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Upstate Regional Airport never seems to change. Although she prefers making the trip from Boston to South Carolina by road, Allison has been in and out of this airport numerous times in the past three years and each is identical to the last. Her favourite part is the Starbucks just outside the front entrance and she makes a beeline for it immediately after touchdown. Everything about this trip is significantly more manageable once she has a latte in hand.
Renee is the next to show up and she is still in her uniform, because the world is not about giving Allison a break. She slides into the booth across from Allison, duffle banging heftily against the bench, and tugs her hair free from its tight bun at the back of her head. Allison focuses on the Peace Corps symbol embroidered over Renee’s left breast pocket so she doesn’t have to think about the way three years has done nothing to still the rush of her heart.
“I hope Abby won’t mind me taking over her shower for an hour at least. I’m a mess,” Renee laughs, rummaging through the pocket of her duffle. Allison smiles and taps her fingers steadily against her takeaway cup. She’s a mess of a different kind, but she doesn’t voice as much. One Fox down, three to go. Allison has never been very good at sentimentality, and reunions are about as sentimental as it gets.
Renee produces a handful of coins and disappears to order herself a sweet tea, so Allison takes the opportunity to people watch out the window. There’s a constant hustle of people loading luggage into taxis at the layby, but Allison is keeping an eye out for a familiar battered pickup truck.
When Dan and Matt arrive, it’s in a seven-seater Range Rover that Allison doesn’t expect at all. She doesn’t even notice them until Renee moves to stand and, even then, it’s only because Dan is leaning halfway out the window to wave enthusiastically at them. They pile their luggage in and climb into the backseat after it, and Matt pulls out onto the road.
“This is an awfully big car for just the two of you,” Allison says suspiciously. The state of the upholstery and lack of dust suggests it’s new and she can’t help but feel a little cheated out of what is clearly an important update in their lives. She only notices the quiet look Dan and Matt share because she’s watching them carefully in the rear-view mirror.
“It’s good to be prepared,” Dan says delicately.
“No freaking way,” Allison says, thumping her fist against the back of Dan’s headrest. The others laugh and she reaches round to dig her fingers into Dan’s hair, giving it a light tug. “I can’t believe you.”
“Nothing’s definite. It’s just, you know, on the table.”
Allison shares a private eye roll with Renee, because they both know it’s been definite since their junior year. She just hadn’t realised how much of their lives her friends were living without her. It still shocks her sometimes that her Foxes haven’t frozen in time as she remembers them, that there’s an entire world between Massachusetts and Georgia and further still between her and wherever the hell Renee’s next assignment will send her. They have grown independently of one another and Allison can see them all blossoming while she herself is still waiting to sprout.
Pulling into the stadium parking lot is nostalgic enough to be sickening. Allison is impatient to get inside the gates and get this over with, but the others seem to be content with just looking. Dan reaches out to lace her fingers through the mesh fence and Allison doesn’t miss the way she sighs into her shoulder, like she’s scared the noise might come out more sob than anything. Allison doesn’t have a sentimental bone in her body, but she isn’t heartless. She won’t begrudge her friends their reminiscence.
Renee presses her fingertips to the inside of Allison’s forearm and leans their shoulders together. Allison barely suppresses a shudder.
“Feels good to be back, right?” she says softly, like it’s a secret only Allison is allowed to know. They’ve each visited innumerable times since their graduation but never altogether like this, and never since Neil became the sole original Fox left on the team.
“It would feel better to actually be inside,” Allison says and Renee accepts it easily. Dan steps up to the gate and punches a few numbers into the keypad, and they walk into the Foxhole Court.
Dan and Matt take the lead down the corridor towards the break room, so Allison walks beside Renee behind them. Renee brushes her fingers along the wall as they walk and Allison pretends not to notice because the sight of it makes sadness twist like a knife in her gut. She’d never say it but she misses walking this corridor with them more than she cares to admit, even to herself.
They enter the foyer just as the Foxes are gathering for a post-practice pep talk. Allison’s gaze flits over a crowd of relatively unfamiliar faces, before settling on Neil standing alone in the doorway. She can tell by the way he holds his body that he is desperately trying to melt into shadows but being all too loud about it in the process. He looks lost in a way she hasn’t seen him for years, and his gaze latches onto the upperclassmen like they might be the only thing tethering him to land.
“Josten,” she says to dispel the tension, because looking at him makes her ache in ways that are somehow still foreign.
“Reynolds,” he says and his voice sounds like gravel.
Danger, she thinks because she does not like the way his expression shutters, and she can tell Renee senses it too from the weight of her index finger tugging at a belt loop on Allison’s jeans. They ignore the rest of the team and head straight for him, crowding him back into the hallway he came from, like they can keep him safe just by keeping him from sight.
Allison hears Dan steal Wymack’s attention behind them, but she doesn’t have time to worry about formalities. She swings an arm around Neil and manoeuvers him to be sandwiched between her and Renee. They are a blockade shielding him from the rest of his team, from the world outside, from whatever is making his hands grip dents into the strap of his duffle.
“You’re hitching a lift with us. You don’t mind, Coach?” Allison phrases it like a question but no one is stupid enough to think there is room for argument. Wymack waves a nonchalant hand, despite the sharp look in his eyes when he addresses Neil.
“Don’t stay out all night. I need my captain at practice tomorrow,” he says. His tongue lingers over captain, like a heavy secret, and Allison has no trouble reading between the lines. Wymack needs Neil, not this shell in the shape of his body. Allison squeezes his shoulders a little tighter and pulls him forward.
“We’ll make sure he’s there,” she says, pushes past the rest of the Foxes, and guides her Neil-and-Renee combo out into the carpark. They climb into the back of the Rover, Neil still squished thigh-to-thigh between the girls, and Dan and Matt join them not long after. Neil picks at a fray in his jeans as Matt pulls away from the Foxhole Court. Allison tries not to stare, but he is a picture perfect apparition of the ghost of a boy long since buried. He is a study in disappearing and Allison can feel the desperation to run thrumming through the air around him. It has been four years. Looking at Neil, it feels like no time at all.
“What’s going on?” Dan says eventually, her eyebrows knitting in the rear-view mirror. Neil jolts and all four of them pretend not to notice the fear he smooths out of his features.
“Nothing. I’m fine.”
And, really, four years does nothing for a person hell-bent on self-destruction. Allison frowns at the side of his head—calculating, concerned, cautious. She hasn’t felt this way around Neil a long time.
It’s only because she has spent years envying Neil’s natural hair colour that she notices the difference. (It’s only because he’s trying too hard to hide it. Allison resolutely doesn’t think about how much would go unnoticed if he wasn’t giving himself away.)
“You dyed your hair, kiddo?” she asks, sliding her fingers through the thick curls. Neil doesn’t flinch at the touch, but it’s a near thing and they both know it. Allison retracts her hand instantly.
“I felt like a change,” Neil says, and his voice is nonchalant but the face he pulls is anything but.
“A change?” Dan asks incredulously.
“A change would be dyeing your hair neon green. You hardly look any different,” Matt says. Neil opens his mouth to respond but Allison doesn’t have time for them to hash out this argument. Not when Neil is sitting there looking like that.
“Pull over, Matt,” she says sharply and is almost surprised when he does so without question. They turn into a Walmart carpark and Allison is out the door almost before they’ve stopped.
“Get out,” she says, pointing at Neil then stabbing her finger at the ground in front of her.
“I’m fi–” he starts, but she cuts him off viciously.
“Out.”
He gets out.
They face each other down, twin righteous pillars on a crash course destined for collision. Allison can almost see the walls slamming into place, shuttering Neil’s vision and cutting her off before she can wedge one foot in the door. They’ve all grown used to living in each other’s back pockets, but the last thing she expected is for him to use this complacency against her.
“What’s going on?” she says in her best impersonation of Wymack. She’d try for Andrew if she was naïve enough not to know how horribly disastrous that would be, but Wymack is second best at wheedling information from Neil when his demeanour turns to brick and mortar.
“Nothing.”
“I’ll take the truth without a side order of bullshit, thanks.”
In her peripheral, Allison sees Matt move to climb out and Renee reach over to stop him. It’s just as well, because Neil is embodying that deer-caught-in-headlights look he first showed up with and Allison can already imagine how easily he’d run if spooked. She folds her arms over her chest and watches his fingers twitch over the hem of his shirt. He’s searching for lies, picking them apart in his head and piecing them together in the shape of something believable. She can see it behind his expression—she barely even has to look for it anymore. Whether or not he likes it, he has turned himself into a book and flipped the pages open for them one by one. He gave himself to the Foxes and, for better or for worse, it is too late to take himself back. Allison knows he knows this, but he tries anyway.
“Look, if you don’t want to talk about it then say so. Don’t lie and pretend to be fine when you clearly aren’t.”
It’s the get out of jail free card freshman Neil would have pounced on, but fifth-year Neil knows Allison as well as she knows him. He is better at the give-and-take than he ever has been and Allison watches his focus shift from finding the right lie to finding a truth he can give in response.
“It’s lonely,” he says at length and his voice cracks in all the wrong places. Allison feels it like a blade to her heart. “Being here without… without any of you. It’s like before.”
Guilt is an unfamiliar weight in Allison’s stomach, heavy and cold as ice. She feels sick with the spread of it across her gut, spiralling up her chest and spiking in the back of her throat. Neil’s eyes are baleful, broken, lost. They are a white flag, waving surrender into the endless void of the ocean. Allison does not think she’s ever been equipped for rescue missions.
The others approach slowly from behind, but Allison is already reaching forward, desperate to hold Neil’s cracked edges in place until he finds the strength to mend himself.
“Neil,” she whispers and he shifts into the welcome of her outstretched arms. That’s all it takes for the rest of them to converge, clamouring for a spare limb, for any appendage to cling to, desperate in their desire to keep Neil steady. Allison presses her cheek to the crown of his head, Dan winds an arm around his waist, Renee slips her fingertips over his bicep, and Matt engulfs them all in a bear hug, bumping his chin lightly against Neil’s scalp.
Allison couldn’t say how long they stay like that, huddled around this ghost in a half empty Walmart carpark, but it is long enough that some of the colour is returning to Neil’s cheeks and his hands don’t shake when he brushes hair out of his eyes. Neil has long since been the glue holding the Foxes (new and old and everything in between) together, but for the first time Allison realises, somewhere along the way, they became the glue sliding between his cracked exterior and the stitches patching him up at the end of the world. Something like nostalgia (like home and family and love love love) swoops in her heart and, for once, she doesn’t quash it.
Inexplicably, they end up at the same restaurant, a burger joint downtown from the university, that they’d first taken Neil to after he became the newest addition to the Foxes all those years ago. Allison almost scoffs at the sentimentality, but the fact that she notices says far more about her than she’s willing to address. The five of them squish into an L-shaped booth, elbows overlapping and knees knocking beneath the table, and it’s easy to fall back on the familiarity of it all. Allison has been graduated and alone going on four years, but if she doesn’t think too hard about it she can almost believe she’s still a reckless student winding down from a day of tough practice and tougher in-fighting. She doesn’t miss it, and yet she does, in the small ways that feel large enough to swallow her whole.
There’s a lull in the conversation and Allison takes her chance, bumping her shoulder lightly with Neil’s where they’re pressed tight.
“Why the hair dye?”
His expression falters for all of a second and she almost thinks she won’t get a reply, before he picks himself up smoothly and shrugs.
“Sometimes the pressure of staying is too heavy. I have too much to live for and I’m still learning what it means to be real, in my own right. Dyeing my hair feels a little closer to what I’m used to. It feels safer.”
Silence hangs in the air for several loaded seconds, heavy and humid all around them, before Allison tips her head to rest against Neil’s and smiles.
“Just promise me you won’t do something stupid like shaving your head. That would be a travesty.”
It sparks a laugh from Neil and sets the tension rippling away in waves. The others relax into its wake and Matt, on the other side of Neil, pushes a careful hand through Neil’s curls, tucking them away from his forehead.
“I don’t know, I think he could rock the bald look,” he says, mischief glinting in his eyes.
“Of course he could. Neil could rock anything,” Dan chips in and Allison groans, ready to gripe something about the fashion disaster seated next to her. There’s an easy rhythm amongst them, a four-step waltz they’ve learnt to dance with their eyes closed, and it steals the concern from heavy limbs, leaving Allison feeling weightless and enamoured. It’s always been like this—the gentle push and pull, never asking too much, never taking more than they can give—and she falls into the safety of it with practised ease. It’s the homecoming she’s been waiting three years for and she doesn’t even care that her heart is swelling with the warmth of it.
Renee kicks Allison’s foot under the table and hooks her toes around the back of Allison’s ankle, holding steadfast. Allison settles back into her skin.