My Best Friend Used Me, Now She Pays novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Pop
Kyla's hamstring tears on the track and Nina, reborn, refuses to defer her future for her; a ledger from a dead life sits in her bag.
The sound came first, a wet snap.
Then Kyla Draper was on the track, hands clawing at the back of her left thigh.
I was already running.
I did not decide to. My legs were just there, in the grass of the infield, and then I was on my knees on the red rubber.
It was April, and cold, and the conference trials had just started.
It was also the second time I had knelt on this exact spot.
I knew that the way you know a stair is missing in the dark.
"Don't straighten it," I said. "Let me see."
My fingers found the muscle and the gap in it, high up, near the sit bone.
Grade two. A bad one, but not off the bone.
Six weeks of nothing, then eight of careful work.
I had known that the first time too.
Kyla's face was white and wet, and her blue eyes found mine.
"Nini," she said. "Nini, it's the trials."
"I know."
"Don't let them cut me."
The trainers were jogging across the infield with the cart.
Her father's coach was jogging behind them, a man in a sponsor quarter-zip with a stopwatch still around his neck.
Dane Seidel.
I had spent six years being polite to that man.
I felt my jaw set before I felt anything else.
Bea Kilpatrick had come over from the hammer cage with her gloves still on.
"Is it bad?" she said.
"It's a hamstring," I said. "It's not the end of anything."
Kyla caught my wrist, hard.
She looked up at me with the face that had gotten her out of every consequence since the fourth grade.
"Listen," she said, and her voice dropped so only the five of us heard. "You know what this is. You know what I need."
She had the whole team around her by then, in a half circle.
"Defer the placement," she said. "Just one year. You'd be with me every day, and when I sign I'll make it up to you."
I was twenty-three, six weeks from graduating, with an internship offer in my bag.
I had said yes to this sentence once.
I had said yes standing in this exact grass.
"You're the only person I trust," Kyla said. "You've always been the one."
The trainers arrived and knelt down.
One of them took her ankle, and one of them began a splint.
I took my hand off her leg.
"No," I said.
Nobody moved.
Kyla blinked at me like I had spoken in another language.
"What?"
"No. I'm not deferring."
"Nini. It's one year."
"It's not one year," I said.
My voice was perfectly level, and that scared me more than if it had shaken.
"The training staff will do your rehab. That's their job, and they're good at it."
"You don't mean that."
"I'm taking the placement. It's Connolly Sports Rehab, in Kettering. I start in May."
Somebody in the half circle said, "Whoa."
Bea, God love her, said nothing at all.
She just stepped in beside me and crossed her arms.
Dane Seidel looked at me over the splint, and his smile came out slowly.
"Nina," he said. "She's hurting. Maybe not now."
"She'll be fine," I said. "She's got a team, and she's got you."
I stood up.
Kyla's hand dropped off my wrist.
For a second the whole face fell away, and under it there was something flat and quick and calculating.
Then it was gone, and she was crying prettily again, with the trainers saying shhh.
I walked off the track.
I walked through the gate, and across the lot, and I didn't look back, and my knees held until the bleachers.
Then I sat down on the cold aluminum and put my head between them.
Bea sat down beside me, and her big hand landed between my shoulder blades.
"Okay," she said. "You've never said no to her. I want that on a plaque."
I laughed, and it came out wrong, and I stopped.
My gym bag was by my feet.
I unzipped it for my keys.
Under the keys, under my towel, there was a green cloth book I had never bought in this life.
The corners were soft and gray from handling.
I knew the cover. I knew the loose thread at the spine.
My father had given me the first one when I was ten.
Write down what you lend, Neen. People forget, but paper doesn't.
My hands shook as I opened it.
Every page was in my handwriting.
Rent I covered. Rides I gave. Hours I stood in physical therapy rooms for a girl who never once asked what I was studying.
Six years of it, in neat blue columns.
I turned to the last written page.
The date was six Octobers from now.
Drove to Kyla's. 2:07 a.m.
Underneath, in the same ink, steady as a ruler, was the total.
Owed to N. Faulk: $212,480 and one life.
My phone buzzed on the bleacher.
It was a text from Kyla, sent from the medical cart, with a little heart on the end.
You'll be at my door by Friday. You always are.
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