Makani tucked away her phone, opened the door, and peered down. The ground was a thick marsh of wind-stiffened mud. She tested it with a sneaker toe. It seemed solid enough, so she climbed out—and tromped straight into it, three inches deep. “Shit!” But she laughed again. “I thought you said you were taking me to the beach.”
“The ocean,” he corrected.
The temperature had dropped. The brisk air smelled like decaying leaves, distant woodsmoke, and chilled terrain, a reminder that Halloween was around the bend. Makani pulled up the hood of her floral-printed hoodie and zipped it up. She should have worn a coat, but she still sucked at this cold weather thing. Most people here didn’t even consider it cold yet. Just nippy.
She plodded forward to join Ollie. He was leaning against the front of the car, its engine ticking lightly as it cooled. But the metal was still warm, almost hot, and it felt good against her jeans. The leggy corn encircled them, two feet overhead. She turned pointedly to Ollie. He was staring straight ahead into the vast golden nothingness.
“It’s not the Pacific,” he said, “but it’s the best I can do.”
Ollie must have registered her confusion in his peripheral vision, because he met her gaze with another smile. “The fields. I know you miss Hawaii.”
As her mind absorbed this thoughtful gesture, her eyes lingered on the curve of his lips. She wanted to kiss them again. She forced her head away and tried to focus on their surroundings—she really did try—but she felt him still watching her.
He slid back and up onto the hood of his car. “Here.”
She hopped up beside him, metal thumping, her left leg touching his right.
Ollie pulled up the hood of his own hoodie. It was tight against his head—hers puffed out a bit with her hair—but a shock of hot pink flashed out from underneath the black cotton fabric. It looked like the only bright thing in the universe.
“Okay,” he said. “Now look again.”
The wind rustled the brittle cornstalks. It sounded like a spitting, crackling fire. The dry tassels reached for the open sky while the dead silks pointed down to the muddy earth. Slowly, ever so slowly, the wind strengthened and changed course, and the fields swayed as a single element, rippling outward in a current of mesmerizing waves.
Something hidden inside Makani lifted its head and blossomed. The sensation was sublime. Makani often complained that she was drowning in corn, but she wasn’t gasping below the water. She was perched on the edge of the horizon.
She felt Ollie trying to gauge her reaction. She smiled, letting it linger on the fields before inclining her head toward his. “Thank you,” she said.
And then she kissed him.
Makani was surprised at the familiarity of his mouth, the taste of it, how natural Ollie’s lips felt when pressed against hers. She remembered how to work both around his piercing and with it. His breath caught, and she felt the thrill of having invoked the reaction. His hands slipped under her hood, on each side of her neck, and it was the first time that his fingers had touched her skin since the end of summer. She gasped. Her arms wrapped around him. Their hips slid against each other, digging into the metal of the car. It was painful, and Makani would have bruises, but it didn’t matter. She didn’t care.
They kissed—they made out like this—until the setting sun ripened the clouds into peaches and apricots. Until his phone interrupted them.
Ollie scooted back as he removed it from his pocket. “Shit. It’s probably Chris, wondering where I am, oh—” He hopped off the car to answer it. “Hello? Hello?”
The connection must have been weak. Makani thought it was odd when he went inside the cruiser for privacy, using it like an old-fashioned telephone booth. Wouldn’t the connection be stronger outside? She could hear the rumble of his voice but none of his words.
Her blood still pulsed with heat, but she shivered. After they’d had sex, he’d turned into a ghost. She wanted to believe that he wouldn’t disappear again.
Ollie hung up.
They stared at each other through the windshield. His eyes were heavy. Whatever it was, it wasn’t good news. With an ominous knot of dread, Makani slid down the hood, trudged the few feet through the mud, and rejoined him in the car.
She left the door open.
“Work,” Ollie said. His body was slumped into his seat. “One of our cashiers was just fired for stealing. I can’t believe it. It doesn’t sound like her at all. They want me to go in and run her register.”
Relief rushed over Makani. She’d assumed that something worse had happened. Haley’s school photo, plastered across the local media, flickered through her mind like a harbinger. Enthusiastic smile. Bright eyes. Neatly parted hair. She looked so wholesome, so undeserving. Not that anyone deserved her fate.
Ollie’s slump deepened. “Sorry. This sucks.”
“Don’t worry about it.” Makani scraped the mud from her sneakers against the bottom of his car. His boots weren’t nearly as caked. “Besides, now we only half lied to my grandma. I promised her that I’d be home for dinner.”
He didn’t respond, so she asked before losing her nerve, “Why did you take the call in here? You didn’t want me to hear you talking to your boss?”
It nudged him back into the present. “Sometimes I get a stronger signal in here. Something to do with the old police wiring, I don’t know.”
“I couldn’t even get a text to send earlier.”
He shrugged. “Maybe we need CB radios, like the jocks and ags.”
She pointed an accusing finger. “Bite your tongue.”
Leaning forward, he lightly took her finger between his teeth. She smiled. “I could call my manager back,” he said, a few minutes later. “Make an excuse.”
But Makani needed to believe that Ollie would return. She kissed him twice, one kiss on each temple, and closed the door. Haley’s school photo vanished from her thoughts.
“Drive,” she said. “We’ll have plenty of time for that later.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
They were undefeated. The best team in the state. And they were playing one of the worst tomorrow night. So why was Hooker being such a fucking dickweed?
For the last forty minutes, Matt Butler had been standing in the locker room showers with his eyes closed. Practice was over. The sun was down. Everyone was gone. He’d told the guys that he’d catch up with them at Sonic, but he wasn’t even sure if that was true. He wanted to be alone, enveloped in water and quiet and steam, forever.
It had been a rough week. The pressure of the playoffs, pressure of the recruiters, pressure of his parents. Haley. That stupid fight in the quad and the disappointed lectures from Principal Stanton and Coach Hooker that followed. Lauren. She’d been ragging on him again for not texting her back fast enough. Worse, she was acting like she’d known Haley—like she’d been personally devastated by the tragic loss of a dear friend—when, as far as he knew, Lauren and Haley had never hung out. Not once. It was okay to be upset about someone’s death, even if you never really knew the person. But Matt hated the way his girlfriend was making the tragedy about herself.
He couldn’t stop thinking about Haley’s parents. The media was placing ample suspicion on her father, but every time Matt saw him in the news, Don Whitehall looked gutted. His eyelids were so swollen that he could hardly keep them open. Only a psychopath could fake that kind of reaction. Then again, only a psychopath could commit that kind of murder. Haley’s mom had issued a televised statement. She’d begged anyone in the community to step forward if they knew the perpetrator’s real identity, but she could barely speak through her grief. Something about her physical appearance reminded him of his own mom. That made it worse.
He still felt the shock of when Buddy had ripped down the Sweeney Todd banner. His best friend hadn’t known what he was doing—Matt could see that now, they were cool—but it had made the entire team look like assholes.
Both Hooker and his father grilled him constantly about the importance of app
earance. And Matt was trying to keep up appearances, but the stress of everything, of everyone relying on him, had been getting to him all semester. It was making him pick these fights. Obsess over the Whitehalls. Misplace his belongings. Matt had been losing his essentials (phone, keys, wallet) in the strangest places (sock drawer, vegetable crisper, patio table) with no memory of having moved them there.
Unless . . . it wasn’t the stress.
Matt’s muscles clenched as three letters chorused in his mind: CTE.
Chronic traumatic encephalopathy was a disease caused by repetitive blows to the head. Early symptoms included memory loss, disorientation, and erratic behavior. Later symptoms included dementia, impeded speech, and suicide. Basically, it destroyed your brain, and football players everywhere were suffering and dying from it. Mostly old guys, who’d played pro. But plenty of young guys, too. Even high schoolers.
It was the disease that the NFL and universities didn’t want to discuss, because it hurt their bottom line. Matt’s teammates didn’t want to talk about it, either. Ignoring it made it easier to pretend that it wasn’t serious, made it easier to keep playing ball. No one wanted to ruin the game they all loved.
But Matt thought about CTE. He thought about it a lot.
Professional football was the only future he’d ever wanted. It was what his father, whose own dreams were shattered when he tore up his left knee on the field at Memorial Stadium, had always wanted.
His mother, on the other hand. She used to want it. Now every time a story hit ESPN, he’d find a printed-out article sitting on his place mat at the breakfast table. Her silent plea. To Matt’s everlasting shame, he always made a show of crumpling up the articles in front of his dad. They’d been working so hard for this, for so long.
But, secretly, Matt had started pocketing them.
The first article he’d kept was about Tony Dorsett, a college and pro Hall of Fame running back. Matt was a running back, too. He was the best in the Midwest, with the Division I FBS recruiters serenading his front door to prove it, but every time he found his phone in the wrong place, he broke into a cold sweat.
CTE? Is that you?
Because what would he do if he couldn’t play football?
On the mantelpiece in his living room, a framed photograph was prominently displayed. It was taken on the day he was born, and he was swaddled in a scarlet Huskers blanket. Now, only a few short months remained before he had to officially commit to one school. Because he would commit. He would keep playing.
The choice wasn’t an actual choice.
Matt turned off the water. He examined his hands, which were pruned and gelatin white. The weak showerhead dripped water onto the tile floor. Somewhere during this exhausted mulling, Matt had decided to join his friends at Sonic.
Tomorrow was the last game of the regular season, and it was important to keep focused on their opponent and not look past them into the playoffs—even though everybody knew it was a win. It’s why practice had been so frustrating. Hooker had drilled them harder than ever, yelling in an unparalleled, spittle-faced volume that they were getting too comfortable. Matt was confident, but he wasn’t comfortable. He wouldn’t feel comfortable until he’d made it through playoffs without injury.
Buddy liked to joke that Hooker yelled because of a deep-seated resentment of being forced to listen to them shout his own terrible name. Matt always laughed, but he knew the head coach’s motivations came from a better, smarter place. Hooker cared.
Matt toweled off and then wrapped it around his waist. He grabbed his combination shampoo/body wash, stepped over his dirty practice clothes, and strode through the cloud of steam. His wet footprints trailed behind him. The lockers smelled like male sweat and old rust, and they were in alternating colors of scarlet and gold. Osborne proudly wore the same shade of scarlet red as the Huskers, but Matt’s locker was gold, because a team superstition asserted that the scarlet lockers were unlucky. Seniors always claimed the gold lockers.
Matt ground to a halt. His combination lock was missing.
CTE? Is that you?
He shook his head, pissed at himself, as he swung open the metal door. His helmet and deodorant were on the top shelf. The larger bottom space, which normally held his backpack and mesh duffel bag, was empty.
“Aw, fuck.” Matt muttered it. But then he slammed down the bottle of shampoo/body wash so hard that the entire row of lockers quivered in shock.
He glanced around the room. Nothing appeared to be out of place. He jerked open the gold door closest to his. Despite keeping it permanently unlocked—Buddy could never remember the combination—their teammates rarely stole or hid things from him. The usual items were still inside of it. Nothing else.
Matt looked under the row of benches. More nothing.
“Fuck. Fuck.”
He stalked toward the showers, annoyed that his own absentmindedness had led to this irritating prank, which was forcing him to re-dress in his soiled practice clothes. It meant that he’d have to stop by his house before Sonic to change. He’d also have to shower again, or Lauren would complain about the smell.
Matt rounded the corner, and his practice clothes were gone.
Perfect.
“All right, guys.” His voice was loud and deep, and it resonated against the steel lockers. “You got me.”
There was no reply.
“What do you want? A dick pic or something?” Matt kept the tone jocular. He was done with this week, but he refused to give his friends the satisfaction of knowing it. “Guess you should have taken my towel, too.”
The steam evaporated. The room grew cold.
He rubbed the hair on his arms. “Hello?”
The question echoed.
Even more than the silence, Matt felt his aloneness. He headed for the coaches’ offices. As expected, their windows were dark, and their doors were locked. Hooker and the assistants usually went home straight after practice, especially if it’d been a tough one. School rules required them to stay until the last student was gone, but they liked to give the guys an opportunity to vent and decompress without the fear of being overheard.
The entrance to the locker room was located beside the assistant coaches’ shared office. Matt readjusted his towel and cracked open the door. He peered into the dusk, half expecting—and very much hoping—to find the team waiting outside, phones raised to capture him in all his humiliated glory.
Nobody was there.
In the distance, a crowd murmured. It was the candlelight vigil for Haley. Parents and students and teachers were already gathering at the front of the school. His stomach dropped as he realized that he’d have to walk past them to reach the parking lot. He couldn’t do that in a towel. It would be disrespectful.
Matt closed the door and tried again. “Hello?”
Doubt crept in.
Did he see his practice clothes when he got out of the shower? The most logical explanation was that the guys had stolen them at the same time as his regular clothes, and that all his shit was currently in the back of someone’s pickup.
Matt weighed his options. He could call Buddy and beg for it back. He could call his mom and ask her to bring him something else to wear. Or he could call Lauren. No way. She’d tell her friends. The only other option was to wait for the vigil to end, but how long would that take? Two hours? And then he’d still have to drive home in his towel.
Wait.
Drive.
His keys and phone were in his pockets.
Matt shouted a long, lethal expletive. Anger coursed through his veins as he threw open every non-locked locker. Crouched on his knees and peered below the benches. Jumped onto the benches and peeked on top of the lockers. He looked in the showers, urinals, stalls, and under the sinks, but his belongings were nowhere to be found.
This was it, then. He’d have to walk home.
Matt lived in the newer neighborhood across town. He had never walked it, but it was probably only thirty minutes away. Still, the tem
perature would be below forty by the time the vigil ended. And he’d be wearing a goddamn towel.
Defeated, he sank onto the bench outside Hooker’s office. His body was a weary sack. Everything ached. Matt leaned against the cinder-block wall—right beside a telephone. He grabbed the receiver off its hook, scanning his brain for numbers.
It’s not CTE. No one memorizes them anymore.
The only number he knew was his parents’ landline, but when he called, no one picked up. He tried again. “Goddamn motherfucking answer the phone!” he said, and a cry emerged from the locker bay.
Matt froze.
Everything was silent. And then . . . someone whimpered.
Before this moment, Matt would have guessed that the sound of another human—no matter how distressed—would have launched him to his feet in fury. But something else kicked in. Instinct, perhaps. It was the only explanation for the overwhelming trepidation triggered by that single whimper. Why his internal sensors lit up on high alert.
His body was stone. He listened.
The person had gone silent again, but their presence was unmistakable. Matt gripped his towel and stood. He felt exposed and vulnerable, an animal lying belly up. He pressed forward without sound, yet his footsteps were still too loud.
He reached the lockers.
At the far end of the bay, at the far end of the bench, a slender figure sat with their back to him. Their hoodie was up, and their head was down. Their shoulders shook in a way that suggested crying. Matt couldn’t tell if it was a girl or guy, but it wasn’t one of his teammates. They were too small to play football.
“Hey.” He didn’t mean for it to come out so angrily.
The figure flinched.
Matt tried to calm his voice. “Who are you?”
The figure didn’t move.
Matt retightened the towel, keenly aware of his genitals. “Hey,” he said again, stepping forward. His tone was softer. “Are you okay?”
The figure sniffled, and Matt realized that it might be one of the special-needs kids. The second-string quarterback had a sister in the after-school program, so he knew they met in a classroom nearby. This might even be her. Sometimes Faith showed up near the end of practice and watched them run drills from the bleachers.