Chapter 7
I read the message again, and then again for what had to have been the tenth time.
“South Florida, so beautiful.”
Really? Florida was beautiful? Yes, it seemed nice in pictures, but it had been weeks—no, it had been months since she’d written.
And this was it? These four words? And was it really so beautiful there in the summer?
We had taken our last family vacation to Alabama in July and it had been hot and muggy.
Wasn’t most of Florida even closer to the Equator?
But the weather wasn’t my real issue. It had been so long since I’d heard anything from my mother, and now these four words about Florida?
“What are you staring at?” my sister asked. “You’re making a face like this.” She pulled her own pretty features into an expression that best resembled a ticked-off monkey. It was very unattractive, even on her.
“Nothing,” I answered. “Nothing’s wrong.
” The best thing was for my sister to live in ignorance, rather than knowing that the woman who had raised us was now in Florida and apparently having a great time, while we had been kicked out of our house and had been worried that we were going to end up living in my car.
At least, I had been worried about that, but I hadn’t told Willow that our situation was so dire.
And I wasn’t going to tell her about the texts from Mom, either.
She looked in the mirror and then kissed a tissue to remove some of the lipstick she’d applied. “I’m ready,” she announced, and it was some kind of miracle. She had gotten up and dressed even before I had, so we now had time to spare before we had to leave. “Your turn.”
“What?” I asked, but she was already pulling me to sit in our chair.
I had gotten us out of the motel, but after handing over my money to rent this studio apartment, there hadn’t been much left over for furniture.
We had a chair, just one. But it was a cheerful yellow and anyway, there wasn’t any space for another.
“Ok, first your hair,” she said briskly, pulling out the elastic that had held it in a ponytail.
“Why do you always wear it back?” Then, in the know-it-all tone that I hated, she started lecturing about the many ways I was failing to properly style myself.
She got her dryer and a round brush and explained that she was smoothing out the ridge from my elastic.
“That tight thing today, of all days…split ends, so many split ends,” she muttered, but I pretended not to hear her over the electric whine.
We both ignored the knocking on the wall by our neighbor, who didn’t like the noise of the little machine.
She did finally pronounce that my hair looked much better, and next, she started on my makeup.
“I don’t want to do too much,” she said, continuing to narrate her actions.
“Since you never wear any, we don’t want to go crazy because the improvement would be too dramatic. You should still be recognizable.”
“Ok, now you’re just being—”
“There.” Willow nodded at me. She stood straight and crossed her arms, smiling smugly. “That’s exactly what I was going for. Take a look.”
I did go into our bathroom, climbing over the box that partially blocked the door so that I could see myself in the mirror. And she was right. She had worked hard to make me prettier.
“See what I mean?” she asked. She was on the other side of the apartment but she didn’t have to yell her question or even raise her voice.
I’d been so glad to find this place because it was affordable, was equipped with both an indoor shower and floors, and seemed to have a sufficient supply of heat and hot water.
However, it was small, maybe even cramped.
When Willow and I were here together, we were really on top of each other, but it worked ok because she was gone a lot.
A lot. That was a problem, but one I wasn’t going to deal with today because we had enough going on. It was enough that my head started to hurt and I reached up to press—
“What are you doing? Don’t touch your face!” my sister yelled, and our next-door neighbor thumped the wall. He was always home and he had the ears of a bat.
“I’m not,” I told her, and removed my thumbs from my eye sockets.
It was time to go and we got into my car. I had told myself that I wasn’t excited, not worked up, not emotional. My sister remarked a few times that I was driving too fast or too slow, and she also mentioned that I hadn’t needed any color on my cheeks.
“You’re so red. Seriously, Zo, you have to calm down! This is not the way to play it today.”
She was very good with things with boys, so I knew that she was right.
But almost everyone in northern Michigan shared this level of emotion with me right now, because this was a special day that they regarded as more important than their birthdays, Christmas, and the Fourth of July combined: this was the Woodsmen football team’s Fan Day.
In years past, I hadn’t given a fat rat’s butt about Fan Day.
I’d listened to my bandmates go on and on about waiting in lines to meet the players, to tour the stadium, to see the cheerleaders, and to do the thousands of other things that they freaked out about on an annual basis.
Before, I had thought that they were silly.
Now I had changed my mind. I agreed that it was a big deal, a very big deal. I had been looking forward to this day for weeks and months. It was the day that I was going to see Everett again.
“Maybe we should talk about this,” my sister said. “Do you have a strategy?”
“Do I need one?”
“Yes,” she responded immediately. “You need to have it worked out in your mind so that you don’t come off as crazy and desperate.”
“I’m not either of those things!”
“Zoey…”
I didn’t have to look at her to know that she was rolling her eyes.
But I really wasn’t! Everett and I were friends, and the evidence was clear on my phone because I’d heard from him.
Several times! He’d sent me a picture of a band practicing near his house, for example, and I had written back.
Then I’d forwarded a post I’d seen about the Junior Woodsmen, that management had started to plan for a few renovations on their facility.
Last winter, an online petition had circulated that asked the owners of the team had to do something about that place, because it was a disgrace.
The petition had gotten attention from Woodsmen fans, leading to a whole lot of signatures.
I was aware of that because the person who had started the petition was me.
“Good thing for those guys,” he had written back. “I’ll be at Woodsmen Stadium.” I hoped that was true.
Fan Day was the first time that many of the Woodsmen players showed up again in Michigan.
Everett had been in Arizona for the past few months but he was at Woodsmen Stadium today, too.
So were some of the other guys from the Junior Woodsmen, but not to meet with fans.
This was the beginning of their tryout for the real team.
They had a meeting with members of the coaching staff, who also didn’t participate in most of the fun activities.
They were already getting prepared for the upcoming season and they were all business.
As was I: prepared and all business. Except I was very nervous and I didn’t know what I should say.
“If you were me, how would you handle this?” I asked my sister, and she had ideas. First, she said that she would be a little bit pouty, because in all the time that Everett had been away, he hadn’t made much of an effort with me.
“A few texts? Some pictures?” she scoffed.
“He should have done more.” She further advised me not to explain what I was pouting about.
“If he really cares, he’ll figure it out!
” She told me not to mention, ever, how much time I’d spent reading about him and the two other Woodsmen quarterbacks, Kayden Matthews and Dallas Laforet.
I had been almost as dogged in my research of them as I was in my pursuit of a teaching job.
“There are other things,” my sister continued.
She told me not to discuss my problems, none of them.
I wasn’t supposed to tell him how hard it had been to move us out of the motel room using only my little car, on three tires and a spare because one had gone flat and the videos I’d watched about patching it hadn’t worked for me.
I also wasn’t supposed to say that the year had ended really badly at school.
“That was good news because I graduated,” I countered. A few times, I hadn’t thought I would make it, but I had. “He already knows because he said congratulations.”
“But he didn’t give you a present, and you should also be mad about that,” she said. She was using the know-it-all voice again. “Anyway, I meant at your elementary school.”
I hadn’t told her everything about what had happened there, but she had noticed how upset I had been (in a room the size of ours, you couldn’t miss much about the other person).
My cooperating teacher hadn’t been very encouraging or positive when we’d had a final meeting to discuss how my semester in fourth grade had gone.
“I could write you a recommendation,” Phil had said reluctantly, “but it would be better to ask for one from someone else.” I had tried my best in his classroom but it hadn’t been enough to make him believe that I would be a good teacher.
Willow had a lot more to tell me about how to purse my lips, how to meet Everett’s eyes and then slowly look away, how to adjust my back and shoulders to present my breasts at the best possible angle, and more.
Eventually, I tuned her out, because there was just too much wrong with me to try to fix.
It was overwhelming, as was the traffic as we got closer to the stadium and the number of cars increased by a thousand percent.
Everyone around here wanted to go to Fan Day.