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And there were photos, one of the whole team, one of Taylor in a serving motion, and...one of her house at 1040 Fox Avenue. My parents’ house. Taken from google maps, it was captioned with:Taylor’s house in River Valley.
It was that photograph that had everyone snickering, yet something felt off about the last paragraph, grammatically weak, like Millie hadn’t written it. And more, why would she mention where Taylor lived. I smelled a rat.
I jumped up, scanning the room. Taylor didn’t always eat in the cafeteria, but if she did, it was often with Lucy, Victoria and Hannah. But Lucy was with us, and my second glance for Millie showed she was nowhere to be seen either.
Bianca tried to call the meeting to order but my intuition told me to seek out Taylor. The tennis team had a match over at Hastings High today, so they would be leaving in the school van to travel there. With Addison in that type of mood, the trip could be hellish for Taylor. I needed to see if she was okay, and warn her if she didn’t already know.
A quick peek in the gym, a few classrooms, down the hallways, but it was like she’d vanished.
Chapter 16
Taylor
An eerie silence fellover the van as I stepped inside, like all the chatter stopped. Not everyone was seated yet, Bianca was out talking to Mrs. Stephens, and Esther was rechecking she’d packed everything in her bag. But after a deliberate giggle, Jorja and Addison hushed, which made everyone else go quiet.
I slipped into the window seat of the first row, smiling at Grace who was seated directly behind me. Another superstition, but I’d sat in this seat every time we’d gone for an away game. Of course, the first time was because I had no friends, but that was different now.
Grace leaned over the seat and whispered, “Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” I said. Sure, I was a little nervous about playing the top ranked school, Hastings High, and an opponent I knew nothing about, but pre-game nerves were all part of the sport. “How’s your ankle?” Grace had tweaked it in training the day before.
“It’s fine. I’ve strapped it as a precaution, but it should be good,” she said.
I nodded and put in my air pods. Another routine that worked for me was to listen to music. It put me in a chill place—and drowned out the shrill pitches of Addison, Jorja and Bianca’s voices.
But as I was about to slouch down in my seat, Addison appeared, plonking herself down on the seat next to me. I removed an air pod.
“That was a really great article in the Times,” she said, yet the words neither matched her tone or the heavy lidded look of her eyes. She reached out and patted my knee and, with a wink, said, “It’s so great that you were able to get the scholarship and come from River Valley every day, all the way to Covington Heights.”
I stared at her blankly. At the most, River Valley was a fifteen minute drive away, ten if the traffic was light.
“I hope it’s not as bad as it looks,” she said, still with her hand on my knee. “I know there are some pretty—” she lowered her voice, “awfulneighborhoods over there.” Her sympathetic fake smile exposed her excessively white teeth. “I’m sorry, honey.”
With another wink, she leapt up, almost colliding with Bianca who entered the van and closed the door behind her.
“Let’s do this Maroons!” Bianca shouted as she followed Addison to the back row. I didn’t join in the cheer, a little stunned by Addison’s remarks. Only one person knew where I lived, knew that I lived in that ramshackle house on Fox Avenue, the one that needed a severe makeover—Max Saunders.
