The Peach He Let Rot

"He doesn't want it. Give it to me." Nathaniel's rival was sprawled across the edge of my desk, grinning, one hand out.

I hugged the peach I'd just brought in. "No." The day before, the peach I'd given Nathaniel had gone rotten in the corner of his desk.

The juice had ruined the note under it, and the smell had the whole room complaining. He, meanwhile, was holding a carton of strawberry milk from the bestlooking girl in our grade.

I lifted the rotten peach up and said quietly, "It isn't garbage.

It only went bad because nobody ever took care of it." But the next day, I didn't put a peach in that corner of his desk.

His rival didn't understand. "Why won't you give it to me?" I bent my head and bit the sweetest part off the tip. "Because starting with this one, I'm keeping the best for myself." Chapter 1 The peach went bad on a Monday.

Our homeroom teacher hadn't come in yet. The boy in the back row pinched his nose and hollered, "What's gone sour in here?" Everybody started hunting for it right away.

I hunted too, for a good while. Then Freya, who sat next to me, poked me with her pen and whispered, "Bird, I think it's coming from Nathaniel's desk." My stomach dropped.

I crouched down, and there it was. The peach. I'd set it in the corner of his desk on Friday. Back then it was still pink and white, and the smell came right through that thin skin.

Now one side of it had caved in. Clear juice was seeping out of the split, and it had soaked the little pale blue note underneath. The note used to say: [Already soft.

Eat it today.] Now all that was left was crooked and washed out: […ady soft… today.] Like its last words. "Found it!" The boy in the back row leaned over for a look and immediately dragged his chair backward, away from it. "Birdie Crowder, how is it always something you gave him?

It's rotted all the way through. It reeks." A few people laughed. I stayed crouched on the floor and felt my ears go hot. But I didn't just drop the peach in the trash.

I found two sheets of paper first and lifted it up carefully. It really had gone too far.

The moment my fingertip touched it, the thin skin sank in, and the sweetsour juice ran all over my hand. "Gross. It's garbage." Another voice.

I pressed my lips together and couldn't stop myself from speaking up for it. "It isn't garbage. The peach was good to begin with.

It went bad because it spent all that time waiting for somebody to take care of it and eat it." The people who'd been laughing went quiet for a second.

Then it hit me, a beat too late, that a peach couldn't understand a word. My face got hotter. Freya's shoulders were shaking from holding in a laugh.

She pulled out a few wet wipes and handed them to me. "All right, all right. The peach knows you defended it.

It went peacefully." That just made me sadder. "They're $4.99 each." Freya stopped laughing. She put her palms together and apologized to the peach. "I'm sorry, Mr. Peach.

I meant no disrespect." I was about to put it in the trash when the back door of the classroom swung open. Nathaniel came in.

He was tall, and even in the plainest clothes he looked aloof and stood very straight. The early sun landed on his shoulders and didn't warm him up at all.

The first thing he saw was me, crouched on the floor. Then his eyes went to the rotten peach in my hands.

His step paused. "Nate." Chapter 2 Sloane, the bestlooking girl in our grade, came in behind him and held out a pink carton. "Thanks for lending me your notes for the math and science competition." "No problem." He took it, tore the straw open, and pushed it into the carton.

Sloane smiled. A couple of people nearby let out a long, knowing ooooh. I was holding the rotten peach, and all at once my fingers felt sticky and awful.

The peach was still dripping. If I didn't get rid of it soon, it was going to ruin my white sneakers. My mom had just bought me those. They were nice.

I wasn't going to lose a pair of shoes over a peach that had already gone bad.

By the time the peach was all the way in the trash, Nathaniel had gotten through not quite half the strawberry milk. He held the pink carton in one hand.

The straw was against his thin lips, and one side of the carton dented gently inward.

Sloane stood next to him, smiling. "Is it too sweet?" Nathaniel shook his head once. "It's fine." I looked down and wiped my hands.

The peach juice was sticky, and it was all over them.

Freya handed me another wipe and followed my eyes. "So Nathaniel does drink sweet stuff." I corrected her, seriously. "He's always liked sweet things." Peaches most of all.

When I was eight, his parents had another fight and he came and hid in my family's store. Back then it wasn't the chain of upscale markets it is now. The corner grocery was small.

The shelves were packed so tight that only two people could walk down an aisle shoulder to shoulder.

Nathaniel sat on the little stool by the register with his backpack still on, watching an ant haul away a cookie crumb. My mom told me to find him something to eat.

I ran over with my whole snack box. Jelly cups, chips, chocolate bars, laid out in front of him one by one. Nathaniel shook his head at all of it.

In the end the only thing left was the peach I'd just washed. It was a big one. Pink and white, and the tip was red, like somebody had kissed it when nobody was looking.

I'd been saving it for when my cartoon came on. But Nathaniel looked sadder that day than I did.

So I made myself hand it over, just to test him. "You don't want this either, right?" And he finally lifted his head. He took it and bit into it.

The juice ran down his wrist and into his sleeve, and he didn't let go. In no time at all there was nothing left of that peach but a bare pit.

I crouched there next to him with my mouth open.

Nathaniel licked the juice off his lip and said, quietly, "I like peaches." Then he looked at me. "Next time you get peaches, can you save one for me?" That saving went on for ten years.

Every year, when the first peaches came into the store, my dad picked mine out first.

Then I went through my own share and picked out the reddest, softest, bestsmelling one and set it aside for Nathaniel. When we were little, he'd sit behind our register and eat it.

I'd lean on the counter next to him and ask, "Is it sweet?" Then we got to high school and Nathaniel stopped coming over. So I started bringing the peaches to school.

The one I'd just thrown away was the seventeenth peach I'd given Nathaniel since high school started. The first sixteen hadn't ended well either.

Two of them he passed on to other people. Three sat in the storage cubby under his desk until the skin went wrinkled.

One rolled under the platform at the front of the room and got swept out by a custodian. The rest, I never saw.

I always told myself, optimistically, that they might have been eaten. Until the day I found a peach at the very back of Nathaniel's cubby with fur growing on it.

Chapter 3 That was when I finally started wondering whether he just didn't like peaches anymore. So I switched to other things.

The croissant got flattened under a workbook until it looked like one of those trendy flattened croissants.

The peach gummies he handed around to the boys in the back row, except he didn't eat any himself. And the breakfast wrap I got up half an hour early to make.

It went from steaming to completely cold. Then into the trash, ziplock bag and all.

Freya asked me once, "Bird, has it ever occurred to you that he just doesn't want to eat anything from you?" I was sliding a foam net over a peach at the time.

My fingers stopped. "It's occurred to me." "And?" I smoothed the net back down. "But he used to love them." The Nathaniel who asked me for a peach and the Nathaniel now were the same person.

I'd just always assumed the first one was still in there, inside the second one. Tucked in a little deeper, that was all. One day he'd come back out.

And now Nathaniel stood right in front of me and finished the strawberry milk Sloane gave him. He set the empty carton down on the corner of his desk.

Right where I always put the peach. I looked at it for a while, then folded up my wipe. He hadn't been tucked in there after all. I'd just gotten him wrong.

In P.E. that afternoon, we had to run a mile. On the third lap, Sloane passed me.

She looked back over her shoulder, smiling. "Birdie, are your legs getting bigger again?" I looked down too. Two solid legs, packed into my sweatpants.

They were definitely not thin. "Looks like it." She hadn't expected me to agree, and it stopped her for a second. Still catching my breath, I added, "But they're stronger too.

Last time you couldn't carry the stack of workbooks, I hauled them up to the third floor for you." The smile froze on her face.

I didn't want her to take it wrong, so I said quickly, "You can ask me again next time." After that she didn't say anything at all. I kept running. I passed her back.

The wind went roaring past my ears. Two thick legs carried me the whole mile. I didn't come in first, but I was twelve seconds faster than last time. I was satisfied.

I bent over to catch my breath, then patted my left leg and my right leg. "Good work." Somebody nearby snorted. Weston was leaning under the basketball hoop with a bottle of water.

He was Nathaniel's rival on the competition circuit. They'd been at it since tenth grade, all the way through eleventh.

On the posted competition standings it was either Weston one point over Nathaniel, or Nathaniel two points over Weston.

People said they got along so badly that neither of them would say the other's name.

Weston screwed the cap back on and came over. "Birdie, who are you talking to?" "My legs." "They understand you?" I shook my head. "No idea." "Then why compliment them?" "Just in case." Weston looked at me for a few seconds, then turned his head away.

His shoulders were shaking. I walked around to see his face. "Are you laughing?" "No." "Your teeth are showing." He gave up on holding it in and laughed harder, head down.

When he was done he got another bottle out of the vending machine and tossed it to me. "For two legs that came through for you." I scrambled to catch it with both arms.

The bottle was freezing, and my palms went numb. I was about to thank him when a hand came in from the side and took the water away.

Nathaniel twisted the cap off and set it down. "You just finished running. Don't drink anything cold. Let it sit a while." His voice was as level as it always was.

As if that peach hadn't rotted this morning. Chapter 4 As if he hadn't finished the strawberry milk somebody else gave him, either. Weston raised an eyebrow. "StraightA Langford.

You sure like minding other people's business." Nathaniel ignored him and looked down at me instead. "Did you get your hands clean?" It took me a second to realize he meant the peach juice. "They're clean." "Good." He turned to go.

There was a time when one sentence like that from him could keep me happy for days. I'd announce it to myself: see, Nathaniel is still the same Nathaniel from when we were little.

Not today, though. Maybe because that peach this morning had rotted so completely. All the excuses I'd made for Nathaniel had gone soft and fallen apart along with it.

I took the cold bottle back and held it against my cheek to cool off.

Nathaniel stopped. "I told you not to drink it." "I'm not drinking it." I finished with my left cheek and switched to the right. "My face got really red from running.

It worked hard too. It gets some ice." Weston started laughing again. Nathaniel was the only one who didn't. His eyes drifted between me and Weston for a moment.

Then he walked off with a cold look on his face. That evening my dad got home from the store right when I did.

He was carrying a crate of peaches that had just come in, and he called for me, excited. "Bird, get over here." I dropped my backpack and ran.

The second the box opened, the whole house smelled sweet. Dad told me these were the earliest ripening batch of the year. Only ten crates had come in.

He dug around for a long time and lifted one out from the very bottom. It had just turned ripe, and the skin was so thin you could almost see the juice behind it.

The tip was the prettiest red. "The best one in the crate." Dad handed it to me. "For our little bottomless pit." I held the peach and looked at it for a long time.

There was only one. Any other time, I would have asked, "What about Nathaniel's?" And if there wasn't a second one, I'd take mine to school.

Wait for him to finish it, then ask if it was sweet. This time I didn't ask anything.

It was Dad who thought that was strange. "Not looking after Natey anymore?" I ran my thumb over the soft tip of the peach. "You gave this one to me." "That's right." "Then I'm eating it myself." Dad blinked, then laughed and rubbed my hair into a mess. "About time." I didn't really know what he meant by about time.

But my feet felt lighter than usual when I carried the peach upstairs. The next day I brought snacks like always. Freya took a bag of sea salt soda crackers.

The kid in front of me got two gummies. I pushed a little box of nuts on the student TA who came to collect the homework.

Passing Nathaniel's desk, my feet slowed down without my permission. The corner of his desk was empty. I looked at it and kept walking.

Behind me came the sound of a pen scraping across paper. One hard stroke. A long one. I didn't take the peach out of my backpack until I was back in my seat.

The lid was barely off the container before Weston came over, following the smell.

He sprawled across the edge of my desk and stuck out a hand, grinning. "There's no way Nathaniel wants it. Give it to me." The room got a little quieter.

A few people snuck a look toward Nathaniel. I looked too. He still had his head down over a problem. His profile was cool and blank, like he hadn't heard a thing.

I used to think I only had to wait a little longer. Wait until he wasn't busy. Wait until he was in a better mood.

Wait until he wanted to go back to being the Nathaniel who sat outside our corner grocery and asked me for a peach.

Chapter 5 But after that peach went bad yesterday, all at once I didn't want to wait anymore. Weston's hand was still out in front of me.

I bent my head and bit the sweetest part off the tip. The flesh was soft. The juice spread across my tongue, so sweet my eyes crinkled up on their own.

Weston stared. "You're not giving it to me?" I shook my head. "No." "Why not?" I pulled the half peach that was left in against my chest. "Because starting with this one, I'm keeping the best for myself." Weston went quiet for two seconds.

Then he took his hand back and gave a lazy little laugh. "Fine.

Next time I've got something good, I'll save you some too." I thought about that and corrected him, seriously. "You should save some for yourself first." Weston's grin went deeper. "Got it, Professor Crowder." Behind me a chair scraped against the floor.

Nathaniel had stood up.

He came over to my desk, and his eyes went from the empty container to my fingertips with the peach juice on them. "Birdie, where's mine?" I opened the empty snack bag and showed him. "There isn't any