Right of Way

by Lauren Barnholdt

  Saturday, June 26, 10:59 a.m.

  Siesta Key, Florida

  Peyton is shady. And not just because she was listening in on my phone call, either. Which, by the way, was none of her business. I’m a grown-ass man. If I want to take my car up to Connecticut, it’s none of my mom’s business. And it doesn’t matter that my mom pays for my car. That’s a completely inconsequential fact.

  I’m eighteen, and the car is in my name. Which means that if we were in a court of law, she couldn’t legally stop me from doing anything I wanted with it. I know my rights. I watch those law shows on TV. (What? They’re good. And sometimes there’s nothing else on, especially when I’m skipping school.)

  Of course, my mom did flip out, mostly because I have graduation tomorrow night and I’m supposed to give a speech since I’m valedictorian. And my mom got all freaked out and started screaming because she thought I wasn’t going to be back in time to attend. And so I told her very calmly that I probably wouldn’t be. I never wanted to give that stupid graduation speech, anyway. That’s when she started screaming some more, and so that’s when I hung up on her.

  But anyway.

  Peyton is shady for lots of reasons, but right now she’s shady because she’s running away. I don’t know much about her family life—she never wanted to let me in on that kind of thing, which is a completely different story—but her mom seems nice enough, if you like those MILF types. Not that I want to bang her mom—cougars aren’t really my thing—but I bet Evan would be all over it. So then why is Peyton running away? The summer right before she’s supposed to start her senior year? What could be so bad that she can’t last at home for one more year before she goes off to college?

  I know she has a nice house. I know because I’ve seen pictures of it—pictures that she sent me. One is of her and her friend Brooklyn, sitting by the fireplace around Christmastime, wearing elf hats, their arms thrown around each other, beaming at the camera. And a couple of, um, more risqué ones she sent me of her in a bathing suit out by her pool. The whole place looked pretty nice.

  So then what’s her problem? Is she just one of those girls who writes people off without any real reason? Like maybe she and her parents got into some dumb fight about something, and now she’s running away?

  “Be careful with that one,” she instructs as I load one of her suitcases into the trunk of my car. “It has a lot of important things in it.”

  “Yeah?” I say, tossing it into the trunk. “Like what?”

  She glares at me and then starts rearranging all her bags, putting them just so. “Like my computer.”

  “Oh,” I say. “Right. Your computer. We wouldn’t want your Twitter log-in getting lost or anything, that’s for sure.”

  “Sorry,” she says. “But I don’t go on Twitter anymore. Twitter is the new Myspace. I mean, how totally 2011.” She wrinkles up her nose, like she’s talking about some stupid website for tweens instead of a multibillion dollar website that has become the center of the social media network and changed our culture and the world forever. What a snob.

  “Right.” I nod and slam the trunk shut. “Well, then, we wouldn’t want anyone getting access to any of your personal pictures.”

  She nods, looking confused for a second. And then understanding dawns on her face. She looks at me in horror. “You better have deleted those.”

  “Deleted what?” I give her a fake innocent look, which seems to infuriate her.

  “You know what I’m talking about.” For a second, I think she’s going to hold her hand out or something and demand I give them back. Which would be ridiculous. You can’t give someone back a digital picture. “Those pictures I texted you.”

  I pull my phone out and scroll to the one of her in the elf hat. “Oh, you mean this one?” I chuckle and shake my head. “But you look so cute in it!”

  She reaches for my phone and I’m so caught off-guard that she’s actually able to take it away from me. I’m All-State in basketball, and this chick is actually somehow able to get my phone.

  She starts scrolling through the pictures. “I’m deleting the one of me in the elf hat!” she announces.

  “Give me that,” I say, reaching for it. The thing is, I did delete her stupid bathing suit photos a day after she sent them to me, just like she made me promise. Of course, that was when I was acting like some lovesick schoolboy instead of a grown-ass man who drives his own car wherever he wants.

  “No!” she says. “Not until I make sure you deleted those pictures.”

  I reach for the phone again, but she runs away from me, around toward the front of the car. Now she’s standing in front of the hood, and I’m in the back, trying to get at her—it’s like some kind of new game, halfway between chicken and freeze tag. An older couple goes walking by and gives us disapproving looks, like they can’t believe what the youth of America are up to these days.

  “Peyton Miller,” I say real loud, “you better give me my phone back! It’s your own fault that you were sexting me inappropriate pictures. If you didn’t want me to have them then you shouldn’t have sent them.”

  The older couple looks at us, horrified.

  Peyton glares at me and then holds my phone up over her head, like she’s going to smash it.

  “Put that down!” I yell.

  “Ooh, what’s wrong?” she says. “Mommy and Daddy won’t buy you another one?”

  “You can’t just go around smashing other people’s property!” I say.

  The old man and woman are past us now, and I can hear the old man asking his wife what sexting means.

  “Take back what you said about me sexting you,” Peyton says.

  “I take it back.” She lowers the phone. “Even though you did.”

  The phone goes back up over her head.

  “Okay, okay,” I say, holding my hands up in surrender. “I’m sorry, you’re right, you didn’t sext me.”

  She lowers my phone slowly, giving me a chance to take back what I just said. But I don’t. “Good,” she says. “Because a bathing suit picture hardly counts as a sext.” Her face is flushed red, though, and I can tell she’s embarrassed thinking about it. I’m a little flushed, too, thinking about it, although not because I’m embarrassed.

  I walk around the car toward her and hold my hand out. But when I get there, she’s looking down at the screen.

  “Is that her?” She holds it up, and I swallow hard. There’s a picture of Kari on the screen, her hair all blond and wild in a ponytail after one of her lacrosse games.

  “Yes,” I say, taking the phone from her and shoving it in my pocket. “That’s Kari.”

  “She’s pretty,” Peyton says. For a second, I see the flash of hurt in her eyes, but it’s so quick that I wonder if I imagined it.

  “Thanks,” I say, which makes no sense. Why should I thank her for telling me that Kari is pretty? It’s not like I’m responsible for Kari’s prettiness.

  “Are you ready to go?” Peyton asks. She looks up at me, and my heart catches. I want to explain to her, about what happened last night, about what happened over Christmas, about Kari, about everything. I open my mouth, and she rolls her eyes. “Well?” she demands. “Are you ready or not?”

  “Yes,” I say. “I’m ready. I just have to get my stuff out of my room. And Hector, too, of course.”

  She shakes her head. “Hector,” she mumbles. “He’s probably going to be the only good part of this trip.”

  Saturday, May 22, 4:37 p.m.

  Greenwich, Connecticut

  So once Courtney called and informed me that Jace was going to be at the wedding after all, I somehow ended up with a very sexy dress. It’s this gorgeous turquoise color and it plunges down in the front, making my boobs look bigger than they already are. It’s tight and short and has spaghetti straps and it makes my waist seem tiny.

  I started grabbing dresses left and right after I hung up the phone, not even looking at prices. Which is why Nicole was ringing us up before I realized that
the dress I picked out was eight hundred dollars. Eight hundred dollars. For a dress. My mom’s dress was only five hundred. Of course, her hat was another two hundred, so really she ended up spending seven hundred, but still. That’s a lot of money for dresses we’re probably only going to wear once.

  Then, of course, we had to get shoes, and by the time we left the mall, we’d spent close to two thousand dollars.

  “Damn,” Brooklyn says from my bed as I turn this way and that. It’s later that afternoon, and she’s come over to inspect my purchases. “That might have been the best eight hundred dollars your mom ever spent.”

  “You think?” Now that I’m home, I’m starting to feel that this dress might be a little too scandalous for a family wedding. That, and it maybe makes my butt look big.

  “Yeah.” Brooklyn nods. “You got it going on in that thing.”

  “Thanks.” I run my hands over the shimmery material, not being able to stop myself from wondering what Jace is going to think when he sees me in it. He always told me how much he liked my body. But that could have been a lie. The same way everything else he told me was a lie.

  “Uh-oh,” Brooklyn says. “You’re thinking about him again, aren’t you?” She sighs, then reaches over and pinches me hard on the arm.

  “Ow!” I say, pulling away from her. “What the hell was that for?”

  “That was aversion therapy,” she says. “Every time you think of Jace, I’m going to pinch you. And that way, after a while, you won’t think about him anymore.”

  “Either that or I’ll just be pissed off at you,” I say, rubbing my arm. “And how do you know I was thinking about him?”

  “Weren’t you?”

  “Yes,” I admit. I throw myself forlornly down on the bed and stare up at the ceiling. “I was thinking about what he was going to think when he saw me in this dress.”

  “He’s going to think that you look hot and that he made a huge mistake,” Brooklyn says. “And he’s not going to know what to do with himself.”

  “Really?” I smile, even though I know in my head that stuff like that only happens in movies and books. More than likely I’ll end up at the wedding, looking absolutely phenomenal, and Jace will end up there too, and he’ll see me in the dress, but he won’t care.

  Probably he’ll have a new girl with him, or even worse, he’ll find another girl at the wedding that he’ll dance with all night. She’ll be wearing the same dress as me, only hers will fit her even better because she’ll be a lot skinnier than me, and it will turn out that Jace doesn’t love my body as much as he said. That it was just a ruse to get me to send him a bikini picture.

  The two of them will dance all night, and then they’ll sneak off into the tropical night air of Florida so that they can—

  “I told you that I needed to get a new dress for the wedding!” The sound of my mom’s voice comes up the stairs, and I sit up, straining to hear what she’s saying. Not like it’s hard. She’s practically screaming.

  “And you couldn’t wear one of the millions of dresses you have in your closet?” my dad yells back. “Christ, Michelle, you spent two hundred dollars on a hat! Two hundred dollars! Do you even understand what money is?”

  “Of course I understand what money is!” my mom screams. “How can I not when you keep reminding me of it every single second?”

  “Then I don’t understand how you could be confused,” my dad says, and I hear the sound of them moving toward the back of the house. “If I say it as much as you think I do, then how can you not . . . ”

  Their voices fade away as my dad follows her around the house. I’ve seen this dance before. My mom spends money. My dad gets upset with her about it. She knows this, and so sometimes she’ll come home and try to hide the stuff she’s bought before he sees it. Sometimes he catches her, and then he flips out, following her around the house yelling at her.

  The thing is, my parents are technically separated. Well, in the middle of a divorce, really. But they’re still living in the same house, mostly because they can’t afford to sell it right now—they owe more on the mortgage than it’s worth. I’m not sure why my dad doesn’t just move out and get an apartment, but I’m pretty sure his lawyer told him not to.

  Brooklyn looks at me, her eyes anxious. “You okay?”

  “Yeah.” I sigh, feeling even more guilty about spending so much on a dress. I reach out and finger the material. “Maybe I should take this back.”

  Brooklyn stands up and shakes her head. “You know what you need?” she asks. “A burger from McGreedy’s.”

  “No way. I’m not going to start eating a ton of fattening food before the wedding. I need to make sure I look like my most fabulous self.”

  Brooklyn rolls her eyes. “You’ve been watching too many Jennifer Hudson Weight Watchers commercials.” She picks her purse up off my nightstand. “You already look fabulous. And there’s no way you’re going to let some guy—no, some loser—stop you from eating what might be the world’s perfect burger.”

  I think about it. She is kind of right. I mean, it’s not going to matter if I don’t eat anything but lettuce from now until the wedding. Jace is probably going to act like a jerk no matter what I do, and then not only will I be all upset about it, but I won’t even have been able to enjoy any really good food in the meantime.

  “Can we get fries, too?” I ask, perking up.

  “Yes.”

  “And afterward can we go and look at lip glosses?”

  “Yes,” Brooklyn says. She grins. “Just because you don’t care enough about what Jace thinks to change your eating habits doesn’t mean we shouldn’t use him as an excuse to buy beauty products.”

  Saturday, May 25, 3:56 p.m.

  Sarasota, Florida

  Fucking Peyton Miller. Ever since Courtney called me earlier, Peyton is all I can think about. I keep looking at the dumb picture of her that I have in my phone. It’s her and her friend Brooklyn sitting in front of the fireplace on Christmas wearing these goofy Santa hats. She has her hair pushed back from her face and she looks so adorable I almost can’t take it.

  “So then I jumped off the roof,” Evan’s saying, “and right into the pool.”

  “You didn’t,” Kari McAfee says.

  “I did.” Evan nods. “Jace got it all on video, didn’t you, Jace?”

  “Unfortunately, yes,” I admit. I did get the whole thing on video. If it ever gets out I’ll probably get sued or something. Okay, that’s going a little too far. But I would definitely get in trouble with Evan’s parents.

  “Next I want to do a prank.” Evan takes a big bite of the hot dog he’s eating. We’re sitting on the bleachers at our school, watching one of the last baseball games of the season. Actually, I guess it’s one of the last baseball games of my whole high school career. The thought should make me sad—I am valedictorian after all—but somehow, it doesn’t. “You up for a prank, Jace?”

  “What kind of prank?” I ask warily.

  “I dunno.” Evan shrugs and then shoves the rest of his hot dog into his mouth. “I saw this one on YouTube that had like a million hits. This dude filled his parents’ house with bottles of water while they were on vacation. You know, he like, moved all the furniture out, everything. It was hilarious!”

  “That sounds lame,” I say. “And besides, your parents never go on vacation.”

  “We wouldn’t have to do that exact one,” Evan says, like it should be obvious. “We’d come up with something better.”

  “I think it sounds cool,” Whitney Blue says. She scoots a little closer to Evan on the bleachers, and I tune them out as they start to talk about all the different pranks they might be able to do.

  I shove my phone back into my pocket and try to get Peyton out of my thoughts. It’s been three months since we’ve spoken. Three months. Three months is a lifetime. She could be doing anything right now. She could have a boyfriend. A boyfriend who she’s bringing to the wedding. A boyfriend I’ll have to see her with. A knot forms
in my stomach and I feel my fists clench as I think about having to see some asshole with his hands all over Peyton. Not that I would ever punch someone out. Well, that’s not that true. I would if someone was hurting her.

  “Penny for your thoughts?” a voice says. I turn to see Kari scooting closer to me on the bleachers. She holds out her container of nachos and I take one.

  “Thanks,” I say, grateful for the distraction. I drag the chip through the melted orange cheese and pop it in my mouth.

  “So what’s new?” she asks. Kari and I have been friends ever since sophomore year, when she transferred to our school from New York City. Everyone was afraid of her at first because she showed up wearing black jeans and a black sweater. Yes, we wear black in Florida, but not all black, and not with knee-high boots. Half the school thought she was going to fight them. Well, the girls at least. And maybe some of the boys.

  “Not much,” I say. “What’s new with you?”

  “Same old,” she says. She flips her head over and gathers her long blond hair up in a ponytail. Kari totally assimilated to Florida, dying her hair blond and ditching the black clothes for the jeans-and-tank-top uniform of the Gulf Coast. She even joined the soccer team.

  We lapse back into silence. “What’s wrong with you?” she asks.

  “Nothing,” I say. “Why?”

  “Because you’re being all quiet,” she says. She elbows me playfully in the side.

  “I’m fine,” I say, and shrug. “Just tired.” I look out onto the field as Ian Walker strikes out. Everyone on our side of the bleachers groans. I roll my eyes. Ian Walker is a douche, and everyone knows it.

  “Late night last night?” Kari asks.

  “Not really,” I say. I’m not much of a partier, and Kari knows it, so she’s teasing me.

  “Well, you should hang out with us tonight,” she says. “Me and Whitney are having a slumber party, aren’t we, Whit?” She turns and looks over her shoulder to where Whitney and Evan are sitting on the bleachers behind us.