You and Everything After

Last night was the first one in a few that I went over to his room alone, without Rowe. Nate was at workouts, like he usually is at that time, and their relationship was literally all we talked about. And that’s when I started to get the strange feeling that Ty might be focusing so much on his brother’s problems to avoid something else—something like me…and us.

This is how one negative thought burns a hole in my chest. It plants a seed, settling in and festering like a wound, an ulcer trying to interrupt my heart’s rhythm. There’s a cloud over me today. It’s black. And I blame the seed. My cloud started to form when I woke up with a little bit of numbness in my toes. It faded, but instead of victory, I waited for the next sign of something wrong. My waiting was rewarded when the numbness was replaced by panic after I realized I completely failed to study for my physics test. Now, I’ll have to spend the morning before I compete with the women’s squad retaking a failed exam in the tutoring lab. And all of it is weighing me down mentally now, making me slow at workouts…where I’m supposed to impress Coach Pennington, and convince him to add me to his roster in the spring.

My cloud—born from that tiny seed—gains power every time Ty doesn’t look at me. And it might all just be crazy shit I’ve cooked up in my head; in fact, the rational side of my brain knows this to be true. But it’s also so damned real, so tangible, that I feel sick running my heart out on this field while he sits on the sidelines watching. My black cloud tells me it’s just a matter of time before he cuts me loose, moves on from his project.

Stupid seed of doubt and black cloud.

I take my break on the opposite side of the field, and Coach Pennington jogs over, slapping my shoulder with approval and a smile. “Looking good, Owens. Keep this up, I think there’s more in your tank,” he says, reenergizing my tired body and wiping my slate clean of clouds for a few brief seconds. The storm comes again, though, when I feel the scowls of the three girls standing by the cooler next to me.

“Owens. You played for Tech,” the girl closest to me says. Her hair is jet black, long, and pulled into a ponytail. She looks strong—fast, too. And she’s the only one of the three who doesn’t look like she resents me being here.

“I did,” I say, my guard still up, albeit a little less.

“Right. My cousin’s Tab Snyder. I thought I recognized you,” she says. Tabitha Snyder was our goalie in high school—she ended up playing for UCLA, where I would have played if I stayed on the path I was on before my diagnosis.

“How is Tab?” I ask, excited to be starting a conversation with one of the girls. There’s almost a sense of relief, but it’s quickly extinguished when she doesn’t answer my question, and instead pretends not to have heard me at all. She tosses her paper cup into the trash and eyes me one last time over her shoulder while she slithers back up with her friends.

The whistle could not have come at a more perfect moment.

I was done.

Life is a series of choices. My mom is always talking about free will, and how we are like marbles, rolling around through life, our paths constantly shifting based on whatever choices we make. Funny, though—no matter how many times I choose to leave my old life behind, it still manages to find me.

I shouldn’t be listening. I should just walk out of the locker room, slamming the door behind me to let them know how close they were to getting caught. But my weaker side forces me to hold my breath, not to zip my bag closed completely, and to lift my feet from the bench and make myself small so I can capture every single cruel word coming from their lips.

“I heard she slept with her coach,” one of the girls says, her whisper not really much of a whisper at all.

“No, it wasn’t her coach,” another girl says. It sounds like the girl I spoke to, Tabitha’s cousin. “It was a teacher. She’s a total homewrecker. The guy was married.”

“Oh my god, do you think that’s why she’s out here now? Would coach really put her on the team just because she slept with him?” the first girl says.

“Probably. I mean, Coach P. is lonely,” Tabitha’s cousin says, and the sound of her locker shutting follows, blended with arrogance and laughter.

My vision is clouding, but it isn’t from the MS—it’s from the sting of tears I’m fighting desperately to keep from falling. It’s been months since I’ve heard the whispers. My father made sure that the whispering back home stopped. It’s amazing what a well-written letter from one of California’s top law firms can do to gossip. But that letter seems only to have power back home—there are new rules here.