Practice Girl's Revenge

Start Reading

He told his friends he practiced on me first.

The summer we turned eighteen, Julian Ashford took me to bed for the first time.

It hurt. I smiled at my ceiling all night anyway, because six years of loving him in secret had finally turned into something real.

Then, the next afternoon, I heard his friends laughing in our classroom.

"Look at you. The prettiest girl in our class, and she's the one who broke you in."

My face went hot. I turned to leave.

Julian answered before I got two steps. Bored. Like it cost him nothing.

"I'm going after the girl the whole school wants. Didn't want her thinking I had no idea what I was doing."

"So I practiced on Delaney first."

I didn't say a word to anyone. Before the deadline closed that night, I changed my first-choice school from Boston to Miami.

Chapter 1

Six years, and he said it like he was talking about a bike he test rode.

Everything in my head went white.

It was ninety degrees out. I stood in that hallway and went cold from the scalp down.

Inside, the talking stopped for a second, then picked right back up.

"Classic Ashford. The prettiest girl in school is practice."

"So what is she, then? Like the housekeeper's daughter the rich kid keeps around for himself?"

Julian laughed. Not even a real laugh. Just air.

"Come on. It's not like she lost anything."

Somebody jumped in fast. "True, true. She is kind of skinny, though. Compared to Camille, the body is"

Julian threw a book at his head. His voice cut over the noise.

"It just happened, okay? The mood was there. And honestly, she looked like she was having a rough time holding out."

Somebody made a noise. Then they all started at once.

"No way. Quiet girls really are the wild ones."

"Man, that's Ashford for you. Food's on the plate, might as well eat."

"She chased him for what, years? She finally got what she wanted. She's probably wanted to jump you for ages."

The laughing got louder.

I bit down on my lip. My hands closed into fists so tight the nails went in.

It took everything I had to stay standing, to not go down right there in the doorway with my backpack still on.

Footsteps came up the far end of the hall.

That snapped me back. I ran.

The nearest bathroom. A stall. The lock.

By then my face was already soaked.

His words came back one at a time, in order, on a loop.

There was nothing left of me that I'd been proud of.

If I hadn't heard it myself, I would have sworn it was a different person. Not the boy from last night. Not the one who held on to me like the world was ending.

So that was the thing nobody tells you. You can do that with someone and feel nothing.

You can lose your mind, say every soft thing there is to say, and none of it has to be true.

The happy ending I'd sat up all night grinning about was a punchline in a room full of boys.

I cried harder.

Quietly, though. Hands over my mouth, shoulders going, making no sound at all.

A long time passed. My phone buzzed against my leg.

Julian.

Julian: [Get yourself a ride home. Some of us are doing something tonight, can't bring you.]

I didn't answer.

Another buzz.

Julian: [Also go pick up Plan B, I'm slammed today. Don't forget to take it. Good girl.]

I sat on the closed lid and stared at those two messages until the screen went dark.

Last night lasted from sundown to gray light. He wore me out and started again and I let him, every time.

At the end of it, when we were both too tired to move, he pulled me into his chest and said it twice before he fell asleep.

"We weren't ready for your first time. I'll get you the pill in the morning. I promise."

He even lectured me about it. Girls have to take care of themselves. You have to take it, or it can really hurt you later.

I remember thinking he was so careful with me. So responsible. I remember thinking, this is it, this is my whole life starting.

And now.

Something in me went very clear, very fast.

I dug my nails into my palm and pressed until the crying stopped.

Six years. It took him one afternoon to spend all of it.

Chapter 2

Wiped my face, fixed my hair, out the door like a person who had somewhere to be.

I couldn't make myself go into a pharmacy. I ordered it online instead.

The driver left it at the door. I waited a long time after the notification came through before I opened it, in case anyone was in the hall.

I swallowed the pill with tap water, still crying, on an empty stomach. Then whatever was holding me up went out of me, and I sat down on the rug and stayed there.

His family moved in next door when I was eight. I'd been following him around ever since, ten years of it, like a duckling with a bad sense of direction.

I had never once pictured a world without him in it.

I hadn't wanted to.

But that was the world now.

Outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, the lights across the street came on one by one, then started going out again.

Sometime later, my phone lit up. Margot Pike, on video. Mo to everybody who knows her.

"Laney, why aren't you here with Julian? Everyone's at the end-of-year party."

"Guess who showed up. Camille Vance, from the other AP track. She's been glued to him since you didn't walk in. It's gross, come look."

Mo flipped the camera.

Dark corner of the room, past the couch. Julian and Camille, sitting so close there was no space to speak of.

Camille was in a crop top and a denim skirt that had been chosen with real care.

The two of them had drifted a few feet from everyone else, the way people do when they've decided the party is somebody else's problem.

Even talking, they had their heads tipped in toward each other.

You could feel it through a phone screen, from across town.

My chest closed up like a fist.

That afternoon he said he wanted to go after her. By nine at night he had.

Camille Vance was the kind of girl whose posts were always sunny. Good light, good weather, never a bad day. She had the whole thing down.

Somebody called truth or dare. Camille drew the push-up dare and got to pick a guy.

Julian stood up before she finished reading it out loud.

The room lost it.

Camille went red and lay back on the couch anyway, hands folded, obedient as anything.

He braced over her and did dozens, easy, not touching her once. Careful about it, the whole time. He kept his arms locked and his weight up and his eyes somewhere over her shoulder.

Then, on the last one, either his arms gave out or he decided they had.

He came down on top of her.

The screaming almost took the roof off.

Both their faces were burning. Everyone was chanting. And Julian, with the whole room watching, just dipped his head and kissed her.

Full on. Like nobody else was in the building.

Three minutes.

When they finally pulled apart, neither of them wanted to.

I know because I counted. I sat on my floor with my phone in both hands and I did not blink and I forgot, for a while, how breathing worked.

Something under my breastbone tore and kept tearing. I sat on the floor and let it.

I wanted to cry. Nothing came. I'd used it all up in the bathroom that afternoon.

"Okay, did you see that? Did you see it? That's not a first kiss, that's a man in love," Mo said, and turned the camera back around, and started walking.

A door. A hallway. Somewhere quiet.

"Don't hate me for this. You were never going to let him go until you saw it with your own eyes."

My throat had gone to sandpaper. What came out barely sounded like me.

"I don't hate you."

I hated the girl who'd spent six years being sure. I thought that spot beside him was mine because he'd never told me to move.

"I'm just done with him, Laney. He knew. He's known for years exactly how you felt about him, and he stood there playing the sweet confused boy and let you sink."

"You saw what I saw. So please, please think hard about this. Don't let him take four more years off you in Boston"

"He won't, Mo."

I cut her off. My voice came out level, which surprised both of us.

"I'm not giving myself another chance at it."

"The portal closes tonight."

"I've already decided. I'm coming to Miami with you."

"But you have to promise me one thing. He doesn't hear it from you."

Chapter 3

I opened my laptop right there on the video call, so I couldn't talk myself out of it.

Minutes before the deadline closed, I changed my first choice to the big state school down in Miami and hit submit.

The confirmation email came in before I'd closed the laptop.

Mo screamed so loud her camera shook.

She'd been begging me to apply there since junior year.

But freshman year, Julian and I had made a deal. We'd work hard, we'd get there together, and we'd go to the school he'd wanted since he was a kid.

Boston. Aerospace engineering. He'd had a poster of a jet engine cutaway over his desk since he was eleven.

I don't love the cold. I have never once cared about engineering. For three years I put that school at the top of every list anyway, because it was where he was going.

Our parents thought it was perfect. Ten years of shared driveways and holiday dinners, and now the kids would be on the same campus.

Everyone assumed the rest of it. That the two of us would just, at some point, officially become the thing everyone already treated us as.

Now I couldn't come up with one reason to go to Boston.

Or, more honestly: after today, if I kept orbiting him the way I always had, I would not be able to look at myself.

I wanted distance. That was all. I didn't care where, as long as he wasn't in it.

He was going north. Fine. I'd go south.

Before bed I ran the tub as hot as it went and got in.

The bruises were still there. Both hips. My upper arms. One at the base of my throat.

Last night came back whether I wanted it or not. How hot his skin ran. How his breath burned at my ear when he lost it a little. All of it still hanging around the room like it had nowhere to be.

I shook my head hard, like that ever works.

Then I got the roughest washcloth in the cabinet and scrubbed. Arms, shoulders, hips, the marks. Over and over, until my skin came up red and stinging.

Like a memory is something you can take off with soap.

All I got out of it was a night of not sleeping, because everything hurt.

He didn't text.

Six years. Since the summer we both got phones, we'd said goodnight every single night. Camp, flu, that fight in tenth grade. Every night.

Fine. Good, even.

It was always going to end one day. Might as well start the withdrawal now.

I finally fell asleep somewhere around dawn.

The next morning I was still under, deep in it, when someone kissed my forehead.

My eyes came open.

A jaw. A throat. Both familiar.

The air above me smelled like cedar, which is what he'd worn since he was sixteen. Underneath it, faint, was a citrus perfume I had never smelled in my life.

Right. He'd known my front door code since it was my mom's birthday.

He saw I was awake and moved lower, laughing under his breath, going for my mouth.

I turned my head.

Then I got a hand between us and shoved and rolled to the far side of the bed.

He stopped. Looked at me. Grinned.

"Shy now? Really?"

I pulled the comforter over my head.

He started yanking it back down, lecturing the whole time.

"Delaney Rae. Bold of you. No goodnight, and then you turn your phone off?"

"Now you're hiding?"

He got under the covers in one move. Before I could get my arms up he had me pulled back against him, both of his around me.

"Come on. How many times. You can't skip breakfast."

"I ran to get it. Half an hour, there and back, that bagel place with the line out the door. Bacon, egg and cheese, extra napkins, the way you like it."

"So. You want to get up and eat, or do you want to be breakfast?"

His mouth was at my ear. His hand moved.

Everything in me came awake at once, and I started to fight.

Chapter 4

I am five foot two. He is six foot two and built like it.

It was not a fair fight.

And the whole time I was thinking, what is this. You have Camille. You have what you wanted. Why are you in my bed.

I twisted and pushed until I was out of breath and he only ended up holding me tighter, laughing into my hair.

"Okay, what's the drama?"

"Are you mad? Seriously? Because I didn't bring you to one party?"

Nothing from me.

He put his face in my neck and laughed.

"Let me guess. Your best friend called with a full report."

"It was a game. You're jealous over a game?"

"It's the same thing every time. I get within three feet of another girl and you go quiet for two days."

There was too much to say, so I said none of it.

Then I remembered the self-defense unit in gym, and I brought my knee up as hard as I could.

He made a sound. I was off the bed and across the room before he finished making it.

"Delaney!"

His jaw was locked and his face had gone red all the way to his ears.

I grabbed a hoodie, pulled it on over what I'd slept in, and went to the living room.

I couldn't be in a room with him. Not that room.

He came out a minute later, walking careful, annoyed and out of patience with me at the same time.

He stood there a while. Then, like it had just occurred to him:

"Oh. You took the pill yesterday, right?"

"Don't let this turn into a thing. I can't be the one explaining that to your parents."

He went to the table, picked up the iced coffee he'd brought, and held it out.

"Sit down and eat something before you're mad at me. You know how your stomach gets."

I didn't take it. I didn't look at it.

His arm stayed out there, cup in hand, for longer than he's ever waited for anything.

Then it ran out.

"What is it? What did I actually do?"

"Delaney, there's a limit to this. Give me a reason."

My voice came out flat.

"I don't rate one."

He slammed the cup down on the coffee table.

He put too much into it. The plastic split along the seam, and the whole thing went out across the rug in one long spreading sheet.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Who do you think you are?"

"We slept together once, both of us wanted it, and now you think you get to run my life? Do you know how suffocating this is?"

He had never once talked to me like that.

I was crying before he finished the sentence. Not building up to it. There was no half second in between. My whole face was wet and my ribs were going and I couldn't get air in around it.

Everything from yesterday came up my throat at once and there was nowhere to put it.

Whatever he'd braced for, it wasn't that. He stood there with his hands half up, and something in his face fell apart.

"I'm sorry. Hey. I drank a lot last night, I'm being an idiot, I didn't mean it."

He crouched down beside me and reached for my face to wipe it.

I moved my head.

His hand stopped in the air between us.

He was still holding it there, mouth open on something he never got to say, when his phone went off in his pocket.

One glance at the screen. His whole face changed.

He was up and moving before he'd finished reading it.

"Something came up. Take a minute, calm down."

"We're going to college, Delaney. You can't keep doing the little kid thing. Nobody's going to put up with that."

Under thirty minutes after the door shut, Mo sent me a screenshot.

It was Camille's post.

[sunnyside.cam: said I was hungry ONE time and breakfast just magically appeared, pretty sure me and my crush are officially on the same page]

The photo showed a bagel wrapped in the same paper. Same shop stamp on the tape. Same brown bag with the corner folded down, extra napkins, the way you get it when someone stood in that line for half an hour.

Same thing sitting on my kitchen table.

I didn't reply.

I wiped my face, got down on the floor, and started on the coffee.

I worked at it a long time. Paper towels, then cold water, then a brush. And the stain just sat there in the wool, gone down past the top layer into the backing, going lighter and lighter and never leaving.

I stood up, dragged the whole thing to the curb, and left it there.

Chapter 5

Not that the rug mattered.

He'd picked it out on a family trip to Morocco with his parents. Spent a whole afternoon in that market, he told me, going stall to stall. Carried it home himself, rolled up under one arm through three airports, because he didn't trust it to the airline.

While I was up, I got a box.

Everything of his that lived at my house. The hoodie on my desk chair. His spare charger. The cleats in my garage.

Then the gifts. Ten years of them, big and small, out of drawers and off shelves and down from the top of my closet.

Then every photo with the two of us in it.

It took the whole day.

I taped the boxes shut and put them out with the rug and figured he wouldn't want any of it back anyway.

He didn't text after he left. Not that day, not the next, not the one after that.

Things must have been going well with her.

Or he was waiting for me to fold.

Every fight we'd ever had, I folded first. Every single one. There was no other version of it.

Not this time.

I blocked his number. I blocked every account he could reach me from. I changed the front door code, and then I deleted my social accounts, all of them, one after another, and it took under ten minutes.

Then I called my parents, who were in another city for work, like always.

I told them I wanted to spend the summer at my aunt's in London.

The plan was simple. Stay gone until August, then fly straight down to Miami with Mo for move-in day.

Nobody knew where I was actually going in the fall except Mo.

If I did it right, I would not have to be in a room with him again.

My mom laughed at me over the phone. "Oh, is this a vacation for two? Are you and Jules running off somewhere?"

I made something up. I didn't want to get into it.

I said I missed my aunt and my grandma, that's all.

My dad booked the first seat he could find. I was flying out that night.

Of course, on my way out the door, Mrs. Ashford was in her driveway.

She caught my arm, warm as ever.

"Laney, sweetheart, why are you carrying that yourself? Where's Jules?"

"He said he's taking you skiing in New Zealand. You two have fun, go all out, I'm paying for whatever he doesn't."

I stood there with my bag on my shoulder.

Back in the spring, buried in test prep, I'd told him I wanted to see New Zealand. Winter in July, snow in the middle of summer. I'd said it once, maybe twice.

Whatever the two of us were now, it was not something you took a ski trip through.

But my car was waiting and the clock was going, so I said something pleasant and left.

I did not expect to see him at the airport.

He was with a whole group. Eight, maybe ten of them.

Camille was there.

He had a purse hanging off one hand and his other arm around her shoulders.

The two of them walked at the back of the pack, slow, in no hurry to catch up.

Every so often she'd turn her face up to say something, and he'd stop and bend down to hear it. Every time. Patient about it.

That's not how we walked.

He'd had a head on me since we were kids, and then more than that. Talking to him meant tipping my chin up, going up on my toes, half skipping to stay level.

Ten years of that, and it turns out he bends down for people he actually cares about.

I breathed in through my nose.

Have some self-respect. What he does has nothing to do with you. Think about him one more time and you've earned everything you get.

The problem was that there was one hallway to the gates, and it went where they were going.

So I walked it, thirty feet back, watching the purse swing off his hand.

We finally hit the split.

He'd gone distracted somewhere in the last few minutes. He put the phone to his ear, took it down, tried again. Took it down again. Then stood there working at the screen with his thumb for a long time.

Whatever he was doing wasn't working.

He said something to a friend, took his phone, and walked off toward the restrooms with his jaw set.

A minute later mine rang. Unknown number.

"Wow, Delaney. Big attitude this time. I don't come to you, so you're not coming to me, is that the game?"

"You actually blocked me?"

Chapter 6

"Fine. Don't reach out. Let's see how that works for you in Boston, alone, in a city you've never lived in, when you need somebody."

He went on like that for a while. He had a lot saved up.

I didn't say anything. There was nothing in there to answer.

That made it worse.

"Okay, I'm done. Unblock me. Right now, tonight."

"I'm going out of the country with some friends for a couple of days, my phone might not work over there, so don't sit around panicking and crying about it."

He didn't get one word out of me