by Lexa Hillyer
And that was when Boyd shoved him. Backward, into a wall. Then there were a bunch of people shouting, “Hey, watch it!” and “Whoa!” and stuff like that, and Fred sneers, “Just ’cause you can’t get any Malloy pussy doesn’t mean I can’t get some.”
And then Boyd reared back and punched Fred in the face.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Now everyone was screaming, “Fight!” and Boyd kept apologizing and it was kind of scary because I’d never seen him so out of control before, but I yanked him out of there.
I was like, “Come on, we need to rescue Dar.”
After racing outside and around the house, we finally found where the bathroom was located, and I made Boyd hoist me up. Within a second, I was able to see into the window, and after some wobbling around, I got the window open.
Dar was in there, all right. She was hunched on the floor.
I almost fell into the bushes but finally got inside. Definitely tore up the dress but oh, well. Clearly it was not designed for actual spying activities. I banged my elbow pretty hard on the counter as I fell onto the bathroom floor next to Dar. It is probably going to bruise.
Dar looked up. She seemed half awake, with dark rings of runny makeup around her eyes, her pale blue slip, well, slipping off, and her blond hair in a gross tangle from having been pinned up underneath the wig.
There was barf in the toilet.
Gagging, I flushed and helped her to sit up. I was just relieved she wasn’t passed out. You can choke like that. I ran some water over a washcloth and wiped her face and hands, but she was shaking pretty hard. She seemed so cold and so brittle, like her bones could snap.
Finally I unlocked the door and got her out.
On the other side, Mel was waiting, demanding to know what happened, what happened. But Dar was just shaking her head, sniffling and crying.
Mel says the strangest thing, then. “We should have gone to Kolbry’s party.” As if she’s friends with Jay Kolbry! As if it has literally anything to do with what’s going on with Dar.
But I didn’t have time to ask her why she was being so weird, because then Boyd showed up and picked Dar up like she weighed nothing, which she probably does. Mel said Dusty could drive her home, so we just focused on getting Dar into the pickup truck.
Her mom was a mess when we showed up at Dar’s house—in her pajamas and all worried and shocked. I felt really bad. I mean, more bad for Dar, but also bad for her mom.
Afterward, we were too wound up to just come home, so Boyd suggested we hit the quick mart for some snacks. My stomach felt all twisted up about everything, so I wasn’t sure what to do, I just went along with it. We showed up and sat in the truck in the parking lot for a while and it got really quiet.
Boyd killed the engine and turned to me and suddenly he sounded all serious. “So. Lilly. What do you want?”
It felt weird—like he wasn’t just asking about the snacks.
“What do you want?” I asked, because, stalling like hell.
He rubbed his face like Mom sometimes does when she’s exhausted, and I could see his right knuckles were all bruised from contact with Fred the pervy pirate’s face. Finally he said, “I’m trying to decide.”
The thing is, that was exactly how I felt too. Trying to decide. Do I still like him? Do I want him to kiss me? Does he maybe like me? Was that why we had so much fun running around at Allison Riley’s? Or was Boyd just being Boyd? And there were still answers I didn’t have, like what happened at homecoming. I think I got so nervous my fingertips went numb. I swear he leaned closer, so I did too, and then I did this super-embarrassing thing where I closed my eyes and waited.
Nothing happened.
I heard the truck door opening, and peeled open my eyes.
“Well, you can nap in here if you want,” he said, “but I’m in need of a frozen burrito.”
“Boyd—wait.” I grabbed his hand, which was super weird just then. I dropped it. He was already halfway out of the truck. “You have to tell me something.”
“Okay.” He just stood there, the orange light of the parking lot morphing his face into angles and shadows like a jack-o’-lantern, except more attractive than that.
And then I asked him. “Do you have a crush on my sister?” I needed to know. If that was why he and Kit were alone together that night. If that was why Kit had been so secretive and everything lately.
He paused, and I was worried I did something really wrong, but then he got a little red—which was hard to tell in the orange street lights—and squinted into the distance. “Yeah.” He said it so quietly I almost wasn’t sure. Then he turned toward me again and was like, “Promise not to tell Tessa or Kit what happened tonight.” He rubbed his knuckles.
So I promised I wouldn’t tell them anything.
But, Diary, I never said I wouldn’t write it down.
Chapter Fifteen
Before
THE HALLOWEEN PARTY AT Jay Kolbry’s.
Patrick had gone hoping she’d be there. But she wasn’t. She had mentioned a party. It was the only party he knew about. But either she’d lied, or changed her mind, or he’d gotten the wrong party, or maybe some combination of all three. There’d been a ton of drunk aspiring frat guys, and girls in too much glitter, fangs and wings and all that crap, a roiling sea of sweat and costumes and sticky beer-covered floors, and that constant feeling of being jostled between one person’s shoulder and another’s elbow, occasionally getting whipped in the face by some girl’s long hair.
It’s a way of being: in between. Not moving of your own accord, just letting the tides of all the oblivious assholes—no, not assholes, people . . . people who just don’t care because they have their own shit to worry about—letting them push you along, determining your path for you.
She wasn’t there.
Not that he wanted her to think he was stalking her or anything. But he’d been hoping to see her. And he needed that ring back.
At school, during the week after homecoming, he’d gone up to her about the jacket, asking if she’d happened to find anything in the pockets. She’d shaken her head and said no. He’d believed her, but became more and more distraught the more he thought about it. The ring had definitely been in the top right breast pocket of the jacket when he lent it to her. Had she lost it? Or discovered it and decided to keep it for herself?
So he was no closer to knowing what had happened to the ring, and on top of it, his head ached, even though he’d only drunk about a third of a beer at Kolbry’s—just enough to taste it.
It was Sunday now, and Patrick raked his hand through his hair, trying to focus on the AP U.S. History book open in front of him. It would help if he was actually taking APUSH, but that would mean caring. That would mean college credits, and really, what was the point of college credits if you had no plan to go?
His attic room felt simultaneously drafty and too small, both confined and exposed. October wind rattled the barely insulated windowpane.
He shouldn’t have had that beer at Jay’s before leaving, feeling more alone than ever. He’d worn a stupid, embarrassing skeleton costume he’d paid twelve dollars for at the drugstore. Now it was lying crumpled on the floor at the end of the bed. Everything about this moment in his life was stupid and embarrassing, including that hungry, big nothingness consuming him from the inside—the vague, lurking suspicion that he existed nowhere and belonged nowhere.
The only thing he had to hold on to was his plan.
The only thing he had was escape.
He needed the goddamn ring.
If he hadn’t been such a sentimental loser, he would have already gone through with it, instead of carrying the thing around in his pocket for weeks, mulling it all over.
And then, of course, there was the problem of the sister.
A bell chimed overhead, and Patrick was hit with a pungent wave of sweet, musky, flowery smells. If he’d felt a bit like a creep the time she caught him in the school halls during the dance
, he felt even more out of place now, in the bright-lit doorway of Lupine, where some sort of trendy Top 40 song was playing just slightly too loudly and a couple sets of preteen girls were vigorously moving clothing around on racks like their lives depended on it.
“Can I help you?” a sharp-featured woman behind the counter asked. She looked like she was biting the inside of her mouth, like she thought his walking into this store was a strike against him.
“I’m looking for someone. Lilly?”
The woman rolled her eyes. “She’s helping a customer.” She nodded toward the back of the store, then went back to the book she was reading.
Head down, hands in his pockets, Patrick pushed his way determinedly past a display table and a few racks of sparkly stuff, and halted when he saw Lilly, her red hair tied in a messy bun on top of her head, talking to a younger girl about a pair of jeans.
“That’s the point,” she was saying, her face very serious. “The pockets are supposed to accentuate your butt. It’s an optical illusion.”
The comment threw him off so much, he accidentally laughed.
Lilly looked up and blushed. “Oh. Hey. Can I, um, help you . . . with something? Or something?”
Yes. No. Maybe. “Or something.”
The younger girl who was trying on the jeans looked from Lilly to Patrick and then back to Lilly, before turning around and retreating to her dressing room with raised eyebrows.
Patrick briefly wondered if he’d stepped into some sort of all-female cult lair. Did they practice human sacrifice in a back room? It was possible. At the very least, goats.
Since this deeply awkward silence could in fact be the first step in preparing the victim for the altar, he cleared his throat and added, “I’ve just been thinking that my butt isn’t getting enough attention lately. I was wondering if you could, like, help out with that. Work some sort of optical illusion on me, perhaps.” Stop talking. Enough is enough already. Jesus Christ.
To his slightly mortification-reducing surprise, she laughed. “I’m sure your butt is just fine, if underrecognized by the masses.” She blushed . . . again. “I mean, I’m sure it’s normal. I mean, um—”
“Okay, I get it. I can live in butt obscurity for the rest of my life.”
“Ew,” said the girl who had been trying on jeans and was now standing outside her dressing room in street clothes, holding the jeans in her hands. “I still think they’re too big,” she said, handing the pair to Lilly. “And you,” she said, turning to Patrick, “have a cute ass.”
She walked away and Patrick nearly choked on his own saliva. “Did I just get hit on by a twelve-year-old?”
Lilly shrugged. “Kids these days.”
“I know, right?” This was stupid. What the hell was he doing here? Why did he come? “So, um, you weren’t at Jay’s. Last night. Kolbry. He had a . . . I thought maybe you . . . anyway, but you weren’t.” Since when had he completely lost any capacity for the English language?
“My sister was there,” she said.
“Oh. I didn’t see her there.”
“I went to Allison’s,” she said by way of explanation.
He nodded. “Is she that girl whose mom—”
“Was in a porno? Yeah. I mean, no, it’s not actually true, at least that I know of, it’s just a stupid rumor. But that’s her.”
He nodded and shrugged at the same time, like, All those mom-porn rumors. You know how it is. “So was it fun? I mean the party.”
Unaccountably, she blushed for the third time. “I guess so. It was weird. Actually, no, it was sort of a bad night. My friend got sick, and . . . things just . . . took a turn.”
He nodded again, wondering what else people normally do with their heads, even though he didn’t really know what she was talking about and in fact wasn’t listening, he was just looking at her lips moving and her shoulders shifting slightly. The tiniest wisp of red hair was caught in her lip gloss, though he obviously didn’t do anything about it other than stare at it. This was the most she’d said to him, since, well, ever, and he was not about to break the spell.
“Lilly, you’re needed at the front,” an annoyed-sounding voice called.
“Your boss?”
Lilly rolled her eyes. “Yeah, sorry, I’ll be right back.”
“No worries, I’ll just be, um, checking out these—” He grasped for the item hanging closest to him and came away with a big billowy silky thing. “These, um . . .”
“Scarves,” she said with a smile, and then she ducked behind a rack and was gone.
A moment passed, him just standing there with the scarf sagging in his hand, and then . . .
Before he had the chance to doubt himself, he was in the back room on his hands and knees.
Somehow it seemed less uncomfortable than simply asking her about the ring.
And besides, he reasoned, if she knew where it was, she’d probably have looked guilty when he asked. If it had fallen out of the jacket pocket, which maybe it had, there were only so many places it could have gone, and one of those places, he figured, was wherever the staff kept their outerwear.
Hence: the staff room.
The room was easy to find. There was a narrow hallway at the back of the shop, containing a couple of clearly marked dressing rooms, a bathroom, an unmarked door, and then, at the end of the hall, a fire exit. He made an easy guess and pushed on the unmarked door. It wasn’t locked, so . . . he went right in.
Let’s be honest. This wasn’t his first break-in.
The room was small, like a little office, with a window overlooking a parking lot. He scanned closely, looking for signs. An L-shaped bench lined the near wall, covered in bright cushions. A coffee maker sat on a desk in one corner. Some bags had been left on the floor. No goat or human sacrificial altars to be seen.
After tossing aside several pillows from the bench, he got down to crawl beneath it.
Soon he was on the verge of giving up. This was silly.
Except there was a glint of silver in the floor vent.
He reached for it and the object—what looked like it could be a nickel, fell deeper into the vent. Shit. It was still visible, but barely. He got up and grabbed a paper clip off the top of the desk, then used it to gingerly scoop out the object, which took several tries, and he began to curse, but then finally it popped up and out, and in fact turned out not to be a nickel but, as he’d hoped, the sapphire-and-diamond ring.
Patrick experienced a surge of giddiness.
Once, his grandfather had given him a fishing pole and he’d lost it in a deep river near where they used to live in Illinois, within just ten minutes of getting on the boat. In early spring, the current was fierce. Still, he’d borrowed a pair of old work goggles from his uncle’s shed and swum for a full hour (the goggles filling up uncomfortably with silty, mineral-laden river water), diving and surfacing, diving and surfacing, until finally, unbelievably, breathless and aching, he’d found the lost pole.
He’d never forget his desperation the moment the pole fell from the boat—the deep shame that had flooded his veins, even as a ten-year-old kid. How he’d felt he had to make things right, to prove that he was worth the price, worth the fishing trip, worth keeping.
Before he died, Patrick’s grandfather had been the person he’d cared most about impressing. They’d had a bond—even his mom, who hardly paid attention to anything, had known it, and tried as much as possible to arrange for them to spend time together.
Once, about four years later, Patrick could swear he had seen his grandfather’s ghost. It had been back in the apartment in Chicago. Their heat had gone out, and his mom had sent him down to the basement of the building to check on the boiler—was it that, or were they simply behind on their bills? In any case, in the basement, his grandfather had emerged from behind the mildewed staircase, stepping straight into the beam of Patrick’s flashlight. “You’re one determined son of a bitch,” he’d said, exactly like he’d said it the day Patrick rescued his fishing pole
from the bottom of the river, with a pleased grin stretching his wrinkled, freckled face.
He could swear his grandfather would be smiling now too, if he were alive.
Hearing the doorknob turn, Patrick stood up quickly, shoved the ring into his jeans pocket, and turned around.
“What are you doing?” Lilly asked, her arms folded across her chest.
“Investigating.” He smiled.
He’d been caught. He should apologize, explain himself. But he was too happy to pretend otherwise.
She squinted at him. “What, are you interested in working here or something? Because I wouldn’t have pegged you as a fashion type. No offense.”
He shrugged. “Wouldn’t be that bad. Working here. If you were working here too. Which you are.” He put out his hands, palms open. “And I didn’t steal anything. If that’s what you’re thinking. I’m not really into scarves and stuff.”
“You’re weird.”
He shrugged. “So are you.”
“Hey!”
“Sorry.”
“I don’t think I’m weird. I’m extremely normal.”
“Is there such a thing?” he asked.
“What, normal? I don’t know, yes? Anyway, you’re distracting me.”
“Am I?”
She nodded, a stray lock of hair slipping into her face. “From finding out what you were doing here in the staff room while I was out in the front being normal.”
He thought quickly. “Waiting,” he blurted out. “For, um, you.”
She rolled her eyes.
“You know,” he went on, feeling more and more like an idiot by the second. “Mood lighting.” He gestured around the small space.
She studied him. “How come you said no to my friend Mel?”
“Mel? What?”
She sighed. “That first week of school. I asked you if you were interested in going out with her. You barely knew—barely know—her. Or any of us. So why did you say no?”
How could he explain he never meant to stick around—still didn’t? Now that he had the ring, he could kick it out of town any day now.
How could he explain, on top of it, that he had a policy of not dating the friends of girls as pretty, and thinks-she’s-normal-but-is-definitely-weird, as Lilly?
