Chapter 15 Bird #3
“Will you ask Jessa about her?” she says, casting a quick look over her shoulder.
“Sure, yeah.”
And here’s Dade again, except this time he glides in right behind Kayla and snakes his arms around her waist, lifting her up and scooping her away from me.
I speed up after them, and I don’t know why—what am I going to do, pull her out of his arms?
I skate past instead and call over my shoulder, “You better not drop her!”
And as soon as I turn around, Dade has caught up to me, no longer carrying Kayla. “Hey,” he says, touching my arm.
“Yeah?”
“Listen, did I, uh, do something to you?” he asks.
“What do you mean?”
“You just don’t seem to like me very much, and I’m wondering what I did,” he says, this weird grin on his face like he’s got me in some kind of standoff he doesn’t think I’m capable of winning. If I didn’t dislike him so much, I might respect him for confronting me about it.
I look back to see Kayla skating solo, lagging behind us.
“It’s not that I don’t like you, Dade,” I tell him. “I don’t know you, okay?”
“Well, there’s something you can do about that, you know. You barely say two words to me whenever we’re all out.”
I take a breath, and I honestly don’t know what’s about to come out of my mouth from all the thoughts scrolling through my brain—thoughts about him, Kayla, me, Jessa, how I don’t think he’s a good guy or at least not good enough for Kayla.
“Yeah, well, it’s kind of hard to squeeze two words in when you’re constantly attached to my best friend at the mouth.”
He laughs. Like that’s not a reason. Except it is. It’s one part of the reason, anyway.
“You could at least give me a chance,” he says.
But before I can pluck another response from the many swirling around my head, the DJ comes on over the sound system and announces, “We’re gonna slow things down for all you couples out there…
. Here’s ‘Iris’ from the Goo Goo Dolls. And don’t try to come up here and complain that it’s played out—you all know you can’t get enough of this one. ”
“Or not,” Dade says when I don’t answer. “Do whatever you want. But just ’cause your summer boyfriend dumped you doesn’t mean I’m gonna do that to Kayla.”
“What?” I yell. “That’s not how—”
But he peels off before I can finish. Skates back to Kayla. All the singles are rushing to get off the floor, and I’m suddenly surrounded by pairs.
My heart is hammering in my chest, and I’m so angry my hands are shaking.
How dare he. And Kayla, why is she talking about my relationships?
And not even getting it right. Nobody dumped me.
And he wasn’t my boyfriend. And whatever happened with me and Silas and Kat—which Kayla doesn’t even understand, because I haven’t had two seconds alone with her to explain any of it—has nothing to do with why I can’t stand Dade.
I make my way to the side of the rink, barely able to catch my breath as I watch the two of them roll past me, hands interlaced.
Dade gives me a chin nod as they glide along to the romantic song, as if we’re cool, as if he didn’t just make a totally uncalled-for and inappropriate and faulty assumption about me and my life.
And then I see them coming up behind Jessa—the last single left out on the floor—down at the other end.
Dade is pulling Kayla closer and closer to Jessa, and just when I think he’s going to make them collide right into her, he raises their conjoined arms above Jessa’s head as they swoop past on either side, sending her off-kilter.
I can see it in slow motion. Her foot flies out from under her, an arm flails to the side, and she goes down, slamming and sliding on both knees. Hard.
She’s still trying to get up by the time I make it over to her.
“Are you okay?”
She’s trying to laugh, but as she looks up at me, I can see through it. “I’m fine!” She takes my hand, pulls herself up, but she can’t stand straight. I look down at her knees—I’m pretty sure she already had holes in her jeans, but she definitely wasn’t bleeding.
“You’re not fine,” I tell her, but she just laughs again.
I lock her arm with mine and I’m holding a decent amount of her weight as we make small strides across the center of the rink. Dade and Kayla slow down and look, but they’re both laughing. Neither of them stops.
“You guys, a little help!” I yell after them. Even Dawn comes over and tries to take Jessa’s other arm.
Jessa shoos Dawn away, insisting loudly, “I. Am. Oh. Kay.” But she holds on to me even tighter while Dawn clears a path for us to make our way off the rink and helps me get Jessa to a bench on the sidelines.
I catch the reflection of a tear sliding down her cheek.
I reach out to dab it with my sleeve but she flinches.
Dade and Kayla are back around again, both of them still grinning and happy. This time Dade shouts, “Nice face-plant!”
“Shut up, both of you!” I yell back, but I doubt they hear me.
Jessa flips him off again and forces a smile, even though I can tell she’s hurting.
“Why are you friends with him?” I blurt out.
“What do you mean? I’m friends with him because he’s… my friend.” She shrugs. “He’s just messing around, Bird. I can take a joke, you know.”
“Well, I don’t think it’s funny. You’re sitting here bleeding.”
“I don’t care,” she insists. “Besides. Why are you friends with her?”
I look over at Kayla and I honestly cannot think of a single reason why I’m friends with her in this moment.
“Me and Kayla, we… we go way back. We’ve been with each other through a lot.
She wasn’t always like this. The way she’s been lately.
This isn’t her. But Dade…” I glance over my shoulder, make sure they’re really gone.
“It just doesn’t seem like he’s nice to you. Like, ever.”
“That’s just Dade. He treats me like I’m another dude friend. It’s just—you wouldn’t get it.” She shakes her head sadly and adds, “You know, he’s actually a lot nicer to me when it’s only the two of us.”
“Yeah, I really hope so.” I look around to see if I can flag Dawn again, wish she would’ve stuck around a minute so I could ask her for some Band-Aids or an ice pack or something. “Listen, just sit here. I’ll be right back.”
“Oh, all right,” I hear her say as I hurry off, as fast as I can on the thin carpeting.
I cut the long line at the snack bar to ask for an ice pack, and thankfully, they have a first aid kit, which they allow me to plunder for iodine packets and bandages. I’m back by the time the couple skate is ending, and people start flooding back onto the rink.
“Okay, you are seriously overreacting,” she says, trying to laugh once again as I open one of the packets and dab the disinfecting wipe against her knee.
“Will you stop laughing about this?”
“Okay, fine, just give me the Band-Aid. You shouldn’t be touching other people’s blood, you know.”
“It’s really okay. I’m being careful. I have a lot of practice bandaging skinned knees.”
She watches me closely for a moment while I gently smooth the first bandage into place over her skin. When I glance up and meet her gaze, she clears her throat and grins. “Get a lot of those when you were training for the Olympics, Michelle Kwan?”
I scoff. “Somehow, I can’t imagine you sitting around listening to punk rock while watching Olympic figure skating.”
She shrugs again. “My sister was into it, actually. It calmed her down when she was—” She stops short and has a momentary caught-in-headlights look, as if she just said something she wasn’t supposed to. “I just watched it with her to make her happy.”
“Well,” I begin, as I layer down the last Band-Aid on her knee. “I have three younger siblings who are way clumsier than you, so…”
“Lots of Band-Aids?” she finishes.
“Two of them are toddlers, though,” I add, just to see her laugh again.
“Why are you so good at skating anyway?” she asks, as I sit down next to her.
“My dad was a really good skater. He taught me and my older brother. We used to come here constantly when I was little. He could do everything that figure skaters do—jumps and spins, and he could dance and, just, everything.”
“Is your dad—sorry, no. Never mind.”
“What?”
“Is your dad dead?” she asks cautiously. “Sorry, that came out weird. I just wondered.”
“Why?”
“Whenever you talk about him, with skating and his records… it seems like all you have is memories of him.”
“Well, that is all I have. But he’s not dead. We think he’s living in Boston,” I tell her. “Wow, that’s the first time I’ve said that out loud. Haven’t even told Kayla,” I add, quieter.
“You think? You mean you don’t know?”
I shake my head. “Me and my older brother Charlie have been trying to track him down. It was a bad breakup between my parents.” It was quick, but bad, I remember.
He was there one day and gone the next. The last time I saw him was from Charlie’s bedroom window, the two of us watching as they screamed at each other in our driveway—I’d never seen either of them like that before.
“So he just kinda disappeared,” I finish, and when I look at her, she’s really listening, eyes crinkling around the edges as she meets mine.
“Sorry, there I go being all serious and boring again.”
She places her hand on top of mine for a only split second before she jerks it away. “Hey, I don’t think you’re boring.”
“Thanks,” I tell her.
“That sucks, Bird. About your dad, I mean,” she says, and seems to mean it.
“Sucks balls,” I add, and smile.
She bursts out laughing. She laughs until tears are leaking from the corners of her eyes.
It’s contagious and I’m hysterical too, and why does it feel liberating to say the word “balls” with this weird girl I still barely even know?
Why does it feel like we’re the only ones left in this whole place?
It’s one o’clock in the morning at Kayla’s house and we’re lying side by side in her bed, staring at the ceiling, and she still has not stopped obsessing over Dawn. We’ve created a monster. Or I guess the monster was there already; we just fed it. “Tell me one more time,” she says.
“Again?” I groan—I’ve already told her fifteen times. “Jessa said that Dade had a crush on her last year. They flirted. She didn’t think anything else happened between them, though.”
“She’s pretty,” she says softly, sadly. “Do you think she’s skinnier than me?”
“Kayla…” How can she even be asking me that—Dawn is at least six inches taller than her, all buxom and curvy. Isn’t it obvious?
“Never mind. I already know she is. She is, isn’t she?”
“She’s not. But why does that matter? You’re two completely different people.”
She sits up in bed and looks down at me.
“Thanks. A. Lot. So you’re saying she’s skinny.
I’m fat. She’s gorgeous. I’m a dog. He’s going to dump me for her because I’m just…
” She looks down at her body and punches her thigh.
Hard. “Fat,” she finishes, angry tears forming at the edges of her eyes.
“I’ve lost thirty-nine pounds, and still. Fucking fat.”
I turn my head to look at her, and all I can see is that monster staring back, ravenous. And I’m starting to wonder if she cares about anything at all other than being skinny. If she actually cares about Dade anymore. Or me.