by Jen Klein
I remember the moment Milo asked me to hold still so he could take the photo. I remember how he traced his fingertip across me, how I felt the light burn it trailed across my skin. Now that he’s captured that moment and put it here for everyone to see, I can read the message he hid away in plain sight. There it is, superimposed over the photograph in glowing blue letters:
I want to kiss you.
Right out here in front of everyone, except I’m the only one who knows it’s a message for me and me alone. A message that Milo’s been trying to tell me all summer and that I’ve been doing everything in my power to pretend doesn’t exist. To pretend that I am not also hiding. My gaze drops to the title card below the photograph.
Hidden Message.
Of course.
I’m standing there, shattered by the knowledge of how he feels and the courage it took to put it out there like this, when suddenly familiar hands slip onto my waist from behind. A familiar voice speaks into my ear. “Hey.”
I turn, finding myself—as I knew I would—standing in the protective circle of Tuck’s arms. He’s gazing down at me, all handsome face and white-teeth smile. “I wanted to see you before the show.”
I swallow, unable to move. I’m not sure where I would go, anyway.
I hear Ella’s voice. It’s loud and strained, coming from somewhere nearby. “I think she might have gone to her car. Maybe we should go check—”
And Tuck’s mouth lands on my own. His lips are warm and his breath smells like coffee. It happens so fast that I don’t have a chance to respond before it’s over, before he’s pulling back, smiling down at me, turning us both to greet Ella, who is standing at the other end of the wall…
Next to Milo.
Tuck keeps one arm slung casually across my shoulders, which—even though I’m horrified—makes me mildly grateful because it stabilizes me. With Tuck holding me, there’s less of a chance I’ll fall over.
Although now that I think of it, if the wooden floor wanted to open beneath me and swallow me in a single gulp, maybe that wouldn’t be so terrible. Because then Milo wouldn’t be staring at me the way he is.
Surprised.
Confused.
Devastated.
Extricating myself from Tuck and Milo and everything awkward is a blur, but I’m pretty sure Ella is the one who makes it happen. All I know is that somehow I end up in the passenger seat of my car, with Ella driving us up the road to Olympus. “I can’t go on,” I tell her as she pulls into the parking lot. “I don’t want to do the show tonight.”
“You have to. It’s your job.”
“I feel sick.”
“No, you don’t.” Ella cuts the engine and turns to look at me. “You’re not sick. You’re just messed up about boys.”
“I’m too messed up,” I tell her. “People as messed up as me shouldn’t be in front of other people.”
“Please.” Ella rolls her eyes. “Have you ever read a trashy magazine? People way more messed up than you are on display all the time, so pull it together. You have two boys who like you. I’m having a difficult time feeling sympathetic.”
“I hate you,” I tell her.
“I hate you too.” She opens her door. “Come on. Let’s go. It’ll be fine.”
•••
It’s not fine. It’s a disaster. When we all come out in our white chorus robes, Milo refuses to meet my eyes. During the woodland-creature scene, he doesn’t meet me in the middle of the stage. When I start toward him in the way I’ve been doing all summer, he changes course and flaps in another direction. I follow, but again he moves away, and because I can’t exactly play this game of tag in front of an audience, I eventually stop and stand around by myself. The saddest rabbit in the world.
Tuck has the exact opposite reaction, which I guess I should have expected. He does nothing but pay attention to me. When Aphrodite offers him the most beautiful woman on earth, he first looks at me before giving his dramatic agreement. Later, when he’s sailing to Greece, he gazes directly into my eyes the entire time that I’m helping the other cast members pull the Aegean Sea across the stage. I guess this is what I had hoped for when I originally imagined the summer, but now that we’re here, it’s terrible.
It’s also a little bit ridiculous.
Is this how the theater kids show their love?
Jesus.
I finally corner Milo when everyone’s exited the stage after our final bow. I wouldn’t have even managed to make that happen except that I don’t get changed first, like we’re supposed to. I just march straight back to the boys’ dressing room and wait outside. Milo flies out of it within moments, which I know means I wouldn’t have caught him had I not come straight here. He shakes his head when he sees me. “This is not a thing we do, okay? This is not our tradition, where you suck and then ambush me to try to explain why you don’t suck.”
“Fine, I suck,” I tell him, except that it immediately rubs me the wrong way. Maybe I’ve been confused, but that doesn’t make me suck. “You could have told me, you know that?”
“Told you what?” Milo’s eyes are darker than usual. “Told you to stop using me? Maybe thanked you for making me your truck stop on the way to Tuck Town?”
“Gross, that’s not a thing. Tuck Town is not a thing.” Speaking of which, the absolute last thing I want is for Tuck to come out and see us fighting about him. “Milo, can we go somewhere else and talk?”
“No.” He folds his arms, glaring down at me. “I’m not mad that you like him. You’re allowed to like whoever you want. What sucks is that at the beginning, I thought I was reading the signs wrong. That there were hidden codes, that still waters run deep and all that bullshit.” A short, harsh laugh escapes his lips. “Nope. Nothing hidden. Everything about you was in plain sight all along. You pulled strings to get here, you didn’t know what you were doing, you didn’t give a crap about any of it.”
“Yes I did!” Right now, I give a crap so hard it hurts. “I got confused. I don’t even want to be with Tuck.”
“Congratulations.” Milo’s smile is brittle. “How lovely for him. We are two lucky guys.”
“If you had told me how you felt—”
“What.” He interrupts me, taking a step backward. “We could have screwed around a couple times? Hooked up at a party or two? I’ve done that, Rainie. I always do that. This time I wasn’t going to. This time I was going to wait—” He stops. Glaring at me. “Do you even get how cliché you are? Chasing the lead. It’s just so…obvious.”
Of course it is.
Because that’s me.
Obvious and uninteresting.
Like always.
I watch Milo stalk away onto the trail, and then, as Tuck comes out of the dressing room and swings his head in my direction, I duck back onto the deck. I lose myself in the crowd, circling back behind the railing to the trees beyond. Waiting there in the darkness alone until Ella texts, asking where the hell I am.
•••
I don’t think I sleep at all, at least during the night; I’m still awake when the sun rises. But I must fall asleep at some point after that, because when I wake up, Ella’s gone and the wall clock says it’s midafternoon. I hear murmurs, so I stumble into the living room to find Ella and Annette sitting on the couch together. Ella flutters her hands at me. Her fingernails have been newly painted a sunny yellow. “Annette did my left hand,” she tells me.
“Ella did mine.” Annette shows me her fingers, which match Ella’s.
Ella hops off the couch and walks over to me. “Get dressed,” she orders. “I want to show you something.”
“Is it the entrance to hell?” I ask her. “Because I’ve already seen that. It’s my life now.”
“God, overdramatic much?” She rolls her eyes. “What are you, a theater kid or something?”
Thirty minutes later, Ella is leading me down Nine Muses. “Annette quit Bel Giardino,” she says as we walk past McKay’s green awning. “She already turned in her apron, and
the only thing she has to do now is pick up her paycheck. The campus librarian offered her a job and she’s taking it. She won’t make as much money, but it’ll be more conducive to getting good grades.”
“And less conducive to needing rescue from parties?”
“Yeah.” Ella shakes her head. “I think she just went bananas for a while. People do that sometimes, you know? I think my mom did, back when everything happened with her and Dad.”
I nod. Maybe that’s what I did this summer.
Maybe I’m still doing it.
I give Ella a tiny nudge. “Better hope the bananas aren’t a genetic thing.”
“Yeah, right?” We go past a parking lot and an art store before Ella takes my elbow. “This way.” She pulls me toward the mouth of an alley, right off the sidewalk.
“Um…” I let her guide me past a rusty blue dumpster that lists to one side. “Is this safe?”
“It’s Olympus,” she tells me. “Everything here is safe.”
Not in my experience.
We walk past a fire escape, stepping over an old blanket and someone’s fast-food remnants before Ella pulls me to a stop. “Behold.” She sets her hands on my shoulders and turns me ninety degrees. “The best graffiti in all of Olympus.”
I look up at the wall. There, spray-painted across the bricks in giant red letters, are four words:
HAROLD, I’M NOT PREGNANT.
Below them, there’s a huge happy face.
I stare at the message for a long moment—at the blatant, basic, obvious nature of the message—and then I burst out laughing. Ella joins me. I raise my arms in a gesture of appreciation. “That…is brilliant.”
“Says it all, doesn’t it?”
“It certainly tells a story.”
“Nothing confusing.” Ella turns back to me. “And speaking of which, I need to clear up some potential confusion about Milo.” She tilts her head, gazing into my eyes. “You don’t need my permission to be with him. But just so you know, you have it.”
“Thanks.” My smile must look as sad on the outside as it feels on the inside. “But I think that train has left the station.”
“Trains can’t leave unless someone is driving them.” Ella makes a motion like she’s pulling a horn. “Toot toot.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” I tell her.
“I know.” She offers me a half grin. “I thought I’d try.”
“Thanks.”
•••
Ella stays at the apartment while I go to Bel Giardino. She says she’s afraid she’ll stab Vic with a steak knife. I agree it’s better for everyone concerned if I go alone. A light sprinkle of rain starts as I pull past the restaurant and into the gravel parking lot behind it. On weekdays Bel Giardino closes between lunch and dinner, and right now it’s not open yet for the evening.
When I trot up the back steps, Cute Cory is just opening the adjacent wide double doors that lead to a covered metal ramp. I wave at him and—after a second of recognition—he beckons to me. Rain mists onto my face as I make my way to him. “Annette’s friend, right?”
“Yeah. I need to pick up her paycheck.”
“I can get it for you,” he says. “How is she?”
“Good,” I tell him. “She’s got a cool new job at the library.”
“Awesome.” Cory’s smile widens. “I’ll go see her when school starts.”
“You should do that.” I watch him head into the restaurant, then turn back to watch the rain spatter across my car. Not enough water to clean it, not enough to cancel the show. Only enough to make things damp and uncomfortable.
A moment later there’s a scraping on the metal ramp behind me. I look back to find not Cute Cory but Vic. He’s holding an envelope with Annette’s name scribbled across it. My immediate surge of contempt must be visible, because he looks properly cowed. “You think I’m a jerk.”
“Only because you are a jerk,” I tell him.
“Maybe you’re too young to get it.” Vic looks thoughtful. “Maybe Annette’s even too young. But it was actually better that it happened like this. No long, drawn-out conversations. No waiting around for the ax to fall. No one got really hurt, you know?”
I stare at him. “Annette got hurt.” I leave out the end of the sentence: you dumb shit.
“I know, but she’s the victim. In a way, that’s easier for her. She’s free. I’m the one who has to live with what we did. She gets to go on with her life.” He peers down at me. “You want to know a secret?”
“Not particularly.” But because he’s still holding Annette’s paycheck, I fold my arms and wait.
“You’re still young enough to think you’ll have all the answers someday.” Vic shakes his head. “Here’s the secret: you won’t. There’s no magical age when you understand everything. Don’t expect magic. There isn’t any.”
“Thanks.” I reach out and pluck the envelope from his hand. “You’re a lying cheater and a philosopher. Your fiancée is a lucky woman.”
I turn and walk away from Vic, down the ramp and into the mist. Although—no doubt about it—he’s a disgusting toad, I’m reminded of the thing Milo always said. Villains don’t know they’re villains. So even though this guy—this shitty college-town assistant restaurant manager who screwed over two women—even though he is the villain in the story of my summer, he doesn’t get it. He can’t possibly.
But as I pull my seat belt over my body and click it into place, another thought crosses my mind. Milo also said that villains have one redeeming quality. Maybe Vic’s redeeming quality is a secret he told me. Not the message he thought he was giving me, but rather something he said earlier in the conversation. Something about victims. Something about freedom.
•••
I’m back with just enough time to pick up Ella from our apartment and drive to the theater. When we arrive in the parking lot, I don’t open my door. She’s digging through her purse for something but stops when she realizes I’m looking at her. “What?”
“Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For all the things. For the summer.”
“Whatever, you weirdo.” But she’s smiling. “You’re welcome.”
I swing from the car and put my plan into motion. The plan I came up with in the last hour, that is.
Ella and I walk down the long cement stairs of the theater, past the rows and rows of aluminum bench seats. We take the dirt pathway to the backstage area, where Ella heads for the dressing room. “I’m going to grab a grilled cheese,” I call after her, but then I keep standing there, watching her walk away. If nothing else, I think I got my friend Ella back this summer. That’s pretty cool.
I turn and head down the wooden deck, which is not empty but not yet crowded with people. I stop at the corkboard, where a new poster hangs for the night, and scribble a quick happy birthday to Bianca. I take a few steps away, then stop and go back, grabbing the marker again to add a word to my greeting: sexy. If Gretchen can endeavor to make everyone feel good about themselves, why can’t I?
From the kitchen comes the greasy smell of grilled cheese. I head in that direction but pass right by it. I turn at the boys’ dressing room, shift onto the trail by the side of the theater, and walk all the way back up to the parking lot. Thankfully, I don’t pass either Tuck or Milo before I can reach my car, turn off my phone, and drive away.
On my way back to the apartment, I stop by the 7-Eleven so I can stock Annette’s freezer with three cartons of strawberry ice cream and the refrigerator with a dozen strawberry yogurts. I pack up the contents of my side of the bedroom and my bathroom shelf and then make four trips down to my car with duffel bags and suitcases. I put the rest of my cash on Ella’s pillow—it’s more than enough to cover my portion of the rent and the last power bill—and slide the apartment key off my key chain. The last thing I do is set it on the coffee table alongside my bottle of bright blue nail polish. Then I open the front door, turn the lock on the knob, and pull it closed behind me.
Down in my car, I finally turn my phone back on. Predictably, there are several texts from Ella, two from Tuck, and a missed phone call from the production office. But I’m only returning one of the messages tonight, and that’s because I know where the recipient will be at this moment: in a Grecian garden, kissing Gretchen. I plug my headset into my phone so I can talk while I drive.
“You were right,” I tell Tuck’s voice mail as I wind out of Olympus. “You said this summer would be a risk, and it was. Everything: the show, living with Ella, you. But I’m done now. You are so cute and so nice and I know I am chickenshit to be doing this over the phone, but I don’t think we’re a thing. And I don’t want to go back to Dobbs pretending that we are. I came here because of your monologue. Which was awesome, by the way, and totally changed my life…” I pause, trying to figure out what I need to say to him. “But it was the words that made me come, not really you. So thank you for saying those words.” I take the turn onto the road heading out of town. I’m really doing this. My thumb is almost to the button when I pause. I leave a final comment. “Sorry again.”
I hang up my phone and turn up my music. It’s hard to drive down a mountain at night while you’re blinded by tears, but—somehow—I manage to do it.
•••
A rapping sound awakens me. I straighten in my seat and gingerly try to tilt my head upright with my eyes still closed. It’s tough because I’ve apparently acquired the world’s sharpest neck crick during the few hours I’ve been sleeping here. I yawn and stretch my arms forward, accidentally hitting the center of my steering wheel. The loud horn blast startles my body upright and my eyes open. I shake my head, blearily focusing on the source of the sound.
It’s Marin. She’s standing by the side of my car—which is right where I parked it, at the curb in front of her house—and staring at me. I open my door. “Hi.”
“What are you doing?” Marin’s wearing tight orange running gear and a headband. “Have you been here all night?”
“No.” I roll my neck and dig my fingers into the side of it, trying to work out the kinks. “I drove around Dobbs until I was almost out of gas.”
