“But that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. I don’t want this to be a secret. I want you to meet my parents.”
“I’ve already met your parents. Literally dozens of times.” In the mirror, I watched as Paisley surgically ran the nail of her pinky finger over the outline of her lips, perfecting the line of gloss.
My own fingers hovered over the keyboard, unmoving. I was listening closely.
“You know what I mean. I want you to remeet them. Like this,” Ava said, a cloying note running underneath her words.
A shuffle of movement that I couldn’t catch. Then Paisley—“Just keep your mouth shut or there won’t be any of this to tell about. Have I made myself clear this time?”
I listened to clicking footsteps, followed by the sound of air whooshing through an open door.
The laptop was warm against my thighs. I checked the time on the bottom corner of the screen. Third period was nearly over. After drama, I hadn’t felt like going to my next class.
Lately, I’d been feeling restless, a side effect of a growing sense of boredom that had been soaking through the crevices of my brain tissue, turning it into a sponge of soggy, mindless nothing. There was class, there was home, there were a couple of hours lost in the theater controlling the lights and the cameras and the sound equipment, and then it all repeated.
For a brief period after my mom died, a doctor had prescribed me antidepressant pills to help with my anxiety. A cloud spread over me in those months. I felt the world running into itself. The days, my surroundings, people, they were all blending into one another like watercolors on a wet page.
That was when I started collecting secrets as a way to pass the time, as a way to keep myself awake.
I wasn’t taking the medicine anymore, but I’d been feeling it again, the soaking through of color as it began to bleed off the paper until everything left over was muted and dull.
Except for Chris. Chris, I had to admit, was unexpected. He woke me up, too. Chris Autry was in Technicolor.
So I had walked to the door of my third-period classroom and stared at it while the other students rushed in and out without paying any attention to me.
Class, home, theater, repeat. Class, home, theater, repeat. I felt the monotony pulling me in, and I didn’t want to let it.
Outside the bathroom stall, I heard sniffling and a choked hiccup. I had heard enough bathroom crying to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool. The clock on the screen told me it was time to go, so I packed up my belongings, slid open the lock, and stepped out of the stall.
Ava spun, pressing her back to the counter. Mascara streaked the unnaturally tanned skin under her eyes. Honestly, if there was one thing I’d learned from eavesdropping at this school, it was that girls should wear waterproof eye makeup at all times. I should really write a handbook.
“You heard all that?” she said, accusingly, as if I’d asked for them to come in and start spilling their deepest, darkest secrets.
I nodded.
Her mouth screwed sideways. She turned back to the mirror and twisted the handle on the faucet. I never liked the smell of the water at school. It had too much sulfur in it and smelled vaguely of rotten eggs. She splashed it over her face.
“It’s not what it sounds like.” She wiped the back of her wrist under her nose.
“It sounds like you’re hooking up with Paisley,” I said.
“It’s not just that.” Ava cut me a look through the mirror. “She cares about me,” she snapped. “Shit.” Ava rested her palms on the counter and lowered her head. “I shouldn’t have said that. Shit.” She put her fist to her forehead and shook her head fiercely. “She’s my first girlfriend.” From her comment, it wasn’t clear whether she’d ever had a boyfriend before. I didn’t care one way or another. If anyone ever bothered to ask me, I’d say that I likely preferred girls—but only slightly—over boys. I assumed that was subject to change because, in reality, I’d never felt strongly driven toward a physical relationship the way other kids my age seemed to be. At times, it made me feel even more on the outside. Others, it made me feel as if I were the only one in the place who was actually thinking clearly.
With the makeup washed off, Ava’s cheeks were a splotchy red. “You’re not going to tell anyone, are you?”
I studied Ava. Her eyes pleaded with me. I was already mentally calculating how much I could take her for—one hundred dollars? Two hundred? My dad was terrible with money. I’d been paying my own bills and purchasing my own clothes since practically the week after Mom died.
By tomorrow Ava would pretend not to know who I was in the halls. She would pretend and then she would forget. They all did. But I had a code. Everyone had to have a code. Part of mine was that I didn’t out people.
I shifted my bag to my other shoulder. The laptop inside it was old and clunky. “I won’t tell anyone that you are hooking up with Paisley,” I said with no inflection. Because even with a code, it was important to leave loopholes.
She ran a damp hand over the back of her neck and sighed. “Oh my god, thank you. She’d kill me. And I like her so much. You do not understand. I just…” She sniffled and trailed off.
I watched the way the emotion played on her face as though someone were plucking the strings that controlled her expressions—a symphony of feeling—and for a split second, a pang of longing inside me thrummed in chorus with hers.
Then, before she could take notice, I disappeared into the hallway.
Inside the classroom, my third-period teacher asked where I’d been. I told her I’d gone to the bathroom, which was true, and so she didn’t even mark me absent. It was an old trick of mine, almost comical how often it worked.
During the last few minutes of class, I recorded Paisley and Ava’s relationship in the ledger of my notebook, another entry for the collection. The day was already off to a productive start.
Next up was slipping the computer back into the library, while making a note of the password of the previous user who’d forgotten to log off. He had a subscription to Sports Illustrated online and that was the sort of thing that could be valuable if you knew the right buyers. I ticked through the usual markers of my day and then it was lunch and Chris Autry stood at the bottom of the ladder that rose into the rafters.
“I thought I might find you here.”
I hadn’t expected to see him here, and, again, I felt parts of me light up, flickering to life. My fingers, the tip of my nose, the spot underneath my belly button, my heart all sparked with feeling.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, instinctively glancing over my shoulder, as though he might be speaking to someone else.
He lifted an eyebrow. “I … thought I might join you for lunch?” Chris bit his lip and looked hopeful. “The alternative is that I can do that cliché new-kid thing where I sit with my tray in an empty bathroom stall and stare at my watch until the end of the period in which case, can you please direct me to the nearest men’s room because I want to make sure to get a good spot.”
My cheeks tightened with the barest hint of a smile. He was back. He’d spent time with me and still wanted to spend more. Inside, it felt as though someone was resetting the circuit breaker. “Follow me.”
Once we were twenty feet up in the air, Chris balanced a lunch tray on his lap.
“So how bad was I in that audition?” he asked between bites of pepperoni pizza. His legs swung from a platform in the theater rafters.
I kicked my boots in the air and nibbled a Dorito. “It was cute.” I winced because that wasn’t what I’d meant. “It was funny, I mean. Very contrite.” I lifted my eyes to see that he was watching me intently. He wasn’t on his phone or half-listening between snippets of conversation with someone else. I was conscious of the warmth of his leg close to mine, the way that another person beside me created a gravitational pull that anchored me in place. I’d forgotten whether I’d ever known what this could feel like.
He bobbed his head back and forth. “Okay, ok
ay, good enough.” He took another bite and wrinkled his nose, picking off the crust and examining a couple of flakes of it on his finger. He shook his head as if it didn’t pass inspection. “So, what’s the deal with this place, aside from having, you know, the worst-tasting pizza ever?”
“The auditorium?” I asked.
“No, Hollow Pines. This high school. All of it.”
“I don’t know.” My voice got raspy when I was uneasy. “It’s not my kind of people, I guess.”
“And by that you mean…?”
My lip curled. “We’re not into the same things.” I stiffened, sensing a trap. “I’m not weird,” I added quickly.
Chris held out his palms, while taking a napkin to his fingertips. “Whoa, I didn’t say you were.”
“Right, sorry.”
His hand touched my shoulder. I absolutely knew that I couldn’t recall the last time someone had touched me like that in person. Maybe Marcy but even that was different, hungrier. “So,” he eased his hand away. I felt the cells that made up the skin that he’d touched buzzing. “So, what are you into then?”
I stared down at the black stage and kicked my heels together. If I stared down at too stark of an angle, the view could make me dizzy. “Different stuff,” I said. “Making videos, editing them. Greek mythology, too.” I snuck a glance at him. He was still listening with the same focused interest. “There’s this one spirit I’ve been researching actually,” I continued, testing. “Or, could be spirits, depending on which texts you read. They scratched people’s hearts out and drank their blood.” I grinned, but then just as quickly wiped it from my face because I wasn’t sure it was a normal thing to be so enthusiastic over. “Anyway, nobody likes that kind of stuff around here, though, I don’t think.”
Chris choked on a sip from a water bottle. “Appetizing.”
I blinked. “Actually, they thought so—Keres—the spirit. She ate the hearts of soldiers that had fallen on the battlefield.”
“Whoa,” he drew the word long with his breath. “Cool.” There was a pause that I didn’t know how to fill, but I was already making plans to show him my drawings and tell him about other mythology that was even more disgusting. He pushed the leftovers from his lunch to the side. “But, the thing is, Lena, I kind of have to find a way to like it here. At least well enough to get by for a time.” He curled his fingers around the cuffs of his shirt and tugged down the sleeves. “Because Hollow Pines is a whole lot better than the alternative for me.”
“Which is?” I asked.
“Military school.” He let out a long sigh. “That’s where my dad’s sending me if I get in trouble again. Not even trouble. If I so much as step out of line. I never have looked good in cargo pants.”
A short puff of laughter escaped. “And if you don’t get into trouble?”
“I’ll stick around here for a while and, eventually, maybe if I’m lucky, my dad will forgive me, and I’ll be allowed to live back in New York.”
My stomach squeezed at the thought of him going anywhere.
“And that’s what you want?” I asked.
“It’s where everything I want to do is.” He shrugged as if it didn’t really matter to him, but the expression on his face read differently. It, too, was a symphony of feeling, and it stamped another imprint of longing somewhere in the deepest burrow of my body. “I want to be able to get takeout at midnight, watch the Christmas lights in the Time Warner Center, take in a matinee at Union Square.” He blushed and shook his head. “Here’s nice, too, though. My parents think I’ll be more grounded around regular old American folk.” He put on a Southern drawl. It was terrible.
“It’s not as regular around here as you think.”
After a time, Chris stacked the napkins, water bottle, and pizza crust on the tray and stood up. “I suppose we should be descending to earth soon, huh?” He clutched the beam of wood that formed a crude rail around the platform. He pressed his chest to the wood and peered over. “Do heights ever just make you want to jump?” he mused.
The blood in my veins went stagnant. Right away, my throat constricted, stuffy, suffocating. A high-pitched ringing began in my ears. I quickly scrambled to my feet, unable to stop the rush of panic that was causing the chips I’d eaten to lurch up from my gut and wedge against my tonsils. My vision swam so that I was half seeing Chris standing in front of me and half seeing a vision of my mother, her icy hands clawing at nothing, the fall a heaving sensation pulling at my own stomach. I reached for the back of his shirt and twisted the fabric around my hand, yanking him too roughly away from the rafter’s edge. “Don’t,” I gasped. “Don’t…” I was recovering my sight and seeing Chris, his mouth open, gaping at me. “Don’t say that,” I said. “Don’t ever—” My eyes were still wide. The wooden deck swayed beneath us. Blood pounded my eardrums and then my breath was coming back. My chest rose and fell with oxygen. In and out.
“Lena, Lena, relax.” Both of his hands wrapped around my shoulders. My stare was still trained over the ledge. “I wasn’t going to jump,” he was saying. “I was just thinking out loud. I was just—”
He came back into focus in bits and pieces like a puzzle coming together. We both bent our knees to keep balanced and in the sliver of space between us, I saw my haunted eyes reflecting back in his pupils.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “That was … dumb.” I shuddered underneath his palms. I had been cracked open in front of him. I knew he’d seen something there that I hadn’t let anyone else see in this school and he was still holding on to me. He laughed, but not one that made me think he didn’t understand or care that his comment had shaken me. “You know one thing’s for sure,” he said. “I have never apologized more than since I moved to this town.”
I swallowed and tilted my chin up. “You never have to apologize to me,” I said.
I’d never seen someone whose whole face could smile and not just their mouth, but Chris’s could. “And see?” he said. “That’s exactly why you’re my best friend at this school.”
* * *
I HAD A friend. A real, live friend. And he wasn’t weird or locked up in an insane asylum. He hung out with me in public—or at least sort of in public. Public enough.
I was lying on the foot of my bed, staring at the contact saved in my phone. Chris Autry. He had given it to me without me even needing to ask, and I liked the look of it there.
I twirled my ankles, cracking them. My stockinged feet cooled under the fan’s breeze. What did normal people do with friends? I wondered. Were secret handshakes still a thing? Matching bracelets?
Not for a boy, surely.
I felt a flutter under my rib cage when I thought of Chris, like the wings of a bird nesting in my chest. I liked how I could recall the way that, after he ran his fingers through it, his dark hair stuck up like the top swirl of a soft-serve ice cream cone before it slowly fell flat. I liked that I could remember that one of his front teeth had a chip in the corner and that he kept a folded-up paperback in his pocket.
When I got home from school, I watched myself in the mirror as I thought about him and—guess what?—my face woke up, too.
He was a real person. And that meant we got to be real friends. And—
A fist thudded on the other side of my bedroom door, and I immediately felt myself resenting the intrusion.
“Come in.” I crawled off my belly and smoothed the pleats of my skirt over my knees.
I was relieved to see it was my dad and not Misty. He glanced around my room—at the purple sheet over the lamp, mythology textbooks on the floor, an Audition movie poster peeling from the wall—and frowned.
“Mind if I hang for a while?” he asked. His work boot felt too heavy for the carpet as he took a step inside.
I watched him carefully as he crossed the room. I scooted over to make room. “No.”
Internal alarm bells pinged. My dad and I didn’t hang. We coexisted.
He rubbed the palms of his hands over his kneecaps. “Lena, I’m af
raid I have to tell you something.” I swallowed down a glob of spit that immediately turned hard in my stomach. He was sick. He had cancer. He was dying. I was going to be an orphan. “I got laid off a few days ago from my job.”
I nodded, not knowing what this meant but wanting to seem okay for him. “Why would they do that to you?” I asked, picking at dead skin on the side of my thumbnail.
He cleared his throat. “Corporate stuff. A lot of bureaucracy.” He waved his hand. “You wouldn’t understand.”
But I recognized the sour hint of alcohol on his breath and thought that maybe I would.
I’d have to be even more frugal with my money. I knew what it was to have my stomach turn so acidic that it burned because it didn’t have anything left to digest. The last time I got a regular job down at the tattoo parlor, Dad thought I was accusing him of not supporting our family. He was drunk and threw a plate at a wall. The parlor owner offered to loan me money, but that was part of my code, too. I didn’t take handouts.
“Listen,” he said. “Misty’s going to be moving in for good.” He rubbed his nose with the back of his hand.
My fingers dug into the bedspread.
“What!” I shrieked. “No!” I pushed to my knees.
“Lena.” He shook his head. “Don’t be like that. This is a good thing. You like Misty.” I jerked compulsively. “She has a steady job. She’s going to help us make rent.”
“She can’t.” I was off the bed, staring at him, dumbstruck.
“Relax, I know what you’re thinking, and that’s why I told Misty that I should be the one to talk to you first. Alone. But nobody is trying to replace your mother.”
Your mother, he said. Your mother. It was as if he was trying to deny any ownership of her at all. My fingernails dug into my legs.
“That wasn’t even what I was thinking,” I bit back. And it wasn’t. What I was thinking was about Misty and how every time she looked at me I saw her mentally assigning where she would have stood in relation to me in the social pecking order if we’d attended high school at the same time. I saw her categorizing me as “weird” and a “loser” and didn’t my dad realize I got enough of that during school hours not to want to bring it home, too?
Teen Phantom Page 4
