Heroine(16)

But those few, horrific seconds are balanced against hours of good times sitting this same way—me driving, her giving me shit from the passenger seat. So it doesn’t take long before we’re good again, her music filling the car, both of us talking over it.

“Not to be all your mom on you or anything, but how is being back at school?” she asks.

“School sucks,” I tell her honestly. “But being in the weight room did me good.”

“It definitely did Lydia some good.”

“Shut your face,” I say. “I’m not into her. Straight girls can be awesome at softball.”

“Uh, duh,” Carolina shoots back. “You’re talking to a straight girl with a free ride.”

“You mean on Aaron or to college?”

“It’s all free,” she says, laughing. I’m behind her just a tick, laughing because I’m supposed to. We’d both agreed a long time ago that having sex wasn’t worth the risk, having seen too many great athletes become mothers, their sports career sidelined while the father carried on uninterrupted. But those conversations were before Aaron, and before this new awkwardness, where I feel like I can’t flat out ask her if they’re doing it.

I drop her off and she hauls her bag out of the back, pulling it onto her good shoulder. It’s below freezing, ice falling from the sky. She winces as a pellet hits her in the face.

“You use those crutches going inside back at your place, you hear me? I see you putting more weight on that leg than you’re supposed to.” She gives me a stern look, and I do my best to look innocent.

“Only toe touch to the ground. I swear.”

“I’m calling bullshit on that,” she says.

She’s right and she knows it. I’ve been straightening my knee, trying out a little weight on my heel when I think the Oxy will let me get away with it. If I can shave one week off my recovery time—one week—I can be ready for conditioning.

Carolina stays by my car despite the ice, teeth gnawing her bottom lip in indecision. “I’m not going to ask you how you’re feeling because you’re just going to tell me you’re fine,” she says. “But I saw what you were benching. Don’t overdo it, okay?”

“I’m not fine,” I tell her. “I’m awesome.”

And right now, it’s true.





Chapter Twelve


understand: to apprehend the meaning or intention of; to have knowledge of; to comprehend; to know; to have sympathy for “Mickey Catalan, I’ll be damned.”

“Hey, Big Ed,” I say, holding the door of the local market open with one crutch while I swing myself through. Ed stays behind the lunch counter, not offering to help or fussing over me one bit, exactly like he knows I want. Instead, he makes my Monday morning coffee like there hasn’t been a month break between this one and the last one.

It’s shit coffee, which is why Ed stopped asking me to pay him for it, and it’s not why I come every week, anyway. I’m here because Ed can talk sports—any sport—better than anyone I know. He puts the coffee in front of me as I settle onto a stool at the lunch counter.

“You hear about the Griffith girl?”

I sip my coffee, letting the familiarity of bad coffee and Ed’s terrible story introductions settle over me.

“She’s the shortstop from Left Bank, isn’t she?”

“Yep,” Ed confirms, then rounds his arms out in front of his belly.

“Huh, I thought she was smarter than that,” I say.

“Smart tends to go out the door when sex is involved,” Ed says, pulling his own stool underneath him on the other side of the counter.

“Yep,” I say, reminding myself that I need to have a conversation with Carolina, whether it’s awkward or not. “So what else is new?”

“Haven’t seen you in a while, let me think.” Ed sighs, pushing his ball cap up to scratch his balding spot. “The big kid from Baylor Springs, basketball player . . . what’s his name?”

“Luther Drake,” I tell him.

“Yeah, the Drake kid. He shattered the backboard over at West Union last weekend, so they’ve got to play in the junior-high gym till it’s fixed.”

“Screw them anyway,” I say, having harbored a resentment ever since their point guard broke Lydia’s nose in an intentional foul.

“Yep,” Ed agrees. We both sip our coffee, and I hear the squawk of a scanner from the back room.

“Why do old people like those so much?” I ask him.

“Well, I’ll tell you,” he says, fishing a day-old doughnut out of the glass case and putting it in front of me. “It’s our version of you kids with your phones and your head book.”

“Facebook, Ed.”

“I’m proud to not know that. Now eat your doughnut, looks like you could use it.”

It’s the most he’s going to say about my injury, about the thinness of my arms and legs, the absence of muscle. My varsity jacket feels big on me, my shoulders no longer filling it out. I take a bite of doughnut. It’s awful.

“I don’t know how much healing properties this has, Ed.”

“Healing is you just being here, talking,” he says.

I hear the scanner again, and I wonder if he was listening the night of the accident, if he heard the details of how my leg had been separated from my body, my blood strewn across snow.