Conversations stop when I approach. I sit down and 2 minutes later, the table empties. Boon looked at the yard. One old oak tree already losing its leaves, but he'd started to like it. Something about the size of it implied decades he found reassuring.
"How's practice? " he said. Ren was quiet a moment. "Practice is different because Coach Foster doesn't run her gym on social temperature. She runs it on whether you can do the work. " A pause. And I can do the work.
I know. I'm probably going to make the squad, she said. Foster hasn't said it, but she stopped watching me the way she watches the others. She watches the others to see if they're good enough. She watches me to figure out where to put me.
The corner of her mouth lifted slightly. Different kind of watching. Boon felt something ease in his chest that had been tight since Monday. Not because the larger situation had changed, because he was watching his daughter read a room correctly and hold her ground inside it. And that was its own particular kind of relief.
Has Dalton been at practice? He said, "Football and cheer don't overlap, but he's in the parking lot sometimes when we come out. " She said it evenly. Not doing anything. Just there. Boon's jaw tightened.
He kept it off his face. Notebook, he said. 12 entries now. Dates, times, specifics. She looked at him.
I know what matters to document, Dad. You taught me that. All right, he said. They sat in the cooling air. The oak moved in the evening breeze.
Nothing's going to break, Ren said. Fact, not bravado. I've been the new kid three times before. I know how to not break, she looked at him. But I need you to stay steady because if you go up there and do something, she didn't finish.
She didn't need to. He knew exactly what the end of that sentence looked like. He'd lived most of it. It makes me the story instead of what they did, she said. And then nothing gets better.
It just gets different. He looked at his daughter. She was absolutely right. The clarity with which she'd thought it through. The precision of it made him proud and furious at the same time.
Furious at a world that required this level of strategic thinking from an 18-year-old just to get through a school week. I hear you, he said. Good, she said, and drank her coffee. The following Wednesday, Boon was changing brake pads on a Ford pickup when he heard Ren come in through the side door after school. He could tell from the sound of her footsteps, something he'd learned to read over 18 years, the way he read engines, that something had shifted.
She set her backpack down, came to the door of the bay. Something happened, she said. He straightened up, waited. Dalton found me after school, she said. Alone in the parking lot.
Not with Kyle, not with anyone. She looked at the garage floor, then at Boone. He didn't say anything about the online stuff. He didn't threaten anything. He just stood there for a second and then he said, "I need to tell you something. " Boon was still and then Kyle Webb came out of the building and called his name.
Ren said, "Dalton looked at Kyle and then looked back at me and whatever had been on his face, it just closed like a door closing. " She paused. He said, "Never mind. " And walked away. Boon thought about what Ruth had told him. Dalton in the diner on Sunday mornings when Pierce wasn't there. The different person.
The one who held doors and listened when his mother talked. He was going to tell you something he didn't want Kyle to hear. Boon said, "That's what I think. " Ren said, "The scar? " Boon said on his forearm. You noticed it the first day. Yes.
You ever find out where it came from? Ren was quiet a moment he told me. Not directly, not on purpose. A few days after that first hallway conversation, I was near enough to hear him explaining it to someone on the team. He said it was a dirt bike accident when he was 14.
She paused. He'd been asking Pierce for 2 years to let him ride. Pierce kept saying no. One day, he just went ahead and rode without asking. She looked at her hands.
He came home with the scar. Pierce didn't yell. Didn't say anything about the bike at all. He just looked at the scar and said, "Now you know what happens when you make decisions without me. " Boon said nothing for a moment. That's not a dirt bike accident.
Ren said, "No," Boon said. "It's not. " They sat with that a while in the bay, the smell of oil and cold metal around them, the radio playing something low. "I want to talk to him," Ren said alone without the audience. She looked at Boon directly, not to forgive him. "Not yet.
To understand him, because if he knows something about Pierce and he's been trying to get it out, that matters. " Boon looked at his daughter, 17 steps ahead of herself and still checking her own motivations while she ran. If he says anything specific about Pierce, Boon said, "Word for word. Don't interpret. Don't summarize. Word for word," she said.
2 days later, she found the moment. After practice, parking lot half empty. Dalton near the side of the gym building, hands in his jacket pockets, looking at his phone without really looking at it. He looked up when Ren came around the corner. You were going to tell me something, she said.
No preamble. He looked at the ground, then at her. I shouldn't be talking to you, he said. You're talking to me right now, she said. You could be anywhere else in this parking lot.
He didn't move. Why is your stepfather interested in my father? She said direct, no buildup. Something shifted in Dalton's expression. She'd named it and he hadn't expected that.