Page 54 of Playing with the Heartbreaker

Piper climbs out of the passenger seat, her cleats clacking on the parking lot’s rocks. No clue what she’d been dressed as earlier. She’s beaming until she registers I’m alone. “Where’s Chloe?”

I sigh and pinch between my eyebrows. “I screwed up. She missed curfew. She’s probably getting grounded right about now.”

Kyle arrives next and tosses me a ball. “Tough break.”

“It’ll be fine,” Piper assures me.

“I don’t know.”

“It will.” Jake points to the field. “Take that attitude of yours and leave it out there.”

Kyle sets up the portable floodlights we use to see since there’s none on The Field. We’ve been coming here to chase away bad days since we were young and our parents let us bike here. Not this late, obviously. Not until last summer, when we all got later curfews. But it’s where our friendships were forged and strengthened.

Now, it’s the place we celebrate and heal, trash talk required.

“Piper, aren’t you on the wrong side of the field?” I ask.

She rakes the ball over to me. “Nope. Jake and I made another bet. If I score on him, he has to decorate the inside of his locker with cutouts of my favorite celebrities. And I can’t wait to see those big headshots front and center.”

I snicker.

“Not happening,” Jake says.

“What if he scores?” I ask.

“She has to get a fake tattoo of my name in a heart and wear it on her arm for a week.”

Piper glowers. “Which is so tacky.” She turns to me. “And we are not going to let that happen. Right, Rhoads? I’m trusting you.”

“Oh, I’m totally on your side.”

We play a fifteen-minute half that ends in a zero-zero tie and take a short break.

“You ready to talk about it?” Kyle asks. He squirts water into his mouth and spits it out.

I groan. This is why we’re here, after all. For the game, but also for emotional catharsis. “I’m wondering now if I’m only going to be a distraction for Chloe, like she originally thought. That was one of the reasons she didn’t want to date this year in the first place, and now I’m proving her right. She’s already in trouble for hanging out with me. How bad of an influence would I be if we were actually together?”

“You don’t really believe that, do you?” Jake says. He wipes his face with a towel.

“You’re good for her. And vice versa.” Piper tightens her bright red ponytail.

“But am I being greedy by taking up her time when I know she doesn’t want to date? Is it selfish to hope that by spending time together she’ll change her mind?”

As I speak my fear aloud, I remember the look on Chloe’s face after I told her about the snow globes. The way her blue eyes sparkled and her face relaxed, and her lips parted.

It’s like she’d started to glimpse the real me and not the version of me that everyone thinks they know.

“What if I’ll just always be—what did you call me over the summer?”

Piper smirks, bouncing on her toes. “The school’s most notorious flirt.”

“Ugh. I’m an idiot.”

“You’re not.” Kyle slaps my shoulder. “And your behavior has been different lately. Not a single person has asked me to hook them up with you since the music wing shenanigans.”

“That’s something, I guess.” I tip my head back, face skyward, as if the wind might pull away the reputation I accidentally created for myself by waiting for Chloe to be single.

It felt good to share a deeper part of myself with her, and I don’t regret it. I just hope it wasn’t too much. That it doesn’t make her take another step back.