I think of all the people here, and what will happen to them. If entire sections of the world go like this. Slipping through some crack in time, swallowed back into the earth.
There’s a long way to go until night, and Kennedy sends a quick text, then powers down her phone again. “I’m worried Joe’s got some tracking app set up, since he grounded me.”
“What did you say to him?” I ask.
“?‘Trust me,’?” she says. She’s lucky, I think, having someone checking in on her all the time. The way Joe looked at me when we first met, like I was something he needed to protect Kennedy from. As if he’s making up for everything he wasn’t able to keep her from before.
The sudden interest from my own parents only seems to be because of Liam.
We go to the same fast-food restaurant again, where Kennedy pays for lunch. “You drove,” she says, waving me off. “Again.”
The worker looks between me and Kennedy. “Weren’t y’all just here?”
I nod but then think it’s in our best interest to get out of here. The only place I can think to go is the ballfield, in the distance.
“Come on,” I tell her. We take our food to go, and I drive down the road, which dead-ends at nothing. There’s no reason for this road to exist, really, except for the ballfield, and even that doesn’t seem to be serving a purpose anymore.
The fence around the field is only partially standing, warped and disconnected in sections, and I step through a narrow clearing where the metal posts have come loose from the earth. There are two silver benches beside the baseball diamond, and I straddle one, spreading the contents of the fast-food bag between us. “Quite the picnic spread,” Kennedy says, taking a seat facing me.
But all I can picture is the family picnic, two years ago. The food we ate before Liam took off. Fried chicken, potato salad—all the little details I had forgotten.
“Did you know Hunter was Elliot’s boyfriend?” I ask between bites.
She shakes her head. “I should’ve realized it. But he was only there the one time, and Elliot didn’t even introduce him to me. I didn’t think he was someone important to him. I wasn’t really paying attention.”
“He never mentioned him?”
She looks up at me and stops chewing. “I never asked. We were the new kids, and I was trying to, I don’t know, find my own people. I was too preoccupied with myself to notice what was happening in the rest of my house.”
She stares out onto the ballfield, picking at her food.
“What are you thinking about?”
She bites the corner of her lip, doesn’t look at me when she starts talking. “Marco told me there were rumors…about you and…” She moves her hands around, like she’s begging me to fill in the blanks instead.
“Me and what?” I say.
Her eyes cut to the side. “Some girl.” She clears her throat. “Liam’s girlfriend?”
My stomach sinks. “Abby,” I say. “Are you asking me if it’s true?”
I narrow my eyes, trying to understand where she’s coming from. Whether she really doesn’t trust me, or if she’s asking something more. “It was a mistake,” I say. “And it was after. Much after. Do you know what it’s like? When you’re stuck in this world, and you can’t see anything past it?”
She looks my way again.
“It was like that. She was missing him, and I was missing him, and I was there.” I didn’t tell anyone, but apparently Abby did. I’m surprised. Then my stomach twists—if Marco knows, others know, and that means the police probably know. As Abby’s friend, Clara must know, and I wonder how many people in our house have heard it, too. My parents, even? I close my eyes from the guilt, just thinking about it. Is this part of my cloud of suspicion? That I was secretly jealous of him, because of Abby?
“It was one time,” I say. “One time, when I was feeling really bad, and I regretted it right away.”
She doesn’t answer at first, just leans her head back, face tipped up to the gray overcast sky. The food is done. She closes her eyes. “I know what it’s like.” Then she looks straight at me. “I regret so much.”
I force the last bite down my throat, but my stomach rebels.
I don’t want to think about Abby. I don’t want to think about the case the police are building against me. I don’t want to think about Kennedy hiding out in the shed behind her house while life as she knew it fell apart just steps away.
We have hours to pass, still. Hours to keep thinking of everything we did wrong in the past, everything we might be doing wrong now. I want to blow off some steam, and we’re suddenly in the perfect place for it. “Hey, I have an idea.”
* * *
—
Inside my trunk, I still have my baseball gear, from spring practices and games. Kennedy shoved it all to the far corner when she loaded my trunk with her brother’s things, transporting everything back to her house earlier this week.
“Can you play?” I ask, sliding on the mitt. It’s worn and broken in, and it feels like a second skin to me by now.
“Soccer was more my thing,” she says. “But I’m a quick learner.”
I hand her the bat. “Let’s see what you got, then.”
She stands in the batter’s box, waiting for my pitch. She hits the first few I throw, one angling off to the side, another popping straight up so I have to run almost all the way back to her just to catch it.
“If you want more power,” I say, “think more about the step than the swing.”
She nods, taking some more practice swings.
After a few more pitches where she lunges for the ball as it heads her way, I jog over to show her what I mean. “You’re swinging on the defensive,” I say. “Here.” I stand behind her, my hands on her hands, gripping the bat. I don’t even think about it at first, how close she is, her hands under my own, until I feel her tense up for a second.
“Sorry,” I say, pulling back.
She shakes her head. “No, it’s fine. Show me.”
So I do, my arms folding around hers, stepping and swinging until her body does the same, in synchrony. I step back, watching her as she takes the swing on her own. “Perfect. You got it.”
Then I jog back to the pitcher’s mound, and on the windup, I tell her one last piece of advice that my coach once gave me. “Don’t swing like you’re afraid, Kennedy.”
She nods and gets into position. Then I toss her a pitch, and the crack of the bat on the ball echoes through the emptiness. It sails over my head, and she raises her hand to her eyes. She laughs then, her face mirroring my own. We’re still smiling at each other when the first drop of rain falls from the sky.
“Probably should end on a high note anyway,” she says, the bat hanging by her side. “I think that was a fluke.”
“No way,” I say. “It’s my teaching, obviously.” She shakes her head as I take off for the outfield to retrieve the ball, and when I turn around to head back, she’s still standing there, waiting for me.
The sky opens up just as I reach her, and we race for the car. I drop the baseball gear into the trunk and she ducks into the passenger side, shaking out her hair. It makes me smile.
“Where to?” I ask after I start the car again.
But I can tell she’s leveled. There are dark circles under her eyes, and she keeps yawning, which makes me yawn. The soda has zero effect. We’re going to need to wait it out.
“I’m thinking a nap would really help right now. You?”
“You know how I feel about naps,” she says.
I drive back up the road until I see an empty parking lot of another empty factory, and I pull the car into the alley behind it.
She reclines her seat first, curling onto her left side, her hands folded into a pillow. The sound of rain on metal picks up, and I curl up on my right side, facing her. I’m not sure which of us drifts off first, but sleep comes fast, dark and deep.
When I wake, it’s dark. The first thing I hear is the tap of rain against the metal roof of the car. The first thing I see, coming into focus, is Nolan’s face, asleep, his lips slightly parted, so at peace. It’s like seeing the Nolan that lives underneath, one that might be possible if his life had followed a different path, a different set of circumstances.
The second thing I notice is the colors, faintly flashing against the window beyond his head. Blue, red, alternating in the streaks of rain against the glass. I push myself to sitting. “Nolan,” I say, shaking him awake.
He stirs, rubbing his eyes. “What?”
“The police,” I say.
Nolan sits upright almost as fast as I did. “What are we doing,” he says, but it comes out slow, like his brain hasn’t fully caught up to the sequence of events.
What’s our story. Why are we here. We’re parked in an alley behind an abandoned factory, in the middle of the night, in some town where we don’t belong. What are we doing? We’re two teenagers, trespassing. Sleeping. We look like runaways. There’s no way the police won’t take Nolan’s ID, run his name, contact his parents.
“Trust me?” I ask.
“Yes,” he says immediately, but he’s staring out the window, immobile as the bright light gets closer.
I slide over the console to his seat so I’m facing him, a knee on either side of his legs.