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“We weren’t friends before, and things were fine,” I told him, tilting my head to peer up at him for the first time. Even in the dim moonlight, there was no missing the confusion shimmering in his eyes. “I think…I think we should go back to before. You’ve got Cindy, anyway. You’re going to homecoming together. Josh is coming with us, so… This is for the best. Yeah.” I nodded quickly, assuring myself that if I said it enough times, it’d come true. “This is for the best.”
Reed drew in a breath, and as he did, something changed. He straightened his spine, rocked on his heels, but there was a fundamental change that I couldn’t pinpoint right away. The confusion was gone now, replaced by something fiercer, and he reached for my hand. “Listen, I haven’t—”
“Reed!”
The name was like a gunshot, splintering apart the moment, and it was one that had me hitting the deck. The area by the slide had opaque partitions, so once I ducked down, I was safely out of view. My knees slammed against the ground hard enough to rattle the structure, reminding me that this was made for kids, not seniors in high school.
“I thought that was you.” Rachel’s voice carried louder as she came closer. I pressed my palms over my mouth, letting out gasping breaths through my parted fingers.She didn’t see me, she didn’t see me. “What are you doing out here so late?”
“H-How did you know I was here?” Reed asked, and despite the stutter, his voice came off normal. Casual.
“Twin telepathy,” Rachel returned, and then the crunching of her footsteps over the mulch stopped. “Is… Do you have someone up there with you?”
Reed didn’t even blink. “No.”
“I thought I heard another voice.”
“Maybe you need your twin telepathy checked.”
I shifted my weight on the wooden deck boards, the coolness clinging to my bare legs. It felt like a sliver was trying to embed itself underneath my knee. He was considerably a better liar than me. When we’d been in this situation a few weeks ago, with him hiding behind his kitchen island after the kiss of a lifetime, I’d been much more frantic.
“So, you’re just hanging out at a park alone? Like a creeper?”
“I get that a lot.” Still without looking, Reed reached down and nudged my shoulder, nearly off-balancing me. “How’d you know I was missing, anyway? I thought you were asleep.”
“Please, it’s still early. I came to ask you a question about our Physics homework, and you weren’t in your room. Are you going to come down or am I going to have to shout up to you? Or I could come up.”
“No!” Reed’s response was a short shout, one that echoed around the street. “I’ll—I’ll come down. One second.”
He crouched down at the entrance of the slide and turned to cast a look at me now that he was hidden, too. “Ava,” Reed whispered, knuckles white as he grasped the bar over the slide.
“Goodnight, Reed,” I murmured, my heart giving a left-overthud-thudfrom the situation.And goodbye.
He opened his mouth to say something, but the plastic slide echoed as Rachel, presumedly, thumped it. “Come on. What, did you get stuck?”
Reed’s eyes fluttered closed for a second before he turned away from me, and without another mumbled word, he disappeared down the slide. I stared into the pitch-black tube, and a few seconds later, I heard him sigh. “All right, let’s go.”
“Are you going to tell me why you’re out here all by yourself?” Rachel asked him, voice suspicious.
No, I thought as his confession came back to me. I wasn’t the only one keeping things under lock and key these past few weeks. I knew for a fact that Rachel had no clue Reed had been the one to find out about his father’s affair first. She’d always told me that her dad came clean on his own.Reed won’t say a thing.
I could hear their footsteps crunch over the mulch as they walked away, and without thinking it through, I raised onto my knees enough to peek over the ledge of the play gym. It was risky. At any moment, Rachel could’ve turned around and seen me—or seen someone’s head poking over—but I didn’t duck away. Not until they both stepped onto the sidewalk and disappeared behind Mrs. Baxter’s overgrown hedges.
With a shaky breath out, I sank to the cold wooden floorboards and rested my head against the edge of the slide, staring through the now dark and quiet structure. Now that Reed left, the magic and fun had gone with him, leaving the playground once more feeling abandoned and empty.
I didn’t know how long I sat there, listening to the wind whistle through the structure, but by the time I got up, my legs had long since gone numb.
“Tell me again why you don’t want to go to the party tonight,” Rachel groaned from her position on her bed.
“It’s a Thursday,” I replied calmly, using her vanity mirror to twist my hair into a bun. Mom was out with friends, and I’d been at Rachel’s house for over an hour now, avoiding the quiet of my own. “I’d rather play it lowkey.”
“Lowkey.” The word was a muttering scoff. “Ava, the entire school’s going to be at this party!”
“Maisie won’t be.” She was helping her mom out at the art gallery downtown. Her mom was a curator there, and this week was their Brentwood Town Spirit exhibit—or something like that. “Besides, it’s not like we could stay long, anyway. You have a ten o’clock curfew.”
Rachel cast a sad glance toward the digital clock on her desk, the numbers8:44staring back unforgivingly.
Every Thursday before the big game, someone from the football team threw a party to celebrate. Last year, Connor had been the one who hosted the party, filling his fancy house on Bleeker Avenue to the brim. This year, the responsibility fell to one of the defensive linemen, Ashton. I’d already gotten a few submissions through Babble about how big his house was—small—and how many people had shown up—many—so I was staying firm to my objection.
