Stay If You Can

Chapter Two

Jenna Ellis had a rule: never let anyone watch you when you don't know they're watching.

She broke it every single day at that court, and she knew it, and she didn't care.

There was something about the rec center hoop at four in the afternoon the light doing its slow gold thing through the chain-link, the squeak of her shoes the only sound besides her own breathing that made her forget the rule existed. Out here, nobody needed her to be anything. Not the loud one. Not the fun one. Not the girl who'd learned, at eight years old, exactly how fast "forever" could turn into "gone."

Out here, she was just good. Undeniably, uncomplicatedly good.

So when she finally missed a shot actually missed, rim-out, ball bouncing off toward the fence and turned to chase it down, she wasn't expecting to find someone watching her from the bottom bleacher like he'd been there a while.

Boy. Her age, maybe older. Dark hair, jaw set in a way that looked less like an expression and more like a permanent condition. Sitting very still, the way people sit when they're trying not to be noticed noticing something.

Jenna knew people. It was practically her whole thing she could read a room in four seconds flat, could tell you who was about to cry before they knew it themselves, could clock a liar across a cafeteria. It wasn't a superpower. It was just what happened when you spent your whole childhood watching adults' faces for the exact moment their voices were about to change.

But this one she couldn't get a read on him at all. And that, more than the staring, was what made her walk over.

"You gonna keep scouting me, or you want next?" she called, ball tucked against her hip, chin tipped in a way that dared him to look away.

He didn't. That was the first thing she liked about him.

"I don't play," he said.

"Everybody plays."

"Not everybody's good at pretending they're not tired."

That stopped her for half a second. It was such a strange, specific thing to say to a stranger too honest, like it had slipped out sideways instead of being offered on purpose. She filed it away the way she filed away everything: *interesting. Come back to that.*

"I'm Jenna," she said, because she didn't do slow.

"Eli."

"You always sit alone on bleachers watching girls you don't know, Eli, or is today special?"

Something almost like a smile happened at the corner of his mouth. Almost. Like even that cost him something.

"Today's special," he said. "You're loud."

"You're avoiding something," she shot back, no hesitation, and watched it land watched the almost-smile flatten out, watched him go still in a different, sharper way.

*Bingo,* she thought. *There it is.*

She didn't know what it was yet. But she knew the shape of a person carrying something too heavy to put down in public she'd grown up around people like that, had learned their weather patterns the way other kids learned multiplication tables. And usually, usually, she could tell exactly how heavy, exactly how long till it broke them open.

With Eli, for the first time in as long as she could remember, she had no idea.

That should have scared her off. It was supposed to. Unknown quantities were how you got hurt she knew that better than almost anyone her age had any right to.

Instead she sat down on the bleacher next to him, close enough that their shoulders almost touched, and said, "Okay. Don't tell me. But I'm not leaving till you at least smile for real."

He looked at her like she'd said something in a language he used to speak fluently and had almost forgotten.

"You don't know what you're signing up for," he said quietly.

Jenna Ellis grinned, wide and certain, the way she grinned at defenders half a second before she blew past them.

"Try me."

She had no idea, in that moment, that she'd just made a promise she would spend the next two years trying to keep or how close she'd come to breaking it before either of them even understood what it cost.