I lock the phone before they can respond and look around the room. The bed is made because I make it every morning, a habit from childhood when my room had to be presentable for Jason's teammates who'd come over after practice and dump their coats on my bed. A bed I’m about to sleep in again, tail between my legs. Every bit the failure my family always thought I was.
At least I’m not a virgin anymore.
In the living room, I grab Jason's laptop from the counter and navigate to an airline site, where I find decent one-way airfare from Pittsburgh to Minneapolis.
I stare at the booking page. The cursor blinks in the payment field. There’s enough in my account to either pay my student loan bill or buy this ticket, and I’m honestly not sure which is the least responsible option.
I have got to get out of my head, find some clarity. Figure shit out.
An idea slides into place, and I know where I need to go to get one last whiff of power before I fly off to face my shitty music. Towing my suitcase behind me, I grab a bus and head for the silks studio.
It’s open hours this morning, and there are just a few women practicing inversions when I arrive a half hour later. I wedge my bag against the shoe cubbies, kick off my Chucks, and find a length of purple fabric.
I grip the material and my palms sting, my arms burn. But I find the foot lock and hold it, suspended, three feet off the ground, then four. I lean back, extend my free leg, and arch my neck the way Jules taught me, and I feel my body do a thing it knows how to do — hold itself up.
I climb higher. My muscles shake, but they hold. The fabric bites my hands, and my foot aches, but I don't come down. I hang there in the purple silk in an almost-empty studio, and I feel the weight of this entire week pressing on me from every direction — the test, the voicemail, the parking lot, Bernard's blood on my thumb, Jason's face, the suitcase.
I don't cry. I just hold on.
My body knows things my brain hasn't caught up to yet. My body knows how to grip when everything is slipping. My body knows how to stay suspended when there's nothing solid underneath.
I might lose my job. I might fly home. Tomorrow, everything I built here might crumble.
But right now I'm in the air, and the fabric is holding, and I'm not falling yet.
Chapter 22
Howie
Mayhem's couch is worse than Rookie’s, but it seems like it costs less, at least.
It's a brown corduroy thing that smells like a dog, even though Mayhem is a cat dad, and my feet hang off the end. His Observatory Hill house is quiet — no barge horns, drunk people sauntering around outside, just birds and the distant hum of Riverview Park waking up.
My cheek throbs. My knee throbs. My everything throbs.
I lie here staring at Mayhem's ceiling, which has cracks in the plaster like a regular-person house, and I think about Ella telling me to go home.
So I went. Because she asked. Because I'm trying to be the man who listens, not the man who takes.
I thought Mayhem would talk to me for once, tell me what to do about that apartment with her clothes in my closet and the ghosts of my promises filling the space.
But he just fed me along with his furball and went to bed.
Mayhem appears in the doorway now, though, with two mugs of coffee. He's already dressed in black sweats, bare feet. He is fully awake, like he’s been up for hours reading. He hands me a mug and sits in the armchair across from me and doesn't speak.
We drink our coffee in silence for a few minutes. I fully understand why Cappy nicknamed this guy Mayhem. He’s anything but. Dude is stoic and calm, but clearly filled with opinions he’s patiently waiting for you to acknowledge.
"What's the plan?" he asks eventually.
"I don't have one."
He nods. Sips. Waits. His orange cat wanders into the room and sits beside Mayhem so both of them are staring at me, waiting.
"I don't know what to do, Cameron.” I almost never use his real name. It comes out raw. "She told me to leave, and it felt like abandoning her in a parking lot. But I also don’t think it would have been right to insist on putting her in my car against her?—”
My phone rings with Rookie’s custom sound effect: the “where’s the beef” commercial from the 1900’s.
My stomach drops. I stare at it until Mayhem says, "Answer it."
