"If you're on probation, your coach cannot allow you to play. It would violate a handful of school rules-and jeopardize the team's standing within their athletic league."
Fi dug what was left of her fingernails into her palm. She could feel skin peel into them. "And if I fail probation?"
"The fact that you're considering that as an option isn't giving me a lot of confidence, Fi."
"Lacrosse is all I have right now."
"So finish probation and get it back. But if you fail probation," Lyon said, leaning forward, "you won't have Milton either."
Fi closed her Spanish book with a smack. Both her and Jackson's coffee mugs trembled on the table. "I'm done."
"Are you fluent yet?" he asked, frowning at the coffee puddle under his mug.
"Only if you need directions to the library-or to buy cheese." She stretched, speaking through a yawn.
"Is it totally pathetic I want to go to bed"-Jackson yawned back, looking at his watch-"and it's only four?"
She had gone to bed at four for weeks after the funeral. Thankfully, it'd been a while since she'd been that bad off.
She stood, throwing her books into her bag. "I feel like a slug. I need to work out or something."
Even though she was teamless, Fi had started running ladders and throwing against brick walls. All the parts of her that had softened were slowly hardening. It was kind of lonely, though-no other girls, no Ryan, no Trent.
Jackson was still leaning like a lump over his chair. "Want to learn lacrosse?" she asked him.
Jackson raised his eyebrows. "Why not?" he said, and piled his things together.
In the coffee shop parking lot, Fi tossed her bag in the trunk and fished through the pile of lacrosse gear. After grabbing one of her sticks, an old one of Ryan's, and a few balls, Fi and Jackson walked in perfectly parallel paths to the neighborhood park across the street. Good thing it had lights, because it was already getting dark.
"So this is a stick." She handed him Ryan's, pointing to the different parts. "The shaft. The head. The ball goes in the pocket. See how your pocket is bigger than mine?" Jackson's eyes raised, and Fi shook her head. "No jokes I haven't heard. Grow up."
He smirked. "The guys have big balls?"
She groaned. "We use the same ball. But you're allowed to check in the men's game and not in the women's. The deeper pocket helps."
Taking a ball and her stick, she walked a few feet away. "Put your hands here and here. Bend your knees as you catch." She tossed the ball lightly. Jackson caught it. "Now shift your hands to here and here to throw. Like this."
He watched her and did a fairly good imitation. They tossed back and forth a few minutes, and as he looked more comfortable, she showed him how to cradle so he could run without losing the ball, and how to reach out and catch with one hand. They talked rules, teams, leagues, the differences between the men's and women's games.
"You're not bad," she said. "It's awkward at first for a lot of people."
"How was Marcus?"
"I never taught Marcus."
He looked surprised. "He wasn't interested?"
"He never seemed up to it."
Jackson sighed, shaking his head. "He never got to do anything."
"Because of y'all." Fi was only half-surprised when this blatant challenge came out of her mouth.
"We didn't have much choice," Jackson said, narrowing his eyes.
Fi frowned slightly. "I keep waiting for a hateful comment."
"Believe me, I'm biting my tongue."
"Why?"
Jackson studied her for a long moment. Then he took a deep breath and slowly lowered the head of his stick to the ground. The ball rolled out of it, resting at his feet. "The day before he died, he wanted me to read to him. We'd gone through everything in the house, so Mom had to scrounge up some old poetry book for us."
"Okay." She had no idea what this had to do with anything.
"So there was this poem. I can't remember much of it, but I'll remember those last two lines the rest of my life. He made me read them over and over."
"What were they?" she asked, a little terrified of the answer.
"The winter of love is a cellar of empty bins / In an orchard soft with rot."
The soft with rot part sounded so familiar, but it took a few moments before she made the connection as to why. "He was mumbling that to me," she said. A clear image of Marcus, gaunt and pale in his dining room deathbed, lit up her brain. She hadn't thought of him like that in so long. "The last time I saw him."
"He said it was you," Jackson said, suddenly looking as somber as she felt. "You were going to be those empty bins, once he died. And it was maybe the saddest thing I had ever heard."
"The poem?"
"No, his voice. How he sounded. Like-like, all the joy he always felt just got sucked out of him all at once. It was tragic." He looked at her now. "It was the same way you looked, at the funeral. You looked just as tragic as he sounded."
She swayed on the spot, either because she might faint-or the earth was actually shifting beneath her.
How could her heart keep breaking? It was the most fragile, delicate thing. Why wasn't it more like her broken ankle-stronger when it healed? "I don't need your pity, Jackson."
"It's not pity," he said. "It's guilt."
"Is that supposed to be better?"
He shrugged. "It's the best I can do by way of apology."
As backward as their friendship seemed, she thought they'd been drawn together because each understood the other. "So being friendly now is just an apology for how mean you were to me before?"
He sighed, spinning his lacrosse stick where it rested on the ground. "You're right, we did keep him on a pretty tight leash. He bitched, complained, tried to find loopholes, but three able-bodied control freaks versus one guy who gets out of breath eating cereal-not a fair fight." He shook his head. "But, no, it's an apology to him-not you."
"Do you even like me?"
"You're fine. I mean, I don't really know you." He held up the stick with a shrug. "Besides your obsession with this weird sport."
Fi looked from her stick to his and back. She remembered sitting in Ryan's room years ago, asking him what she was good at, what defined her. The list was just as pathetic now as it was then. After all this time and all this pain, she added up to nothing more than Marcus and lacrosse. The two things she loved. The two things she'd lost.
For no reason she could explain, she spontaneously let out a cry-a guttural yell-and hurled her stick as far away from her as she could. She even took a few steps for momentum, like she was throwing a javelin.
She sank down to the grass, pulling her knees into her chest and wrapping her arms around them. She saw Jackson's feet in her peripheral vision-how they turned away from her, hesitated, then turned back and walked over.
He sat down a few feet away, kicked his legs out straight, and leaned backward against his elbows. He didn't speak, so Fi didn't know if this was one of those coffee-shop-comfortable-silences, or if he was waiting for her to say something first.
"If I never met Marcus, I'd be at Northwestern. I'd still have it," she said.
"Have what?"
She pointed in the general area of her thrown stick. "I couldn't love them both at the same time. I had to pick one."
"Looks like you picked wrong."
Fi groaned and buried her head in her knees. "Do you really think so?"
"God, I don't know." He sighed. "He was happy. I was furious. Now you're miserable, and I feel guilty. Flip side-what? Y'all never met? He and me, we'd have been the same we always were. You'd have been the same as you were before you met him. You and I could have avoided this weird . . . friendship or whatever."
"I'd have been the same," Fi repeated. She wished she knew which was better.
Since May, it had felt like horrible, cancerous thoughts had been eating her from the inside out. "A few months ago, you said that everywhere you looked, you saw some connection to him."
"Yeah," he said cautiously. "So?"
"Do you think anyone, you know, got his organs?"
"I know Mom and Dad signed the papers, after. I don't know what actually got donated, though."
"Do you think it would have hurt him?"
Jackson exhaled. "He was dead."
"Do you think he's happier now?"
"I don't know."
She looked at the sky, like she could squint out the view past the clouds. "Do you think he can see us?"