Bitter End

by Jennifer Brown

  “We could, uh… go on a hike in the mountains,” I said.

  “Um, isn’t that the first thing we’re going to do?” Zack asked. “It’s a given. And you can hike up a mountain in December, just so you… ha-HA! I just blew your arm off!”

  “Gah!” Bethany roared, punching him in the shoulder. “Yeah, I think one hike is enough.”

  “We could ride horses,” I suggested.

  “You can ride a horse in Dec—dammit!”

  “Take that, Zackhole!” Bethany screeched.

  “Take that, Zackhole,” Zack mimicked. “Bethroom,” he said, pulling out his old elementary school nickname for her. This conversation was only going downhill, and I started to get annoyed. I’d missed a date for this?

  “Zackass!” Bethany retorted.

  “What about bike riding?” I said irritably, but they kept arguing, as if I wasn’t even in the room with them.

  “Cowboy Ugly!”

  I tried again. “I think you can mountain-bike down Pike’s Peak.”

  “Zackwad!”

  “You guys,” I said, but they kept horsing around. “You guys,” I said again. Someone’s controller cord knocked a taco off the table onto the floor by my head. “Stop it! God!” I shouted.

  The couch went still.

  “I’m trying to actually be productive,” I said, my tone sharp. I could feel my pulse in my forehead. “You’re acting like little kids!”

  There was a beat of silence—the only thing I could hear was the ominous video game background music—and then suddenly both Zack and Bethany cracked up.

  “She’s right,” Bethany said. “You’re acting like a real Zack-off!” She burst into giggles, and there was more jostling.

  The doorbell rang, and I struggled to get upright so I could answer it. But I’d been upside down too long, and Zack was too quick. He tossed his controller into Bethany’s lap and leaped so he was sitting on my stomach, facing the back of the couch, where my feet were.

  “Little kid, huh? I’ll show you little kid.” He wrapped his arm around my calves, locking my feet into place, and started tickling them, which he knew I hated more than anything in the world.

  “Stop!” I squealed and laughed, pounding on his back, trying to pull my feet out of his grasp. All hell broke loose on the couch as Bethany came to my aid, lunging into Zack’s side over and over again, trying to knock him off me. I writhed, laughing until I could see spots in front of my eyes, like I was going to pass out, and continued smacking his back. I couldn’t breathe.

  Zack ate it up, just like Zack always did. If I said, “Don’t. Stop,” he would say, “Don’t stop? Well, if you insist…” If I begged, “Get off,” he would respond, “Well, I’ll try, but I really just think of you as a friend, Alex.”

  He was impossible, but at least I wasn’t mad anymore.

  Celia stomped in from the kitchen, chewing. “There’s someone at the door,” she said accusingly.

  “I can’t get up,” I said, between laughs. “This idiot is on top of me!” I banged on his back like I was banging on a door. Celia rolled her eyes at me and reached for the doorknob.

  “Idiot, huh?” Zack said, and started tickling me again, sending me into a new gale of laughter and squeals.

  I didn’t see who had come through the door until Zack stopped abruptly. I pounded on his back with the flat of my hand a few more times and then opened my eyes. Cole was standing just inside the front door, peering at us over the couch. He had his hands pushed down in his jeans pockets, his shoulders slumped.

  I felt even more blood rush to my face, and all of a sudden the room got very serious. I planted both palms on Zack’s back and pushed. “Get. Up,” I said through clenched teeth.

  He raised himself up so he was kneeling on the couch cushion and I thunked, headfirst, onto the floor, my legs slithering out from under Zack as I tried to right myself, pulling my shirt down and smoothing my hair with my hands. Bethany was still on her knees at Zack’s side. She snickered and shoved him with her shoulder.

  “Hey,” I said, ignoring the head rush I was getting from being upright. I walked around the couch. “I wasn’t expecting you. We were trip-planning.” Even as I said it, I knew how it sounded. Of course we weren’t trip-planning. That much Cole could see with his own eyes.

  “No problem,” he said, grinning. “I just thought I’d stop by.”

  Celia had moved over to the couch and sat where I’d just been sitting, picking up a taco. “Add me in,” she said to Zack.

  Zack walked across the room and bent over the game console, plugging in another controller. He didn’t say a word, but he looked extremely put out.

  “Hey, Cole,” Bethany said, turning around and lowering herself back into playing position. “Taco? We can add you in, too.”

  Zack aimed a look at Bethany, and she shrugged like, What am I supposed to do? I didn’t think I was supposed to see that and wondered what Bethany knew that I didn’t know.

  “Ah, no. Thanks,” Cole said. “I’m not staying.” He reached out and touched the back of my hand with his fingertips. “Can I talk to you for a second? Alone?”

  “Um, yeah,” I said. “Of course.”

  I stepped around him and took my jacket off the hook by the door. “Be right back, guys,” I said, then opened the front door and stepped outside, pulling Cole behind me. They’d already started calling names again. I don’t think they even heard me.

  Outside, the air was crisp and not quite fall-like. Another clear night when the dew comes early and clings to your ankles as you walk through the grass. I turned to face Cole on the front porch, but right away there was a burst of laughter from inside. Cole’s face twitched toward the front window. I could tell what he was thinking—this still didn’t feel like we were alone.

  I stepped off the front porch, grabbing Cole’s hand, and walked down the driveway, then turned left on the sidewalk toward the neighborhood playground where Zack and Bethany and I used to play when we were little kids.

  Cole and I said nothing. Just walked. My forehead was still pounding, and I was embarrassed and unsure what Cole was thinking. Our shoes made scuffling noises against the sidewalk as we plodded along, the laughter from my living room disappearing.

  When we got to the park, the sounds of our footsteps changed as the pea gravel shifted under our feet. I slogged through the gravel to the jungle gym, climbing up a ladder and crawling into a tunnel at the top. Halfway through, I stopped and peeked out at Cole, motioning for him to join me.

  The tunnel was where Zack and Bethany and I used to go in middle school when we wanted to be alone but weren’t old enough yet to really go anywhere.

  I settled myself right in the middle of the tunnel, where it’s darkest, and sat, curving my back along the wall. Cole crawled in after me and then stopped awkwardly on his knees when he reached me.

  “Hi,” I whispered in the familiar dark, barely able to make out his facial features.

  “Hey,” he said, his voice flat.

  “You wanted alone,” I said, forcing a breathy laugh, trying to break the ice. I bit my bottom lip, waiting.

  After a beat, I heard him chuckle, too, and could feel him shift his weight so he was off his knees, his back curved along the side of the tunnel opposite me, so we were facing each other. “We’re definitely alone,” he agreed.

  We were both silent for a minute, as I replayed the scene Cole had walked in on in my head. Even though I knew it was innocent, how would it have felt to Cole? How would I have felt if I’d walked in on him with a girl sitting on top of him and tickling him?

  “Don’t be mad,” I said. “Zack was just being a goof. It’s what he does. There’s nothing behind it.”

  Cole let out a little gust of air. I felt my hair move gently against my shoulder. “I’m not mad,” he said. But his voice sounded very flat, and something about the feeling in the air between us made me think he was angry. “I just…” He stopped and shifted position again, the tunnel jiggling.


  I waited. He didn’t go on.

  “They were acting like jerks,” I said, rolling my eyes and feeling flushed. “I was trying to get them… I should have gone out with you tonight instead.” I reached out and touched his leg with the tip of my finger. Out of the darkness his finger pressed down on mine, holding it against his leg.

  “I just need to know,” he said. “Do you like him?”

  I laughed. “Zack? No.”

  He let up on my finger, and started rubbing it with his. “I just… I really like you, Alex. But I can’t share you.” There was something very raw in his voice.

  I picked up his hand with both of mine, then pressed my palm against his. “You don’t have to,” I said. “I like you. Nobody else.”

  I felt another gust of air. “He wants you, you know.”

  I shook my head, even though he couldn’t see it. The thought of Zack “wanting” me seemed almost laughable. It would be like Bethany “wanting” me. “He doesn’t,” I said. “You just don’t understand our relationship.”

  “No,” he said. “I guess I don’t. But what you don’t understand is that I want to explode every time I see him, because he’s always got his hands all over you.”

  I pressed my palm against his even harder. “Then I’ll make him stop.”

  He sighed, long and hard this time. “My Alex,” he whispered, curling his fingers around mine, our palms still matched. “My little Emily Dickinson.”

  We stayed that way for a long time, talking about poetry and football and the spillway and movies and English class. Anything but Zack and Bethany.

  By the time we got back to my house and Cole drove away, Bethany and Zack were no longer in my living room. I could hear them talking on the steps of Zack’s front porch. I walked across the grass, feeling an irritated scowl stretch my whole face downward.

  “Ah, how’s Big C?” Zack asked. “So hot he’s positively melty?”

  “Shut up,” I said.

  “Ouch,” Zack said. “Someone’s touchy. Don’t make me start tickling you again.”

  “No,” I said. “You have to stop doing that. Especially if Cole’s around, okay?”

  Zack’s eyes widened. He glanced at Bethany, and then issued a bark of laughter. “Are you being serious right now?”

  For some reason his laughter stirred up even more annoyance in me. “Yes, I’m being totally serious right now,” I said. “He walked into my house and saw another guy sitting on top of me. Can you really blame him for being a little weirded out by it?”

  Zack’s face twisted with annoyance. Zack was the kind of guy who rarely got irritated, but when he did, it sometimes got ugly. “Uh, yeah, actually. I can,” he said. “This guy’s known you, like, five minutes. You’ve gone out what? Once?” He stood up and dug around in his jeans pocket, fishing out his plastic tube of toothpicks. He popped it open and slid a toothpick out, gesturing with it. “Is this why he came by? To bust us doing something bad?”

  “No,” I said, crossing my arms. “He was stopping by to say hi. Not that I need to justify anything to you. You’re my best friend, not my dad.”

  “Exactly. Your best friend. So he needs to deal.”

  “No, you need to stop acting like I’m your girlfriend.”

  Zack’s eyes narrowed and he stuck the toothpick into his mouth. He chomped on it angrily and then turned to Bethany. “Back me up here.”

  Bethany looked miserable. She cleared her throat and licked her lips, scuffed a pock in the concrete with her shoe, then shrugged. “Alex has a point. Just… don’t tickle her so much when Cole’s around. It’s not that big a deal.” She lifted her eyes to me. “But you did kind of ditch us,” she said. “Again.”

  I put my hands on my hips. There were a million things I wanted to say. No, I didn’t ditch you. You weren’t doing anything but playing video games anyway. Why do we need to have planning sessions every stinking weekend? And, um, yeah, by the way, you’re making me choose between you and Cole, which I would never do to either of you.

  And when I thought about it that way, it seemed like they were the ones being very unfair.

  “Next week we’ll have to really nail some things down,” she said, pulling her feet in closer to her chest, her flip-flops making a scratching sound against the concrete.

  “I can’t,” I said. “I’m going out with Cole next Saturday. You’ll have to play video games without me.”

  I turned on my heel and left, barely hearing the frustrated noise Zack made at my back, or the low murmuring between them as I stormed across the lawn.

  Two hours later, when I was getting ready for bed, they were still out there. And I was still mad. I couldn’t believe that, after all we’d been through as the Terrible Three, it looked more like they were two and I was one.

  At least I had Cole.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  As it turned out, I wasn’t going to miss anything anyway. Bethany’s grandpa fell getting out of the bathtub, and the whole family was hanging out at the hospital, waiting for doctors to stitch up his forehead and patch his two broken ribs and sprained wrist.

  Zack was going to a soccer game with some girl named Hannah from drama club.

  Cole picked me up just as Zack was leaving to pick up his date, the two of them eyeing each other across the yard like stray dogs getting ready to fight.

  “Come on,” I murmured to Cole, pulling on his elbow to distract him. Zack and I had patched things up, and I didn’t want him to think I was encouraging Cole to stare him down.

  Cole shook his head and chuckled as he got into the car. “That guy definitely doesn’t like me,” he said. “In weight training, I refuse to let him spot me. I’m afraid he’d let a weight fall on me and choke me to death.”

  “He’ll come around,” I said, staring out my window at Zack’s car backing out the driveway and zooming down the street. “He’s got a date tonight,” I added, hoping it would help put Cole’s mind at ease about Zack and me. What I didn’t tell him was that Zack thought Hannah was too loud and had a grating, nasally voice, and he was only going out with her as a favor to his mom, who was friends with her mom.

  Cole put the car in reverse and started to back out of the driveway. But after a few feet he stopped suddenly. “I need to ask you something very important,” he said.

  I ducked my chin to my chest and tried to steel myself for it. Was this where he would ask me if I was into Zack… again? Or was this where he would ask why my house is such a wreck? Or maybe this is where he would ask why I don’t ever talk about my family or why he never sees my mom or dad hanging around. I took a deep breath. “Okay.”

  “You eat butter on your popcorn?”

  “The more the better,” I answered, relief washing over me.

  He pounded his fist on the steering wheel, then shouted into the closed car, “She’s perfect, I tell you!”

  Laughing, we pulled out of the driveway and headed to the theater, talking about, of all things, flavored popcorn and the merits of M&Ms as the perfect movie treat.

  The theater was packed, so we had to park way out at the back of the parking lot.

  “Stay there,” he commanded, just as I reached for the door handle. “Don’t get out.”

  My hand fell away and landed back in my lap. He turned the car off and jumped out, then jogged over to my side. He grinned as he opened my door with a flourish, bowing a little.

  “My lady,” he said in this phony British accent that had me giggling. He reached in and took my hand, tugging me gently out of the car, shutting the door behind me with his other hand.

  I curtsied and adopted my own goofy British accent. “Why, thank you, sir,” I said. But when I looked up from my curtsy, he wasn’t smiling anymore. His face had taken on a totally serious look.

  He stepped in toward me, resting both hands on my hips, which practically burned under his touch. “You look amazing tonight,” he said, pulling me in until our bellies were touching.

  I could feel my fac
e get hot. “Thanks,” I said. “You look great, too.” I expected him to say something else but was surprised when instead he just reached up, buried his hands in my hair at the back of my head, and kissed me. It was a soft, slow, easy kiss. One of those first kisses where nobody gets adventurous and where it feels so good you think your toes might melt off, but you’re so busy hoping your breath doesn’t smell and your stomach is in such tight knots, it’s over before it even really registers that it began.

  But when he released me, I wasn’t sure I could even walk into the theater, which looked to be about a thousand miles away. My knees were shaking, and I couldn’t believe what had just happened.

  “Shall we go?” he asked finally, in that same British accent, and I nodded, pressing my lips together to smooth my lip gloss.

  He wrapped his arm around my neck, and we walked into the theater, our hips bumping and me thinking that there might be other good days in my life, but there was no way any day could get better than this one.

  We were early for the movie and walked into a mostly empty theater with our sodas and popcorn. A part of me hoped against hope that we would be the only two to show up, even though I knew from the looks of the parking lot it would be packed before the previews began.

  Still. Maybe he’d kiss me again. The thought made me totally not hungry. I sipped my soda.

  “You choose the seat,” he said, gesturing with his soda.

  I walked to the middle of the center row and we sat down.

  “Perfect!” I said, settling my soda into the cup holder.

  He sat next to me. “I’m surprised. I would’ve taken you for a front-row viewer for sure.” He winked at me, positioning the popcorn in his lap and taking a big handful of it.

  “Front row? Why?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. You just look like a woman who wants to be up close to the action.”

  I shook my head. “Uh-uh. Sitting in the front row gives me a headache. What about you? You a front-row guy?”

  He shoveled the popcorn into his mouth, chewed for a minute, and then said, “Always.”