Signed to Hate You

Chapter 5:The Question

AVERY

Maya's message is still sitting unanswered on my phone when Coach Hale claps twice and the whole lawn goes quiet.

Seven the next morning, cold grass, two hundred people in a loose circle under a gray sky.

Hale stands in the middle with his arms folded, the Crestwood head coach, forty-two, a man who measures a person by their last result. He doesn't raise his voice. He doesn't have to.

"Couples' quiz. Each of you answers a card about your partner, separately, no talking.

The cards were written by the other school. I read both answers out loud, round by round."

Written by the other school. Beside me, Julian's thumb stops on his wristband.

"I wrote the Riverside-Crestwood cards, Coach," Dom says, and holds up a stack of index cards like a dealer. Sharp dark eyes, a smile that never reaches them. "Figured we'd keep it fair."

His eyes aren't on Hale. They're on Julian.

Hale shrugs and takes the stack. He reads the list off the top card. "Quinn. Kane. You're up first.”

They give us index cards and a pen each, and they stand us six feet apart so we can't see each other's hands.

Round one, Hale reads. What does your partner order at a coffee shop?

Easy. Everyone in this hall has seen Julian with a black coffee at every away game for three years. I write Black and fold the card.

Hale reads them out. Black. Black.

A warm ripple goes around the ring, somebody whistles, and I let my shoulders drop half an inch.

Round two. Where did you first really talk to each other?

My pen stops.

Behind the bus, I write. It's true. It's the only conversation we've ever had that wasn't a score.

Hale reads mine, then Julian's. "Regionals. We were eleven. She told me my free throw form was an embarrassment."

The ring goes quiet for a second. Then laughter, loud, delighted. I stand very still with the heat climbing my neck. I'd forgotten. I'd actually forgotten, because I was eleven and furious and he was the boy who beat me, and he kept it for seven years.

"That wasn't a conversation," I say, and the circle laughs harder. "That was a public service."

It works. I feel the room tip back toward us, a girl with a quick tongue and a boy who remembers. But Julian has gone completely still.

He's looking at me across six feet of grass, and it's the look he gives the floor when he's stopped trusting what he sees there.

My thumbnail digs into my palm.

Round three, Hale reads, and checks the card twice. When did it start?

Dom's card. He's smiling at me now.

I write it plainly. After the video. The truth, and the only thing I'm sure of.

Julian writes something longer.

Hale reads mine first. Then his, slowly, as if he doesn't trust it either. "'Weeks ago.'"

Weeks.

The ring doesn't laugh this time. It does something worse. It goes quiet and starts counting.

I feel the gap open under my feet. After the video, and weeks ago. Two answers, one word apart, and two hundred people with phones.

The sheet in Vargas's clipboard says any further public incident, and this is the loudest silence I've ever stood in.

"Before," I say. It comes out steady. "He means before."

Julian's head turns, slightly.

"While I was still with Ethan." I keep my eyes on Hale's folded arms, on anything but the boy six feet away.

"He noticed. I didn't let myself notice back. I told myself he was the rival, that was all he could be." A breath, and it's almost real. "I'm good at not noticing."

He doesn't correct me.

His thumb stops on the wristband and stays there. The room reads it as agreement. A low soft sound moves around the circle.

“Oh.Funny," Dom says, loud, across the grass. "I thought the video was two days ago."

"I was paying attention," Julian says.

Nothing else.

Dom's smile doesn't move. His eyes go from Julian to me and stay, and I understand that he didn't hear the story. He heard the seam.

Hale looks at the three of us for one long beat. "Next pair," he says.

The circle loosens. A few people clap, scattered, polite.

Dom doesn't.

***

The nearest door is a supply closet behind the dining hall, and I don't remember choosing it.

Julian pulls it shut behind us. Mops, folded tables, a shelf of plastic cups, one bulb swinging on its cord.

The room is small enough that I can smell cedar soap on his collar. Through the wall, the circle is still breaking up, muffled chatter and somebody's laugh.

"Weeks," I say.

He doesn't look at me. He's looking at the shelf of cups as though it might offer him a different sentence. "It slipped."

"Slipped." I keep my voice low. "You said last night behind the bus. Then you said weeks to two hundred people. Which one slipped?"

His thumb finds the clasp on his wristband, opens it, shuts it.

"It didn't matter," he says. "It worked."

It did work. I'm the one who made it work, standing on a lawn improvising a story about a boy noticing me while I told myself I hated him, and I still don't know why part of me held my breath while I said it.

"Okay." I fold my arms. They don't stay folded. "The page says no real feelings. No crossing lines.

You wrote it. So tell me which part you were trying to cross out in front of everyone."

"I know what the page says."

"Then say it back to me."

"No real feelings," he says, flat, like reading a score. "No crossing lines."

"Good." My voice cracks on the word and I push straight past it. "Because I won't be the one to fall first. I want that on the record."

Nothing.

I wait. A cup rolls off the shelf and bounces once on the concrete. He doesn't pick it up.

He's looking at me now, dark gray eyes, no captain's mask, the way he looked at me across the grass when I laughed at his free throw.

He hasn't said no. He hasn't said neither will I. The silence stretches long enough that I can feel it settle into the room like a third person.

"Ave," he says, very quietly.

Not Avery. Not the voice he uses in front of people.

My name stops in the air between us, small and wrong, and I understand that he hasn't noticed he said it.

The door opens.

Not a knock. Just light, flooding the shelves, and Dom Shaw leaning in the frame with one shoulder against the jamb.

His phone is already up, his thumb steady over the red dot, and he's smiling.