Pink. Black. Green. Black. Blue. Black.
No red curls.
I shoulder my way off the dance floor, cross back through the living room, and slip through the vanishing door. My blood pumps as I skip down the stairs as quickly as I can without slipping. I search the basement, the cave, even the spare bedroom Hudson and I were in; but everywhere I look, people are smoking, slurring, hooking up. I shove past them, across the cave again, out through the iron gate, and into the secret garden, as if somehow Kris will be waiting for me in the exact place I left her. As if time hasn’t moved forward. As if I never brought Hudson into that room. But when the iron door clangs shut behind me, Kris isn’t there, either, and the couple smoking next to the trellis, talking in hushed tones now that I’m here, is proof that time didn’t stop. It passed. It’s still passing.
I find the door to the ivy-covered gate surrounding the secret garden but miss the handle and end up slamming into sculpted metal. I ignore the pain in my face, chest, knee as I turn the handle and push through the door properly this time.
“Who was that?” the smoking guy asks as the gate swings shut behind me.
“You don’t remember her?” the girl asks, voice dripping with disbelief. “Last year she—”
I shove the words away and climb the steep slope to the main yard. Then I skip up the wood steps to the deck, but it’s empty. So is the hot tub. There are bubbles in it, but not because the jets are on. There’s an open bottle of gin, a pair of boxers, and a blow-up crocodile drifting in the water, which has a green tint. I head back down the steps, around the pool, and across the lawn. The grass is hard and stiff. It crunches beneath my sneakers as I pick my way past shadowed groups of people and peer behind bushes.
“What the fuck?”
“Sorry,” I say, “looking for somebody.”
After a few more of those episodes, I reach the back of the yard. I’m ready to give up and call my mom for a ride—not cool, but not a death sentence, either, since she’s told me to do exactly this if everybody’s drunk and I need a lift—until I hear a group of guys behind the last row of bushes wondering out loud what they can do to some poor girl.
“You see that G-string? Fuck-me red, man. She wants it.” The voice is slick, low, boasting. But even through a row of bushes I can tell it’s not entirely confident. I step closer, try to peek through the needles; but the bush is wide, thick. I can see only baggy jeans, cargo pants, and between them a set of long, honey-colored legs.
“Try a girl who’s conscious first, freak. You wouldn’t even know what to do with her.” This guy’s smiling; I can tell without seeing him. He’s the leader, or at least a step above the first kid. I inch closer, push a branch aside.
“Screw you,” the first guy says, sullen.
“That’s not just any girl right there, though,” says a third voice, smooth, easy. Someone who doesn’t care, not enough to stop the first two, anyway.
“No it isn’t,” the second voice says, slow, like he’s tasting each word, and enjoying it.
I push my face forward, into the needles. That’s when I see her: mouth open, eyes closed, cream-colored shirt slipping off her bony shoulder; brown hair spread out on the lawn chair, like her legs; three juniors circling her like vultures.
“That’s Jolene,” he continues. “Senior meat. The sweetest. And pretty much untouchable. Well, most of the time.”
I shove the branches aside and push myself through the sharp twigs and prickly needles. For a second I’m inside the bush, and then I’m out again. The junior guys aren’t staring at Jolene anymore; they’re looking at me, which makes sense, I guess. This is probably the only way I could win a contest between the two of us. She’s passed out, and I just walked out of a tree.
I brush a few needles from my face and push my hair behind my ears.
“Am I interrupting something?” I ask, hip to the side, glare in my eyes.
“Who the hell are you?” guy #2 says. He’s all cocky confidence. He steps toward me, to let me know how tall he is, how popular. Like I care. I don’t have anything left to lose in that area. I gave it all up a long time ago, but he doesn’t know that. He doesn’t remember me. But I remember him. He’s on the soccer team. I’ve seen him with Hudson and Cal in the hallways and practicing at the park.
“You don’t need to know who I am,” I say. “Cal’s looking for you.” The lie is easy enough. I keep my eyes fixed and still, tilt my head, raise my eyebrows. Cal is the cocaptain of the soccer team and Hudson’s best friend. He wouldn’t be pleased with this scene. And #2 knows it.
“Yeah, well,” he says, looking me up and down, the trail of his eyes sticky and thick like an oil slick. I let him look, just like Jolene would. I smile at him until he pushes past me. “We were just leaving anyway.”
The other two follow him. When I can’t hear them laughing anymore, I drop the act. My hands shake. So does my breath. I stare at Jolene, who’s still sprawled across the lawn chair. If I hadn’t been here . . . But I haven’t been here for over a year. Has this happened before? I swallow back the taste of bile in my mouth and bury the thought. If something that bad had happened—to Jolene, of all people—I would have heard about it. That’s the kind of story that flattens the forest.
I lift Jolene’s arm and lay it next to her on the chair, clearing a space so I can sit down and get my shit together. I can’t leave her back here. The same thing could happen again. And no matter what she’s done, I can’t let it.
I scoot down until I’m near her waist and push her legs together. She moves. I jump back, startled, like she just woke from the dead. She murmurs, rolls onto her side, lays her legs on top of each other, and curls up in a ball like she’s home in her bed.
I look at Jolene. Really look. Since I spend most of my time avoiding her these days, it feels strange. So I start with the most familiar parts, her landmarks: the small scar on her neck from her half of the cracked necklace; the dimple in her ear from that third earring hole she always hoped would close up but stayed there instead, as if her body refuses to let her forget, as if it’s just as stubborn as she is.
Then my eyes travel down, to the hem of her skirt and the length of her legs. Even her feet are pretty, fit into ridiculous shoes for this weather. The fact that she’s wearing a skirt is bad enough, but sandals?
She must be freezing. I have to get her up.
I press my palms to her cheeks. “Jolene,” I say, shaking her face. When she doesn’t respond, I shake her harder. “Jolene!” I say again, louder now. “Wake up!”
Her eyelids flutter. She tries to lift her head, but it falls back against the hand I’ve slid beneath it.
“Hudson,” Jolene mumbles, and my body goes numb. She knows what I did, that I was with him. “It’s me,” she insists. “Don’t leave.” She thrashes her arms in the air. Her right hand smacks me in the chest. When it connects, her eyes fly open. The whites are pink and watery, but the hazel part glistens. “You.” She grips my shoulder hard.
I hold my breath. A reflex. From all the times she held me tight: hands under blankets, fingers pinching my nose, palm covering my mouth, glass through my skin. One touch from Jolene and I’m back in that smothering, comforting darkness again, where gills exist and anything is possible.
“I knew it,” she says, slurring the words. She’s trying to focus on me, but her eyes fight it. They move side to side, in circles, roll back, then down to me again. “I knew you’d come,” she says with a sigh as her head falls to the side a final time. Her hand loosens its grip on my shoulder, slides—deadweight—down to my hand, where it slips right in.
Jolene doesn’t know about Hudson. She thinks I came for her. And the thing is, no matter how many of her texts I’ve ignored or months I’ve put between us, no matter how many times I’ve told myself I hate her, packed our history away deep inside me, pretended that she’d disappeared; no matter what I told Kris about why we should come out tonight (we couldn’t miss our senior bonfire) or what I told myself
(we had to do something before we graduated and there was nothing left), I can’t deny it.
I knew Jolene would be there with her smothering possibilities and tightfisted wishes. This is the night we’d all agreed to meet.
I came for her.
I did.
“Where are your keys?” I ask. She squeezes my hand, pulls it into her stomach, and curls up into a ball again. “Jolene,” I say, insistent, “your keys!”
She doesn’t move at first, but after a few seconds she drags my fingers across her waist and over her hip, to her back pocket. She presses my hand against her ass. I yank it away before I realize she was showing me her keys. I reach in and tug them out of the tiny pocket.
“Can you walk?” I ask.
“Mmmm,” she says, rolling onto her back. Her eyelids are heavy, her smile wide and sloppy. “You.”
“Yeah, me,” I repeat, whoever that is. I lean down, lift her arm over my shoulder, and hoist her up. Her head falls on my cheek, her hair fans across my chest and back. It still smells like cinnamon, even through the faint scent of vomit. I start walking, but each step over the cold grass is slow. After a few paces I stop for a break, and her right arm, which was slung over my shoulder, bends at the elbow. Her hand lands on my chest.
Jolene took her cut palm off my mouth and pressed it against my chest. I gasped and coughed, gulping air. She laughed again.
“A total rush, right?” she asked.
“No.” I rolled away from her in Bella’s bed, placing one hand on my breastbone, where Jolene’s had been, and the other on my throat, where she’d drawn gills. My blood beat fast in both places.
“Shut up,” she said, chin to my shoulder, cheek to my cheek. “You liked it.”
“No,” I lied. “I like breathing.”
Jolene tugged me back around until our noses touched.
“Hey. I’m sorry. You’re the one who said you wanted to be something new.”
“New, not dead. That was dangerous.” I tried to sound angry, but my words lost their edge. I had said it.
What do you want to be, Mattie? Jolene had asked over the sleeping bags. Bella wanted to be on Broadway; Kris wanted to be anywhere but here. I wanted to be something new. Bella had laughed and asked, Shiny too? Kris had thrown a pillow at me. Jolene had taken me seriously.
My body softened next to hers in the bed.
“Anything new feels a little dangerous.” Jolene gathered my hand in hers and traced the scab on my palm with her fingertips. “Seriously. It’s not like I’d ever actually hurt you.” She pulled the blanket back over our heads. “Then who would save me if I tried it for real and my gills didn’t come in?” Her words floated in the dark; our hot breath filled the rest of the small space.
“Don’t say stuff like that,” I said.
“Why? You would save me. Right?” Jolene shifted her hips, sliding her thigh so close to mine, I could feel the curled hem of her cotton boy shorts. “You’re probably the only one.”
Jolene’s parents checked out when she got to high school. Not that they’d ever checked in. Not since I’d known her, anyway. They were always out with friends or away on business. And when they were home, they had their eyes glued to their phones.
“Of course.”
She gave my hand a quick pulse. We lay like that—under the covers, breathing each other’s breath—for so long that I started to drift off again. And then, just as the real world spun away from me, words, whispered: “I know you will.”
I heave her up again and drag her across the neighbor’s lawn so no one will see us leave, because she’s Jolene, and I’m me, and here we are again: two little girls all alone in the world.
CHAPTER 7
BEFORE OPENING MY eyes the morning after Bella’s party, I unstick my tongue from the roof of my mouth and swallow a few times to slick my sore throat. A stuffy darkness swims around me. The insides of my eyelids are a murky midnight blue instead of the orangey-red I usually get from the sunlight streaking in through the blinds. I must have pulled the comforter over my head.
I’m not hungover—at least not from the beer—but I definitely feel a little slow. I lie still for a second, to see if I can drift back into my dream, but then the memory of last night crashes through me, lifting my eyelids and leaving my scalp tingling.
I’m awake. I am so awake.
I pull the covers off my face and blink into the brightness, then roll over and throw my head onto a pillow. Even though the scent of chicken soup and sweet potatoes seeps through the house, I can still smell the night on my hair: Kris’s cigs, the burn of the bonfire, the stink of the weed. It would be a deadly combo if not for the hint of Jolene’s shampoo and the whiff of pine that clung to Hudson’s shirt and skin.
Hudson.
I close my eyes, wishing I could relive the part of the night that starred him, but it’s impossible. The sky is bright and clear, I’m alone, and it’s Thanksgiving. I can tell from the ting tang of silverware being laid out in the dining room—my dad’s holiday job—the swing and knock of cabinets opening and closing, and the crash of platters being piled on top of one another.
My mom goes all out at the holidays, even when it’s only the three of us. Especially when it’s only the three of us. My brother, Jake, is a first-year at his law firm, and he’s already warned us he’ll be at the office today, and maybe even tonight. Ever since my brother started working in New York City at Clarence and Biddle, he’s only made brief appearances at home. So today won’t really be different from any other day in this house, except we’ll be eating a huge turkey on flowery china with polished silverware and drinking from heavy crystal glasses, all of which have to be washed by hand. And my mom will spend all day cooking and prepping so that she can barely eat with us before she has to get up again and start cleaning.
I sit up and pull my hair into a ponytail, then slide across the sheet and grab my cell from the nightstand. Nothing. I drop back into bed and look up at the poster on my ceiling. My parents got it for me in second grade, the first time I offered them a shortcut across town. It’s a cartoon version of Westfield, full of brightly colored, bulbous buildings and that terrible font that’s supposed to look like handwriting. I used to stare at it each night—walk the streets, visit the stores, find our house and picture an upside-down version of myself staring back at me.
I’ve been meaning to take it down for years. Now that I have a real collection, it’s easy to see this map is for kids—it doesn’t have a legend or a scale or a compass rose; it’s not weathered or worn; it doesn’t have any original folds. It doesn’t color us into a neat, moss-green rectangle and label us Division 14, Block 493. But there it is, above my bed. And here I am, finding our house on Cherokee Court, scanning the streets, tracing my way to Hudson’s.
It’s too early to hear from him, but I expected something from Jolene, considering she’s been texting me once or twice a week for almost a year and a half, despite the fact that I’ve never replied. I scroll through her messages. A list of one-word locations: alone, home, lawn, woods. Pictures of places: a half-open window, a dead-end street, a fish, the cliff. Phrases: cut myself on our necklace, found something new for my treasure box, know you’re reading this.
I turn off my cell and throw it across the bed. I don’t know why I kept those messages. I don’t know why Jolene sent them when she had Hudson to share her bed and star in her stories. I should have erased every single one.
If I’m lucky, Jolene won’t remember anything about last night: my hands in her hair as she heaved on the street, my arms around her waist to buckle the seat belt, the pillow I slid under her head before slipping off her heels and tucking her in. She’ll have blacked it all out, and I can pretend it never happened. Because it shouldn’t have. Jolene should have been with Bella, at the party. I should have stayed home, with Kris.
I roll across my bed and pick up my phone again. Still nothing from Kris, which means today is actually different. But not in the happy-smiley-family-together
ness way. This is the longest Kris and I have gone without talking (or texting or messaging) since the manhunt game.
I really hope she got grounded. I know that’s a terrible thing to say, but the alternative is so much worse—that she’s so mad she can’t bring herself to speak to me. All I have to do is think it, and a hole opens up inside me, hungry and bottomless. It sucks in everything about last night except for this: Kris’s call, and me ignoring it. I’m about to text her when I hear the creak of the stairs, followed by the slap of bare feet on the wood floor. The sound stops outside my door, which inches open. My mom peers inside.
“Out late, huh?” She’s already digging for information, and I’m not even out of bed.
“Not that late.”
“Actually, it was pretty late. One, maybe two?” she asks, plucking a shirt from the pile on the floor and starting to fold it. “I was still up watching TV. You know I can’t sleep before a holiday.”
“Mom, just leave that stuff alone. I can deal with it.”
“Well, it’s going to get creased, which means I’ll have to iron it, so—”
“Just put it down!” She drops it on the floor, pulls in her lips, and straightens her back. And I think she’s going to leave, but instead she sits down on my bed, smoothing out the blanket next to me.
“So, what did you guys do last night?” she says, leaning toward me. When she gets close, she wrinkles her nose. “Ugh. I know Kris smokes, but don’t you think it smells disgusting?” She flips over my ponytail and starts to separate the strands of my straight hair. I slide my elastic out, and she spreads my hair into pieces on the pillow, then runs her fingers through them, top to bottom, one by one, easing gently through each catch and tangle. I love it when she plays with my hair. I turn toward the window so I’m facing away from her and all my hair is free for her hands, then I press my cheek into the pillow. I curl up, close my eyes, and take a deep breath. There it is again. Winter.
Underneath Everything Page 5
