Open Grass

[CLINK]

The brass key lands in my palm before I even ask for it.

Thursday, two minutes before the last lunch bell. Ms. Carter doesn't look up from the stack of quizzes she's grading. She just opens the drawer, takes the key out, and holds it over my hand until I put my hand under it.

"Amber stopped by this morning," she says. "She says the last one is yours to open."

"She's not late?"

"She's not late. She asked." Red pen, check mark, next quiz. "Count the float twice. Last day is when people get sloppy."

I close my fingers around the key. It's warm from the drawer, or from her hand, or from nothing. Last time I had to ask for it. This time somebody asked for me.

That's a different kind of heavy.

***

The half-door goes up the same as always. Same chain on the stamp. Same laminated card: OPEN. COUNT. LOG. CLOSE.

I count the float twice. It's right both times. Amber watches me do the second count and doesn't say anything, which is how I know she was going to make me do it anyway.

The line is short today. Last window of the season, and most kids already bought what they need. A few stragglers. A sixth grader who wants to know if tickets for spring are on sale yet. They are not.

Between customers there's nothing to do, and I find out something weird: a quiet booth is harder than a busy one. A busy booth tells you what to do with your hands. A quiet booth just waits for you.

The chips kid is leaning on the ticket roll, tearing a strip of nothing off the end and folding it into smaller and smaller squares.

"What do you do," I ask him, "when there's no window?"

He shrugs. "Window hour's free period. I sit on the wall by the courtyard. Chips. Watch the game."

"Every time?"

"Since before the fair." He folds the square one more time. It won't fold anymore. "It's fine. It's a good wall."

I know about good walls. I had a whole courtyard corner. It was a very good corner. That was the problem with it.

At ten past, Amber flips the laminated card over. On the back, in marker, somebody wrote a long time ago: LAST DAY = TOTAL THE SEASON.

So we total the season. Amber reads numbers off the log sheet and I add them on the back of a refund slip. Six shifts for me. More for them. Ryan's refund is in there, a single line with a minus sign. So is every ticket I stamped with my heart in my wrist.

The number at the bottom is bigger than I expected. Not huge. Just more than nothing, which is what I used to think I added up to.

"Okay," Amber says. "Aprons."

I untie mine. The DAVE sticker is still on it, crooked, edges going gray from three weeks of ink thumbs.

"Take it," Amber says. "Apron doesn't need it till spring. And somebody else might be wearing it by then."

I peel it off slowly so it doesn't tear. Then I don't know where to put it. Pocket feels like hiding it. Wrist won't hold it.

My bag is on the floor by the cash box. Down near the bottom seam there's the scar where I sewed it back together, the stitches I did myself, uneven and holding.

I stick the sticker right over the stitches.

Amber looks at it. "That's either really cool or really dorky."

"Same fleet," I say, which makes no sense to her at all, and she laughs anyway.

[THUNK]

The half-door comes down. Amber chains the stamp one last time and hands me the cash box to carry to the office. The chips kid pulls the schedule off the glass, Thursday's red box and all, and folds it into his apron pocket like he'll need it later.

At the office, Ms. Carter holds out her hand for the key. I give it to her.

"Drawer's still here in spring," she says, and signs the log without looking up.

***

Saturday morning the sticky note is still on the fridge.

GUTTER. Two dates crossed out. No third date yet. Dad is on the couch with coffee, the TV on with the sound off, watching a cooking show where nobody talks.

A month ago I would have taken my cereal upstairs and let the note be his problem. It is his problem. It's his gutter.

But I have a brass key's worth of practice now at asking for things that aren't mine yet.

"Dad," I say. "Is it next weekend?"

He looks at me. Then at the fridge. Then back at me, and for a second I think I made a mistake, because his face does something tired.

Then he laughs. Not a big laugh. A surprised one, like a cough that turned nice.

"It's been next weekend for about a month," he says.

"I can hold the ladder."

He sets the coffee down.

[SCRAPE]

The ladder is in the garage behind the bikes. It takes both of us to get it out without knocking over the rakes. Dad climbs. I hold. The gutter is full of black leaf sludge that smells like a swamp having a bad day, and he scoops it into a bucket I hand up, and I hand up the next bucket, and he says, "Copy," without knowing that's Leo's word.

It takes forty minutes. That's all. A month of next weekends, and it was forty minutes.

When we're done Dad washes his hands at the kitchen sink for a long time. Then he takes the sticky note off the fridge, looks at it, and drops it in the trash.

"Thanks for asking," he says. He doesn't say anything else.

I don't know why that makes my stomach feel strange too. Different strange. Better.

***

Tuesday the last lunch bell rings and my feet go to the office glass on their own.

Habit loop. Left at the water fountain, right past the trophy case. I'm almost at the office before I remember.

The half-door is down. The glass is empty. The tape marks where the schedule was are still there, four little rectangles holding nothing.

Nobody is waiting for me here. Nobody is going to hand me a key. That's the whole thing about a door that only opens twice a week: when it stops opening, you're just a kid standing in a hallway.

The library is right there. I have a comic in my bag. The library corner is quiet and nobody would ask where I was, and it wouldn't even be hiding, exactly. It would just be easy.

That's how I know it's the wrong one.

***

The courtyard is loud. The pickup game is already going, sweatshirts for goalposts. Leo is in goal again, crouched, yelling something about a corner kick that is definitely not a corner kick.

On the wall by the rail, a kid with a bag of chips is watching. Same spot. A good wall.

I've played this game exactly once. Seven ugly minutes, the day of the map redo, after Leo looked at me and I stood up on my own. I missed a pass and tripped and laughed for real one time.

Leo doesn't look at me like an open channel today. He sees me. I know he sees me, because his windmill arms stop for one beat. Then he goes back to yelling about the corner kick.

He's leaving it to me. Co-pilot. Not the pen.

I walk up to the kid with the ball, a seventh grader I don't know, and I say, "Need one more?"

He looks at me like I'm a slightly confusing weather report. "Uh. Sure. You're on shirts."

I'm wearing a shirt. Everybody is. I decide not to ask.

Before I go on, I turn around toward the wall.

I call his name. Out loud, across the grass. Loud enough that two kids on the other team look over to see who it belongs to.

The chips kid blinks. He points at himself with a chip.

"Need two more," I yell. Which is a lie. Nobody said they need two. But the seventh grader shrugs, and that's the same as yes.

He folds the chip bag over, tucks it in his pocket like a tool he might need later, and climbs down off the good wall.

***

I am bad at soccer.

I want to be clear about that, for the record. I miss two passes. I kick the grass instead of the ball once, and a clump of dirt flies farther than the ball ever does. My shin finds the ball the way it did last time, and it stings the same.

But I don't leave after seven minutes.

I stay the whole window hour. I stay through the part where I'm tired and the part where I'm embarrassed and the part after that, where it's just running.

Near the end, somebody passes to me. Actually to me. On purpose.

I trap it. Barely. It bounces off my knee and I chase it, and there's open grass and Leo's goal, and Leo is crouched in it with his arms out wide.

In my head the Vanguard's thrusters light. I don't need them. I see it anyway, because I always see it, and that's fine. The daydream doesn't have to take me somewhere else. It can ride along.

Burn left, I think.

I kick right.

It goes in. It's not a good goal. It rolls in so slowly that Leo could have stopped it if he wanted to.

He didn't want to. Or maybe he did. He dives a full second late and lands face-first in the grass and lies there.

"Tragic," he says into the dirt. "Betrayed by my own fleet."

The booth kid is laughing so hard he has to sit down. A couple of the other team say "nice" in the voice that means it was not nice but they're being decent.

Somebody yells my name, the way somebody yelled Leo's through the glass. Like it belongs in the open air.

***

Last period, Ms. Carter is writing on the board before we even sit down.

NEW UNIT: TRADE AND TRAVEL. GROUP PROJECT. GROUPS OF FOUR.

Underneath, in smaller letters:

YOU PICK YOUR OWN GROUPS. NAMES ON MY DESK BY FRIDAY.

The whole room makes the noise a room makes when it's thrilled and scared at the same time.

I sit very still.

The last time we had a group project, we got put in groups, and I got the fourth chair in a library corner that three people had already claimed. I was the leftover. I didn't have to choose anything. I just had to be put somewhere.

Nobody is going to put me anywhere this time.

Across the room, Leo catches my eye. He could mouth "us" right now and half my group would be done. Instead he points at me, then at the board, and mouths two words I can read from here: "You first." Co-pilot. Not the pen.

Four names. Friday.

I look down at my bag. The DAVE sticker sits crooked over the stitches.

I take out a pencil and a scrap of paper and write my own name first, at the top, where I'd see it.

Then I sit there and think about whose name I'm going to ask for next.