Nine
Our agreement, if you could call it that, was brought to its knees almost immediately.
Tuesday afternoon, Cella’s sister called the moment drama class let out and wailed into her ear loud enough to be heard down the hallway.
Cella told us frantically that Diane was waiting for her outside; her relationships had come to a final, catastrophic end.
Mason suggested we put off working on the play until the next day, but Cella wanted it over with so she could focus on the economics project due Monday, and she couldn’t predict how long Diane’s breakdown would last.
“She needs me,” she said. “Besides, the play’s almost done, and I’ve put in more hours than either of you.”
She whisked away, muttering about getting behind the wheel before Diane managed to crash in the pickup loop, leaving the two of us standing there before we’d gotten the chance to protest.
Reluctantly, I said, “I’ll wait for your practice to end. We can work here.”
Mason agreed without looking at me. We went opposite ways down the hall. I used the three-and-a-half hours until Mason texted me the traffic light emoji, which I took to mean “go time” or something equally inane, to catch up on homework. Two days in turtle mode had set me behind.
I waited high up on the stadium bleachers with Cella’s notebook in my lap and watched a few scrawny, gung-ho boys, surely freshmen, chase each other around despite practice having ended.
Mason came jogging up the steps with his head down, a towel on his shoulders to catch the water dripping from his hair.
He smelled like lemon and lavender, which was so unlike what I would expect of his shampoo that it was distracting.
The play was pretty far along, only the final scenes left. It was impossible to work together without speaking to each other, but we gave it our best shot. It made us more productive than usual. Condensing our exchanges to as few words as possible seriously limited our potential for combustion.
In the play’s final moments, tragic hero Mick Betty dies after falling off the school roof. The victor, rival gang leader Mac Tuff, calls off the gang fight raging below, ending his speech with:
Kings fall. Bosses break. Nothing lasts forever.
We’ll rebuild atop these ancient foundations.
I squinted at the page, then reached across him to strike the last lines out with my pen.
“Really now,” Mason said flatly. He didn’t look himself today, eyes tired and pinched, everything rumpled. Under the white stadium lights, the circles under his eyes were puffy and bruise-colored.
“It’s melodramatic,” I said. “What kings are you even talking about? Ancient foundations? They’re high school students.”
“They’re also killing each other. Suspend your disbelief.”
“Just—give me the notebook.”
Mason’s nose wrinkled. “Dude. It’s fine.”
“Cella’s trusting us with this one thing. Can’t you even care enough to do a good job?”
“I don’t get you.” He seemed flighty, barely sitting on the bench, like he was ready to take off at the drop of a hat. “We’ve miraculously gotten this far, and you want to nitpick at the last second. It’s like you were just waiting for something to take issue with.”
“Don’t flatter yourself,” I said. Now that he was looking at me head-on, I felt oddly like I’d gone digging for something and found it. “It sounds like a slogan. Or the cheesy voice-over at the end of a coming-of-age movie.”
“I don’t hear that.”
“It’s the rule of threes. Imagine I said, Thrones break. Crowns get clowned. Even legends flunk chem. It’s terrible.”
Mason barked a surprised laugh. “That’s perfect.” He wrote it down word for word beneath the crossed-out lines. For the final line, he wrote: I’ll fix everything . . . if I ever get out of tutoring.
“Give me the damn notebook.”
Mason hopped swiftly to his feet when I swiped for it. “Not feeling it? How about . . .” He wrote quickly, muttering aloud, “Castles crumble. Queens block your number. Even bosses have to file FAFSA. Am I getting ghosted, or is he an actual ghost?”
I jumped up after him and snatched the notebook. He held the pen up over his head.
“Taller than you,” I reminded him, plucking it out of his fingers. I scratched out the lines, using the notebook to shield his grabbing hands as I wrote, then read aloud, “Empire’s dead. Homecoming got canceled. We made history in tardy slips and body bags. We’ll rise again—after detention.”
Unnervingly fast, Mason climbed onto the next bench row and took back possession, standing a head above me. “Now there’s not enough drama. ‘Kingdoms fall. Youth is stripped to the bone. God’s leaving texts on “read” tonight. Time to mop the blood and fix the vending machine.’ ”
I lunged, and Mason leaped to the ground, clearing twelve rows of benches in one fell swoop.
I jumped after him and accidentally sort of onto him.
We crashed together onto the red track, his arm tangling with my legs.
The notebook had landed open on our last page, and the pen was still rolling.
I kept my knee pinning his arm as I reached for them.
Not that Mason was putting up much of a fight.
He was laughing hard enough to curl his back off the track, even as he held his shoulder, wincing in pain between bouts.
His face was so open he seemed just bloomed.
Our hasty scrawls had taken up every leftover inch on the page. “I guess we can keep what you originally wrote,” I conceded.
“After all of that!” squawked Mason. I smiled, small and relieved, at his rage.
“Good,” I said. “You were acting weird.”
His expression slackened, leaving him open-mouthed and quiet enough for me to hear my own words back. I regretted them immensely. I hurried to get off of his arm.
Just when it was getting uncomfortable, Mason said, “Worried about me? This feels momentous. Like the moment in a movie right before everything goes dark.”
“Everything?”
“Whole screen.”
“Sounds scary.”
“Scary?”
“I used to be afraid of the dark when I was little,” I said, then considered ripping a page out of the notebook and shoving it in my mouth. It wasn’t like me to say the first thing that came to my head.
“How is that possible?” he asked with awe.
Words were equations. They needed time to be solved, but I kept finding myself rushing through the math.
“It’s too loud.”
Mason was giving me a strange look, and I was mortified.
“I’m gonna go for a run,” he blurted, even though he’d just practiced for three hours.
“After how disastrous last time was?”
We both cringed. I’d meant the wolf-trap thing, not the kiss thing, but that had been a disaster too. Not that the wolf trap was even funny to begin with. And not like I was trying to be funny anyway, not for Mason. This whole thing was a disaster, actually.
Mason stood and dusted off his pants. He climbed the bleachers, packed his bag, and left in a hurry.
I waited a few minutes before gathering my things, so we wouldn’t cross paths in the parking lot. I shoved my phone into my back pocket, then pulled it back out and called the number saved as “Problem.”
I spoke before Mason could.
“I said I don’t care. Last night. And I meant that, okay, but you talked about hurting, and now you look like shit. It’s freaky when you get all skittish. You’re not a cat.”
After a long pause, Mason said, “I don’t like cats.”
“That’s terrible. You’re terrible.”
I heard a puffed breath. I couldn’t tell whether it was aggravated or amused. “Thanks, Sunshine. Why’d you call?”
“Because I’m annoyed with you.”
“If that was grounds for a ring, you’d be my number-one caller,” said Mason.
“I’m fine. And you’re terrible too.” He didn’t sound angry, but he sounded like he meant it.
My phone beeped. He’d hung up. Blissfully, his car was gone when I got to the lot.
I sat in mine for a while, gripping the wheel even though I wasn’t moving.