The Comeback Season

  The bowling alley is crowded for a beautiful Saturday afternoon, and Ryan longs to switch the channel on the TV set in the bar to the Cubs game, but Kevin has already beaten her to it, and so the Masters is on instead. Ryan crosses her arms, left to wonder if her team is winning or—more likely—losing.

  At the counter behind her, she’s surprised to recognize Sydney’s voice requesting a pair of bowling shoes. Dismayed, Ryan twists around and sees that she’s here with Will, the basketball player. She’s relieved to discover that none of the others seem to have come along, but this doesn’t stop her from sinking a bit lower in her seat.

  Mom pokes her arm. “What are you doing?”

  Ryan groans.

  It takes only a minute for Sydney to spot them. “Hi, Mrs. Graham,” she calls out, waving, and as much as she hates the sound of Kevin’s last name used to address her mom, Ryan hates it that much more coming from Sydney. She sits up in her seat and smiles weakly.

  “Sydney,” Mom says, getting up to give her a hug. “I haven’t seen you in ages!”

  Her mom knows little about what happened between them, other than that they no longer spend any time together, though Ryan suspects she must be able to guess who was left behind by whom. It isn’t terribly hard to figure out.

  “Ryan,” Sydney says, smiling hugely. “You know Will, right?”

  Will lifts a hand, his face unchanged. Ryan manages a feeble hello.

  “How’s everything with you?” Mom asks Sydney. Ryan finds this completely humiliating, standing here with her mother, talking to her ex-best friend as if nothing has changed. She looks toward Emily and Kevin, wishing she could take Mom by the sleeve and drag her away.

  “Everything’s great,” Sydney says, positively beaming. “Except it’s been so busy that Ryan and I haven’t gotten to see much of each other lately.”

  Ryan resists the urge to roll her eyes. Mom’s nodding hard, probably sympathizing with Sydney’s busy schedule. Will looks anxious to get away from the conversation, his eyes roaming the room.

  “Plus Ryan’s always with that cute new guy,” Sydney says, winking at Ryan as if they share some great secret. “They’re practically inseparable.”

  Mom raises her eyebrows. “Really?”

  “Just the guy I’m doing my math project with,” she says quickly, and Sydney pats her on the arm condescendingly. Ryan feels like she’s about six years old. She smiles politely at them, then looks to her mom. “We should get back.”

  Sydney loops her arm through Will’s. “What a cute party,” she says. “Hope you guys have fun. It was great to see you, Mrs. Graham.”

  As they walk away, Ryan steering them fast toward the bumper lanes, Mom looks at her with interest. “So who’s this boy, anyway?”

  “Just a guy,” she says, shaking her head.

  Unsatisfied, Mom presses for more information. “What’s his name?” she asks. “Is he cute? Is he nice? What’s he like?”

  Ryan shrugs. “I don’t really know him that well.”

  There’s only one conversation taking place at school the following week. Nobody’s talking about math tests or biology experiments. Nobody’s even interested in discussing the weekend’s winning football game. There’s little interest in the state of the world or global affairs. The collective mind of the school is, for the moment, on one track. And the topic drifting through the hallways is singularly focused on the upcoming spring dance.

  This, as it happens, is the one thing Ryan isn’t in the mood to talk about.

  Nick hasn’t said a word about it since chickening out at the game, and so, as the committees meet and the posters seem to multiply in the halls, Ryan chooses to pretend the whole thing isn’t happening—though what had been effortless only weeks ago is now more difficult. She’s having trouble admitting to herself just how much she wishes Nick would ask her.

  At lunch on Monday, he finds her sitting alone on a bench outside.

  “Want to come over tonight to finish the project?” he asks, joining her.

  Ryan lowers her sandwich. “Aren’t we pretty much done?”

  “Yeah, I guess,” Nick says, adjusting his cap, and Ryan immediately regrets having said anything. Other girls would have seen this as an opportunity to spend more time together, but somehow, Ryan always manages to figure these things out a beat too late. Now, they’d probably finish up the project at lunch one day, adding the final touches over peanut butter sandwiches beneath the watchful gaze of the entire cafeteria. And once they finished, that would be it. No more math project, no more Cubs games, no more lunches together.

  “Hey,” Nick says, watching her carefully. “You okay?”

  “Fine,” she says with a little nod.

  Ryan realizes that now would be the time to say something about what had happened at the game the other day, but it’s not an easy subject to broach. After the fight, Nick had been sullen and quiet, staring out the window of the train and grunting in response to her questions. After a while, she’d given up and inched away, watching the flickering lights of the train car cast shadows across the floor. A part of her can’t help feeling that something had been lost that day. Where before she thought they understood each other perfectly, Ryan now gets the sense that there are too many stories they each guard too closely.

  They sit for a few minutes in companionable silence, side by side on the bench, their backs to the rest of the world: the soccer field and the lawn, their classmates in all their various activities. A few crows pick at the remains of someone’s sandwich, and a squirrel circles a nearby garbage can appraisingly.

  “Listen,” Nick says, tossing a piece of his bread crust on the ground at their feet. “I’ve been meaning to ask you …”

  Ryan feels her face flush, unable to look at him as she waits. But a new voice breaks the quiet between them, a sharp intrusion from the forgotten motion of the lunch hour behind them. She hears Lucy before turning around to see her standing above them, Sydney at her side.

  “Hey there,” Lucy says. She punches Nick’s shoulder playfully, and winks—actually winks!—at him. “What’re you doing all the way over here when there’s a basketball game going on?”

  Nick cranes his neck to where the other sophomore guys have started their daily pickup game. “I’m not much of a basketball player,” he says, holding up his cast.

  Lucy rocks back on her heels. “Well,” she says, letting her gaze fall on Ryan. “We’re always under the tree over there if you want to hang out once they start playing.”

  “Thanks,” Nick says with a polite smile. “Good to know.”

  Sydney opens her bag and rummages through intently, searching for something Ryan’s sure isn’t there. She’s not particularly hard to read: she’s nervous near Lucy and wary of her interactions with Ryan, and because of all this, she needs something to do with her hands. When she catches Ryan watching, she zips the bag, then crosses her arms and looks to Lucy.

  Lunch is nearly over, and people are already beginning to shuffle inside. The squirrel disappears behind the garbage can, and Ryan flings the rest of her sandwich in its general direction. Without looking at her once, Lucy steps back toward the school and waves to Nick. “You’re welcome anytime,” she says, falling into step with Kate and April, who stroll by just then as if the timing had been choreographed. Sydney hurries after them, and Ryan bites her lip.

  “That was nice of her,” Nick says, leaning back on the bench.

  Ryan, unsure whether he’s being serious, can’t resist chiming in. “Yeah,” she says. “She’s known for that, actually.”

  Nick laughs. “Being nice?”

  “The nicest,” Ryan says. “You probably wouldn’t know, being new and all. But Lucy Barrett is practically a saint.”

  “Ah,” he says. “Good thing I have you around to fill me in.”

  The lawn is almost empty now, and Nick tosses his lunch bag in the garbage, then stands waiting for Ryan to collect her stuff. They walk back inside without talking, and Ryan wi
shes he’d finish the question he’d started to ask earlier. At the door to her biology class, they pause.

  “So we’ll add the finishing touches to the project tomorrow then?” he asks.

  “Sure,” she says, tripping on her shoelace as she tries backpedaling to the safety of the dark classroom. “Tomorrow’s fine.”

  “We’ll give the team a chance to up their stats a little bit at tonight’s game,” he says with a laugh, then walks off to his next class. Ryan stands at the door for a moment, then turns to find her seat in the classroom. The teacher is late getting some slides together, and so she sits very still at her desk, holding her breath against the antiseptic smell of the dissection tables. A moment later, Sydney slips into class unnoticed, scrambling into the seat just across the aisle from Ryan.

  “Hey,” she whispers, as the teacher begins pointing out the different organs of a frog. “You must have good taste.”

  Ryan raises her eyebrows.

  “Lucy never asks guys to dances,” Sydney whispers, her voice tinged with giddiness. “I mean, every guy always wants to ask her.”

  “Good for her,” Ryan mutters, turning back to the front of the classroom.

  Sydney continues, unfazed. “You might be interested to know that we just ran into your buddy, Nick,” she says. “And Lucy asked him to go with her.”

  Ryan looks up sharply, her mouth falling open.

  “That’s what I thought you might say,” Sydney says with a little laugh.

  The teacher dims the lights in the room to show a slide of a frog’s intestine, and Ryan is grateful that nobody—especially Sydney—can see her face, which she’s sure must be giving her away. She rests her forehead in her hand, pretending to study her notes, and after a moment, Sydney loses interest and turns back to her own papers. When the lights go back on, Ryan rubs her eyes and takes a deep breath.

  Once class is over, she waits for everyone else to trickle out the door before pushing back her chair. She’s so concentrated on trying to keep herself from crumbling, right here among the dead frogs and the petrified wood, that she doesn’t notice the boy who is waiting—the one who wears Hawaiian shirts every day and controls the lighting for school plays and is at least two years older than anyone else in the class—until he is standing right in front of her.

  “Hi, Ryan,” he says, tugging at his flowered shirt.

  “Hi,” she says wearily, having forgotten his name.

  The next words, she knows, are inevitable. “I was wondering if you’d want to go to the dance with me,” he says, then wipes the sweat from his upper lip as he waits for her answer.

  Ryan—who has zero interest in going to the dance at all anymore—presses two fingers to her forehead. The clock on the wall lunges forward, the sound loud in the empty classroom. The boy shifts from one bulky leg to the other, waiting.

  “Sure,” Ryan says, utterly miserable. She tries to keep the hollowness out of her voice, forcing herself to smile. “That sounds great.”

  Chapter Nine

  * * *

  THE NIGHT OF THE DANCE, RYAN SITS PERCHED ON the toilet seat while Mom helps her curl the ends of her hair. She’s still wearing pajamas and trying hard not to think about the evening ahead of her, which will begin in just a half hour when Robert—the junior in her freshman biology class—is set to pick her up. Emily’s balancing on the bathroom counter near the sink, carefully observing what’s happening with Ryan’s hair.

  “I wish I could go too,” she says.

  “Want to take my place?” Ryan offers, and Mom shoots her a look in the mirror, then turns to Emily.

  “You’ll go someday,” she says, switching off the curling iron. She bends down to kiss Ryan on the cheek. “Tonight is Ryan’s night, though.”

  After she changes into a simple pink sundress with a white ribbon around the waist, Mom and Emily clap their hands, and Ryan eyes herself in the mirror. Despite what others might think, she doesn’t mind wearing dresses, and tonight, especially, she knows she looks pretty. For a moment, she’s pleased at the thought that Nick will see her too, but then she remembers who he’s going with and feels deflated once again. There’s no competing with someone like Lucy Barrett.

  Since the day she found out Lucy had asked him, Ryan has been avoiding Nick. It wasn’t something she planned, but when she’d first seen him in the hallway before math class that same day, he’d been awkward and stammering, and rather than wait around to hear what she already knew, Ryan told him she’d forgotten something in her locker, and then made her escape.

  And so it had gone for the past few weeks.

  They’d finished their math project at the end of class one day, scribbling down the last few additions to their findings, then hastily binding the whole thing together. Ryan saw that he’d printed a cover with the Cubs logo on it, and sitting there beside him in the empty classroom, she felt suddenly like crying.

  “Not bad,” he said, admiring their work with a rueful grin.

  Ryan nodded, but then scraped back her chair before he could say more. “I have to get going,” she told him. “I’ll see you later.”

  During lunch, she often noticed him heading in her direction, but Lucy and her friends began intercepting him on his walk over, and so Ryan started spending the period on the floor beside her locker as she had in the past—a far better option, it seemed, than having to watch Nick get drawn into the frightening whirlpool that had so far claimed every good friend Ryan ever had.

  She glances at her watch now, then slips on her shoes. Downstairs, Kevin insists on taking pictures, and so Ryan waits patiently until he’s gotten enough, then hovers in the kitchen until she sees the headlights from Robert’s car graze the windows. Mom gives her a hug, and Ryan waits for the doorbell to ring.

  “Mom,” Ryan begins, turning around.

  “Yes,” Mom says before she has a chance to finish. “You have to go.”

  Robert smiles when she opens the door, and though his suit looks a size too small, she’s relieved to see that at least he’s not wearing a Hawaiian shirt. “Wow,” he says, handing her a small white flower. “You look great.”

  “Thanks,” she says, then forces herself to add, “You too.”

  Robert opens the door of his parents’ car for her, and they spend the short ride to the school in silence, except for the sharp sounds of the radio as he searches for a station. When they pull up to the gym, Ryan gets out of the car and stands staring at the hordes of her classmates funneling inside, a sea of familiar faces in unfamiliar attire, all sparkles and ribbons, flowers and silk. Robert offers his hand, and Ryan pretends not to have noticed as they walk to the door, a small distance apart from each other.

  Inside, the gym is decorated like a jungle—this year’s theme for the dance—and they make their way toward the punch bowl, moving past a cellophane waterfall and a wall plastered with green-construction-paper trees. There’s a disco ball on the ceiling that makes Ryan feel silly somehow, the flecks of light passing over them dizzily. She hides her face in a cup of punch.

  “I’m not much of a dancer,” Robert apologizes.

  “Me neither,” Ryan says, relieved.

  Across the gym, she spots Lucy and Nick, and something inside of her grows heavy at the sight. Nick had gotten his cast off the week before, and his hair is neat and combed. His face looks pale against his suit. Lucy’s wearing a strapless red dress with her hair drawn up from her face, and could easily pass for a college student. Ryan suddenly feels about eight in her sundress.

  She watches as Lucy grabs Nick’s hand and pulls him toward the photo area, where she motions for him to bend down to tell him something while they wait. Ryan turns back to Robert, who’s telling her about a joke the tech guys once played on the drama teacher.

  “That’s funny,” she says, doing her best to sound convincing.

  Robert shrugs modestly. “We thought so.”

  When Nick and Lucy have finished taking their photos, Ryan can see Sydney and Kate trying to gathe
r up the rest of their friends for a group shot. They walk by, leaning in close to whisper once they’ve passed Ryan. She ignores them, glancing over to the punch bowl where she spots Nick. A few random guys grin and slap him on the shoulder as they walk by, no doubt congratulating him on his date.

  Ryan feels Robert’s hand on her back, and she sidesteps away, pretending to have dropped something from her purse. She crouches on the gym floor, making a show of feeling along the ground, and when enough time has passed, she stands up again. They’ve been joined by two of his friends from the tech group, dressed in all black, dateless, and in charge of the lighting for the evening.

  “Do you mind if we borrow your date?” one of them asks, a short kid with a mop of reddish hair, and Ryan is momentarily terrified that they’re talking about her. But then she realizes there’s a problem with the blue lights on the fake waterfall.

  She pats Robert on the arm. “Go save the rain forest.”

  There’s a lull in the music, and Ryan presses her back against the cinderblock wall of the gym, kicking at a fallen piece of cellophane with the toe of her shoe. When she looks up again, Nick is standing a few feet away, looking quite suddenly shy.

  “You look nice,” he says, his hands shoved in his pockets.

  It takes her a moment to find her voice. “You too.”

  He sweeps his eyes around the gym, then takes a few steps toward her. “Listen, Ryan,” he says, but she stops him.

  “Could we not talk about Lucy?”

  He bobs his head. “Sure,” he says. “Of course.”

  “Okay, then,” she says.

  He nods. “Okay, then.”

  They stand shoulder-to-shoulder against the wall, half-hidden by a cardboard elephant, watching their classmates across the dance floor. Ryan finds herself wishing Robert would never come back, that Lucy might never find them. She’d like nothing more than to stand here for the rest of the night.