Chapter 11 five years in second place
five years in second place
Preston Darling
“We’re finally going to do it.”
Dolly’s voice was somewhere between a whisper and a squeal of excitement as she leaned over to share the news with Destiny and Lacey. “On my birthday, after my Sweet Sixteen party. We’re going to sneak out and meet in Grampa Darling’s treehouse.”
“Oh my god, that’s so romantic,” Destiny said, covering her heart.
“Do what?” I asked, trying to keep my voice neutral but loud enough for the people around us to hear, as if that would change the inevitable, the cruelty of fate I’d seen coming for months. If I thought about it, I would have known it for years.
“Preston,” Dolly hissed, tilting her head and widening her eyes.
It was a Friday afternoon, and after running over the plays for tonight’s game one last time, the coaches had turned on some music and let us have free time so we wouldn’t be worn out from practicing before the game.
The doors to the gym were all propped open to let in the perfect fall day.
The sun streaming across the hardwood seemed to taunt me, as if it were purposely bright and beautiful just to spite me.
“What?” I asked, forcing my face into a casual expression, though inside I was seething with the kind of rage I imagined Dad felt, uncontainable and unending.
“Shhh,” Destiny said, putting a finger to her purple lips and trying to stop giggling.
She glanced around at the other kids, though I was sure this would be public knowledge within days.
Dolly and Devlin were the town’s beloved golden couple.
Everyone was obsessed with them to a ridiculous degree, like they were celebrities.
“Let’s move over there,” Lacey said, nodding to an empty row a little way down the bleachers. She gave me a dirty look over her shoulder. “This is girl business.”
“It’s okay,” Dolly said, putting a hand on Lacey’s arm to stop her.
She turned to me and smiled, but it wasn’t the kind of smile she used to give me.
She smiled at me like I was a kid brother, someone to be tolerated and treated with kindness while hiding just an edge of pity.
We’d started drifting apart when she went to middle, then got closer again when I joined them the next year.
Then she’d gone to junior high for eighth grade, then transferred to Willow Heights, the town’s private high school, for ninth.
That meant for the first time ever, we weren’t in school together for two years in a row.
For the past two years, I’d watched with simmering rage and despair as she and Devlin kept growing closer to each other and further from me.
But I never gave up hope. Forcing patience, I waited for the moment when I’d join them in high school and everything would go back to the way it had been when I saw her every day instead of just at social events and occasional weekends.
But now that I was in high school, she barely gave me the time of day. It wasn’t because I was a freshman—Destiny was a freshman, and the moment we started at Willow Heights, Dolly and her new friend Lacey had snatched her up and absorbed her into their popular group.
I was popular in the lower grades too, so we saw each other all the time, but there was something different between us, some carefulness.
More than that, I got the feeling she was trying to avoid me, making sure we were never alone together or even the first two people at our lunch table, where we’d have to face each other without distractions.
When I’d grumbled over dinner one night that my friends weren’t the same now that we were in high school, Mom patted my hand and said sometimes people outgrew a friendship.
I didn’t think it was that, though. Dolly just didn’t want to admit that we had something, something even deeper than what she had with Devlin.
They went to dances together, and she was a majorette while we played football.
On the surface, they were the perfect couple.
But I knew he took her for granted, that he didn’t appreciate the things about her that I did.
Not just her beauty, but her commitment to being exactly who she was.
She didn’t apologize for her size, didn’t try to downplay it.
She was almost six feet, but she still wore heels.
She was flashy and big in all the right places, and even though lots of girls who were thinner than her complained about their weight or went on diets together, she never joined.
She’d be the first to suggest a trip to Boehner’s Burgers after school, where we’d sit at picnic tables eating burgers and their signature Neapolitan shakes and tossing fries into the air to catch in our mouths.
She just was herself, and she owned it far before most girls got there.
And I… I couldn’t stop watching and wanting.
She wasn’t a bitch to me, was never rude or cruel to anyone.
She wasn’t fake, like some of her friends, either.
She truly saw the best in everyone, was sweet and kind and gracious to even the most desperate little pimply freshmen who dared to ask her out.
She had all the friends she could ask for, not just because she was a person you couldn’t help but like, but because of Devlin, who the town worshipped.
They’d already been talking colleges before he even started high school.
The second game of his freshman year, the senior quarterback took a hard hit and Coach put Devlin in for the last quarter, after the game was basically already lost. WHPA was behind by three touchdowns.
Devlin came in like a fucking savior and threw the most beautiful quarter the town had ever seen.
We won by one extra point kick, but no one remembered the kicker. They remembered Devlin.
He became the starting QB for the rest of his freshman year, which meant by default, Dolly was the most popular girl in school.
But even the bitchiest of the mean girls couldn’t resent her.
Dolly won them all over as the benevolent queen.
How could I not admire her? Her softness could soften anyone, win them over one genuine smile at a time, until before they knew it, her worst enemies had become her best friends.
Proof enough was Lacey, who apparently had been dying of jealousy for half of their freshman year. Now she was her closest friend besides Destiny, who’d been part of our circle since elementary. Lacey didn’t like me, but Dolly wouldn’t be rude to anyone, not even when I was being rude to her.
Her cheeks colored, but her smile never wavered as she looked me straight in the eyes and said, “Me and Devlin are going all the way.”
I froze in place, holding myself perfectly still, the way I’d learned to do when Dad got the belt out and looped the ends together, gripping my shoulder with a malicious glitter in his eyes before he began the beating.
That didn’t happen now that I’d started high school.
Somewhere along the way, I had learned my lessons, and I never gave him reason.
Now when he needed to take his wrath out on me, he took me to the boxing gym he’d bought as some kind of tax write-off back when the governor had offered incentives to places that kept poor kids ‘off the streets’ after school.
When there were other people working out there, my father was fucking Dad of the Year, bringing his son to learn boxing as some father-son bonding exercise.
When we were the only ones there, though, he’d let himself go.
Eventually, he’d always manage to get me on the floor, where he’d pummel me relentlessly while screaming at me to get up and hit back.
One night, a manager tried to intervene and get Dad to let me up so I could fight back, but Dad fired him on the spot.
The next guy he hired stayed in his office when Dad was there with me alone.
One day, I’d be strong enough to knock him down.
For now, at fourteen, I wasn’t a match for him, just like I was no match for the information Dolly had just slammed into me like Dad’s boxing glove, taking the air from my lungs.
I wanted to tear apart the gym, to grab Dolly and shake some sense into her, tell her that she had to at least consider me as an option.
She couldn’t just fuck Devlin because he happened to be her boyfriend at the time. She hadn’t even given me a chance.
“Why?” I managed, my throat constricting around the word.
Lacey giggled and rolled her eyes at Destiny. “Oh my god,” she said. “Can you believe these freshman boys?”
“Where do they get their audacity?” Destiny agreed, like she wasn’t a freshman, too.
Her words only twisted the knife deeper into me.
We’d been friends all our lives, even the past two years, when Dolly was in a different school.
In fact, she’d been my best friend during that time, two years that felt like we were both waiting to catch up with the others, for our real life to begin.
Now, having solidarity with her new high school friends came before a lifetime of friendship with me.
Dolly frowned at them before fixing me with a soft smile, like she was explaining something to a child. “Well, we’ve been together two years, we love each other, and we already know we’re getting married after graduation,” she said. “So why wait?”
“Did he say that?” I asked, feeling like I’d been kicked in the testicles.
“Say what?” she asked while her friends whispered and looked at me like I was something to be pitied.
Even though I was already turning heads as a freshman, on and off the field, I’d never had a real girlfriend. Not because I couldn’t get one, but because I couldn’t get the one I wanted.
“Did he say he loved you?” I asked.
Dolly looked like she’d been slapped. “Of course he said it,” she said, drawing herself up to her full height, which was pretty impressive. She was still taller than me that year, and with her hair all done up, she towered over me even while sitting.