Chapter Twenty-Six
Dearly Beloved
Jordan
I wake up to the feeling of someone pulling my brain out through my ears.
It would actually (probably) be something more movie-scene perfect if not for that. I’m lying in a bed I immediately clock as not mine, in deep blue sheets that are all tangled round my feet, and light streams in through the window from the sun already claiming its space in the sky.
Unfortunately, I don’t have the capacity for that much natural light. I flop over onto my belly, which only makes the tangle more impossible, and groan into the fancy-pants memory foam pillow.
‘You alive?’ says a voice from below.
That catches my attention. I absolutely refuse to get out of bed, but I do wiggle over so I can see to the floor at the side of the bed.
Bleary-eyed and way too chivalrous, Rod looks up at me from a sea of various spare comforters and kids’ pillows.
His hair is all tousled, the dark brown/almost black sticking up at every possible angle.
He has on a grey Whittaker-Joyce High T-shirt and old football shorts.
He’s got the look of an average zombie on his face, still half asleep.
The alcohol was the first truck to slam into my head.
The shock from seeing him there is the second.
We’re just friends, right? May and I have done this for one another before.
Slept over at your drunk best friend’s dorm to make sure she doesn’t have to puke in the middle of the night and then chokes helplessly or something.
But this feels different. Rod is not May. Rod is really not May.
‘Morning,’ he manages.
Okay, so obviously we have slept together. We have shared a bed. So why is it this moment where we clearly did not that has me at a loss for words?
‘Were you here all night?’ I croak. Bullfrog with a severed throat. Hot.
‘Yeah.’ This unusual bashfulness enters his voice. ‘You know. Someone’s gotta be there in case of … alcohol aftermath.’
‘Exactly.’ My answer is way too fast. Ugh. ‘That’s exactly it. Uh. I appreciate that.’
‘Of course,’ replies Rod. Now he just sounds downright awkward; we both do.
He reaches around and scratches the back of his neck, his perfect biceps flexing inadvertently.
‘We have work in an hour. You should probably take something … I put ibuprofen and aspirin on the nightstand ’cause I wasn’t sure which one you used.
There are a couple of water bottles there, too.
I’m making toast, so eat some before we leave. ’
I massage the spot between my eyebrows, down to the bridge of my nose, then adjust my shirt.
It’s the same one I wore last night: Colt’s playoff jersey, over my tank top, with jeans.
I’m grimier than the fucking troll under the bridge.
As embarrassing as this is, it doesn’t escape me that Rod still has all my ducks in a row for me. He absolutely doesn’t have to do that.
‘Thank you.’ I glance down at the jersey. ‘This is … a choice.’
Rod blinks somewhat drowsily, then lets out a raspy laugh. ‘I got thoughts.’
‘What thoughts?’
He clambers to his feet. Brushing a hand over his face, he throws me a sleepy smile. ‘Never mind. But I’m gonna get the shower ready for you. There’s a toothbrush on the counter. Rebecca dropped some of your camp stuff off. Your chai tumbler’s there, don’t worry. C’mon.’
I watch him slip out the door, and as I listen to the sound of the shower turning on, I peel some of the massive knots of sheets off my legs, swing them over the side of the bed in slo-mo. Yeesh. I don’t think I’ve put away this much alcohol since sophomore year.
I make for the ibuprofen on the nightstand right away, snagging one of the bottles of water that Rod’s left beside it.
I toss the pill into my mouth and chug it down before setting the bottle back down.
It’s then that I notice a couple other boxes of pills nearby – one’s the aspirin, no surprise, and the other is labelled Zoloft.
An antidepressant. The questions swirl in my brain, but I push them away. Concerned? Absolutely. Not my business.
I rub my eyes for the thousandth time, hoping it will spur me to wake the hell up. Which is when the dreaded words I drunkenly confessed to Rod flood back to me in dramatic flashes of memory.
You give me hope … That there are still good dads left in the world. Still good men.
‘Seriously?’ I mumble. I tug the Colt jersey over my head and fold it, setting it on the end of the bed. The very brief shit about Declan reminding me of my father was enough. Telling Rod that … it should have been too much. In any other circumstance, I’d have held it in, even while plastered.
I plant my feet in the carpet and haul myself to standing. ‘Fuck you, Dad,’ I say to no one in particular. Just for good measure. That’s the magical thing about him. He’s not here – hasn’t been, since ever – and he still manages to make my life hell.
It’s now two weeks until the Cross Camp game, and our kids are making daisy chains.
I kid you not. As we bring out the cones and nets, Benny gives us a confused shrug from where he stands with the entire group of them, all sitting in the grass, even chaos child Josh, linking together daisies like they’ve got rent to pay.
‘Guys!’ Rod puts his goal nets down and blows his whistle, two sharp tweets. ‘What is this?’
Lyla and the middle-school entourage, Stephanie and Mavis, give us pointed looks. They have makeup on in eighty-degree outdoor weather, these girls, all sparkly eyeshadow and glossy lips. ‘Um, you two would know,’ Lyla says with all the sass in her body.
Rod and I exchange a look of ‘we were not made aware.’ I plant a hand on my hip. ‘I’m afraid we definitely don’t know, miss girl.’
‘Benny?’ Rod tries. He just throws his hands up in surrender.
‘It’s the camp wedding,’ emphasizes Mavis, a separate moment in time dedicated to each syllable.
‘Girl, you are in the sixth grade. You know y’all are way too young to get married.’ I stab an incriminating finger her way and totally pretend my head isn’t pounding when I do so. ‘No camp wedding will be happening today.’
‘It’s not our camp wedding,’ Stephanie corrects me with a royal dose of stink eye. ‘It’s yours.’
WHAT.
I’m at a loss for words, so I turn to Rod, but he’s not helping. He tries to talk but words don’t come out, making him look a little too much like a fish out of water. I look to Benny next. Our boss just tugs awkwardly at his blue tie-dyed shirt.
‘Isn’t there some policy against this?’ Both of my hands are now on my hips. If Rod won’t stay on the safe side of the line we seemingly drew, I’ll have to – even if there’s a part of me that screams otherwise.
‘Uh, it usually happens with the kids.’ Benny gestures to the campers with a helpless arm. ‘Coaches … We’ve never really had—’
‘Come on!’ Lyla snaps her fingers, as if she’s a cranky nine-to-fiver with a caffeine addiction. ‘We need to know already!’
Rod and I exchange our second weird look of the day.
His face says the same thing I feel: This is not very ‘summer fling’ of us.
But whoever came up with the textbook definition of ‘summer fling’ evidently didn’t go to summer camp.
Shit just seems to happen here (usually on account of the kids) and we take it in our stride.
With a gentle tug of Rod’s arm, I pull him out of earshot of our campers. ‘We definitely do not have to do this.’
‘We definitely don’t,’ he agrees. What he doesn’t say is what I pick up, though. His eyes search mine, as if for signs of a risk, of a willingness to jump in blindfolded. ‘Lyla seems pretty determined, though.’
‘HURRY UP!’ multiple girls’ voices screech from behind us, followed by the grumbles and ‘Aw, man’s of boys clearly unhappy with their assigned daisy-chain roles.
‘Screw it.’ Some stupid force of nature forces words out of my mouth. Wait, what? ‘I’ll do it.’
Rod blinks. He swallows hard, then he manages to eke out a laugh. ‘Sure. The kids will get a kick out of it.’
‘We’ll do it—’
No sooner have I turned to the girls and said the words that I feel three sets of sparkly-nail-polished hands grip my wrists and whisk me away across the field, towards the shade of the clustered trees in the right corner.
I shoot Rod a ‘save me’ plea with my eyes.
He just rolls his eyes and mouths, ‘Good luck.’ He proceeds to lean down to the campers with a stern, ‘And this had better be over in the span of half an hour, is that clear?’
Lyla is running on all cylinders. Another gaggle of girls rushes up to us. One of them – Olivia – holds what I believe is a plastic crown purchased via ticket currency from the nearest arcade, painted in silver with a big fat purple heart gem in the middle.
‘For you,’ Olivia says sternly.
I lower my head with an ‘okay’ wrapped in a chuckle, and she pops the thing on my head. Of course, it doesn’t completely fit, perched more than anything else, but I rise with a big smile. ‘How’s it look?’
‘Good.’ Stephanie grins, dare I say, evilly? No, it’s that scheming middle-schoolgirl face. The face you make when you set your best friend up with the guy she’s been eyeing up in class all year. ‘I know you know why we’re having this camp wedding.’
I arch an eyebrow as the majority of the girls run off to the flower bushes behind the trees, leaving me with Stephanie and Lyla. ‘Why might that be?’
‘We’re done with the insufferable flirting between you and Coach Rod,’ Lyla says with a glance up and down that feels like an arrow to the chest. Yikes. Pre-teenage judgement stings.
My jaw, for the record, nearly falls to the ground. I’d thought we had done a pretty good job keeping everything neat and tied away with a bow. Honestly, I should’ve known better working with this many kids. They tend to find out. ‘We aren’t—’
‘You are.’ Stephanie points right at me with narrowed, incriminating eyes that contrast jarringly with her curly blonde hair tied by a pink scrunchie. ‘We see the way you look at each other. Like, every movie ever. Like …’
‘Like Heath Ledger looks at Julia Stiles in that marching band scene,’ Lyla fills in the blank.
‘Ten Things I Hate About You.’ Stephanie adds an extra gut-punch.
Now my jaw has definitely come off its hinges. I scoff and do the most dramatic hand throw I possibly can. ‘How in the world do you know that? You’re literally, what, Gen Alpha—?’
‘Let me continue!’ Lyla cuts me off. Okay, sass.
I step back and cross my arms. It doesn’t really have the intended looming effect when I have to crouch down so the rest of the girls can start putting their freshly picked flowers in my hair.
‘It’s my fourth year at camp, Coach Jordan.
Coach Rod is really nice. He does a lot for everybody in Whittaker.
Camp is really cool and stuff. But he’s never, ever had as much fun at camp as he’s having this summer. ’
‘With you here,’ finishes Stephanie ultra-helpfully.
Standing in the shade of the trees in my arcade-ticket crown with flowers all over my hair, the word of these middle-schoolgirls freezes me in my place.
I know my eyes go bewildered, because I’ve been told by my mother.
It’s what my face does when people get emotional.
‘Too many feelings,’ she’ll joke, ‘for your hard-shell self.’ This is so much, though.
This is: what have I even done to affect Rod so deeply?
In such a positive way? I have done zero things.
‘He woulda never let us canoe,’ Lyla hums as she stuffs a bouquet that looks an awful lot like cheer pom-poms into my hands. ‘Not before this year.’
The more she talks as the girls give me various odds and ends to complete my couture look (my something blue is literally somebody’s Nike headband wrapped around my wrist), the more it hurts, way, way more than the judgey twelve-year-old up-down.
The truth often does. Every story is real; it’s evidence that Rod and I have begun to tiptoe into territory in our lives best described as ‘way more than friends’.
Attention is nice. But crossing the line is my sign to run. Isn’t it?
Before I can consider bolting from this impromptu camp wedding, Mavis gets started at volume fifty, ‘DEARLY BELOVED. WE ARE GATHERED HERE TODAY. TO CELEbrATE THE WEDDING OF COACH JORDAN. AND COACH ROD.’
I am coaxed to the centre crease by a pack of giggling girls, clutching my pom-pom bouquet for dear life. I’m face to face with Rod, our officiant, little Theo, between us, and his eyes reflect mine. Unsteady. Unsure. Taken aback.
Nevertheless, we manage wobbly smiles that break into real ones when Theo starts, ‘If anybody does NOT want Coach to have a wedding to Coach, you can say no NOW.’
No complaint from the seated rows of campers, all decked out in daisy garlands. I spot Jake sporting his like it’s a twenty-four-carat gold chain.
‘Coach Rod, do you do?’ Theo asks, throwing a tiny arm towards Rod.
Unfazed, Mr Charisma gulps. They have somehow got him a bow tie and suit jacket (no doubt stolen from someone’s dad).
He looks like his Pinterest inspo was ‘dapper Adam Sandler’.
And yet it wrenches at a soft, exposed part of my heart.
In this moment, we are both no longer bluster, flirty jokes and avoidance.
Yeah, it’s a fake camp wedding. But I feel myself faced with something way more real.
‘I like your …’ He gestures to his head and the empty space beside it. Hair, maybe? Whatever it is, I’ll walk with him. We can cut this with humour.
‘Not an answer,’ quips Theo. Jeez, who let Lyla teach this kid his lines? The potential shaky laugh I’d been holding in escapes, and Rod, across from me, looks like he breathes a little more easily. His eyes finally meet mine.
‘Sure, I do.’
My heart thuds like that marching-band scene from the movie.
What is going on with me? A fucking camp wedding, Jordan?
No sort of wedding – fake or otherwise – is supposed to be in my best-laid plans.
Theo’s ‘do you do’ is muffled in my hearing as I take stock of the deadly butterflies in my stomach. The nervous smile that crosses my face.
‘Why not,’ I say. ‘I do.’
Rod and I swap very loosely folded candy-wrapper rings that we have to work overtime not to destroy, and I do my very darndest to plaster all my attention there.
As for the rest of it? I know I am so totally and completely gone because, even after the day’s camp is over, I tuck that stupid crown away in my bag. My fingers gloss over the purple gemstone, and I allow one very small smile, for only me to know.
Girl, what are you doing to yourself?