blue buttons for dinner tonight,” she said. It took me a minute to know she was talking about one of the new cardigans. We’d bought so much that day I couldn’t even remember everything anymore.
“Forrest will love you in that one,” she said. “Forrest loves yellow.”
77
A Practice Match
It was Friday afternoon of Labor Day weekend. Just two days left at Wonderland.
“We need to spend one more session on the court together before the tournament,” Jonathan told me. Our last one, maybe ever. Thinking about this left a hollow feeling in my stomach. All this time I’d been so focused on Forrest that I hadn’t much thought about how much I’d grown to care about Jonathan. When you got down to it, he was probably the closest person I had to a real friend. At Lake Catherine or anywhere.
I got to the courts early to be sure I wouldn’t miss a minute of my time, but Jonathan was already waiting for me. The rain was over and the court was dry, thankfully, and the sun was out, though I could feel fall in the air now.
“You’re going to play a real game today,” Jonathan told me. In all our time together that summer, we’d never actually done this. He wanted me to know what it felt like, facing a competitor on the other side of the net.
“I’ll warm you up,” he said. “Then you’re going to hit with Olivia.”
Olivia, the girl whose lessons I’d picked up when she quit, way back at the beginning of the summer—before I knew anything about tennis,or Brenda Barnett, orThe Joy of Sex, or Polaroid cameras and mini tape players, or moss, or murder plots.
“Here’s the thing about Olivia,” Jonathan told me. “She’s lazy, and she’s got a bad attitude. But she’s been taking lessons from me since she was six years old. She doesn’t have your kind of passion, but she hates losing. She’ll give you a good game.”
It was the last thing I wanted—playing my first real game of tennis ever against a girl who’d practically been born with a tennis racquet in her hand. Clearly she didn’t care about tennis the way I did. But she didn’t need to care. She was just better, probably. She’d destroy me.
I told Jonathan I’d rather just rally with him, but he shook his head. “You need to get out of your comfort zone,” he said. “See what it’s like out there in the real world.”
He meant the real world of tennis, of course. Which wouldn’t seem all that real to some people I knew. My parents, for instance. Or just about anybody I went to school with back home in New Jersey.
Olivia was supposed to show up in ten minutes, but we were halfway through my court time before she made it. She was wearing one of her many matching tennis sets—one I’d never seen before. I felt grateful I hadn’t put one of my new ones on. I’d only feel like even more of an idiot if I had.
She took her time unzipping her tennis bag. Then she took some more time retying her shoelaces. She took a long, slow drink from her water bottle and adjusted her ponytail. She flashed me a smile.
“I’ve seen you here, right?” she said. “You new?” I’d only been around every day all summer.
“Kind of,” I said.
I’d never seen the racquet spin before, which players do before a match to see who serves first. Jonathan had to explain this part to me. Olivia won the spin.
