1. Chapter One #3
I close my fingers around the sticky note until the paper bends.
“This is going to be the time of your life,” Josh says. “Enjoy it.”
He lets go before I’ve worked out how to breathe around it. Points a finger at me on his way to the door.
“Don’t make me drive up here. Fresh start, kid. Good first impression. Let the past stay in the past. Be present.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And don’t fight anybody bigger than you.”
I look up.
His mouth twitches. “Actually — don’t fight anybody. Mary made me promise I’d say that part.”
I almost smile.
He steps back into the doorway. “Alright.”
The word goes through me like a puck off the crossbar.
Alright.
Which means he’s leaving. Which means I’m staying.
I follow him down.
The house is louder now. Music from the kitchen. Stanley is arguing that rice is superior to pasta, and Benson is telling him to let the freshmen unpack before he starts inventing traditions, and Rowan isn’t participating, just standing there letting it happen around him.
Josh stops at the front door and looks back at me.
For one second I think he’s going to shake my hand.
Instead he pulls me in.
The hug lands wrong. Not bad wrong — just wrong, unrehearsed, my arms not knowing where to go, my whole body locking down for a full second before it remembers this is safe, this has been safe for four years, this is Josh.
He doesn’t squeeze too hard. He doesn’t hang on past the point where it becomes a thing. He just holds on for a beat and lets go.
Say it.
He steps back.
“You versus you, kid.”
I look at him.
He taps two fingers against his own chest, twice. “Day one.”
I nod, because my throat has closed and there is physically nothing else available to me.
Then he walks out before either of us can make it worse.
I stand in the doorway and watch him cross the grass.
Everything in my body is telling me to move. Not think — move, the way you move when the puck’s already past you and you’re going anyway. Every muscle from my calves up is braced to go down those steps and say it. Just say it. Thank you. Two words.
I don’t move.
Four years of him picking me up from practices he had no reason to attend.
Mary putting a plate in front of me every night for four years without one time commenting on how fast I ate it.
Josh sitting in his truck outside a courthouse for six hours on a Tuesday because I said I didn’t want to go in alone.
Two words. That’s the bill. That’s the whole bill, and I can’t pay it.
My blood feels wrong. Thick, slow, going the wrong direction.
For the first time in my life, I’m letting something go on my own terms. I’ve been so used to things being taken from me, so this feels wrong. Every muscle in my body screams to stop him. That I should thank him. That’s the least Josh and Mary deserve. The least.
Josh doesn’t look back right away. I get my throat under control while he’s not looking.
Chest full, hold it, let it out slow through my nose.
In for four. Hold for four. Out for six.
He starts the engine. Checks his mirrors, both of them, the way he does, the way he’s told me to a hundred times.
Then he looks back. He lifts one hand off the wheel.
And I just stand there. Frozen in a doorway with a folded piece of paper in my fist, throat locked, hand at my side like it’s bolted there.
Lève la main.
Lève-la.
He pulls away from the curb. At the stop sign, his brake lights flare. He turns the corner and disappears. And just like that, he’s gone. It’s over. That’s it. That’s the end of it.
I’m not a foster kid anymore.
I’m Percy Deveroux. Goalie. Freshman. Camden Wolves. A guy who lives on Hawthorne Street with four athletes and a whiteboard.
For a minute I don’t go inside. I stand in the doorway of a house that isn’t mine, trying to figure out how I got here.
None of it adds up. When you don’t let yourself picture a life, and then the life shows up anyway, your head can’t process it — it’s like being handed a language you never learned and being asked to read something out loud.
This feels like a lie. It feels like a setup.
Some part of me is standing here waiting for Mike Deveroux to come around the corner of the house with that look on his face, the almost-smile, the one that meant he’d already decided how the night was going to go and was enjoying knowing it before I did.
He’s not here. He doesn’t get to be here. I make myself say it in my head twice.
The street keeps going around me. Car doors shutting. More boxes being hauled into the houses. Laughter from somebody’s mother.
Life just continues, right in front of me, like mine didn’t split in half thirty seconds ago on a lawn.
Behind me, the kitchen goes off. Benson says something I don’t catch.
Rowan says, “We’re ordering pizza.”
Stanley makes a sound of betrayal.
Then a laugh.
I just stand holding the note while the house makes noise behind me, warm and strange and too much, and for the first time in my life, I don’t feel like running.
I step inside and close the front door.
Keep the past in the past.
Day one.
You vs you.