by Nicole Baart
“My life is nothing like yours,” Dylan said. “And my dad is just the tip of the iceberg. We came up here to try and get away from it all, but Sutton isn’t home. We don’t belong here. I don’t belong here.”
Meg tried to reconcile the Dylan she knew with the bleak narrative he was painting. She could feel the angst rolling off him like waves of summer heat, shimmering and indistinct with the pain of all the secrets he still held. “But you’re not your father. You’re nothing like that,” she said.
“No. But that doesn’t change anything, does it?” He turned and caught her chin loosely in his hand, rubbed her jaw with his thumb. “Do you think your parents would let you date me if they knew that my mom still drinks to forget? That my brother got kicked out of school in Arizona because they found weed in his locker?” He searched her eyes, leaned in a little closer. “The only reason I didn’t get kicked out, too, is because they didn’t find mine.”
“Dylan . . .”
He shook his head as if he could read her mind. “That’s not me. At least, not anymore. But, still.” His gaze was earnest, almost pleading. “I did the best I could, but I more or less raised myself. Why do you think I always liked hanging out at your house so much?”
Meg turned her face into his hand and closed her eyes. She wanted to kiss his palm, to press a gift inside it so that he would know just how much he was worth. How much she loved him for who he was. But she didn’t dare.
“I’m not going to college,” Dylan said, dropping his hand. “I have no idea what I want to do with my life. No clue where I’ll go after graduation. Seriously, Meg. What can I offer you?”
“Does it have to be all or nothing?”
Dylan gave her a wry look. “You think we could have a few casual dates? Hang around a bit and then call it quits?”
“My parents would understand,” Meg started, but Dylan cut her off.
“It would never work,” he said again. “I don’t fit in your world, and you don’t fit in mine.”
“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“But it’s true. You belong with someone like Jess. Not Jess, mind you. He’s a moron. But you’ll find yourself some handsome scholarship recipient, graduate college summa cum laude, rise to the top of your field, have a few adorable babies, and live happily ever after.”
“And you’ll . . . ?”
Dylan arched one eyebrow, but his eyes were heavy. Sad. “I told you. I have absolutely no idea. And I can’t take you with me. You’d wake up one day in some cheap trailer with a job as a gas station attendant and a hangover, and hate me for ruining your life.”
They were silent for a few long minutes, and in that small span of time, Meg realized that at least in some ways, Dylan was right. She had lived a sheltered life, and though she hated to admit it, there was a set of unwritten rules that she was expected to follow. Her parents did have plans for her, and as much as they liked Dylan, she knew that they considered him a bit of an outsider. Broken family, a bit rough around the edges. A bit too good-looking. A bit too dangerous. Meg’s life was supposed to be simple and clean. Dylan’s baggage wasn’t something they would want her to shoulder. And they didn’t know the half of it.
But even as Meg’s heart broke, she became aware of the fact that she also had plans for herself. She didn’t know what her future held, but it sparkled bright and fresh and just out of sight, the merest whisper of all that was to come. A promise. She was surprised that Dylan could see it. And stunned that he couldn’t imagine it for himself.
“Hey,” Dylan said before she could muster the courage to speak. “It’s okay. You’re still my girl. You’re just my sometimes girl. Sometimes I have you, sometimes I don’t. It’s enough.” He didn’t say “for now,” but the limitation was implied. “You know, Meg, I’m really sorry. I never meant for this to happen.”
“You regret kissing me?”
His bittersweet half smile slipped a little, and it was so perfectly lopsided, Meg had to repress the urge to kiss the downturned corner until it righted itself. But the mood in the truck had changed, and though every inch of her body still prickled with the desire to slide next to him and bury herself in all his angles and lines, she made herself sit very, very still.
“Some people just don’t fit,” Dylan told her. “Whether we like it or not, I don’t think we were meant to be.”
After a long moment, Meg nodded, sealing an agreement that tore her heart to make. She didn’t know exactly what Dylan expected from her, from them, but she was willing to suspend all her doubts if it meant that maybe, sometimes, at least more than this one time, they could share the furtive refuge of a moment like this. “Okay,” she whispered, because it seemed the only thing to say.
“Okay.”
They breathed in harmony for a long minute, then Dylan stuck out his hand in an imitation of the hapless greeting he had extended when he pulled her down behind the raspberries. It recast everything. Made light dark. “Friends?” he asked.
“Friends,” she agreed, but the word was harsh against her tongue, sour and thick with yearning that she swallowed whole.
Maybe it should have been easy to go back to the way things had been, but in the days and weeks after giving in to the irrepressible pull of each other, Meg had a very hard time reverting to same old, same old. Passing him in the hall at school, it was almost impossible for her to stop herself from touching him in some small, hidden way. She turned her palm out and brushed his arm, keeping her face blank and her eyes fixed straight ahead as she felt the cord of muscle beneath his warm skin. Or she would alter her path a bit and brush past him on her way to what she now considered some inconsequential class. Their hips would touch, their shoulders, elbows, legs, it didn’t matter. But wherever she touched him, she would burn in the spot for many minutes after he was gone.
Her skin felt tight, constraining, as if the girl inside was not the same as the one who had existed before Dylan changed everything with a kiss. She hated herself for each display of weakness, loathing the way that he had somehow separated her from everything she believed herself to be. The worst of it was, she couldn’t read him. She was no more aware of his desires and intentions than she was able to decipher her own. Everything was foggy and indistinct, muted by the overwhelming fact that she ached to be with him, no matter the personal cost.
It didn’t help that Dylan kept coming to her football games. He sat beneath the oaks, tucked far away and out of sight unless you knew what, or whom, you were looking for. Meg looked. She inspected the hill for him with an increasing urgency that bordered on desperation. The inner turmoil contributed to the passion of her game, but the mental clarity that had kept her team on a winning streak was muddled and dark. The Riot Girls started to lose, and Meg found that she didn’t care. After the clock ran out, she tried to be cool, nonchalant, encouraging her team and quickly sending them on their way. “I have a ride,” she would admit when pressed. “An old friend.” She hoped her face didn’t betray the agony that word inflicted.
And though she wanted to run when the rest of the girls turned toward the parking lot, Meg forced herself to cross the field slowly. Arms wrapped tight around her, chin tucked low, head down, so she didn’t have to watch him watching her come.
Sometimes they didn’t even make it to the truck. Sometimes he caught her chin and tipped it toward his own face, tasting her with little kisses as if she was something to be savored.
“I’m sweaty,” she complained, pulling away.
“I don’t care.”
It was always the same. A dance of their own invention that had a certain careful choreography, even though everything felt haphazard, quick and wild in its bewildering intimacy. She demurred, he chased, and they gave in to each other for as long as they dared. Until they had to pretend that nothing had ever happened and go back to the status quo of their normal lives. But there was nothing remotely normal about their clandestine relationship or, in fact, any area of their lives, when the da
ys seemed to center around the next possible time they might find to be alone.
As November wore on and the end of the Girls’ Football League approached, Meg began to feel restless. The girls were starting to complain about the cold, and the football games were no longer well attended by either players or spectators. But Meg was afraid to pull the plug on the league because it meant her stolen moments with Dylan were numbered. In the end, the choice wasn’t hers to make: the Pigskin Barbies announced the date of their last game against the Riot Girls and called it the championship.
Nobody contested the unorthodox conclusion to the GFL, and Meg actually smiled when she heard. She couldn’t help thinking of the girls as her girls, and she was happy to imagine that the league had been a bright point in their fall, maybe even in their entire high school experiences. It certainly seemed to have emboldened them.
A large crowd gathered for the final game, bundled in football blankets and waving extra team T-shirts over their heads as makeshift pennants. When the league champions had been decided once and for all, everyone was supposed to go home and shower, then meet at Giovanni’s, the only pizza place in Sutton, for a victory dinner. It didn’t really matter who won; the victory belonged to every one of the forty-two girls who participated in the full, unsanctioned season. Everyone was coming: players, fans, parents who thought the girls were plucky and admired their charming audacity. It was the perfect end to the season, but the plan filled Meg with both excitement and dread because, although she was looking forward to celebrating the success of the GFL, she was terrified to have her last postgame encounter with Dylan.
The early snow had melted and the day of the championship was cold but not unbearable. Meg’s breath came in short bursts anyway, as if the temperature was well below zero and it caused her physical pain to inhale. She told herself that it was because she didn’t want the football league to end, and she tried valiantly to keep her head in the game. But though she strived to focus on leading her team to victory, the Pigskin Barbies won by a touchdown. Then there were screams and hugs and chaotic piles of girls on the field as they rejoiced in the weeks of their self-made glory. Some girls even cried, and Meg didn’t begrudge them their tears. She just hugged them harder and smiled wide to make up for their tear-streaked faces when someone from the sidelines shouted, “Say cheese!”
It was all much, much more than she had ever dared to hope or expect when she had walked into Mrs. Casey’s office months ago. Meg should have reveled in the success, taken a few moments to relish the sights and sounds around her, to enjoy the triumph of the GFL that had, in a few short months, become iconic in Sutton. But her heart was already over the berm at the end of the field, she saw herself holding Dylan for what she feared would be the last time. After all, it wasn’t like he could just start coming over to her house or pick her up after dark to take a long drive down a deserted road. It wasn’t like she could break up with Jess and let Dylan make an honest woman out of her, so to speak. Dylan had made that perfectly clear.
Meg stayed on the field, pasting a grin on her face for countless photographs and shaking hands when the girls wanted to introduce her to their parents, until the last stragglers found their way to the parking lot. Then she picked up the football that all the girls had signed with a permanent marker She crossed the field with a strange hollowness in her gut, a sense of foreboding that made her petulant and short-tempered as she approached Dylan’s shadow against one of the naked trees.
“You were awesome,” he said when she was close enough to hear the low rumble of his voice.
“We lost.”
“Doesn’t matter.”
She shrugged to show him that it didn’t matter to her either.
Dylan’s gaze shifted beyond her, and she saw his eyes narrow as he tried to make out the parking lot. It was already too dark to see across the expanse of field. “I’ll miss watching you,” he told her, seemingly buoyed by the fact that they were alone.
“Whatever.” Meg broke away from the line of trees and started down the far side of the small hill in the direction of Dylan’s waiting truck.
“Hey,” he soothed her, snaking an arm around her shoulders and giving her a little squeeze. “What’s up with you?”
“This is wrong.”
“The end of your infamous Girls’ Football League?”
Meg squinted at him in the descending darkness and saw that he knew exactly what she was talking about. She spelled it out anyway. “Us.”
He nodded. “I know.”
“What do you mean?” Meg asked, stepping out of his one-armed embrace.
“What do you mean, what do I mean? You’re the one who said this is wrong.”
She bit her lip. “Wrong because I’m still supposedly dating Jess? Or wrong because . . .” She couldn’t finish. Or maybe she didn’t want to. It was too hard to admit that what he was playing at she had hoped was for real. Kind of like the Girls’ Football League. “Forget it.”
Some of the tenderness that Dylan had exhibited the first night in his truck had disappeared with the advent of their less than conventional friendship, and he gave her a playful shove. Meg knew there were terms for this sort of thing, this thing that they were—Friends With Benefits, FTMO, Friends That Make-Out—and they all sickened her to the point of actual, stomach-clenching nausea. When Dylan leaped in front of her and spun her off her feet with a laugh, Meg gritted her teeth and pushed him away.
“What?” Dylan looked surprised, maybe a little hurt.
“This is wrong.”
“You already said that.”
“It’s not . . .” She fumbled, trying to encompass everything she felt in one perfect word, something that would fall from her lips like a bomb and explode with meaning at his feet. “It’s not honest,” she managed.
“So tell Jess. Or stop seeing me.”
But Dylan had missed the point entirely. It was true that she wasn’t being honest with Jess—his phone calls were becoming increasingly uncomfortable for her, and it felt wrong to wear his ring, even though she didn’t dare take it off any longer than the span of her football games. And yet she was more concerned about being honest with herself. She hated the lies that she was telling herself: That everything was okay. That Dylan’s kisses were meaningless. Fun. A diversion, like the GFL and her entire ruse of an autumn.
“What do you want, Meg?” Dylan demanded, but his eyes were wide and dark and, she imagined, sad.
She opened her mouth and closed it, trying to come up with a way to explain all that she felt and the hurt of having him in bursts. But in the end, she didn’t know what to say to him.
They got into the truck in silence, and she didn’t slide across the seat to hold him like she usually did. He turned the key and revved the engine just a little higher than necessary, then drove her home without another glance, without a single remark to ease the tension between them, though the air was filled with all the thoughts they refused to voice.
When he pulled into the driveway, Meg sat in the truck as if in a trance, her mind swirling with things unsaid, years’ worth of confessions, and what felt like a lifetime of emotion that she had pressed deep and tried to ignore. Now she pictured herself pushing it all back, using her hands to force it down and down, into the dark places that had healed when Dylan’s kiss loosed the chains and set every unspoken hope free. But the sea of emotion had grown in the short weeks of their so-called affair, and she knew their furtive romance was the sort of quiet crime that could leave a graveyard of broken hearts in its wake. Her palms overflowed with the breadth of it all. It spilled between her fingers and trickled down over the seat where she had believed, for a moment at least, that everything could change. Didn’t he feel it?
But Dylan must not have felt it. He must not have known what it meant to Meg to leave him like she did, wordlessly, without a kiss to ease the parting or even one last touch. He didn’t even say good-bye, and neither did she.
17
LUCAS
&n
bsp; Lucas spent the morning unhinged, blowing in the wind, as if one of the screws that held him together had finally slipped loose. He felt like that more and more these days: undone; falling apart in places that he wondered if he would be able to fix. He had been wrong about so many things. It was disconcerting.
Thoughts of Angela and the ring underscored every moment of the long hours before his lunch break. Had he done the right thing? It was the question that seemed set on continuous play in the sound track of his life. Always there, always demanding more than he was able to give.
“Do the right thing,” Lucas’s father had said, repeating his own personal mantra as if it was enough to keep his son on the straight and narrow. And Lucas did as he was told. He lived life clean and simple, trying to keep people and circumstances in careful order within the world that he so painstakingly constructed around himself. Jenna was an aberration. So was Angela, the ring, his fixation on the woman in the barn. Was it a fixation? An obsession? Or had he, like always, just hoped to do the right thing?
When lunchtime finally rolled around, Lucas locked himself in his office and riffled through his notes about the missing women. Their names slipped beneath his fingers as he fanned the pages, their stories blurred into one long lament. It felt so hopeless, so completely impossible to find one single, forgotten woman out of thousands who had vanished that Lucas was ready to throw the entire heap into the garbage can. He couldn’t save Audrey. He couldn’t save his marriage. And he couldn’t save this broken, nameless woman.
The stack of papers made a dull thud at the bottom of the plastic recycling bin. Lucas stared at the top sheet for a moment, then shifted a pile of old envelopes off the edge of his desk and watched them flutter down to obscure the evidence of his research. He felt a brief stab of hope that Angela was doing better with the ring than he had done with the missing women.
