A&b

by J. C. Lillis

  I nod.

  “I can’t go up there. I can’t start this all over again. What if we move too fast? Make the same mistakes? What if—”

  “Hey,” says Ava. “Can I say something?”

  We both turn and look at her.

  “Sure,” says Brandon.

  She steps up to him, locks her eyes to his.

  “Hate isn’t the number one enemy of love,” she says. “It’s fear. And it’s up to you, right now, to stare it in the fucking face and say no. Not now. Not anymore. Because fear loves to eat up second chances. And it’ll eat up yours unless you kill it, now.” She powers ahead, hammers him with beautiful bossy directives on stomping fear to pieces. It sounds like a speech she’s pre-rehearsed for Dani but I’m melting at how smoothly she’s saving the moment, spinning doubt into trust with her warlike words like a true Army of Awesome soldier.

  That’s my girl. I catch myself thinking it, scrub it away.

  “…Y’know what I’m saying?” she says.

  “Yeah,” says Brandon.

  “Go. Don’t question this. Or you’ll regret it.”

  “You’re right. You’re right.” He pulls his jacket back on, slips his shades over his eyes. “See, that’s where I ended up after like, three hours of reflection today, because yes, I love him too, and it’s time to stop being chickenshit, but then I started overthinking everything and—”

  “Brandon,” says Ava.

  “Hm.”

  “The cat ears.”

  “Right.” He whips them off, tosses them on the counter. He picks up the silver box and takes a deep breath. “Wish me luck.”

  “Good luck,” we say.

  When he’s gone, I edge myself next to Ava in front of the Pez case. “That was quite a speech.”

  “Ehh. Had it in my head for a while. Pretty much everything I want to say to Dani.” She sneaks a glance at me. “Or wanted to, before.”

  Before what? Before she got engaged?

  Before me?

  I want to ask. Instead I lean my head against the glass case and sing a potential line of a potential chorus: “Don’t let fear eat your second chance…”

  She rests her head next to mine. “Not at the Super-Gay Halloween Dance…”

  “Who says you’re no good at choruses?”

  “I learned from the best.”

  “Still want that Haterade?”

  “No. I want to get out of here.”

  My face makes a question.

  “Isn’t your keyboard at Abel’s?” she says.

  “Oh! Yes. I guess we’ll need her.”

  “My boots are upstairs. I’ll have to—”

  “I can grab them.”

  When I’m on the steps, she says “Hey.”

  I turn around.

  “Can we make s’mores?”

  My smile’s so big. I can’t help it. “Sure.”

  I float upstairs as a new song starts. Cher’s “Believe.” I wasn’t born when this song came out and I know anecdotally that everyone was well and truly sick of it in 1998, but this crowd loves it as much as I do. It’s amazing how time makes things new again.

  Speaking of that.

  Ava’s nun boots are behind the new folding screen Abel’s put up, the one with dancing skeleton and witch silhouettes. The screen is pretty hard to see through, so I don’t realize who the moving shapes are until I’m four feet away from them, reaching for the black laceup clunkers on the floor. I see brown boots kissing white shoes first, and then my eyes flick upward and oh my God.

  Abel’s white shirt is unbuttoned halfway; I see a flash of the A+B tattoo before Brandon’s hand covers it up and pushes him gently against the wall. They are kissing—finally, extravagantly, like it’s the first thirty seconds of a kissing competition and they can’t imagine they’ll ever get tired. The mechanical heart glows on and off in Abel’s clutched hand and his white knuckles say I will never let go.

  I stand there for a second, too happy to move. Then realize I’m being horrifically intrusive and I grab the boots and dash. Dollars to donuts they never noticed me. They are where they belong now, in torrid sexy A-and-B-land.

  And I’m scared of what my brain thinks next.

  Tonight you could go there too.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  “Yessss. Oh, yes yes yes yes.”

  Nothing to see here. Nope. Just a hot girl sitting at a ping-pong table with me, moaning around a mouthful of s’more. Strictly to set the scene, I will say that she has removed the heavy nun dress to reveal a white tank top and battered jeans, and that she looks like a genuine rockstar—lean and sensual, her hair in a messy bun and her guitar case caged between her legs.

  She wears no bra. Not that I noticed.

  We sit side by side on the lawn in folding chairs, roasting s’mores over a beeswax candle. This might seem like a romantic thing to do in a backyard on Halloween night, but I swear this ping-pong table will be transformed into a songwriting workspace the minute our snack break ends. Franny is our furry chaperone, crouching by the saggy net and searing us with her green eyes. We douse ourselves with cynical tunes from Brandon’s portable speaker—Don’t Start Believing, Ava’s favorite Transitive Properties album.

  “How the hell did I live without these?” says Ava, piling chocolate on another cracker.

  I refill her glass from Abel’s pitcher of cranberry-pomegranate juice, which shouldn’t go with the s’mores but somehow does.

  “So no s’mores at the Hollow, huh?” I say.

  “Refined sugars are a no.”

  “And your family never made them?”

  Her face flinches at your family and I want to disappear.

  “Nah.” She clears her throat. “My mother didn’t like us eating ‘grocery store junk.’ She’d make desserts from scratch when we had them. We’d have avena on cold nights, or arepa—that’s like corn pudding, except it’s the texture of bread pudding? The best comfort food.”

  Her eyes fill with sudden tears and God, I can’t believe I dragged this up.

  I lay my hand on hers lightly. She lets me.

  “You miss them,” I say.

  “Yeah.” Franny creeps close to the candle. Ava scritches her chin, shielding her from the flame. “I mean, I tell myself I shouldn’t. That I’m better off without them. Like, if they’d only accept me if I spent my whole life lying about who I am—who the fuck needs them, right?”

  “But…?”

  “But when I was little…” She closes her eyes. “…their love felt so good. So warm. Mamá’s hugs. Papá teaching me chords on Fernando. Family dinners next door con mis abuelos. All the cousins watching the Red Sox at Tío Pedro’s, because he had the best TV. Me and my brother playing ping-pong—my God, he’d get so mad when I beat his ass.” She smiles sadly, draws a circle on the table with her finger. “I lost a universe of people when I ran away. I mean, they ran away from me first, but still.”

  “It left a hole.” I squeeze her hand, aching for her.

  “More than a hole. A hole implies you can fill it.” She toys with her letter-A pin, which is tied around her wrist on a thin blue ribbon. “I…thought Dani could fill it, once.”

  I point at the pin. “She gave you that, didn’t she?”

  “For my fourteenth birthday.” Ava sighs. “I’m pissed at her right now, but she’s—I don’t know. She’s occupied so much of my heart, for so long.”

  “So were you guys ever…”

  “We were friends. Best friends. Part of it was like, queer girls trapped in Catholic school have to stick together. But also, she was the only other person I knew who loved music as much as I did.” She grips her s’more between two kebab sticks and holds it over the flame. “We weren’t allowed to listen to the radio, so we’d sneak CDs from the library, look up bands online. We loved discovering new music and getting each other excited about it. We’d share earbuds in her room and listen to all kinds of stuff. Prince.
Joni. Patti Smith. Excuse 17. Future Bible Heroes…”

  I want her to keep listing music forever in her lovely smoky voice, but then the corner of her s’more catches on fire. She blows it out with a sharp puff.

  “When we decided to leave together, it felt so intimate. We made plans for weeks. Where we’d meet. How much food and money we’d take. How we’d protect ourselves on the road. And then the first night at the Hollow—we couldn’t believe we’d actually made it. We felt free. Electrified with power.” She shrugs. “So, you know. We had sex by the fire pit.”

  My mouth freezes mid-chew. I swallow with difficulty. “…Wow.”

  “Yep.” She bites the corner off her s’more. “We were awake way after everyone else went to bed. We sat by this dying campfire and I think it hit us then, like, the magnitude of what we’d done. So we sat there holding hands really tight, trying to list our ten favorite songs to get our minds off it, only we didn’t get past number five because the whole vibe changed when she said ‘I Would Die 4 U.’ And then our lips came together in this perfect…”

  “Campfire Kiss.” My heart wilts. I want that song we wrote to be all ours, with no ghosts dancing in the flames.

  “Yeah. And then our clothes melted off like we were in a dream, and we did it under one of the scrap quilts her aunt makes for the farmer’s market. Then the next day she said it was a mistake. That we were sisters, and that was so much more powerful than romantic love.” She yanks her hair free from its elastic band, so hard it snaps. She flings it into the darkness. “Fuck that, you know?”

  I shut out the image of her bare legs tangled with Dani’s. “So you became…the Mistress of Misery.”

  “I did. I was a machine. During the day we were friends, working the garden together and tending the pigs, but at night I let my mind run wild. I wrote thirty-six songs about her. They were…like nothing I’d ever written before. I even sang differently, from my guts instead of my throat. I had this voice all of a sudden. And I wanted to use it to make a new life. A life of my own, that I could arrange exactly how I wanted.”

  “So…enter Pop U?”

  “Yeah. One night Dani and I were watching some video on YouTube and I saw a Pop U call-to-audition ad. I hitched to Dallas and went. Bought those pretentious boots for luck.” She rolls her eyes. “Vassal knockoffs. Sang on a corner, scraped together the cash for them.”

  “Guess they worked.”

  “Eh, I was always good at winning stuff. Talent shows, debates, hundred-yard dashes. I loved the rush.” She winds a curl around her finger. “When I’d win something back home, my family was proud. It felt like they loved me then. No asterisks or disclaimers.”

  I nod. “Are you, like….partially doing this for them?”

  “No, I….I actually thought…” Her shoulders slump. “It’s silly.”

  I lean in. Closer than I should. “Tell me.”

  “I thought if Dani saw me on that big stage, singing songs I wrote for her, she’d see me in a different way. She’d see my heart and she’d love me the way I wanted her to. The way I thought she did, deep down.” Her forehead meets the table. “I’m pathetic.”

  I rest my hand on her hair and stroke it lightly. “Passion is never pathetic.”

  “I thought if I could win this, I could get us a nice little house and a dog, like she always wanted, and she could come on tour with me and we’d live happily ever after.” She sits up, sweeps her hair off her face. “But whatever. There’s no love story. There never was. And happily ever after’s no good for my brand, right?”

  Her eyes fill up and she blinks fast, her long eyelashes wet and shining. I stare down at the table. I want to help her, want to pop my brain open and pluck out the perfect words to blot her hurt away.

  “Ava.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you…want to play ping-pong?” I say. “And possibly beat my ass?”

  She stands up. She takes her tortoiseshell eyeglasses from her pocket and slips them back on. Then she ties her sheaf of curls back with the twist-tie from the marshmallow bag.

  “Hell. Yes.”

  ***

  Ten minutes in, we’re tied, five to five.

  It’s a close game that speaks to eons of practice—Ava with her brother, me with sharp old Mr. Mendoza in the Fox Run Apartments game room when I was stuck on a song or my algebra homework.

  “So it’s your turn to spill,” says Ava.

  “About?”

  “The person who broke your heart.”

  With that she slams the ball and scores a point on me, like the adorable jerk she is.

  I shrug with one shoulder. “No heartbreak here.”

  “Like hell. C’mon, fair exchange. My story for yours.”

  I hit her with a backspin serve. There’s no way. I’ve never told a soul about Chelsie, so I go with the second, less significant heartbreak.

  “There was this guy, Mick. Basketball player, semi-big deal at our school.”

  “Oooh.”

  “He worked at the bowling alley with me and we’d flirt—I mean, the guy would chat up anything with boobs, and I guess he liked mine.”

  “They’re quality boobs. Very symmetrical.”

  “Thank you.” I bless the dark that veils my burning face. “So one night he kissed me in the shoe room and then we started making out in there sometimes…he made sexy growly noises and he had these incredible soft lips, like gummy candy but without that weird powdery stuff on it?”

  “You’re not selling me.”

  “It’s almost over. Then I got extremely into him and I wanted us to be a thing, like a public thing, and he said he was focusing on basketball and didn’t have time for a relationship. And then a week later he was dating the class treasurer.”

  “Bastard.” She tries a short serve.

  “I’m over it.” I flick it back.

  “But you’re not over her.”

  “What?” The ball sails past me.

  “Who was she? The one who really broke your heart.”

  “How do you know it was a girl?”

  “I don’t. I’m guessing.”

  I do a backhand serve and score on her. Man, I hope she’s not going to be gross like Ma and tell me I’m probably really a lesbian, and bi is a pit stop on the track to Sapphic Station. But Ava’s not that kind of jerk. I can tell.

  She retrieves the ball from the grass and initiates a gentle rally. We keep it up as I start the story. No dirty moves, just comfortable back and forth.

  “Chelsie was—like Dani, sort of. My best friend, since I was eight. She was the new girl that year and we were both baby weirdos, so we connected like that—” I tap the ball back. “She got my Tera fandom because she was there from day one. Every year on Tera’s birthday she’d help me bake cupcakes and then we’d have a video marathon. I watched Titanic forty-six times with her so it evened out.”

  Ava bites on a grin.

  “What?”

  “I love that you baked Tera birthday cupcakes.” She gifts me with an easy serve. “Sorry. Continue.”

  “Her parents didn’t like me much because they didn’t trust Ma and we didn’t go to church, but Chelsie invited me over anyway, even though her parents scared her. She acted like she was proud to be my friend. And she was kind to animals, even ants, and she laughed like Ernie from Sesame Street, and she said she was the worst dancer in her class but I loved the way her body moved. When she danced I could watch her for hours.”

  I score a point on Ava. She barely seems to notice.

  “The first time we hooked up was June 29th, the summer after freshman year. We were in her bedroom practicing a dance routine we’d made up, and I kissed her after she tripped into me. It was so beautiful. Like…cracking the floor of your existing love and finding this whole other layer of love underneath. We made out for fourteen minutes on her canopy bed and then she said let’s make this our secret, but she smiled like it would be a nice secret and
not a shameful one.”

  Ava nods, returns my shot. Her face is grave, like she knows what’s coming.

  “The second time was July 4th, after fireworks. We were wandering in the woods behind her house eating cherry sno-balls from paper cups, and we stopped at the base of an oak tree to make a fairy house from sticks and moss like when we were kids. We never finished the roof. It’s pretty uncomfortable to make out on a forest floor with all the twigs and stones, but I didn’t care. The only thing that hurt was after, because she said this was starting to feel weird and wrong, and we probably shouldn’t do it again.”

  Ava clacks a high ball back to me when she easily could’ve spiked it.

  “The third and final time was July 11th. There was a summer storm and her windows were open and the sky was a radioactive orange. She kissed me this time. I was sitting on the floor with my back against her bed, singing her part of a new song I’d written, and she lunged at me like a wild animal. And I was like what about what you said, and she was like forget what I said, and it was the most joyful and erotic thing that ever happened to me, and we were on her carpet with our shirts off and her bra undone when her mother walked in.”

  “Holy shit.” Ava dives to the corner to return my serve. “She freaked?”

  “She freaked. Yes. And then she and Chelsie were in the hall fighting and her mom kept saying It was her idea, tell me it was her idea, and finally Chelsie was like yes, it was.”

  “Traitor!”

  “She was crying so hard, really sobbing. She told her mother it was all me, and she knew it was wrong but she went along with it, and we would never do it again. Her mom said damn right you won’t, and she came back in the room and told me I was to leave their house and never come back.” I hit Ava with a tricky serve. She returns it. “So I did. I didn’t see her for the rest of the summer. I tried to call but she never picked up. And in the fall she transferred to St. Mary’s and that, as they say, was that.”

  “Oh, fuck.”

  I’ve never heard the f-word said so tenderly. I pour all my focus into our rhythm—ca-think, ca-think, so easy and steady, the only thing keeping three years of stifled tears from streaming down my face. “It happens, you know? We were young. Still figuring things out.”