Hudson rests his elbows on his knees and hangs his hands together loosely in front of him, admiring the scene. “Sit down if you’re going to stay.” He nods his head toward the spot next to him on the ground.
“I don’t want to interrupt—”
“All this?” he asks, spreading his arms out around him, then draping them back over his knees. “I mean, yeah, I didn’t come back here to chat, but you’re cool.”
I feel a shiver that has nothing to do with the weather, and a weakness I want more of. Then I hate him for making me feel this way. And I hate myself more for letting him.
“Cool,” I respond, because it’s simple and meaningless—the opposite of how this feels. I sit down next to him in the frozen grass like this is normal, something we do every day. Like this isn’t the first time we’ve found each other on the fringe of a crowd since he stopped speaking to me. My skin prickles. I can feel every inch of it. I need to move, to do something. So I stretch my legs out in front of me, position my arms behind me, and sink my palms into the ground.
The wind picks up, blowing my hair into my face. A few strands stick to my lips, caught in the lip gloss or ChapStick or whatever Kris gave me. I reach up, carefully pull the pieces away, and scoop them behind my ear.
I look at Hudson. He looks straight ahead. I follow his gaze until I see Jolene’s hair flip, a swish of black shadow. Of course he wasn’t looking at me. Not with her standing so close.
Jolene’s the kind of girl people stare at: Hazel eyes. Honey-colored skin. Wide lips. Dark-brown hair so thick you can barely run your fingers through it.
She’s the kind of girl people listen to.
She could have been completely self-centered and gotten away with it. But she wasn’t like that. Not with me. She never talked about herself. Instead she asked me question after question. And when I spoke, she leaned in to listen, devouring every detail like she would never tire of mining me. Like I was fascinating.
My palms hurt. They’re pressed flat against the frozen grass and solid dirt. But I don’t move. We both watch her.
A few minutes go by, and I’m starting to wonder what time it is, how long it will take me to get back around the fire and find Kris, when I turn to speak and realize Hudson is looking at me. Not Jolene. Not the fire.
Me.
So I stare back. Really, I don’t have a choice. It’s his eyes. They pin me in my place. I see something move across them—the faintest reflection of the silver-streaked sky. And something else, too. A promise. A private joke. A recognition. But of what, I don’t know. I can’t feel anything except his gaze moving through me, haunting me, hollowing me out.
“Thought you didn’t show up at these things.” His voice is deep, easy.
“Oh, I’m not really here,” I say.
Hudson laughs, but he doesn’t smile. Instead he picks at the grass by his sneakers, rolls it between his fingers, throws it out into the field. “No, of course not. Not really one for showing up, are you?”
I stare at the spot where he tossed the tangled grass, because, really, what can I say? I said I’d meet him. I promised. I didn’t show up.
Jolene did.
Hudson wipes his hands on his jeans. The silver ring glints in the moonlight.
We both face forward. The crowd is splitting up now. The bonfire is more smoke than fire.
“You got the time?” he asks. “Cal probably thinks I took off.”
Cal plays soccer with Hudson. They’ve been on the same team since town leagues and traveling teams. Now they’re cocaptains of varsity. Hudson may have a real-life older brother, but he and Cal are closer than blood.
“Sure.” I slide my phone out of my pocket and turn it on, the glow of the screen lighting us from below. “Nine twenty-five.”
He nods. And just when I think he’s going to get up and leave, he glances over my shoulder. “Wait. Is that you and Kris? From, what, fifth grade?” He’s pointing to the picture on my main screen, leaning over me to get a better look.
He smells like winter. Always has.
“Yeah,” I say, fumbling to shut it off. But Hudson wraps his hand around mine and holds the lit screen between us.
I’m supposed to rescue Kris now, but I don’t move.
“You look the same,” he says, his breath white against the night.
“Hope not. That was, like, forever ago. Things have changed,” I say, with quick eyes toward the fire. Where is Jolene? Is she waiting for him?
“But not everything.” He lowers his chin to the picture of me and Kris.
“Not everything,” I admit.
Kris has had my back since the day we traded shoelaces in first grade. She’s my oldest friend. For almost a year and a half, she’s been my only friend. And right now I’m late to meet her. “I should go,” I say, tugging my phone toward my pocket. Hudson’s hand hardens around mine, gripping it tight. I look up, and our eyes meet for a second before a lock of his brown hair swings between us. He’s let it grow long, almost down to his shoulders, and even though it’s pulled back, this piece has escaped. As he reaches up to push it behind his ear, my phone blinks off, and the night falls new around us.
Hudson drops my hand, gets to his feet, and turns his back to me. But he doesn’t leave. I shove my hand—suddenly cold, still gripping my phone—into my pocket and stand up beside him. We walk in silence toward what’s left of the bonfire: blackened wood, a dense cone of smoke, small clusters of seniors, and a mass of underclassmen trying to figure out where to go, what to do. I keep waiting for Jolene to materialize out of the night, as if the gray swirls of smoke and ash will suddenly turn solid and she’ll be standing right in front of me.
“Cal wants to meet the team at Bella’s after this. He’s my ride home, so I guess that means I’m going. But you won’t be there, right? You don’t do parties.” Hudson stops just short of the sidewalk.
I spot Kris up ahead, at the edge of the parking lot. Jim is behind her, rubbing her shoulders; she’s shaking him off, scrolling through her phone, probably looking for a text from me, which she’s not going to find.
“Right.” I turn to Hudson and search his face. If only the smattering of freckles on his nose formed a compass rose, or the flat line of his mouth pointed true north. Maybe then I’d understand what direction he’s going: Does he want me to come? Does he want me to stay away? But his expression doesn’t change. He’s no map. I can’t read him. “No parties.”
Hudson nods in response. The slightest dip of his chin, the faintest flash of lowered lashes.
It’s a minuscule movement.
It’s not enough.
“No bonfires, either,” I tell him.
Hudson’s eyes tick to mine. Blue. Inscrutable. Then he steps into the splash of yellow light spreading from the single bulb behind the school, and for a second I see something ease in the crease of his brow and the set of his lips; but I can’t quite figure out what it is before he starts up with those long, easy strides of his, down the sidewalk, out of the light, into the parking lot.
Hudson doesn’t turn around. He doesn’t miss a beat. He just walks away, like it never happened.
CHAPTER 3
“I DIDN’T AGREE to this.” Kris locks her car and flicks at the filter of her Camel, launching ash onto the sidewalk. Her wine-red Docs thud purposefully beside me as we walk up the hill to Bella’s house, stepping in and out of streetlamp spotlights and past a few parked cars. There are obviously people here, but it’s not the bumper-to-bumper scene I thought it would be, considering it’s Thanksgiving weekend. The tight grip of my ribs relaxes, releases my lungs. I breathe deeply.
“You promised you’d come,” I remind her.
“To the bonfire. Not Bella’s.”
I drop my chin to my chest and burrow into my jacket.
Most weekends we don’t park; we drive—blasting heat and music, leaking laughter and smoke through slit windows. When I’m behind the wheel, we stick to Westfield. I tick off street names and lot numbers
in my head as we pass them, marking and measuring the land like my ’21 Sanborn map, coloring certain plots pink and others green, cruising past Xed-out rectangles with one-word descriptions: Butcher, Library, Post. We drive down dead ends that don’t exist yet. We know the future.
In Kris’s car we cross the town border for roads that dip and climb and wind around mountains. We leave Westfield for the Watchung Reservation—a massive chunk of woodland that, due to its historical significance, was preserved (and saved from its fate as a neon-lit strip mall) in the twenties, around the same time my Sanborn map was created. But that’s where the similarity ends. The reservation map is no pencil-drawn grid, full of boxes and block letters. It’s like calligraphy, covered in curves and loops and wavy elevation lines. One look at that map and it’s easy to understand why Kris likes the reservation—for the same reason all those plastic-covered plaques around the grounds tell us George Washington did: its mountains create a natural fortress. The only difference is that Washington used the Watchungs as a barrier against the British. Kris uses them against everyone.
And right now we’re in enemy territory.
“I mean,” Kris says, “I’m going to need a pretty spectacular reason to risk our fantastic, untouchable status as Nobodies.” Kris pauses at the end of Bella’s driveway—which is not so much a driveway as a mailbox next to an open mouth in the woods—and takes a long drag. She’s squinting, and not because of the smoke. She knows there’s something I’m not telling her. She always does.
So I swallow, say it—“I hung out with Hudson at the bonfire”—and brace myself. There’s a hierarchy to Kris’s hate. Jolene is the clear winner (isn’t she always?), and Hudson is a close second. I’m not saying I don’t get it. I’d hate anyone who led her on, broke her heart, and ignored her existence. And the way Kris sees it, that’s exactly what he did to me.
“Hudson,” she says.
I nod and wait for the Hudson speech, but Kris doesn’t say anything. Instead she takes a drag that singes her Camel down to its brown filter, then she flicks it. It burns a red arc through the night—the wrong kind of lightning bug—before it lands on the pavement, under the reinforced toe of her boot. Then she starts walking again. We pick our way over a mound of protruding roots bowed like muscles over the cracked cement skin of the driveway. Leaves rustle deep inside trees. Scampering claws scratch high branches.
Kris checks her phone, pockets it again.
And just when I’m thinking Kris might actually let the whole Hudson thing go, she says, “So, what’s up with Jolene’s boyfriend these days? Are you two friends now?” Kris leans on the F word like it’s a curse.
“No.” Hudson and I were never friends. Even freshman year—when Jolene got us into senior parties and Hudson and Cal were the only other underclassmen there—Hudson kept his distance. Not just from me but from everybody. The way he stood, slanted away. The way he sized up a room, silent. Like he was guarding something. Then one night he let me in.
Then came Jolene.
Then he was gone.
“But you still want to go,” Kris says. “Even though you’re not friends. Even though Jolene will be with him.”
We’re only halfway up the tree-smothered drive, but we can already hear it: not music exactly, but a strong, rhythmic bass beat mixed with a mess of voices. The farther we walk, the fuller and more distinct the sound gets. Drums and guitar join the bass. Shouts poke through the wall of voices.
A closed part of me opens.
The memories come quick, like punches: the four of us squeezing onto Bella’s deck swing and pumping our legs in the afternoon sun; Kris sneaking cigarettes on the back porch; Bella in the hot tub; me and Jolene swinging in the hammock, limbs hot and mingling, matching words and breath. And back, before that. The beginning. Bella bringing her new neighbor the day we hiked the cliffs at the reservation, the summer before seventh grade. Kris’s voice lost to the leaves. Bella’s laugh floating back to us from between the branches up the path. Jolene and me climbing the thin strip of cliff that clung to the mountain. Me, carefully. Jolene, surefooted. My heart skipping as her sneakers knocked rocks to the street hundreds of feet below (my safe streets, suddenly dangerous). Jolene grabbing my hand as she ran, screaming “Let’s race!” before I could say no—that the path was too narrow. Jolene running ahead as I followed. Terrified. Ecstatic. Laughing into the sky.
“Even though Jolene will be there,” I confirm.
Kris sighs, stares up at the slate-gray sky. She never talks about the beginning, only the end: the rope around my wrists, the tape on my lips, the busted lock, the bang of metal.
“Remind me again why I’m here?” Kris asks.
“Because you love me?”
She waves me off. “Obvious.”
“Because it’ll be your choice,” I say. Because this is what she told me the night we left the manhunt game. It’s what she always says. “It’ll be on our terms.”
“Well, when you put it that way.” Kris takes out the small tin of goo, refreshes the red shine on her half smile, then offers me the container. I shake my head. She covers the tin and slips it back into her pocket. “Jim did say he’d make an appearance if we decided to go. And I have to admit, I’m not not curious about what goes on at these things,” she says.
“Oh, you know, I’m sure it’s all naked wrestling and champagne,” I say, straight-faced.
“Bubbles and bathing suits!” she cheers. And we’re laughing, because in eighth grade Bella spent most of her time imagining the crazy parties she’d have in high school. The guest lists, the bartenders, the bouncers, the outrageous themes. And we’d always laugh at her. Like that stuff ever happened. But what do we know? It’s not like we’ve been to one of Bella’s senior-year parties. Maybe we’re about to walk into a sand pit or wall-to-wall foam. Anything’s possible.
We’re just shy of the moonlight, in the last stretch of tangled branches, when Bella’s house comes into view: three massive cubes nestled together and topped with heavy, rectangular slabs. It cuts white angles into the black sky.
Parked cars pack the wide circle of driveway to our right.
Everyone who’s anyone? I think. More like anyone at all. Half the school must be here.
We’re here.
“Okay. Let’s get this over with,” Kris says, but she doesn’t walk toward the house. She’s waiting for me, to make sure I’m cool, even though she can barely keep her teeth from chattering. And that’s enough to get me moving.
“Let’s.”
Together we step onto the lit grass.
As we climb the long flight of stone steps stretching up to the house, I recite the surrounding street names in my head. One for each red plastic cup I sidestep: Hillside Avenue. Breeze Knoll Drive. Roanoke Road. It settles the nervous spark in my chest, lengthens my breath, helps me orient. When we reach the front door, we follow the white slate path around the house to the gate, then stop and face each other. A last check-in.
Kris raises her eyebrows. Ready?
I force my shoulders up into a shrug. Not really.
But I lift the heavy metal latch anyway and swing open the wide gate.
My body tenses. I’ve always hated walking into parties—that moment before you know exactly who’s there, how drunk they are, whether they’re staring at each other or dancing. Except for the times I’d walk in with Jolene, because to her they weren’t parties. They were movie sets, magic acts, epic quests. The skater in the corner was a stalker. The cheerleader by the fireplace grew fangs at night and hunted to kill. The jock by the keg could break chains and escape underwater cages.
I was a queen.
And Jolene? She was God, of course. She created us all.
Tonight there are no shape-shifters or illusionists, just circles of smokers scattered across the sloping lawn, small groups laughing on lounge chairs, and couples claiming the hidden steps that lead to the upper deck. A few of them lift their heads when we walk in, then look away when they see us. We
’re not the friends they’re expecting.
Kris and I walk past the pool. It’s one of those inset, stone deals that look like a freshwater pond someone found in the woods. Like it was here first, and everything else—the exotic plants rooted between the rocks, the tiny spotlights, the house, the party—sprang up around it. Which is exactly what Bella’s mom was going for. We heard her tell the landscaper she wanted her backyard to look like a magical forest, and Bella’s been calling it that ever since.
“Looks like you were right about the bathing suits.” Kris tilts her head forward, toward the opposite side of the yard, and I follow the path of her eyes through the hanging vines to the hot tub. You’ve got to be kidding me. There really are people sitting in there, drinks in hand. I burrow deeper into my jacket.
“I really hope they’re wasted. Or freshmen,” I say, trying not to stare.
“The only two acceptable explanations,” Kris agrees, peering into a floater on the table next to us. She rubs her hands together, then folds her arms across her chest. It’s near freezing, and we’re still standing in the backyard.
“You think Bella’s dad still has the man cave?” I ask. The man cave is a dark wood den carved into the corner of the basement. It has darts, vintage video games, and a smallish pool table; and it’s exactly the type of place I always tried to find at a big party—when I used to go to them, that is. Someplace far from crowds and soaring spaces. Someplace on the fringe. Which is how I ended up on a small couch off Cal’s living room a year and a half ago, talking to Hudson. He liked those places too.
“If he’s still a man, he does,” Kris says. “Want to play some pool?” She’s already weaving around the patio furniture.
“Want to lose?” I’m close behind.
Kris is the first one in the house. I watch her. She’s good at this—blending in. She’s already at the keg, standing next to a couple of guys from our class, holding out two red cups, making some kind of small talk. As if she’s actually enjoying this instead of counting the minutes until she can leave for college and cut everyone loose. Everyone except me. Obviously.
Underneath Everything Page 2
