“Thank you for the sandwich,” I say, ducking my head.
We touch, shoulders and hips grazing as I dip past her to get to the door of the trailer, and my body lights up like I’ve been plugged into a socket.
Fuck.
I slam her trailer door open, and when I make it outside, it feels like I’m resurfacing from a suffocating depth. I can’t get enough air. I look back and Raelynn’s standing in the door of the trailer, her eyebrows furrowed, her blue eyes carrying all her secrets. She just told me kissing was off the table, and now she looks pissed at me for listening to her. I get it, Little Bird. I want to kiss you as badly as you want to be kissed.
I keep my focus straight ahead as I get into Leanna’s car and start to drive away. It’s dark and quiet out on the road. I don’t fiddle with the radio. I keep my hands at ten and two as I debate whether I did the right thing. I hate that I left her. A bigger part of me hates that I went to her home in the first place, but it’s too late to backtrack. The writing’s on the wall: Raelynn and I will collide. There’s no way around it.
Once, midway back to Coach Dalton’s property, I flip on my blinker, turn off on the side of the road, and prepare to U-turn back to Raelynn’s trailer before I curse myself and continue on my way.
I have no choice but to not visit her at the diner in the morning. I’d forgotten—what with everything else going on—but I have to fly out to New York for my meeting with Nike and my Olympic promo shoot.
There’s a helicopter waiting for me at the compound at 5:15 AM. It takes me to a small private airport in Austin, and from there, I take a plane to New York City alongside my manager, assistant, and PR rep.
“You look tired. Have you been training too much?” my manager asks once we’re in the clouds.
I shake my head, trying to fend off his concern. “I’m fine. Training’s fine.”
“Right, well we need your million-dollar smile today. You’ll need to turn it on for the cameras.”
I level him with a stare that’s dripping with so much disdain I’m surprised he doesn’t piss his pants. He’s talking to me as if I don’t already know that. As if I haven’t shot a thousand of these commercials before.
He gets the hint and backs off, returning to his laptop and leaving me in peace.
I stare out the window of the small jet, wondering how early Raelynn has to get to Dale’s to get ready for the breakfast rush. She’s always going a mile a minute by the time I arrive. She needs more help. Another coworker to help her out.
“You look like something’s troubling you.”
I turn to see my assistant wearing a tentative smile.
I shake my head. “It’s nothing.”
“I know it’s a pain, but would you mind—”
She holds out her laptop for me to take, and I don’t hesitate. I can’t keep biting heads off just because I’m in a foul mood. My assistant walks me through the deck of slides Nike sent over for us to review before the meeting later. I spend the rest of the flight familiarizing myself with the final designs of the sneakers as well as the campaign options they’ve suggested, and I’m glad for the distraction.
Once we touch down in New York, a driver whisks me straight to the studio for the Olympic promo shoot. The two other athletes, the gymnast and the soccer player, have already arrived and are sitting side by side getting their hair done when I walk in. I wave and make a point to stop and chat with them for a few minutes so we’re all comfortable enough with each other to ham it up in front of the cameras. I’m grateful that their personalities will carry the team considering this kind of stuff makes my skin crawl.
Brie’s a tiny gymnast, and the representatives for the Olympic committee obviously get a kick out of setting us side by side for candid shots. For an hour straight, we pose and joke around. I spin a basketball over her head and whisk it away before she can get it. I stand aside and watch—genuinely awestruck—when she pulls off some kind of standing flip while the cameras roll. The shoot team eats it all up.
The next hour, they do close-ups of the three of us grouped together while we wear our Olympic gear and hold up the gold medals we won back in the Rio games. They tell us they plan on putting the images on billboards across America, and Andie and Brie seem genuinely excited about it. I just want to get back to Pine Hill.
On the way home on the plane, I scroll through my private Instagram feed and pause when I find a photo Leanna posted a few days ago. She and Raelynn are sitting side by side on the couch in Leanna and Trey’s cabin, and Raelynn is holding up a bottle of nail polish and giving the camera a cheesy smile. Without thinking, I screenshot the photo and crop it down so only Raelynn is in it. I save it to my camera roll on my phone then check to make sure it’s there. Bright-eyed and carefree—she’s the embodiment of sunshine.
The photo isn’t enough.
I open my phone’s browser and type her name into Google. The first results don’t come back fruitful. It’s a unique name, but I still need to narrow it down. I type in “Raelynn Birdie Texas” and still, nothing comes up that seems related. Then I switch to “Raelynn Birdie California” and an article pops up at the very top of the search results.
Caltech Students Named Goldwater Scholars
I skim the body of the article that mentions the three Caltech undergraduates who were named Goldwater Scholars last year for excellence in STEM fields. On the right of the short article, there are photos of the three recipients, Raelynn beaming among them.
Beside her photo, there’s a short paragraph describing her accomplishments at Caltech.
Raelynn Birdie, a junior studying engineering and computer science, just completed her first year working in the lab of Melissa Olmsted, Caltech professor of computer science. Birdie is interested in designing systems that integrate algorithm and sensor design to better observe phenomena previously impossible to measure with traditional methods. Birdie plans to maintain her position in Professor Olmsted’s lab through the remainder of her time at Caltech as they work in collaboration with the Event Horizon Telescope to capture images of black holes and analyze them to learn more about general relativity in the strong-field regime.
My eyebrows are in my hair.
What the hell did I just read?
General relativity? Black holes?
What in the world is Raelynn doing at Dale’s Diner?
Chapter Twelve
Raelynn
I’m chugging along on a conveyor belt I can’t escape from. What little money does come in goes right back out. I wake up early on my day off from Dale’s and count the cash in tips I received the day before, playing the game where I triage pressing life matters: do I want to fill Nan’s car with gas or take it in for the oil change that was due six months ago, do I want to buy more prepaid minutes for my cell phone or get some groceries. I settle on putting half the cash toward gas (that’ll last me a few measly days) and spend the rest on the oil change. The guys at the mechanic shop try to sell me other services, crap I’m sure the car truly needs, but until it actually sputters and dies on me mid-drive, I’ll take my chances.
From there, I head over to visit Nan. When I walk into her room, an orderly is tidying up around her bed and aims a kind smile my way when she sees me at the door.