She was looking at me with big, shiny eyes, pleading with me, and I’d never felt denser in my life. Then she shook her head. “I just thought... Well, it doesn’t matter now. I think... I think I’m going home. I’m getting a headache.”
I tried and failed to convince her to come to my apartment. She wasn’t mad anymore, but she kept shaking her head.
Before we went our separate ways, I caught her hand and stepped closer so I could hug her.
And then she left me.
Jolene
I stood inside my apartment, heels pressed against the back of the door, my hand wrapped around the knob behind me. I heard Shelly moving around in her and Dad’s bedroom. I could tiptoe across the living room and slip into my room, and she might not think to check on me. I hadn’t been lying to Adam about Shelly acting strangely since that morning I’d eavesdropped on her call with my dad and then vomited way too much personal information on her until she’d cried like she was broken. She wasn’t acting broken now; she was acting determined, and avoiding each other had become a game I played by myself, one that had become so much harder since she’d started seeking me out.
There’d been more notes and texts from Dad lately, too, nearly every day, and they usually contained some bit of information from the day before, details I knew Shelly was feeding him. The one that had been waiting for me that day congratulated me on a zero-cavity dentist appointment the week before, and I didn’t want to know how Shelly had found that out. The rest was always the same: sorry...promise...excuses and lies. I still never saw him.
Sometimes I’d spot one of his shirts or jackets lying over a chair, or an empty beer bottle on the counter that I knew belonged to him, because Shelly didn’t drink. But Shelly must have cleaned before I got there. The apartment was spotless.
Ten minutes passed, twenty. I watched the hands on the clock tick past. I was sure if I went to my room and listened, I’d hear the soft murmur of Adam, Jeremy, and their dad all talking, laughing. By the sound of things, his mom’s voice might be joining the mix in the not-too-distant future, only they wouldn’t be at the apartment anymore. They’d be home. Together.
I squeezed my eyes shut and felt wetness on my eyelashes.
And then I was back in the hallway, wiping my eyes dry with my fingertips, not thinking about where I was going until I was knocking softly on his door.
Guy opened it after the second knock. “What happened to your friend?”
“He was the one who had to go, not me.”
“You sure about that?”
I nodded. “Can I come in?” And then I added, “Please.” I’d been saying that word a lot to Guy lately.
Slowly, so slowly, he moved to let me in. I jumped when the door clicked shut. “I don’t think your boyfriend liked me very much.”
“I told you he’s not—and he didn’t get to know you.”
“So you think he’d like me?” Guy moved behind me, and I could feel his body heat as he stood too close. “Would he like me like you like me?”
I turned to face him and put a little distance between us. “Why wouldn’t he?”
Guy answered with a flick of his eyebrows before taking a swig from his beer. It was a different brand from my dad’s. Guy noticed me looking. “You want one?”
“I’m sixteen.”
“I know how old you are, Jolene.”
I moved farther into Guy’s apartment, heading as I inevitably always did toward his movie collection. I trailed my fingers over the glossy cases. “You want to watch something?”
“Is that what you want?”
I frowned at him.
“It seems like we always do what you want.” He dropped onto the couch and crossed his feet on the coffee table. Adam’s empty Coke can was still on the corner.
“That’s not true.”
“No? So we can do what I want? Is that what you’re saying?”
I felt a chill chase across my skin. My back was to him as I looked over his shelves. “You can pick the movie.” He didn’t answer me for the longest time, and I felt brittle and naked in front of him. He knew so much about me, my situation. And I was telling him more than I meant to every time I came back and said that same word. “Please.”
He rattled off a title and I reached for it gratefully. It wasn’t one I’d ever heard of, but for once I didn’t care. I started the movie and settled into the far corner of the couch.
“Why are you sitting all the way over there?”
“Hmm?” I tried pretending that I was engrossed in the opening credits, but I was forced to look at him when he snatched the remote and paused the movie.
“I said, ‘why are you sitting all the way over there?’”
“I like the corner.”
“Really? Then why don’t you put your feet up?”
“Sure.” I curled my legs up sideways, but Guy grasped my ankles and pulled them across his lap.
“There, isn’t that better? You can stretch out now.”
“Yeah, that’s better. Thanks.” I reached for the remote in his hand, and he let me take it. As the movie started up again, I relaxed. It was a drama, but with one character who never failed to make me laugh in his scenes. Guy laughed at him, too, and at once it was easy between us again, just like I needed. It would have been better if Adam had been there, too, but at least I wasn’t alone.
I didn’t even mind when Guy started to rub my feet. I looked at him, and he didn’t seem to be aware that he was doing it. I jerked when he touched a ticklish spot. He apologized, but then he did it again.
“Stop.” I laughed. “I can’t pay attention to the movie.”
Guy held up his hands, and I turned back to the movie. The second I relaxed my guard, he grabbed my foot and started tickling me. I squealed and tried to twist away, but he yanked me down the couch as he moved his hands up to my waist, my shirt bunching up as he attacked my bare stomach. I was laughing to the point of pain by that time, but the laughter fogged my brain, clouding out the alarms that were screaming inside my head that this wasn’t okay, the same ones that had been hovering around the edges of my thoughts since I entered Guy’s apartment. A lot longer than that, if I was being honest with myself.
The fog started to thin when I realized that Guy had me flat on my back and he was on top of me, his weight pressing me down into the cushions. He was so much bigger than I was, so much heavier. Hot flickers of panic started to whip through me, and the laughter that he kept wringing out of me was touched with half-formed words that didn’t sound like the protests I needed them to be. Suddenly he stopped tickling me. His hands were still touching me, but he wasn’t laughing and he didn’t want laughter from me either, if he ever had. He smashed his mouth down on mine and his tongue thrust inside. His hands were grabbing and squeezing and everywhere. I couldn’t catch my breath.
If I screamed, he swallowed it.
If I kicked out, his thigh pinned my leg down.
If I bucked, he pressed me harder into the couch.
Fear froze me colder than the blizzard raging outside.
And then his hand moved to the button of my jeans. I jerked my head free and gasped the word that had been trapped inside. “Stop!” And I kicked and bucked and twisted. Nothing. He moved only because he wanted to, and this time he dragged his mouth down my neck. He licked me.
“No. Stop. Guy, I’ll scream.” My threat sounded pathetic in my ears. It was weak, and my throat felt raspy from laughing. I wanted to cry until I realized I already was. But the walls were thin. Guy knew that, but I repeated it out loud. Someone would hear me. I’d scream until they did.
He hurled himself to his feet.
“You’re gonna scream? After you’ve been teasing me all this time, you’re gonna act like you don’t want this?” He said other things, things that battered against me as I scrambled off the couch.
/> “Yeah, run home, little girl. Where are you gonna go? Who’s gonna care, huh?” He blocked me when I got to the door, grabbing my wrist when I reached for the handle. “You gonna tell Daddy? Tell him how you kept coming to me and begging me to let you in? How many nights, Jolene? How many?”
Too many. I remembered them all, and I felt so foolish because, even then, I’d known. I’d known, and I’d kept coming.
“You gonna tell your boyfriend how you kissed me? You didn’t mind then, did you?” He released my hands. “No, you’re not gonna tell anyone, are you? Who would you tell? Nobody cares about you, do they?” He moved aside so that I could yank open the door. “Go on. Come back when you want your letter and you’re ready to grow up, Jolene.”
His laughter chased me down the hall.
ADAM
Bees were buzzing inside my head. Or I thought they were until reality penetrated the dream I already couldn’t remember. My phone was vibrating on my nightstand.
Jolene:
Are you awake?
Adam:
No.
Jolene:
I’m on my balcony.
I looked toward my sliding glass door and the snow pounding angry fists against the glass. The display on my phone read 1:47 a.m.
Adam:
You’re not on your balcony. Frozen death is on your balcony.
She didn’t text back.
I sat up, cold seeping into my skin just from looking outside. It made no sense for her to be out there. I told myself that as I flung back my blankets and, armed only with flannel pants and a T-shirt, peered through the glass. Visibility was like two inches. An entire hockey team could be out there and I wouldn’t know it.
I felt each one of my teeth freeze solid when I slid the door open. “Jolene!” I called her name but the wind ripped the sound away. It didn’t matter that I was still standing in my room. Snow swirled around me and licked my skin with needled tongues. Stepping out, I reached the wall and leaned over, telling myself I wouldn’t see anything, not a girl shivering against the wall.
And I didn’t.
Jolene wasn’t shivering anymore. She was too cold.
“What are you doing?”
“C-can you c-come over? Or c-can I?”
“What?” I could barely hear her, but if she’d said what I thought she’d said... “No. Jolene, no. Go inside. I’ll call you. Go!”
Her response was to break from her position and place her foot and hands on the railing.
“Are you trying to kill yourself?” I grabbed her shoulders and shoved her back. Instead of letting go, she gripped the railing tighter. “Jolene. What.” I wasn’t even asking her a question at that point. Either her brain had frozen with that one imperative locked in place, or something was wrong enough to make her forget that she’d nearly died the last time she climbed onto my balcony, and that hadn’t been during a snowstorm. That, or she didn’t care.
Both options scared the hell out of me.
“Okay, okay.” I swung my leg up and hissed when my hands wrapped around the burning cold metal railing. I shifted to grip the wall, and something soft and impossibly cold pressed my hand into the brick. Jolene grabbed a fistful of my T-shirt and pulled. When I tumbled onto her balcony, I realized the soft, cold thing was her hand.
Breathing hurt, and her hand in mine was almost too frozen to hold. I pushed her toward her door, which she’d left open, so there was no warmth to welcome us when we got inside. Shoving the icy wind out when I closed the door helped, but not enough. I was still in the process of freezing. Jolene stood still as though already frozen. I ripped the thick down comforter from her bed, wrapped it around her back, and pulled her against my chest before cocooning myself in it, too.
Ice had begun forming on the exposed hairs on my arms, and as I looked at Jolene, that ice seemed to stab deep inside me. Her eyelashes had frosted over and glistening tracks of frozen tears trailed down her cheeks.
We both started to melt as we sank to the floor in front of her bed. My teeth were chattering; her lips were gray. I didn’t know what I was saying to her as I started rubbing warmth back into her hands, her arms, her back. She said nothing as I coaxed circulation back into her limbs. I didn’t stop until her teeth were chattering, the sound a sharp clicking that was so fast that it almost sounded like my phone vibrating.
“Are you going to tell me why you were freezing to death outside?”
We were sitting shoulder to shoulder, so she didn’t have to move much to let her head drop to my shoulder. “No.”
Glancing at her face, I saw that the color was returning to her lips, but she didn’t feel all the way thawed out. Little shivering tremors still racked her body, so I wrapped my arm around her waist, sharing my body heat. I forced my tongue to the roof of my mouth so that I wouldn’t say something rash in response to her one-word answer. With gut-twisting panic, I thought back to the look on her face when she’d grabbed the balcony railing. She’d have done it. She’d been that desperate. I hadn’t been that afraid since the night we’d gotten the call about the accident that killed my brother. So I didn’t say anything else. I added another arm, and I held her.
I wanted to make her tell me, to shake her and scream at her and hold her all at once. I wanted her to hold me. I still felt threads of terror stitching through me until I could almost see them under my skin. I’d already known I loved her. But I didn’t know until that moment when she’d started to climb to me that I’d die for her.
“Just so you know,” I said, hearing the way my voice shook, “you’re my favorite person. In every way, you are my favorite.”
After a minute, I leaned forward to flip open the laptop that she’d left on the floor. I turned on the first movie I found, then settled back into the comforter with her as the opening credits of Napoleon Dynamite started to play. Her frozen tears had melted away, but new ones fell silently as we watched the movie.
Jolene
I woke up on the floor. With a person for a pillow.
We’d sort of folded into each other. Adam’s head was resting on the crook of his arm, which was draped over my hip; mine was cushioned on his thigh. The comforter that he had wrapped us in was constricted tightly around my arms and pinned under Adam’s weight. When I tried to extract myself, I had to tug hard, which succeeded in freeing my arms but also waking him.
Adam shifted so that I could untangle the rest of myself and sit up. He blinked several times and arched his back, then righted himself, too. Weak sunlight spilled into my room through the glass doors. It lit a path that stretched toward us but didn’t quite reach. There was no real warmth from the early-morning sun.
“You stayed all night.” My voice cracked when I spoke. Not because I was struggling to control my emotions—I felt more numb than anything—but because I’d abused it the night before with laughter that had turned into something else. “Did you mean to?”
“I wasn’t going to leave, so yeah, I meant to.”
I’d let so much cold into my room the night before that the air still felt chilly once we were no longer pressed together. I shivered. “You’re going to get in trouble.” I didn’t want Adam to pay for helping me, but even had I been thinking clearly the night before, I still would have gone to him. I’d needed him more than I’d worried about what his dad would do later.
Adam leaned away, not from me but toward my laptop to wake up the screen and check the time. It was still early. Maybe early enough for him to sneak back home—through the front door this time. If he left right then, if he was quiet...but he didn’t get up.
“Is it too late?” I asked.
Adam shook his head. “Probably not.”
“Then you should go.” But I didn’t push him or in any way urge him to move, apart from my words.
We were back in the same position we’d started in the night before. S
itting on the floor against the foot of my bed, shoulder to shoulder, except we weren’t touching. It had been so easy to lean on him in the dark, but I couldn’t shift even an inch to my left that morning.
“Doesn’t matter anyway.” When I looked at him, Adam plucked at the side of his pants. “I didn’t think to grab my keys.”
When he moved, I was able to see him in a way I hadn’t during the night. Adam was wearing a short-sleeve T-shirt and the same red plaid pajama pants he’d worn on his birthday. And he was barefoot. He’d gone out into a blizzard for me with nothing but thin cotton covering him. He’d crawled across an ice-covered wall to reach me. Because I’d needed him. Because I was stupid, so stupid. I hunched into myself as my stomach clenched.
“Hey, hey. It’s all right.” Adam’s hand slid over to grasp mine, to thread our fingers together. “I’m not complaining.”
The thing that broke me, that thawed my numbness, was that he meant it. He’d gladly get in trouble for me, and we both knew he was going to get in some trouble. He wasn’t agitated or mad or anything like that. He was completely relaxed, holding my hand like he didn’t have a care in the world beyond being there with me.
“What you said last night, about me being your favorite person, did you mean it?”
“You know I did.” The answer came so easily to him. He didn’t even think about it. He wasn’t trying to comfort me, keep me from freaking out and running into a blizzard again. He didn’t have to say it again, but he did. I closed my eyes, because he was so bright.
“Sometimes I just think about you and I feel better. I don’t even have to see you or touch you—” Adam squeezed my hand “—and I feel warm. How do you do that?”
“I’m the physical embodiment of Prozac.”
Adam didn’t laugh.
“You’re better than I am.” I forced myself to look at him, letting him look at me. “Your mom, your dad, Jeremy, even Erica knows that. Everyone who knows you loves you. They want you around. They fight over you—you, not what you represent, but you. I never knew Greg, but I know he loved you, too. Because how could he not? How could anyone not?” I pulled my hand free and immediately missed his warmth. I wasn’t to anyone what he was to everyone. The breath I took then was painful, hollow, empty, and cold.
Every Other Weekend Page 33
