Thousand Words (12 page)

I texted back:
???

Vonnie inched forward behind a van, which we were pretty sure belonged to one of the sophomores’ mommies.

Car stratification was very important in our school. You could always tell who was who by what they drove. Minivan or Volvo? A sophomore driving his parents’ car. Old-fart car with bumper stickers that said stuff like
MY OTHER CAR IS A TRUCK
, half ripped off? A junior with her first wheels of her own. Brand-new Mustang parked way out by the art modular? Totally a senior’s car. And a beater, half rusted, half spray-painted, all four tires were spares? Dopeheads. You stayed away from those cars. Unless you wanted administration searching your locker during pot busts.

“We exacted justice for you,” Vonnie said.

“For me? What are you talking about?”

“You shouldn’t be mad. It was all out of love,” Cheyenne said, patting me on the shoulder.

“I don’t even know what to be mad about,” I said, though I was getting there. Whatever they’d done, they were acting totally sketchy about it.

Annie leaned forward. “We told the world what’s what.”

Vonnie inched forward some more, hitting the brakes in little taps that made us all look like we were moving to the beat of a song only we could hear. The van in front of us took too long to turn and she laid on her horn.

She glanced at me. “You’re going to love this, Buttercup. We got him back.”

“Him who?”

As if in answer, my phone buzzed again. I glanced down. Kaleb.
Oh, no. They didn’t.
I opened the text.

Things clicked into place. “You shaving-creamed Kaleb’s house?” Spraying shaving cream onto someone’s window screens was big when we were in junior high. The cream was hard to get out, because it liked to foam up when you washed it, plus it cleaned the screens, so whatever you’d written stood out even after you’d washed it off, and the person who got creamed ended up having to scrub their whole screen. It was a big pain in the butt, which made it hilarious, but we hadn’t done it since we were twelve.

The girls burst into laughter once again as the van in front of us finally inched out onto the road toward the school and Vonnie whipped around him and flung her car into the parking lot.

“The front windows at his parents’ house,” she said between guffaws.

“And we shoe-polished his truck windows,” Cheyenne added. “Though we have to give Vonnie most of the credit for that one. She’s quite the artist, especially when it comes to drawing penises.”

More laughter, during which my throat felt stuck together, it was so dry. It was all seriously funny, true, but I could tell from Kaleb’s texts that he was not feeling it. And I couldn’t say I could blame him. “You drew penises on his truck windows?”

“She also wrote ‘I love dicks,’ ” Annie said, but she was
laughing so hard she had to pause several times before she could get the word “dicks” out.

“And we wrote ‘small penis inside’ on his window screens. Nothing major. It will all wash out. Don’t look so mad, Buttercup. It was the least he deserved after what he did to you.”

“I’m not mad,” I said, but my voice felt very small, and my hands were sweating.

I texted Kaleb back:
WASN’T ME.

They continued talking, telling me about their mishaps and close calls, and the laughter would not stop and I was getting a headache trying to keep my mouth pulled into a grin like I thought this was the funniest thing ever, all the while hoping Kaleb didn’t hate me too much, and knowing that he probably did. Wouldn’t I have hated someone if I’d thought they’d done something like that to me?

Finally, as Vonnie pulled into her usual parking space, my phone buzzed for the last time that morning:

I knew cross-country was the place I was going to miss Kaleb the most. Running sort of belonged to us, in a way. It was
part of who we were. We met during a 5K, we sat together on the bus to every meet, we ran side by side in practice, racing, and we cheered each other on during competitions. When Coach Igo gave me a hard time for being slow, Kaleb rallied for me. And when I wanted to quit—which was about every other day—Kaleb talked me down. We both had other friends on the team, but we’d built our own little cocoon within those friends, and that was where we hung out the most, just the two of us. When Kaleb went to college, he took with him my biggest reason for wanting to stay on cross-country. Without him it was hot and sticky and I was winded and tired and sick of doing the same sport I’d done since eighth grade.

But with the two of us broken up, it was even worse. Before, I had hoped he’d drive home to see me run in a couple of meets, but now I knew that would never happen. I imagined him stretching out in another field with another girl, a college girl, looking at that girl’s shorts as she pulled ahead of him in a race, holding her gym bag for her.

It didn’t help that his last text was a threat and he’d sounded so much like he hated my guts. I’d texted him back, telling him that it wasn’t me, that someone else must have done it, that I hadn’t even known anything about it until I’d heard this morning. He never responded. No way would he believe me; not with the timing of it happening right after our breakup. Even if I could convince him that it was Vonnie, he’d only think I put her up to it. I even called him during lunch period, slipping out the performing arts center doors, where all the smokers hid behind the bushes, but he didn’t answer.

Part of me was really angry with Vonnie, even though I knew her heart was in the right place.

In between classes and at lunch, she kept telling me I was too quiet.
I know you’re mad, Buttercup,
she’d said,
but you’ll get over it, and then you’ll thank me. Totally. Come on, admit it. It was hilarious what we did.

I’d smiled, told her again that I wasn’t mad, that it was hilarious, and that I was sad about breaking up with him, that was all. But on the inside I felt like she’d ruined everything, and wished she’d just stayed out of my business.

I dressed in my running clothes and used the bench to stretch my calves, then headed outside into the heat, squinting and shading my eyes with my arm.

“Glad to see you could show up,” Coach Igo said, standing at the gym door. “I thought you’d given up on our team. You’re late.”

“Sorry, Coach,” I said. “I’ve got a lot going on.”

She frowned at me. “I can guarantee you the Washington Springs girls’ team doesn’t have a lot going on,” she said. “The only thing they’ve got going on is practice. First meet’s next week. You can’t afford to have a lot going on. At this point, I’m not sure if you’ll be running against them.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said miserably, bracing myself for more punishment. I’d seen Coach Igo make teammates run bleachers for being late, even when they had a good excuse. I had nothing.

She stared me down for a minute longer, then sighed.
“First group took off a few minutes ago. You can run with Adrian, Philippa, and Neesy. We’ll gather on the track for a talk when everyone’s back.”

“Okay,” I said, and gratefully ducked into the small cluster of senior girls shifting from foot to foot, gathering their hair up in ponytails, retying their shoes. They were our fastest runners. I’d be huffing and puffing to keep up with them, and Coach knew that. But at least I wasn’t running up and down the bleachers until my quads practically burst through my skin. She was definitely going easy on me.

We ran through the parking lot and took a left into the residential neighborhood that surrounded our favorite running trail. It was shaded in the hot weather, like today, and we sweated less there. In a month or so, all those leaves would be dropping to the ground and making the trail soft underfoot. I loved the muted
whup whup whup
sound my sneakers made on it in the fall; as if I weren’t running so much as I was bouncing on a cloud.

I let my mind wander as we turned onto the trail, immediately going up a hill that had me sucking wind. Neesy was so fast.

My face slid in and out of the dappled sunlight filtering through the trees, and the strobe effect calmed me, relaxed me. I remembered running over the same stretch of trail with Kaleb last fall, both of us wearing caps and gloves with our shorts and T-shirts. Kaleb’s cheeks had looked mottled and his nose had been bright red with cold. His eyes were watering from the wind, the tears streaming back toward his ears.

We’d passed a couple of walkers, a gray-haired man and a woman with a cane. They were bundled up, shuffling slowly along, holding hands. They looked content, like being together was all they’d planned to accomplish that day. We automatically shifted so that Kaleb was behind me to share the trail with them, and then veered back together after we’d passed them.

We ran in silence for so long, both lost in our thoughts, I was surprised when he spoke, between measured breaths.

“So you think… we’ll be like that?”

I glanced at him. “Like what?”

He motioned with his gloved thumb over his shoulder. “Like them… the old people.”

“Be like them how?… You mean old?”

“No.” He stopped, bent over, and put his hands on his knees, puffs of breath crowding around his face. It took me a few strides to realize we were stopping. I went back to him. He stood up and grabbed my hands. “I mean, will we be walking this trail together when we’re old? Will we be holding hands? In love like they are?”

I smiled, and it felt like all the blood in my body rushed straight to the center of my chest. Warmth flooded me, and I didn’t care about the wind and the cold. I held tight to his hands. “I hope so,” I said, and he pulled me in by the waist, halfway lifting me up so that I was barely resting on my toes and he was kissing me, deep and with feeling, our mouths hot against the cold wind around us.

We stayed that way until the footsteps of another group
of runners pounded up on us: guys from the team. “Yo, Kale, get some!” one of them yelled as they stampeded past. Kaleb grinned and rested his forehead on mine as we waited for them to disappear from sight.

“I hope so, too,” he said. “Come on, you’re shivering, we should get moving.”

And we started running again, but what he didn’t know was that my shivering had nothing to do with the cold; it was the excitement of being with him, and I couldn’t shake it, not even after we’d finished the course and I was standing under a shower so hot and steamy it made my flesh red.

I used to love that memory. I used to cherish it like it was precious. Now I hated it, because remembering it—running on this section of “our trail”—reminded me how much I’d been in love with him. And I was trying so desperately to forget that.

By the time we finished the trail, I was several feet behind Neesy and the others. Coach Igo stood at the fence surrounding the track, shading her eyes with a clipboard, which she brought down and wrote on as we approached. I tried not to look as exhausted as I was, but it was impossible. My lungs ached. My legs ached. My heart ached.

We filed in through the gate and walked around the track to steady our breath. Adrian, Philippa, and Neesy walked shoulder to shoulder, whispering their gossip, leaving me a few steps behind them, as if they’d never noticed I’d been running with them. I didn’t care what they had to talk about,
not really. But it only made me miss Kaleb more. I would normally have been walking around the track with him.

All the groups were getting back from their runs now. A lot of kids were already taking off their running shoes and sliding their feet into flip-flops, downing Gatorade, goofing off on the bleachers, while Coach Igo stood by the fence writing things on that clipboard and shaking her head disgustedly.

I heard footsteps and moved over to let some of the guys from the boys’ team pass.

“Hey, Ashleigh,” one of them said when they got next to me. It was Silas, from Kaleb’s baseball team. They laughed as they passed.

“Hey, Silas.” I pulled the elastic out of my hair, letting it fall to my shoulders in wet, sweaty clumps.

The boy walking next to him—I think he was a sophomore named Kent, but I wasn’t sure—snickered into his balled-up fists. Silas got a grin to match his, like he was holding in a great big joke.

“What?” I asked.

“Nothing,” Silas said, and this time he couldn’t hold it in. He punched Kent in the shoulder and both of them doubled over in laughter. “I didn’t recognize you at first.”

“Ooo-kay,” I said slowly. “Whatever.”

They kept walking, passing Neesy and the other girls, knocking into each other and cracking up every few steps. Idiots. Probably thinking it was so funny that Kaleb broke up with me.

But when I rounded the last corner of the track, I noticed
that other guys were looking at me and laughing, too. And so were a couple of girls. I swiped the back of my shorts with my hands, wondering if there was something on them. I ran my hands over my hair, discreetly wiped my nose with my index finger, looked down at myself for a quick once-over. Nothing seemed out of place.

God only knew what Kaleb had told them.

I decided I didn’t care what Kaleb had told them. I was going to have to block out all thoughts of Kaleb if I was going to get over him. I finished my cool-down, half-listened to Coach rag us out for being slow, and then headed into the locker room without even giving Silas and his idiot friends another thought.

I showered, dressed, and headed to the field house, where the volleyball team was running suicides, to catch a ride with Vonnie. The coach blew the whistle and, with moans, the girls fell to a stop.