Reese Chapter
Reese
That night, Emily organizes a family baseball game.
“Everyone plays. No one is exempt,” she says, before I can even protest.
I go through the motions. I put on my shoes. I follow everyone else—Emily, Nolan, Wyatt and Mae—blindly out of the cottage,
though I fall immediately behind, not keeping pace. Mae looks back, teases, “Hurry up, slowpoke,” before turning and running
down the hill to Cass, who waits up ahead, beside her own cottage with Aunt Courtney and Uncle Elliott.
Uncle Elliott.
He’s looking off into the distance at first. When he knows we’re coming, he turns to look at us. He gazes sideways at me out
of the corner of his eye like he doesn’t know where to look, like he’s trying hard to act normal. I don’t buy it. I see the
tension in his jaw, the way his chin is lifted and his posture stiff. I somehow managed to avoid him all day because he never
came to the pool, because Aunt Courtney said he had a migraine, which came as a surprise to everyone. No one knew he ever
got migraines.
“How are you feeling?” Emily asks, reaching them first.
“Better,” he says.
Mae takes Cass by the hand. They run off ahead. Everyone else follows, trying to keep up, except for Uncle Elliott, who lingers behind.
“You coming?” Aunt Courtney asks, reaching out to him, her smile warm and her eyes kind.
“You go ahead. I thought I’d wait for Reese to catch up.”
“You didn’t have to do that,” I say as I reach him.
He says nothing to that. Instead, he asks, “Can we talk?” as we start to walk. He’s anxious. Up close, there is tension on
his face, his skin red, one of his eyes bloodshot. He rubs at the back of his neck. He doesn’t wait for me to say if we can
talk. Instead, he says, “I want to talk to you about last night.”
There is an air of desperation in his voice, which is strained.
“Well, I don’t want to talk to you,” I say, not looking at him but keeping my eyes ahead where the gap widens, everyone else
walking fast to catch up with Mae and Cass, who run.
In nothing flat, he reaches out to grab my arm when no one’s looking, his hand a death grip. He stops me. He forces me to
turn and look at him, the pressure in my arm throbbing.
“Stop playing games with me, Reese. We need to talk.”
I pull my arm away. “Get your fucking hands off me, you creep.”
I don’t raise my voice. No one hears because they’re too far up ahead to hear, but still, I see the fear crop up on his face.
I’ll tell them that you were being inappropriate. That you touched me.
He pulls back. He drags his hand through his hair. I see the movement in his throat when he swallows. He shakes his head and
says, “You don’t know what you’re doing.”
I hold his eye. I say, “I think I do.”
He goes completely still.
“You think this is funny,” he says. “You think this is a damn game.”
I don’t know why I do it. It’s not him I’m mad at.
It’s Daniel. Daniel’s the one who hurt me.
But for whatever reason, I take my rage out on him and say, “I don’t think there’s anything funny about child predators,” before turning and trotting off ahead without him, leaving him standing open-mouthed behind me.
I meet up with everyone else. My heart is beating harder now, and I can’t focus because I can still feel his hand on my arm, and every time I blink, I see Daniel staring at that girl.
I see him wave, I see her wave back, and then he waves again.
It plays back over and over again in my mind.
Daniel stares. She opens her eyes, catches him staring.
He waves. She waves. He waves again and she laughs.
Over and over again until I want to scream.
It takes a minute for Uncle Elliott to come.
“What’s wrong?” Aunt Courtney asks when he does, going to him. “Is it your migraine again?”
He presses the space between his eyes, says, “Yeah. I think so.”
There isn’t an actual baseball field for us to play on. It’s just grass. We don’t have any bases, and so I stand, watching
as Emily lays down random things like a frisbee and paper plates, weighing them down with rocks, but even as I do, I’m still
thinking about Daniel and something Skylar told me once about how, when you give guys what they want, they don’t want you
anymore.
“Earth to Reese . . .” someone says, and I come to. Everyone is watching me now, waiting on me to begin.
“This is so stupid,” I mutter under my breath. “Why do I have to play?”
“Because we’re all playing,” Emily says, as if that’s an actual answer.
There are eight of us here, which means four on each team.
Emily assigns teams lest anyone’s feelings get hurt—which means Mae, because Mae would have no doubt been last to get picked and she would have cried.
I wind up on a team with Nolan, Uncle Elliott and Mae, and though Emily claims she tried to be fair, she takes Wyatt—high school all-star—for herself.
He has a batting average of something like .
500, which means that when Wyatt swings, he doesn’t miss.
Wyatt is up to bat first. Within a few seconds, we’re losing. The next three batters strike out and then our team is up. Nolan
gets on base first. When it’s my turn, I can’t hold or swing a bat to save my life, though I don’t even try, not really, because
I don’t care about something as stupid as baseball. I can’t stop thinking about Daniel. About that girl and about Skylar’s
words. When you give guys what they want, they don’t want you anymore. I should have listened to her. I should have known better.
Wyatt stands on the mound, sneering at me, saying, “Imagine not even being able to swing a bat,” and Emily tells him to be
nice, that we can’t all be as good at baseball as him.
I feel Uncle Elliott’s eyes on me the whole time. When I look over, his jaw is clenched, his feet are spread wide apart and
his arms are crossed, like he’s silently raging.
There is a part of me that almost feels guilty for threatening him. Though, if I’m being objective, he’s the one who started
it, I think, looking down at the red mark from his hand still on my wrist.
He’s the one who threatened to tell.
It’s after eight now and people are hungry.
The game went longer than expected and we haven’t had any dinner yet.
Mae is whiny. She says that her stomach hurts, and Emily coddles her, saying she’ll cut her an apple while Dad puts something on the grill, as if she can’t just cut her own stupid apple.
But I’m not complaining. Because when Emily is hyperfocused on Mae, then she can’t pay any attention to me, which means that I drop back.
I lose them. I take my time getting back to the cottage, going my own way.
I take the path through the woods. It’s the golden hour now, which used to be Skylar’s and my favorite time of day, when we’d
go out into the field by her house and take turns posing for pictures. The world is gold. The sunlight is soft and dreamy.
It creates long shadows in the woods while the temperatures drop and bugs come out, fireflies creating light. I think of all
the pictures I have of Skylar and me posing in the golden hour. Once they covered her Instagram page. Now she’s taken them
all down. The only pictures she has on there anymore are of her and Gracie.
As I walk through the woods alone, I hear voices carrying from the other side of the trees.
I draw in a breath.
Daniel.
My breath is shaky. I creep out from the trees, staying far enough back that they can’t see me. I find Daniel and the new
girl standing face-to-face beside a cottage. As I watch—not breathing and anchored in place like a ship—she asks, “When did
you get this?” running her hand up his arm, over his tattoo. She traces it, a king cobra, which is long and coiled around
his forearm and up his bicep, its mouth open, fangs and forked tongue jutting out. He tells her how he and a couple buddies
got them, and she asks, “Did it hurt?”
“If it did, I don’t remember,” he says. “I have something for you,” he tells her, reaching into his pocket. “Close your eyes
and hold out your hand.” She does. He lays something in the palm of her hand, and I don’t have to see it to know. “Open your
eyes,” he says. When she does, she lifts a bracelet from her hand, and I watch him clasp it onto her thin little wrist, asking,
“Do you like it?” She nods.
“How long are you here for?” he asks, leaning in.
She sinks back against the cottage, letting it bear her weight, and says, “A week.”
“That’s all?” he asks, coming closer, closing the gap, thinking they’re alone, that no one can see them.
“Yeah,” she says, her face turning pouty. “That’s all.”
He strokes her cheek with the back of a finger, says, “Then we have to make the most of it,” and it feels like time slows
down. Like it stops. My vision blurs, a feeling of vertigo rushing me. The world spins. I set my hand on a tree for balance,
feeling the rough bark beneath my palm, telling myself he didn’t say what I think I heard, but he did. It’s exactly what he
said. I bite my lower lip hard so I don’t cry, tasting blood.
Then we have to make the most of it.
The same thing he said to me.
I run as fast as I can back to the cottage. When I get there, Emily is in the kitchen making dinner. She turns, sees me when
I come in. My hand is on my stomach. She asks what’s wrong, and I tell her I have a stomachache, that I think I might be sick.
“Maybe you’re just hungry,” she suggests, as if it could be that easy, as if heartbreak could be likened to hunger and cured
with food.
“I don’t think so. I don’t think I can eat.”
“Well, you have to eat something.”
“I can’t,” I say again. “I’ll puke if I do.”
She watches me for a long time. Then she says, “Okay,” letting me off the hook because of the look on my face and because
she thinks I might actually be sick. I fight tears, desperate to get out onto the porch, to be alone before I start to cry.