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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2021 by Kara Bietz

  Cover art © 2021 by Ashlena Sharma. Cover design by Karina Granda. Cover copyright © 2021 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

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  First Edition: September 2021

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  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Bietz, Kara, author.

  Title: Sidelined / Kara Bietz.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Poppy/Little, Brown and Company, 2021. | Audience: Ages 12 & up. | Summary: “High school seniors Julian Jackson and Elijah Vance reconnect on the football field after three years apart, learning to both trust and love each other again.”—Provided by publisher.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020051551 | ISBN 9780759557512 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780759557499 (ebook) | ISBN 9780759557505 (ebook other)

  Subjects: CYAC: Friendship—Fiction. | Dating (Social customs)—Fiction. | Gays—Fiction. | High schools—Fiction. | Schools—Fiction. | Meridien (Tex.)—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.1.B533 Si 2021 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020051551

  ISBNs: 978-0-7595-5751-2 (hardcover), 978-0-7595-5749-9 (ebook)

  E3-20210812-JV-NF-ORI

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  One Julian

  Two Elijah

  Three Julian

  Four Elijah

  Five Julian

  Six Elijah

  Seven Julian

  Eight Elijah

  Nine Julian

  Ten Elijah

  Eleven Julian

  Twelve Elijah

  Thirteen Julian

  Fourteen Elijah

  Fifteen Julian

  Sixteen Elijah

  Seventeen Julian

  Eighteen Elijah

  Nineteen Julian

  Twenty Elijah

  Twenty-One Julian

  Twenty-Two Elijah

  Twenty-Three Julian

  Twenty-Four Elijah

  Twenty-Five Julian

  Twenty-Six Elijah

  Twenty-Seven Julian

  Twenty-Eight Elijah

  Acknowledgments

  Discover More

  About the Author

  For SLB and the broken guitar string

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  · one ·

  JULIAN

  When Coach Marcus postpones after-school football practice until sunset because of the heat, I take the long way home. I don’t hurry down Main Street with the rest of the kids from my neighborhood, but instead cut through the soccer fields and head into the scrub pines behind Crenshaw County High School.

  My grandma, whom I’ve always called Birdie, used to tell me when I was little, “Idle hands are the devil’s playground, Julian.” In fact, she said it so often and with such an accusatory tone, I was convinced that the devil himself was just waiting for me to become bored so he could use my hands to commit some heinous crime. I used to sit in church with my palms under my thighs, silently repeating not today, not today, scared out of my wits that the devil knew I was bored and was ready to come up from the depths of hell and lead me into a life of debauchery… right there in front of the entire congregation of the Crossroads Church of Meridien. And then they’d all know how really bored I was. I pictured Ms. Brownie, whose real name had been lost to years of the entire town calling her Ms. Brownie, shaking her head and saying in her thick Texas twang, “I always knew that boy had idle hands.”

  As I got older, Birdie didn’t repeat it as much. Maybe it was because I learned how to behave myself and she felt I didn’t need the warning. Now that I’m grown, I know that idle hands aren’t necessarily the devil’s playground. You know what is, though? Meridien, Texas, in the thick of the early September heat.

  The dried pine straw cracks under my feet as I reach the clearing in the woods near the end of Kirkland Road. I can see our old backyard from here, the sunlight dancing on the tire swing and dappling the mixture of dead grass and sand underneath. The lone tall oak casts a shadow onto the roof and right across my old bedroom window. It’s not much to look at, this old house with its yellowing paint and red shutters. A shotgun house, Daddy called it, long and narrow. Every so often when I walk home this way, memories flash of me and my father in the backyard, tossing a football back and forth.

  “Fingers between the laces,” he taught me, even though I could barely get my six-year-old hand around the narrowest part of the ball. “Get that pointer finger on the seam, Julian.” One fluid motion. Release the ball at the highest point and step through. Every time I throw a pass, I remember his instructions.

  “My boy is going to be a star,” he said once, carrying me around the yard on his shoulders. “Hear that crowd cheering for you? Everyone’s going to know Julian Jackson: the best quarterback in Texas.”

  I don’t remember anything about my mother, who left us just weeks after I was born. And I really don’t have a ton of memories of my father, either, but that one is really bright.

  I touch the chain-link fence that separates the yards on Kirkland Road. I wish I could see him as vividly as I sometimes remember his voice.

  I notice that the woman who lives in the house now is sitting on the front porch, a tattered paperback in her hands.

  “Afternoon, Julian,” she says without looking up, her glasses perched near the end of her nose.

  “Afternoon, Miss Jean.”

  “Some tea for you?” She points to an ice-filled pitcher next to her without lowering her paperback.

  “No time this afternoon, Miss. But thank you,” I answer.

  We have the same exchange every time I take the long way home and she’s there. I never say yes, and she always asks. I wonder what would happen if I did say yes one day. I haven’t been in the house since the morning my father died.

  I reach the end of Kirkland Road and throw a look over my shoulder at the house at the end of the street before I turn onto Main and head for home. The sharp contrast between the quiet of Kirkland and the bustle of Main Street is jarring. I’m walking at a snail’s pace now. Without the woods for shade, the sun beats relentlessly on my back, and I can feel the sweat running down toward the waistband of my shorts.

  I wind my way past the town line, the rusty WELCOME TO MERIDIEN sign blown off-kilter after years of fighting a losing battle with the Southeast Texas wind. If I were walking in the other direction, I’d be passing huge ranches lined with white vinyl fences framing freshly mown grass and dotted with tall trees. On this side of the county, the road leads to rows of tract housing, overgrown c
hickweed, and bobbing pumpjacks. Officer Calvert sits in the Crossroads Church parking lot at the edge of town, just waiting for someone to come barreling down Main Street on their way to the beach, too busy looking at their phone to notice the sharp drop in the speed limit. The road is patched together with a dizzying pattern of thick tar that still stinks in the late summer steam. Empty storefronts, their windows covered with brown paper and sometimes duct tape, dot the main drag between the businesses that survived the big oil downturn a couple years back. Jake’s Convenience, Ron Redd’s Rapid Repair, the Meridien Motel and Diner (parking in rear), Mabel’s Beauty Box. Burger Barn rises up like some turquoise beast at the corner of Main and Rudy Street. I ignore the stream of kids hanging out there on the pink picnic tables and turn right on Rudy Street to head home.

  The TV is blaring when I come in the front door. Ray Remondo, Corpus Christi Action 8 Weather, is standing in front of a map, gesturing to a storm churning down near Barbados.

  “Birdie,” I call. “I’m home.”

  “There’s my boy,” she says, her voice coming from the kitchen. “Come on in here and help your grandmama.”

  I drop my backpack on the brown plaid couch, worn thin in spots from years of Birdie’s hospitality. As far back as I can remember, there has always been a visitor or two a few meals a week in this house.

  Birdie is standing on a chair trying to reach a heavy bowl above the refrigerator when I appear in the kitchen. Her heavy frame teeters on the edge of the seat, and I notice it starting to flex and bend underneath her.

  “Birdie! Here.” I guide her down gently. “What are you reaching for?”

  “I need the good glass bowl,” she says. “We’ve got special company tonight!”

  I step up on the chair and grab the big bowl in one motion. I set it gently in the sink and start washing it out with soap and warm water. “Who is it?”

  Birdie calls everyone special company, even if it’s just Ms. Brownie coming over for gossip and a muffin in the morning. Though she’s not a regular dinner visitor, and I doubt we’d be getting out the good bowl for her. Maybe it’s Pastor Ernie and his husband, Thomas Figg. Figg, whom no one except my grandmother refers to as Mr., only Figg, has been teaching calculus at Crenshaw since the dawn of time. Maybe earlier.

  Or maybe it’s my least favorite visitor, my football coach. When Coach Marcus and Birdie get started on offensive plays and passing-game strategies, sometimes I have to leave the room. I don’t know that anyone has ever met a booster club president more vocal than Birdie. No one in Meridien loves Crenshaw County High School football more than she does. Including Coach Marcus.

  “No football practice today? I thought for sure you’d be out there getting ready for the Taylor game,” she says, sucking her teeth and shaking her head.

  “Coach Marcus says it’s too hot for practice this afternoon, so we’re playing under the lights tonight at seven,” I say, yawning. I pull my soggy shirt away from my back and try to fan a little fresh air under there. It doesn’t help. “Plus, we’ve got four weeks before the Taylor game, Birdie. Stephens City is our first game, this weekend.”

  “Oh, I know that,” she says. “But you know Taylor is the game we all have our eye on.”

  Don’t I know it. Everyone who’s lived in Meridien for longer than five minutes knows it. Our rivalry with Taylor High School is something that seems to have started around the time Moses parted the Red Sea, if you listen to any of the folks around here.

  “Never too soon to start preparing for those Taylor Titans,” Birdie mumbles. “You know they have morning and afternoon practice some days up there at Taylor?” She shakes her head. “They’re getting ready for us. We ought to be getting ready for them. Give that Coach Marcus a piece of my mind next time I see him. You’re going to have to have your wits about you this year,” she admonishes.

  “I always do,” I tell her, trying to smile. Birdie sometimes rides me harder about football than Coach Marcus does, and that’s saying something.

  “Ooh, sounding more and more like your daddy every day.” She rolls her eyes. “You’ve got to get that homework done, then. Time’s a-wasting,” she says, swatting me on the backside with a dish towel.

  “You going to tell me who the special company is?”

  “Never mind that,” she says, tucking the towel into the waistband of her full flowery skirt. “You keep your head in the game. You’ll see ’em soon enough, when you get home after practice. Now get.” She pulls me close to her for a kiss on the forehead and then gently shoves me in the direction of my room.

  I grab my backpack on the way. What kind of company will still be around after practice ends late on a Monday? Maybe someone is spending the night? Someone from Birdie’s book club or a church friend? Why would that be a surprise, though?

  I put my backpack on the floor by my desk and straighten out the green blanket on my bed. I lay out the homework I have in order of difficulty, starting with calculus because it’s the easiest for me and ending with English because it’s my least favorite. I sit down at the desk with a sharpened pencil and my notebooks. The work is mindless, and I’m still distracted by Birdie’s secrecy about tonight’s guest. Does Birdie have a boyfriend? Is that why she wanted the good glass bowl and she’s wearing her favorite church skirt?

  I quickly put the idea out of my head. Surely I would have noticed if some guy had started coming around.

  Well, there is that one man at church who’s always hanging around her. Mr. Cooper. Only problem with that is Mr. Cooper is about eight hundred years old, and we just had a big birthday blowout a couple of years back for Birdie’s sixtieth. Maybe it’s someone from the other side of the county. Some lonely rancher who’s looking for a wife who can talk football.

  I let myself settle into that fantasy, living the good life on some big ranch on the other side of town. I picture myself riding a horse and living in one of those houses behind the white vinyl fences while I finish up calculus and physics and at least look at my English lit assignment.

  Birdie is sitting in front of the TV when I come out of my room. Ray Remondo is drawing colored lines from the massive blob near Barbados all the way up to the Texas coast. Birdie chews a fingernail. Ray Remondo graduated from Crenshaw County High School around the time my dad was there, and a few years later he was one of those dudes they stick out on a pier during a hurricane on the Weather Channel to show you how bad the wind is. He came back home to Texas recently and started working for Action 8 in Corpus Christi. He’s Meridien’s little claim to fame. Plus, he’s been known to wax poetic about Crenshaw football now and again, which makes him one of Birdie’s favorite people. I think he even writes a sports opinion column in the weekly Meridien newspaper that only the old people read.

  “What’s old Ray Ray gesticulating about today?” I pat myself on the back for using an SAT word.

  “Storm out there brewing in the Caribbean. Maybe it’ll give us some relief from this ridiculous heat wave,” she says, throwing her hand up toward the TV.

  She points the remote at the screen and clicks the power button in a huff. She pulls a towel from the laundry basket at her feet and starts folding.

  “You think it’s something we need to pay attention to?” I ask.

  “Not just yet. That thing may take ten days to get on up here. And you remember what happened with that Ashley,” she says, rolling her eyes.

  Everyone on the Texas Gulf coast knows about that Ashley: the Hurricane That Wasn’t. Statewide panic and a bread-and-milk shortage all for a couple of clouds and a barely there thunderstorm that took a turn toward Louisiana at the last minute. Folks in Meridien talk about that Ashley the way they talk about that one uncle who ruined Thanksgiving or the Dallas Cowboys: with complete and utter disgust.

  “Did you finish up all your homework?” she asks, wiping the sweat from her brow and pulling another towel from the laundry basket.

  “Yes, ma’am.” It’s just a little white lie. I can finish my Engli
sh assignment tonight after practice. It’ll help put me to sleep.

  “You work hard out there,” she tells me, straightening my T-shirt and inspecting my shoelaces.

  “I always do.”

  “And you tell Coach Marcus he’s got a weak spot on defense on his left. He needs to fix that mess before Taylor.” She winks and squeezes my shoulders while guiding me toward the front door.

  “What time is company coming?”

  “Should be here within the hour, I suspect,” she says, her voice a little uneven. She looks out the window and wrings her hands. “Now get on out there and do what needs to be done.”

  “Still not going to tell me who it is?” I raise my eyebrows at her like I used to when I was small and I wanted a piece of candy or an extra cookie after dinner.

  “Get!” She laughs, opening the front door and pointing down the driveway.

  I sling my football bag over my shoulder and, with a quick smile back at Birdie, hustle down Rudy Street.

  · two ·

  ELIJAH

  I walk myself to the bus station. It’s not as dramatic as it sounds, as we live only a few blocks away. Three blocks in the afternoon Houston steam with a black duffel bag slung over your shoulder, however, can feel like forty days in the jungle if you let your imagination get away from you.

  The 2:45 bus to Corpus Christi isn’t completely full. I set my bag down on the seat beside me and put in my earbuds before we even leave the station. I watch people step onto the bus and make up stories about them in my head. It keeps me distracted enough to not think about my sister, Frankie, and my niece, Coley, for at least ten whole minutes.

  Frankie wanted to walk with me. She wanted to bring Coley and wave from the station as the bus pulled away. I told her I think she’s watched too many Hallmark movies.

  “Come on, Elijah,” Frankie begged. “Coley loves anything with wheels. She’ll love seeing the big buses.”

  “I can do this on my own,” I told her. I left out the real reason I didn’t want her there with my niece: that I thought it would rip my heart out to see Coley waving at me from the platform as the bus pulls away. Maybe it’ll be only a few weeks until I see her again, but it will definitely be the longest I’ve been away from her since the day she was born.