by L. E. Flynn
“Sarah really sounds great,” she says absentmindedly while she’s stirring a pot of whole-wheat spaghetti one night. “You should bring her around sometime so I can meet her.”
“Sure,” I say weakly. But I know what she really means. She doesn’t want a repeat of the arguments we had about Trixie. She wants to know my friends, know the influence they have on me.
I try to lose myself in Jasper, in the darkened car. I let his hand creep up the back of my shirt. I get used to the way his hair feels between my fingers, the way his neck smells when I press my face against it.
I don’t know why we always come here, why everything is such a secret. I sometimes fantasize about Trixie walking up to the foggy car window, tapping on the glass and shaking her head. I’d pull away from Jasper long enough to smile and wave, or maybe just give her the middle finger she deserves.
I’m the one who suggests going out in public together, because being together in secret stops being enough. I want the world to know that I don’t give a shit what happened to Trixie Heller anymore. I want everyone to know that I’m over it, over her.
“I’m hungry,” I tell Jasper, sliding off his lap.
“Yeah,” he whispers in my ear. “I can tell.”
“No, I mean for actual food. Let’s go have some.”
“Here?”
“No. I have a better idea. Do you like surprises?”
“Not really. I’m not so good at dealing with the unknown.”
It’s such a Jasper thing to say. Sometimes it sounds like he swallowed tarot cards or a crystal ball and he’s fated to spew out their lines at random times. I’m not sure what he’s going to think about where I’m taking him, but it feels right somehow, my idea of flipping off the universe and Trixie, lost somewhere in it.
When we get to Cabana Del Shit and park, Jasper sighs. “Of all the places, you want to eat here?”
“They have the best quesadillas.” Not that I’m going to eat a quesadilla in front of Jasper. I’m sure he wishes I was in better shape, that when his hands are on my skin he wants there to be less of it. The last girl he was with was Trixie, and we’re still competing, even though she’s not here for me to compare myself to. Those were Dr. Rosenthal’s words.
“Okay,” he says. “If you want.”
Honestly, I don’t really want. I lean over and kiss him again, and I almost want to frame his face, his lips and flushed cheeks and messy hair, and keep it that way forever, just to remember that somebody felt lust for me.
Cabana Del Shit is empty, and there are black paper lanterns fluttering in the wind that look almost like shadows. Skylar is behind the bar, wiping the surface with a rag, and she looks up and arches an eyebrow when she sees us come in.
“We’re closing soon,” she says. “But sit anywhere.”
Trixie always complained about what a bitch Skylar was. I wish Skylar wasn’t a bitch so I don’t have to agree with her, but when she practically throws menus down in front of us and rattles off the specials, I have to admit that Trixie was right.
“I’ll just have a Diet Coke and a salad with dressing on the side,” I say, taking smug satisfaction that I made her waste her breath telling us the specials when I knew I wasn’t going to order anything besides salad.
“Same here,” Jasper says.
When Skylar is gone, I raise an eyebrow at him. “Are you on a diet?”
He nudges my knee under the table. “Are you?”
“I’m a girl. I’m always supposed to be on a diet.” I roll my eyes like it’s a joke, like I’m okay with it, but I’m not. I wish he would tell me I’m beautiful, but I know he won’t.
He drums his fingers on the table. My hands are in front of me, clasped together like a fleshy seashell. If this is a date, shouldn’t our hands be entwined across the table, or at least touching? But he doesn’t make a move to touch me so I don’t either, and maybe he’s embarrassed to be seen with a girl like me in public, even though this barely counts as public because we’re the only two people here.
We have nothing to talk about. In my car, in the dark, we don’t have to talk at all. We let our bodies do the talking, our lips and hands and skin. But here, under the harsh Cabana Del Shit lighting, there’s absolutely nothing to say. We share one thing in common and it’s not even a thing but a person, and she’s this giant elephant in the room that I don’t want to give the chance to step all over me again.
“I’ll be right back,” I say, because I need to be alone to think of things I can talk to Jasper about. Things that are safe.
I duck into the bathroom and stare at myself in the mirror, fixating on how greasy my face looks. I use a brown paper towel to blot my forehead. I wish I had makeup with me, powder and concealer to even everything out. Jenny never went anywhere without a makeup bag, which used to clank around in her purse, and Alison and I would tease her for it. Now I get it. She didn’t want to get caught anywhere looking less than perfect.
The door to the bathroom swings open, almost smacking me in the face. It’s Skylar, who makes a beeline to the sink beside mine, where she starts scrubbing her hands with soap.
“Be careful,” she says when I stick my hands under the dryer on the wall.
“I think I know how to use a hand dryer,” I snap.
She rolls her eyes. “No, not that. The guy you’re with. Be careful. I’m surprised you’re even here with him. Don’t you know who he is?”
“What do you mean?” I say, my chest tightening. I rub my arms, where goose bumps have started to rise, despite the heat of the hand dryer. Of course I know who he is. That’s his smell all over my skin. His hair is messy because my hands were just in it.
“Shit. You don’t know,” Skylar says, and I can tell by the way something softens in her eyes that she’s preparing to take me into her confidence. “I guess it’s a good thing I’m here to tell you. He used to hang around here, like, all the time.”
I continue to stare at her blankly.
“He’s the guy who was obsessed with your best friend.”
49
“OBSESSION,” YOU SAID, standing in front of the vanity in your bedroom with purple lipstick in your hand. “A three-syllable euphemism for its ugly older sister, stalker.”
I was on her bed, flipping through a magazine. “What are you talking about?” I said. “Who’s obsessed with you?”
She applied the lipstick expertly, with her eyes closed. She didn’t even need to use the mirror.
“Nobody. That’s just the name of the lipstick.”
I didn’t quite believe her.
50
I TRY TO forget about what Skylar said, but her words are on repeat in my brain, like an annoying chorus from an overplayed song on the radio. He’s the guy who was obsessed with your best friend. Jasper and I ate salad and drank Diet Coke together, and I dropped him off at home and didn’t say a word about what Skylar told me, but now what she told me is all I can think about. Jasper said he and Trixie were just friends, that he didn’t care about having an actual relationship any more than she did.
But maybe he lied. I read the note he left in our locker. I already know Jasper cared more about Trixie than he admitted to me, but it feels different now, because somebody else knew too. Maybe he’s the kind of guy who needs to be obsessed with someone.
As much as I don’t want to care, I need to know the truth. Except, I have no idea how to bring it up. It’s not like I’m going to approach him and say, “The waitress from last night told me you used to be obsessed with Trixie. Can you elaborate?”
I don’t owe it to Trixie to investigate what Skylar said. I don’t owe her anything. She slept with the one person she knew meant everything to me. But maybe whatever I’m doing with Jasper isn’t revenge at all. He didn’t mean anything to her, and she’ll never know what we’re doing anyway. I guess I need to figure out if Jasper means anything to me.
A week after the Cabana Del Shit date, or whatever it was, Jasper asks me if I want to come over aft
er school. I’m terrified that it’s because he wants to have sex with me, and more than that, I realize I’m scared to be alone with him—actually alone. There’s a comfort in being in my car in a parking lot, because I could open the door and let myself out at any time, and people are close by without being too close. But being alone in his bedroom is a whole other beast. I’ve been using him to move on, to do what I think I should be doing, but we’re still tied up in the same person, the uninvited third party in the passenger seat with her arm hanging out the window, smoking a cigarette, asking why we’re taking so long.
I end up saying it on the drive to his house. “How did you really feel about Trixie? I need to know.”
“I’ve already told you. We were friends who hooked up. That’s all.”
I flush, embarrassed. That’s exactly what we are, except minus the friends part. I don’t even have what Trixie had with Jasper. I’m sloppy seconds, a hasty replacement.
“Did you hang around Cabana Del Shit after you stopped seeing Trixie?”
I can tell by the way his eyes widen that he wasn’t expecting that, and part of me expects him to get mad and tell me off. But he doesn’t get mad. He starts to talk.
“No. I mean, sort of. I went there a few times, just to make sure she was okay. She wasn’t returning my calls or texts. I figured something might be wrong. It wasn’t like her to just blow me off.”
“But you were only hooking up. That’s what you said.”
“Yeah, but she still owed me an explanation.”
I want to tell him she didn’t owe him anything. I try to remember the conversation we had on the way to the beach that day, which feels like forever ago. He said Trixie wouldn’t give him a ticket to her graduation. Why would he even want one, if they were just friends with benefits?
“I just need to know the truth.” My voice is small, but my desperation feels huge, big enough to swallow me up. “Were you in love with her?”
“The truth is,” he says, leaning against the window. “The truth is, I don’t know. I think I felt more for her than she felt for me. It was unbalanced.”
I know the feeling, I want to say, but I don’t.
“But if you loved her, and you think she’s still out there, how can you just move on? Don’t you need to know what happened?” That’s what I actually say. I try to imagine it the other way around, if Beau went missing. Even though I’m pissed off at him—it feels like he cheated on me with Trixie, even though it was actually Jenny he cheated on—I wouldn’t stop looking until I found him.
“I don’t know,” he says. “I haven’t moved on. It’s complicated. I mean, I don’t think I loved her. I’ve never been in love. I just don’t see the point in following all these dead ends that lead nowhere and leave us more frustrated than when we started.”
“You were obsessed with her. You were, weren’t you?”
“Who told you that? It’s not true. I just thought she was cool. We had fun together.” He rubs a hand over his face, pulling his eyes and nose down, making himself look grotesque. “Look, I have an idea. That’s why I wanted you to come over today. I have a theory about where she could be, but I didn’t want to get your hopes up. I was looking at that globe in my room and remembered a place she mentioned she wanted to go. Tijuana.”
I narrow my eyes. “She never mentioned Tijuana to me.”
“Well, I’m sure she didn’t tell me everything you guys talked about either. She used to say to me, How nice would it be for us to get away and spend a weekend in Tijuana?”
That doesn’t sound like something Trixie would say, I want to scream. Especially since she spent all her weekends with me. But maybe he’s right. We knew two different girls who somehow make up the same person and that’s why we need to work together, to build the actual girl.
“Okay,” I say, and somehow we’re back here, back to wanting to find her, even though I’m still so mad. Maybe that’s why I want to find her, because I’m full of all this hate, and I need to spew it somewhere. I picture us finding her in Tijuana, maybe with Toby Hunter, walking on the beach, skinny and tanned. I’d act shocked to see Toby, of course, because I’m not sharing with Jasper what Beau told me. I imagine my hands making contact with Trixie’s back, pushing her down, watching her crumple in the sand. I hear myself telling Toby what she did with his brother and watching him abandon her too.
“She told me about New York too, you know,” he says, his fingers brushing over mine. “She told me you were going there together.”
A flicker of hope opens up somewhere inside me, and I wish I could fill it with cold, hard hatred, pour it into the void like cement. She slept with Beau and didn’t tell me, and might have only become my friend as some sick little vendetta to get back at him. I may have been the biggest pawn in a game I didn’t know I was playing. But little things like this, her telling Jasper about me, somehow mean something.
“So, Tijuana,” I say, changing the subject back. “When are we going?”
51
MAYBE YOU WERE the one with negative body image, because you were obsessed with the size of everything. Your ears were too small. Your nose was too big. Your toes were too skinny and your kneecaps out of proportion to your body.
Morrison Beach didn’t fit.
“I’m done here,” Trixie said one day when we were walking from my car to the school. “Don’t you think we need something bigger?”
I thought everything was big enough already. If anything, I wanted to shrink. Shrink myself and shrink the world down to just the two of us, where nobody expected anything of me and I expected nothing back from them. I wanted our world to become a bubble we could draw curtains around, a snow globe immune to the outside.
“What do you mean?” I said.
“I mean,” she said, slinging her arm around my shoulder like she did when she got especially amped up, “New York City big. What do you think?”
I stopped, and she kept walking. “Are you asking me to move to New York with you?”
“Of course I am. I’m not going by myself, silly.”
The idea kind of scared me. I always figured I’d end up at UCLA, like I talked about with my old friends. I had even gone to visit the campus last summer with Jenny and Alison, and we stayed in a dorm room, picturing how awesome life after high school would be.
“Okay,” I said, because maybe New York would be the scene of my awesome life after high school. What was anchoring me in California anyway? Or who?
“They have the best cheesecake,” she said. “And bagels. And snow, Fiona. Plus, you love fashion. I picked up some brochures about NYU. It’s the perfect place for us.”
I nodded along with everything. I had gotten rid of my sewing machine and didn’t talk about clothes anymore, so I was surprised she even remembered. She was so excited about the possibility of New York that I got excited too, started to feel like maybe I really would have an awesome life after high school, that I could become myself again. Maybe getting away from everyone would be the best way to get back to that girl.
I never considered that if I had an anchor in California, in the form of a boy I wished I didn’t love, Trixie might have had a magnet, pulling her farther and farther away. Toby.
How far did she go for him?
52
“WE SHOULD JUST go,” Jasper says one day at lunch, plucking blades of grass from the ground and splitting them in half. “If we’re going to do it.”
Tijuana is an hour’s drive from Morrison Beach, but we can’t just go there after school and hope nobody notices. It has to be the right time. And thanks to Mom, the right time ends up being the first week in November.
“I’ll be back Monday at the latest,” Mom says, throwing clothes in her suitcase. Her forehead creases. “I think it would be best if Aunt Leslie comes and stays with you.”
My stomach forms a knot. Aunt Leslie would ruin everything.
“No,” I say. “I’m fine on my own.” Please, I beg silently. Please, believe me.
> Mom purses her lips. “I expect you to call every day. Twice a day. And if you don’t call, I’m sending Leslie to the house.”
I nod emphatically. She didn’t say anything like that during the summer. She has been different since Trixie left, more worried Mom and less cool Mom. Trixie changed more people than she’ll ever know.
I wave as Mom’s car pulls out of the driveway. She waves back and for a second I feel like running after her, like asking her to stay and make me feel like a little kid, loved and protected and safe. But I can’t think about that now. Not when I have a mission.
I pick Jasper up after school. He has a duffel bag with him, which he shoves into the back seat of my car. I raise my eyebrows. “Are you planning on sleeping over?”
He laughs. His incisors are pointy, almost vampire-like. I remember how they felt tugging on my lip. Then I remember what Skylar said, and I shake the thought out of my head.
“I just figured it was best to be prepared.”
“Where did you tell your parents you’re going? Did you think of a good excuse?”
He stretches out his legs. “Astronomy project. Something about the lunar phases of the moon. I’m a good liar when I need to be.”
Jasper’s fingertips are perched on the console while I drive. His hand creeps closer and closer to my thigh, where it comes to rest. When I jerk away, he stretches out his palm, which is hot against my jeans.
“Relax,” he says. “I just wanted to touch you.”
“Why? Why me?”
It’s a valid question, but he could ask me the same thing. Neither of us wants to answer it. But Jasper’s mouth is edging closer to the side of my face, his breath tickling my earlobe. “Let me tell you a secret,” he whispers, and I instinctively clench up, because I don’t have room to store more secrets. “You’re the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen.”
