Expelled(60)

Sasha comes running to where I’m lying on the ground. I’m clutching my knee, which is on fire with pain.

“What in the hell?” She’s practically screaming into my face. “Are you okay? What were you thinking?”

I smile up at her, dizzy with pain and exhilaration. “You were talking about a moving train, weren’t you? Well that, Sasha Ellis, is a very clear and practical demonstration of how you get off one.”

She stares at me in wonder and disbelief.

“Yes, it will hurt you,” I say. “Possibly it will hurt a lot. But on the bright side, you’ll finally be off.”

Sasha falls to the ground and her head drops to my chest. “I love you, too, you stupid, romantic, deranged idiot,” she whispers.

The End





EPILOGUE


But of course, that wasn’t really the end. And it couldn’t be, because we weren’t a couple of actors in a dumb teen movie. We were two people trying to figure out how to live our lives in a summer when it felt like the world (or at least a good-sized chunk of it) had turned against us.

“You want a refill?” Danny asks, holding up a carafe.

I shake my head. “No, thanks,” I say.

It’s not that the coffee’s terrible. The Hamburger Inn’s made a few changes recently, and their brew no longer tastes like hot battery acid with a dash of nuclear waste. The problem is that I’ve had five cups of it, and my pulse is running double time.

Jude says, “I could have a refill on the hash, though.”

That hasn’t gotten any better, but Jude loves it anyway.

Jere7my looks at the meaty lump skeptically. “Undoubtedly that is the nutritional version of malware,” he says. “It looks innocent enough, but when it enters the processing system—” He clutches his guts, mimes having massive diarrhea. “Like the Galaxy Note 7, you just explode. Amirite?”

“As a matter of fact, you are not,” Jude says primly.

“If he wants to spend the first day of senior year locked in a bathroom stall, it’s not our problem,” I say to Jere7my. “But come on, you guys. We’re going to be late.”

Jude throws down a twenty for our breakfasts. He sold a painting last month and he’s been playing Mr. Moneybags since. “And that’s the last of it,” he informs us. “Time to get my hustle back on.”

We grab our backpacks and hurry the six blocks to school, where Jude and I have been returned to our former academic standing. Jude’s even our mascot again, although I doubt the Fighting Tigers are going to enjoy another undefeated football season.

As for me, I’m going to try to keep a low profile. No Twitter, no nagging editorials. Palmieri resents me because he owes me, so I’m going to work on not aggravating him too much.

When the powers that be started asking around about the use of steroids, I kept my mouth shut. I never mentioned that Palmieri knew about the doping before Parker’s surprise speech. Why ruin another career? Coach Higgins deserved to be fired, but—as much as I hate to admit it—I don’t think Palmieri did.

I believe he would have done the right thing. We just made him do it faster.

“Slow down, you guys,” Jere7my whines, struggling to keep up with us.

Jere7my’s basically our friend now, although sometimes I have mixed feelings about it. He’s taken to calling me Crusher, after a character from Star Trek: The Next Generation. I’ve never seen the show, but somehow I’m pretty sure it’s not a compliment.

Parker stayed on at Chase, our region’s number one producer of rich lacrosse bros with severe resting douche face. Weirdly, I sort of miss him.

Felix and I spent the summer editing all our footage, and we came up with a sixty-minute documentary that isn’t even terrible. Maybe someday it’ll come to a YouTube channel near you.

And as for Sasha, the person whose fate I worried about most (yes, by this time, I cared about hers even more than my own), she left town not long after my motorcycle “accident.” Things got ugly, but she figured out how to get off her moving train. She told a teacher, who phoned the Pinewood police. Professor Ellis was quickly arrested and charged with incest and statutory rape; as far as I know, he’s still in jail, awaiting trial. I try not to think of him too much or what he did to his brilliant, beautiful daughter. I try to look forward rather than back.

Sasha’s trying her best to do the same. After spending the summer in DC with a cousin, she got herself a scholarship to boarding school. Her application essay, she informed me, was a profile of Spanish anarchists who see stealing as a valid political protest against hyper-consumerism. She donated her stolen quarters, plus all the money she’d swiped from her dad’s wallet over years, to an organization that offers support to victims of sexual abuse.

“I’m working through things,” Sasha told me via video message. Guess she’s really embraced the “truthful cinema” philosophy. “Slowly and painfully. I go to a lot of therapy. I’ve been writing. And taking jujitsu. And I like to recite that Philip Larkin poem—you know the one. ‘This Be the Verse.’ It’s unexpectedly comforting.” Her smile is both terrible and hopeful.

I didn’t know the poem, of course, but I didn’t ask her to explain her reference to me.

Later, I looked it up.