Chapter 16
My Sister Is Worth a Thousand Friends
Wyatt
Zayne Callahan is spinning around on his stool. He has his fingertips together in the shape of a pyramid, and I’m wondering if he belongs to the Illuminati. Wouldn’t surprise me; I mean, this dude is loaded.
“Wyatt, we’re still in the middle of the transfer period.”
“I know.”
“You’ve been injured for half a year.”
“Yeah.”
“You haven’t played a single game.”
“I’m aware of that.”
Zayne stops spinning. Now he looks right at me and crosses one leg over the other, so that his ankle is resting on his knee. “I gave you a chance yesterday. You said you could do it.”
“And I can. It was…a stupid accident.”
“A stupid accident,” he repeats and leans back. “Lying to my face is kind of a bold move, don’t you think?”
I pull my baseball hat off and turn it around in my fingers. Whatever hope I had left is disappearing. Everything inside me is heavy with fog.
“Okay, yeah. But I can do it, Zayne. I’m really good. If it weren’t for this damn injury, I’d be scoring goals every game. Sending me back to the minors just wouldn’t be fair.”
Zayne grunts. “That’s not how things work, Lopez. Yeah, you’re good, or I wouldn’t have gotten you for my team. But what good are you when I can’t let you play? What good are you when you’re not scoring goals?”
My palms are full of sweat. I rub them off on my jeans.
What good are people when they can’t do anything?
You’ve always got to be able to do something; that’s what this life is like and always has been.
When you can’t do anything, you aren’t worth anything.
What the fuck? Right now, I really can’t do shit, and I feel like a hopeless bum who still has too much hope, hope that he shouldn’t have. I mean, I CAN’T DO A THING, okay?
I take a deep breath. “Just give me a little more time, Zayne. Until the deadline for the training period is up. Please. If I’m still useless, fine, go for it, kick my ass down a league.”
The Aspen Snowdogs’ owner puffs up his cheeks. His forehead breaks into creases as he stares at me. Then his shoulders slump down as he exhales and leans back his head.
“Fine, Wyatt. Until the deadline. But at our home game next weekend, you’re going to be riding the bench and will only be back on the ice when you’re healthy.
We’ll tell the press that what you said at the press conference was true, you were indeed supposed to play, but, stupidly, you broke a rib during training. ”
A feeling of relief floods through me. A liquid kind of bliss that seeps into my nerves.
“Thanks,” I say while standing up from the mussel-shaped velvet armchair. I’m almost at the door when I turn around. “No offense, but you really should kick Gray off the team.”
Zayne gives a bitter laugh. “You have no idea how much I’d like to, kid. Boston and Seattle have offers from me on the table for another replacement, and as soon as I’ve got someone else, Gray’s gone. I thought he was really promising. But, well…” He smiles. “Everyone makes mistakes, Wyatt.”
Not folks like me, Zayne. Not folks like me.
This hope, man, really, it kills me. I don’t know why it’s there at all, but it always creeps up on me when everything’s going to shit.
My parents died, everything was a fucking mess, but this feeling of hope showed up to say, “Hey, don’t worry, I’m here, no big deal, things will get better.
” And I was like, Wow, okay, solid, I believe you, just a little bit maybe, but enough.
And so I drank way too much because I thought shutting everything out was better and my sense of hope would take care of the rest. It didn’t.
Aria took off, simply packed her shit and left, after all those years, no see you, no later.
Then again, why would she? I mean, after what I did, it’s not like we’d be seeing each other again that soon.
And me, “That was that. For real this time.” But the sense of hope came back, tickling me and purring, “Hey, don’t give up; things will work out.
” While all I could think the whole time was, NOTHING WILL EVER WORK OUT. THAT WAS IT. GOT IT?
And now it’s back. I won’t be able to get rid of it. Like a nasty zit that comes back no matter how many times I pop it. I wake up in the morning, and, yep, there it is again, big and red and glowing in its glory.
But this is my last chance, and, to be honest, if I don’t get my shit together, heal my arm, my head, and, essentially, my soul (which doesn’t really seem all that healable), then that’ll be that, over and out.
And then I’ll have to turn my life upside down and start all over again, from zero, or maybe zero point one six, because there’s this hope in me saying, Come on, pal, zero is zero, and zero is nothing; that won’t work, come on.
Up to the transfer deadline, I tell myself over and over. Maybe saying it over and over will help. Up to the transfer deadline. Transfer deadline. TRANSFER DEADLINE.
This is what it’s like in my head the whole bus ride back to Aspen because I don’t have enough for an Uber.
People are staring at me because they know who I am, and they’re wondering why on earth I’m riding the bus.
I could tell them. It’d sound something like this: “You know, actually, I should be swimming in cash, but, ha ha, I don’t have a dime, and at night my sister goes to parties and comes back overflowing with Washingtons, and I have no idea why she’s not a kid anymore.
All the same. You know what? I’m just riding this shitty bus and looking at your fucking faces until the TRANSFER DEADLINE.
And you know what else? I’m not going to make it because I’m so wiped out. Awesome, right?”
That’s what it would sound like if I were to open my mouth. But I just stare back until they look away or scratch their throats or backs or butts or whatever.
Jocelyn is standing behind her white lace curtains watching me as I turn onto our street.
I see her right away because her house is the first one on the block, and all that’s next to it is a long, bare path leading straight into the woods, and behind the woods is Buttermilk Mountain, endlessly high and endlessly beautiful.
That’s Jocelyn, always just standing at her window. It’s not a big deal; that’s just how she is, and to be honest, I don’t really care. But the way she tilts her head and the look of pity on her face just makes me so friggin’ sick. I mean, how bad can I look?
Walking through our front yard to the porch, I notice all the hellebores and pansies among the rest of the brown.
It’s not like it’s beautiful. I mean, they’re shriveled up and ugly and kind of brown, too; everything’s brown, and all I can think of is how sad it is because this was Mom’s passion; it’s Aria’s, too.
They would garden together and water together and laugh, their faces full of dirt.
My heart would skip a beat every time I saw them.
But nothing blooms here anymore. Now everything’s dead.
Camila is sitting in the living room. Her hair is pinned up in a kind of black bun with a thick, ugly pin, but somehow it looks good on her.
She’s in her seat in the bay window, the one with the colorful cushions, her legs pulled up, a wool blanket over them because she’s always cold, a checkered notebook on her lap, the same one with Paxton’s name inside it and all those little hearts.
When I put my keys into the wooden dish on the sideboard, she looks up.
“Hey,” I say, but she ignores me and just keeps on writing with her pink felt-tip pen, the one she shouldn’t be using to do her homework. I’ve told her a hundred times. “Hey,” I say again, somewhat louder.
Camila rolls her eyes.
I walk over to her and sit down on the couch. Keeping Up with the Kardashians is on TV. I pick up the remote and turn it off.
“I wanted to watch that.”
“Can we get along?”
“No. I wanted to watch that.”
“I don’t care.”
Camila turns toward me with a huff. Her notebook slides halfway off her knee. I catch sight of formulas and roots and letters and vectors, but no little hearts, no Paxton, and I’m relieved.
“All that shit before was fucked up, Wyatt.”
“I know. But, to be honest, from your side, too.” I slide toward her and take her hand.
She tries to pull it away, but I don’t let go.
I won’t let my sister go, or she’ll fall way too deep, and I don’t want that to happen because then she’d be like me.
“I know it’s hard, Mila. Especially for you.
You and Mom, you all had a strong bond, like kryptonite or something, and it’s obvious that you’re just done, especially after Aria took off because she was all you had left.
And, yeah, I was selfish; all I could think about was myself because I was drunk and doing drugs and just thought, Who cares?
But I should’ve thought about things a little more, should have considered that there would be consequences to my actions and that they could affect Aria, and then maybe I would have thought about more than just me and my own heart; I would have thought about yours.
I’m sorry, Camila, I’m really, really sorry. ”
She grows teary-eyed, but she isn’t going to cry.
Later in her room, maybe, but not in front of me.
She’s a big girl now, she’s earning money, she’s got to be strong, and she wants to show me that so badly.
She’s seventeen, damn it, seventeen. She should be wearing sparkly dresses and dancing in gyms with pom-poms in her hands and a smile on her face.
Instead, here she is looking like she’s got three lives behind her already, all of them bad.
“It’s Aria’s fault,” she says. “She’s the one who took off. Not you. She ditched me. Not you.”
I press my little sister’s soft fingers, just like when she was four and I was eight, and she’d be in her little bed howling, and I’d rush in to comfort her so that Mom and Dad could go on sleeping.