Pretty Little Touchdown

Chapter 1

Three months ago

The trick to smiling for six hours straight is the same as the trick to holding a plank. Don’t think about the muscles, and definitely don’t think about how much they’re screaming at you.

I have gotten very good at it.

“Again from the top!” Coach Diane claps twice, sharp, and forty-two girls in matching blue-and-gold sports bras drop into first position without groaning. We’re on hour four of a Tuesday preseason practice in a gym that smells like rubber flooring and grapefruit body spray, and my thighs are shaking, and I am smiling.

I can see myself in the mirror wall opposite the mats. Everyone can. That’s the point. Coach Diane is a big believer in what she calls “mirror discipline.” Meaning: watch yourself do the wrong thing so you never do it again. Meaning: watch yourself all day, every angle, no mercy.

My smile is perfect. I practiced this smile. It cost me eight months of muscle memory and a lot of nights standing in front of my bathroom mirror at Fairview High going up, up, hold until my cheeks cramped. Now it happens on its own. Someone yells five-six-seven-eight, and my face turns into a photograph.

Show teeth. Not too much gum. Corners high. Eyes lifted so it looks like the smile is happening to you and not from you. Bright girls don’t try. Bright girls just are.

Down. Kick. Turn. Basket toss. Melina goes up, laughs the whole way, comes down like she’s been dropped out of a helicopter and never once thinks about it. She weighs, at a guess, ninety-eight pounds. I have carried a backpack that weighed more. She lands, tosses her ponytail, hits her mark, and I catch her because that is my job on this squad. I am a base. I don’t fly. Flyers are five-two and look, from below, like they were born to be thrown into the sky. Bases are five-two to five-four and sturdy, and Coach Diane means it as a compliment when she says it, and I know she means it as a compliment, and my brain still hears fat.

Sturdy. Sturdy. Sturdy.

I catch Melina. I smile.

Somewhere in the back of my skull, the ticker never stops. It’s been running since sophomore year of high school and it doesn’t sleep and it doesn’t care about the smile.

The ticker calculates in fractions now. Fractions of fractions. It notices the protein bar Melina keeps offering me and does the arithmetic before I’ve even said no. It notices the almond that fell off the top of that protein bar into her lap. It notices the almond. It notices the sugar in the gum she’s chewing and the sugar in the breath mint she offered me at eight this morning and the tiny bit of toothpaste I always swallow when I brush too fast, and it converts everything, everything, into a running total against a number it will not tell me but I feel in my chest like weather.

The ticker has become the loudest thing in my head. Louder than Coach Diane. Louder than the music. Louder than the eight-count. Sometimes I catch myself standing perfectly still, smiling, doing math nobody asked me to do, while the world moves on around me.

The girl at Fairview High who weighed a hundred and eighty pounds ate whatever she wanted and had never heard the word macro. That girl was miserable and free. The girl on this gym floor could recite the calorie count of every food she has ever put in her mouth, and if you woke her up at three in the morning she would recite them in order. That girl is miserable in an entirely different way, and the trade feels, most days, worth it.

Most days.

“Rowen!” Coach Diane’s voice cracks across the gym. “Head up, sweetheart. You look like you’re about to cry. Are you about to cry?”

“No, Coach!”

“Good. Because we don’t cry in preseason. We cry in playoffs.” She winks. The whole squad laughs. I laugh. My laugh is also excellent. I practiced.

We run it twice more before she lets us go.

Wexford University’s main dining hall is called Havermeyer, because everything at Wexford is called after a dead man who once gave the school a boat. It is the size of a cathedral, and it is a cathedral, literally. Back in 1874, when Wexford was still a divinity school and the town of Wexford-on-Hudson was still trying to convince the Vanderbilts to summer here. The ceiling is vaulted stone. The windows are stained glass.

Melina drags me by the elbow toward the coffee station. Melina is captain of the squad because Melina has been captain of everything since she was seven years old. Her father owns a shipping company and her mother is on the board of the Whitney, and she told me both of these things inside our first ten minutes of knowing each other, not to brag, but in the same tone you might use to tell someone your zip code. Just orientation.

“Ash. Ash. Are you listening?”

“Yes.”

“Get the sparkling water, not the flat. The flat’s from the tap, they just bottle it in the back. It’s disgusting.”

“Okay.”

“And do not, do not, do not let me get the pasta. If I get the pasta I will hate myself for six hours.”

“Okay.”

I get the sparkling water. I do not let her get the pasta. I get a salad, no dressing, no cheese, no croutons (the ticker approves), and half a plain grilled chicken breast that I will eat two bites of and push around. Melina gets a salad and adds three grape tomatoes and one hardboiled egg and calls it dinner, and I don’t say anything about that either. We have an agreement neither of us has ever spoken aloud.

We sit at the cheer table. There is a cheer table. There is a lacrosse table and a rowing table and a debate team table and a finance club table, which is really just the sons of hedge fund managers eating dinner together and pretending it counts as an extracurricular. Wexford is like this. You are your table. Your table is your family. Your family, if it is the right family, gets you invited to the right parties, and the right parties determine who you know for the next forty years, and who you know for the next forty years determines everything. Or so my Comms 210 professor said in a lecture last week that I don’t think he meant to sound as ominous as it landed.

I am at the cheer table on a scholarship. Everyone knows. Wexford is need-blind on paper and extremely need-aware in practice. You can smell the scholarship kids from across the hall. We are the ones without watches. I have gotten better at faking it. My cheer uniform is provided. My meal plan is provided. My tuition is provided. What is not provided is anything else. The sushi nights. The ski trip Melina keeps mentioning like it’s already decided. The skincare, my god, the skincare. I have gotten very good at saying I have plans when I don’t, and then eating peanut butter out of the jar in my dorm room and calling it a Saturday night.

Melina takes a sip of her water and does the head-tilt she does when she has spotted prey.

“Oh, no.”

“What?”

“Don’t turn around.”

I turn around.

Behind us, three tables over, a girl I don’t know is sitting alone, reading a paperback and eating what looks like a plate of french fries. She is wearing a t-shirt that says WEXFORD MARINE BIOLOGY DEPT and her hair is in a bun that has clearly been in that bun since eight in the morning. She is minding her business.

“That is the saddest thing I have ever seen,” Melina says, into her sparkling water. “Like. Genuinely. Do you think anyone loves her? Do you think anyone has ever, in her entire life, loved her? Look at that shirt. Look at those fries."

The girl turns a page.

“Melina.”

“What? I’m allowed to notice things.”

Priya and Sloane, snort into their salads. Priya says, “Marine biology, though. Like. What are you doing?”

Sloane says, “Studying fish, apparently.”

Melina says, ”In this economy."

They all laugh. I laugh. The laugh sits in my throat like a swallowed bone.

The girl with the fries is still reading her book. She has not heard us. She is fine. She is having, probably, a perfectly nice dinner. I could stand up right now and walk over to her and say something. Sit down. Ask her what she’s reading. Do literally anything. Instead I take a sip of sparkling water and I laugh with the rest of them and I smile, up, up, hold, and the ticker in the back of my head is going this is who you are now, this is who you had to become, don’t you dare cry about it, don’t you dare, and I don’t. I don’t cry about it. I never do.

Melina moves on. She always moves on. Her cruelty is not a fire. It’s a spark that jumps from thing to thing. She is already onto the boys.

“Oh my god," she breathes. “Callahan is here.”

Priya and Sloane both turn.

I don’t. I know better than to turn.

“Beckett too,” Sloane says, in a voice like she just found a twenty in a coat pocket. “Ash. Ash. You have to see this. The whole crew is here.”

The whole crew is what everyone at Wexford calls the five boys who essentially run the campus. The sons of oil, the sons of banks, the sons of dynasties with plaques on buildings here dating back to before the Civil War. Chase Callahan is their quarterback in more senses than one. He is the golden face of the operation. His family made a fortune in shipping in the nineteenth century and simply never stopped making it. There is a Callahan wing on the library. His grandfather has a portrait in the alumni club that I have seen exactly once, by accident, and did a full double-take at because it was Chase in an ascot.

And then there is Beckett Ashford, who is not golden. Beckett Ashford is the third generation of Ashford Capital, and if you Google his name at least four separate scandals come up before you get to his LinkedIn, and one of those scandals involved a yacht, and I am not going to think about the yacht scandal right now. Beckett is dark-haired and lazy-eyed and he smiles like he’s about to break something expensive on purpose. Beckett is who your mother warns you about. Chase is who your mother would kill to have you marry.

Together, they walk into Havermeyer in the middle of the dinner rush like they own the room, which they sort of do, because the marble plaque above the fireplace at the north end of the hall has both of their family names on it.

I do not turn around. I stare into my sparkling water. The ticker is loud. The smile is on. Melina is whispering something to Priya about Beckett’s hands, and Priya is whispering back about a party this weekend at the Ashford lake house, and I am concentrating very hard on the piece of grilled chicken on my plate, and I am not looking up, I am not looking up, I am not looking up.

“Rowen. Your phone.”

Melina taps the table. My phone is buzzing across the wood. It’s my mom. I let it ring.

“You should get it,” Melina says, not really meaning it, and I stand up because it’s an excuse to move, because if I sit here one more second I am going to eat the entire chicken breast and hate myself all night, and I grab my phone and I turn.

And I walk directly into a wall.

Except the wall is warm.

Except the wall is wearing a soft grey sweater that smells like laundry detergent and something under it, something clean and expensive, like a very good hotel.

Except the wall has hands, and one of the hands is on my elbow, steadying me, and I am looking up, and up, and up, and I am looking at Chase Callahan.

Up close, he is not real.

I have seen him in the campus paper. I have seen him on the ESPN highlight reel Priya sent to the group chat last spring. I have seen him from across quads and across parking lots and across the athletic complex, and none of that prepared me. Up close, his face is a construction problem. The proportions are wrong. The jaw is too clean. The nose is too straight. The eyes. The eyes are pale blue with a darker ring around the iris and lashes so long they should be illegal on a boy, and they are looking directly into mine, and I am suddenly and horribly aware of every pore on my face, of the sweat still drying at my hairline, of the way my ponytail is coming loose in three separate places, of the fact that I am wearing yesterday’s mascara because I slept through my alarm, of the fact that I am five-foot-three and he is six-foot-three and I am craning my neck to look at him and the angle is not flattering, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god.

He smiles.

It is the smile from the poster in the athletic office. It is the smile from the alumni magazine. It is a warm, easy, aw-shucks smile that should be impossible on a face like his, and it isn’t.

“Hey. You okay?”

His voice is low. Polite. Kind. He is still holding my elbow.

“I. Sorry. I wasn’t. Sorry.”

“You’re fine.” He lets go of my elbow, slowly, like he is making sure I can stand on my own. He looks at me with what a normal person would call attention, and what my brain immediately re-classifies as pity. He has clocked, in the two seconds we have been standing here, that I am nobody. He is being nice to me because he is a nice boy. Nice boys are nice to nobodies. This will be forgotten by both of us in fourteen seconds and I will remember it for the rest of my life.

“Really,” he says. “I walked into you, honestly.”

He didn’t. I walked into him. But he is standing there, hands now in the pockets of his stupid perfect chinos, giving me an out, and the ticker has gone completely, unnervingly silent for the first time in nine hours because my brain has run out of processing power to do anything but stare at him.

“I’m. I’m fine,” I say, finally. “Thank you. Sorry.”

“You keep apologizing.” He grins. There is a dimple. Of course there is a dimple. “Don’t. I’ve had worse tackles.”

Then he steps around me, easy, casual, and he and the crew move on toward the back of the hall where the “reserved” table that nobody says is reserved is always, somehow, waiting for them.

I stand there holding my phone. It has stopped ringing.

When I sit back down, Melina is staring at me with her mouth actually open.

“Did Chase Callahan just touch you.”

“I fell into him.”

“Ash.”

“By accident.”

"Ash."

I pick up my fork. The ticker restarts immediately, as if it never paused, and I put the fork back down.

Across the room, at the reserved-not-reserved table, Chase is laughing at something one of his friends said. He is not looking at me. He has, as predicted, already forgotten.