by Jay McLean
I swallowed the lump in my throat, shook my head, said, “Why would I mind?”
His eyes stayed on mine. He said nothing. I said nothing.
“Luke,” Cam said behind me. There was something in the way he said Luke’s name. It wasn’t to get his attention. It almost sounded like a warning. Like that was his chance to speak to those girls and if he didn’t do it then, he might never get to again.
“He has a name,” said one of the giggling girls.
“Luke!” they cooed in unison.
I dropped my gaze, hid my emotions.
He left, only to return when the movie started.
I timed the release of my tears to match Lucy’s sobs.
She cried over the movie.
I cried over my life.
And when the movie was over and Cam, Lucy and I waited for Lucas to stop talking to the girls just outside the building, his words “I’ll call you,” acting as the final stab wound to my chest, Lucy turned to me, her voice full of pity. “You really do look nice, Lane.”
“Yeah?” I asked, looking down at the prettiest dress I owned. “Because I feel so fucking stupid.”
Chapter Nine
LOIS
There should be a limit to the amount of tears a person can shed within a certain amount of time. Or at least some kind of chart to verify the level of tears to the level of tragedy. For example, losing someone like Kathy Preston should equal infinite tears for an infinite amount of time. Being hurt by the spawn of Kathy Preston should equal, say, three sets of tears for three fuck-ups and then said spawn should be deleted from your life, your mind, for all of eternity.
But there is no chart.
Just tears.
It’s 10:30 pm when the knock sounds on my door.
I answer, but I don’t speak. I have nothing to say.
“Just hear me out,” Luke asks. “She called me over thirty times yesterday, sent me a ton of messages. I went to see her last night to break up with her, and when I got there, she was crying. Her brother was in a car accident over in LA and her parents flew right there and she was alone and she needed me and I wasn’t there. She kept crying, Lane, like non-stop, and I couldn’t get a word in and I couldn’t do that to her. But I will. I promise.” He takes a breath. “You just need to give me time.”
“Don’t,” I whisper.
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t break up with her.”
“Laney, stop.”
“Did you stay with her last night?” I ask, refusing to meet his gaze.
“Yes, but we didn’t do anything. I swear. I’ve been trying to get away from her long enough so I could see you and explain it but with school and practice, I couldn’t, and then you saw us and you saw wrong. You have to believe me.” He pauses a beat. “You believe me, right? Because I want to be with you. And you know that. But I can’t break up with her right now. I just can’t.”
“You need to leave.” I start closing the door on him, but he stops me, his palm loud when it smacks against the timber. “Lane, please.”
I finally look up at him, my tear-stained eyes meeting his sorry ones, and I’m sick of his sorry eyes. Sick of his sorry face.
I blink, let the tears fall, and I don’t wipe them away because I want him to see what he’s done to me. I clear my throat so my voice doesn’t falter. I want him to hear my words, and I want them to be loud. To be clear. “You need to leave because I don’t want you here. I don’t want you standing at my door, apologizing, trying to make me understand why I can’t be hurt by this because I am. I hurt. And I don’t want to hurt. I want to go back to last night when you made me feel beautiful, when you made me feel loved and worthy of that love. When I gave you something I’d been holding on to that I can’t take back, that I’d been saving… for you. And you can’t be here because having you here is making me forget that feeling, and I don’t want to forget. I want to pretend like that feeling lasted more than seventeen fucking hours, and I want to pretend like I don’t hate you for it. Or hate you, period.”
Chapter Ten
LUCAS
I try to be quiet, but I’m crashing into walls, into chairs, into Dad’s giant desk in his home office. I got home from Laney’s and went straight to the garage apartment and drank every single drop of alcohol I’d kept hidden from my dad. But it still doesn’t erase the image of Laney’s tear-stained face from my mind.
I had it all planned out. I’d tell her the truth, no sugar-coating, because she deserved that much. I didn’t say it to hurt her. I don’t want to hurt her. I fucking love her. In my head, she’d forgive me, tell me she understood that I didn’t have it in me to hurt someone I care about. And honestly, I did care about Grace. I just didn’t love her. I love Laney. Always have. If the roles were reversed and something happened to Brian, I’d have spent the night with Laney. I probably would’ve spent the night with her anyway. I just wouldn’t tell Grace about it. Grace doesn’t know I sleep in Laney’s bed. No one does. And maybe that’s where I fucked up. Where my mistakes turned me into an asshole because in a way, Laney was my secret, hidden away from the eyes of my friends so they couldn’t want her, have her. She was mine. My secret pleasure. She didn’t forgive me, obviously. She gave me her own truths, laid out her pain in detail so someone as stupid as me could understand. Then she slammed the door in my face and switched off the outside light, the light she always kept on for me. I should have expected it. But I didn’t. And I stood outside her door, in the dark, and I knew it was over.
She told me, warned me, if I didn’t show her I loved her, I’d ruin everything.
I fuck up, Lane. I make mistakes. I told you. I warned you, too.
“What the hell are you doing, son?”
I don’t bother turning to my dad, too out of my mind to care. I keep going through his keys, one after the other, trying to find the one that’ll unlock his liquor cabinet so I can keep drinking the pain away, so I can drown in it, just enough to get her words, her face, her hurt, out of my mind. “I hurt her,” I murmur, fumbling with the keys.
“Who?” he says, his voice louder as he steps toward me. “Grace?”
Fuck Grace. “Laney. She hates me, and I hate me, and I can’t get the hate out of me.”
Dad’s hand grasps my shoulder, pulls me back until I tip over and land on my ass. I want to cry, but I haven’t cried since Mom died and I sure as hell won’t show him, the strongest man I know, how weak I am.
He gently pries my fingers off his keys, finds the right one, and a moment later, he’s pulling out a bottle of whiskey and two glasses.
“Sit,” he says
“I am sitting.”
He sighs. “On the chair, son. Sit.”
“I’m fine,” I murmur, standing up, eyes on his office door because Dad and I don’t drink together. We don’t even talk. Not like this. We make plans, set schedules. We don’t talk.
“Sit,” he says, and this time it’s an order.
I take the seat on the other side of his desk, the one where his clients or his assistant sit when they have meetings in the office, and I’m nervous, afraid of what he’s going to say because he just caught his seventeen-year-old son trying to break into his liquor cabinet at two in the morning and he loves Laney. They all do.
He stays standing when he pours the brown liquid into both glasses, then slides one across the desk toward me. “Did you drive home like this?”
“No,” I tell him. “I’ve been drinking in the apartment.”
“Good. This family’s already experienced one death. We don’t need another.”
I say nothing.
“Lucas,” he says. “What happened?”
I finally look up at him, across the desk, past his sleep pants, beyond his white t-shirt, above his dark beard and into his worried eyes. I didn’t expect to see worry. Disappointment, anger, yes. But not worry. For seconds he stands there, eyes on mine and when I don’t speak, his shoulders drop and so does he, right into the chair opposite me. He s
ips on his whiskey, our eyes locked.
“Where did you go earlier?”
“To see Lane.”
“Where did you sleep last night?”
“At Grace’s.”
He nods, like he already knows where this is going.
I add, “After I went to see Lane.”
He puts down his glass, then places both elbows on the table and leans in, waiting for me to continue.
I swallow. Nervous. “I told her I loved her.”
“Grace?” he asks.
I shake my head.
His teeth show behind his smile, but it lasts only a second before his brow bunches and his lips purse. “But you spent the night with Grace?”
I inhale deeply, exhale slowly.
He’s shaking his head now, side to side, slowly, slowly. “What did you do, Luke?”
I tell him everything, everything, my knees bouncing the entire time because we don’t talk, and now we’re talking, and I’m giving him reasons to hate me like she does.
“Maybe she’ll forgive you,” he says, as if it’s that simple. “She always does.”
“This is different, Dad.” He knows it’s different. I can tell by the way he lifts his hand, pours another drink for himself and eyes my untouched one.
“She’s going through a lot right now, Luke. Her mother coming to see her—”
“You know about that?” I cut in.
He nods. “Brian told me today.” Another sip. “I told him we could arrange a loan if it meant getting Lane to UNC.”
My chest tightens. “You’d do that?”
His huge shoulders lift once. “Lane’s like a daughter to me, and your mother loved her. We all do.” His voice cracks and he clears his throat. My dad’s not an emotional man but any thought, any mention of his wife can bring him to his knees. “I wasn’t sure how you’d react to her mother being here, but my truck has a full tank in case you need it.” He stands up and heads for the door, but he stops beside me, his hand on my shoulder. “Give Laney time. You’re a good friend to her, Luke, and maybe that’s all you can be, even if it’s from a distance.”
PAST | LUCAS
“It’s not a big deal,” Laney said, slamming her locker shut.
“It’s your sixteenth birthday!”
“So?”
“So you have to do something!”
“With who, Luke? My eleventy-three friends? I have you and that’s basically it.”
“You have me and your dad and my family… so that’s eleventy-seventy.”
She giggled, handed me her books and started braiding her long black hair to the side. I watched, fascinated. She raised her eyebrows. “What?”
“Nothing.” Then I blinked hard and cleared the fog in my mind she’d created. “Will you at least let me take you out to dinner or something?”
She whined, “It’s really not a big deal.”
“But I want to,” I said, giving back her books.
She stopped in front of me, her books held against her chest. “Nothing fancy?”
“I promise.”
“Okay.”
“Good.”
“Good.”
She started to walk away, and I followed. She must’ve washed her hair the night before because I could smell her shampoo and was stupidly drawn to it. She stopped suddenly, causing me to almost slam into her. “What are you doing?” she asked, eyeing our surroundings. She pointed behind me. “Your class is that way.”
“Luke! You promised it wouldn’t be fancy!” she whisper-yelled over the menu.
“It’s not that fancy!” I said. It was. A few weeks earlier I asked Virginia, our nanny at the time, for the fanciest place I could take a girl and so there we were, sitting opposite each other in a booth made of red, shiny leather, smiling at each other, her in an olive green dress and me in a suit, sans tie. “Order whatever you want.”
She shook her head, her smile spreading. She said, testing me, “I’m going to order the lobster.”
“Do you even eat lobster?”
She laughed out loud, and I wanted to kiss her right then and there in the middle of the fanciest restaurant in town. “I’ve never had it, but I always see it in movies, you know? The lobster’s the most expensive thing on the menu.” She started flipping through the pages, her eyes scanning each item quickly. “It’s ninety-eight dollars, Luke!” she whispered, her shoulders bouncing.
I leaned back in the seat, basking in everything Laney, and said, “Order it.”
She dropped the menu, narrowed her eyes at me. “How can you even afford this?”
“I’ve worked a couple of shifts for Dad lately.”
Her eyes widened. “For this?”
“Yeah, for this.”
“No.” She shook her head. “Let’s just order a pizza and go back to my room or something. This is too much.”
I called for the waiter and ordered the damn lobster.
Laney did not like lobster.
Neither did I, but I traded my steak for it and pretended like lobster was the greatest thing I’d ever tasted. I skipped dessert, she ordered two, and I sat and I watched as she told me about her new job at the movie theater and how she’d made sure her shifts didn’t collide with my track meets, and I fell deeper and deeper. And when she was done, I pulled out the rectangular box that’d been burning a hole in my pocket and watched her eyes light up when I slid it across the table toward her. She looked so beautiful, hair braided to the side, lips red, eyes bright. She whispered my name, and I imagined our lives ten years from then when she’d whisper it again but in a different way. She opened the box and instantly covered her mouth. “It’s stunning,” she said, and I verbally agreed, but I wasn’t talking about the gold bracelet in the box. I was talking about her. “Now I feel bad for getting you that heart rate monitor strap.”
“That was a perfect present, Lane.” My fingers shook when I clasped the bracelet to her wrist. I was nervous. Scared. Because for the past few weeks, I’d been counting down to that night, to the moment I’d tell her how I felt about her.
“Can you send a picture to my dad?” she asked, so I took out my phone, aimed the camera at her, focused on her smile, and sent the picture to Brian.
“I can’t believe you got me this, Luke. It’s too much,” she said.
It wasn’t enough.
She added, “I feel like we need to make a pact or something to remember this moment. Like, what if something happens over the next couple of years and we change and our lives change and we never get to celebrate birthdays together again? We barely see each other now with school and your practices and me working on weekends and… we should go to senior prom together!” She shouted the last part. “Yeah, Luke. We should do that!”
I smiled. “Okay.”
“Yeah?”
“Of course.”
She leaned back in her seat, watched the light glisten off of her new present.
I told her, “We have one more stop before I take you home.”
My family wanted to see Laney on her birthday, so I drove us back to my house where a cake was waiting, along with sixteen candles. My dad had taken my brothers to the mall, handed them each twenty dollars and said to pick out something for her. She opened present after present, responding to each one equally, even the candle made to smell like vomit that Logan had gotten her, which I’m sure only cost a few bucks so he could pocket the rest. Lachlan gave her a hand-made card with a picture of her and me and him in the middle, and I know she wanted to cry. She didn’t. But she held him for a long time and kept him on her lap when Dad announced that he had one more gift. I wasn’t aware of the gift until he pulled it out of the hallway closet. It was a basket, Mom’s basket, filled with all her craft items: knitting needles, yarn, thread. It used to live on the floor between Dad’s recliner and the couch where Mom would sit and hadn’t seen the light of day since my aunt Leslee decided it was time to pack up all of Mom’s things.
Laney actually did cry when she saw it,
the back of her hand covering her mouth as she fumbled through her words, “Are you sure?”…“But it’s Kathy’s!”…“I can’t.”…“I love it.”…“Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
And then we lit the candles, sang Happy Birthday, and I took more pictures of her blowing out the candles, holding her presents, smiling, smiling, smiling. We told everyone about dinner, about lobster, about our pact to go to senior prom together and that’s when Lachlan started acting out, laying on his back and kicking the crap out of Logan for no reason. He was tired, it was hours past his bedtime, so I picked him up off the floor and said I’d do his “one-minute.” He was out like a light after a few seconds in his bed, but I lay there for a while, trying to form words that would hopefully bring Laney and me closer. I couldn’t just come out and say, “I love you, Lane. Will you be my girlfriend?” because, at the time, I thought it would suck. Now, looking back, it probably would’ve been enough. I closed my eyes, tried to think, but then the song Wonderwall by Oasis started playing from downstairs, and I sat up quickly, my heart in my throat. Us kids had grown up with the song constantly playing loudly from the kitchen when Mom would be preparing dinner. Some nights, Dad came home early from work, and they’d dance together, my mom standing on Dad’s feet, to the song they danced to on their wedding day.
I was almost afraid to go downstairs, to see my dad, to see his reaction to the song. But when I landed on the seventh step down, just enough so I could see the living room from my spot, I saw the lights dim, the original record playing, and Laney in Dad’s arms, dancing amongst her many gifts scattered around the floor. “She’ll be all ready for you come senior prom,” Dad called out to me. Smiling.
I sat on the stairs, watched them through the gaps of the staircase. The song played on, and my brothers and I sat in awe as we watched my best friend give my dad a reason to smile, and we took a moment to miss our mother and to appreciate Laney for every single thing she brought to the family.
