Chapter 6

After that day, Chloe stopped coming over.

She and Mark were everywhere. Beach trips, football workouts, cheer practice, four hundred pictures a week. Every post was tagged, every story was shared, every caption was a joke about how obvious they were.

I knew what she was doing. She wanted me to break first. She wanted me to text her at two in the morning and apologize for something I hadn't done.

I didn't. I was busy.

Running in the mornings before the heat came up. Lifting in the garage with a bench my dad had built in high school. Eating what I was told to eat, sleeping when I was told to sleep, checking my email every hour like a kid checking under the tree.

Then, on a Tuesday, the camp office wrote to me.

We're sorry to hear you have decided to withdraw from Elite Football Summer Intensive.

I read it standing up. Then I sat down and read it again.

I had not withdrawn.

I called them immediately.

"Someone used your email and confirmed the cancellation," the woman on the phone said. "Same address, same password. From a university IP."

"Can you put me back in?"

"There's a waitlist. I'm sorry."

Only one person in the world knew my passwords. I had given them to her in the tenth grade so she could check my grades in the office when I was sick.

I called Chloe.

"Julian." She picked up on the first ring, like she'd been holding the phone.

"Did you cancel my camp spot?"

A beat.

"I did it because I care about you."

My whole body started shaking. I had to put a hand on the wall.

"You had no right."

"That camp is brutal. You're not ready for it."

"You don't get to decide that."

"Julian." Her voice softened, and that was worse. "I don't want you embarrassing yourself."

There it was. Not concern. Not kindness.

Shame.

"My dream is embarrassing to you?"

"Julian, come on. Stay here this summer. Train at Riverton if you want. I'll help you. Mark will help you too."

"I don't need help from you or Mark."

"You're being dramatic."

I hung up.

Then I called the camp again and explained everything. I told them about the password, the shared email, the whole ugly story. I stayed on the line for forty minutes until the woman came back and said, quietly, that she'd moved me off the waitlist.

She'd put me back in.

I thanked her maybe four times. I couldn't stop.

The next day was Riverton's end-of-year pep rally.

I walked into the gym and stopped six feet inside the door.

My football team application packet had been taped to the wall. Every page. My weight from the physical section circled in red marker. My height. My photo from the form, blown up and printed, with GO HOME STINSON written across my face.

The room burst into laughter.

"Who did this?"

Nobody answered. They only laughed harder.