Riot

by Jamie Shaw

  “Yep,” I answer. “Van actually came through.”

  “How are you not freaking out?!” she asks.

  “I did, believe me.”

  “Did you sign the contract yet?”

  “I wanted to sleep on it, but I’m going to.”

  Rowan slides back into her own seat as we talk about the terms. Van told me not to be afraid to negotiate any I didn’t like, but the contract was more than generous. Based on the time it takes me to make the shirts, I’ll be making nearly triple minimum wage. My “brand” will also be featured on the band’s website and at their merchandise booth. They want me to send a picture and a bio and make it a whole big thing.

  “I think I might also apply to fashion school,” I add, and Rowan’s eyes get big.

  “Really?”

  Nikki and Molly had been the first to suggest it, and Joel had been the last. “Yeah, maybe. I mean, it’s just something I’m thinking of. I—”

  “I think you should do it,” Rowan says. “You’d be really good at it, Dee.”

  “You think so?”

  “I know so.” She presses the heels of her palms against her eyes when she starts getting choked up again. “I still don’t want you to go though.”

  “I know,” I say, because we both know I’m going to anyway.

  “I’ll miss you.”

  I give her a weak smile. “Nah, you’re going to hate me when you realize what this means.”

  She pulls her hands away from her eyes, and I manage a sincere smirk in her direction.

  “You’re going to have to tell your parents about you living with Adam.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  OUR FINAL WEEK in the apartment, Rowan spends every night either in my bed or camped out with me in the living room. We build a massive fort out of pillows and blankets and leave it up until it’s time to pack everything away.

  “They want to meet him,” she tells me as we fold a sheet together, and I laugh. I wish I could see her dad’s face when he sees Adam’s black nail polish.

  “Of course they want to meet him.”

  We bring the edges of the four-hundred-thread-count sheet together and Rowan gives me a flat stare as she takes over the folding. “You don’t have to sound so happy about it.” When I just smile at her, she says, “He’s going to drive the moving van for us on Sunday and stay the night at my house.”

  “They’re going to make him sleep on the couch,” I warn, and Rowan nods.

  “I just hope he stays there.”

  I laugh and ask, “Are you going to make him dress up?” Adam could be considered “dressed up” if he just wore jeans without rips, took off some of his bracelets, and wore a shirt with buttons.

  Rowan shakes her head. “No. I love him the way he is, so they should too.”

  I smile, pretending her words don’t sting the open wound in my chest. I wonder if Joel loved me like that—just the way I am—and if he did, how he could stop doing it so quickly. He was the first boy I ever loved, the first boy I ever let inside me with nothing between us, the first boy I ever wanted to really be with, and it took him approximately two seconds after fucking me against a bathroom wall to haul some other girl out of Mayhem and probably fuck her the same way.

  I broke his heart first, but he broke mine last.

  “Do you know what I love?” I ask, ignoring memories of Joel, pretending to feel normal. Pretending to be myself. I flop onto the couch and watch Rowan fold. She tucks a long-edged seam under her chin and works her magic.

  “What?” she asks once her chin is free.

  “This new you. Adam has been really good for you. You don’t take shit anymore.”

  “I took enough shit from Brady to last me a lifetime,” she says, and I toast a half-empty margarita glass into the air. I’m sucking at its salted rim when Leti knocks on the front door. He pushes it open without invitation and strolls inside with Kit on his heels. I’ve seen her a few times since she joined the band, and if I were sticking around, I think we might’ve even become friends.

  “Help has arrived!” Leti says with both arms thrown in the air.

  Rowan, the genius that she is, insisted on throwing me a packing party disguised as a girls’ day, and I figured it was a brilliant way to secure some cheap labor. Tomorrow, she’s throwing me a birthday-slash-going-away party, for which everyone is required to bring a present and help us load the moving van. We’re having the party in my empty apartment, and then I’m going to Rowan’s to spend the night at her place. By then I will have said all my goodbyes, and on Sunday morning, I’ll leave this life behind.

  “You’re not packing up the fort, are you?” Leti asks with an exaggerated amount of alarm, keeping me in the present instead of a future that feels just as lonely.

  “Yes?” Rowan says.

  “But I brought my jammies!” He lifts a backpack in the air, and I manage a chuckle.

  “I was promised a fort,” Kit says, and Rowan shrugs before shaking the blanket back out.

  With Kit’s help, we pack up most of my things and build a fort even better than the one we had before. Mismatched bedsheets—some lavender, some pink polka-dot—are hung over couches and lamps and packed cardboard boxes, and the entire fort is full of comforters and pillows. Two tiny lamps illuminate the inside, and we camp out within the dryer-sheet-scented walls.

  Kit credits her fort-building skills to her older brothers, who I suspect can also be credited with her willingness to cram herself into a tiny space with Rowan, Leti, and me. Even though we’ve only hung out a handful of times since her audition a couple months ago, I like her, and as long as she continues lacking any interest in Joel, I’ll keep liking her. She’s pretty and she knows it—but in a tough, impenetrable kind of way. She’s not sweet like Rowan or girly like me, but she’s got a sort of playfulness about her that is as feminine as it is tomboyish.

  “I feel like I’ve been a horrible friend,” I say to Leti while he finally lets me paint his fingernails. He said it would be his birthday present to me, and I was twisting off the cap of the sparkliest, purpliest nail polish I own before he even finished his sentence. “What ever happened with that Mark guy?”

  “Who?” Leti asks, not looking at all comfortable to be on the receiving end of what I insist is the most fabulous manicure he’ll ever get. He furrows his brows at the polish like it might make his fingers fall off, and he only half seems to hear what I’m saying.

  “Mark. The fireman.” Leti raises his eyebrow and I say, “You met him at Mayhem a few weeks ago . . . dated for a while . . . We joked about him being hot enough to be Mr. February in the firemen’s calendar . . .”

  “Oh!” Leti chuckles. “Mark, right. You know he wasn’t an actual fireman, right?”

  Now it’s my turn to raise my eyebrow. Leti’s smirk sinks even deeper.

  “I just nicknamed him that.”

  “Why?” Rowan asks, and a mischievous spark glints in Leti’s eye.

  “Because he put out a fire in your pants?” I ask, and Leti grins while shaking his head.

  “Because he had a really big hose.”

  “Oh my God,” Rowan says, and she and I break into a fit of giggles.

  We’re still giggling when Kit, staring at a random polka dot on the wall of our fort, says, “I slept with Shawn.”

  All of the sound gets sucked out of the room. Three sets of eyes lock on her and three jaws drop open. She glances at each of us, as if just realizing that she said it out loud, and gives an embarrassed smile.

  “You slept with Shawn?” Rowan asks, and the apples of Kit’s cheeks redden.

  “Not recently . . . It was a long time ago. When we were in high school.”

  Rowan shares a look with me. She’s gone to a few of the band’s practices with Kit, and she’s told me how weird Shawn acts around her, but I know Rowan’s loyalty is to Shawn over Kit, so she chooses her words carefully. “Has he brought it up?”

  Kit shakes her head. “He doesn’t remember.”
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  “Are you sure about that?” I ask. The girl code in me wants to tell Kit I think she’s wrong, based on what he said about her at her audition, but just like Rowan, I’ve been friends with Shawn for a lot longer.

  “Why, has he said something?” she asks, and I can hear the dusting of hopefulness clinging to the edges of her voice.

  I shake my head. “No, but . . .” I don’t even know how to finish that sentence. I don’t want to give her false hope, but I recognize something in her that I see in myself every time I look in the mirror anymore. A quiet longing for something lost. “But I think you’d be hard to forget.”

  She gives me a smile that seems bigger than it should be, like she’s fighting to keep it on her face. “I didn’t look the same in high school. I was way more of a tomboy—T-shirts and flannels, less makeup, no tattoos or piercings, glasses.”

  “Hot enough to sleep with,” Leti offers, and Kit gives another forced smile.

  “Why don’t you say something to him?” I ask, watching as her smile grows both warmer and colder. It’s a troublemaker smile, the smile of a girl who grew up with four older brothers and knows how to take care of herself.

  “It’s fun playing with him. I’ll tell him eventually . . . maybe.”

  I chuckle, and Leti pouts. “Well, it’s official. I’m the only one here who hasn’t slept with someone in the band. Shawn, Adam, J . . .” He trails off on the ‘J’ sound, and we all know why. Shame colors his face, and his apologetic eyes swing to meet mine. “Shit.”

  “Consider yourself lucky,” I say, taking one more purple swipe over his pinky before twisting the nail polish shut. “It looks like Rowan is the only one who got a happy ending out of it.”

  When I sit back, she frowns at me. “Are you sure you don’t want me to invite him tomorrow?”

  “In what world would that turn out okay?”

  “What happened between you two?” Kit asks, and Leti subtly shakes his head, freezing when I catch him doing it.

  “A lot,” I answer, and when she continues waiting, I add, “Too much.”

  “Were you in love?”

  The answer is that we were. The answer is that I still am. I love him, and I hate that, and if I could shut it off, I would. Part of me wants him to be happy, in his own place with his new life, but the other part of me hopes that he can’t sleep, can’t eat, and never gives his heart to anyone else. I hope that when the next girl tells him she loves him, he tells her to go home. “Who wants another margarita?”

  That night, after I’ve drank enough to forget about Joel and everyone else has drank enough to stop bringing him up, Leti and Rowan both wrap me in a cocoon of arms. They do it as a joke, and we all giggle, but no one pulls their arms away, and eventually we fall asleep like that. In less than thirty-six hours, I’ll be moving home, and next semester, Leti will be graduating. The cocoon is precious, a memory not yet a memory, and we hold on to the night for as long as we can.

  In the morning, I wiggle out of my tight spot between them still feeling more like a caterpillar than a butterfly. I crawl over an unsteady mountain of pillows, slip through the exit of our fortress, and find Kit groaning in the kitchen.

  “I can’t believe we packed away your coffeemaker,” she says, her layered black-and-blue hair wild and untamed. Her lashes are so thick and dark that they frame her eyes even without eyeliner or mascara, and I hate her just a little for it.

  “Let’s wake up Sleeping Beauty and Prince Charming so we can go to IHOP,” I say.

  I’m walking back toward the fort when Kit replies, “I love their pancakes.” My mouth tips up at the corners, and I know with absolute certainty that we found the right girl for the band.

  After pancakes, Adam, Shawn, and Mike show up at my apartment with the moving van and start loading my stuff into the back—my bed, my dressers, my boxes and boxes and boxes of shoes. Not all of this stuff is going to fit into my room at my dad’s, and I wonder if maybe I should get my own apartment back home. Maybe a roommate. Hopefully not a weird one like I had at the dorms. If I can find the band a kickass guitarist, I should definitely be able to find myself a not-weird roommate, right?

  Considering Rowan will still be here, over three hundred miles away, I can’t imagine liking anyone I’d be living with. She could be the most amazing person in the world and she’d still feel counterfeit—I’d always hate her for not being Rowan.

  “What’s wrong?” Rowan asks as we watch Mike and Shawn carry my dresser into the van. Leti and Kit are taking a break on the grass, and Adam is sitting in a basket chair waiting to be loaded, smoking a cigarette and looking downright cozy.

  “Nothing.”

  “Liar.”

  I sigh, and she turns her gaze back toward the boys. There’s no point in telling her I’ll miss her. I’ve told her a thousand times.

  “Me too,” she says, and she bumps her shoulder against mine.

  I wish she was the only one I’ll miss, but looking out at the boys, I can’t help thinking that I’ll miss them too. And I can’t help knowing that one of them is missing.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  PACKING AWAY MY glassware was our first mistake. Forgetting to buy Solo cups at the store was our second. Now, everyone is passing around a collection of liquor bottles and soda cans. We’re all sitting on the empty hardwood floor of my apartment, boxes of pizza in the middle of our circle and a cake Rowan won’t let me stick my finger into hiding in the fridge.

  “To getting an A on that marketing final,” Shawn says, toasting a bottle of tequila in the air.

  “To fashion school,” Leti adds, toasting a bottle of vodka.

  “To drinking straight from the bottle,” Adam quips, toasting a bottle of whiskey.

  I chuckle, and Rowan toasts a hard lemonade in the air. “To Dee.”

  I smile and steal the tequila from Shawn, holding it out toward Adam. “To Adam, for being the only not-corny person here.”

  He laughs and clinks his bottle to mine, and we both take big gulps.

  “To everyone who bothered to work today,” Mike adds, and Rowan laughs and toasts her lemonade bottle to his beer bottle. Adam laughs too because he knows Mike is referring to him. For the most part today, Adam did a miraculous job of looking like he was helping without actually doing anything.

  “How many pairs of shoes do you think you own?” asks Kit. She somehow ended up sitting next to Shawn, but he’s doing a remarkable job of not acknowledging the bombshell at his side, and Kit is doing a remarkable job of being extra bombshelly. I wonder what would happen if they accidentally rubbed elbows. Would they glare at each other and show their teeth, or would sparks fly and lead to a whole lot of clothing being ripped off right in the middle of this room?

  “Easily a thousand,” Leti answers, “judging by how much those boxes weighed.”

  “You should see my closet at home,” I say, and then I laugh and add, “and the basement, and the guest bedroom.”

  Rowan nods. “It’s true. When I lived at home, I almost never needed to buy shoes because we’re the same size.”

  “What size are you?” Kit asks.

  “Seven and a half,” Rowan and I both answer.

  “I’m a nine,” Kit replies. “Your feet are tiny.”

  “Yours are just big because you’re tall and built like a freaking supermodel,” I point out, mostly for Shawn’s benefit.

  Kit smiles but shakes her head at the compliment. “Everyone in my family is tall. My older brothers are huge. They’re all over six foot.”

  “So are we,” Shawn says of himself and the rest of the guys.

  “Yeah, but you,” Kit says, pushing her finger into his bicep, “are scrawny. You don’t look big at all.”

  Shawn stiffens, and I nearly burst out laughing. Kit just smiles that warm-cold smile of hers, making me wonder what happened after they slept together in high school. It must not have been pretty.

  “Are you ready for cake?” Rowan asks to diffuse the tension.


  “I’m ready for presents,” I say, eyeing the stack piled in the corner of the room. It’s always so easy to tell which were wrapped by boys—loose edges of wrapping paper and extra tape everywhere.

  “You know the drill,” Rowan says. When she pushes off the floor, I attempt to follow her to the kitchen, but she shoos me back out to the living room. “Don’t look.”

  “I hope it’s vanilla,” Kit says, and I shake my head.

  “It’s going to be chocolate with chocolate icing.”

  The lights cut, and Rowan starts the birthday song. Everyone joins in, and in the dark, a lump forms in my throat. I’m going to miss them. Every single one of them. I try to clear my eyes before the candles illuminate my face.

  “Dear Deeeeee,” everyone sings, “Happy birthdaaay to yooou.”

  “Make a wish.” Rowan holds the cake in front of me, and I think about making one. I could wish to get accepted into fashion school. I could wish for the T-shirts to make me famous. I could wish for Joel to appear in my doorway. He’d tell me he still loves me and ask me not to go. When I realize that’s what I want most of all, I blow out the candles without wishing anything at all. Rowan smiles, my friends cheer, and I pretend to be the kind of girl who still believes in wishes and who still bothers to make them.

  “We did buy plastic plates and silverware, right?” Rowan asks, and everyone looks at each other.

  “Not it,” Adam calls, initiating a frenzy of not-it calling and nose touching. In the end, Mike and Shawn take a road trip to the grocery store. They return with plates and silverware, and when Rowan asks them why they didn’t get cups too, since we still need those, they simply shrug and tell her because she only told them to get plates and silverware.

  “Alright,” I say, licking a fourth swipe of icing off my finger as she huffs at them, “someone give me a present.”

  Rowan cuts the cake and begins handing out slices as Leti slides the pile of gifts in front of me. I open them at random, getting a gift card from Kit, a scented candle from Shawn, a kickass perfume from Leti, and a second scented candle from Mike, who I suspect brainstormed gift ideas with Shawn. Rowan and Adam give me a ridiculously expensive sewing machine that almost makes me cry, and then she gives me a second present which is a set of the coolest-looking pairs of scissors I’ve ever seen—with sparkly purple handles and lots of differently shaped edges.