Chapter 14
April, Four Years Ago
“Does the shortstop have to be short?” I ask. “Is that a biological necessity for the position?”
“That man,” Zara drawls, nodding at the baseball player we’re analyzing on the field, “is no taller than five five, which must mean he’s either the exception or the rule.”
“Maybe it’s about being close to the ground,” I reason. “He can more easily catch a lowball.”
“A lowball?” Zara mocks. “You made that up.”
“Obviously.”
She cackles and shoves a buttery hand back in our bucket of popcorn. “I’m having the time of my life!” she exclaims. “Go, sports!”
A group of girls wearing matching sorority T-shirts in the row below us turn and glare.
“We’ve been here for three minutes,” I remind her.
“And I’ll be bored in twenty, so let me enjoy this while it lasts.”
“Is this your first sporting event as a student?” I ask.
Zara shoots me a patronizing glare. “Of course not, Paige. I attended one quarter of a football game, three years ago.”
I sit crisscross on the bleachers, tossing my hair into a ponytail. It’s late April, but already, I feel summer coming on. I take a slurp of my frosty Diet Coke and steal a handful of popcorn. In the infield, on the pitcher’s mound, my eyes snag on Liam.
Today is his first home game in weeks. The team has been on a winning streak and the stands are packed. I haven’t seen him in person since our kiss during baseball practice nine days ago, though we’ve texted every day in between.
Liam’s curls are covered by his baseball cap but still peeking out on all sides.
I can’t make out his face at all, only the way his knee bends up to his chest before he throws.
The way his arm moves like a windshield wiper, looking completely disjointed from the rest of his body, as the ball hurls toward the batter.
“That thing is moving fast,” Zara comments.
Then makes a slurping noise as she downs her soda.
It’s momentarily drowned by the smack of the ball against the bat.
I watch the batter sprint for first base, but quickly, my eyes sneak back over to Liam, who has his glove up, ready to catch the ball as it heads his way from outfield, caught by the shortstop.
The batter kicks his feet in the dirt and peels back to the dugout.
“He’s good, right?” Zara asks.
I turn to her. “Who, the shortstop?”
“Quit playing dumb, dummy. I’m talking about your new boyfriend.”
I push my sunglasses onto my head and glare. “He is not my new boyfriend.”
“That’s odd. I can’t think of a single other reason you and I would be at a college baseball game if not to support your new boyfriend.”
“Zara! You said months ago you wanted to come to a baseball game on your farewell tour before you graduate!” We’d made the agenda after Zara got an editorial assistant job offer in New York. She starts this summer.
She smirks. “So my reasons have become numerous. Yours haven’t.”
“Why did I tell you?” I wail at the sky.
“Please. You could’ve said nothing, and I’d still have gotten knocked over from your yearning pheromones when he dropped you off that night. Besides, why can’t I be happy you’ve got someone else in your everyday life I actually like for once?”
“What did Maisy Morgan ever do to you?” I ask.
“It’s not about what she did to me, Paige, it’s about what she did to you.”
I shift uncomfortably at Zara’s penetrating look.
The only fight Maisy and I have ever gotten in was senior year, when she outed my anonymous poetry from that literary magazine to the entire school.
Sounds bad, and it was, but we got through it, and from the bottom of my heart, I know Maisy didn’t do it maliciously.
She told everyone because she was proud of me.
Maisy Morgan didn’t ever come into my life, and I didn’t come into hers.
Our mothers grew up as neighbors, both married their high school sweethearts, then found themselves living as adults on the same street.
When we came along with the exact same birthday, they practically forced us into codependency. Which stuck long after my mom split.
Suffice it to say, we’ve always been linked, and our shared birthday was no exception.
Every May, her parents and my dad reserved the picnic tables at the Bristol Aquatic Center, where we’d grill out and devour Krispy Kreme donuts with birthday candles, slurping on orange Fanta, our noses sunburnt.
Our presents, too, were given in tandem: new bikes, nail polish kits, sparkly pink soccer balls.
I’m pretty sure Maisy’s parents just got duplicates for me and credited my dad, but I never minded.
It’s always been my favorite day of the year.
Even when we turned fifteen and snuck beers from the adult table, absconding to sip alcohol only to get grounded that night when we threw up.
Or when we turned seventeen and Maisy invited boys, none of whom realized it was my birthday, too (but that year, Maisy threw away half the cards and reassigned the boys’ presents to me when she thought I wasn’t looking).
I certainly had days when I was envious of Maisy, but on others, I pitied her.
Like when we were fourteen, and her mom told her not to eat her birthday donut, that she might need to return her gifts for a larger size.
Or our senior year, when we were getting ready for a Friday night football game together, and she stared at herself in the mirror blankly for two solid minutes until she started to cry.
I tried to be a good friend in those moments, but I’m not sure my words of affirmation ever really took.
And in the end, I could feel privately sorry for Maisy Morgan all I wanted, but that didn’t change the fact that everyone else in Bristol viewed me as her tagalong.
That everyone else felt sorry for me, because of her, and how obviously she outpaced me.
“I think you might still be playing a role you’ve almost outgrown,” Folly said to me once, the week before she moved to Portland, in response to me telling her I wasn’t going to a farm bonfire since Maisy was sick.
“What role?” I’d asked her, immediately defensive.
“The side character in the protagonist’s story,” she explained. “But I think you’re on the brink of changing your mind.”
I was so embarrassed by her analysis that I stormed off, pretending at anger. She was gone days later. We never finished that conversation.
But now, as the Tennessee sun beats down on us and Zara reaches into her bag for the sunscreen, I know that if Folly comes home—if she contacts me in any capacity—I’ll tell her she was right. But also, that things are different between Maisy and me these days.
For example: when we had dinner last week and I finally told her Evan and I were through, that Liam and I had kissed, Maisy lectured me about the perils of college athletes by saying, “You’re a game, Paige, you’re his shiny new game.”
But I held my ground, told her I thought this was different, and promised Maisy that even if I was wrong, I could handle myself no matter the outcome.
“Here’s the thing.” Zara snatches my drink and takes a sip. “I’m moving to New York in one month, and you and Maisy barely see each other anymore. I think you can admit you’ve been growing apart for a while.”
“And because you’re leaving, I need a new babysitter?”
“How on earth did you get babysitter from boyfriend?” Zara asks. “I’m trying to say it makes me happy, that you’ll still have a person here once I’m gone.”
“Liam is getting drafted this summer,” I remind her. “He could wind up on the other side of the country in a few months. I’m a big girl. I can take care of myself.”
Can I, though?
The prospect of Zara leaving Knoxville, of my friendship with Maisy dwindling, ignites a terror in my gut I don’t know how to process. With Dad doing his agritourism thing abroad and my sisters all gone from Bristol, there’s nothing left for me there.
What if, come summer, there’s nothing left for me here either?
Find out what you want from your twenties and figure out how you get it. Don’t wait for it to find you, or you’ll turn into Folly, aimless and confused.
“I just don’t want you to turn into—”
“Folly?” I snap. “I’m my own person. And you are, too, so stop acting like Maren. For the record, there’s nothing wrong with being a waitress or being single or not having my future figured out when I’m twenty. There wouldn’t be anything wrong with it at any age.”
Zara sighs, turning back to the field. “It’s not about any of that. It’s about the fact that he’s good for you, Paige.”
Liam strikes out a player, which is announced over the loudspeaker, and Zara leaps onto the bleacher, cheering at the top of her lungs. Every person in a twenty-foot radius turns to stare, as do half the players, including him. The brim of Liam’s baseball cap tips our way.
After the game (which they win), we head to the athletes’ entrance, where Liam told us to meet.
We’re in a horde of people who’ve spilled onto the walkway that bisects the baseball stadium and parking lot.
I turn to ask Zara if she’s familiar with this part of campus only to discover I’ve lost her.
I spin in circles, searching for our telltale mop of dark curls in the crowd.
“Hey.” That voice.
Slowly, I rotate on my heels, aim a plastered-on smile up at Liam.
He went to Texas, came back. It’s been just over a week since—
“Fuck,” he says. “I wanna kiss you.”
His sweat has soaked through the fabric of his cap and his dark, damp hair curls at the nape of his neck. Dirt on his bare forearms, white pants marred, bat bag slung across his shoulder blades, hands fisted around the strap.
I swallow thickly, taken wholly off guard by my body’s charged reaction to his physical state. His eyes trace the contours of my face.
“You—can,” I say.
Liam nods, looking like he’s trying to suppress a smile, but doesn’t come closer. “What happened to Z?”