4 #2
‘It just happened. Did you forget? You’re the hole guy!’
Gem gave a baffled laugh.
‘She’s messing with you, Gem,’ Asta said fondly. ‘She knows exactly how that sounds. Honestly, Yixin.’
Yixin smiled innocently. ‘What?’
‘You’re incorrigible.’
‘How would you know? You never even tried to corrige me. Maybe you should let the hole guy try.’ She laughed as Gem floundered for a response.
A persistent beeping sound behind them was getting louder and louder. Now someone was shouting at them to move.
It was the track crew, clearing the way for a crane dangling a bulky section of a vertical wall as it backed slowly down the track.
Yixin clutched her clipboard to her chest. ‘We’re moving! We’re moving!’ She made for the fence that ran behind the pits, separating them from the stands. Gem and Asta followed briskly, but Asta kept her eyes on the crane, conscious of how easily it could crush her with its rolling tracks.
‘Asta, watch out!’
But the warning came too late. She turned her head at her name, and her right temple slammed into someone else’s head, sending a flash of bright white pain across her vision. She grabbed her head and swore. Whoever she had just headbutted was doing the same.
‘Asta la vista,’ Yixin scolded, running up to her and pulling her hand away to inspect the collision site. ‘That is no way to greet an old friend.’
Asta looked, and there he was, bent over in pain as he felt out his bruise with his fingertips.
Felix Seraphin.
A hundred different emotions exploded inside of Asta simultaneously.
It was really him. Those were his squarish hands. That was his dark, fine hair. His shoulders. His everything.
There was something different about him, though. She couldn’t put a finger on it.
Maybe it’s that his hair was longer than it had been at Pillar.
He brushed back the soft, dark mass of it to prod the place of impact.
Maybe it was his two-day beard or the fact that he was starting to look more like his father.
Maybe it was that his boyhood had evaporated, leaving a full-grown man behind.
No, that wasn’t it. Something was off. She didn’t know how to describe it.
He looked like a walking advertisement. He was dressed head to toe in black-and-gold Seraphin-branded leisurewear, the family crest blazoned over his chest and on the side of the pants by his hip.
But that was normal. There was something in his expression that bothered her.
When Asta thought of Felix – which was more often than she’d like to admit – she always seemed to picture him as he was when they last knew each other, usually with that stupid grin on his face, the one that meant he was about to dare her to do something neither of them should be doing and neither would regret.
Even though she had seen him on television and in the magazines in the intervening years, she had subconsciously expected him to reappear as the light-hearted, bright-faced young thing he had been when he vanished from her life.
But that was not who was standing in front of her.
There was a palpable heaviness about this man’s expression that she didn’t recognize. Had she done that to him?
Asta’s heart sank. What kind of an idiot was she that she thought seeing him again would check a box and finally free her of that weight she had been carrying for years? This was Felix. There’s no way this was ever going to be easy.
‘Hey, Asta,’ he said, wincing.
‘Hi.’ It was all she could manage.
It seemed appropriate, somehow, that after all this time, their meeting should be accompanied with blinding pain. After all, their parting had been.
The track crew had run out of patience. ‘Get out of the damned way,’ someone yelled.
The four of them – Gem, Yixin, Asta, and Felix – retreated to the far side of the pits.
They stood with their backs to the chain-link fence and watched without a word as the crane crawled by, filling the air with its earth-shaking grumble.
It was bizarre standing next to Felix again, close enough that the heat of his shoulder warmed Asta’s against the chill of the raceway’s shadow.
For more than three years, thoughts of him had haunted her – unrelenting cycles of melancholy, anger, and guilt.
He was an idea that she wrestled with, a spur to her pride and a cautionary tale.
He had almost ceased to be a real person to her.
But here he was, right beside her. If she wanted to, she could reach out and touch him.
What then? Shake him, probably. Finish the fight that they had barely begun before tragedy struck.
After that day at Pillar, something had clamped shut in Asta.
Bitterness and resentment had been building up in her like dry brush.
Asta longed for the spark that would ignite it at last. She wanted to reach right out, grab Felix by the shoulders, and make him admit what he had done to her.
She wouldn’t, though. Because whatever accusation she might make against him, she feared his would be worse.
She had not meant to hurt him, but she had.
As soon as she could be heard again, Yixin beamed at Asta and Felix. ‘It’s a reunion!’ She turned to Gem. ‘They used to be the two peas in a pod. Like this.’ She tucked her clipboard under her arm and put her two fists together, thumbs touching.
Gem looked at Asta, his eyes asking for guidance. But Asta dropped his gaze. With a shrug, he extended a hand in greeting. ‘Hi again, Felix. We met once at the farm. I’m Gem Manar, Asta’s cousin.’
Felix reached in front of Asta to shake hands with Gem, forcing her to press herself against the fence to avoid the brush of his shoulder.
The smell of him blindsided her. It was sunshine on rich earth, long grasses and white clouds.
If he wasn’t going to look the same, what right did he have smelling the same?
Memories of happier days flooded Asta. She could see them loafing together under her oak tree at the top of the hill, bemoaning the terrible choice of movies at the movie theater in town, or racing through Asta’s chores together so that she had time to ride before nightfall. It made her want to cry.
‘The old Ekenberg Farm,’ Felix sighed. ‘I remember that place.’
Asta was taken aback by his tone. He made it sound as if he hadn’t seen the farm in half a century.
As if, standing under the portico of his family’s estate house, he couldn’t look over a gentle valley and see straight into the upper fields where Asta’s oak stood.
As if they hadn’t worn a track between their front doors.
The way he said it, it was as if their whole friendship was a distant memory, one that he was content to let slip away into the past. Asta couldn’t say she was ready to go back and patch things up, but it still rankled to hear him talk like that.
‘Way back when,’ Asta said, mocking his false nostalgia.
He shot her a chilly look that set Asta back on her heels. It was true. She didn’t know this person anymore. Sure, he still had that errant tuft of hair sticking up at the back of his head, still held his shoulders as square as a billboard, but the Felix she had known was gone.
No, it was worse than that. He was gone and not gone at the same time.
Standing before her were all the Felixes she had ever known.
The wavy-haired, freckle-faced kid she had met outside a dragon pasture.
The know-it-all kid she used to pal around with, day in and day out.
The boy king holding court in the Pillar cafeteria, surrounded by the other sons of old racing families, all wishing they were him.
The young man making plans for the future.
Her best friend. Her betrayer. Her rival.
She couldn’t seem to separate them from one another.
Asta pushed her back harder into the fence, almost as if she was trying to burst through it.
She had the overwhelming urge to run back to the stables, climb on Carmine and run away.
What was she supposed to say to this man, this too familiar stranger?
Should she ask after his parents or his little sister, Monika, who had been four when Asta last saw her?
Should she ask him how he was feeling about the races this week?
If he was nervous? It all seemed so absurd.
A shriek from the stands behind them cut through her thoughts.
They turned around. Four teenagers with black-and-gold scarves bearing the crown of the Seraphin crest were pressing themselves against the fence from the other side, their fingers latched on to the wire.
‘Felix! Felix Seraphin!’ they cried. One of them had actual tears streaming down her face.
Felix straightened and switched on his public-facing smile. The sight of it turned Asta’s stomach.
‘Hey, guys,’ Felix said. Even his voice sounded weird, all smarmy and self-satisfied. ‘You here to watch me win?’