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I barely contain a deep sigh. This is not her trying to come up with a subject change—she asks me this, via phone call or text message, every three or four days. “The same as they’ve been. Bs and Cs, the one A.”
“You’re capable of more than one A, Maverick.”
She always says that, too.
This is the first time I’ve ever been happy to have my mom nagging me. It’s like a sign:she’s here, she’s okay, she feels well enough to hound you about shit you don’t care about.“I know.”
“You can’t count on being a baseball player forever. You have to apply yourself,” she says. “You’re better off than Stephen, at least.”
I barely resist the urge to roll my eyes. “I’m not sure Stephen was really college material, Mom.” I feel a stab of jealousy at the reminder that while my high school friend Stephen already has three minor league seasons under his belt, I’ve been sitting in lecture halls and taking exams. “I think entering the draft out of high school was him playing to his strengths.”
“Well,yourstrength needs to be working hard on your degree,” she continues, not letting it die. “You can come home and see us every night if you want to. But the best thing you can do for me right now is to keep your focus on school. Let your dad and I worry about things here.”
All that is easier said than done, but I tell her what she wants to hear. “Alright.”
“Are you going to go back today?”
“How about next week?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Mom, I need a little more time to get my head around this before I jump back into everything,” I say. “Wednesday.”
Mom smiles as if she’s won, and I realize that I’ve been played. She was always going to give me a couple more days.
She reaches for the plate she made me and shoves it into my hands. “Great. Now eat.”
Chapter Five
Azalea
“Grantjusttextedme,wanting to know if I’ve heard from Mav.” Callie spins her desk chair toward me. There is a textbook open in front of her, but she’s mostly been scrolling on her phone during this study session. I’m sitting on her bed, back against the wall, with my laptop warming my thighs. “I haven’t since Friday. Have you?”
“It’s been a few days,” I tell her, reaching for my own phone and finding my text thread with Maverick. “Yeah. Friday.” I chew on my lower lip, counting the days. It’s Tuesday now—that is quite a while for us to go without speaking, and the texts I’ve sent him in the interim have gone unanswered. “He went home this weekend.”
“Grant says he’s still not back and wasn’t in their marketing class yesterday.”
A wave of unease roils through me. Maverick isn't the best about going to class, but I know that he has been enjoying his marketing elective more than he thought he would. “Did he ask Pax?”
“Yeah. Pax says he hasn’t been by the apartment at all.” Callie thumbs through her phone. “I’m gonna call my mom.”
I try to relax as I return my attention to my computer. I haven’t actually gotten any schoolwork done tonight. Ever since I found my mother’s last name, I’ve been able to think of little else. I only spent one night at my dad’s house before coming back to my apartment, desperate to start looking for information but too paranoid to do it under his roof. In the past few days, I’ve pored through social media profiles, public records, genealogy websites, and every other possible resource I can think of.
The unfortunate reality is that Marie Hall is a common name, and I can count on one hand the identifying details I have about her. Any of these people could be her. There’s every chance in the world I’ve already found her Facebook or Instagram profile and scrolled right on by.
I peruse my latest list of search results, my attention split between that and Callie’s side of the phone conversation. She explains the situation with Maverick, then listens for a while, intermittently uttering “yeah” or “I’m not sure.” When she hangs up, she turns to me and shrugs. “She doesn’t know anything.”
Callie and Maverick grew up three houses apart, and their parents are good friends. “Surely she would if something was wrong?”
“I think so.” She stares at her phone screen for a few moments. I can tell she’s still worried. I am, too. Then she shimmies her shoulders, as if shaking it off, and stands up. “I gotta go. I’m meeting that guy for drinks.”
“Share your location with me.”
“I never turn it off, Mom.” She grabs her textbook from my bed and sashays out of the room.
I roll my eyes and then look back at my computer screen. Callie putters around the apartment for a few minutes before I hear the front door open and close. Deciding that I better do something that’s actually productive, I close out of all my tabs and then open my half-finished lab report.
After a few minutes, it’s clear that I’m not going to get much done. My mind is too muddled with thoughts of my mother, of Maverick. I find myself picking up my phone and scrolling back through our text thread, looking for any clue as to why he’s fallen off the face of the earth. Finding no answers, I bite the bullet and call him.
