The Rivals by Daisy Whitney

fight even more,” he says, then runs his hands through my hair the way I like. Everything he does is the way I like.
    “Mmmm…”
    He shifts me so I’m sitting on his lap. “Now I’m literally beneath you. So fitting.”
    I pretend to swat him, but he pulls up for another kiss.
    “I like you beneath me,” I whisper to him.
    “I like it too,” he says, and right now, in this moment, it’s just the two of us here. No one else is in my head.
    Then as soon as I think that, an image flickers by. Quick, fast, like a burglar outside a window. But I’ve spotted the thief and, try as I might, he keeps looking through the glass. So I shut my eyes and rest my head against Martin’s chest. He wraps his arms around me tight and holds me close. And now we are not Mockingbirds. We are just us. Just a boy and a girl trying to move beyond what happened.

WORKING GIRLS
    When I was younger, I was a baseball fan. My father was a fanatic, a diehard, so he felt it was necessary and vital to take my sister and me to ball games. He taught us how to keep score, and by age seven I was tracking the number of errors and base hits and the batting averages for every professional baseball team. I know—it was an unusual habit for a piano girl. But I liked the numbers, the history, the strategy.
    Then I stopped.
    I went cold turkey when I learned about the sport’s modern history and how steroids had radiated across nearly all of professional baseball, touching virtually every player. The sport was tainted; they were tainted. Their records didn’t matter; their scores didn’t matter. I could sit there and tally up RBIs till the wee hours of the morning, but there would be asterisks next to their names.
    Because they doped up to get ahead.
    “You just don’t do that,” I told my dad. “So I’m not going to follow baseball anymore. And I don’t think you should either.”
    It broke his heart, but he agreed and joined in my boycott.
    I was just a fan, though. So while I understand the broader philosophical stance—success of any kind needs to come on its own terms, by its own merits—I also want to understand the personal one. I want to understand why Delaney’s so worried about a possible déjà vu that she’d seek me out the second school started.
    When classes end the next day, I head straight to her dorm.
    I knock and knock and knock.
    There’s no answer.
    The music is blasting from her room, so I bang louder. They’re probably rocking out to her tunes in nearby Connecticut too.
    “Delaney!” I shout as loud as I can possibly go.
    The music stops, and she yanks the door open.
    “What? Oh. It’s you,” she says.
    “Yeah, it’s me.”
    “What are you doing?”
    “I’m here to see you,” I say. “You came to find me yesterday. I came to find you today.”
    She narrows her eyes at me, looks me up and down, then scans the halls. She nods and lets me in, quickly shutting the door behind her.
    Her bed is piled with clothes, T-shirts upon jeans upon jackets with ironed-on patches all over them. Her floor is littered with suitcases and duffel bags. The one thing that’s neat is the row of nail polish bottles on her desk, easily twenty or thirty of them. I notice she’s holding the brush of one of them—a sparkly sea green. I glance down at her nails. Every other one has been painted sea green; they alternate with cherry red.
    “I like your nails,” I say.
    “Want me to do yours?”
    “Sure,” I say, and I sit down on her desk chair. She grabs another chair and pulls it up next to mine.
    “What color do you want?” she asks.
    “You pick,” I say.
    “Blue,” she declares, and reaches for a color the shade of a cloudless summer sky. “You are definitely a blue.”
    “You must be the Color Oracle. Yesterday you said I should do a blue streak.”
    “Yes, but that was because you told me you’d thought about dyeing your hair blue,” she says, correcting my memory.
    “True,” I say as she brushes on a daub of