Page 5 of Bump and Run

Two

Eliza

“Tell me everything.”

I chuckle and kick my bedroom door closed. “Well, I went downstairs, grabbed two bottles of water, and came back.”

Grant narrows his thin eyelids. “You left out the chapter about Junior Morgan walking inside just as you happened to make it to the kitchen.”

I shake my head. Of course, he was watching from the window. “He walked in and introduced himself.”

“And?”

“And then my dad interrupted us and yanked him back outside with the rest of the good dogs.”

Grant sighs, relinquishing his love for decent gossip. “Damn.”

“What do you know about him?”

He pauses, blinking quickly. “Oh, honey. He’s Junior Morgan.”

I hold out his bottle of water and he takes it from me. “And?”

“I keep forgetting you’re new around here,” he mutters, leaning back to peek out the window again.

When he heard there would be several dozen young footballers gathered in my backyard tonight, he basically invited himself over to watch. Not that I mind the company. It gets lonely up here on the third floor.

“Junior’s a player, in every sense of the word. Throw a rock in the quad and you’ll probably smack a girl he’s hit and quit.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” I say, collapsing onto my floor cushion and reaching for my script. “We should keep running lines—”

“Shush,”he snaps, his eyes still focused outside. “Ty Fisher just bent over to tie his shoelaces.”

I push off my cushion to join him by the window. He scoots a bit to the left to give me room and we stare down at the lawn below. My father stands tall above them with a pressed suit; his big, thick hands waving around as he spews out more words to them than he’s ever said to me in my entire life.

“Your dad seems cool,” Grant murmurs.

I shrug. “I suppose.”

My eyes fall on the only familiar face in the crowd other than my old man: Junior Morgan. A player, in every sense of the word. No wonder he practically broke his chain to nip at my heels.

Grant sighs. “Ty is gorgeous.”

I laugh. “Something tells me you might not be his type…”

He raises his thin eyebrows at me. “I beg to differ.”

“Really? How so?”

“A gentleman never kisses and tells…” he jokes, “but I have a friend who does and let’s just say Ty is going through the experimental phase of his college social experience.”

I look down at the lawn again, zeroing in on Ty and his perfectly-styled black hair, not unlike Grant’s neatly-trimmed blond locks. “I can see that.”

Grant lets out another sigh and spins away from the window, lost and lovelorn. “All right, let’s do this.”

I shift back down onto my cushion with my script in hand, ready to dive into this scene. Auditions for the fall show are this Friday and I’m eager to make a good impression on the theatre director, Mr. Young. I would never have gotten into the program at all if it weren’t for my father’s influence and Young made it pretty clear that I’d have to impress him right out the gate or he’d boot my ass to the curb.

“Okay…” I clear my throat. “Page twenty-nine. You read Danny, I’ll read Nora.”

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