The Chance You Won't Return (3 page)

In the rearview mirror, I could see Edward shake his head and chuckle to himself. “Jesus, Alex, you fucking suck.”

“Out of the car.” Mr. Kane’s voice was choked, as if he’d swallowed a beetle.

I grasped the door, swung myself out of the Volvo, and walked stiffly on the grass. Let Mr. Kane yell at me; I was just happy to be standing on my own two feet again. Everyone else followed, standing as far away from me as possible, except for Theresa. Mr. Kane turned from us, hands at his hips, clipboard wagging at his side. His breathing was deep but sharp. When he faced us again, his cheeks were flushed and his nostrils flared.

“Alexandra,” he said through his teeth, stressing the last syllable and turning my name into a kind of wince, “were you visualizing a street?”

I glanced at Theresa for help, but she was studying her shoes. “Yes,” I lied.

He had to choose his words carefully. “Visualize that street again for me, won’t you, Alexandra? You have run over everyone on that street, Alexandra. They are all dead.”

Edward snickered in his fist, while Caroline looked vaguely ill. I imagined it was them I’d run over. Suddenly being the neighborhood assassin didn’t seem so bad.

Mr. Kane took another deep breath, and when he spoke again, his voice was clearer, hitting the deeper register of his tenor. “I’m not sure you should be in this class,” he told me. “I think we should call your parents and set up a conference. Maybe we can find an alternative.”

Because of my dad’s schedule at the post office, it was hard for him to make conferences. Most likely, it would only be my mom. I could see it, the two of them discussing how unfathomable it was that I couldn’t drive. Shamefaced, Mom would assure him that she could parallel park anywhere. My lack of skill must have been from my father’s side of the family. They’d laugh. She would thank Mr. Kane for bringing this to her attention and refuse to let me on the road at all, in order to save the lives of pedestrians across town. Afterward she would drive me home, asking why I couldn’t do this one simple thing. It would be heinous if my mother came to school. I hoped that if she were at home right now, staring out the window, she would be too distracted to hear the phone ring.

Of course, by the next morning, everyone had heard that I’d plowed onto the football field. It was a small school — ninety-three juniors, ninety-four now with Jim Wiley — so I wasn’t surprised they all knew. The lawn was choppy near one of the end zones, two straight patches torn from where I had hit the brakes so sharply. Football practice had been limited to one half of the field, so the players’ cleats wouldn’t do any additional damage. The football coach and two groundskeepers were out there, hands on their hips and shaking their heads at the bare dirt.

“Oh, please,” Theresa said. “It’s just grass.”

The rest of the student body didn’t seem to think so. Somehow our football team had managed an undefeated season so far — a first for the Oak Ridge Mountaineers. People other than the players’ parents were attending games. Even my school spirit extended so far as to wear a maroon T-shirt on pep rally days (though it was really only so I wouldn’t stand out). People were talking about going to the state finals. According to the rumors, state was out of reach now that I had destroyed the field. Which was totally ridiculous — the field was barely damaged — but they claimed it was a mental thing. Without a perfect end zone, they wouldn’t be able to score. Because obviously that had been their problem all the years the team sucked.

“Hey, Alex,” a sophomore boy called to me while I was getting books from my locker, “can I get a ride after school?” Before I could think of a clever response, he turned back to his friends, all hooting with amusement.

“Yeah, laugh your brains out,” I said. I shoved a calc book into my locker so hard, the metal clanged.

From across the hall, Theresa heard the noise. “I hate math, too,” she said, “but at the end of the year, they make you pay for the books you mess up.” When only half my mouth rose into a smile, she shook her head at the sophomores. “Screw them, seriously. They’ll be smoking pot in their parents’ basements when they’re forty.”

“Forty needs to hurry along,” I said.

A group of boys in letterman jackets strolled down the hall, and my stomach knotted. From kindergarten through junior year, I had tried so hard to be inconspicuous, to fly under the radar, and so far it had worked: I certainly wasn’t going to be prom queen, but I had my friends and managed to avoid crippling social trauma. Now everyone seemed to know both my name and that I couldn’t manage a simple task everyone else had mastered.

One of the senior football players, Nick Gillan, his neck as thick as his skull, smirked at me. “Better start gardening.”

“Christ, it’ll grow back,” Theresa said.

“It won’t by Friday.” Nick leaned toward me, so close that I saw the scars from where he’d scratched his acne. “Better get to work, Alex. It’s not going to grow back on its own.”

I could smell the smoke on his breath under spearmint gum, stale and sugary. Behind him, the other football players chuckled. I swung my locker door shut. “Yeah, like your bald spot? That hair’s never coming back.”

Nick briefly touched the back of his head, where hair was already starting to thin. His mouth bent into a frown. “Fuck you, Winchester.”

My eyes narrowed. “Asshole.”

Mr. Hunter, the vice principal, appeared nearby. “Problem here?”

“Not with me,” Nick said. Stuffing his hands into the pockets of his jacket, he sauntered away, the other football players behind him.

Mr. Hunter frowned at me. “Watch your language, Miss Winchester.” Then he walked down the hall, limbs swinging in a poor imitation of the strut in old cowboy movies.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said.

Theresa shrugged. “He probably has money on the game.”

I hadn’t known how bad things would be if the football team’s winning streak was threatened. For years, they’d suffered humiliating defeats, ranked as the worst team in their league. And suddenly, after winning a few games, I was the one responsible for jeopardizing their chances of going to state. All day everyone kept harping on it, either as a joke or taking it seriously. People claimed I had hurt the team’s focus, or that the cheerleaders had better watch out when I was behind the wheel, or that I was a plant from our rival schools, out to kill the quarterback. When I was calm, I could say their behavior was immature and irrational, and they’d be lucky if they passed geometry or managed not to knock up their girlfriends. But by the time I followed Theresa into the cafeteria and heard my name at various tables, the calm had burned out of me.

Even when kids didn’t call out or approach me, I could feel eyes turn whenever I entered a room. At one table, girls from the soccer team pretended they’d been looking elsewhere when I turned to them. Last year when I was on JV, we’d all been friends. I quit when I finally got sick of my mom lecturing me after games about what I could have done better. Now I wished I’d stayed on the team just so they might stick up for me. I would have made varsity this year. In sophomore English, we read
The Scarlet Letter,
and although I hadn’t liked it at the time, now I felt like Hester Prynne was my kind of girl.

Theresa and I sat in the corner, joining our friends Maddie and Josh. I’d been friends with Maddie since elementary school, when we were both into horses, and Josh since middle school, when we both were into hating math class. They’d been talking about some band coming to Richmond, but stopped once Theresa and I sat down. I was sure they’d say something about my driving, but instead Josh asked, “You know Jim Wiley?”

All three of them looked at me. “Yeah,” I said. “Everybody knows Jim. He drove into his house, remember?”

“No, I mean,” Josh said, “like, are you friends?”

I balanced an apple in my palm before taking a bite. “Not really. I mean, I saw him on the way to school yesterday.”

“What’d you do?” Theresa asked, grinning. “Hook up in the woods?”

“Yeah, it was really romantic,” I said. “Bugs and wet leaves. I’m super outdoorsy.” My mind flashed to Jim’s perfect mouth and how I bet he would be an amazing kisser. “If Jim Wiley wanted to hook up in the woods, that’s what I’d be doing right now.”

“Like Tarzan and Jane,” Maddie said. She took out a pen and started drawing purple flowers on her hands. “Except fewer gorillas, more squirrels.”

I looked at Josh. “Did Jim say we were friends?”

Josh explained that he had been in Spanish class when people started talking about me, the car, and the football field. And then Jim said, “Like you guys are any better.” I thought that was surprising enough, but Josh went on to describe Nick Gillan arguing with Jim about me, Nick saying I was some dumb bitch and they were going to lose the game because of me. “So Jim goes, ‘Whatever. You sucked to begin with.’ Nick’s face got all red and he tried to jump out of his desk, which didn’t really work because he’s too big. Jim was, like, staring him down. I totally thought Nick was going to flip desks over or something, but then Señor Oria came in, so everyone had to shut up and sit down.”

Maddie nodded. “Jim Wiley totally stood up for you.”

I chewed a bite of apple and tried not to smile. “Yeah, well, he demolished part of his house. He probably thinks messing up the football field is so minor compared to that.”

A few tables away, Jim Wiley was sitting with his senior friends but didn’t seem to be saying much. He hadn’t been in school long enough after driving into his parents’ house to deal with any of the rumors. Some people had claimed he drank a whole bottle of Jack Daniel’s. Others said he hated his family, and another group insisted that he snorted coke with the lacrosse team in the boys’ bathroom. Whatever he’d done, it was cooler than freaking out behind the wheel.

I swallowed a bite of sandwich, but it was hard in my throat. I barely knew Jim; the first time he’d said more than “hey” to me had been that morning in the woods. Except now he was sticking up for me when most of the student body thought I was an idiot. I hoped the rumors about him weren’t true. I hoped he was mostly an okay person. That suddenly seemed important.

Just after last bell, Mr. Kane caught me in the hall. I thought he was going to tell me about more imaginary people I’d killed, but he’d calmed down a little since driver’s ed. “Alex,” he said, exhaling heavily. It was as if he’d been practicing how to say my name without swearing.

“Mr. Kane,” I said.

“I just spoke with your mother about your situation. Your parents and I are going to have a conference and discuss our options. I really don’t want to fail you, so be prepared — it’s probably going to have to be a lot of extra work.”

I could already imagine the lecture — how I wasn’t applying myself, how I was totally capable, and how I had to get over it already. “What did my mom say?” I asked.

“She’s concerned, obviously,” he said. He paused, frowning at his clipboard, and then met my gaze. His voice was softer. “She said she’d been feeling a little out of sorts, so please let her know that I can work around her schedule if she’s under the weather.”

“Right,” I said, remembering how my mother had glazed over at breakfast. It was nothing, I told myself. Not like when she’d been sick — or that’s what we called it — years earlier. “She’s fine. You can meet whenever.”

“Excellent. Until then, you can observe.”

I tried to smile. Observing driver’s ed — such a thrill. Public humiliation aside, I wondered if it would be better to fail the class.

“We’ll make a driver out of you yet,” Mr. Kane said.

“Can’t wait,” I said.

That night, I expected Mom to corner me about driver’s ed, but it didn’t happen. At dinner, we talked about Teddy’s science-fair project — a baking-soda volcano, like every other kid in second grade — and how Katy felt like she was kind of over gymnastics. Mom asked me how school was that day but didn’t bring up Mr. Kane, and Dad didn’t seem to know anything, either. I kept quiet.

Walking up the driveway the next afternoon, I could hear Patsy Cline on the stereo, a sign my father was already home from work. Usually he didn’t get home until six, after my mother if she was working at the dentist’s office that day. He probably pulled a muscle on one of his routes and left early. Teddy, whom I’d grudgingly picked up after school, started dancing.

“Oh, my God,” I muttered. “Not this shit.”

“I like it,” Teddy said. Then he smirked. “You said shit.”

“No I didn’t. You heard me wrong.”

“I’m gonna tell Dad.” He raced toward the house with unwarranted glee, sticklike limbs flailing.

Inside, our father was sunk into the reclining chair, still in his postal uniform, a bag of ice slung over his shoulder, Jackson at his feet. Teddy was by his side, jabbering at him about me and a math test he’d had at school and eight other things. Dad’s eyes were half closed, but he nodded at Teddy. “Great multiplying, Ted. See how all those flashcards paid off?” he said, patting Teddy’s shoulder. He saw me hanging back in the hall. “I’ll talk to Alex about that, okay?”