Robin Constantine - The Promise of Amazing

My heart raced as I trotted up the small stone steps. The tip of my sneaker caught on the top step, and I tumbled forward, helpless to stop my fall. The bin flew from my hands, crashing a good three feet away. I followed, landing with a thud on my elbow, belly down, my skull an inch from being cracked. The front door squeaked opened.

Footsteps.

“Grayson?”

A pair of brown loafers and a smaller pair of light-up sneakers appeared in my line of vision. Two surprised blue eyes met mine.

“He’s bleeding!” Ryder yelled, tearing off back into the house.

Laird crouched down and reached out to examine my face. I flinched but stopped when I saw his look of concern. I was tired, all my fight gone. There was no need to struggle against this. Laird wanted to help me. I’d been nothing but a prick to the guy, yet he still wanted to help me.

“Grayson, he’s right, you’re bleeding.”

“I’m fine,” I said, propping myself up, a little dizzy from getting the wind knocked out of me.

“Let me just take a look,” Laird said, tilting up my chin to see the left side of my face. His brows drew together.

“You didn’t get this from falling, did you?”

I stared down at the walkway.

The door opened again. Ryder dragged Mom toward me; she went from smiling to stricken the moment she saw I was on the ground.

“What happened?” she asked.

“I, um . . .”

“He fell, nicked his chin, nothing a bag of frozen peas won’t fix. Think you could hook him up, Ryder?” Laird asked, holding out his hand to me. I grabbed it and pulled myself upright.

I brushed some dirt off my jeans and inspected the damage. The top of the bin had popped off in the fall; a few of the antique ornaments lay on the stone path, shattered.

“I’m sorry, Mom, I—”

“Don’t worry about it. Are you all right?”

She brushed some hair away from my face.

No. I was not all right. I was broken and screwed-up. And as I stood there, feeling Wren’s absence, all I wanted to do was bawl like a five-year-old. You must be an awesome big brother , she’d said. I wanted to be that guy she saw in the picture. For her. For me . Big brother to Ryder and Grier. The son my mother and Laird bragged about. I’d pushed my mother’s family away out of some sense of duty to Pop, but he’d moved on. They all had. Except me.

“Yeah, fine,” I said.

“I’ll get this,” Laird said, walking over to the mess.

“Laird,” I said. He picked up the top of the bin and turned to me.

“Thanks.”

He grabbed the rest and walked toward the house. “Get those peas on that soon. It’ll stop the swelling.”

“Your father mentioned you were bringing a friend,” Mom said.

“She, um, couldn’t make it.”

“You sure everything’s okay?”

“I wanted you to meet her,” I whispered, wrapping my arms around her. My chin rested on top of her head. When had she shrunk?

“Next time,” she said, pulling away and beaming. “Grier has been talking about you all day. Come on, there’s a ton of food.”

“Sounds good.”

I RAN.

Mostly because I didn’t know what else to do.

Maybe I was trying to outrun Grayson’s Mike Pearson confession.

Or maybe I was trying to sprint away from the awful feeling that I’d been humped-and-dumped again. At least, this time, I was the one doing the dumping.

Whatever the reason, I booked it like I’d never had before.

Five blocks, long blocks , after I’d left the A&P parking lot, a jagged pain seared up my right side under my rib cage, letting me know how not a runner I really was. I doubled over in the middle of the sidewalk, hands on my knees, panting. I collapsed onto the front steps of a large yellow house. I leaned on the slightly rusted railing, sucking in gulps of frigid air until my breathing became almost normal.

The pain grounded me in the moment. I could focus on my breath and not on the haunted look in Grayson’s eyes when I’d left. The look that made me feel like I was abandoning him, when, let’s face it, he sort of deserved to be abandoned. Giving me a stolen necklace?

No matter how much time had passed since it had been taken—the necklace belonged to someone else. Someone it probably meant something to. Like it meant to me. I tore open my scarf, reached for the chain, and stopped just short of yanking it off my neck. I undid the clasp and tucked it into my coat pocket.

I trudged on, finally realizing what it was I was running from—the urge to go back to Grayson. I still felt that magnetic pull, this sense of belonging with him . . . and I hated it. I couldn’t go back to him now . . . possibly ever.

I’d known there was more to Grayson. Some part of himself he kept hidden. These were things he did before we were together. Could I really hold that against him? Everything that had happened between us up until this moment had been genuine. Hadn’t it?

But . . . Allegra. The mental picture of them leaning toward each other; the way she’d looked at him. That would take a while to get out of my head, whether or not it meant anything. I wasn’t entirely sure the fact it was meaningless to Grayson made me feel any better. Was he capable of being so heartless?

I couldn’t go home either. My mother would grill me about my change of plans, and I wasn’t ready to face that kind of interrogation. There was one place I knew I could go, no questions asked.

Maddie opened the door, eyes popping as she pulled me in.

“Wren, what the hell? Were you running?” she asked as I whipped off my coat.

“Kind of,” I answered, trying to catch my breath. “Jazz is certifiable if she’s willing to torture herself like that.”

“No argument here,” she said, holding out her arms for my coat. The acrid smell of hair dye hit my nose. Maddie’s mom was in the kitchen with a styling client. She gave me a quick wave with a small brush covered in thick, white highlighting goop. There was another scent too—craft glue—and as Mads hung up my coat and pointed me toward the dining room, I saw Jazz sitting there sprinkling glitter over something. She stopped when she saw me, like I’d caught her doing something wrong.

“Hey,” I said.

“Wren? What are you doing here?”

Maddie sauntered into the room. “She’s caught the running bug, Jazzy.”

“No freakin’ way,” I answered as my breathing finally returned to normal.

On the dining room table, there were three rows of cardboard-cutout teacups with names in script across the rims. They’d been in the middle of a project.

“We’re working on this for the NHS mother-daughter Christmas tea.”

“Yeah, I maintain a 4.0 average so I can make glittery teacup place cards. I’m so proud,” Maddie interjected as she sat back down on the dining room chair, one leg curled beneath her. She pulled on the sleeve of her oversize black sweatshirt, revealing a sliver of shoulder, and grabbed a Sharpie.

I picked up one of the place settings. Jasmine Kadam, it read in fancy calligraphy that I knew was Mads’s handiwork. My emotions were raw, right at the surface. I wanted to crush that stupid, glittery teacup in my hand, hating the fact that I didn’t have one of my own. Try again next semester. What if I didn’t get in? There were no guarantees.

But there were no guarantees in life either, were there? The Camelot. My sister, Brooke’s, perfect life plan. Grayson. Even my friendship with Mads and Jazz was changing, evolving. With the NHS they were part of something I wasn’t—and maybe never would be.

One thing I could guarantee was that I wouldn’t be denied entry into the NHS because I was quiet. Quiet could be a lot of things—fierce, thoughtful, compassionate—but never deficient. That teacher evaluation was just a piece of paper. I had to stop letting it define me.