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When he looks up from the machine, his eyes are full of warning. “You got any other questions?”
I shouldn’t. I know better. The more I ask him right now, the faster he’ll shut down.
“Why didn’t you ever say?”
“You didn’t ask. ”
“If I’d asked, would you have told me?”
West shrugs, but he’s scowling. “Sure. Why not?”
“I don’t believe you. ”
He shakes his head, but he doesn’t say anything more. I watch as he goes over to the shelf, flips the top bread recipe to the bottom of the pile, and starts working on whatever is next on his list. His lips move in a whisper, words he’s making only for himself. He could be repeating the ingredients on the list, except it’s just like the clipboard—I know for a fact he already has those recipes memorized.
I go back to the dill bread, furious and hot, my heart aching.
He has a sister called Frankie. He’s wearing her love for him on his wrist, and I’m glad for him. I’m glad there’s someone else in the world who cares about him enough to press the letters of his name into leather, word into flesh, an act of memory.
I do it sometimes, in the dark. Lie in my bed, staring at the crosshatched pattern of springs supporting Bridget’s mattress above my head and drawing the letters of West’s name on my body.
W-E-S-T across my stomach, around the side. I use my fingernail, only my fingernail, and bring up goose bumps.
W-E-S-T along my sternum. Over my collarbone and down the swell of my breast, tripping and catching on my nipple.
His name feels like a secret, and now he’s wearing it on his wrist. I want to know all about this girl who put it there. What she looks like. If she’s got freckles, fair hair or dark, like his. If she’s scrappy or ethereal, funny or serious, scrape-kneed or ladylike.
I know that she loves him, so I want to know everything else.
But West doesn’t want to share her with me.
I shouldn’t keep trying to scale these walls he puts up. I’m a terrible climber.
I don’t like arguing, and he doesn’t owe me a thing.
“Get down on your hands and knees,” Quinn says, pointing. “And put your arm over Gwen’s back. ”
The grass is cold. Dampness soaks through the knees of my sweatpants more or less immediately, but I have a feeling it’s not the worst thing that’s going to happen to me in the next few minutes. I’m tacking myself on to what Quinn calls the “scrum”—a word that sounds enough like scrotum to make me uncomfortable.
Author: Robin York
But not as uncomfortable as I feel slinging my arm around a stranger’s back.
We are a tightly formed cluster of three rows of women, hands clutching shirts, shoulders into shoulders, and hips into hips. Quinn says that in a minute our eight people are going to shove against their eight people, and then the ball will get rolled down the middle and … something. She briefed me on a lot of these rules on the way over, but when she said I’d be tackling people, she failed to mention the largeness of the people I’m meant to tackle.
Behind me, another player puts her head down and jams her shoulders into the two second-row players I’m flanking. She grasps a fistful of my T-shirt with one hand.
“All set?” Quinn asks.
“Um, no?”
She gives me a sunny smile. “You’ll figure it out. ” She starts jogging backward to the sidelines, where she grabs a ball. “All right, let’s do this thing!”
Seconds later she’s rolling it between the two halves of the scrum, and my whole side of the formation is lurching forward. I have to scramble to hold on to Gwen as the grass tries to slip out from beneath my shoes. There’s grunting and shoving, another rapid forward lurch, and someone shouts, “Ball’s out. ” The whole thing kind of collapses and dissolves at the same time, and I just stand there, dazed, as everyone else on the field runs away.
“It’s your ball, Caroline!” Quinn shouts. “Follow it!”
I spend the next half hour feeling like a very dumb kid sister, trailing after the older girls and shouting, Hey, wait up!
