First & Then(16)

I heard Mr. Everett and Mr. Jones murmuring about “special teams” and “field work,” and by the time they approached Foster with a final decision, I had lost my place in Sense and Sensibility and was wishing I was close enough to hear what they were saying.

Whatever it was, Foster’s expression never changed. He just bobbed his head and then proceeded over to the bench to pick up his stuff.

“Well?”

“They said their best kicker can’t get distance like that.”

“You made it?”

A shrug. “I got to be at two weeks of practices before I can play.”




At dinner that night, my mom let out a happy shriek. “You’re joking. You’re absolutely pulling my leg.”

“Way to go, buddy!” was my dad’s exclamation. “We got a walk-on in the family, a genuine walk-on!”

“I need a physical,” Foster said, and then shoved a large piece of meat loaf into his mouth and chewed unceremoniously.

“Well, you just had one,” my mom said. “I’ll call the doctor’s office and have them send the papers over.”

“I need spikes,” Foster said, through more bites of meat.

“We’ll drive up to the mall after dinner,” my mom said.

Foster looked suspicious. “They’re expensive.”

“Don’t worry about that,” my dad said. “As long as your feet promise to stay the same size ’til you make it to varsity.”

Foster didn’t smile.

This wasn’t unusual—and if I had noticed it, then my parents certainly had, too. Foster was cool with “Aunt Kathy,” forever happy to talk her ear off as often as he did mine, but he hadn’t warmed up to my dad yet. I wondered if it was because he reminded him of his own father. Older, to be certain, but maybe they sounded the same, or looked similar, and maybe it was just … painful, or something. I didn’t know, and I wasn’t about to ask.

“Ezra Lynley is going to help Foster train,” I said, only to break the moment of awkward silence that followed. I figured it would impress my parents, who knew Ezra merely as TEMPLE STERLING’S OWN.

“No way!” Dad said. “How’d that come up?”

Foster just shrugged, so I cleared my throat a little and said, “Remember how we have gym class with him?”

“Sure. You’re the lone seniors.”

“Yeah. Well, I guess Ezra offered to help him during gym class. Right?” I looked to Foster. “Didn’t he?”

Foster was tearing apart the skin of his baked potato. “Uh-huh,” he said, and shoved a long strip into his mouth. I glanced at my mom. She never let me eat the skins when I was younger, and so by habit I never attempted to now.

She didn’t seem to notice. “What did he say?”

“We have a secret.”

“What is it?” To my surprise, the question escaped from my own lips.

“If I told you,” Foster said, “then it wouldn’t be a secret.”

Mom and Dad smiled at each other, like they were exchanging some secret of their own. “Well, we’ll just leave it between you and Ezra then,” Mom said.

Foster just kept on chewing.





7


We have a secret. I watched part of varsity practice after my meeting with Mrs. Wentworth on Wednesday and thought about secrets. I didn’t have any really good ones, save a long-term crush on Cas, which wasn’t really that great of a secret anyway. Secret crushes went out of style in the seventh grade.

Foster had lots of secrets, and as much as he jabbered, he was good at keeping them. He went to therapy once a week, and what he talked about there was a secret. His mom had been unwell since Uncle Charlie died, and all that had happened with her he kept secret, too. That was one of the things that bothered me about Foster. Not the therapy stuff—that was private. But he hadn’t said a single word about her since the moment we left their house in California. It was as if he’d never had a mother at all. He never talked about her, never cried, never complained, and as far as I was concerned, that wasn’t normal.

Maybe all his normal emotions took place behind the door of the therapist’s office. Maybe for an hour once a week he cried and yelled and punched a pillow like a regular person. Or maybe whatever it was that happened with his mom squeezed all the normal right out of him.

“It smells like nacho cheese.”

I looked up. Marabelle Finch was drifting up the bleacher steps toward me, one arm wrapped around Baby as always. She’d been doing that since she was two months in and there was nothing there but flat old stomach.

I would say that before Baby really started growing, Marabelle was delicately pretty; fragile, like spun sugar or a glass figurine. But this was her sixth month, and she had fleshed out. Her face was rounder and her body was fuller and she looked more like a real person—like a really pretty real person.

I sniffed my underarm as she sat down next to me.

“It’s not you,” she said. “It’s the air.”

So I sniffed the air experimentally. To me, it smelled like afternoon heat and, somewhere below, forty high school guys working out.

“How are you?” I asked.

“Okay. My head hurts.”