Page 108 of The Backup Plan

“Then come with me.”

“Come where?”

“Come with me to Knoxville next weekend for the game. Coach okayed me skipping the bus. I’ll drive down Saturday morning and back on Sunday evening so I can see my mom and dad for a little bit. Come with me.”

“Meet the parents?”

He grabbed the football with the heart he’d drawn earlier and wrote on it.

Encore trois saisons, ma chère.

“Viens avec moi,” he said, placing it in her hands. “After three more seasons, come with me. Everywhere.”

THIRTY-TWO

The Jordans

AVERY

Avery held the sketchbook to her nose and inhaled before she flipped it open. The empty pages were a whiff of a repeated memory, of every time her mother took her hand and pulled her away from the section of blank books and notepads at the bookstore and over to the books she could read. Books that were already written didn’t entice her the way empty books did when they demanded someone fill their pages.

She tried whatever series was popular every year, from Harry Potter to Hunger Games, just so she didn’t feel left out. Fan art was a fun connection with her classmates until she got good enough to draw a picture of the Hogwarts characters and insert herself as Luna Lovegood. The girl she drew it for thought it was creepy.

The plain, black sketchbook was a familiar weight in her hands, the same size and shape as a hundred others, and, true to her own superstition about making any one idea too important too soon, she skipped the first page and set her pencil on the second. She drew his name in large, loopy cursive across the page, lead skipping off the edges, then over and over again, smaller each time, skirting the curves of each layer and letting the words shift into whatever came.

Jordan Ackerman Jordan Ackerman Jordan Ackerman Jordy #18 Ackerman Where are you Jordan where and why and how are you Jordan?

She opened the notes app on her phone and scrolled through the list she’d compiled of every rumor or offhand remark, comical to gruesome, scribbling each one on a sticky note and hanging each note on the edge of the shelf above her desk.

Smoking hash and training coyotes with an art advisor in a desert commune.

On the run from the married Vegas showgirl’s husband.

Witness protection in Central Europe.

Some terrifying disease—a rare cancer, maybe, and experimental treatment in an unapproved lab as a last resort.

Quarterbacking in the CFL under an assumed name.

Cruising the Mediterranean on a yacht with a billionaire’s widow.

Tattoo artist in the Badlands.

Prison, for hard drugs.

Rehab, for hard drugs.

Botched plastic surgery in Mexico.

Rock-paper-scissors in the Easter Islands.

Kibbutz in Israel. Gambling in Monaco. Scotland Yard. Aliens. A cult.

Benny suggested he might have hit it big with some investments with all the cash the football program threw at him and decided not to risk his health. Benny was far too practical. Even Cameron planned to ride out the college years to bank his money as long as he could and get a degree out of it. Jordan, who scouts already whispered about as a first- or second-day pick, wanted to go all the way.

Thumbing through a stack of printouts, Avery studied him, starting with the social media posts when he committed to UND as a bright-eyed, lanky high school senior. She could make a flipbook and capture the transition from boy to man in the set of his square jaw, the stubble that spread on his cheeks, the faint circles forming beneath his eyes. His shoulders broadened and his arms bulked up in three years of training in a highly ranked program, and the shift from a teen heartthrob to a man on the verge of a dream was almost imperceptible as the pictures marched on week by week, season by season.

Avery

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