I pick up a chicken strip and pause right as I open my mouth. Martha walks in Cooper’s direction, but what’s really pissing me off is that he’s strutting right toward her. In the middle of the cafeteria, they stop less than a foot from each other. She smiles at him like he means something and he gives her that same sly grin that he flashes for every girl he’s trying to play.
My chair cracks back.
“Oh hell,” whispers Todd.
Oh hell, what? I shoot a glare down the table and everyone becomes intensely interested in their trays. “Is he playing my sister?”
No one says anything.
“Wasn’t this the same guy who bragged that he did Missy Parker in the back of his car last weekend? If he’s playing my sister, someone needs to tell me.”
Silence from them all.
“Now!”
“What’s going on?” Cooper slides into the chair across from me. The same damn spot he’s sat in since first grade. Me on one side. Him on the other. The guy I’ve hung with and stood by for as long as I remember.
“Are you playing Martha?”
Cooper laughs, but when he notices no one else has joined him, his forehead wrinkles. “You’re serious?”
“Have I laughed yet?”
Cooper twists the cap off his soda and glances too many times at the other guys at the table. “She’s your sister.”
“Damn right she is.”
He has the balls to look me straight in the eye. “You know me better than that.”
A stray thought advances from the back of my brain. He’s right. I do know him. Better than probably anyone else and I know he doesn’t believe in lines or boundaries. I stand and say, “Stay away from Martha.”
Without waiting for a response, I leave the cafeteria, enter the empty hallway, and wonder where Stella hid herself. The cafeteria door slams open behind me, the roar of voices from the lunchroom rising and falling. I have a strong suspicion of who it is, but I continue walking. If Cooper’s smart, he’ll stay the hell away.
“Jonah!”
Evidently the boy doesn’t possess a brain.
“Jonah!” he yells again.
The tapping of his shoes increases as he runs to catch me and I turn the moment he’s near. “What?”
“What?” His eyes widen. “You call me out in front of everyone and you’re asking me what?”
“Call you out?” I shove my finger into his face. “I saw you with Martha.”
“I heard what you said about Trash Can Girl and I let it slide,” he shouts. “And as for your sister, we were talking. Just talking. God, your family is right. You are majorly messed up. I don’t pretend to know what happened the night of the accident, but you’ve changed, and I’m sick and tired of carrying you because of it.”
He’s stating my worst fears. I didn’t want to change. But it’s all changed and hanging with Stella, it was supposed to help. “I haven’t changed.”
“Yeah. You have.” He pauses. “Accusing me of going after your sister. Your sudden fascination with Trash Can Girl.”
I move closer, my chest bumping his. “Her name is Stella.”
“She lives with a stripper in the Section 8 housing on the other side of town. She dyes her hair purple and wears the same damn clothes every day. Girls like her don’t give a crap what I say.”
“You’re wrong,” I tell him.
“On what?” he says. “That she gives a damn about anyone or that she’s a stripper-in-training?”
I tower over him and Cooper appears to get smaller.
“What the hell?” Cooper’s eyes dart across my face. “Are you going to throw our friendship away over a freak?”
Anger becomes white-hot acid in my bloodstream. My fingers close into a fist and my voice drops to a new level. “Say it again and find out.”
“Jonah!” Stella’s voice jerks me away from my showdown with Cooper.
Cooper steps back with his hands in the air. “Decide which way you’re going on this. I know you’ve been hanging out with her and I’ve been patient, but here’s the truth. You’ve changed and she’s the new factor. Think about what you’re giving up, Jonah. I’ve been your friend for years and she’s...” My one-time best friend scrutinizes Stella like she belongs in a dumpster. “Decide soon.”
Cooper retreats back into the cafeteria. Leaning against the windows, Stella presses her folder to her chest. She’s almost as pale as James Cohen was the night I held his hand.
“I’m not worth this,” she says in a small voice.
My eyebrows furrow. “Yes, you are.”
“No, I’m not. He’s right about me. I’m trash.”
“You’re not.”
The edges of the folder bend as she grips it tighter. “You don’t know anything about me.”
The anger boils over and I ram my fist into a nearby locker. Pain slices through my knuckles. Stella flinches and I immediately wish I could take the action back. But I’m mad. Mad at Cooper and mad at Stella. She’s right. I know nothing when it comes to her. “Then tell me. Tell me who you are.”
“You won’t like me anymore.”
“Stella, I like you. All the rest of it, it’s just the stuff that came before.”
“So you don’t need to know it.”
“I do if it makes you feel like you aren’t worth that fight with Cooper.”
Her lips flatten into a thin line. “Once we do this, there’s no going back. It’ll end what we have now. By the end of today, you could be running back to Cooper and begging his forgiveness.”
Going back, it’s what I craved those first few times I visited James Cohen’s grave. But in meeting Stella, I found a way forward. I don’t want what’s between us to end, and the one thing I’m learning is that there’s no going back. “Or I could choose you. Bring it, Stella. Give me your worst.”
Stella
So maybe Mrs. Collins isn’t the Antichrist. With one phone call to his parents, she released Jonah from school so I could, in his words, give him my worst. It’s my debut trip in his Charger and it’s also my inaugural ride in a car built this decade.
If deep down I’m honest with myself, it’s also the first time I’ve been so alone with a boy that I like as more than a friend. A boy who I dream at night of kissing.
Besides a few directions from me like “turn here” or “merge onto the interstate,” we’ve stayed silent. The only noise is the hum of the radio in the background. I run my hand over the material of the passenger seat and inhale that new-to-me car smell. It’s not the car ride I’m trying to cement into my memory; it’s every detail of being with Jonah.
He grips the wheel with his left hand and rests his right one on the console, palm up. If I wanted I could easily lay my hand in his.
For the past couple of weeks, Jonah and I have lived in a bubble—a twisted sort of bubble, but it was ours. Seeing him argue with his friend over me...I should have cut Jonah loose then. We belong to different worlds, and it’s time he returned to his and I accepted mine.
Now that he’s admitted what happened the night of the accident, maybe Jonah can find the strength to move on...without me.
But I didn’t cut him loose and it’s because when he works out whatever is going on with him and the accident and he returns to his real life, I hope Jonah will become a little bit better a person. Not laughing at Cooper’s cruel jokes isn’t enough. I want him to remember this—to remember me—and to forever be the guy who doesn’t allow anyone to talk trash.
Showing him this is the only way to teach that lesson, to give him that memory.
The tree line along the road thins out and the elementary school pops into view. In front of the half-circle driveway is a trailer I’m very familiar with.
“Over there.” I point and I ca
n feel Jonah’s heavy stare before he pulls into the lot and parks.
“I tell you to give me your worst and you drag me out to volunteer. You’re right. I hate you. I had no idea I was friends with such an awful human being.”
“Ha. Ha.” But my sarcasm comes off flat. I rub my palms along my jeans and step out of the car. At the door to the school, children bob and weave in the line. I remember that feeling, being so thrilled over something new that I’d have to lean way far to the left or right or even stand on my tiptoes because seeing it reinforced the excitement.
We stand next to the trailer and Jonah rocks on his feet. “What exactly are we supposed to do?”
“You and me?”
“Yeah.”
I dig two shoe scales out of a box by the door and hand him one. “We change lives.”
Jonah
Bent on one knee, I write down a shoe size and hand it to the boy I just measured. He runs off toward the trailer full of shoes. From the schoolchildren to the volunteers, everyone has been full of smiles and enthusiasm, but what’s been amazing is watching Stella.
She lights up around these kids. She talks with them. Laughs with them. Stella becomes the kind of person everyone envies and wants to be friends with. The person you’d spend all night trying to be close to. She’s alive, addictive and contagious.
“You like her, don’t you?” A tiny girl slides next to me and observes Stella with awe.
I glance at Stella again and she’s shaking her purple hair to make a boy who can’t be older than six laugh. With a smile on my face, I refocus on my next client. “Yeah.”
“I like her hair.”
“Well, I like yours.”
She grins and her dark eyes shine. One front tooth is missing with the new one barely peeking through. A million freckles dot her pale face and after my compliment she locks her hands behind her back and swivels from side to side.
“First grade?” I ask.
Hands slam onto her hips. “Second.”
“My apologies.” I lift the scale into the air. “Are you ready?”
She nods quick enough that I wonder if she’s given herself whiplash.
“Can I tell you something?” she asks.
“As long as you kick off those shoes and place your feet on the scale, I’m game.”
She unties both sneakers, slips them off her feet and puts her right foot on the scale. “This is my favorite day.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because I get new shoes.”
I remember racing through the mall with Martha because we loved testing out the new ones Mom bought us at the store. “It’s a great feeling, isn’t it?”
“It is,” she quickly agrees while pulling her right foot off the scale. She then steps the left in so I can measure it. “I don’t get teased for new shoes.”
I drop the pencil and it rolls away. “What?”
“New shoes,” she repeats, and shoves her feet back into her old ones. “Plus ones that fit. I used to have to wear my older brother’s and they never fit. They’d fall off during gym and this one boy called me clown feet, but now I get new shoes that fit. He can’t call me clown feet anymore.”
“No, I guess he can’t.” With my knees on the sidewalk, the girl stands taller than me and holds her hand out for the sheet. For the first time in my life, I feel small, and it’s not because I’m the one closest to the ground, it’s because I’m the boy who has hurt this little girl.
I scan the area. The colors of the trees and the bushes and the clothing of all the people merge together. I grow dizzy and sway with the blur, but even with the disorientation, I can make out the face of every single child I talked and laughed with.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper.
“For what?” She wrinkles her nose.
For staying silent when she needed someone to stand up for her as everything and everyone around her was yanking her down.
“I’m sorry,” I say again, but there’s no one there. The little girl has skipped off to the trailers and the line of kids to be measured has dispersed. I’m left alone with the weight of my sins.
“Jonah?” Stella crouches beside me. “Are you okay?”
I’m not okay. None of this okay. The fact that there are kids who have parents who can’t afford shoes that fit or shoes at all, that’s not okay. The fact that idiots like me make their life worse, that’s not okay. But the damn awful pain pulsating in my chest is the knowledge that... “This was you.”
Her delicate throat moves as she swallows, then she nods imperceptibly. “And it still is.”
Stella
I don’t know why I have an obsession with canvas shoes, but I do, and these are the best ones yet: neon purple, with white laces and a heck of an arch. Stepping into these babies is like walking on pillows. I wiggle my toes inside the shoes and marvel at how well they fit.
The Kentucky program started two years after Nikki Berti founded Goodie Two Shoes out in Las Vegas. I was ten when I received my first pair and, sitting here today receiving my last, I still feel the same giddiness that I did eight years ago.
As much as I long to run around in my new shoes like the kids who were fitted before me, I don’t. I slip them off with great care and lay them one at a time in the box. The shoes on my feet have a few miles left in them and I need to be more forward-thinking. Shoes aren’t the only things in life that are expensive.
With both hands on the tug-of-war rope, Jonah acts as if it takes all his strength to keep from being yanked across the line by a group of eight-year-olds and when he quite convincingly throws the game, the children squeal in delight.
Jonah laughs, but the happiness drains from his face when he spots me. This is why I never wanted him to ask personal questions, why I never wanted him to know. Pity annoys me.
He rolls off the ground and waves away the pleas for another game. As he walks in my direction, I touch the rose barrette in my hair. It’s still there exactly in place, the leaf feeling as smooth as it always does.
Jonah sits beside me on the brick retaining wall and his legs slide open, allowing his knee to brush against my thigh. He’s warm and solid and if we lived in another universe, he possibly could have been mine.
He opens his mouth and then shuts it. As he tries to open it again, I save him and myself from whatever uncomfortable thing he is going to say. “They gave me hope.”
“Who?”
“This foundation. They didn’t just give me shoes. They gave me hope. They gave me the right to believe that I was more than what anyone ever said about me. And sometimes, just sometimes, it was enough to make me dream that I could become more.”
And maybe I have become more. Not the more that Joss warns me about, but more than who I used to be. I affected someone. I took a chance, befriended Jonah, and found a way to reach him. The change I’d hoped for, it’s there in his eyes. He can try to fight it, but today altered him. It’s what I wanted and no matter what happens in the next few minutes, hours, days or years, for a few seconds, I was more.
“Tell me this changed you, Jonah.” I turn my head to look at him and I hold my breath, hoping for the right words from him. I saw the shadow on his face when he connected the dots between the child he once was and the children in front of him, but I crave to hear the words.
There’s hurt in his blue eyes, but there’s also this sweet hope. “It changed me. You...changed me.”
“Good.” I break our connection and stare at the ground. “Good.”
Jonah nudges my knee with his. “Why do I feel like you’re breaking up with me?”
Who knew a statement could be like a tiny dagger to the heart? “We’d have to be a couple in order for that to happen. I’m a girl who hangs at a cemetery and you’re a boy who needed a break from normal for a few
weeks.”
“We’re a couple,” he says.
I wish we had been. My skin prickles at what it could have felt like with his arms around me as he sat against a tree and pulled me close so that my back settled into him with his breath hot on my neck.
“We aren’t.” I rub my arms, feeling cold. A part of me is glad we never crossed lines. I like the memories of us as friends. I like that my heart can’t hurt because I never really gave all of it to begin with.
“We are.” Jonah jumps off the wall and holds his hand out to me. “I like you, Stella, and you can deny it, but I see in your eyes that you like me too. Today’s not over and I’m not the only one with a decision to make, so let’s be together. We have a couple of hours left before midnight.”
Before we turn back into pumpkins. “What happens at midnight?”
“I don’t know, but let’s find out.”
Jonah
With her hands shoved, straight-armed, into the front pockets of her blue jeans, Stella wanders around my house. I like seeing her here. She fits, but doesn’t. Everything surrounding her is high-priced, having been picked by Mom and a designer.
By the way she carries herself, Stella has class. More class than I’ll ever possess. Plus I like her style. From the roots of her dark purple hair to her rose barrette to her white cotton shirt, blue jeans that hug exactly right and purple shoes, she’s head-to-toe gorgeous.
Like a weary bloodhound trailing a scent, Stella leaves the kitchen in the direction of the living room and I follow. She hasn’t said much. Occasionally she’ll pause over something and squish her mouth to the side, but other than that—nothing.
In the living room, she peers into a three-foot-tall blue floor vase that sits in the corner next to the double patio doors. When she straightens, she gestures at it with one finger like it’s contagious. “Is it an urn?”