Mordent's Lament

Chapter One

Part I: The Season

The bleachers at Cedar Valley High smell like popcorn, cut grass, and the particular kind of nervous energy that only exists before a Friday night game. Matthew Sullivan—Sully to everyone—sits on the low wall by the locker room doors, under the bleachers, helmet balanced on his knee, watching Ethan Riley try to fix his own shoulder pads for the third time in what has become a pregame ritual for the two.

"You're doing it backwards," Sully says.

"I am not doing it backwards."

"You've got the strap under your armpit, man. That's not a pad, that's a hostage situation."

Ethan looks down, freezes, and swears under his breath. "Okay. Maybe a little backwards."

"Dude." Sully hops off the wall and yanks the strap free, retying it in about four seconds flat—the same way he's been doing since eighth grade when Ethan showed up to their first real practice wearing the pads like a confused turtle. "You'd think after four years you'd have this figured out."

"I have other talents."

"Name one."

"I caught that ball you threw last week that should've ended up in the parking lot."

"That doesn't count, that's my talent working through you."

"That's not how talent works, Sully."

"It is if I say it is. I'm team captain."

"You're a tyrant."

"I'm a benevolent tyrant." Sully claps him on the shoulder pad he's just fixed. "Big difference."

From the top of the bleachers, a voice cuts through the noise like it's designed to. "Are you two done getting flirting over shoulder pads?"

Sully turns, and something in his chest does the thing it always does when he sees her—loosens, settles, like the whole day just exhaled. Madison Reed comes down the steps wearing Sully’s letterman jacket over her cheer uniform, her hair still half in the claw clip she uses for studying, a stack of index cards visibly shoved into her bag between the pom-poms.

"Are those flashcards in your cheer bag?" Sully asks.

"AP Chem midterm review waits for no one, Matthew."

"It's September."

"Midterms are in three months, Reed. How are you already preparing?" Ethan asks in disbelief.

"There’s a reason she’s top of the class, bro. Her dedication to academics is almost scary," Sully reminds him.

"Scary, you say?" Madison walks over to Sully, trying to maintain a very serious face. "So, what, you’re saying I’m intimidating?" She stops in front of him, close enough that he has to look down at her, and her whole face changes—softer, only for him, the way it never is for the hallway, the cameras, or the thousand people who think they know who Madison Reed is. "You nervous?"

"Terrified," he says. "Total wreck. Might throw up in my helmet."

"You say that before every game."

"And I mean it every time." He bumps his forehead lightly against hers. "You have your lucky scrunchie?"

"Always do," she replies, raising her arm to show the light blue and white scrunchie around her wrist. It was the first gift Sully gave Madi when they started dating three years back.

"Cheer for me?"

"Always do," she agrees, smiling, and kisses him quickly before he can ruin it by saying something else charming. "Don't get hit in the head. I need you functional for our anniversary dinner tomorrow."

"I have never once been hit in the head."

"You got tackled by three guys at once last season and stood up singing Wicked."

"That was strategy."

"That was a concussion, Sully."

"Strategic concussion."

Behind them, Ethan makes a loud noise of disgust. "Can you two ogle at each other somewhere that isn't directly in my immediate area? I'm trying to get my head in the game."

"You gotta getcha head in the game," Sully says, almost singing. 

"Getcha head in the game!" Ethan cheers back.

That's what makes Elena look up from the bottom row of bleachers where she's quietly adjusting the zoom on her camera, testing the light before kickoff. She catches the whole exchange through the lens without meaning to—Sully's ridiculous grin, Madi's exasperated fondness, Ethan’s pretending to be scandalized—and takes the shot before she can think twice about it. It's a genuinely good photo. She can already tell.

"Got something good." Candice drops onto the bleacher beside her without asking, already mid-thought about something else entirely. "Okay, so, Jenna Marsh told Priya that Coach Denton is definitely getting engaged over Thanksgiving, and I know that Jenna Marsh has never once in her life had correct information, but I need you to understand that I already have three sources confirming a ring exists."

"That's not a story," Elena says, not looking up from her camera.

"It's not a story, it's intel. There's a difference. I gather the intel. You decide what becomes a story."

"You just want it in the column."

"I want it in the column eventually. I'm patient. I'm a patient woman, Ms. Hart." Candice stands on the bleachers, her presence almost commanding attention. "Speaking of the gossip column from the school newspaper, people are still losing their minds trying to figure out who writes it."

"Are they?"

"Toby Anderson told me—with complete confidence, mind you—that it's definitely a senior boy because, quote, 'girls aren't that funny in writing.'"

Elena finally looks up. "I will end him."

"See, that's the reporter voice. You should let that out more."

"I let it out in four hundred anonymous words every other Thursday. That's plenty."

Down on the field, the marching band is warming up, students are barely starting to show up, and the whole stadium begins to take on that pregame hum—that sense of something about to tip over into either triumph or disaster, which, in a small town like Cedar Valley, gets treated with roughly equal seriousness.

The stadium fills in minutes with students, faculty, and town members alike. High school sports were practically a religion in Cedar Valley. Sully jogs out the team, Ethan falling into step beside him, and for a second—just a second—the noise of the crowd swallows everything else.

"You good?" Ethan asks, quieter now, the joking character dropped like a mask he only wears for company.

"Yeah."

"You sure? You had that face again at lunch."

Sully doesn't answer right away. There's a face he makes, apparently, when his father's name comes up in his head uninvited—a flicker Ethan learned to read years ago, back when they were twelve and Sully used to show up to practice with bruises he blamed on falling off his bike. Ethan never bought the bike story. Not once. But he learned when to push the subject and when to just be there instead.

"I'm good," Sully says, and this time it's closer to true. "Eighteen years old in eleven days. My mom wants to do a whole thing."

"A whole thing?"

"Cake. Balloons. Party. All our families together. Probably my aunt showing up uninvited. But really, she wants to give me Gordon’s 'when you turn 18' box." Sully hadn’t called Gordon ‘dad’ since before he went to prison.

Ethan doesn't say anything for a second. "You gonna take it?"

"I don't know." Sully rolls his shoulders, working out something that isn't physical. "It just has a bunch of stuff that reminds me of the awful things he did to my mom and me. But your dad used to say it doesn't have to be a reminder of that, that it can mean whatever I want it to mean. That I get to decide."

"He believed that. About a lot of things." Ethan's voice goes soft at the edges, the way it always does when his dad comes up—five years gone now and still somehow present in nearly every important conversation they have. "For what it's worth, I think he was right."

"Yeah." Sully knocks his fist lightly against his best friend’s shoulder pad. "He usually was."

They don't get to finish the thought, because Coach Denton is already hollering for the team to line up. Minutes later, Cedar Valley kicks off against Millbrook under the lights, and for two and a half hours, nothing else in the world exists except the ball, the grass, and a hundred small decisions that add up to either a win or the kind of loss that gets talked about in the cafeteria all week.

Cedar Valley wins, 24–21. And it’s the start of an unbeatable streak for the team.

The four of them—Sully, Madi, Ethan, and Elena—end up at Cornelius's afterward, the diner two blocks from school that has been feeding Cedar Valley teenagers greasy fries and mediocre milkshakes since before any of their parents were born. Candice shows up twenty minutes late, dramatically, the way she shows up to everything.

"I was stopped," she announces, sliding into the booth and immediately stealing a fry off Elena's plate without asking, "by no fewer than six people who wanted my opinion on whether Sully looked, quote, 'romantically unwell' out there tonight."

"Romantically unwell?" Sully repeats.

"Their words. Apparently you play better when you're thinking about Madi. Which, frankly, tracks, because your face gets very stupid whenever you look at her, and stupid people throw better spirals. It's science."

"That's not science," Madi says.

"It's sports science. Don't fact-check me, I'm establishing a narrative."

"Wait, so I didn’t play well today?" Sully asks, catching the implication.

Ethan laughs so hard he nearly chokes on his milkshake, and Elena—who spent the whole game with her camera up and her eyes catching things nobody else notices—finally sets the camera down long enough to eat.

"You get anything good tonight?" Madi asks her, leaning over to peek at the little screen.

"A few." Elena scrolls, tilting it so Madi can see. A few shots of the crowd and cheer squad with Madi leading the charge. A shot of Sully mid-throw, jaw set, eyes tracking something forty yards downfield that made the entire student section lose its collective mind. A shot of Ethan hauling in a catch—the one picture Elena lingers on a second longer than the others—and a few of Candice mid-cheer in the bleachers, caught in an expression so purely, theatrically joyful that it looks staged even though it isn't.

"Oh, that one's going in my portfolio," Candice says immediately, having somehow seen it upside down from across the table. "That's a headshot, Elena. That's Broadway. Frame that."

"It's a photo of you screaming about a touchdown."

"A true action shot."

Under the table, Ethan's hand finds Elena's, and if anyone at the table notices, nobody says anything, because it's been happening for weeks now in small, quiet ways—a hand on a shoulder that lingers half a second too long, an inside joke that comes out too fast to be new. Madi catches Sully's eye across the table, and the two of them share the specific look of people who placed a bet a long time ago and are watching it slowly, satisfyingly pay off.

"So," Madi says a few moments later, entirely too casually, stirring her milkshake with a French fry, "anything you two want to tell us?"

"No," Ethan and Elena say at exactly the same time, with exactly the same too-fast tone, which is somehow more incriminating than if they'd said nothing at all.

Candice points a fry at them like a gavel. "That's a guilty verdict if I've ever heard one."

"There's nothing to tell," Ethan says, his ears going faintly red, which everyone at the table pretends not to notice out of something like mercy.

"Sure," Sully says, grinning. "Sure there isn't."

"Drop it."

"I'm just saying, for two people with nothing to tell, you're holding hands under a table that has a transparent top."

Ethan looks down. The table does, in fact, have a see-through top. Elena puts her face directly into her hands while Candice cackles loud enough that the couple in the next booth turns around.

It feels like nothing. Just five kids at a diner after a win, the kind of Friday night that happens fifty times a year in a town where the biggest dramas are school rivalries and who likes who. Madi laughs until she has to wipe her eyes, and Sully watches her do it, thinking—not for the first time—that he has no idea what he's done to deserve a night this easy, a life that feels, for once, like it belongs entirely to him and not to the things that have happened to him.

It's just a Friday night in September. Nobody at that table has any reason to think it's anything other than the beginning of the best senior year ever.

Part II:

The rest of that fall unfolds the way good seasons do when you're seventeen and eighteen and the whole world seems built specifically to root for you—one win bleeding into the next, the town's attention narrowing week by week until it feels like all of Cedar Valley exists just to stand in the cold on Friday nights and scream itself hoarse for a group of teenagers in green, white and gold.

Sully throws for more yards that season than any quarterback in school history. Ethan catches nearly all of them. The "Surly Twins" nickname, coined years earlier by some bitter rival-team commentator who meant it as an insult, gets printed on a banner by October and worn like a badge by November.

The core five have a standing lunch table by the windows, and it becomes something like a courtroom, a writers' room, and a comedy club depending on the day.

"Okay, agenda item one," Candice says one Tuesday, unwrapping her sandwich like she's about to deliver a keynote. "Homecoming. I have been offered three separate promposal—no, sorry, homecoming-posal—concepts by three separate boys, and I need the table's opinion before I crush any dreams."

"Just say yes to whoever has the least embarrassing sign," Ethan says.

"There is no such thing as a non-embarrassing sign, Ethan, that's the entire genre."

"Show us," Madi says, grinning, already reaching for Candice's phone.

"Absolutely not, this is need-to-know information, and you are not cleared."

"I'm literally your best friend."

"You're my best friend with a terrible poker face. You'll tell me exactly which one I should pick just by making a face at it, and I want to enjoy the chaos of choosing on my own."

Elena, half-listening, half-editing a photo on her camera's little screen, says without looking up, "For the record, if any of them rhyme 'Candice Lloyd' with 'lost in the void,' that's an automatic disqualification. It's lazy."

"Thank you," Candice says, pointing at her. " Someone with standards."

"I have a rhyme dictionary at home if any of them need help," Sully offers.

"You do not," Madi says, almost scared of what that would mean for their homecoming-posal.

"I might."

"You've never rhymed anything in your life, you communicate almost exclusively in football metaphors," Candice retorts.

"That's not true, I'm very romantic."

"You wrote 'you're the Riles to my Sully' in Madi's yearbook last year."

"And I meant every word. It was a compliment—"

"It was deeply confusing to everyone who read it out of context," Madi says, laughing into her water bottle, "including me, briefly, and I'm dating you."

Ethan chokes on a chip. "Wait, he wrote what?"

"It made sense in my head," Sully says, with the particular dignity of a boy who doesn’t know he's already lost the argument. "You two are just jealous of my poetry."

"There is no poetry, Sully," Elena says. "There has never been poetry."

While the group laughs, Madi sits closer to Sully, reaching for his hand and squeezing it tightly, reminding him that she knew how romantic he actually was and how much she loved him for it.

The whole table dissolves, and it's like that most days—small, dumb, precious arguments about nothing, the kind that only feel important because they're happening between people who've decided, without ever quite saying so out loud, that they're going to keep choosing each other for the rest of their lives, one lunch period at a time.

"You're doing the thing again," Madi tells Sully one night in November, after a game they've won, the two of them alone, driving to the grove that, regardless of all the town legends, became their favorite spot.

"What thing?"

"The thing where you smile with your mouth but your eyes are somewhere else entirely. Where'd you go?"

He looks at her for a long moment and tells her the truth. "Just thinking about what Gordon left me. A pocket knife and a letter saying that it belonged to his father, and his father before him. About the 'family heirloom' it's supposed to be."

"You don't have to take it, you know. Just because it's tradition doesn't mean you have to follow it."

"I’m worried I’m like him sometimes. The knife seems to be a constant reminder of that. Every time I get even remotely angry, I’m worried I’ll snap and become just like him."

"Well, I’m not. I know you. And you don’t have to be like him if you choose not to be. The knife can be a reminder of what you don’t want to be. And I know you already chose not to. I mean, look at me—I’m adopted, I have no idea who my real parents are. For all we know, they could have been serial killers or weird cultists. Does that change who I am? No." She takes his hand, warm fingers lacing through his, and says the thing she always says when the dark creeps up on him. “You get to write the ending, Mattie. Not him. You."

Mattie. Not Sully. Never Sully, not from her, not once in almost four years. It's such a small thing, the kind of detail nobody else would ever think twice about, but it's the realest thing he owns—the one syllable in the world that means you are safe here, you can put it down for a second.

By December, the Wildcats are 14–0, and Cedar Valley—a town that hasn't seen a championship banner go up in ninety-one years—has entirely lost its mind.

Part III: State Championship

The championship game is played under lights so bright the whole stadium looks like daylight's been bought and paid for. Cedar Valley against Ashford Prep, a school with better funding, a retired NFL athlete as a coach, a longer bench, and complete dominion of their bracket.

During the game, there wasn’t a single moment where you could relax. The intensity engulfed the entire crowd, home and away, motivating the viewers to cheer louder and the teams to play harder. This was the single most important two and a half hours of these young athletes’ lives. Elena shoots four hundred photos that night, and keeps lowering the camera every few minutes just to watch with her own eyes instead, certain no lens can actually hold what it feels like to be there. Candice, for once in her life, is too hoarse by the fourth quarter to say anything at all, which everyone agrees is its own kind of historic achievement. Madi stands at the front of the cheer line the entire game, hands clenched so tight around her megaphone that her knuckles go white, unable to sit down, unable to look away, watching the boy she loves throw a football like their very lives depended on it.

Down by four with eleven seconds on the clock, Cedar Valley needs a miracle. Sully rolls right, avoids a sack, and uncorks a straining 58-yard throw across his body that drops right into Ethan’s hands for a jaw-dropping, leaping catch in the back of the end zone.

The whistle blows. The stadium becomes something closer to an earthquake than a crowd.

Sully barely registers the pile of teammates that buries him, Coach Denton crying openly on the sideline, the student section pouring over the fence in a wave that security gives up trying to stop and eventually joins. All he can process, with a clarity that cuts straight through the noise, is turning around in the chaos and finding Madi already running toward him, cheer uniform and all, catching her when she jumps, and spinning her once just to hear her laugh in his ear over all of it.

She kisses him, quick and fierce, right there in front of the entire town of Cedar Valley. "You did it, Matt! Broke a ninety-one-year curse. Always my hero!" And the crowd lifts him and Ethan on their shoulders, carrying them toward the championship trophy.

The whole town spills into the streets, celebrations louder than during the 4th of July parade—car horns, bonfires down at the quarry, fireworks that no one knows who bought, the senior class crying happy tears in the school parking lot, Candice commandeering someone's truck bed as an impromptu stage to deliver what she calls "a victory monologue" that runs nearly nine minutes and includes, at one point, a full bow. Ethan picks Elena up and spins her the same way Sully spun Madi, and when he sets her down, he doesn't quite let go of her afterward. 

For a while, all five of them end up together near the bonfire, hoarse and grinning, Candice narrating the entire game back to them in a voice loud enough to carry to the next county. Elena finally lets herself be in a photo instead of behind one, her arm looped through Ethan's, both of them lit orange by the fire. Sully has his arm around Madi's shoulders and can't stop looking at her, can't stop feeling like the whole ridiculous, impossible night is somehow smaller than what he feels standing next to her.

"Ninety-one years," Candice says again, shaking her head like she still can't quite believe it. "We're going to be legends. They're going to name a hallway after us."

"They're going to name a hallway after Sully and Riles," Elena corrects.

"Fine, but I get a plaque. A small plaque. I've earned a small plaque."

"You get a small plaque," Madi agrees, laughing.

"Thank you. This is all I've ever wanted."

Sully finds Madi again past midnight, pulls her away from the noise with a hand and a grin, and neither of them has to say where they're going. Their favorite spot. They've been slipping off to the grove at the edge of town since sophomore year—the eerie stretch of old trees past the quarry road that the younger kids swear is haunted. To Sully and Madi, it isn't a scary place. It's their place. The one spot in the whole town that belongs to nobody's expectations but their own.

They lie in the truck bed under a blanket that still smells like campfire smoke, looking up at more stars than the town lights usually let them see, talking about nothing that matters and everything that does.

"Less than a month," Madi says, tracing a lazy line along his arm. "Then graduation. Then you're off being pre-med somewhere, and I'm off acing psychology somewhere, and we have to figure out if 'somewhere' is the same place."

"It's the same place," Sully says, like it isn't even a question. "I already decided."

"You can't just decide that unilaterally, Matt. We don’t get college acceptances till next week. And I worry."

"Worry? What about?"

"What if you choose to go to college with Ethan? He’s practically your brother. And I totally understand if you do, I just know I won’t change where I study. You know I applied to the best psychology program in the state; I can’t say no if I’m accepted. And I can’t ask you to choose between your brother and me. I won’t."

"You don’t have to, I already chose."

"But what if Ethan has something to say about it? I don’t really have a say in this."

Sully pulls her closer, kisses her forehead, and looks her in the eyes. "You always have a say. You're the only person who's ever had a say in anything I do."

"That's not true. Ethan has a say."

"Riles has opinions. You have a say. There's a difference."

She laughs—the real one, the one that doesn't perform for anybody—and pulls him tighter around her. They stay like that a long time: champions of a town that's waited ninety-one years for a night exactly like this one, wrapped in a blanket that smells like woodsmoke, certain, in the particular unshakable way that only eighteen-year-olds in love can be certain, that they have the rest of their lives figured out.

They fall asleep like that, under the stars, in the one place in Cedar Valley that's always felt like theirs alone.