Twenty-three
In the final months of junior year when everyone was picking classes, Cella and I had thought it would be a great idea to completely match up our schedules for the last year of high school.
After all, Cella was going to apply to colleges all over, even one in Florida, which was just about as far away as someone could get from Oregon without crossing the ocean.
We needed to get in as much shit-talking and cheating on quizzes as we could before high school came to an end. What could go wrong?
Everything. Everything could go wrong.
When the final bell rang at the end of every period, I waited until Cella was out the door before standing to put space between us so we wouldn’t cross paths. I walked slower than usual so my long strides wouldn’t catch me up to her.
It felt idiotic, but I was the idiot in question, so.
Aside from calculus, where our teacher had assigned seats, Cella and I sat beside each other in every class.
She wasn’t speaking to me, obviously. It shouldn’t have felt weird to be quiet in a classroom, but I’d gotten so used to our perfect whispering.
She didn’t move seats except for seventh period, where she abandoned her spot between me and Mason for an empty desk in a front corner (I remembered her eyeing it on the first day of class—I’d shot it down, not wanting to sit so close to the teacher).
I felt her presence like a physical thing, like I used to feel Mason walk into every room, except this time it was around my chest, more an ache than an itch.
I couldn’t scratch it by picking a fight. I just had to sit with it.
There were two weeks of school before winter break, and I was counting down the days.
The most communication we’d had since Sunday was a single text on Monday morning.
I had nearly dropped my phone when I’d seen her name on the notification, but she was just telling me that I didn’t have to pick her up before school, which either meant she was riding with someone else or had convinced Diane to quit hogging the car.
During lunch, Cella ate with Lara, who was definitely avoiding meeting my eye in the halls.
I would bet my borrowed life that Lara didn’t fully know what had happened, because even at her angriest, Cella wouldn’t out anyone for anything.
I knew this the way I knew grass was green and blood was red. I knew her.
Or I had known her. Something had obviously shifted even before she knew about Mason.
She had auditioned for the school play and gotten a role.
I knew she liked theater, but it had never occurred to me that she might love it.
It wasn’t just that she hadn’t told me. She had hidden it from me.
I wondered how many rounds of callbacks and readings there had been—how many times I had dropped her off at home just for her to get in the car she shared with Diane and drive back to school.
Cella was endlessly changing, learning, soaking in the world like a sponge. She was always going through all of these phases. And I was always exactly the same.
Now she was keeping them from me, finally moving on without me. And I had blown up any chance I had of at least getting to stand by her, or even sit in her audience, when she finally found something that stuck.
I spent lunch in the library.
Mason offered to ditch his friends and join me, but I refused.
It didn’t feel right, just like it didn’t feel right to meet up with him during class knowing Cella had probably guessed where I’d been slipping away to all these weeks.
Tiptoeing around for clandestine kisses in closets was starting to feel like a bad metaphor anyway.
Mason kept telling me—over text, because that was the only way we had spoken in days—that I didn’t need to punish myself by being alone.
Didn’t I, though?
With Mason at practice every afternoon, the only person I had spent time with since Sunday was Annalisa.
Every day at sunset, I showed up at her door like clockwork.
She was usually just waking up and sometimes still asleep.
I knew I looked extra pitiable when the most chiding I got for waking her was an eye roll.
Only one corner of her room was still covered in petals.
She was using the dried flowers to create wall art.
There was a skull wearing a crown of flowers on the wall beside her mirror, a dancing woman’s silhouette in the basement’s sitting room.
Flower collages hung throughout the dark halls.
The night Cella dumped me, Annalisa had suggested we work on one together for my room.
Every night, we pulled dried flowers apart and mounted the pieces.
We were trying to form the shape of a hummingbird.
The final product was going above my headboard.
It would be the first time since middle school that I put anything on my walls that wasn’t my mother’s.
It helped. So did the dozens of pictures and videos I got from Mason: of the sheep, of the chickens, of our poppies, of the bat he captured and released from the barn (hey, you know this guy?), of himself in his fogged-up mirror after a shower.
He meant well, trying to keep my mind off of Cella, but the sound of his voice in an audio message couldn’t replace the real thing.
I needed him with me so badly, sometimes my whole body tensed with longing.
Friday afternoons in the shed had become our routine, the thing I looked forward to all week, but that Friday, Mason’s team was getting on a bus to Portland as soon as school was over.
I wanted to get violent about it. The game was Saturday afternoon, and Portland was an hour away; there was no need to leave a day before.
Mason responded to my admittedly pissy texts stating my grievances with a voice message about team bonding and celebrating a great season.
All I heard was, My coach hates you and wants you to die.
The school had been buzzing all week over Saturday’s championship game. The pep rally on Friday was loud enough to give me a headache.
Carrington had made it far before but had never sealed the win—Dalton High, a school in Eugene, took it every time. We hadn’t had Mason then, though. Having a werewolf as a running back was definitely a huge cheat.
I couldn’t care less about school rivalries, but I felt frantic all the same as I drove to Portland on Friday evening.
Mason had told me in advance which hotel the football team would spend the night in.
I checked in like someone was hot on my heels, and by the time I reached the elevator, I’d already sent Mason the room number—312.
I had hardly gotten my backpack off my shoulders when he knocked.
He crushed me in an embrace, and I made a pathetic noise, crumpling into him.
“Hey,” he said, walking us into the room. Hearing him speak so close shocked my whole system. With Cella not speaking to either of us in art, we hadn’t spoken to each other, either. Even taking fake digs at him had been better than the silence. “How’re you feeling?”
He had texted me some iteration of that every day since Sunday. The answer was always the same. “Might as well stop asking.”
The backs of my legs hit the white duvet. Mason gently pushed me down until I was sitting, still clutching his shirt at the waist. Standing between my knees, he rubbed circles behind my ears. I shut my eyes, leaning into his touch.
“How about you?” I asked.
“I’m fine,” he said. I doubted it. He had lost a friend, too, the first one he’d made here.
The cold shoulder Cella gave him wasn’t cold at all.
Somehow there was a furious heat in the way she disregarded him.
More than once that week, he had texted me, talk later, going for a run, so I knew he was ruminating.
I squeezed his waist, coaxing. “Okay,” he said.
“Like shit, a little. Trying to stay focused.”
“You’ll do great,” I said. Mason touched the corner of my mouth, looking pleased. He had reminded me incessantly to drink my fill before I left home. “How much time do we have?”
“Dinner’s at seven,” he said. “Then we’re going over plays. Not sure how long that’ll take, Coach has been feeling inspired. His motivational speeches sound like slam poetry.”
My face did something between a laugh and a grimace. I wanted to keep him to myself. I twisted my hands tight into his shirt; if I didn’t let go, he couldn’t leave.
Mason sank to the floor. “Yeah. I don’t want to go, either. I’m sorry I have to leave you. Let me make it up to you.”
I felt a bit lame, like a pet with separation anxiety. That didn’t stop me from finding a new part of his shirt to grip tightly, fingers curling into the shoulders.
“You don’t have to make anything up to me,” I said.
“No,” Mason agreed, hands smoothing up the sides of my legs. “But you’ve had a bad week. I want to make you feel good.”
“You’ve had a bad week too.”
He slid his hands to the backs of my knees and pulled me to the edge of the bed. “Good thing we have forty minutes.”
***
It was after ten when Mason returned. I was at the desk doing homework when he let himself in with the extra room key and draped himself over my back, screwing up his nose at my differentiation worksheet.
“You’re so tense,” he said, rubbing at my shoulders. “Someone could use a hot shower.”
“Are you trying to tell me you want to take a shower together?”
“When in Rome.”
“Where do your teammates think you are right now?” I asked.
“I told them I’d ‘met someone’ and not to expect me back tonight.”
“Camouflage. Nice.”
“Got a lot of pats on the back. A few of them barked. It was bad.”
“You loved it,” I said. “Should I leave a few marks to play up to it? Down your back, so you can get wolf whistles in the locker room?”
“I would not be opposed to that.”