Born Losers

6.

November 27
19 Weeks Before
12:01 p.m.

"Hi, Em."

She looked up in surprise, caught in the middle of unwrapping her sandwich, and smiled.

"Hi, Beck."

"Would it be alright if I sat with you?"

"Sure." She gestured to the seat across from her and opened up her water bottle, taking a quick sip as he settled in. "How are things?"

"I can't complain," he said politely. "How are you? How are you feeling?"

"Pretty much back to normal." Her wrist had been declared healed in mid-November, and the broken toes only hurt when it rained. The bruises had long since faded, and now that there were no physical reminders of the ordeal it seemed much harder to remember why it had been so traumatic in the first place. "I um, never said thank you. For coming up to the hospital."

"Of course." He unpacked his lunch with methodical neatness that made her fight back a smile. "I couldn't have been anywhere else."

"I heard that you and-" She swallowed hard, toyed with the edge of her sandwich, unable to actually put it in her mouth when his name was filling it already. "–and August had a fight."

"People tend to do that when they disagree."

"I'm sorry," she said quietly. "I know you were close."

"There's no shame in a differing of opinions," he was diplomatic as he unscrewed his own water bottle and took a sip, keeping watch on her out of the corner of his eye.

For months they had shared a lunch period, but invariably with August as their conversational linchpin. The table they'd always claimed had been directly in the pool of sunlight pouring in through the west wall of windows, and to Beck Em had seemed otherworldly bathed in the luminosity, her hair shimmering and her skin glowing like it had been dipped in gold.

During those lunches her eyes had danced and her smiles had come quick, but during those lunches she always had her hand on August's, or his arm around her waist, or her back against his chest.

Alone now, lost in the crowd of a table towards the back of the cafeteria where the fluorescents buzzed and flickered, she had looked ghostly when he'd finally spotted her, pallid and insubstantial. A fresh flare of anger at August had roared through Beck at that moment; had strengthened Beck's resolve and propelled him along.

"Quinn told me you two have been running together in gym," he broke the silence. His voice came out raspier than he'd intended, so he cleared his throat and tried again. "She said she was glad to have someone around who didn't live or die by the post-mile selfie."

Em's lips twitched into a reasonable facsimile of a smile.

"I like Quinn," she voiced cautiously. "She speaks her mind. That's kind of refreshing."

"Until you have to live with it," Beck was rueful, and Em laughed. "She likes you, too. I think she was very sorry when you and August broke up."

The words spilled between them on the table, ugly, awful, and Em's fingers went to work on an apple, twisting the stem off harder than necessary. She looked for him involuntarily, turning out of instinct first to the tables closest to the window, where Paisley sat nestled next to Jake Morgan, giggling as he tattooed her arm with a sharpie.

Em's eyes skipped over them, going past their social brethren and down to where a clutch of smaller tables sat next to the double doors that led into the west hallway. There August was sitting with Quinn, both of them visible thanks to their distinctive hair: August's a burnished auburn in the outlying tendrils of the sun; Quinn's platinum ponytail bleached colorless.