Her Name in the Sky (35 page)

“Baker, you are the
best
,” Clay says, slurring the last word. “And we all know what a hard time you’ve had lately with some of this nasty bullshit that’s been going on, but we all love you!”

An even bigger cheer goes up around the yard, a cheer that lasts for a full minute, with whistles and whooping and drunken shouts of “Yeahhhhhh!” Hannah’s stomach goes cold. She has a hard time swallowing. She feels Joanie’s eyes on her, and when she turns, almost against her will, to make eye contact, she finds that not only is Joanie watching her, but Luke and Wally are, too.

He’s an asshole
, Joanie mouths.

Hannah bites her teeth together. She feels a growing desperation inside of her, like her heart is drowning and doesn’t know where to reach.

“Everyone give Baker a drink tonight!” Clay shouts from the front of the party.

“I’m gonna go,” Hannah mouths to Joanie, and then she drops Joanie’s vodka drink on the grass and turns to walk along the perimeter of the yard.

“Hannah, wait!” Joanie says sharply, and Hannah hears racing footsteps behind her and feels Joanie’s grip on her arm. “Let me go with you, okay?”

They’ve walked five paces when they hear another commotion. “Wait, wait, what?” Clay shouts from his post on the brick wall. “What are you saying?”

Someone at the front of the crowd is talking, but the distance and the crowd muffle their words. Hannah and Joanie stop walking, and Hannah experiences an inexplicable feeling of dread.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Clay says, his voice hoarse, his face fallen.

“What’s going on?” someone shouts.

Hannah stands still as Clay looks out over the yard, his face white underneath the lights from the deck. He drops his drink as his arms fall to his sides. “We lost the Diocesan Cup.”

“What?”

“What?”

“No!”

The backyard is suddenly riotous, with people yelling all at once, their cacophonous voices scraping against the night heat. “Hold on!” Clay says, throwing his arms down as if trying to slam a car trunk.

“What happened?” someone shouts.

Clay looks down to the same spot in the crowd, and a suffocating silence blankets the night. Hannah strains her ears to hear the words of the person talking.

“We can’t hear back here!” one of the guys standing near Luke says.

Clay raises his head again. There’s a murderous look on his face.

“Kasey just got a text from her friend whose mom works at the diocese office,” he says, his voice cutting over the backyard. “They’re rescinding the Cup. They’re awarding it to Mount Sinai instead.”

“What?”

“They can’t do that!”

“Why?!”

Clay’s jaw clenches. He stands completely still, his shoulders tight and his fists balled at his sides. Under the glare of the deck lights, his eyes flicker out to the very back of the yard, searching for something. Hannah’s chest surges with fear.

“You know why,” he says, his voice deadly.

There is one packed second of silence, and Hannah has the sensation of tumbling over a ledge, her heart in her throat and her body out of her control.

Then, noise. Roaring, angry noise.

“We need to go,” Joanie says, her eyes frantic. She pushes Hannah forward, causing them both to trip in their haste to get out of the backyard.

The next thing Hannah knows, Wally is at her side, helping her up, his glasses reflecting fire. “It’s okay,” he says, his voice as steady as always. “They’re not gonna do anything.”

“I need to get out of here,” Hannah pants.

“We’ll come with you,” someone else says, and Hannah looks behind her to see Luke at Joanie’s side. 

“Hey, what’s going on back there?” Clay’s angry drunken voice shouts, and in her peripheral vision, Hannah sees dark figures turn their heads toward her.

“Come on,” she says, leading the way forward along the torch-lit perimeter.

“Yeah, that’s right, leave!” Clay shouts. “We don’t need your bullshit anymore!”

“Shut up!” Wally yells, his voice grating on Hannah’s ears. 

“Get the fuck out of here!” Clay shouts back, and then the sea of people between them starts to shout, too, their voices yelling indecipherable things, and Joanie starts to shout back at them, screaming herself hoarse, catapulting profanities into the air.

And then Wally starts yelling at Clay. 

“You’re a spineless asshole!” Wally roars. “You’re a self-obsessed prick who never gave a shit about his friends!”

“You fucking—!”

Then Clay’s moving off the wall, jumping down into the crowd, storming through the mass of people until he’s within feet of Hannah and the others. “What’s your problem, huh?” he says, shoving Wally in the chest.

“Back off, man!” Wally shouts, pushing him back. “You crossed the line!”

“Are you
kidding
me?!” Clay snarls, his nostrils flaring and his face burning red. “Open your eyes, man!
She
crossed the line! She crossed all of us and she used you and now she’s making you and our whole school look like fucking idiots!”

Wally lunges, his sprinter’s legs propelling him forward, and throws a solid punch at Clay’s jaw. Clay stumbles backwards into the crowd of people, his face registering shock and pain. He lets out a primal roar before launching himself at Wally and throwing his own punch.

Then they’re both throwing punches, and Hannah ducks down to the ground with them, begging Wally to stop, begging Clay to stop, and one of their hands goes awry and smacks her in the face, and she stands up, dazed, her left cheek smarting, the shouts of people all around her. More people jump into the brawl—Luke barrels in and tries to pull Clay and Wally apart, and then Jackson drops down to the ground and hits Wally, and then Luke hits Jackson until Bradford hits Luke—

“Way to go, H’Eaden,” says a venomous voice, and Hannah turns to see Michele and her friends glaring at her. “I guess it’s not enough to get Carpenter fired and cost us the Cup, right, I mean now you’ve gotta pit the whole school against each other—”

“I had nothing to do with this,” Hannah says, tears springing into her eyes.

“Bullcrap you didn’t,” Michele says, stepping nearer to her. “Everything was
normal
until you started in with your crap—”

But then Hannah doesn’t hear what Michele has to say anymore, because Baker appears in the circle of onlookers, her eyes terrified as she looks down at Clay, Wally, Luke, and the other boys on the ground. Hannah’s heart jumps into her throat, and as she stares across the circle at Baker, Baker looks up and meets her eyes, and there’s something in them that Hannah recognizes: there’s something in them that tells Hannah nothing is finished—

“Hey!” Michele shouts, pushing Hannah backward. “Give it up! Stop lusting after her!”

“Don’t push me!”

“If anyone deserves to be hurt tonight, it’s you!”

Below them, the fight finally breaks up, with multiple guys holding Wally, Clay, and Luke apart from each other. Hannah looks at the blood smeared across their mouths and down their shirts, at Wally’s broken glasses hanging off his face, at Joanie’s horrified expression as she rushes to tend to Luke, but before Hannah can go to help them, something smacks against her right cheek with the force of a wooden plank—

“How’s that feel?” Michele says, retracting her hand.

Hannah’s whole face is stinging now, her throat full of tears. Across the circle, Baker looks at her with anguished eyes, her mouth open on a silent cry, but she does not move.

Michele takes a cup from one of her friends and Hannah knows what’s going to happen before it does. She tries to turn away, but the beer hits her full on in the face, seeping into her eyes and mouth before she can process what happened.

“HEY!” Joanie shouts, lunging at them from where she was tending to Luke. “Get away from her!”

“Back off, Baby Eaden!” Michele yells.

Joanie launches herself at Michele, slapping her and pushing her with all the force she has, until Hannah jumps forward and pulls her off, begging “Joanie, Joanie, stop, please stop—”

One of Michele’s friends jabs Joanie hard in the stomach. Joanie stumbles backwards into Hannah, toppling them both over with sudden force.

“HEY!” Luke roars. He jerks himself free from Cooper’s stronghold and starts to run at Michele, but Miles and Walker grab him. 

“I’m giving you three seconds to run, H’Eaden,” Michele says, her low voice slithering across the silent onlookers. “And then we’re kicking you out of this party.”

Hannah blinks up at her, wondering how serious she could be. The crowd all around them stands still and silent, their faces contorted with hatred. Wally and Luke writhe against their strongholds, Wally panting and sputtering. Joanie starts to rise off the ground, her hand clamped on her stomach, but Hannah pushes her down with a firm hand.

And then she looks to Baker, who stands stock-still, her eyes full of tears and her mouth still open on a silent cry.

“Get out of here!” Michele screams, and then she and her friends lunge forward, and Hannah moves without thinking, jumping up from the dark grass and running back along the same path she’d earlier walked, making a wide circle around the lawn, blood rushing in her head. She runs until she’s at the far edge of the yard, just before the rickety fence and the steep downward slope to the woods, and as these boundaries come into view she switches her path to sprint back around the opposite side of the yard, away from the angry mass of people.

But some of Michele’s friends run towards her from the opposite side of the yard, and she halts, terror gripping her, wondering which way to go. She starts to cut a path down the middle of the yard, but her pursuers weave their way toward the middle so that she can’t run that way, and she has no choice but to stop and back away from them toward the edge of the yard. She backs up until she’s only a couple of feet from the rickety fence, equidistant from two of the blazing torches.

“Funny predicament you find yourself in,” Michele pants as she draws near. “It’s like, which way should you run? Two choices, right? Two directions to go? And you picked the wrong one.”

“You need to calm down,” Hannah says, feeling seriously scared for the first time, for it’s clear to her, as they stumble and laugh unrestrainedly, how drunk these people are.

“I think
you
need to shut up.”

“No, Michele, really, there’s steep woods behind us—Clay’s mom is always warning us about them—”

“There’s also a fence behind you, you imbecile,” Michele sneers. She steps forward and pushes Hannah again, laughing delightedly in her face. The heel of Hannah’s foot brushes against the fence, and the blood rushes to her head so fast she feels dizzy with it. Behind Michele, the crowd of people grows larger, and Hannah sees Clay, now free from his hold and calm again, walking nearer to the scene.

“I bet you wouldn’t have done all that crap if you knew this would happen, huh?” Michele taunts. “Bet you wish you could get us that Diocesan Cup back, huh?”

“I didn’t mean for any of this to happen,” Hannah cries.

“But it
did
. You couldn’t keep your mouth shut—couldn’t sit quietly on your little problem—and now you’ve screwed us all over. So screw—you—” Michele says, shoving Hannah again.

“Stop!” someone cries. “Stop!”

Hannah’s breath catches in her chest.

Baker walks out of the crowd, her dark eyes reflecting the torches’ light. She looks fragile and small—smaller than Hannah’s ever seen her.

“You’re standing at the weakest part of the fence,” Baker says, her voice shaking.

“Relax, Baker,” Michele says, sounding exasperated. “We’re not gonna do anything.”

“You’d better not,” Baker says, stepping closer and closer to Hannah.

“Stop giving orders,” Michele says, her voice quivering with anger. “You’re not the president here, you got it?”

“This isn’t about that,” Baker says.

“You already saved your lesbo pal once, remember? Your good deed is done, blah blah blah, you can go be Saint Baker somewhere else.” 

“Stay away from her,” Baker says, her voice still shaking but loud enough to be heard by the crowd of people. “I mean it. Walk away.”

“So, what,” Michele says, turning to face her. “You ignore H’Eaden for weeks, and now you want to save her?”

“She’s my best friend.”

“Some best friend you’ve been. You try to negotiate for her, but when it doesn’t work out, you walk away, right?”

“
Leave
,” Baker says through gritted teeth.

“Fine,” Michele growls. “But before I do, let’s be honest for a second, Baker: Why do you
care
what happens to her?”

Baker flushes red in the firelight. Her eyes narrow. Her chest heaves. She opens her mouth to speak, but her words catch, and she clenches her jaw, seeming to struggle with something.

“Wow,” Michele says, “so much love for your
best friend
.”