The Chance You Won't Return Read Online Free

book into my locker so hard, the metal clanged.
    From across the hall, Theresa heard the noise. “I hate math, too,” she said, “but at the end of the year, they make you pay for the books you mess up.” When only half my mouth rose into a smile, she shook her head at the sophomores. “Screw them, seriously. They’ll be smoking pot in their parents’ basements when they’re forty.”
    “Forty needs to hurry along,” I said.
    A group of boys in letterman jackets strolled down the hall, and my stomach knotted. From kindergarten through junior year, I had tried so hard to be inconspicuous, to fly under the radar, and so far it had worked: I certainly wasn’t going to be prom queen, but I had my friends and managed to avoid crippling social trauma. Now everyone seemed to know both my name and that I couldn’t manage a simple task everyone else had mastered.
    One of the senior football players, Nick Gillan, his neck as thick as his skull, smirked at me. “Better start gardening.”
    “Christ, it’ll grow back,” Theresa said.
    “It won’t by Friday.” Nick leaned toward me, so close that I saw the scars from where he’d scratched his acne. “Better get to work, Alex. It’s not going to grow back on its own.”
    I could smell the smoke on his breath under spearmint gum, stale and sugary. Behind him, the other football players chuckled. I swung my locker door shut. “Yeah, like your bald spot? That hair’s never coming back.”
    Nick briefly touched the back of his head, where hair was already starting to thin. His mouth bent into a frown. “Fuck you, Winchester.”
    My eyes narrowed. “Asshole.”
    Mr. Hunter, the vice principal, appeared nearby. “Problem here?”
    “Not with me,” Nick said. Stuffing his hands into the pockets of his jacket, he sauntered away, the other football players behind him.
    Mr. Hunter frowned at me. “Watch your language, Miss Winchester.” Then he walked down the hall, limbs swinging in a poor imitation of the strut in old cowboy movies.
    “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said.
    Theresa shrugged. “He probably has money on the game.”
    I hadn’t known how bad things would be if the football team’s winning streak was threatened. For years, they’d suffered humiliating defeats, ranked as the worst team in their league. And suddenly, after winning a few games, I was the one responsible for jeopardizing their chances of going to state. All day everyone kept harping on it, either as a joke or taking it seriously. People claimed I had hurt the team’s focus, or that the cheerleaders had better watch out when I was behind the wheel, or that I was a plant from our rival schools, out to kill the quarterback. When I was calm, I could say their behavior was immature and irrational, and they’d be lucky if they passed geometry or managed not to knock up their girlfriends. But by the time I followed Theresa into the cafeteria and heard my name at various tables, the calm had burned out of me.
    Even when kids didn’t call out or approach me, I could feel eyes turn whenever I entered a room. At one table, girls from the soccer team pretended they’d been looking elsewhere when I turned to them. Last year when I was on JV, we’d all been friends. I quit when I finally got sick of my mom lecturing me after games about what I could have done better. Now I wished I’d stayed on the team just so they might stick up for me. I would have made varsity this year. In sophomore English, we read
The Scarlet Letter,
and although I hadn’t liked it at the time, now I felt like Hester Prynne was my kind of girl.
    Theresa and I sat in the corner, joining our friends Maddie and Josh. I’d been friends with Maddie since elementary school, when we were both into horses, and Josh since middle school, when we both were into hating math class. They’d been talking about some band coming to Richmond, but stopped once Theresa and I sat down. I was sure they’d say something about my