I stared down at the pill bottle in my hand and all at once felt like I might throw up. “Is there a bathroom around here I could use?”
“Oh, sure,” he said. He pointed to a door on the opposite wall.
“Thanks,” I said, leaving the pill bottle on the table. “I’ll be right back.”
I shut the door and pulled the chain on the lightbulb hanging low and bare from the ceiling.
My hands found the edges of the sink as I doubled over with my eyes closed. “Breathe,” I whispered. I gripped the sink tighter and opened my eyes, bringing them up to the mirror.
The mirror was disproportionately large for the small bathroom—the whole top half of my body was visible.
I looked into my eyes and allowed them to go big. This was a step I’d known I would probably have to take, but I hadn’t expected it to feel like this. I was about to buy drugs in a bar from a stranger. More than that, somehow I was about to owe him a favor.
I straightened my spine and started combing my hair back. Copying my motions from earlier—flinging my hair over and sticking out my chest—I realized with a jolt that I had unconsciously slid into position as the girl in the picture. I gulped and slowly, deliberately this time, did it again.
And just like that, I was wearing a fake face. Inside, my guts may have been churning like a hurricane, but even I could tell that the mask was convincing. Pale hair tossed carelessly around my face, shoulders relaxed, eyes narrowed: I belonged in that back room, flirting with an E dealer, getting what I needed from him.
I almost laughed out loud. I was the glowing girl, and it had taken nothing at all. I just had to decide to put her on.
Eyes still on my reflection, I knocked the door open sideways with my hip and rejoined Trev on the couch.
“Everything OK?”
“Yeah,” I said, grinning and picking up the orange bottle. I slipped it into my purse. “Of course. Thank you so much for this. What do I owe you—aside from my everlasting gratitude?”
“For just two? Thirty. For the four, that plus your good will.”
I got up. “It was a pleasure to meet you, Trev.”
“All mine, believe me.”
I turned to leave and then realized I needed one more question answered.
“I’m really the only dork who says ‘doses’? That’s sad. I need to stop hanging out with Mason so much.”
If I hadn’t been looking for it, I might not have noticed the flinch. “Mason?” he said.
“Yeah, you know him, right? He mentioned he had a friend at the Fish Hook, but when I saw Simone, I just got the number from her.”
He fidgeted a lighter out of his pocket and started playing with it. “I know a Mason. He’s a friend of yours?”
“Sure,” I replied innocently. “That’s where I picked up the apparently outdated slang. I guess he’s just trying to add to his mystique.”
He laughed a little, but it sounded hollow compared to before.
“Anyway, I know he was dry,” I went on. “Some sort of drama with supply. Hasn’t affected you, has it?”
I had gone too far. Trev stood up and stuck out his hand. “It was really nice to meet you, Kendall. But unfortunately I have to get back to the coal mine.” I shook it and then followed him into the bar with a shrug. He had given me a lot more information than I would have expected. Couldn’t win them all.
Trev gave me a distracted high five and then left me alone. I let myself out from behind the bar and squeezed and dodged my way back outside into the cool lamplight.
Gilly was still waiting across the street, playing with his phone. He didn’t see me until I was right in front of him.
“Did you get what you needed?” he asked tightly.
I let out a breath. “I think so,” I said, running my hand through my hair and casting a look back toward the bar. “I know who in our class regularly buys ecstasy. Whatever that gets me . . .”
“Did he tell you anything about this Mason guy? Kendall? Earth-to-Kendall. What are you looking at?”
A bulky but gracefully tapered silhouette was lighting a cigarette to the side of the entrance to the Fish Hook. As he leaned forward to offer a light to a small blond chick, his chocolate-colored curls and black leather jacket came into view.
I drew a raggedy breath.
It couldn’t be. That would just be too unfair.
He straightened up, tossing the lighter to a buddy, and I saw his snub nose and pouting red lips. It was definitely him.
“Oh shit,” I said, as he laughed at something the girl said. “That sucks.”
“What?” Gilly’s voice was way too loud. “Wait. Is that Grant Powers?”
“Shut up,” I hissed, but it was too late. At the sound of his name Grant looked up and peered across the street. He exhaled and half waved at me with a cocky grin.
I turned my back quickly. “Is he still looking?”
“Yeah, he’s looking. And he’s coming over here.”
“No, no, no,” I moaned. I felt Gilly put his hand on my elbow. He wrapped his long fingers around it and squeezed.
I looked up at him. He was standing in front of me, looking down with a mixture of compassion and exasperation on his face. All my contempt from earlier drained away, and I hung on to his relatively friendly face like an anchor.
“Hey, Kendall,” I heard behind me.
Gilly tightened his grip, and I . . . just . . . reacted. I went up on my toes and pulled Gilly’s ear to my mouth. “Don’t stop me,” I whispered. Then, with my hand still buried in his hair, I swerved to the side and kissed him.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I smashed my lips against his and held them there, waiting for him to respond—or not, I guess. But it didn’t take long. I’d caught him by surprise and felt his sharp intake of breath, but after what felt like either a light-second or a century, he exhaled and his lips pouted out, softly wrapping around and in between mine, sapping the sensation from every other part of my body. Like a rush of blood to the head, only instead of my head it was my mouth and my fingertips still on his scalp.
It didn’t feel the way I would have expected it to feel.
Not that I had ever imagined what kissing Gilly would feel like. But instantly my mind was wiped clear of everything except for was happening on and in my mouth. I don’t think I was even conscious that it was Gilly I was kissing, just that I was kissing.
His hand dropped from my elbow down to my waist and pulled me closer to him. I grabbed and pulled on the front of his shirt. He took his mouth off of mine to breathe. In the space of that breath, he gasped, “What . . . ?”
That was enough to break the spell. I was out of the fog and pressed face-to-face with Michael Gilbert, breathing heavily. We were in a discordant rhythm, me inhaling his exhale and vice versa. I let go of his shirt, but it took a few seconds for the fingers on my other hand to get the message to relinquish his hair.
Gilly abruptly let go of my waist.
I took a step back.
He looked anywhere but at me.
I opened my mouth but realized I wasn’t sure what to say. “Gilly—”
“Powers went inside. You’re covered.”
“Good,” I answered, trying to catch his eye. “Thanks.”
“Let’s go find a cab,” he said, heading in the direction of the more populated Van Brunt Street.
“Hey, wait,” I said, struggling to catch up. He stopped but didn’t turn around. I skipped in front of him. “Are we cool?”
“Sure, Barbie.”
“Jesus, Gilly,” I exploded. “Stop fucking calling me that!”
He cracked up. He started laughing so hard, he had to sit on the curb. Unsure whether this was a good sign or bad, I decided to keep my distance and stay standing on the street.
He eventually ran out of laughter and looked up at me, eyes wide.
“What the hell was that about?” I asked, annoyed. It felt like he was laughing at an inside joke with himself, one I didn’t get.
He sobere
d up and got to his feet. “Nothing,” he told me, looking away.
“OK,” I said, reaching out to touch his shoulder. “So are we cool?”
He shrugged me off. “We’re fine. Let’s go find that cab.”
We walked to the corner without talking, but I kept sneaking glances at him and catching him doing the same. We had passed some sort of boundary that lived between girls like me and boys like him, and I didn’t have a map of the new terrain.
No cabs were in sight. I checked my phone—11:45—and stopped suddenly.
“I just realized I have no idea where you live,” I said, turning to Gilly. “Do you have a curfew? Am I getting you in trouble?”
He snorted. “I think my parents would be really excited if I didn’t get home until dawn; don’t worry about it. But I live in Windsor Terrace, a little south of you. I see you on the train some mornings.”
We resumed strolling toward the F train. “That’s convenient,” I said. “Actually, it’s a relief. I wouldn’t want to take the train by myself after midnight, and I don’t see any cabs.”
“You can do battle with angry henchwomen, go into seedy bars to do drug deals, but you don’t want to take the subway at night. Weird.”
“Hey, you wouldn’t either if you’d been trained the way I have,” I said. He grabbed my elbow and pulled me out of the splash as a car barreled through a puddle down the street. “Thanks. If you were a girl, you’d know.”
“What, exactly?”
I sighed. “Every girl I know was given the exact same instructions from their parents about the subway: Don’t ride it after eleven unless you’re with a boy.”
“Unless you’re with a boy? Isn’t that sort of what they’re trying to prevent?”
I shook my head. What an innocent. “There are boys and there are attackers. Not the same thing.”
His forehead wrinkled. “Isn’t that kind of sexist? Girls need boys to keep them safe?”
I shrugged. “I don’t make the rules. I just follow them.” Gilly scowled so hard, I could almost hear it. I laughed. “I am a very good girl, you know.”
“I can see that,” he said flatly.
“Oh, hey, a cab!” I ran out into the street to hail it. I motioned toward Gilly, but he was standing with his arms crossed. I turned back to the cab as the driver rolled down the window.
“Tenth and Sixth please. Get in the cab, Gilly,” I said, bouncing in. “I’m sorry I assaulted you. I’m not a good girl. It’s like you said in the nurse’s office: I’m a bad, bad girl.” I pouted at him and was pleased when his stern expression cracked into a smile.
“You do genuinely annoy me,” he said as he got into the car. “I want to make that clear.”
“So you spent all night helping me under protest? You want that noted for the record?”
He turned toward me and stuck out his tongue. “I told you,” he said. “I’m writing a book.”
When the cab pulled up to my house, I quickly thrust a twenty-dollar bill at Gilly and hopped out. I ran to my stoop and then stopped. Whirling around, I said, “We’re not telling anyone this happened, right? This is not a thing.”
He grunted. “Like it would be great for either of our reputations at this point.”
I scrunched up my nose and gave him the finger. He smirked and blew me an ironic kiss. “Go ahead,” he said to the visibly annoyed driver, and the car sped around the block.
As I tiptoed up to my bedroom, I could feel the bravado and adrenaline of the last couple of hours drip away, slowly but inevitably, like honey off a spoon. Five minutes later, I was in my bra and underwear in front of the bathroom mirror, staring blankly at myself, not sure which girl I was looking at.
I wasn’t sure what to expect in the way of fallout after the flare-up between my mother and me.
We didn’t fight a lot. Oh, we argued. We argued a lot, and sometimes those arguments got heated. But there had been no argument in what happened between us on the stairs—no rational reasoning at all. There was just irrational reaction, anger, irrational reaction, anger.
When I came downstairs Saturday morning, my mom was already at the table with a bowl of Cheerios, a cup of coffee, and the newspaper.
“Morning,” she said placidly, not looking up from the paper.
“Morning,” I answered back. I made my way to the Keurig. After putting in my pod and my cup, I turned back to my mother.
I felt uneasy. “We’re OK, right?” I asked.
My mother looked up, peering at me over the rims of her reading glasses. “Of course we are,” she told me and went back to the paper. “Everything’s fine,” she said. “We’ll just forget about it.”
I nodded. That was the most conflict resolution that ever happened in my house, so I’m not sure why I had expected any sort of closure. But, even though she said everything was fine, I couldn’t shake a queasy twinge in the pit of my stomach. I wished my mom would look at me, but she just kept reading. I took my coffee back up to my room.
I had a suspects list. Sure, none of the suspects were talking to me, but if I could bullshit my way through last night’s meeting with Trev, a complete stranger, I could find a way to interrogate people I’d known since before we all became bitches. So I did what I always did:
My homework.
I started a new document on my laptop and made a list of each Howell student Trev had mentioned.
Immediately, I eliminated the boys. Grant and his friends had no reason to humiliate me more than I had already humiliated myself. Lucas was new last year, and we had been nothing but friendly: no history there. Lemon was a sweetie. Drew was an unpleasant X factor, but I had had little to no contact with him for all of high school. And this felt personal. Which meant, it felt like a girl.
Danica, Simone, Ellie, and Audrey.
Danica was a hippie type I had run against for student council vice president last year. She’d had campaigned against using animal products in the cafeteria. She’d had a decent argument: It was cost-efficient and promoted health, and those who didn’t want to abstain could go out to eat anyway. I’d destroyed her in a landslide. Could it have been her?
I tapped my fingers against the space bar. The fight hadn’t gotten mean. She had shaken my hand afterward, and I had even asked her to present a proposal for Meatless Mondays in the cafeteria. It got voted down, but I think she appreciated the thought. I eliminated Danica.
Simone. I thought a second and crossed her out. If she had framed me, she wouldn’t have put me in touch with Trev.
Audrey. My heart sped up, but I forced it to slow down. Obviously, Audrey was the most likely person to want to harm me. She had motive. She had been in the back room at the Fish Hook, so she had opportunity. She even knew my Facebook password.
But . . . Audrey hated drugs. Audrey hated all drugs. She wouldn’t have wanted to touch them. I was surprised she had even gone into that back room. She couldn’t have known what Grant and Ellie were there for.
Eventually, I zeroed in on the likeliest suspect: Ellie Kurtz. Ellie was technically my friend, but she had always been a little bit my enemy, too. She wanted to be closer to Audrey. I had fallen, and if Ellie had seen an opportunity to keep me down, she would have taken it.
I highlighted her name on the screen and bolded it. Pleased, I closed the document and turned to my actual homework.
But just as I opened my history textbook, my mind landed on Gilly. I flashed back to him grabbing my waist, and a swift cramp raced across my stomach, like a somehow pleasurable electric shock.
Great. That’s just what I needed.
I gave up on homework and went to Hulu on my laptop, turning on a rerun of America’s Next Top Model. I tried willing the image of Gilly’s mouth out of my head, but it wouldn’t leave. I could still feel the ghost of the kiss, the way his teeth had nipped my lips in surprise.
Anyway, I reminded myself, it wasn’t even me who had kissed him. I was still the girl in the picture when that happened. I had had her sheen, her pati
na of glamour, coating my skin like an especially potent body glitter. The glitter had smudged a little when I saw Grant.
Grant. Fucking Grant.
I shut the laptop, lay down, and clamped my eyes shut.
Audrey had never told me why she broke up with Grant, and that was out of character. Audrey was a girl who valued articulation. She insisted on expressing herself and being understood. Instead, I’d found out my best friend had dumped her boyfriend practically by default.
It was maybe a month after the warehouse party. I was waiting for Audrey by her locker when Grant walked toward us.
“Hey—” I started to call out, when Audrey shot me a freezing look.
“Don’t do that,” she warned.
Grant rolled his eyes and moved sideways to talk with Pete Morrison.
“Why not?” I asked, trying to catch his eye, puzzled and secretly frightened. I had started to depend on his funny faces and gentle body checks when he passed me in the hallway. I didn’t want to lose this small bright spot, this secret way I had of feeling special.
Audrey shrugged slightly. “I broke up with him.”
“What?” I turned to stare at her. “When? Why?”
Audrey set her mouth and again just shrugged. Still in shock at this sudden fault line in my foundation, I looked back at Grant and felt my throat close. He was looking back at me and smiling. He wasn’t looking at Audrey. He grinned like he was opening a present.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, I didn’t sleep well that weekend. Monday morning, I was slumped against my locker, mainlining coffee, when Simone’s impossibly spiky crocodile heels clicked to a stop in front of me. She slid easily into a graceful side-saddle-esque sitting position and cocked her head to the left.
“Good morning,” she said lightly.
Simone and I had never hung out before. The longest conversation we’d ever had was last week. “Morning,” I answered.
Simone hadn’t been looking at me, but she did when I answered, and, to my surprise, she looked as unsure as I felt.
“Is it OK if I sit here?” she asked. I nodded. She tipped her head in acknowledgment and scooted so that her back was against the locker bank, sitting right next to me but far enough away that there was no danger of touching. When nine o’clock came, she unfolded herself and stood up. Without saying anything, she offered me her hand. I took it, and she pulled me up.
The Accidental Bad Girl Page 8
