by Kilby Blades
But my ulterior motive—watching Zoë like a hawk—had to do with her teammate and secret acquaintance, Annika Smith. The same Annika Smith who was dating Declan McCabe, one-third of the Bod Squad and close associate of Jagger Monroe. Annika was tough as nails and solitary somehow, even though she captained the derby team and was joined at the hip with Declan at school. She’d been cool with Zoë for all two years they’d been on the team, though they never spoke at school and never hung out. She was into cars and had even restored the black 1973 Camaro she was famous for driving herself and helped fixed cars at her older brothers’ body shop.
Zoë meant well, but was prone to interloping. Asking about Jagger would spark curiosity as to why Zoë was asking. The last thing I needed was for Zoë to mine information from a comrade who would figure it out.
“So, Jag’s not seeing anyone…”, Zoë mentioned casually on the ride back to her place after roller derby was done.
I grimaced. Some job I’d done on Zoë control.
“No wonder,” I turned the heat as high as it would go and raised my palms to let them hover over the vents. “He spends all his time stalking strangers on Instagram.”
“He likes you…” Zoë was indignant.
“Based on what? Things you won’t shut up about now but never mentioned before?”
I had her there. All week, Zoë had been making mountains out of molehills, insisting that he looked at me, reading significance into the one time he’d helped me off of the floor. The cafeteria thing was ancient history, and even if it wasn’t, the lack of acknowledgment since that day rendered any earlier acknowledgment null and void. And so what if he looked? He didn’t, by the way, but a lot of people had at some point. That was what happened when you were a new girl in a small town that had its teeth in the juicier morsels of your family’s business. I was Luke Vega’s daughter and Adam Jinn’s soon-to-be stepdaughter. Of course people were going to look.
“He likes you, Roxx…” Zoë practically whined. And since I’d run out of responses for her provocations…
“Kind of like Gunther likes you?”
Zoë swallowed whatever she’d been ready to say.
It was after ten-thirty when we got back to her place; Zoë lived on the edge of town in one of the post-modern beauties near the top of River Road. Rye had become an enclave for a certain class of Californian. A flattering photo spread published in a travel magazine years before had showcased our pristine redwood forests and clear lakes, putting my parents’ little hometown on the map. The accompanying article had lauded its lack of through traffic, several celebrated artists in residence, and its quaint downtown. It had been bait to the city-dwelling ultra-rich who were ready for an alternative or who simply wanted an idyllic place to build a second home.
Zoë’s parents definitely fell into this category. Her dad had been employee number ten with one of the big Silicon Valley tech giants. Other transplants had similar stories—of cashing out and getting out of the rat race farther south. Zoë hadn’t moved to Rye until she was eleven. Like Zoë, the cohort of kids at Trinity who hadn’t been born here all had bigger houses and drove nicer cars. Not everyone who’d lived here since forever liked the way the town was changing, but the influx was good for business for people like my dad.
Zoë jumped in the shower while I got into my pajamas. I wandered down to the kitchen to grab us some drinks, stopping to admire my father’s custom craftsmanship. My dad had hand-made the cabinets in this and half of the high-end kitchens for miles around. When I was little, he’d been known only locally, but commissions throughout Trinity County had led to commissions in Humboldt and Sonoma. Getting noticed in Marin had naturally led to clients in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. His work had gone into homes featured in Architectural Digest and on TV.
Heading back upstairs, I unlocked my screen to thumb through my phone. I’d checked it in the car, but who knew what I’d missed? When Zoë found me ten minutes later, I was exactly as I had been the previous week. This time, my hand trembled as I handed her my phone. Her eyes widened as they fell upon Jagger’s image on the screen. That enigmatic fuck had friended me again.
“Why is he doing this?” My voice was a whisper. My gaze switched between the two buttons that had haunted my thoughts.
Confirm or deny?
Confirm or deny?
“There’s only one way you’ll know for sure.”
Zoë looked up from the screen with a question in her eyes. This time, I had to know the answer. This time, I didn’t stop her from hitting “Confirm”.
Jagger
I grabbed a bowl, some milk, and a half-empty box of Golden Grahams, and toted them up to my room. Gunther and Deck had just gone home, and, at 12:30AM, I had the munchies. I settled at my desk to surf my regular sites—I hadn’t gotten a turn with my own computer in hours, what with Declan’s greedy consumption of what Annika forbade him. The few glances I stole throughout the night found him viewing my Instagram feed, what looked like pole dancing on YouTube, and some pretty freaky porn.
Going straight to Instagram, I figured I’d better assess the damage right away. It had taken me a few days this week to figure out that Deck hadn’t been a passive observer during last week’s spree. Not only had he viewed some of the crazy ass messages I got from girls—he’d responded to a few of them.
I looked in my sent messages and was relieved to find nothing I hadn’t written myself. A few people had hearted snarky responses to posts he’d written on my behalf. I didn’t like him posing as me, but at least nothing too out of character had emerged. After reading a few status updates, I was about to move off of Instagram completely when my eye caught something under Recent Activity:
Roxy Vega started following you.
Wait…what? When had Roxy friended me, and when had I accepted? My account was private and so was hers. So what if I knew that because I’d had the impulse to check it out a time or two? It took me a second to figure it out, and when I did, I was livid.
“Son of a bitch…” I growled.
Declan and his theories about my alleged crush on Roxy Vega. This time he took things too fucking far.
Three
It's a Fire
'Cause this life is a farce.
I can't breathe through
this mask, like a fool.
So breathe on, sister breathe on.
-Portishead, It’s a Fire
Jagger
After I called Declan and tore him a new one, sleep was no longer an option. The only shows on at two-in-the-morning were infomercials, I was maxed out on video games, and my piano would wake up my parents. Not that I really wanted to do any of those things, anyway. In the solitude of my room there was no point in denying that I was desperate to know everything there was to know about Roxy Vega.
Sure, Declan had it coming for pimping me out on Instagram. But some secret part of me cheered his interference, despite the resulting mess. His overture had stayed true to the Jagger Monroe persona—abrupt, impersonal, maybe a little cocky. Only he and Gunther knew how greatly my assholery had been exaggerated.
I had a bit of a reputation—one I came by honestly—one that had never died. It didn’t matter how far in the past it was. Being caught in flagrante delicto with anyone would’ve been a notch in any Freshman’s belt: I was caught at the biggest party of the year losing my virginity to the Homecoming Queen. Not only did that little stunt secure my status as a sex god, it sent the stock of everyone I was friends with soaring. By sophomore year, Gunther, Declan and I were among the most popular kids in school.
Even the teachers treated us differently. We could get away with anything, and for awhile we did. Then Michelle Peters happened. Turns out that being a guy and a manwhore is a respectable profession according to the rules of high school. It also turns out that if you’re a girl, and you date a manwhore, everyone calls you a slut. The bitterness that came from that realization only dug me deeper. I seemed more the part now that I was a misanthropic prick.<
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So, yeah. My plan was to hang with my bros and ride out high school, get good grades, and re-invent myself at the college of my choice. People still thought whatever they wanted to about me, and I still stood by and let them. But I'd never planned on liking a girl. I'd never planned on Roxy Vega.
I barely knew anything about her—only that she was different. She’d been born here, but not being raised here…well, it showed. Most kids in Rye dressed like they spent entire weekends at the mall begging the people at Forever 21 to shut up and take their money. Most girls wore too much make up—eye shadow and blush and some sort of fairy dust that made their faces shiny. Apart from her hallmark—a single, bold stroke of color on her lips—Roxy was fresh-faced and wore clothes that hadn’t come from any mall. Between the leather jackets and dark, metallic nail polish, her look was kind of edgy, but it never seemed like she was trying too hard. It was a good sign that she was friends with Zoë DuBois—one of the only other originals at Trinity High.
I clicked on Roxy’s name and it took me to her page. Did I mention she was kind of beautiful? In her profile picture, her bone-straight, strawberry-blonde hair was down, thick and shiny over one shoulder. Her cheeks flushed pink on her heart-shaped face, their apples the same dusty rose as her cupid’s bow lips. She wore a Van Halen t-shirt—one that looked like it had actually been purchased in 1980, its neckline cut out to reveal a smooth, slender shoulder. And, her eyes—those deep brown pools of mystery—pinned me with an emotion I could not identify.
Goddamn.
Scrolling through her feed, it made my heart skip a little to find so many posts about music—real music. Nothing about that band her mother was supposedly on tour with, thank God—Selfish Bliss sucked. No, her feed was chock-full of references to original music—not the over-produced, derivative shit that tried to pass. As the son of a retired music producer, I’d heard a lecture or fifty about the evils of the pop music industrial complex. The indignity of engineering hits with mediocre artists rather than making magic with real talent was exactly why my mom had gotten out.
Scrolling lower, I scanned for selfies. I both loved and hated that I found none. It was a bit stalker-ish, but I took to looking for photos she was tagged in. At school, I could barely steal tiny glances, but the novelty of staring as long as I wanted found me feasting on what I saw: Roxy in cutoffs and Chuck Taylors, laughing with friends; Roxy on the beach at a bonfire, her tiny frame tucked under the arm of a big, older-looking boy; Roxy posing with a woman whose likeness was so strong, she had to be her mother; Roxy holding a guitar in the desert.
Every photo revealed something new and fascinating about this girl—something that deepened my ache to know more. But getting closer than this would be a bad idea. She was already on the fringes, already too different from everyone else, already too uncomfortable from their stares and whispers about her sudden reappearance and her L.A. style.
No, I resolved. My reasons for avoiding the Trinity High social scene were good ones, and my reasons for avoiding Roxy were better. I drew attention to everyone around me, and not the good kind. It would be reckless for me to do that to someone so private—someone so new she couldn’t fathom the consequences. As far as she knew, I’d friended her, which meant she might have ideas. I had to stop them now, no matter how intriguing she was.
Roxy
I felt pathetic as I turned my attention away from my history essay yet again, palmed my phone and pushed my Instagram feed. I’d turned into one of those teenagers who could barely function without knowing every piece of news the second that it happened. Except nothing ever happened in Rye, and I was barely friends with enough people at Trinity to be involved in any sort of drama.
You’re totally stalking him.
I totally wasn’t—at least that was what I kept telling the voice in my head. I’d bet money that twenty or more girls at Trinity High—and probably a few boys—had taken their time admiring pictures of him. And the more I looked, the more I fixated on all there was to admire: it was hard to argue with tall stature, muscular forearms, and always-shiny-perfectly-tousled hair.
I don't know what I'd expected from accepting his friend request, though any attention seemed unlikely at this point. He hadn’t commented on any of my posts and he still ignored me so hard in civics, I’d started to think he was getting extra credit from Mr. McAbee for not speaking a word to me. How likely was it that he would even say hello before the end of the quarter?
Not any less likely than the friend request, Roxy…
Awesome—I was talking to myself again. And I was beginning to sound like Zoë.
Speculation would get me nowhere. And it could be that me thinking of him differently was exactly what he wanted. But I had to rely on what I definitively knew: Jag Monroe may be wickedly smart and undeniably pretty, but there was nothing cute about being rich and aloof. Sure, he tried to seem deep in that brooding kind of way that made lesser girls swoon—and swoon they did. But I had his number. Jag Monroe was shallower than a kiddie pool.
I’d seen enough movies to know what happened when the most popular boy in school turned his attention on the new girl, especially when rumor had it that said new girl was a prude. The fact that I hadn’t hooked up with anyone at Trinity in the six months I’d been there had earned me that reputation. The male chauvinist rules of high school dictated a repulsive reward: elevated status for anyone who could break that trend.
No doubt, Jagger would expect me to be flattered that someone so inherently divine would give a second glance to someone so far on the fringes of the Trinity social elite. He'd only need to string me along briefly—to make me believe we were friends—would only need to take me on one sorry excuse for a date before he'd flash me a panty-dropping smile and achieve just that: a quickie in the backseat of the car his daddy bought him and the silent treatment from there to eternity.
But what if he really isn’t that guy? screamed the wicked voice in my head—the one that wanted to believe that beneath his bad boy ways, there lived something good. He listened to music obsessively—in his car, in the library, and even tucked away in random nooks and crannies around school. And it was more than just having his headphones on. I'd caught him hanging outside of classroom doors as the bell rang, staying with his music until his song ended, looking raw as he got lost in something real. It was the one vice I held in common with my mother—one that would surely get me into trouble, as it had her—I was drawn to dark, tortured men.
Just as I went to put my phone down, the app reloaded and pushed new photos onto my feed. I recognized the posting style of an account I followed religiously. It ripped lines from old songs and arranged them to look like a guitar. People guessed the song and the artist in the comments. Eager to see whether I could guess, I took a closer look at the quoted lyrics:
Oh, and twisted thoughts that spin ‘round my head
I'm spinning, oh, I'm spinning
How quick the sun can drop away
And now my bitter hands cradle broken glass of what was everything.
I read it twice. Three times. It sounded familiar but I couldn’t place it. It wasn’t until I tried to click into the comments to see what other people had guessed that I realized that the post was not the original. This post had no comments, only the repost symbol that showed that it had been taken from the original feed I also followed. The re-poster was none other than Jagger Monroe.
Holy shit.
It was nothing like any of the last dozen status updates he’d written. His older ones were all stupid captions and pictures he took at his house, things like ”Jagger Monroe is kicking shit-talkers' asses at Guitar Hero" and "Jagger Monroe is studiously ignoring his homework." I wanted to dismiss this strange message as random. So why couldn’t some part of me shake the idea that it wasn’t?
For minutes I sat, trying not to overanalyze the fact that the only things that had changed on his profile in the past few days were the cryptic nature of his updates and becoming friends with me.
Half an hour passed. An hour. And I still couldn't stop myself from wondering. I was always wearing band t-shirts. Of all the things Jagger Monroe could know about me without actually knowing me, my love for music would be at the top of the list. Suddenly, he was posting song lyrics. The question now was, why? Was he speaking to me? Could he possibly be speaking to me?
Four
Drift Away
Give me the beat, boys and free my soul.
I want to get lost in your rock ’n roll
and drift away.
-Dobie Gray, Drift Away
Jagger
Declan had the good sense to look sheepish as he stepped into my car on Monday. Between giving him the silent treatment for the entire weekend and our stilted conversation on the way to Gunther’s, he'd gotten the message loud and clear. I felt slightly guilty for letting him suffer, but he had to know I was serious about him backing off. His intentions were good, but there were things even he didn't know.
We took our places in the parking lot, our cars near the main doors of the school. Gunther and I leaned against the back of my Tiguan and Declan bent over Annika’s Camaro. Ostensibly, we were just enjoying our freedom until the five-minute bell rang. The truth was, Gunther never went inside 'till he'd laid eyes on Zoë, and we still had a few minutes to wait.
Being with Gunther was always easy—the guy only had three quiet moods. Intense Gunther was reserved for war games and Zoë. Calm Gunther was the norm, a perfect counter balance to Declan’s and my extremes. And droll Gunther—who didn't come around nearly enough—was my favorite.
