Stay If You Can

Chapter Four

Jenna didn't hear from Eli that night. Or the next morning. Or during first period, when she caught herself checking her phone under the desk three times in ten minutes like an i***t.

She told herself it didn't matter. People got busy. People had families, sisters who texted three times in a row, whatever fire he'd had to go put out. It didn't mean anything.

Except Jenna had spent her whole life reading the difference between *busy* and *disappearing*, and something about the way he'd said *nothing's wrong* while looking like his whole chest had caved in that wasn't busy. That was the specific, practiced flatness of someone who'd had a lot of practice hiding damage in plain sight.

She recognized it because she used to be fluent in it herself.

Jenna was eight the year her older cousin Dani drowned.

Not slowly. Not with warning. One ordinary July afternoon at the lake house, Dani laughing, diving off the dock the way she'd dived off it a hundred times before, and then she just didn't come back up in the way that mattered. Jenna remembered almost nothing about that day directly. What she remembered was the after: the adults' faces doing the thing where they tried to arrange themselves into calm and failed, the specific silence of a house with one fewer person's noise in it, the way nobody would say the word *dead* around her for almost a year, like protecting her from the word would protect her from the fact.

It hadn't. Eight-year-olds aren't stupid. They just don't have anywhere to put grief that big, so it goes somewhere strange instead.

For Jenna, it had gone into speed.

She'd started running that fall not organized, not a team, just running, blocks and blocks of it, like if she moved fast enough the feeling couldn't catch her. Basketball came a year later, and it turned out the same instinct that made her outrun her own grief made her genuinely, absurdly good at reading a court she could see three moves ahead because some part of her brain had spent a whole childhood scanning for the moment things were about to go wrong.

Most people, she'd noticed, took a loss like that and turned inward. Got careful. Started keeping people at arm's length so it couldn't happen again.

Jenna had gone the opposite way, and she still wasn't totally sure why, except that somewhere in that first terrible year she'd made a decision, half-conscious, that she was going to live loud enough for two people. Dani used to say that *live loud, Jen-Jen, we only get so many summers* the kind of thing a fourteen-year-old says without knowing it'll become scripture to an eight-year-old five years later.

So Jenna didn't guard the door. She threw it open. She said what she meant, showed up uninvited, told near-strangers on bleachers that she wasn't going anywhere because the alternative, the guarded version of grief, had never made sense to her. If you could lose someone that fast, that randomly, with an ordinary Tuesday turning into the worst day of your life without any warning at all then what exactly was the careful version buying you? A few extra months of distance before the same loss found you anyway?

Better to love recklessly and get hurt than to love carefully and still get hurt anyway, just with less to show for it.

That was the whole architecture of her, if you knew where to look. Bold because careful hadn't saved Dani. Loud because quiet hadn't either. *Always there* because someone, once, had been there and then simply wasn't, with no warning at all, and Jenna had decided a long time ago that if she couldn't control the leaving, she could at least control her own showing up.

Which was exactly why Eli's silence was eating at her more than it should have for someone she'd known five days.

Because Jenna knew, better than almost anyone her age had any business knowing, what it looked like when someone was carrying a loss they hadn't figured out how to hold yet. She'd seen it in her own mother's face for two years after Dani. She was starting to see it in his.

The difference was, Eli's loss whatever it was hadn't happened once, cleanly, terribly, and then stopped. She was starting to suspect his was still happening. Slow-motion. Every single day.

That afternoon she went to the court anyway, half-expecting an empty bleacher.

He was there.

Sitting in the exact same spot, same stillness, like nothing had happened except his eyes were red-rimmed in a way he clearly hoped the low sun would hide, and there was a rawness in his face that hadn't been there three days ago.

Jenna didn't run over. She didn't make a thing of it. She just walked up slow, sat down beside him without a word, close enough that their shoulders touched, and let the silence do the talking she knew he needed more than questions.

They sat like that for almost a full minute before he spoke.

"My brother called," Eli said finally, voice low, flat, careful. "First time in eight months."

Jenna kept her eyes forward, on the empty hoop, giving him the space to keep going without the pressure of her looking at him while he did it.

"That's good, though. Right?" she said carefully. "That he called?"

Eli let out a breath that wasn't quite a laugh.

"He called to tell my mom he's not coming back for Thanksgiving. Again." A pause, his jaw tight. "Everyone in my family is really good at calling to explain why they're not coming back."

Jenna's chest ached not pity, she didn't do pity, but something closer to recognition, one grief nodding at another across a gap neither of them had named yet.

"I'm sorry," she said, and meant it completely.

"Don't be." His voice had gone flat again, the wall sliding back up brick by brick right in front of her. "I'm used to it."

"That's not the same as being okay with it."

He turned to look at her then, really look, something raw and unguarded flickering across his face for just a second before he caught it and pulled it back and in that one unguarded second, Jenna saw something that scared her more than anything he'd said out loud.

She saw a boy who had already, quietly, decided that everyone left eventually.

Including her.