Love Edy (10 page)

“Cake,” Edy said.

Cake. As in what Hassan called her.

“You always talk as if the two of you live
together,” Wyatt said. He heard the envy in his voice and buried
it.

Edy shrugged it off.

“So . . . he’s like a brother then?” Wyatt
tried again.

She paused. Considered. “No. Not
really.”

Wyatt glanced at the Phelps home, a towering
lemon-colored dollhouse, accentuated with hints of pearl. He
scowled when the front door opened.

Hassan. That guy again. The guy who kept
busy enough for his lifelong friend to feel slighted, but
nonetheless had a knack for finding her in Wyatt’s company
anyway.

“I speak English, Punjabi, and Hindi,” Edy
said. “And all of them better than
him
.”

She nodded toward the sturdy ninth grader
emerging from her home, a guy who should’ve been promoted to the
tenth off size alone. When their gazes met, Wyatt offered something
of a disarming smile. It wasn’t returned.

“No argument from me,” Hassan said and
pressed a kiss to her forehead. He’d wrapped a hand around her
forearm to do it, and pressed lips to a place near her temple.
Wyatt wondered what he was thinking, what he was feeling, and
whether he knew that Wyatt envied him more in that moment than in
any single one on the field.

He kept his lips there too long. But if
anyone seemed to notice, no one cared.

Except Wyatt.

“How goes it, Slim?” Hassan said when he
parted from her.

“What?” Wyatt blinked.

“He asked how you were doing,” Edy said.

“Oh. Fine. Just returning from ballet with
Edy.”

Hassan raised a brow. “Yeah? Sit in
often?”

That wasn’t the question, of course. There
was a conversation within a conversation here that Edy wouldn’t be
able to sense.

“I do actually,” Wyatt said. “Why? Did
you?”

Nothing.

But then he saw it: a ripple beneath
otherwise calm waters. A flicker of menace dissolved in an
instant.

“Let’s go, Edy. I’ve got three hours before
I hit the gym with the Dysons. That’s enough for a movie.”

Hassan placed an arm around Edy’s shoulders
and steered her toward the house. Wyatt couldn’t help but notice
the easy way she turned for his touch.

But then she stopped.

“I’ll give you a call later on, Wyatt. We
can do homework later or something,” Edy said.

Hassan stopped, every muscle in his back and
arms rendered taunt as a bowstring. When they started off again,
Wyatt couldn’t keep the grin from his face.

~~~

Hassan slipped onto the back porch of the
Phelps’ house just in time to see Edy kneel, a bowl of milk in one
hand, two open cans of tuna in the other. They were perched on the
cusp of November, with the vibrant shimmers of autumn already
having dwindled to a listless frozen winter. Edy bunched the fabric
of a wool coat together to shield herself from the brisk breeze.
Just as she made it to the porch, a gray shorthair cat curled out
from under the stairs and bounded up to meet her. A mangy black cat
followed on its heels, and after that, two more, both striped steel
and white. The last of the bunch had a back paw out of sync and
nursed it on a tentative climb up, the last in a procession of
strays.

Edy went for the hurt one first, scooping
him into her arms. She plucked a choice chunk of white tuna and
held it under the cat’s nose. Tiny teeth tore the chunk in two
before it disappeared from sight altogether. When he was done, Edy
dug out another, larger piece, and carried him over to the
milk.

For their entire lives, Edy’s mother had
been screaming about the strays. Once, she’d threatened to drown
them. Hassan knew, not because he’d been there, but because Edy had
run to him, crying and threatening to run away. He’d been ready to
run with her then. He’d run with her now.

“Ready for ballet?” Hassan said, trying to
unhinge the old memory with a shake of his head.

“You’re here to walk me?” Edy sounded
surprised.

“As soon as you’re ready,” Hassan said. He
shifted, suddenly hyper-aware of his body’s breath, movements, and
proximity to her. Seeing her with the strays, remembering her
coming to him like that . . . He cleared his throat and looked
away. “Do you need another minute with the cats or something?”

“I’m ready,” she said. “It’s just . .
.Wyatt’s agreed to walk me.” She shot a look at her house,
past
her house.

Wyatt.

Hassan couldn’t help but wonder what else he
had offered to do. “I’m here now,” he said. “So, there’s really no
need.”

Edy dropped her gaze. She returned to her
cats, picking up an empty can of albacore and running a finger
along the inside before offering her findings to a weak cat that
licked from her finger.

“It’s alright,” Edy said. “He likes it. He
enjoys walking me and he enjoys sitting in on the lessons.”

“For two and a half hours?” Hassan said,
deadpan.

“Yes!”

“Yeah, right,” he snapped.

She stood. Gentleness washed away as her jaw
set and hands clenched, giving her a ferociousness that likened her
to her mother.

“Is it really so hard? To imagine someone
with me when it isn’t their duty?”

“Edy—”

He took a step forward and the cats
scattered. They knew only her, trusted only her.

“Listen to me. Listen good. He’s after
something. And if he gets it, I’ll snap off his—”

“Hassan.”

Apparently it wasn’t the right thing to say,
as Edy’s face turned like the clouds on thunder’s approach. “Go.
Away. Find someone else to babysit,” she said.

She started for the house. Hassan took
after. Edy wasn’t listening. She wasn’t even trying to listen.
Instead, she wanted to scramble everything he said.

Well, he’d make her listen. “Edy—”

She whirled on him, eyes wide, nostrils
flared. “Let me guess. He’s using me. Because no one could actually
want
me, right? I’m not some redhead with humongous boobs
and kissable lips!”

“Edy,” Hassan said. “Would you stop that,
please? You don’t know . . . ”

But the truth was,
he
didn’t know. He
didn’t know what he was feeling or what his next words would
be.

“Forget it,” she said, face suddenly slacked
with fatigue. “It’s nothing. I just—” She turned away from him,
“you should leave me alone right now.”

Hassan stared at her back, rigid with
resolve. And yet . . . he had this overwhelming urge to say some-
-thing, do something, to connect with her so that the ice and the
freeze evaporated between them.

“Cake—”

She slipped into the house, silent; no
longer interested in anything he had to say.

~~~

Wyatt crossed the street to the Phelps’
house at the exact moment that Hassan exploded from the front door.
Hassan stalked down Edy’s walkway, burst through the fence, and
made it halfway down the sidewalk when he stopped, taking note of
Wyatt.

She chose me,
Wyatt reminded himself.
Hassan was there to walk her, but she chose me.

Be steady. Be steady, despite Hassan’s
caustic glare. No ass kicking will actually commence.

The front door flung open again, and Edy
stormed out, stopping to kick it closed behind her. She slung a
backpack on and threw up her hood before charging from the yard
onward, in the direction of practice. Without Wyatt.

So much for victories.

He took off at a trot to catch her. “Hey,
wait! Did you forget about me?”

He didn’t see how she could, when he took so
much care to ensure she didn’t: lunch every day, walks home from
school and to practice, text messages, phone calls, emails. Wyatt
not only had Edy’s schedule memorized but knew every nook and
cranny of it that he could exploit.

She shot him an impatient look.

“I have to get to practice, okay? So, if
you’re not ready to go—”

She glanced down at his hooded sweatshirt,
no doubt looking for a coat he didn’t own.

“I was standing right here, ready,” Wyatt
said. “Here before you.”

Hassan called out to her from his place on
the sidewalk. Wyatt hesitated.

“Edy,” Wyatt said. “You don’t have time
to—”

She headed back.

Wyatt backtracked, too, staying just close
enough to be in hearing range but just out of arm’s reach. Since
the moment he had taken to being Edy’s constant companion, Hassan’s
brooding glares had registered as adequate warning. Wyatt treaded
near him with care.

Edy went to Hassan, who stood with hands
burrowed in his pockets, eyes weary and thoughtful.

He pulled her into his arms.

Long seconds passed, maybe even a minute,
where he held her. Only held her. His chin brushed against her
forehead—maybe even his lips, before he murmured something, too
soft for Wyatt’s ears. When they parted again, their hands were the
last to separate. Edy turned back to Wyatt, eyes brimming with the
threat of tears.

“What?” he whispered the second she stood
close enough. “What’s happened?”

Wyatt verified that Hassan was out of
hearing range before speaking his next words. While he had no means
to punish Hassan for any form of maltreatment, it seemed that
implying he could or would, would only help his cause.

“Tell me what he said,” Wyatt insisted.
“Now.”

She looked up with eyes way too beautiful,
brimming with intensity, more alive than ever.

“He asked me if I still knew he’d run away
with me,” Edy whispered. “That he’d take it, if that were ever an
option.”

She choked out a hiccupping laugh, wiped her
face on her sleeve, and took off, leaving Wyatt to look from one of
them to the other, desperate to understand a message never meant
for him.

~~~

Wyatt supposed that coming to South End
qualified as a raw deal. After all, he’d been jettisoned over the
course of a week from the known to the unknown, and the unknown had
been about as receptive of him as the bars in Charterdee were of
his dad. When the pressing need came for Wyatt and his family to
get out of town, South End became their first and only option. But
it wasn’t the roll of the die it appeared to be. Wyatt’s mom, who
had once been as beautiful as her one-time supermodel sister,
called on that sister to bail them from yet another nightmare. She
did so with a caveat, as everything came from Cecily Jacobs with a
tangle of strings attached. Wyatt’s aunt, who lived in Milan,
wanted property in Sci-Sci, though real estate was rare there. One
house sat on the market and it had done so for close to a decade.
Since Wyatt’s dad was something of a handyman, Cecily agreed to buy
the property and rent it out to them at a significant discount,
should the Greens fix it up while there. While no one liked to be
indebted to Cecily for anything, it was a solution at a time when
no others appeared.

Not every face was unfamiliar to Wyatt at
South End High. After all, his mother’s roots came back there, even
if her downtrodden state didn’t show it. Still, those were his
mother’s memories, not his own, and at a time when he could only
grin and bear conditions he’d brought on, Wyatt looked forward with
breath-stealing trepidation to his new start. How could he not? He
spent every free moment thinking of the girl he’d met on his first
day. He anticipated every brush with her in the hall, only to
replay it in his mind, like a game changer at the Super Bowl. The
walks home, the ballet, he longed for the days when he could do
more than watch her, when he could reach out and hold her, when his
lips could demand hers, when she trembled for his touch. It was all
he thought about, every day, without end.

Wyatt pushed through the press of a bustling
hall at lunchtime, eyes keen in their search for Edy. They met at
the space between his locker and hers, every day since the first
meal they’d shared. Three minutes from math to the meeting place
for her, fifteen seconds from world history there for him.

But he was only a little late that day, held
up by a bumbling and hulking black guy in a football jersey who had
a ton of questions and no clue how to get out the way. An awkward
shift left and an awkward shift right and finally Wyatt resigned
himself to explaining what they’d just been tested on. What was the
point, he wondered. But the boy said he’d wanted to know for future
reference.

Wyatt made it to the place where the lockers
met the fountains at the exact same moment that he spotted Hassan.
Hassan draped an arm around Edy and wheeled her in the direction of
the cafeteria. She tossed a look back only to have their field of
vision split by two copies of the same person.

Four hands seized Wyatt by the shirt and
pitched him headfirst into a pile of people. Everyone scattered,
shrugging away from his outstretched hands, backs at the wall in an
instant. The crowd’s density saved him for a second, keeping him
from a fall before hands pawed him again. Matthew and Mason, Mason
and Matthew, Wyatt couldn’t tell one from the other. No matter,
both held him, gripping him by the shirt, wrenching it up to his
throat and exposing his back to the masses.

They laughed, expectation painting
everyone’s faces.

“Bathroom,” one twin said and they hurled
Wyatt toward it. The first paused to open the door, the second to
fling him in. “You’ve got two minutes to convince us you’re not
trying to get your pogo stick in Edy.”

“What? No!” Wyatt didn’t even know which
twin had spoken. Mouth dry, throat closed, he looked from one to
the other, pulse shallow, breath absent.

Lawrence slipped in, closed the door behind
him, and leaned against it. One of his older brothers took a seat
on the sink’s ledge; the other hovered over Wyatt.

“Jesus,” Wyatt said, cheeks flushed with the
shame of their words. “I just got to this school. I just met
her.”