Chapter Seventeen
If Marley’s calling it’s either because she’s butt-dialing or because everyone in the family has been picked up on charges for disrupting the peace of the local movie theater by intermittently yelling Marvel fan theories and/or loudly crying over the death of a CGI creature. I pick up on the first ring.
“Hey, so what the fuck?”
Ah. Nothing like the warm, welcoming voice of your older sister to take the edge off what has been a spectacularly anarchic week. I finish taping the flyer to the side of McLaren for the third—fourth?—time today, knowing full well someone hired by the administration will have it pulled down within the hour. At least doing the rounds to replace them means I’m getting some fresh air.
“Which fuck are you referring to?” I ask.
Marley’s stunned into silence for a moment. I forget that she’s not fully used to campus Sadie yet. But I’ve leaned so far into my boat-rocking waves this week that I couldn’t turn off campus Sadie if I tried—the last five days have demanded it.
Five days. It feels almost like I got yanked through a wormhole, they went by so fast—just a blur of underground organizing with the athletes and student-run groups, giving the administration the runaround about where we’re meeting to decide how to respond to their threats.
Of which there are many. It’s not just Newsbag on the line anymore but a bunch of other student organizations the administration is claiming were “borderline” but are all too willing to axe now because of the “lack of respectful dialogue.” Not that we were offered any kind of dialogue in the first place.
So now we’re split up into two groups. Rowan is leading one, trying to work with the donors we could get ahold of and staff members who want to help so we can propose a restructured budget and transparency policy of our own. Amara is leading the other, rounding up all the student groups to see who’s on board with defending it, and when and where we plan to do it.
Seb’s been off with Rowan’s team and I’ve been off with Amara’s so I haven’t seen much of him this week, or anyone outside of Newsbag, really. Even hearing Marley’s voice feels a bit like getting pulled off another plane of existence.
“The one where you’ve ghosted the whole family group chat and haven’t called home once this week,” says Marley.
I frown. Marley barely even acknowledges me on either of those mediums, or anyone, for that matter. “I’ve been busy,” I say, a tad defensively.
Marley does not pick up on the subtle “pot calling kettle” vibes. “Well, I hope whatever it is, it’s more important than Hadley’s world imploding.”
For once my heart doesn’t lurch in my chest, my spine doesn’t snap to attention. It’s not that I don’t care. It’s that I’m exhausted, and I have an armful of flyers and another mile of campus to canvas, and I’m assuming from the sass and liberal use of hyperbole that this isn’t actually that big of a deal.
“Over what?” I ask.
“You don’t even know?”
Hadley still hasn’t deigned to talk to me or Seb. I’m used to the occasional silent treatment from her, but the past week just slid out from under me so fast that I’ve stopped measuring time in hours and started measuring it in the snacks the Foodie Club hurls at us to keep us going.
“I don’t,” I admit.
“She’s freaking out over this school play thing. Keeps freezing in rehearsals and coming home bawling about her stage fright. Her face is a goddamn Slip ’n Slide.”
“Shit,” I mutter, half about the Hadley situation, and half because the wind just picked up out of nowhere and jostled a few of the flyers out of my hand.
“Yeah, that about covers it. So can you come down from your coed cloud for half a second and talk to her already?”
I pause, letting some of the flyers get away. There’s an edge in her tone that’s sharper than usual, one she’s aiming with precision. I tread carefully but can’t help the twinge of irritation in my voice.
“Have you tried talking to her?”
“You’re the one who knows how to fix her when she’s like this,” she says, like she’s scolding a misbehaving dog.
The wind picks up again and I hug the stack of flyers to my chest, trying to turn my back to the gust.
“Because I’m the only one who tries,” I say. “You’re her damn sister, too.”
Oh, shit. I didn’t mean for it to come out like that. I wait for the crush of guilt, but curiously, it doesn’t come. I feel lighter, like some valve in me sprang a leak and let some of the pressurized air out.
“Excuse you?” Marley snaps.
“Fuck,” I mutter—the wind came at me from the side and now the flyers are scattering all over the quad.
“What the hell is going on with you?”
The valve in me gets lawless then, because it just—snaps. Like the pressure’s been building for so long that suddenly it has nowhere to go.
“I’ll tell you what’s going on with me,” I say, kneeling down in the mud to grab the flyers. Might as well be a figurative and literal mess. “A whole lifetime of always being the one who has to fix things.”
Maybe it’s because I’ve startled Marley with the sudden appearance of my backbone, but she lets up a bit. “Yeah, well. You’re good at it.”
Unfortunately for Marley, I’ve already burst and now it’s all just blowing out of me. “No. I’m just the only one of us not going buck wild all the damn time. So I’m always the one who has to fix things, who has to keep the peace, who has to go out of their way to convince the rest of the world that our family has a modicum of normalcy in it, which you know what? Is no easy task. I’m tired of it, Marley. I’m tired. Can’t you solve one damn problem yourself?”
By the end of my little rant I am basically putting on a one-woman show in the middle of the quad and can feel the curious eyes of students passing by. I’m tempted to pull a face at them, to snap something like Enjoying the view? Tempted, ironically, to cause the kind of scene I’ve actively been trying to stop my family from causing for years.
And fuck. It feels good.
“Damn, Sadie,” Marley says with a bite. “Tell me how you really feel.”
I let out a frustrated groan, apparently so theatrical that I manage, against all odds, to drop even more of the damn flyers. “Forget it.”
I’m assuming she will only because it’s been easy for her to do it before. Marley has two modes: causing drama or slinking away from other people’s, not unlike the family cat she’s been in a years-long feud with.
But apparently I’m not the only one full of surprises today.
“No, I won’t. Because you’re wrong,” says Marley, her voice surprisingly firm. “We’re not like—cavemen over here. We’re loud and opinionated and honest about our feelings, and if that embarrasses you enough that you feel like you have to ‘fix’ us, well, tough shit, Sadie. Because from the sound of it over there, turns out you’re just like us.”
“Maybe because it’s the first time I’ve been allowed to be,” I say, my throat suddenly tight. “There’s no room for me to be anything else at home, and you know it. Everyone’s just—so much all the time, and if I don’t step in, who the hell will?”
“If you could hear yourself right now.”
“Are you hearing me ?” I snap back. I turn my back to the least populated part of the quad as if lowering the witness count will do me any favors, but it’s too late for that. “I mean shit, Marley. You’re on my case about being there for Hadley this week—when the hell were you ever there for me all these years?”
Marley surprises me by letting out a sharp laugh. “You never needed me. You made that pretty clear.”
My eyes really are watering now, but the anger is welling up in me so fast that it knocks two tears out and won’t allow for anymore.
“Of course I needed you,” I tell her. “You’re my sister. I had questions—I still have questions—shit I can’t come to Mom or Dad about, but you were always off doing your own thing or caught up in some drama and I had to just figure everything out for myself.”
There’s more to it than that, but while I apparently have no issue blowing a gasket on the quad, I draw the line at yelling, “I have a deeply inconvenient lack of understanding about sex and relationships for someone whose sister is so damn blunt about them!” at the top of my lungs. One or two of my standards will remain upheld this afternoon, damn it.
“Well, that’s fucking it, ” says Marley, her throat thick. I’m entirely certain I’m going to hear the faint vacuum of the call being dropped or at the very least the Marley Meltdown to End All Meltdowns. Instead I hear the jangle of her keys. “We’re not having this conversation over the phone. I’m coming to get you.”
I blink, holding up my muddy flyers and staring out at the quad in shock. “You’re what?”
“I’ll drive you back after dinner. Be outside your dorm in an hour.”
And there’s the vacuum of a call dropped.
I stand there for a few moments, half-stunned and half-warmed and fully unsure what to do with myself. Eventually I finish up my flyer-posting with the few that don’t look like they joined a mud-wrestling team and head back to the dorm, still unsure if I made that entire conversation up.
When I let myself in, Christina is sitting on her bed with her laptop propped on her knees, her hair wet from a post-practice shower. She’s already in her pajamas despite it barely being five o’clock. Unsurprisingly, it’s the first time I’ve seen her sit still all week.
“Where are you going with a backpack on a Friday night, Dora the Explorer?” she asks when I pull mine out, putting a change of clothes into it just in case.
“Home, for a hot second. For dinner and back. You want a ride?” I ask, hoping she’ll take me up on it. “We can drop you off at your parents.”
“Maybe. What’s shaking?”
I toss my keys into the backpack, considering. “The SparkNotes version is I think Marley and I just got into like—the worst but best fight of our lives?” I explain. “Fair warning, she’s coming up here to either resolve it or kill me with her bare hands. Jury’s still out.”
“What’s all this?”
“Oh.” I hand her the least-mucked-up flyer in the pile, which is declaring an open gathering on the quad tomorrow to rally anyone interested in supporting the athletes and the student-run organizations with getting the school to restructure the budget. “The Foodie Club is bringing treats. But unless you feel like flirting with your own mortality, avoid anything the Jelly Bean Appreciation Society tries to hand you at all costs.”
Christina doesn’t laugh, handing the flyer back to me. “This is what you’ve been busy with all week?”
That and trying to keep Seb’s damn mouth shut. He got it in his head that if he confessed it was him who found the numbers that maybe the dean would stop coming down hard on the student-run organizations as a whole. Rowan and I have been taking turns talking him down by reminding him that the administration is not like a pantheon that will be appeased by a freshman sacrifice and will come after us all regardless.
“Yeah. Some of us are grabbing lunch together after, if you’re coming.”
“Pass.”
I cut a quick glance at her, but she is very determinedly not looking at me.
“Everything good?” I ask.
Christina works her jaw, still staring at her laptop screen. “I just—we’ve only been here a few weeks. But you seem really, really confident you know what you’re doing, bucking the system like this.”
I pause in my packing for long enough that Christina finally looks up at me, her eyebrows raised and her eyes sharp.
“I’m not confident I know what I’m doing,” I say carefully. “I’m not calling any shots here. I’m confident because all the seniors and team captains and other athletes are involved.”
She tilts the laptop screen down. “Yeah, well, I’m not the other athletes. I’m your best friend, and you’ve hardly asked me what I think about this at all,” she says. “And if I’m worried, don’t you think the other scholarship students are, too?”
It’s the first time we’ve touched on this since we were on the quad last week.
“You’re worried about the scholarship?”
My own valve burst on the quad an hour ago, but the look Christina gives me is just short of nuclear. I brace myself, knowing whatever this is, it’s long overdue.
“When am I not ?” She gestures widely and sharply enough to nearly topple her laptop off her bed. “My entire college career is going to be spent worrying about this damn scholarship, apparently, and all this delay with the budgets isn’t helping. You know they have to confirm our funding every semester? That’s why that email went out. They’re refusing to confirm until they’ve solved this, especially now that the donors are pissed off and getting involved again. You guys are throwing a wrench into everything. ”
I don’t doubt for a second that this is true. The other scholarship kids—Joey included—must have calculated the risk, then, in conversations on Rowan’s end that I’m not a part of. So all I can do is be honest.
“I’m sorry. I had no idea,” I say. “You didn’t say anything.”
Christina is scowling in that way she only does when she’s trying not to cry. “I haven’t had time. And you—you’ve been running around taking classes you actually like and getting fired up about Newsbag and living out a ridiculously cute slow-burn rom-com with Seb, and I don’t even have enough time to sit down to eat at our terrible dining hall anymore.” Her eyes are swimming with tears but locked on mine, clearly not finished. “You think you have to be perfect Sadie all the time, and I get it. It’s a lot. But I have to be more perfect than perfect. Because I’m not like you, with your parents paying half your tuition. If I fuck up, I’m out of here.”
The words hurt to hear, but in some way I’m almost relieved—it’s been weeks of trying to check in with Christina, and at least now she’s being fully honest about her situation. I only hesitate to answer because I’m not sure if she’s got more to say, and sure enough she lets out a dark, wet laugh.
“Honestly, I might as well be,” she says, standing up on the bed to glare at the “Christina and Sadie Make Maple Ride Their Bitch!!” list still taped above it. “It’s not like I’ve gotten to do one goddamn thing I came here to do other than run and study, study and run, and even that’s not going to be enough to undo this.”
“But that’s exactly what we’re trying to push for. Less of this stress on the athletes. That’s where we’re trying to reallocate the budget for—Christina, wait—”
Too late. She’s pulling the Bitch List off the wall. It’s not lost on me that not a single item on it was checked off for either of us. She crumples it, or at least attempts to—she’s shaking too hard. She drops it and it doesn’t go down with the satisfying thud either of us are expecting but flutters and takes its time hitting the floor.
I pick it up carefully. By the time I look up at Christina, she’s sitting back down on the bed, tears streaming down her cheeks.
I lean in and hug her hard, but it’s not like the night of the Alphabet Party. There are no gulping sobs or green carnage. She is stiff as a board and then gets up so abruptly that I stumble letting her go. She stands at our window with her back to me, her arms crossed over her chest, every part of her rigid.
I take a hesitant step toward her, feeling a new tension ripple through the room.
“I’m sorry,” I tell her quietly. “I should have checked in with you more.”
She just shakes her head. Her voice is as quiet as mine but edged with steel. “You did,” she says. “And you still went through with all of this without even considering how I’d feel. It’s hard enough that the school doesn’t seem to give a shit about what I need, but you’re my best friend. I thought at least you would.”
The guilt wraps around my ribs so tightly that it’s hard to speak. Christina and I have gotten into plenty of squabbles before, but this is different. It isn’t some passing, trivial thing we’ll get over by dinner. It’s been building long enough that I should have understood the depth of it long before it burst.
“Tell me what you need,” I say. “Please. We’ll figure this out.”
She tilts her head just enough for me to see her jaw twitch. “With Newsbag ’s little budget revolution?” she says flatly.
“No,” I insist. “We as in you and me. We’re in this together.”
Christina whips around then, her cheeks flushed under her bruised, exhausted eyes. She doesn’t come any closer, but she doesn’t have to for the words to hit their mark.
“No, we’re not,” she says through her teeth. “You’re in this for you. You’re in this to make sure you get everything you want, and it doesn’t matter who stands in your way. Not me and not even Seb, apparently.”
“That’s different,” I blurt, and I know it’s too fast, too defen sive, because Christina’s eyebrows nearly fly into her ponytail. “Seb and I have always competed, but you and me—we’re on the same team. You know that.”
Christina’s eyes are wet with unshed tears, but it does nothing to shake her resolve. “I know he’s leaving the school if you beat him out for that role. But you don’t care about that the same way you apparently don’t give a shit about what this does to me. You’re more loyal to a damn zine that you’re not even a part of than the people who love you.”
The words tilt my reality so fast I’m almost dizzy with it. I’ve been so tunnel-visioned on this goal for so long that it’s startling to see what it looks like from the outside. That it would make Christina doubt even for a second how much our friendship matters to me.
“That’s not true,” I plead, but her words have me by the throat. She’s right. I haven’t let myself fully consider the consequences of this. Not for her, and not for Seb, either.
And then it hits me. The real reason why I’ve been holding back with Seb. It isn’t that we’re competing or that we might be long-distance on the other side of it. It’s that I am scared deep down that this is who I am: somebody who will always have to choose between success and love, and get it wrong.
Because Christina’s right. Seb has more to lose here than I do. At the start it didn’t matter, because at the start I knew that if our roles were reversed, he’d do the same thing I did and fight tooth and nail to win. We respect each other too much to back down from a challenge, to give anything less than our best.
But enough has shifted that we both understand it wasn’t just respect. It was love before we could make sense of it. And now that I have, this much is crystal clear: I know winning will push Seb out of my life, and I’ve never once considered backing down. Is that fair, then? For me to put any kind of claim on him, when I’m chasing a dream that can’t come true without hurting him first?
Christina and I both flinch at the sound of a car horn squawking below loud enough to wake the dead. She jerks her head for me to leave, settling back on her bed.
“This is important to me,” I insist. “ You’re important to me.”
Christina shakes her head, her face pale and resigned. “I have to sleep.” She sinks into the mattress, her eyes practically half-shut already. “I’m so fucking tired. Just go.”
“I can have Marley wait,” I say, as evenly as I can. “If you want to go home with us.”
“Just go, ” Christina snaps.
She throws the covers over herself, blocking her face from view. Shaking, I shut the door carefully behind me, pausing for a moment to take a breath. Seb is right. I can make waves. I just didn’t think about people getting caught in the undertow.