Page 14 of I'm Gonna Get You Back
By the time I get out of the shower, I’m limping, my leg locking.Fuck, if anyone sees… I close my eyes and pull in deep breaths, riding it out. I manage to make it to my room unnoticed, dress quickly, and ice my knee with the compression wrap Jason gave me.
Collapsing onto my bed, I shove a shaky hand through my wet hair. My running clothes are still in a heap on the floor, discarded and pathetic. Just like me.
My phone buzzes to life against my nightstand. The constant pressure that sits heavy on my chest these days quadruples when I see Clara’s face on my screen.
I blink. That can’t be right. We don’t so much as follow each other on social media anymore, let alone text each other. I wrench my phone to look at it closer.
Oh, it’s the group chat. RUN FORREST RUN. We haven’t used this in months. Not that I ever used it much back in high school, since Kenji abused the space with his incessant stream of consciousness and random shirtless selfies.
Ignoring all the texts, I scroll right to the photo of her. My heart hammers in my chest as I stare at it.
Dark, tumbling hair. Emerald-green eyes. Thoselips. Slightly parted like she’s about to say something snarky.
I grip my phone tight as I take in the other details. She and Mitchell are at her house. Together.
What the hell? She never lets anyone in her house. I barely went over there. And Mitchell hasn’t talked about her once since I left. Not that I’ve asked, but you’d think my own stepbrother would mention in our daily texts that he’s been hanging out with the girl who shattered me.
I zoom in. Their knees are touching. Mitch’s head rests on her shoulder as he leans back to take the picture.
It could be platonic.
Or they could be hooking up.
I almost throw my phone across the room at the thought. No one ignites the competitive spark in me like he does. It may not be by blood, but we’re still brothers. I take a deep breath. No, they wouldn’t do that to me… Though I’ve had a feeling Mitchell has been holding something back from me for a while now.
I shouldn’t, but it happens without thinking, really. I pull up the photos from last year. I scroll through them in a loop of self-pity.
Tons of photos from the season. One of me and Mitchell after the Woodhurst Invitational that I won. I’m in my red singlet, laughing because Mitchell is pretending to bite the medal around my neck as if checking if it’s real gold.
And inevitably, I scroll to the one I’ve looked at… too often. The one picture I have of me and Clara after our first hike together. The sky is a heavy gray behind us, and she’s wearing my jacket because the temperature dropped suddenly once we got to the peak. She rolled her eyes when I put it on her shoulders, but she didn’t take it off, either.
“I bet you hate pictures,” she said, as she pulled out her phone.
I shrugged. “Not if you’re in them.”
She’d gone pink. Which she did a lot around me. I fucking loved that. I remember she let her hair down from its ponytail then, and it tumbled between us as we got close to fit in the screen.
Just before she took the photo, I said, “You smell like a meadow.”
She burst out laughing and called me corny.
That’s when she snapped it. Her—pink and pretty and laughing; me—grinning like I know how lucky I am to have my arm around her. Like I have no clue the clock is already ticking.
It’s the shittiest thing about a breakup. The only other person who actually understands it from the inside out is the one you can’t ever see again.
“Psh, shut it down,” I say, dragging a hand across my face.
I close the photo and scroll to the top of the chat to read through it quickly—trying to understand how this bomb landed on my phone at the end of an already shit day. And there it is.
Legacy Weekend.
That’s next week already? The email invite my dad sent me flashesthrough my mind: LEGACY WEEKEND: WITH SPECIAL GUEST OF HONOR!
I tried to turn it down. So what that it’s a town tradition? So what that I already agreed and told Principal West I’d be there? He’s an asshole anyway. After the way the Legacy committee treated Clara, I’m not proud to be part of this program. I still don’t know if she ever got the answers she deserved. Like if they ever found out who did it. Or why. It was all so unfair.
But my dad insisted I accept the guest of honor offer. A stipulation of keeping my Legacy scholarship is coming back for the weekend anyway, and I need it if I want to stay in school. With my knee and grades the way they are, I could lose my athletic scholarship any day. Changing course isn’t what I do. It isn’t what anyone expects me to do. People are counting on me. Even if I’m still not really sure forwhat. I finally gave in.
But what would they do if they all found out that I’m full of shit?
