Kris finishes the last sip of her Coke and sets down the can with a hard click.
“Is it him?” Kris asks, her voice barely audible over the layered conversations in the cafeteria. If I didn’t know it so well, I might not have heard it. But I do. And I did.
I lean over the table, lower my voice to match Kris’s. “Is what him?”
“Is Hudson the reason you’re wearing those clothes, ignoring your phone, and talking as much as a first-year foreign exchange student?”
“No.”
“Because he’s not worth it.”
“And Jim is?”
“I didn’t change anything for him,” Kris says, tapping her empty can on the table.
“Maybe that’s the problem.”
“Jim and I don’t have a problem. He knows it’s over when we graduate.”
“Do you think that changes the fact that he’s in love with you? Or do you just not care?”
Kris looks over her shoulder, then back at me. Her lips move like she wants to say something, but instead she sits up and sighs. It’s a rare victory, to leave Kris speechless, but it doesn’t feel like a win.
“Just—don’t tell me what Hudson’s worth, okay? You don’t know him.”
“Fine. I don’t know him. But I know that no guy is worth it.”
I don’t argue with her. On this we agree. We always have. That’s why it’s so disappointing that she can’t, for a second, believe me.
“I told you. It’s not about him.” Kris has been friends with Bella again for a week, and she’s telling her she can get into Rutgers. She’s been mine since grade school, but she can’t imagine me reaching for anything. Being different. Better.
“Weird timing then.” Kris shrugs.
I grab my backpack from the floor before she can say anything else. “See you at the car,” I say, with a quick wave. Bella blows me a kiss from behind her compact, but Kris keeps quiet as I head for the doors and what I know is beyond them: brisk wind, warm sun, red cheeks, dark hair, deep breaths. Someone who believes there’s more to me.
CHAPTER 19
I TAKE QUICK steps across the gray pavement toward Hudson. He’s in loose jeans, soft at the knees, and a flannel shirt, cuffs unbuttoned, collar flapping. Dead leaves spin at his feet, lift up into the field, and flatten against the surrounding trees, whose branches blow into impossible curves before snapping back against the strength of the coming storm.
He’s looking down when I push his headphones off his ears and press myself against him with a hard kiss. He pulls away at first, surprised. But I keep my hand on his neck, my eyes closed, and my mouth open, until his stiff lips soften and his head tilts. I kiss him until the only thing I can hear is my heart and his breath and the music—something acoustic—floating up from his headphones. And when I’m finished—when our noses touch and we’re taking fast white breaths—I try to kiss him again, but he closes his hands around my shoulders and holds me where I am, his expression as dark and tight-knit as the cloud cover above us.
“What?” I ask. It’s not the first time he’s stopped me, or himself.
His grip tightens before he lets go of me completely and leans back against the bike racks. I shove my hands into my pockets, find my lighter, and form a fist around it.
He shakes his head. And as he does, the wind kicks up. Whistling. Whispering.
Jolene.
I wonder if he’s heard it too—the two syllables, so familiar, springing from people’s lips like a hiss, a hush, a secret. Or if his headphones block that out as well.
“Tell me,” I say, my voice pushing back since my hands and lips can’t.
“Nothing. You just . . .” He pauses. His shoulders rise and sink, like he’s made a decision. “Just nothing,” he says, and starts walking toward the building. I rush to catch up. The bell rings as I follow him between parked cars.
“Hudson.” I grab his hand at the top of the steps. He stops and faces me, his fingers rigid, his expression solemn. “Is this about what everyone’s saying?” I ask.
Is it about her?
“Yeah.”
“Oh.”
Hudson shakes his head. “I mean, no. It’s about everyone, but I don’t give a shit what they’re saying.”
“Right,” I say. “Me neither.” I lift my eyes to his. I try to make them hard, to be the girl he sees when he looks at me. The one he’s certain of. But Hudson’s not looking at me. He’s not really looking at anything. He’s thinking. And no matter what he says, I’ve got to believe it’s about Jolene. He was certain of her once, too. He’s got to be wondering how she is, where she’s been.
There’s a bang behind the door. It shakes, like something’s trying to escape.
Hudson sets his deep-sea eyes on mine. Behind him, a cloud shifts, shadowing his face, darkening the sky. “Later, okay? Not here,” he says. “Come over.”
“Come over,” Jolene said, her voice thin, shaking.
I nod.
The second bell rings. We go in.
“Jolene?” My voice came out thick and slow, heavy with sleep. I took my phone away from my cheek and squinted at the time: 12:30 a.m. Then I shut my eyes again and pressed the phone to my ear.
“Sneak out. You can walk to my house.” I could hear her breath, quick and close to the phone.
“Now?” Lying in the dark, listening to Jolene’s voice, was confusing. It had been a month since the ropes, since we’d spoken.
“Leave your parents a note, tell them you went for an early walk. I know they sleep in. They’d never notice. Just—come over.”
I blinked myself awake. It might have been a month, but I hadn’t forgotten what Jolene sounded like when she needed me.
“Okay.”
“I’m in my room,” she said. Then she must have hung up, because the call ended.
I got up, threw on clothes, splashed water on my face, and hit the road.
Outside, the streets were the way I’d always imagined them: clear, cold, open. The road unfolded before me. I crossed blocks and divisions, walked over numbers and through colors, toward the center of Sanborn’s 1921, where Jolene’s street sat, dressed in cardboard brown and adorned in hand-drawn letters. It wasn’t until the tip of my nose started to sting ten minutes in that reality set in. I wasn’t walking a map in my head. I was outside, and it was freezing.
A dog barked down the street. I whipped around to see a dark figure dragging it along on a leash, moving toward me. I sped up and rounded the last corner onto Carleton Road.
All the lights were off in Jolene’s house, except for the one in her room. I walked past the front door, toward the right window on the first floor, and ran my hand along the top of the frame, sending the spare key clattering to the cement porch. The noise startled me—not because I was worried about waking her parents; they were always out—but because it had been so tinkly and bright, so different from the sounds of the night.
I inched open the door and climbed the rug-covered steps in my boots. I listened to my heart, its thudding pulse in my neck, my chest, all the way down to my toes, like I was in some Edgar Allan Poe story. Beat, beat, beat, beneath my feet. When I got to Jolene’s bedroom, I peered beneath the door. The light was solid, no shadows of movement. I pushed it open.
“You scared the shit out of me!” Jolene stood against the wall, her eyes wide, her hands clutching a baseball bat. She threw the bat to the ground and dragged me onto the bed. I kicked off my boots. She drew the covers up and over us.
“You told me to come over,” I said in my defense.
“And you did,” she said, reaching under the blanket, squeezing my hand.
“What’s going on?”
“Nothing,” she said, looking away from me, our hands locked and hot, her toes curling and uncurling next to mine. “I just hate being here alone.”
“Now you’re not.”
Jolene smiled at me then. Not the smile she gives everybody—the wide one where she dips her chin to the side, narrows her eye
s, and flashes her teeth—the real one: lips pressed together, corners of her mouth curved up, eyebrows high, like she’s surprised herself that it happened at all.
It was the smile that made me say it. “Two little girls all alone in the world, who woke from their beds and decided to live.”
Jolene looked at me, her eyes wet for a second, before she said, “Two little girls who walked out of this world, peeled off their skin, and let magic seep in.”
“You win,” I said. “That was good.”
Jolene rolled onto her back and stared at the ceiling. Her sheets smelled like her: Cinnamon shampoo. The lavender lotion she used before bed. And something astringent too, something she must have washed her face with.
We didn’t talk for a while. Just lay there, holding hands, in the only lit room of the empty house; until she reached over, switched off the lamp on her nightstand, and leaned back in the bed next to me. The lengths of our arms touched.
“You hurt my feelings, you know.” Jolene pulled my hand onto her stomach and let it rest there. “That whole thing with the ropes—” My body tensed. Jolene pulled my hand farther across her body, past her belly button. “You didn’t trust me. You were always saying how bored you were, how you wanted to do something different. I was trying to do that for you.”
“Then why didn’t you tell me?” I asked, my voice tight.
“Wouldn’t that have been boring,” she said, turning her head toward me, smirking. She looked back at the ceiling, inhaled. Our hands rose and fell with her breath. “I can’t believe you thought I’d do something like that to you,” she said, guiding our hands up a few inches. I could feel the ridges of her rib cage. “I mean, I know I shouldn’t have done what I did afterward, with everybody. But you left. You were supposed to stay, and instead you just walked away.” Her voice broke a little at the end. Was Jolene crying? I’d never seen her come close. “Anyway,” she said, with a sniff, “you may as well thank me. Nice friends who would turn on you like that, in a second. I was hurt. They didn’t have an excuse.”
“It’s true.” I hadn’t thought of it that way. Jolene rolled over so she was facing away from me, but she took my hand with her again so that my chest was pressed against her back, my legs against her legs.
We listened to the sounds of the house. The creak of the windows. The whoosh of the heater.
“So,” Jolene said as the rush of air stopped, leaving the room suddenly quiet, “now that you’re something new, let’s play again. What do you want to be, if you could be anything?”
. . . you’re something new . . .
I tried on Jolene’s words, and they were true: Right after the ropes, I’d felt isolated. Then I’d gotten used to it: walking, stone-faced, through school; spending my free periods in journalism. I’d gotten used to the sight of Hudson, too, leaning over his locker, hair hanging over his eyes. Him in his faraway place and me in mine. Until he looked up one day when I walked by as if I wasn’t a stranger who stared at him in the hall, but someone he recognized.
He was the only boy who’d looked me in the eye. Other than Kris, he was the only person who saw me.
What would make him call me at midnight, I wondered? What would make him hold me tight? What would it feel like? What would I be, if I could be anything?
“I want to be loved,” I whispered.
Jolene held my hand to her chest.
“What about you?” I asked.
It was a few moments before she answered. “I want to be real,” Jolene said softly. “Sometimes when my parents stay out late, I wonder if I’m even here. Do you know the last time my mom was home to see me most nights? It’s when she still tucked me in and told me stories.” Jolene let out a breath. “She told the best stories.”
I smoothed Jolene’s hair back with my hand and set my lips against the lobe of her ear.
“You’re here,” I said. “I’m with you.”
“Maybe we’re both not here.” Jolene shifted her hips. I shifted too, until we fit again. “What if we’re both not real?”
“We’re not,” I said. “We’re better than real. We’re the two little girls.”
CHAPTER 20
AFTER MR. RILEY’S red-faced, desk-slapping lecture in calculus, the corridors seem calm. Quiet. I start to wonder if I’ve imagined the whole thing—her palm against the glass in Spanish class, her name in the wind. But when I walk into the library for study hall, I stop thinking and see. The wind never stopped; it’s just a storm whirling around me.
Jolene’s sitting in my seat.
She hasn’t morphed into someone else the way people said. Her honey-colored skin still glistens. Her dark hair still shines. The auburn streak still glows underneath, even under the horrible halogen lights. She doesn’t look sick. But something is different.
“Due to some schedule changes, we’ve got someone new today, as you can all see,” Ms. Glick says, motioning toward Jolene. And then, in a decidedly sharper tone: “Maitreya! Seats, please!” For a librarian, Ms. Glick has always been loud.
She starts the roll call. I clutch my calculus text to my chest, walk past the biography section and along the decal-decorated window, and take the only open seat, which is across from Jolene. What is she doing here? My eyes dart down, my fingers itch for a to-do list, my mind wants its mantra of street names, color-coded blocks, neat divisions. But I don’t give in. For almost a year and a half I’ve kept my head down. I’ve done my time. Now I’m the one at the corner table with Bella and Kris. I’m the one heading to Hudson’s after school today. And I deserve it. Whatever’s wrong with Jolene, whatever’s she’s doing, won’t make me retreat.
I fight through the clawing, restless feeling. I still my hands, steady my breath, and lift my head. I look at her.
Jolene’s slim fingers pull at the zipper on her black backpack, which sits on the table between us. Her nails are unpolished, her eyes unlined. I haven’t seen her this colorless in years. Not since we had sleepovers and she came back from the bathroom, face clean, and told me stories.
We spend study hall in silence, the way we’re supposed to. I stare at my calculus notes. Curves and graphs I don’t understand. I try to do the homework, but instead of tangents and proofs, I end up drawing what I always do. The same thing that covers my notebooks and scrawls across my margins, hangs above my desk and lives in my head. But this time, instead of starting with a border and a compass rose, I go straight for the center of the map and work my way out, until intersecting streets take over the page and bleed off the edge.
Across the table, Jolene takes notes from one of those thick Norton Anthologies. Her hand moves smoothly along the page, script slanting slightly to the right, letters round and wide, same as always. She doesn’t say anything about being outside my Spanish class this morning or why she transferred into my study hall. She doesn’t say anything at all. Until the last few minutes before the bell, when everyone’s shutting books and capping pens and sliding zippers. Only then do I feel her hot, strong grip under the table and the thick triangle of paper she presses into my palm.
I close my fingers over it.
I don’t unfold the note during English, or when I pack up my books after class. I hold it tight in my fist as I sit shotgun next to Kris (who doesn’t have a cigarette; did she finish it?) and listen to see if Jolene spoke to anyone else. But Bella’s telling a joke, and Kris hasn’t said a word to me since the cafeteria. So it’s just me and the whispers and the note I clutch tight against the cold when Kris drops me off with a hard look and a weak salute.
It’s not until I’m parked in front of Hudson’s house that I cup my hands around the note—the same way Jolene did with her treasures—and pry them apart slowly, as if the paper might sprout wings and fly away.
CHAPTER 21
I GATHER THE sleeves of my jacket in my fists as I walk up the slate path to Hudson’s front door and ring the bell. For a few seconds I don’t hear anything. No voices, no footsteps, no movement. The wind blows under my jacket a
nd up my shirt. I’m about to peek through the side windows when I hear the fast thud of feet down the stairs. Hudson opens the door. I’ve barely slipped off my boots and jacket before he takes my hand and leads me to the second floor, past the framed pictures rising in a line on the wall. Hudson as a bald baby, a little boy with a bowl cut, a skinny seventh grader kneeling next to a soccer ball, a scowling freshman in front of a washed-out blue background. His older brother at all the same ages, looking at me with the same sparkling blue eyes but from a face cut with sharper edges: square jaw, dimpled chin, angled cheekbones. A family portrait—one with their mom still in it. She’s smiling. She seems happy. Even though inside she was screaming to leave.
I wonder if Hudson ever suspected who she was underneath. I wonder if he suspects me. I look up at him, as if the answer might be in the arch of his back or the slope of his shoulders. But all I see are broken-in jeans hanging loose on his hips and the soft stretch of his thermal across his back when his arm swings forward to push open his bedroom door.
The smell envelopes me—wood and wind. Him. It’s from the furniture. An ancient, stained-wood bookcase stuffed with peeling paperbacks, ruffled comics, used pads of drawing paper, pencils. A wide dresser with deep drawers (perfect for ditched phones) and bronze metal handles. A long, sprawling desk with nothing on top of it but nicks and dents. A worn wood chair to match, shoved out and angled back, like it’s waiting for someone. A window above the desk, open a crack to let in the late-fall air.
I know every inch of Hudson’s room by now, but it’s the window that’s always seemed the most familiar.
The first thing Hudson does when he closes the door behind him is tell me he’s sorry. The second thing he does is kiss me—lightly on my collarbone, insistent on my lips. He doesn’t hold me back or pull away like he did earlier. He leans into me until I’m up against the wall and out of breath.
Underneath Everything Page 14
