Chapter 1
The gymnasium smelled like rubber floor wax and popcorn, and somebody had strung up a banner that read HEARTS FOR HELEN in letters clearly cut out by someone's little sister, the H's slightly crooked. I stood under it with a clipboard hugged to my chest and told myself I was not nervous.
"You're nervous?" Priya said, elbowing me.
"I am not."
"You definitely are." She reached up and physically pushed my jaw down, like she was closing a cabinet door. "There. Now you look like someone who isn't about to throw up."
I wasn't going to throw up. I was going to win two thousand dollars for Helen Marsh's chemo fund, eat a slice of the sheet cake Mrs. Alvarez had been threatening to bring for a week, and go home. That was the whole plan. Simple.
Then Jonah Cross walked in with his team, laughing at something, sleeves shoved up like he already owned the room, and the plan got a little more complicated.
I'd known Jonah through Dex, and I exactly knew he is one of them type of stirrer people and decided, wisely, to stay three feet away from them at all times. We'd talked maybe a dozen times. Every one of those times, I'd walked away vaguely certain that he thought he was the funniest person in any room he entered, and vaguely annoyed that half the time, he wasn't wrong.
"Calloway." He nodded at me on his way past, easy, like we were old friends instead of acquaintances who'd once argued for twenty minutes about whether cereal counted as soup...I know, it’s stupid but bare with me.
"Cross."
"Ready to lose?"
"Ready to watch you cry into a participation ribbon."
He grinned like I'd complimented him and kept walking.Priya watched the whole thing go down like it was her favorite show, and honestly? She was having the time of her life. Because Priya has never, not once, had to face the mess after encouraging me. She just gets to sit back, popcorn in hand (metaphorically, though I wouldn't put it past her), and enjoy the chaos she helped create. Zero accountability, maximum delight. That's her brand.
"He's cute," she said.
"He's a menace."
"Those aren't mutually exclusive, Reese."
The event organizer — a Mrs. Alvarez knockoff named Denise with a whistle around her neck and clear ideas about crowd control — herded the two teams to opposite ends of the gym floor. Ours: me, Priya, and six others from the community college crowd, all people who'd shown up because Helen used to run the after-school program half of us grew up in. Theirs: Jonah, Dex, and a rowdier crew who mostly seemed to be there because Jonah told them to be, which, fine. Whatever got bodies in the gym and dollars in Helen's jar.
The relay rounds went fine, better than fine. Sack races that had half the gym wheezing with laughter, an egg toss where Priya shrieked so loud a toddler two rows up started crying in solidarity, a trivia round about local history that I aced because I'd spent an unreasonable amount of my adolescence in the library two blocks from here, memorizing plaques nobody else bothered to read. Somewhere in the middle of it, Jonah's team pulled ahead on the three-legged race — Dex and a girl named Marisol moving with a coordination that felt almost unfair — and I caught Jonah watching our side of the gym with a smugness so loud you could practically hear it.
"Don't get comfortable," I called across the floor.
"Wouldn't dream of it, Calloway." He was still grinning when Denise blew the whistle for the next round, and I hated how easily that grin found its way under my skin, how it made me want to win less for Helen and more just to wipe it off his face.
We clawed the lead back in the history round, then held it through the water balloon toss, though not without casualties — Priya's shirt was soaked through, and she declared, with total sincerity, that she was never forgiving me for suggesting she go last. By the time the scoreboard flipped to show us up by a narrow margin heading into the final stretch, something in my chest had started to unclench, that particular lightness of a good night going the way you hoped, the kind where you let yourself believe, just for a minute, that things might actually work out the way you planned them.
Then Denise blew the whistle and said the words that would ruin my life: "Time for the Team Weakness round!"
I didn't know what that meant. Nobody had told us there'd be a Team Weakness round. Denise explained it with the cheerful obliviousness of someone reading off an index card: each team would send up one member to share, live, a personal challenge or insecurity they'd overcome — "for bonus points, and to remind us why we're really here tonight, supporting each other" — and the crowd would vote on which story moved them most.
"This wasn't in the rundown," I hissed at Priya.
"I know. I think Denise just added it. She does this."
"She does this?"
"She's very into vulnerability as a bonding exercise. Last year she made the chess club do trust falls."
Our team huddled. Nobody wanted to go up. I understood — nobody wants to stand under fluorescent gym lighting and confess something to a room full of people who came for cake — but we were down two rounds' worth of nerve and up against a deadline, and finally, because I am apparently constitutionally unable to let a silence sit, I said, "Fine. I'll go."
Priya grabbed my wrist. "You don't have to."
"It's for Helen." Which was true, and also easier to say than I don't want anyone else on this team to have to stand up there instead of me, which was the actual reason, the one that had less to do with generosity and more to do with control. I'd rather it be my nerves on the line than someone else's.
The microphone had a whine to it that made the first few words come out fuzzy. I told them about my dad, mostly — not everything, not the parts that still made my throat close up if I let them — just the shape of it. That when I was fourteen he'd left for what he said was a work trip and came back eleven months later, and in between I'd spent that year terrified that everyone who said they'd stay actually meant it right up until the day they didn't. That I still, at twenty-two, checked my phone too many times when someone was late. That I'd worked really hard, was still working, on believing people could be trusted before they'd proven it, instead of only after.
It wasn't a speech. It came out messier than that, in pieces, my voice cracking exactly once on the word trusted, which I hated, because I'd promised myself it wouldn't. But the gym had gone quiet in that specific, held-breath way, and when I stepped down Priya hugged me so hard my ribs protested, and Denise dabbed at her eyes with a HEARTS FOR HELEN napkin, and for one clean, warm minute, I felt like maybe that had been worth it.
Jonah's team sent up Dex, who talked about failing his first year of community college and how ashamed he'd been to tell his parents. It was sweet. Genuine, even. The crowd liked it too, though not — I noted, with an ugliness I wasn't proud of — quite as much as they'd liked mine.
Denise announced the scores would be tallied for the very final round, the one that would decide the whole night: a rapid-fire trivia sprint, head-to-head, one representative from each team.
"Reese," my team said, more or less in unison, because apparently I'd used up all my objecting privileges for the evening.
I walked to the center of the gym floor still a little raw around the edges, the kind of raw that makes you feel like your skin's on the wrong way. Jonah walked up from the other side, and for a second — just a second — something in his face looked almost soft. Almost like the story had landed on him the way it had landed on the room.
"You okay?" he asked, quiet enough that only I could hear it.
And I almost believed he meant it.
"I'm great," I said, because I didn't know yet, standing there under the banner with the crooked H's, that in about four minutes he was going to prove exactly how much that softness was worth — and I was going to spend a long time afterward wishing I'd never opened my mouth into that microphone at all.
Denise raised the buzzer between us.
"Final round," she said. "Ready?"
I nodded. Across from me, Jonah nodded too, and something shifted in his eyes that I would replay for months afterward, trying to pin down the exact moment I should have known.
"Go."
