Chapter 30 The Angle

Chapter 30 The Angle
Daisy

We watched. Liam lined up behind the center. He turned his head slightly and said something to the receiver on his left. Then, so briefly you would miss it if you weren't watching for it, his hand came up and scratched the back of his neck.

Three seconds later the ball was in the air in a perfect arc, and the receiver caught it at the thirty-yard line, and the stadium erupted.

"Told you," Chloe said, completely unsurprised.

Sarah stared at her. "You study him."

"He's my brother," Chloe said simply. "You study the people you care about."

She said it with the matter-of-fact certainty of someone who had not yet learned to make that observation sound like less than it was, and it landed in the space between us with a quiet weight that I felt but did not acknowledge.

I drank my hot chocolate.


It was during the third quarter that it happened.

Liam had taken a hit, a hard one, the kind that drew a collective inhale from the whole stadium, and when he got up slowly and walked toward the sideline to confer with Coach, the camera on the jumbotron followed him.

And Tiffany moved.

It was subtle. Professional, even. She broke from the cheer formation with the smooth efficiency of someone who had done this before, crossed the sideline in her perfect uniform, and appeared at Liam's elbow with the practiced ease of someone who knew exactly where she was and why.

She touched his arm. Said something. He turned his head.

From the stands I couldn't see his expression. I couldn't hear what was said. I could only see Tiffany Thompson standing two inches from Liam Martinez on the sideline of a home game with her hand on his arm and the stadium lights making everything look more significant than it probably was.

Beside me, Sarah went very still.

Chloe's jaw tightened in a way that looked exactly like her brother's.

I looked at my hot chocolate. The heat had mostly gone out of it. I drank it anyway.

"She's not supposed to be on the sideline during play," Chloe said. Her voice was carefully neutral, which on a twelve-year-old sounded exactly like controlled fury.

"That's against the cheer regulations. Mrs. Alvarez is going to make her run drills tomorrow."

"Good," Sarah said, with feeling.

"I'm going to the bathroom," I said.

Maya closed her book. "I'll come."

"I'm fine, Maya."

"I know." She stood up anyway, tucking the book under her arm. "I want a pretzel."



The concourse was loud and bright and crowded with the particular chaos of halftime still dissipating, people moving in every direction with food and drinks and phones out capturing things.

I walked without specific direction, just movement, because movement was better than sitting in the stands watching Tiffany Thompson's hand on Liam's arm and cataloguing the specific and unwelcome sensation that came with it.

I stopped near the railing at the far end of the concourse where it opened to a view of the field. Below, the teams were reassembling. Tiffany had returned to her formation. Everything was exactly as it had been.

Maya appeared beside me with a pretzel, broke off a piece, and held it out.

I took it.

"Say it," I said.

"I'm not saying anything." Maya ate her own piece. "I'm just standing here with my pretzel."

"Maya."

She looked at me sideways. "You had a face."

"I don't have a face."

"You had a very specific face," she said. "The one you get when something surprises you and you're angry at yourself for being surprised."

I looked at the field. Down below, Liam had rejoined the huddle. Whatever had happened on the sideline was over. He looked exactly the same as he always looked: collected, unhurried, already running the next play in his head.

"I don't care about Tiffany touching his arm," I said.

"Okay," Maya said.

"I care about the information it represents."

"What information?"

I turned the pretzel piece over in my fingers. "He said he had a conversation with her. After the cafeteria. He said she understood. "I looked at the field.

"But people who understood things don't cross the sideline during a game to stand next to the person they understood something about."

Maya was quiet for a moment. "That's a fair point."

"Which means either the conversation didn't land the way he thought it did," I said, "or the conversation wasn't entirely what he told me it was."

Maya looked at me carefully. "Or both."

"Or both," I agreed.

Below us the whistle blew. The fourth quarter began. The stadium noise rose back to its full volume.

"The secret thing," Maya said. "You still haven't found out what it is."

"No," I said.

"Are you going to ask him directly?"

I thought about last night's library. About the one-second pause. About the way his pencil had slowed almost imperceptibly before his face went perfectly steady.

"No," I said. "He's very good at being steady. Asking directly just gives him a question he's already prepared to answer. "I ate the pretzel piece.

"I need to find a different angle."

Maya broke off another pretzel piece and handed it to me. Down on the field, Liam threw a clean forty-yard pass that landed perfectly, and the stadium went loud around us.

Chloe's voice carried from the stands, high and clear: "That's my brother!"

Something moved in my chest at the sound of it. Something that had nothing to do with the play and everything to do with a twelve-year-old who studied the people she cared about and said so simply, like it was the most obvious thing in the world.

You study the people you care about.

I looked at the field.

"Come on," Maya said. "We should get back before Sarah combusts."

I followed her back toward the family section, and I told myself that the hot uncomfortable thing sitting in my sternum since the third quarter was information, just information, useful data about a situation I was managing carefully.

I told myself it had nothing to do with a hand on an arm under stadium lights.

I told myself that all the way back to the stands.

I almost believed it by the time I sat down.