The girl blinked at Sawyer.
She was tall and thin—unfortunately so—with a boyish body that was all edges and angles. Her long brown hair was looped in a herringbone braid that fell over one shoulder, and baby hairs stood up in a static-y halo around her head, shot out from the loose weave of the braid. The girl’s eyes looked like they may have been velvety brown and deeply alive once, but they were sunken and flat now. Her full lips were barely pink and pulled down at the edges. This girl wore her mourning black like a second skin.
Sawyer swallowed; the girl swallowed.
Sawyer paused for a full beat before tugging self-consciously at her braid, then averted her eyes from the mirror that reflected a girl she scarcely recognized. She continued down the hall, moving quickly.
She knew from nights lying to her parents and sneaking, shoeless, past his parents’ room that Kevin’s door was the last one on the left. She slipped in there on a sigh, clicking the door shut softly behind her. A curl-edged painting was scotch taped to the back of Kevin’s door and Sawyer, stunned, fingered it softly. It was a beach scene she had painted the first day Kevin spoke to her. They were in art class and she was lost in her own brush strokes, squinting, leaning close to make the crush of the waves as realistic as possible.
“You’re really good,” he had said, his chin jutting toward the scene. Sawyer could still feel the overwhelming heat in her cheeks as her index finger followed the curl of foam on the forever-still water.
She heard a soft breath in the yellowing light that filtered through the blinds and cracked across the painting. “The recruiter came to see him, you know.”
Mr. Anderson said it without turning around. Kevin’s father was perched on the end of his son’s bed; his head was bowed and his back was toward her, but Sawyer could see that his fingers were working the silky fabric of Kevin’s number twenty-one Hawthorne Hornets football jersey while an army of gold plated football trophies looked on.
“He talked about marrying you.” Mr. Anderson looked over his shoulder then, his watery blue eyes finding Sawyer, a reminiscing half smile on his chapped lips. “He said that he’d get into Cal and you’d get into the Art Institute and that would be it.”
Sawyer tried to smile, tried to remember the moments when she and Kevin would sprawl in the grass, her hand finding his as they talked about a future that was far off and pristine, that sloughed off divorce and jealousy and high school pressures and rivalries. She remembered telling Kevin that she wanted to go to the Art Institute, remembered the far-off look in his eyes when a smile snaked across his lips.
“What?” she said, barely able to keep the grin from her lips.
Kevin shook his head and squeezed Sawyer’s hand gently. “How perfect is that? I’ll go to Cal, be the dashing football star, and you’ll be across the bay at the Art Institute painting portraits of your beloved.”
“Portraits of John Lennon? I think I’d get tired of that.”
Kevin tugged at her arm—gently, softly—and Sawyer slipped into his lap, loving the feeling of his arms wrapped around her. She felt so safe, so warm, and when his lips nuzzled her ear, she felt the spark move low in her belly.
Now the memory caught in her throat. That was when things were good, she told herself.
Mr. Anderson sucked in a sharp breath that brought Sawyer back to the present; she looked up just in time to see Kevin’s father double over himself, heavy hands hugging his sides. There was no sound except the ragged tear of his breath as he cried.
Sawyer felt her bottom lip quiver, and when she pinched her eyes shut, she saw Kevin, cheeks pink and alive, lips pressed up into that half smile he shared with his father. In her mind’s eye, that grin turned into a snarl. She heard the sickening smack of skin against skin in her head. She reeled, feeling the sting again.
“He loved you so much.”
Sawyer felt Kevin’s warm breath, heard the deep rumble of his voice as he told her he loved her for the first time. She remembered the shiver that zinged from the top of her head to the base of her spine, amazed, delighted, enraptured. Kevin—Kevin Anderson, the most popular boy in school—loved her. She was everything in that moment when Kevin’s fingertips brushed against the small of her back, when his lips pressed up against hers. Her life—her family—had splintered. Her mother had moved across the country, her father loved another woman, but Kevin Anderson wanted Sawyer. He wanted Sawyer Dodd, and that made her feel real. She wanted to hold on to that moment, was desperate to hold on to that moment and nothing else—not when he got angry, not when she made him mad, not the tear-racked apologies that followed.
Sawyer nodded, the tears slipping over her cheeks. “I loved him too.”