For a moment, I was too shocked to do anything. My brain was yelling at me to move, but I couldn’t process it. Finally, adrenaline kicked in, and I dashed into the street just as the light turned red, making it across just in time to see Rockford stride confidently through the front door.
I hurried after him and got in line for the security checkpoint, not knowing what else to do. But Rockford didn’t do the same. He went straight to the head of the line and pulled out his wallet. He opened it and showed it to the guard.
There was a badge there. Not the shitty plastic one Vin had used to trick me out of the house. A real one. Real gold-plated metal, with a real NYPD seal.
“No fucking way,” I whispered.
The guard waved Rockford through with a back clap. “How’s tricks, Detective?”
“No way,” I said again, louder this time. People in line turned to look. I quickly pulled the drawstring on my hood. I walked out of there as quickly as I could without running until I made it back outside to fresh air.
Rockford was a cop.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
All day at school the next day, I started at loud noises, instinctively positioning my body in a defensive stance. Every whisper or dumb-ass comment from my classmates, even the ones not directed at me, was like someone using my own hand to slap my face and saying, “Stop hitting yourself. Why are you hitting yourself?”
Finally, the clock struck three. I grabbed my bag and bolted to the lockers. I wanted out of that building, preferably before anyone else had the chance to talk to me. An odd feeling, like something was boiling, had started in my head, and I wanted to be alone in case it exploded.
I ran down to my locker and began shoving books in as fast as I could. The hallway was still empty.
“Yes,” I breathed. I stood up, turned, and walked smack into Ellie Kurtz.
“Sorry,” I muttered and dodged around her, still heading toward the door.
Behind me, she said with a quiet, nasty laugh, “What, does the two-for-one special at the liquor store end at 3:15?”
And pop goes the weasel.
I dropped my bag off of my shoulder, pivoted, and launched myself at Ellie, knocking her to the ground.
When I caught my breath, I was lying on top of the wriggling Ellie, hands burning from the fall on the rough carpet runner, kicking at her ankles to keep her down. She managed to get a slap in, and the shock rolled me to my side, scratching and pulling at her hair, until our flailing, interlocking limbs blossomed into a full-on girl fight of smacking wrists and shirt-pulling, our legs tangling in the struggle, both of us horizontal on the floor.
Someone grabbed my free arm and yanked me to my feet. I stood over Ellie, still scrambling upright, listening to the yelling that had taken over the hallway. It wasn’t until I was led through the double doors toward the administrative offices that I realized the yelling had mostly been me.
Some middle-school teacher I didn’t know dumped me in a chair outside the principal’s office and turned to Ms. Lowery. “She started a fight in the hallway,” he said, jutting his finger in my direction. “Can I leave her with you?”
Principal Meyers walked in but stopped short when he saw me. I reached up to smooth my hair down.
“What happened?” he asked, sounding exhausted.
“Uh . . . I think I just got suspended.”
“What?”
I told the story, from Ellie’s comment to getting dumped in his office, mechanically, factually. It didn’t take long: It was a pretty simple story.
He shook his head, not in negation but in confusion. “Ellie Kurtz said something snide, so you knocked her down? That’s it? That’s all you have to say about it?”
I shrugged and nodded.
He sat back, dumbfounded. “What were you thinking? What is happening inside your head?”
A significant upswing in serotonin and endorphins. “That’s rhetorical, right?”
“I am sincerely and seriously disappointed in you,” he said, on the knife-edge of yelling. “You are most definitely suspended. We’re going to have to start talking about a disciplinary plan going forward. And I should let you know that I will be giving your parents a list of counselors who have worked with Howell students in the past . . .”
I listened to him in a state of beatific calm, literally feeling my muscles soften. I rotated my head, kneading the kinks out of my neck. I hadn’t felt this at ease in months.
“Are you hearing me, Kendall? Kendall!”
I stopped rolling my head and composed my features into a serious position. I nodded. “Yes sir,” I said, the words sounding strange in my mouth. Had I ever called someone “sir” before?
He shook his head and reached for the phone, putting it on speaker. I heard my mother’s voice mail click on. Principal Meyers sighed and started to dial my father’s number.
“He has an appointment from 2:45 to 3:30 on Wednesdays,” I said helpfully. “You should probably try him at 3:45.”
He looked at me with narrowed eyes. “Don’t think I’ll forget,” he said acidly. “Go home now, Ms. Evans. I’ll see you back here in my office at 8:45 a.m. on Tuesday morning.”
I felt a corner of my brain scream in horror: a three-day suspension. Had that ever happened to anyone in my class?
While that one neurological nook panicked, the rest of me was able to say, “I understand. Have a good weekend.” Then I calmly picked up my backpack, got out of my chair, and walked through the hallway and out the door into the fresh, mildly windy fall afternoon. I took a deep breath.
Punching Ellie had given release to something I hadn’t acknowledged before: I was angry. And not just at Mason or my hacker or Grant. I was mad at the world and had been since getting caught in that gym.
What really killed me about this whole mess was that everything I was, everything I had ever been—athlete, honor student, class officer, friend; smart, social, responsible, funny—had been wiped out the second I’d had sex. Not just for Audrey, not just for my classmates—for everyone. My teachers, my coaches, even my parents. All I was to them now was trouble, and what did my society-appointed caretakers assume was at the root? Had to be the sex.
The Barbie phone went off: I was being dispatched to the dorm at Columbia. Great, I thought. An encounter with Jeff was the perfect complement to my mood of righteous indignation.
Because it wasn’t just about sex in and of itself, I corrected myself as I rode the subway uptown. After all, no one threw the book at Grant because he wasn’t a virgin. So what made me so special?
Outside, as I walked to the dorm, a light rain dotting my white tank top, some unconscious lock in my brain snapped open, and images started leaking out in a slow, steady stream.
Grant holding my face in both of his hands, forehead pressing into mine, everything blacked out except for the bones in his cheeks and nose and brow, shadowed, seemingly outlined in glowing red, like campfire coals.
Black curls falling between my lips as he bent his head to fold his mouth around my collarbone.
Scraping my finger along his rib cage and the sweat and dust accumulating under my nail like clay. Marveling that instead of being gross, there was something primal and profound about having access to particles and chemicals from someone else’s body.
After signing in as K. Evans in the dorm lobby, I rode the elevator to the seventh floor and made my way to Jeff’s room. I knocked on 7A, but there was no answer.
I checked the phone again and frowned. I had misread it and was going to a new room, down the hall from Jeff. I shivered as the rain dried on my skin, leaving it cold, and made my way down the hall.
Grant wasn’t the first person I had had sex with. That was Naya’s cousin, at her sixteenth birthday party. All I remembered feeling was intense relief that I was getting it over with, with someone safe, and that it didn’t hurt too much. My brain was working so hard that afterward I couldn’t even remember what it had physically felt like. I don’t think I had been paying att
ention to my body at all.
It wasn’t like that with Grant.
I knocked on the door. Grant opened it, and my skin went from chilled to searing.
He smiled like he was expecting me. “Hey you,” he said.
For a second I was sure I was hallucinating. I closed my eyes, but when I opened them again, Grant was still there.
“What are you . . . ?” I asked, standing uncertainly in the hallway. Could he read what I had just been thinking about on the lines of my face?
He put his hand on my shoulder and reeled me into his room. “You’re at the right place, don’t worry,” he said, sounding pleased. “I heard you were doing this and wanted to pick up some E anyway, so . . . come on in. I mean, I’m surprised, duh, but it’s nice to see you.”
Grant Powers’s room even smelled like boy. All the bedding was green or brown and downy soft.
I heard the door shut behind me. I willed myself to turn around, to simply trade pills for money, to be as icy as I had been with Jeff or any of the others. But I couldn’t. I no longer felt icy. I was burning up. Trying to shake it off, I reached down into my pockets, noticing as I looked down that I had been clenching my fists so tightly that my nails had left tiny crescent moons in my palms.
He sat on the comforter, stretching out his legs, and rotated his ankle, the one he’d sprained sophomore year during basketball season. It still bothered him but only when he was preoccupied.
“I wanted to talk to you,” he said simply, a smile hovering around his lips but not quite landing. He looked down for a moment, turning his head away, unaware as ever that his neck was maybe the most beautiful part of his body. I looked at the long, delicate muscles there, feeling strangely empty.
I put the pills on his desk. “Let’s get this over with,” I said.
Pouting a little, but his eyes lighting up at the sight of the pill bottle, Grant shot me a quick look and then handed me a few bills.
I reached out for the money, but he caught my hand before I could withdraw it and didn’t let go.
I avoided his eyes. This I had not signed up for. “What did you want to talk to me about, Grant? It’s been kind of a long day.”
“You’re not even gonna sit next to me?” he said, scooting over with a dare in his bright, dark eyes. “Come on, Skipper. Please?”
Against my will, I smiled at the sound of my old nickname. Grant had called me that since I was fourteen years old. It was his own personal nickname for me, devised after he’d heard my mom call me Ken Doll at the sports banquet at the end of eighth grade, when high school athletes welcomed the incoming ninth-graders. I sat down on the other side of his bed.
“You totally screwed me over,” I said suddenly, surprising myself. He turned to look at me. “You do realize that, right? How completely you just abandoned me?”
He grimaced and looked down. “What did you want me to do about it?” he asked sulkily. “I can’t control Audrey. You know that.”
“You could have taken some responsibility!”
“How do you know I didn’t? How do you know what I said to her?”
Because I know you, and you don’t have it in you. It was on the tip of my tongue, but suddenly I didn’t want to go over it with him. What was the point?
I stood up. “I’m going to leave now.”
“Wait,” he said, struggling to his feet. “I wanted to talk to you about Simone.”
“What?” My hand on the doorknob, I stopped and turned around. “Simone? What about Simone?”
He shoved his hands in his pockets. “I want you to know that I had nothing to do with what happened,” he said, pleadingly. “I know I’m an asshole and all that, but it’s important to me that you know that it wasn’t my fault. That it wasn’t me.”
My stomach turning, I asked slowly, “Why would I think that?” He raked his hand through his hair, making the curls stand on end. “OK, yes, they got those capsules from me. But I thought it was just a rave drug. I really didn’t know. The thing with Simone wasn’t anyone’s fault, you know? I didn’t find out until later that the liquid doses did that. It got a little out of control, maybe, and she freaked out. I mean, you were there—we were just using it to party. Shit, those doses weren’t even for me.”
He seemed to be waiting for me to respond. When I didn’t, he sighed and shrugged. “Look, I know you and Simone are close now. Trev told me about it after I saw you at Mason’s party. I wanted to make sure you weren’t mad at me for that, at least.” He shut his eyes briefly and then opened them. “Things aren’t simple here. Me and Audrey. You and me.”
“There is no ‘you and me,’” I croaked, feeling like I was choking. I cleared my throat. “Never call Mason again.”
I opened the door and slammed it shut behind me, running all the way down the stairs, into the rain, pure and cold.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Two years ago, Simone Moody went crazy. Then she disappeared. And when she came back, she was different.
It wasn’t wholesale personality change. I had never known her that well, but she had always been sarcastic and wry. She had always been poised, the only one of us who could walk a whole hallway in heels with a book on her head during Howell’s ill-advised decorum unit in eighth-grade health. When she came back to school, she was still all of those things, with one big difference, so subtle I had never thought of it until now, lying on my bed, staring at the ceiling, trying to fit the pieces Grant had given me into the puzzle of Simone Moody.
In the last two years, I had never seen Simone back down from any position, laugh at any joke, ask how she looked, apologize, or be embarrassed. Simone no longer cared what anyone else thought of her. Everything she did, she did because she wanted to.
I dialed the phone. She picked up on the fourth ring. “Try to get whatever shrink they make you see give you Klonopin,” she said. “It’s supposed to be very relaxing, and if anyone needs to mellow the hell out, it’s you.”
I smiled a little. “Hey, you busy tonight?”
“It’s Wednesday, Kendall. I’m clubbing.”
I hesitated. “Could you come over? There’s something I want to talk to you about.”
She sighed. “It’s like having a pet. I’ll be over in a bit.” She hung up.
I spent the next hour pacing the floor, compulsively lining my belongings up in rows, trying to figure out what I wanted to ask her. I felt that I knew the question, but somehow there was caution tape around it in my head: Dangerous. Do not enter. Do not go there.
I was still trying to figure it out when Simone knocked on my bedroom door.
“Hey,” I said, surprised. “You’re here.”
“Your dad was getting in just as I got here,” she said, looking confused. “He said he was glad that you were rebuilding friendships with young women, because at this stage of psychosexual development, it’s important to have a homosocial support network. I told him I was happy to help?”
“That was probably the right answer,” I said wearily.
“So what’s the 911?” she said, spinning my desk chair backward and straddling it. “Has someone slipped a stolen diamond into your coat pocket? Anonymously sent you top-secret missile plans?”
I drew a deep breath. “I ran into Grant.”
Her face remained impassive. “And?”
“He wanted to talk to me,” I said awkwardly. “About you.” Simone’s eyes narrowed. “Really,” she said in a clipped, tight tone. “And what did Grant Powers have to say about me?”
“Why did you go away sophomore year?” I blurted out.
At first, Simone didn’t seem to react. Her face motionless, she surveyed me without an ounce of discernable emotion. Finally, she unfolded her legs from behind the chair and, standing up, said, in a breathtakingly even, dismissive voice, “If you already know, then why ask?”
She turned to go, and I ran ahead and blocked the door. “I really don’t know,” I said fiercely. “He was very vague. But if Grant Powers feels guilty enough abo
ut something that happened to you to apologize to me . . .” I found I couldn’t finish the sentence.
Simone still looked calm. So calm, it was scaring me. “There must have been rumors,” she said, staring me dead in the eyes.
“Honestly, it was so weird, most of the theories ended up being more like Simone fan fiction, less like gossip.” She looked thoughtful at this and sat down on my bed.
Simone looked at me appraisingly. “I don’t really talk about this,” she said matter-of-factly. She didn’t sound angry anymore. “It’s not something I need to talk about. Does it matter to you to know?” Scared, I nodded.
She nodded back at me. “You’re going to feel bad, and there’s nothing you can do about it,” she said. “But since you want to know, I was doing what I thought was ecstasy with Pete Morrison and Burke Kenneally at the party that happened over Thanksgiving break at Grant’s house. I think you were there.”
I nodded, remembering climbing up onto the roof with Grant, Audrey, and Ellie. Ellie slipped on the ladder, and I caught her. Mellower then, Ellie laughed for about fifteen minutes, clutching my shoulders and cracking me up as she slipped into a flawless impression of a boozy Joan Rivers, trashing everyone’s outfits, mine included, too funny for anyone to get mad.
“I was, but I don’t remember seeing you,” I said.
“That’s because I was mostly in Grant’s room with Pete and Burke,” she continued evenly. “The ecstasy was in tabs, and we all swallowed one. Then they started laughing. They had emptied a capsule into my drink, and the tab I had swallowed was an aspirin. They had run out of the tab ecstasy and just had liquid left. They said they didn’t want me to miss out and apologized for tricking me. I think I laughed.” She paused. “And six hours later I woke up in Grant’s bed not wearing anything.”
I felt like someone had popped a balloon in my rib cage. “You don’t mean . . .”
She shrugged a little. “I don’t really know exactly what happened. Pete and Burke were gone; I was alone in the room. But when I was getting dressed, I found a used condom on the floor, so—”
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