by Kit Frick
“That’s really low,” I’d said.
Ret tossed back her hair. “The split was my dad’s fault, one hundred percent. But he wasn’t around, so I needed to take it out on someone. I was ten, sue me. Who’s next?”
Jenni and I balked, but Ret played hurt. She’d gone first after all, now we had to do it. Didn’t we trust her?
Jenni told a story from elementary school, how she’d gotten some kid—a nose-picker, an easy target—in trouble for something she’d done. It was bad, but not as bad as mine. I’d written my real feelings about Jenni: that I thought she tried too hard, how I put up with her for Ret’s sake.
I refused to read it, choosing Ret’s ridicule and Jenni’s scorn over the alternative. But somehow, Jenni knew. Whatever I’d written, she knew it was about her. The damage was done.
“I can’t,” I say to Ret, her expectant face drawing me back into the present. “Not today.” It’s tempting, but I’m not ready for whatever she wants to talk about. For whatever game she’s playing.
She’s quiet for a moment, shifting her bag against her shoulder and studying my face. “Okay, Ellory,” she says finally. “Some other time then. I’m there most days after school. Come find me.” Without waiting for my response, she takes off toward the nearest stairwell. I watch her retreat down the hall, her hair fluttering against the back of her neck in a fan of black and pink.
Alone again, I slump against the wall and close my eyes. I can feel my muscles let go, my body sliding down the cool paint like a marionette clipped from its strings. Somewhere down the hall, I hear a boy’s voice shout, “Better keep it together, Holland!” followed by a chorus of giggles and slamming locker doors. When the laughter dies down, I can almost swear I hear a softer voice say, “Leave her alone,” but that might be wishful thinking.
From the instant I saw her in class on the first day back, I knew. She could sense the cracks in my resolve. She knew I still needed her, after everything. Come find me. The echo of her words in my ears starts as an invitation that swiftly becomes a rush of river water, pummeling and loud, until all I can hear is the greedy, deafening roar.
5
JULY, SOPHOMORE SUMMER
(THEN)
“You seem nervous.” Matthias turned his gaze on me from the driver’s seat. He, on the other hand, looked almost too relaxed. His eyes lit on my hands, which I’d been clasping and unclasping on top of my cutoffs for the last five blocks. I shoved them underneath my legs.
“This is just kind of new,” I said. “It’s like worlds colliding.”
“So quiz me,” he said. “Ret, Jenni, the girl from Canada. How’d I do?”
“Not bad. Bex. You really haven’t had class with any of them?”
He shrugged. “Ret, I think, freshman year. I kind of keep my head down, remember?”
Four weeks ago, Matthias had been an idea, a pretty star in a faraway galaxy. Now he coursed beneath my skin, wet ink, a heady drug. For four weeks, I had kept him close. Mine and mine alone. But Ret was getting antsy. Is there something wrong with him? I told myself I didn’t need her approval, but of course that wasn’t true.
In my defense, my time with Matthias was measured out in small doses. He was almost always working or substitute parenting or away on mysterious Cordelia-related missions about which he’d tell me little. I fantasized about lifting the burdens from his life, taking them for my own, but they weren’t mine to take. Instead, I lived for the time we had together, wrapped my whole body around it, held fast. I was greedy. I didn’t love the idea of sharing Matthias today, but it was a party. It was time.
So we were on our way to Jenni’s. My parents were grilling with the neighbors, a family event that had not been so easy to wriggle out of. I’d never had a boyfriend before. They weren’t sure what to do with this new, consuming presence in my life. In the end, they’d agreed to release us to Jenni’s on the condition that Matthias come by the house first so they could bestow their approval.
He looked over at me in the car. “I think I can handle it. Your parents loved me.”
I pressed my lips together. My parents were easily charmed. Ret was not so easy.
“Seriously though,” he said. “It’s cool that your parents care. Really cool.”
Cool was not a word I used to describe anything related to my parents, but I bit back the thought. Of course it would mean something to Matthias that they gave a shit. I was a jerk for even thinking otherwise.
“Consider my alternative,” he went on. “Babysit Ricky’s drunk ass while Rebecca takes Cordelia to the pool? Hard pass.”
“That’s good about your mom, though. That she’s out with Cordelia.” I gave myself a mental high five for holding my tongue.
“The holidays always bring out her parental instincts. Good timing though, because now I get to spend the Fourth of July with my gorgeous, only slightly nervous girlfriend.”
“Girlfriend?”
“I was thinking girlfriend. That okay with you?”
The word echoed inside my head like a beautiful secret. “Definitely.”
He grinned, that quick flash of joy I was growing to crave, and it hit me that Matthias wasn’t searching deep inside me, scouring my depths for the girl I was trying to be. He liked me for the girl I was already. He thought I was beautiful. He liked my jewelry, wanted to know more about the art I made in shop. He even liked my parents, their profound lack of chill. I was so freaking lucky.
By the time we pulled up to Jenni’s street, I forgot to feel nervous. “It’s the third house on the right, the big blue one.”
Jenni’s house was an anomaly in our neighborhood of little ranch homes—an old brick two-story at the end of a cul-de-sac with a big yard in the front and back. The party was in full swing when Matthias and I rounded the corner to the back of the house. Jenni was grilling hot dogs and burgers on the patio, and there were kids sprawled out on the lawn, drinking beer, bouncing on the trampoline. There were more people here than I’d ever seen at Jenni’s. More people than I knew. Pine Brook was a big school; no one knew everyone. Jenni may have been hosting, but the guests—mostly upperclassmen from the look of it—were all Ret’s doing. I slipped my hand into Matthias’s just as Jenni turned to deliver a heaping plate of burgers and buns to the picnic table. When she spotted us, she raised a pair of aviator shades and waved.
From across the patio, the sun at her back, Jenni looked aloof and terribly cool. Empress of her domain. Her thick red hair was twisted up into a knotted braid, and her apron hid the front of a gauzy shirt and patched bell-bottoms. She looked plucked from an earlier time, an era when finding yourself mattered more and being a high achiever in all things academic and extracurricular wasn’t practically mandatory at sixteen.
Without Ret, we might have actually relaxed into one another, appreciated the good stuff. And there was a lot of good stuff about Jenni. She was a consummate hostess, a style queen. She cared about making the people around her happy. Her dad and his new, young wife were preoccupied with their ten-month-old, leaving Jenni basically alone to cultivate obsessions with vintage fashion and ambitious recipes. I was a little jealous of Jenni’s freedom, a fact I’d never admit to her face.
Burgers turned over to the hungry masses, she strolled our way.
“Welcome to our little soiree.” Her voice was a purr. “We’re all so glad Ellory finally brought you around.”
For the past four weeks, I’d been at Jenni’s less and less. Now I was back, bearing the reason for my absence. Of course Jenni loved my boyfriend. Boyfriend. Sure, she was probably genuinely charmed, but it wasn’t lost on either of us that Matthias was her ticket to more and more of Ret.
“Matthias, meet Jenni, our hostess.”
“Hey there.” He extended one hand to shake hers and in the other, he held up a six-pack of some craft beer I’d never heard of. “Brought some brews.” I wondered if Ricky had bought them for his son, but decided against asking.
Jenni gave Matthias an approving smi
le, then turned to me. “Matty is welcome here any time.”
She was the only one of us who had ever had a regular boyfriend, but Jenni and Mark had broken up in March, and Ret never brought her string of guys around. Being here with Matthias felt good, even if Jenni’s approval was a little self-serving.
She took him by the arm to give him the rundown: “Food’s over here, drinks in the coolers by the door, swing set, tire swing, trampoline, and there’s a bathroom down in the basement.”
“Is Ret here yet?” I asked.
Either Jenni actually didn’t hear me over the music suddenly pumping from the little speakers on the picnic table, or she pretended not to. Still holding Matthias by the arm, she continued. “Two rules: no puking on the trampoline, and the upstairs is off limits. Also, don’t forget to hydrate. That’s not a rule, just common sense. Otherwise, go wild.”
Jenni glanced back toward the grill, which was starting to smoke, and turned on a platform heel, ushering us off into the party. Matthias strolled over to the coolers to add his beer to the collection, and I took a look around. Older kids, rising seniors, abounded. I recognized a group of guys from our year jumping on the trampoline in the back, and across the lawn, through the haze of grill smoke and incense, I could see Bex and another girl passing a clove back and forth.
Abigail? For a second, all I could see were dark curls floating down to frame round, rouged cheeks. But she couldn’t be here. Ret would never, ever allow it. Then the girl plucked the clove from Bex’s hand and tilted her head toward the sky. The grill smoke cleared. Not Abigail, of course not. Just some girl from dance team.
My heartbeat slowed, and I realized it had been racing. I lifted my hand to wave, and Bex waved back.
Rebecca Landry. Rebex. Bex. Her family moved here in eighth grade, which is a terrible time to move anywhere. Her mom was a professor of Black Atlantic history, and when Professor Landry got a new job at a college nearby, the whole family left Montreal to settle on the West Shore. It must have been pretty rough. Bex grew up speaking Quebecois French and eating things with exotic names like coq au vin and tourtière. I guess her accent and extensive knowledge of ice hockey didn’t endear her to the few other black kids at Pine Brook, and she spent a lot of eighth and ninth on the social outskirts—not exactly an outcast, just displaced, alone. Like the rest of us, until Ret drew us into her fold.
When she first started bringing Bex around, I saw her how Ret saw her: vulnerable, serious, the new girl who still hadn’t found her place. But Bex had no interest in being anyone’s charity case. She knew who she was; she needed friends, not pity or advice.
Bex was ballet (which Ret quickly insisted she’d always admired, after initially throwing shade at Bex’s place on dance team) and French romance novels (which Ret adored—so much more sultry than American erotica) and a complete unwillingness to compete with Jenni or me (which despite Ret’s persistent baits, I think she respected more than anything else).
I wanted to be closer to Bex. I did. But three months after our wobbly coffee date, I let Ret keep us at arm’s length because it seemed to be what she wanted. Another stage direction in the never-ending performance of our lives in which Ret was writer, director, and star. We knew our parts; only Ret knew where the plot would lead.
Matthias returned from the cooler with two beers, jolting me back into the present. I tore my eyes away from Bex and not-Abigail to fill two plates with hot dogs and potato salad at the picnic table. We had just settled down on the patio stones when the back door swung open revealing Lizza Kendrick, one of Pine Brook’s most rabid gossips. Of course she was there, trolling for scraps. Behind Lizza was Ret, holding hands with none other than Jonathan Gaines. Jonathan had fine, white-blond hair, an all-American smile, and Abercrombie catalogue abs. Jonathan played varsity lacrosse, did community service with his church youth group, and helped old ladies cross the street. Jonathan was about as far from Ret’s type—scruffy, slightly dangerous, and usually college-aged—as I could possibly imagine.
Yet here he was at Jenni’s party for indie kids and emo queens, fingers intertwined with Ret’s, grinning that perfectly straight and sparkling grin as he walked through the screen door and onto the patio. I may have kept Matthias close for the past month, but I had told Ret everything. And she hadn’t mentioned Jonathan once. I almost choked on a chunk of red skin potato.
“Hey, lady!” Ret called, breaking away from Jonathan to run over and give me a big, sprawling hug. “About time you showed up.”
She flung herself down next to us and swiveled toward Matthias, extending her hand. “Ret, Ellory May’s best friend. If you don’t play nice, you’ll have me to answer to.”
Matthias took her hand and gave it a firm shake. “Yes, ma’am.” His voice was perfectly even.
She tilted her head to one side and looked him up and down. There was nothing subtle about Ret. She wanted him to know she was giving him the once-over, that she was watching him. I silently promised to forgive her for neglecting to tell me about Jonathan as long as she blessed Matthias with her approval. Even though I was still a little pissed.
“So, what’s the deal with—” I started to ask, but Ret was already back on her feet and waltzing over to Jonathan, who was waiting just outside the back door. He hooked his thumb around the back of her studded belt and pulled her in close. I raised my eyebrows at Ret. She grinned and gave Jonathan a kiss on the cheek. Her eyes were open, fixed on me. I wasn’t sure what game she was playing, but it hit me that it was somehow my fault that I didn’t know about Jonathan. This wasn’t neglect, this was a deliberate omission. And Ret was rubbing it in.
I turned toward the grill for backup, but Jenni was staring straight at me, smirking. So I was the last to know.
I must have been making a face because Matthias reached over to squeeze my hand. “Your friend has nothing worry about,” he said, mistaking my look for nerves. “I always play nice.”
But I had moved past nerves. I squeezed his hand back, but my eyes were on Ret, who was nuzzling into the collar of Jonathan’s polo shirt across the patio. Ret had introduced a plot twist, and she was waiting to see how I’d react.
* * *
Twenty minutes later, while Matthias was dissecting pop covers of rock classics with Jenni, I went off in search of Bex.
“How long?” I asked, when she’d drifted away from the rest of the dance team and I had her to myself. She knew exactly what I was asking, but it still took her a full thirty seconds to answer. Bex made a habit of steering clear of Ret’s drama, but right now, I needed her. I gave her my most pleading look.
“A few weeks.” She leaned back in the grass, crossing one long leg over the other.
I pulled my own legs into my chest. I felt a little ill. “And she really likes him?”
Bex laughed, quick and sharp, then rolled over and lit another clove. “You want?” She held the pack out toward me.
I shook my head, no.
She took her time drawing the smoke between her lips, then putting away her lighter before responding. “She seems entertained. He’s so normal, he’s different.” Then she pulled out her phone and started scrolling.
I nodded, shoving myself up off the grass. So Ret had been bringing Jonathan around. I wanted to press her for more, but Bex’s fingers were already flying across her screen. I tucked my hands into the pockets of my cutoffs instead and started to walk away.
“You hurt her feelings, you know?” Her words caught me off guard. I spun back around and waited for an explanation. Bex took another drag, then said, “You’re either with Matty, or you’re thinking about him. You know how Ret is. She misses you.”
“Thanks,” I mumbled. My eyes traveled across the backyard, searching for Ret. There she was. Jenni was back at the grill, putting on a round of corn on the cob, and Ret was standing behind her, her arms wrapped around Jenni’s waist. She leaned over to whisper something in her ear, and I watched Jenni’s face light up. I wondered how long it had been since Jen
ni’s dad had given her a hug, made her eyes sparkle like that. How long since her mom had remembered to pick up the phone. I stared at them until Ret looked up, her eyes meeting mine. Then I turned away and walked toward the tire swing.
Five minutes later, Ret came to meet me.
“So Jonathan?” I asked.
She sat down on the swing and kicked off her flip-flops, letting her bare feet drag in the dirt.
“Push me?” she said. It was more statement than question.
I pressed the tips of my fingers into her shoulder blades and pushed. Ret kicked her legs up and let out a whoop like a little kid. She was going to make me ask again. I started to count backward from ten.
When I got to three, she said, “We started hanging out at that party last month. While you were making googly eyes at Matty, I had to entertain myself somehow by the pool.”
So this went all the way back to Dave Franklin’s party. This was punishment for picking Matthias over her. For abandoning her at the pool. You’d better not bail on me, Ellory May. Ret had been with Jonathan since the day I’d been with Matthias, and she had made sure I was the last to know. I pushed her again and again, sending her sailing higher and higher.
“Easy, tiger.” She spun around to look at me, a warning. I stood back and let the motion of the ropes run their course. “I was talking to Dave for a while,” she said when the swing had slowed to an almost-stop. “But he was so wasted. Like a six-pack and two bumps of coke wasted. The Smurf and some freshman had to drag him up to his room like an hour after we got there. Remember?”
I didn’t. An hour after we got there, I was still on the Franklins’ couch, totally absorbed in Matthias Cole. And Ret knew it.
I shook my head.
