Chapter 7
Shay
Students will be able to serve as a human shield.
“Hmm. Do these letters look right to you? Are they all standing properly?” I asked. Gennie frowned at the small whiteboard in her lap. “Any of them backward?”
Understanding hit her. “Oh. The D s. And the G s.”
“You know how to make a G ,” I told her. “ G for Gennie.”
She rubbed a sock over the board, erasing the misshapen letters. “ G for game.”
I nodded slowly. We were talking about old shipwrecks up and down the Atlantic, and a few in nearby Newport Harbor. “Also that, yes.”
She set to rewriting her sentence. “Do you like games? Like, sports and stuff?”
“Yeah. Sure.” I bobbed my head. “Let’s think about punctuation and capitalization in this sentence. Where would we do that?”
We didn’t have much longer until Gennie and Noah were scheduled to meet with the school to determine whether they’d promote her to first grade. I didn’t want to waste a minute of that time on side conversations.
I’d learned in the past few weeks that Gennie was really bright—and really struggled to stay focused. It was like she had a hundred thoughts buzzing around her head at once and it was all too easy for her to lose track of the one she needed.
She wiped the words away again and started over.
She was also a perfectionist. If the work wasn’t correct, everything was thrown out.
If she didn’t think she could do it without error, she wouldn’t do it at all.
Whiteboards and dry-erase markers helped cut down on the risk of being wrong but didn’t eliminate it entirely.
“Like this?” she asked.
I read the words. “That’s a strong statement. ‘Ships wrecked because of rocks they did not see.’ Nice attention to capitalization and punctuation.”
“There’s a football game tonight,” she said, erasing the words in one dramatic swoop. “You said you like sports so you should come to the game with us.”
“Hmm.” I paged through the book we’d read. “Let’s think about the words wreck and rock .” I wrote them on her board. “What similarities do you hear in those words?”
“They both have ck ,” she replied quickly. “So, you’ll come to the game? Noah says I can get a pretzel as big as my head and there’s a marching band too and—”
“This is really interesting,” I said. “I want to hear more about it after you look through the story and spy the other words with a -ck blend. Find those words and then we’ll talk about giant pretzels.”
I really didn’t want to hear about giant pretzels.
Not that Gennie’s stories weren’t amazing—they were, even more than most kid stories were amazing. But we were running out of time here.
“Done.” Gennie snapped the book shut. “It’s the first football game. They start playing football even before school starts. Noah says everyone goes so you should go too.”
“I’ll have to think about it,” I said. “Can you think of any other words that have the -ck blend?”
“Chicken. Blackie. Truck.” She wrote them on the board. “Fuck.” She didn’t write that one down, thank god. “You could come to the football game and sit with me.”
Before I could respond, the side door opened and Noah entered, phone pressed to his ear and yet another crate tucked under his arm. He nodded to us, set down the crate, and stalked up the stairs.
“—and food trucks and frozen lemonade. That’s my favorite. Frozen lemonade. I could have frozen lemonade every day for all of time ever.”
“That would be a lot of frozen lemonade.”
“You could get one too. I have money in my room.”
I eyed her. “Big spender, huh?”
“Noah gives me money when I help him at the markets,” she said. “I have a lot of dollars.”
“It sounds like you worked hard for it.”
She nodded and capped the marker. “Do you have any friends? Do you play with them at your house?”
“I do have friends,” I said. “But they live in another state.”
“Are you lonely without them?”
“Sometimes,” I admitted.
“Then you should come to the game,” she said. “You won’t be lonely.”
Never let it be said that Gennie wasn’t determined. That girl did not give up. I grinned at her. “I will think about it. Now, why don’t you help me gather all these books.”
We filled my tote with the books I’d borrowed from the town library and loaded the markers and sticky notes back into the lidded container.
Noah returned to the kitchen wearing a fresh shirt, phone clutched in his hand. “Hey.” After a beat, he turned his attention to his niece. “Gennie, what’s the egg situation?”
“Dammit,” she muttered.
“You can walk me out and then check the coops,” I said.
Resigned, she shuffled toward the door. “You’ll try to come to the game, right?”
Noah glanced at me but then started unpacking the crate he’d left on the countertop. A carton of cherry tomatoes, paper-wrapped herbs, several empty mason jars.
“I’ll think about it.” I swung my bag over my shoulder and took hold of the book tote.
I followed her outside, unsurprised when I heard her mumbling about the wicked hens. The surprise was Noah lumbering down the steps and meeting me beside the henhouse. We hadn’t talked much since last week. For reasons I still didn’t understand, that seemed intentional on his part.
“How’s she doing?” he asked.
“She’s very capable,” I said.
He scowled at his phone before sliding it into his pocket. “That’s good, I guess. Yesterday, the psychologist recommended having her tested for ADHD.”
“Mention it to the school when you meet with them. Tell them she’s being evaluated. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you anything about disability law as it pertains to educational settings. I’m sure you’re aware that documentation from her psychologist could be very beneficial in this matter.”
He turned to face me as Gennie dashed back into the house with the eggs. “Thank you. If you hadn’t shown up and yelled at me about our trucks, I don’t know what I would’ve done.”
“You would’ve figured it out.”
“I’m not sure about that.” He seemed to debate something internally before saying, “It’s good to have you back.”
“Is it?” I intended the question to sound teasing though I wasn’t sure it landed that way. “There have been a couple of moments where I’ve wondered if we’re still friends.”
“I wouldn’t ask you to marry me if we weren’t.” He gestured to me. “Not that I’m trying to rush you on that matter. Just making a point.”
“So, you’re just a bear with a pricker in his paw on a regular basis? That’s your look now?” There was no way anyone could miss the teasing in my tone this time.
“Listen, don’t knock it. The more people I can scare off with this look, the better. Saves me from having to mediate every damn hiccup in this town.” A sigh rumbled out of him. “You disappeared, you know. You were just gone. Left town, never to be heard from again.”
A moment passed where I tried to put his words in an order I could understand. I couldn’t find one. “Wasn’t that the plan?”
He bobbed his head but there was nothing convincing about it.
“We both wanted that. Right? We wanted to get out of here and never come back. That’s why you went to that summer program at Yale.
So you could leave as soon as possible.” I stepped closer, my book bag brushing against his leg.
I couldn’t have this conversation without seeing it in his eyes.
“And you left first. I spent most of the time after graduation here. Alone. I took my sweet, slow time leaving. I didn’t disappear at all. ”
He brought his hand to the back of his neck as his lips twisted into a joyless smile that said keep telling yourself that .
“Am I missing something?” I asked.
“No, you have it right,” he said after a pause. “I guess I figured you’d—” He pulled the hand from the back of his neck, dropped it against his thigh. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Noah, wait,” I said, touching his forearm. He froze, staring down at my hand. “It does matter. To me.”
Gennie ran out the front door, the screen banging behind her as she dashed toward me. “Did you think about it? Are you going to come to the game tonight?”
“Oh, sweetie.” I glanced at Noah, hoping he’d help us both out and give me an exit from this event. No such luck. “I have to go home and do some adult chores first. I’m not sure I’ll finish in time.”
Gennie nodded, obviously disappointed. “Okay.”
“I’ll see you on Monday for sure. We’ll talk about explorers. I have a really cool story about an explorer and how his ship might be one of the shipwrecks in Newport Harbor.”
I opened the car door and set my things inside.
Noah called, “There’s a decent food truck scene before the game. It’s worth it for that alone but you should check it out. You might realize you don’t hate it here.”
I dropped into the driver’s seat. “Is that how it went for you? You looked around one day and realized you didn’t hate it here anymore?”
Noah held my gaze while warmth pressed in around me. It was a hot day. Afternoon sun. Humid too. Hot, humid, sunny. That was the only thing I was feeling.
“Check it out,” he said. “See for yourself.”
* * *
“There’s a football game tonight.”
Jaime frowned at the screen. She was in her classroom with the overhead lights off because she hated bright lights but I could still make out that frown. “What kind of football?”
“High school,” I replied. “I think. I’m pretty sure.”
“Why do we care about this?”
“The little girl I’ve been tutoring, she talked it up.” I peered into the empty fridge. “Apparently there are food trucks. I’m guessing it’s a tailgate situation. Maybe fundraising? I didn’t ask a lot of questions.”
“The kid you’re tutoring is into food trucks? That generation has its priorities straight.”
“It wasn’t like that when I was in high school,” I said. “Football games were as basic as you could get.”