We got on the highway, and he turned down the radio.
“You coming to the tournament Friday?” he asked.
“Of course. You’re playing, aren’t you?” I said sarcastically, giving him a big smile and fluttering my eyelashes dramatically.
He grinned, turned up the music again, and leaned his head against the headrest. “That’s my girl,” he said, then turned the music up another notch.
The car was practically vibrating. Cole was practically vibrating. Definitely intense. But intense in a good way. I felt it radiating off him, but this time I didn’t feel dread.
We turned into the mall parking lot, and Cole parked. When he turned off the car, the sudden silence made my ears ring. I looked at him quizzically. We’d been to the mall dozens of times together. Why was this time special?
“Come on,” he said. “I have something I want to buy you.”
We got out and met at the back of the car, where he intertwined his fingers with mine. We walked into the mall that way—happily holding hands.
When we got into the mall, he started to walk faster, pulling me along behind him. He took me straight past the food court and to the other side, where he finally stopped in front of Book ’Em, Danno.
He held up his arms like one of those game show models.
“The bookstore?” I asked, staring up at the sign. “You want to buy me a book?”
He dropped his arms, rolled his eyes, and came around behind me, ushering me into the store. “Not just any book,” he said.
Once we were inside, he grabbed my hand again and started pulling. He pulled me past the fiction and past the cookbooks and past the self-help, all the way to the back of the store, where he finally stopped.
“Travel,” he said. He ran his finger along the shelves. “Kansas, Nebraska, aha! Here.” He pulled a book off the shelf and held it out to me.
I read the title out loud. “Frommer’s Colorado,” I said.
He nodded. “And I found this one, too.” He pulled out another book and held it up: Soul of the Rockies.
This time I didn’t read the title aloud. I couldn’t. I was too touched to say anything. Instead, I took it out of his hands and opened it, leafed through it.
The images nearly knocked the wind out of me. The mountains looked so beautiful, so magical. I could almost feel Mom in the grain of the paper beneath my fingers. I sat down on the floor in front of the bookshelf, unable to take my eyes off of the photos.
I’d seen photos of Colorado before. But it was different looking at little thumbnails on Bethany’s laptop. These photos were so vivid and crisp, so colorful, that I almost felt as if I was there already. I could understand why someone would want to go there just to see the mountains. Why maybe the beauty would be reason enough.
Cole sat down next to me. “When I found it, I hid it so nobody would buy it before I could get you up here. I knew as soon as I saw those pictures that you would fall in love with it.” He brushed his finger across a photo of an ice-capped mountain, the sky behind it so blue that it made me want to breathe more deeply. “You’re going to find your answers out there, baby. I can feel it.”
“Cole,” I said, but I didn’t know how to finish. He’d always told me he understood, but so had Bethany and Zack. And I never quite knew, with all their talk of ski bunnies and hot boy bands and new clothes, if Bethany and Zack actually did understand what the mountains meant to me—that it wasn’t just some silly obsession and it wasn’t only about taking a vacation.
But now I knew. I knew that at least one person out there got it. Cole understood. He understood everything.
“Oh, and I want to get you these, too,” he said. He stood up and walked around to the other side of the bookshelf while I paged through the photographs some more, backing up and looking again at the ones I’d already seen. He came back and dropped two maps in my lap: Colorado and Kansas. “I don’t think you guys’ll get lost, but just in case. These are the good ones, the waterproof kind.”
I held the maps in one hand and closed the book with the other, then scooped the Frommer’s book into my lap.
“I love it,” I said.
“Oh, and one more.” He reached behind some Walt Disney World guides and pulled out a paperback: Emily Dickinson. “In case, you know, the mountains inspire you to write some more poetry,” he said.
I took the book and held it against my chest, unsure of what to say.
We headed up to the cash register. As Cole pulled out his wallet and handed the cashier a handful of twenties, I knew this was why I’d stayed with him when things were bad. This was why a couple of bruises didn’t matter. Because he understood me as nobody ever had before. Because we were perfect together.
I stood behind him while the cashier handed him his change and bagged up the books. I leaned my forehead against his back, feeling so lucky.
“I love you,” I whispered into the fabric of his shirt.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
The Bearcats had been having a horrible season, and it was sort of amazing that we made it into the tournament at all. You could feel tension in the stands, radiating off the parents, who were hoping for that big win for their players. The students in the crowd were just there to show off for each other. Get a little freedom. Screw around at school. Make out a little. Fight a little. Wear a little face paint.
I was there by myself. I hadn’t seen Bethany for two weeks, ever since the weekend that I’d gone over to Zack’s house to help him work on his lines and had felt like a third wheel the entire time. Cole had eased up on Bethany, and Bethany had responded by shutting me out entirely. She’d barely even talked to me all night—not like she was mad at me, but like she didn’t know what to say. This was the first time I’d ever felt like an intrusion when it came to Bethany and Zack. We’d always been the Terrible Three, the Three-Headed Monster. Now it was the two of them… and me.
I suspected she was with Zack, working on his lines again instead of at the game. Or maybe they were at a movie. All I knew was I was definitely not in the Zack/Bethany gossip loop anymore.
Even when Zack came in for his tutoring sessions, we mostly just worked. There was hardly anything personal between us anymore. He stopped joking and sat there, answering my questions diligently.
If I were to write a poem about our friendship, I would have to use the word awkward. And stilted. And changed.
So, yeah, I was a little mad at them at the moment for shutting me out when I’d finally worked Cole into saying it was okay for them to be in. And it meant if I wanted to see Cole play, I would have to go to the game alone. Seemed as though I was doing a lot of things alone these days.
And it was a bad game. At halftime the score was 43–12. In the beginning of the second half, the Bearcats managed to put up a couple of shots, but the final score ended up being 62–23, an embarrassment for the Bearcats once again.
People actually booed as the team filed off the court after the game. You could see the disappointment in the shoulders of all of them. Well, all except for one. Number 12. Cole, whose shoulders were taut and stiff beneath his jersey. He’d had such a bad game the coach had benched him for the last eight minutes.
I knew he’d want to be alone for a little while to shake it off, especially since we had plans to go to an after-game party at Trent’s house. He’d want to cool down, get in a party mood. And things had been really good between us. I’d learned when to leave him alone. This was definitely one of those leave-him-alone times.
So I sat on the bleachers, thinking about what I would say to Cole to lighten him up when he got out of the locker room.
Next thing I knew my entire row was empty, and when I glanced around, I realized that most of the crowd had gone.
I stood up, and that’s when I saw them: Zack and Bethany, at the game, sitting just half a dozen rows behind me, their heads bent together sharing a set of earbuds. Had they been sitting there the whole time? How come they didn’t say anything to me?
 
; “Hey!” I shouted, and both of their heads snapped up to look at me.
“Alex!” Zack shouted back. “I didn’t see you there!” But I noticed Bethany turn her head slightly to the side to hide a smirk when he said it. Lie. They totally knew I was there and were ignoring me. On purpose.
“I’m sure you didn’t,” I said sarcastically. “Otherwise you’d have said hi, right?”
Bethany looked up sharply, but before she could say anything, some girl I recognized from hanging around Bethany’s locker, but didn’t know by name, tapped Bethany on the shoulder. Bethany turned, and her scowling face turned to smiles, just like that. She stood up and hugged the girl, and the two of them chatted happily.
When did that happen? When did my best friend not want to talk to me, and when did she get so close to this other girl that she chatted with her just as she’d always done with me?
Zack stepped over the bleachers, hopping down one row after another until he was right in front of me.
“Hey,” he said. “Listen. I’m pretty sure Bethany’s gonna ask you if you mind if Tina goes on our trip.”
“Who’s Tina?” I asked, but then it dawned on me that he was talking about Bethany’s new friend. “Her?” I asked, pointing.
Zack nodded. “You’ll like her.”
“No,” I said, furiously jamming my arms into my coat sleeves. “No way.”
“They’re tight,” he said, motioning with his head to Bethany. “She’s really funny.”
“I don’t care, Zack,” I said, realizing too late that my voice was way loud. “This trip isn’t about having a laugh a minute, or maybe you guys with your RVs and your road trip tattoos and your extra shopping money for real Native American souvenirs don’t remember what it is about.”
He held out his hands as if he wanted to capture the sound waves as they came out of my mouth and hold them right in front of us, keep Bethany from hearing me. But it was too late. She and Tina were already staring at us, matching appalled looks on their faces.
“Whoa,” Zack said. “Don’t get riled. We haven’t forgotten what this is about.”
“Well, you could’ve fooled me,” I snarled, stepping over the bleacher in front of me to get around him. “Like I want to share the moment I’ve been looking forward to my whole stupid life with Funny Tina!” I gave him a sarcastic thumbs-up. “Great plan, guys. Really!”
I hurried toward the steps.
“C’mon, Alex, don’t be that way,” Zack called to my back.
I started to turn around—Zack didn’t do the vulnerable thing very often, and I started to feel bad—but I heard Bethany say, “Whatever. Let her go,” in a very annoyed voice, so I straightened up and walked even faster.
But instead of turning right toward the hallway and waiting outside the men’s locker room for Cole as I always did, I turned left and pushed through the doors into the parking lot. I couldn’t handle the fluorescent school lights right now or the humid, smelly gym. And I couldn’t handle running into Bethany and Zack… and Tina… again. Instead, I found Cole’s car and paced in half-circles around it.
Despite the horrible game, there was lots of partying going on. People lingering, pulling drinks out of coolers in their backseats. Girls getting piggyback rides. Guys cheering as their friends came out of the locker room, shouting things like, “Hey, man, that was a tough team, but you looked good. You did.”
All the parents had left the parking lot, holding sleeping toddlers on their shoulders and dragging candy-hyped elementary kids behind them. Their taillights were disappearing down the main drag toward town, and the parking lot once again belonged to the teenagers.
But Cole took so long to get out of the locker room that even the teenagers had moved on, leaving skid marks on the blacktop and hanging out windows, yelling for no reason into the night sky. The only cars left in the lot belonged to Cole and Coach Dample, who always stayed for a long time after games, not leaving until after everyone else had gone.
From the sound of things, pretty much everybody was heading to Trent’s house. I wondered if Bethany and Zack were going there, too. Great. They’d probably bring Funny Tina.
The thought brought on new waves of anger and despair. Why? Why couldn’t anything ever be easy?
I paced some more, thinking. Maybe we could talk this out. Maybe I could make them understand that this trip was too personal to bring along people I didn’t know, even though I’m sure she was a perfectly nice girl.
Maybe I could explain to them that now that I was with Cole, I needed to do this more than ever. I needed to understand what was so important out there in the mountains. I needed to prove to myself that no matter what the draw was for Mom out there, I should’ve been more important, dammit. I needed to put it to rest once and for all—to stop being Alex, the kid her mom left behind, and start being Alex, the whole girl who wasn’t so stupidly needy and volatile. I needed them to know that. I needed them to understand how unimportant I’d been feeling lately and how I felt as though I could trace that unimportance back to the day the police were washing Mom’s brains off the road. And how I could trace that unimportance all the way from that day to the day I left Cole’s house with a bruised cheek. I wished like crazy that I could tell them about Cole hitting me. Then maybe they’d understand why I needed proof that I wasn’t unimportant.
But in order to tell them that, I’d have to let them in on my secret. And now that Cole and I had fixed things, I wasn’t going to do that. I wasn’t going to be the girl who got beaten by her boyfriend. And I wasn’t going to out Cole as the boy who beat his girlfriend because he was frustrated and jealous. He wasn’t always that guy, but nobody would ever understand that.
I was tired of pacing by the time I saw Cole emerge from the side door of the school. I’d cooled off, so much so that I’d gotten cold. I’d zipped my coat to my chin and then pulled my arms up inside it, wrapping them around my waist to keep warm like I used to do when I was a little kid. I knew I looked ridiculous, hopping around, mummylike, inside my coat, but it helped warm me up.
“I thought you’d be inside,” Cole said, coming through the lot in quick, wide strides. The shadows were dense and I couldn’t see his face, but I could see that his fists were clenched at his sides. He hadn’t gotten over the game yet.
“Sorry,” I said. “I wanted the air.”
“I’ll bet,” he said, and he pushed the button to unlock the car.
“Hey, sorry about the game,” I said, shivering harder. “You guys totally should’ve won.”
He’d been reaching for the door handle but stopped short. “Should we have?”
Something about his face warned me. This was one of those nights when I would need to watch what I said, for sure. He looked dangerous, and I knew from the past what dangerous could equal for me.
“I didn’t mean…” I said, then stopped and chewed my lip. My mind raced. What would I say? What could disarm him? “Aren’t we going to Trent’s?”
“No,” he said, reaching out and grabbing my shoulder. He wasn’t clutching it hard, but I couldn’t help feeling that cold feeling slide over me again. All I could think of were those two punches and my cheek throbbing. All I could think about was my neck stiff from lying on one cheek for two days, feigning illness so I wouldn’t have to show people my bruised, puffy face. I couldn’t go through that again.
“No, we’re going to stay here, and you’re going to tell me your theories on how we should have won that game. Since you know so much about basketball.” With that, he shoved me, lightly, knocking me barely to the side. He did it again three or four more times, reminding me of a bear playing with its prey before eating it. “Huh?” he kept saying. “Tell me. How is it we should have won?”
I didn’t say anything. In fact, I tried to react as little as possible, hoping he would lose interest and just get in the car and go to Trent’s and have a drink and be fine again.
But he didn’t lose interest. “Hey, everyone!” he shouted to the empty pa
rking lot. I glanced around but didn’t see anyone in the lot. “Listen up! Turns out my slut girlfriend isn’t just a shitty poet but a sports expert as well. She’s going to tell us all about how to win a basketball game!”
“Cole,” I hissed. “I wasn’t trying to tell you how to win the game. I was just—”
“What? What were you ‘just’? Huh? Go ahead. We’re all waiting.”
He shoved me again, a little harder this time, forcing me to take a step backward. I glanced around nervously. There was no “we” waiting to hear anything. The realization chilled me—there really was nobody out here anymore. He could basically do what he wanted.
“Please, Cole,” I said, my voice wobbly around my words. I hated my voice for sounding like that—like I was pleading for my life—but, in a way, I kind of was. “Can’t we just go to Trent’s now?”
“Can’t we just go to Trent’s now?” he mimicked in a high, sneery voice. Shove. “Can’t we just go to Trent’s now? Please, Cole?” Shove.
I stepped back with each shove, making no move to step toward him again. He was coming to me instead. Shove. Step. Shove. Step. We were several feet from the car now, and getting closer to the shadows of the tree line that bordered the parking lot.
I was pleading with him to stop, wrapping my arms tighter around my middle. I wanted to slip my arms back into their sleeves but was afraid to appear as if I was resisting or, God forbid, going to shove him back. I’d never tried to fight back with Cole before, and I wasn’t going to start now. I was afraid of how hard he would hit me if I did. “Come on, Cole. Let’s just go,” I said, trying to keep my voice low and even, so he couldn’t mock it. So it wouldn’t irritate him. But nothing was working. He was already irritated.
Shove. Step. “You know something, Alex? You’re so incredibly stupid.” Shove. Step. “You think you know everything, too; that’s what kills me. You think you have all the answers. You write one stupid amateur little poem and you think you’re the shit.” Shove. Step. “Nothing worse than a stupid slut girlfriend trying… to tell…” Shove. Step. Stumble. “… you what to do!”