Thirty Days and A Girl

Girls Who Lie To Themselves

Ivery's POV

I did not sleep well.

This was not unusual. Sleep had been complicated since Mason, not impossible, not every night, but complicated in the specific way of someone whose nervous system had spent eight months on a particular kind of alert and had not yet fully received the message that the alert was over. I would fall asleep fine and then wake at two or three in the morning with my heart already going, already scanning, the body doing its assessment before the mind caught up.

Nothing here. You're safe. Go back to sleep.

Sometimes it worked. Sometimes I lay in the dark and listened to Sammy breathing on the other side of the room and ran through the things I knew to be true until my chest unclenched. You are in a new city. You transferred. He does not know where you are.

Except that last one was becoming less certain by the day, which was a thought I was not going to have at two in the morning in a dormitory room in a city I had been in for less than twenty-four hours.

I thought about it anyway.

Mason was not the kind of person who accepted the end of things. I had understood this in the abstract when I left and had been understanding it with increasing specificity ever since, the unanswered calls that kept coming, the messages that shifted from apologetic to cold to something that was not quite a threat but sat in the neighborhood of one. The way he had been standing outside my last lecture three weeks ago with the patient, unhurried energy of someone who was not worried about time because he had decided the outcome already.

I had transferred within the week.

I had not told anyone the full reason. Not my parents, who thought it was about the program. Not my friends from before, most of whom had been his friends first. Not Sammy, who had known me for eleven hours and had already seen more of the real version of me than most people managed in months.

I lay in the dark and breathed and told myself that distance was safety. That starting over was not the same as running.

At some point I slept. At some point after that my phone lit up.

The message from the night before, the one I had sent at midnight and had not expected a response to: One more thing. You said you don't run. I think you do. I think you're very good at it. I think the composed thing is how you run, you stay so still that nobody notices you've already gone.

He had not responded.

I turned the phone face down and went back to sleep and told myself this was fine. That I had said a true thing to a stranger and he had chosen not to engage with it, which was his right, and none of this was anything.

I had exactly one important thing to think about and I was choosing not to.

Sammy woke me at eight with the specific lack of mercy of someone who had been awake for an hour and found the solitude boring. "Your hair," she said, from somewhere above me.

"Good morning to you too," I said, into the pillow.

"I'm serious, Ivy. It's a situation."

"It's my hair."

"It's a situation that is happening on your head. Get up. Library."

I turned over. Sammy was standing at the wardrobe holding two dresses against herself with the expression of someone making decisions that mattered. "The blue, right?" she said.

"The blue," I confirmed, sat up, and accepted that the day had begun.

We spent two hours at the library, Sammy making herself visible in the periodicals section while I actually read, which had always been the division of labor in friendships I found myself in. I checked out two books I wanted and one I did not need and would read anyway, and we left at ten with the satisfaction of a morning that had been used rather than merely passed through.

On the way back Sammy suggested the sports complex. I did not suggest it. She suggested it and I agreed because I liked basketball and the court was there, and the fact that I spent the walk thinking about whether a specific person might also be going to the sports complex on a free morning was entirely coincidental and not a factor in my agreement.

He was not there when we arrived. Good. Fine. Irrelevant.

Favour was there, which Sammy received with the careful nonchalance of someone who had absolutely anticipated this possibility and had dressed accordingly. I found a ball and went to the far end of the court and started shooting.

Left hand. Always left. My father had spent three years trying to correct what he called my backwards shooting and had eventually, after watching me shoot sixty percent from the left corner in a school game, accepted that there was nothing to correct.

I fell into the rhythm of it, the gather, the release, the particular satisfaction of a shot that left your hand already knowing it was going in. I loved that sound. Had loved it since I was seven in my father's backyard, which was too small for a proper court but had a hoop on the garage door that I had worn down over years of afternoons that belonged entirely to me.

Basketball was mine. Had been mine before Mason, had remained mine during Mason, the one thing he could not reach because he was not interested in it and therefore had not thought to take it. When everything else had been carefully dismantled and reconstructed in the shape of what he needed it to be, the court had stayed. I had held onto it the way you held onto the one thing that still belonged to you.

I was mid-motion, crossover left, step back, the ball already leaving my hand, when the door opened. I released. The ball dropped through the net. I turned.

Nathaniel Kings was standing at the entrance with Dante beside him, both in training gear, both still, both looking at me. Dante's expression was open, the unguarded appreciation of someone who had just seen something worth appreciating. Nathaniel's was not open. Nathaniel's expression did the thing I was already learning it did, a small, controlled adjustment, a recalibration, the filing of new information into a revised category. Nothing on his face that he had not chosen to put there.

His eyes moved from the ball in the net to me.

"That's her?" Dante said.

"Don't," Nathaniel said, which was not quite an answer.

I picked up another ball. Dribbled it twice. "Morning," I said, because ignoring them required more effort than acknowledging them and I was conserving my energy.

"Morning," Dante said warmly. "That was a nice shot."

"Thank you," I said.

Nathaniel said nothing. He was looking at me with those dark, controlled eyes and I looked back for exactly as long as was reasonable, three seconds, maybe four, then turned and went up for another shot. It went in.

Favour's voice carried across the court: "King , come on. Threes. Me and you, Dante and "

"Ivery," I said, without turning.

"Ivery," Favour repeated. "What do you say?"

I turned then, ball on my hip, and looked at Nathaniel across the court. Arms crossed. Expression giving nothing. I thought: *he responded to none of my messages last night. He read them and said nothing. He is standing here giving nothing, and I am going to play basketball with him, and it is going to mean absolutely nothing to me.

"Depends," I said. "Is he any good?"

Something moved at the very edge of his mouth. Not quite a smile. The suggestion of one, controlled before it arrived. "She's asking if you're any good," Dante said, delighted.

"I heard her," Nathaniel said.

"Well?" I said.

He uncrossed his arms and held out a hand. Favour passed him the ball. He caught it without looking, dribbled once, clean, automatic, the specific ease of someone for whom the ball was an extension of what his hands already knew and looked at me. "We'll find out," he said.

His voice was even. Entirely without performance.

Sammy appeared at my elbow. "Are we doing this?"

"We're doing this," I said.

She made a sound of joy and went to Dante's side. I bounced on my heels and told myself very firmly that I was a person who did not care about proving things to people who had not asked to be impressed.

I cared. An embarrassing, inconvenient, deeply ill-timed amount.

Now is not the time, I told myself.

For basketball? some part of me asked, innocent.

You know what I mean.

The game began.

We were tied at eight when it happened. Nathaniel had the ball at the top of the key and I was on him, chest watching, weight balanced, giving him nothing toward the middle because that was where he wanted to go. I had learned this in four possessions. He was a middle driver who used his length to finish over contact.

He looked left. I did not move. He looked right. I did not move.

Then he said, quietly, for only me: "You're going to foul me."

"I'm not going to foul you," I said.

"You're too close."

"This is legal distance."

"Barely," he said. And then he moved right, a crossover that was not fast but was precise, the kind of move that did not require speed because it had already happened in his head three seconds before it happened on the court.

I recovered. Stayed with him. Got a hand up.

He did not drive. He stopped. Set. And looked at me from two feet away with those controlled dark eyes and said: "I didn't respond to your messages last night."

I blinked. "I know. You "

"I read them," he said. "All of them."

The court was happening around us. Favour calling for the ball. Sammy talking to Dante. None of it was relevant.

"Okay," I said.

"You were right," he said. "About the composed thing." A pause. "It doesn't mean I'm going to do anything about it."

He shot the ball over my outstretched hand, a clean pull-up jumper that hit the back of the net without argument and turned and walked back up the court like the conversation had not happened.

Favour cheered. Dante groaned.

I stood at the spot where the conversation had occurred and looked at the net and felt my heart doing the thing I had specifically told it not to do.

Now is really not the time, I told myself.

But he had read all of them. Every word. And he had waited until I was two feet away on a basketball court to tell me, which was either the most calculated thing anyone had ever done to me or the most honest, and I could not yet tell which, and I was terrified that I was going to spend a significant portion of this year trying to figure out the difference.

The game continued.

I did not foul him.

I did not need to.