“Oh,” she said. She sounded surprised and looked surprised, too, her mouth forming a little pink circle. She folded her fingers together, brought them up to the knee of her crossed leg, and waited for me to continue.
“I’m really, really sorry. And I wanted you to know that there wasn’t anything wrong with you. It was…you were kind of an easy target. I just mean—it was easy because you…you were like…”
“Nerdy,” she finished for me.
“Well…yeah. And because you didn’t do anything. You didn’t say anything. Not that I’m blaming you, I’m not blaming you at all. It was our fault. My fault. But you never stood up for yourself. Why didn’t you?”
She looked at me, and I wondered if she was remembering one of the many encounters I had running through my head. The day we invited her to the diner and never showed up or the time that Adam lodged so many spitballs in her hair that the nurse had to cut a section out. Or maybe she wasn’t thinking of one instance in particular but of a general atmosphere we created around her, where anything she did—answered a question correctly in class, struck out during a game of softball in gym, or simply walked by one of us in the hall—was met with teases and ridicule.
Her silence went on for what felt like forever but was probably about ten seconds. “I don’t know. I guess I didn’t really care.”
“You didn’t care?”
She shrugged. “About being popular. Not that it didn’t bother me. Sometimes I’d go home and cry.”
Fantastic.
She shrugged again. “But I had friends. I had really great friends.”
I remembered some of the girls Fiona had hung out with—Lacey, the girl with unfortunately large ears that Amber called Dumbo; Kerry, who lived out by the cemetery and was one of the very few kids at Stonebury High who qualified for the free lunch program; and Melissa, who, in four years, I’d never heard speak one word. It had never dawned on me that they were actually friends. In my mind they were nothing more than outcasts, a group of girls who stuck together because they had to. I realized now that I’d just been projecting.
“I’m glad,” I told her. I took another deep breath. I’d gotten the apology out, and I was relieved about that, but it didn’t really feel like it was enough.
Fiona surprised me by changing the subject as if there was nothing left to say. “So where are you planning on starting your business?”
“In my fantasy, Boston. But that didn’t happen. So I’m back in Stonebury.”
She raised her eyebrows and her expression changed from curious to almost pitying. As if she was thinking, sucks to be you.
“I know. I keep telling myself that this is just one stop. Not forever.”
Fiona turned away to pick up her bag, and I assumed she was getting ready to leave. But then she pulled a card out of her wallet and handed it to me. justin hanscomb, mba. 50 Boylston Street, Boston MA. “He’s a friend, a financial planner. Specializes in small business. You could go in for a consult. If you tell him I sent you, he might even do it for free.”
I held the little card in my hands. So far, I’d talked only to Lori, who had surprised us all by not only maintaining her parents’ salon and spa but by growing the business. The whole time she spoke, though, I kept thinking I can’t believe I’m taking business advice from a girl who couldn’t even pass trig. “Seriously? You’d do this for me?”
She laughed. “It’s not like I’m giving you the loan.”
“Yeah, I know, but…thank you.”
She nodded like it was no big deal. But why did it always surprise me when someone was nice?
Fiona slipped her computer into her bag and zipped it up. “I’m really sorry, but I have to go. My boyfriend’s mom is in town for a visit and wants to go sightseeing. So I should really thank you for calling. It got me out of the house for a little while. I’m not good if I don’t get some alone time. But I appreciate you coming all the way down here to tell me that.”
Then she did the last thing I ever expected Fiona Locke to do. She hugged me.
“It was really nice of you.” She pulled back, looked me in the eyes. “Try not to be so hard on yourself.”
As she spoke, I could barely register what was happening. I’d been kept up nights, reliving every prank my friends and I had played on Fiona, every mean thing I’d ever said to her about her hair or her glasses or her gangly limbs, certain I’d scarred her for life, and yet she seemed…fine. Better than fine. Better than me. As if the things I’d done and said to her hadn’t really mattered at all.
Fiona wasn’t done. “I can tell you’ve changed,” she said. The very words I’d hoped to hear from Jack, coming from Fiona’s mouth, still felt like a revelation. “It’s not like you’re still hanging out with Amber Howell or something.”
When she said Amber’s name, Fiona’s lip curled the slightest bit, a tiny fracture in her shellacked exterior. She blinked her lovely eyes at me, and I smiled and said, “Right, no. God no.”
Fiona smiled, too, and then she said good-bye, clearly not wanting to be late. I waved, still standing in the same place. It wasn’t until I started walking to my car that my shoulders started to hurt and I realized how tense I’d been the entire conversation.
It had all been going surprisingly well, up until the lie. But I couldn’t have told her the truth. Not only was I still friends with someone I thought was an awful person, but I was going to be a bridesmaid in her wedding. What would Fiona have thought of me then? Would it have changed her acceptance of my apology?
I was pissed at myself for the lie, but another part of me was oddly uplifted. Fiona had accepted my apology. She hadn’t yelled at me or called me names or done any of the things I probably deserved. The truth was Fiona was okay, and I had done what I’d come to do. Maybe these apologies wouldn’t be so hard after all.
Chapter Eight
Five Years Earlier
Just one time and I was hooked
Seeing your face
Light up with abandon
— Jack Moreland, “Abandon”
Riding home with Jack Moreland was the closest thing I’d ever done to doing anything wrong in seventeen years.
Not wrong, exactly. Unexpected. Unlike me. And it was definitely unlike me to not tell Sarah. I’d always kept secrets from Lori, since she was physically unable to keep her mouth shut. And I’d been keeping secrets from Amber since the day we met, the first day of seventh grade. Sarah and Amber were paired together for a book report. Until then, all Sarah and I had done was admire Amber from afar—coveted her long, perfectly straight hair, envied her expensive wardrobe, wondered what it’d be like to have her notice us. I never thought she would. She and Sarah hit it off—which possibly had something to do with the fact that Sarah did all the work and let Amber attach her name to it—and the next thing I knew, we were sitting at the popular table at lunch.
But to keep that seat, I had to keep secrets. Amber didn’t like anyone knowing more than she did, so I purposely tanked some quizzes in math so that she could “help” me. She liked having the longest hair, so I lied and said I was sick of mine and cut it to my shoulders. Not super important stuff, maybe, but it all added up. Sometimes it was like becoming a different person. But it was worth it. No one picked me last for teams in gym anymore, even when my physical ability to do anything except move out of the way of a hurtling softball or volleyball hadn’t changed. Kids looked at me differently, boys and girls. No one screwed with Amber Howell’s friends. That was what I was.
I’d always looked at it as a fair trade. I still had Sarah and I could trust her. But not with this. I wasn’t even sure what this was yet—if anything. All I knew was that with Jack, something inside me changed. Molecules rearranged themselves into place, the way they’d been before. I was myself again.
Even when I was doing something incredibly stupid, like breaking into an abandoned lighthouse.
I’d been on my way to work at the café when Jack called. I got a little charge at hearin
g his voice on the other end of my phone. “I need you to help me with something,” he said. “I already told Darce we might be a couple minutes late.”
“Um, okay.” I didn’t like being late to work. But if she said it was okay… “What is it?”
“I’ll tell you when I see you. Ten minutes?”
He hardly gave me a chance to respond and never said where he’d pick me up. I took my chances and wandered down to the cul-de-sac, hoping my parents didn’t look out the window. His clunky car pulled around the corner, slowed for me to get in, then took off toward the beach.
“You’re sure Darcy said this is okay?”
Jack glanced at me. “It’s okay, I promise. She likes you to take care of the band, and this is a band issue.” His mouth turned up the slightest bit when he said take care of the band. Well, if it was my duty…
“Where are we going?”
He was turning onto Old Lighthouse Beach Road. It was a less popular area for tourists because there was no boardwalk and too much seaweed. Eventually, the beach thinned out, we passed the grassy dunes, and he turned onto a dirt road. We drove by a sign that said private property. no trespassing. violators will be prosecuted.
I turned to Jack, who was keeping his eyes on the gravel road. “Are you serious?”
The car bounced on dirt and rocks, and the headlights illuminated a tall, impossibly beautiful lighthouse. The ocean was a black line in the distance. It was only four thirty, but the sun had already set. Jack cut the engine very nonchalantly.
“It’s okay, I promise. We’re here all the time. I’ve never seen a cop. Well, I did, but just once.”
“Do you want to get kicked out of school? Wait, I forgot, you don’t care about school. But I do.”
I was reaching for the bungee-rigged door handle when he reached out and stopped me. “Come on, it’s no big deal. I have to go up there and get a notebook.”
I wasn’t going anywhere, but he didn’t move. He still had his hand on my hand. “A notebook?”
“Full of very important band business. If this notebook fell into the wrong hands…” He drew in a breath. “I don’t even want to think about it.”
I rolled my eyes. “If it’s so important, what’s it doing up there?”
I tilted my head to get a full view of the lighthouse. We’d toured it on an elementary school fieldtrip, before it had almost been destroyed by a fire. The businessman who owned the lighthouse never tried to repair it.
I hadn’t given it a second thought since then, but now that I was seeing it again through older eyes, it struck me as crazy that someone would let something this magical sit and rot. While the structure was imposing and seemed strong at first glance, if you looked close enough, you could see where the right side had crumbled and nearly caved in. The small attached cottage was still intact, but several of the wood shingles had fallen off, and those that remained were weathered and ratty.
“We party up here sometimes.”
“You do? Why?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s fun.”
“It’s also illegal.”
“I’m telling you, no one cares. I thought you wanted more fun in your life?”
Well. I had said that, hadn’t I?
We got out of the car, Jack coming over to my side and extending his hand. November wind by the sea could be brutal. It wasn’t so bad today, but a couple of gusts could easily unsettle me. The road was full of jagged rocks, and while Jack traversed them gracefully, I bit the inside of my mouth a couple times when my ankle slipped and nearly twisted. Though, on the plus side, an ankle injury would have gotten me out of cheerleading.
“Having fun?” Jack asked, the wind blowing his hair into his eyes, when I slipped again.
“A blast!”
Judging from his laughter, he thought that was hilarious.
I steadied myself and somehow managed to reach the end of the path and the lighthouse. The base of it was blackened with soot and ash, and I didn’t want to ask, but I couldn’t help it. “You sure it’s okay in here?”
He squeezed my hand for a second before dropping it. “No, the whole thing could cave in at any second.”
“Jack!”
“What?” He laughed again. “We’re having fun here.”
“Nothing says fun more than dying before I ever have a chance to get out of Stonebury.”
“If you’re afraid of dying, you’re not really living,” he said sarcastically.
“I had no idea I was breaking and entering with Dr. Phil.”
He stepped inside while I stood for a second at the threshold. Here goes nothing.
It wasn’t scary like I thought it’d be. It wasn’t much of anything, actually. It was a little cave that smelled like dirt and salt. In the middle of the room was a fancy spiral staircase. It looked completely out of place, like something that should be in an oil billionaire’s mansion. The railings were coated with dust, but when I slid my finger over a spot, it revealed shiny gold underneath.
I blew the dust from my finger. “So you guys party up here, huh?” It was a long way from the game room in Adam Dixon’s basement.
He scraped rubble from the wall. “When we need a change of scenery. We chill up here, drink beer, play cards, whatever.”
Seemed as good a reason as any. Drinking beer in a hundred-year-old historic structure did sound like more fun than drinking beer in a Colonial built in 1991.
Jack started up the spiral staircase, then looked down at me. “Are you coming?”
I considered the probable death trap that was the staircase, and then I thought about where I’d be right now if I never took the job at Nona’s Café. If I never talked to Jack. In Amber’s room, watching her try on clothes, or being a third wheel at the coffee shop with Mike and Sarah. Even if the staircase folded underneath me, this was still so much better.
I extended my hand, and he took it. He walked slowly and was extra careful on a couple of the stairs that were especially rickety. We stepped over a ribbon of yellow caution tape that made me falter, if just for a second. “One stair at a time,” he said. I kept going up three unsteady flights before we reached the very top.
His black and white composition notebook was there, tucked away in a dusty corner next to some empty beer cans, but he didn’t go to it right away. He reached for my hand again and led me to the edge. Once I got over a minor case of vertigo, I managed to open my eyes and take in the view of the ocean, the lights on boats in the distance, the tops of the houses that sat on cliffs on the other side of the water.
“Isn’t it wild?” His eyes shined in the darkness.
The whoosh of the waves and the rattle of the wind and being up so high didn’t scare me. I was exhilarated, seeing the world from a whole new vantage point. How many other things was I missing out on?
“It is fun to party here, but it’s not really why I come,” Jack said. “I like it because it reminds me that living in Stonebury isn’t completely hellish. I mean, there’s all this…”
He looked out at the ocean and then back to me. We were so close that when he breathed out, I felt the warmth on my face. He looked at me as if I were a test he was studying for. No one had ever looked at me this way before; he wasn’t envious, and he wasn’t afraid of me. His eyes were curious, definitely interested. His hands left mine and for a second, I was cold, but then they traveled to my shoulders and settled there.
I leaned into him, my heartbeat suddenly louder than the waves crashing all those feet beneath us. I curled my fingers around the soft fabric of his sweat shirt and heard the hitching of his breath. Was I really going to do this? Was I going to kiss Jack Moreland? I looked up at him and saw that he was completely focused on me. He parted his lips the slightest bit so I could see a hint of white teeth and tongue.
When he kissed me, it tasted like salt. I kissed him back, surprising myself. Surprising him, too, I think. I liked that I could, that I had it in me. But I did. With his arms around me, the wind at our backs, and
the sounds of the sea crashing all around, I felt fearless. I felt alive.
Minutes passed and the kiss deepened. We instinctually moved together, away from the ledge and up against the crumbly wall of the lighthouse. The smell of salt mingled with the dust and his coffee-tinged breath, and I’d never smelled anything so good in my life. My shoulders hurt a little from being pressed up against the concrete, but I didn’t care. I could barely concentrate on anything beside the sweetness of his lips, and when he reluctantly pulled away, my mouth ached with the emptiness of a phantom kiss.
“We should get to the café,” he said. He didn’t sound as solid, as confident as he usually did.
I resisted the urge to touch my lips. “All right.”
We were halfway down the staircase before I remembered he’d forgotten his notebook, again. I waited there as he retrieved it, and then we went to his car. I tried to think of something funny and witty to say, something to bring us back to where we’d been before, but I wasn’t sure what to do or if that was even possible.
Jack Moreland had had his lips on mine.
I hadn’t really ever kissed anyone before. There was Joey Armstrong in a sixth grade game of spin the bottle. He’d tasted like mustard, and I’d sworn off the condiment ever since. Then there was my dirty secret. Adam Dixon, freshman year, on the couch in his parents’ basement. It was the first time I’d ever had beer, and it didn’t take much to get buzzed. The kiss was messy and wet and not in a good way.
Nothing like this.
I let myself bask in the glow of it until a thought seared itself into my brain: my friends. They couldn’t know about this. I’d be getting spitballs shot into my hair with Fiona Locke faster than I could say loser.
Once we were at the café, but before we got out of the car, I bit my lip and turned to him. “That was…really fun.”
“I had to do something to kick it up a notch,” he said.
The Mean Girl Apologies Page 10
