Page 99

“I want you to try and remember what it was like to have been very young. And particularly the days when you were first in love […] Will you remember that, please?”

—Thornton Wilder, Our Town

Reed didn’t say a word as I led him away from the party and into the woods that eventually ended at the small gravel parking lot of Bud & Bloom, our local florist. I motioned for him to go up the ladder of my brother Robbie’s old treehouse and followed him, sitting so our legs touched and dangled off the edge. The treehouse’s roof blew off in a storm a few years ago, but the floor, railings, and ladder were still sturdy enough.

“I shouldn’t have worn the damn tie.” He yanked the knot till the tie hung loosely. “I looked like an idiot.”

“You look great.” I placed a hand on his shoulder, but he shrugged it off.

“Everyone else was in a suit.”

“Why should you care about what everyone else wears?”

“Good point. I never used to…till recently,” he muttered.

“Recently”?

I opened my mouth and then shut it quickly. Something was seriously stirring inside of him. I had never seen him so tense before, even on the mound.

After a long moment of silence, Reed finally spoke. “She’s not wrong, you know. Ms. Gratton, I mean.”

“Not wrong about what?” I asked.

“About it being a lot of pressure.” He rolled an acorn back and forth. “It has been hard to keep it together.”

I placed my hand on his leg. “But your team is undefeated. You’re all playing so well—”

“We’ve gotten lucky more than once. We almost lost the last game.”

“But even if you had, you’d still probably make it to the championship. You still will. It’s just one more game.”

“A championship I have to win.” He leaned his forehead against the railing, keeping his eyes toward the noise from the party. “If I don’t…”

“Your grandparents lose some of their sales. I know—”

“Forty percent isn’t ‘some,’ Eliza. That’s almost half. They’ll lose the farm.”

“I know.” Hollowness settled into my gut. “And if we lose, we’ll have to move. It sucks either way.”

“What?”

My empty stomach turned sour. “A new town my senior year. I won’t know anyone. Wherever I go, the theater department won’t put a new girl in the booth. And everything I worked for will be for nothing—”

“Moving is hard. I get it.” He flicked the acorn into the brush below. “But your family will still be together. You’ll still have your money. You guys will be okay. Mine may lose everything, Eliza. Everything.”

“I know.” My palms started sweating.

“You just can’t understand what people like us go through.”

“ ‘People like us’?”

He sighed. “My family. Farmers. You just…you don’t understand what it’s like to live paycheck to paycheck or harvest to harvest.”

That’s true.

But I had seen it with others like Lauryn or the Browns. How it wore on them, made them look tired and sad. Lauryn gave up a lot of her earnings when she first started making jewelry just so she and her mom could pay the bills or fill up the tank for the car they shared. And once, while getting a haircut, I overheard Mrs. Brown, two chairs away from me, speaking about their thrift store and how they’d need to take out a second mortgage just to keep their house. I didn’t even know you could do that—take out a second mortgage. That must’ve felt so scary.

Something sharp pinched in my heart as I turned toward him. “So why don’t you tell me about it?”