How Things Got Complicated Between Us
1693 Words
Saturday morning I woke up and told myself firmly that Chase Hendricks was not interesting. He's just a boy who happened to live near me and had a brother I liked. Who happened to walk in the same direction as my house on a Friday night. These were all coincidences and coincidences meant nothing and I was going to eat my breakfast and study for my chemistry test and not think about anything he said. “You shouldn't have to disappear”.
I put more sugar in my cereal than necessary and stared at the wall.
My phone buzzed. Priya.
Priya: why do you look weird in my dream last night, like you were hiding something
Priya: Are you hiding something Zara?”
Priya Anand had been my best friend since the eighth grade when she sat next to me in English class and whispered "this book is terrible" about a book the entire class was pretending to love. We had been inseparable since then. She was also dangerously perceptive and I was not in the mood for it at eight in the morning.
Me: I'm not hiding anything go back to sleep
Priya: It's 8am I'm not sleeping
Priya: also you took too long to reply which means you ARE hiding something
Priya: who is he
I put my phone face down. It buzzed four more times.
I ate my cereal. Karen Hendricks asked me to come in at noon on Saturday because she had errands and Chase had practice. I showed up at five to twelve and Micah opened the door before I could knock, which meant he'd been watching from the window.
"You're early," he announced.
"You're in your pajamas," I replied.
He looked down at himself. "These are my day pajamas."
"That's not a thing."
"It is in this house."
Karen appeared behind him looking slightly harassed in the way mothers of small boys always looked slightly harassed. She was a tall woman with the same dark eyes as Chase and a warmth about her that made you feel immediately comfortable.
"Zara, thank you so much." She grabbed her keys from the hook. "There's lunch stuff in the fridge. Micah knows the rules. Chase should be back by three." She kissed the top of Micah's head. "Behave."
"I always behave."
She gave him a look that said we both know that's a lie and then she was out the door.
Micah turned to me. "Want to see something cool?"
"Depends on your definition of cool."
He grabbed my hand and pulled me upstairs and down the hallway to a door covered in stickers, rockets, dinosaurs, one very random sticker of a strawberry. He pushed it open and pointed dramatically at the corner of his room where he had constructed what could only be described as a fortress.
Blankets. Cushions. Three different flashlights. A sign that said NO GROWN UPS in green crayon with a drawing beneath it that was either a monster or a person, it was hard to tell.
"I made it yesterday," he said.
"Micah. This is very impressive."
He beamed. "You can come in. You're not really a grown up."
"I'm seventeen."
"That's not grown up. Grown up is like …." He thought about it for seconds. "Thirty."
I couldn't argue with the logic. I crawled into the fort.
We spent an hour there. He told me about his best friend at school named Jerome who could burp the alphabet. I told him about Priya and how she once convinced a substitute teacher she was a foreign exchange student from a country she made up on the spot and the teacher believed her for an entire class period. Micah thought this was the greatest thing he'd ever heard.
At some point I stopped thinking about chemistry tests and Tyler Mace and Friday night conversations under streetlights.
That was the thing about Micah. He made everything simple just by being in it.
Chase came home at two-thirty, earlier than expected.
I was in the kitchen making Micah a sandwich when the front door opened and then there was a sound not quite a crash but close. Something heavy against the wall. I came around the corner and stopped.
Chase was sitting on the floor in the entryway, back against the wall, still in his practice clothes. His helmet bag was on its side next to him like he'd dropped it. He had his head back and his eyes closed and there was a tension in his jaw that made him look older than seventeen.
Micah ran out from behind me. "Chase…"
"I'm fine buddy." He opened his eyes and his whole face shifted into something softer for Micah's benefit. It was automatic, practiced. "Just tired."
"Want to see my fort?"
"Later okay? Give me a minute."
Micah looked at me. I tilted my head toward the living room and he understood, he was a surprisingly perceptive kid and went back inside.
I stayed. Chase looked at me. "I said I'm fine."
"I know. Do you want water or anything?"
He blinked like that wasn't what he expected. "No."
I sat down on the bottom stair. Not next to him. Just nearby. Not making a whole thing of it.
He was quiet for a moment. Then: "Coach benched me for the Ridgefield game."
I didn't know enough about football to know what Ridgefield meant but the way he said it told me everything. It mattered a lot.
"Why?"
"Said my head wasn't in it." His voice was flat in the way voices get when someone has decided not to feel something yet. "He's not wrong. My head hasn't been in it."
I didn't say I'm sorry because it felt thin. I didn't say it'll be fine because I didn't know that.
"How long has your head not been in it?" I asked.
He turned and looked at me like that was an unexpected question. "Few months."
"Since your dad?"
The silence that followed was its own kind of answer.
"Micah told you," he said finally.
"Just that things changed. He didn't give me details."
Chase looked at the ceiling. "He left in October. No big fight, no warning. Just one day he was here and then he wasn't. Called three weeks later to say he'd moved to Phoenix. New job, new apartment." A pause. "New girlfriend."
He said the last part like, it still tasted bad.
"Chase…I don't want sympathy. I'm just explaining why my head isn't in it." He straightened up from the wall, rolling his shoulders like he was physically resetting. "My mom works doubles now. I handle most of the Micah stuff in the mornings. Practice runs until six most days. And then I come home and I'm supposed to also be a good student and a present boyfriend" He stopped.
I kept my face neutral. "Boyfriend?"
Something crossed his expression. "Technically. Amber and I are technically still together."
Amber Liu. Westbridge's head cheerleader. They'd been together since sophomore year. Half the school called them by a joint name like they were a brand.
"Technically meaning?"
"Meaning she hasn't officially ended it and neither have I but the last real conversation we had was six weeks ago." He stood up, picked up his bag. "She doesn’t really do complicated things."
"And you're complicated right now."
"Yeah." He looked at me. "Apparently I am."
I stood up from the stairs. We were closer than I realized and I took a small step back without making it obvious.
"For what it's worth," I said, "being benched for one game isn't the end. You know that."
"I know."
"And your coach isn't wrong but he's also not seeing the full picture."
"Also know that."
"Okay. Just making sure."
He studied me for a second with an expression I was starting to recognize, that look of mild recalibration, like I kept saying things that didn't fit whatever version of me he'd constructed in his head.
"You don't do that thing," he said.
"What thing?"
"The thing where people feel bad for you and then make it about how they feel. You just say the actual thing."
"Saying the actual thing is faster."
The corner of his mouth moved. Not quite a smile. But it was getting closer every time.
"Yeah," he said quietly. "It is."
He went upstairs to change. I went back to the kitchen. My hands were doing something weird,not shaking, just slightly too aware of themselves and I ran them under cold water for no real reason and stared at the faucet.
He has a girlfriend, I told myself. Technically, something else replied.
I turned the tap off harder than necessary.
At five o'clock Chase came downstairs in a clean hoodie and sat at the kitchen island while I packed up my bag to leave. Micah was watching cartoons in the other room, volume too loud the way he always had it.
"Zara."
I looked up.
He was looking at his phone but not at anything on it. Just looking at it as an excuse not to look at me directly.
"The thing in the hallway. With Tyler. On Thursday." He set the phone down. "I didn't help because I felt sorry for you."
I waited.
"I helped because I was angry." He finally looked up. "I've watched him do stuff like that for two years and I always… I don't know. I was always walking away. And that thursday I just can't"
I thought about several responses and chose the most honest one. "What changed?"
He held my gaze for a moment longer than felt casual. "I don't know yet."
Then Micah yelled something from the living room about a cartoon dragon and the moment broke and I finished zipping my bag and said goodbye and walked out into the cooling evening air.
Three houses down I pressed my hand flat against my sternum like I was checking that everything was still in the right place.
It mostly was. This is not the best time to fall in love plus he has a girlfriend, but can never tell. Luck might be on my side.
- Writer
