“No. Different is fine. Different is cool.” Kris grabs two hunks of hair in her hands and fixes her ponytail. “But you don’t seem different. You seem like someone else. I mean— Shit, Mattie. If I didn’t know you better, I’d say you seemed like Jolene.” She says the last part with a huff and a half laugh, like the thought itself is ridiculous. That I could be anything like Jolene.
“Just because we’re not together every second doesn’t mean I’ve turned into someone else. Just because it’s so impossible for you to believe I could change—” I blink back a budding tear, take a ragged breath, and reset. “Doesn’t it ever get to you? That it’s been me and you—just me and you—for so long?”
I turn away from Kris and try to focus on something else. Something other than the end of us. But nothing else exists. The window is caked with white flakes.
“No. It doesn’t,” Kris says, quick and cold as the mounting snow. “Because that’s what I wanted. It’s what you wanted, too.”
I turn back to her. As soon as she sees my face, her expression changes. She’s looking at me now like I’m far away. Like I’ve stolen the last year from her and dropped it on the seat between us.
“Oh, please,” she says, her voice sharp now, bitter. “I didn’t ask you to come with me that night, remember? I was leaving.”
That night. The skin under my arms and beneath my breasts slicks with sweat. No matter how many ways I walk away, that’s where I am. A hot August night. A maze of town houses. A game of manhunt.
The second time I walked away from Jolene, we picked teams, dropped our cells in the basket (no cheating!), and ran into the web of connected buildings, concrete pathways, and rows of bushes that made up Cal’s complex. In the souped-up version of hide-and-seek we called manhunt, the rules were simple: one team hunts, the other hides. If you get caught, you’re escorted to home base, where you stay until the game ends or a member of your team beats the guards and tags you free.
But I wasn’t worried about the rules.
Hudson had called me that afternoon sounding tense, desperate. His mom was on a plane over the ocean. His dad was deep in his drink. His brother was nowhere to be seen. I promised to meet him after the teams split. He said he’d find me.
So I pushed apart some branches and sank my sneakers into the dirt between two short bushes where the leaves kept trying to meet but never quite made it.
“You know you’re hiding in plain sight, right?” Kris asked. She stood in front of me, arms crossed, red curls kinky and high from the heat.
“That was sort of the idea.” I looked past her, scanned the silent grounds.
Kris had been quiet for a few weeks in the fall, after I’d forgiven Jolene for the ropes, but she’d never asked what had happened. She’d never asked about Hudson, either, even though she’d seen him fish a blade of grass from my hair the night we named stars. She didn’t want to know every single thing like Jolene did. So I hadn’t told her. Not because I wanted to keep anything from Kris, but because it didn’t belong to her. Hudson had trusted me. He’d drawn me into his distant place. And I loved the dark, dense closeness of it. The shared secret. It made me greedy. I wanted him all to myself.
“As team captain, I should care,” Kris said, separating the branches and stepping in next to me. “Lucky for you, I don’t give a shit about winning.” Our shoulders touched. The sticky skin on our arms pressed together. It had to be ninety degrees, at least.
“Maybe that’s why Jolene chose you as opposing captain.”
As if I’d summoned her, Jolene came around the corner: ballet flats soft on the cement, draped tank top swishing against her stomach, head swiveling left and right, throwing dark hair over her bare shoulders. I’d never seen her hunt. Usually we were on the same team. She reminded me of a cat: sleek, smooth, ready to spring.
When Jolene was a few steps away, Kris reached for my hand but hit a thin branch. It snapped. As Jolene’s head whipped around, Kris and I took off in opposite directions. I ran flat out until I realized no one was behind me. Jolene must have gone after Kris, which made sense considering Jolene’s competitive streak, Kris’s hatred for any form of physical activity, and the fact that they were opposing captains. So, with heavy breaths and a thin film of sweat, I trotted back toward the last row of town houses and ran along the path that led toward Cal’s, where it would be easier to find Hudson, and to tag Kris free once Jolene brought her back to base.
But I never made it. Jolene appeared in front of me. Alone.
“Lose something?” I asked. Jolene slowed to a stop, turned on her heels. If she still cared about the game, she could have tagged me. But she didn’t lunge or run in my direction.
“Nope. You?” Her voice was light, pleasant almost, like I’d just asked if she wanted a tall glass of lemonade.
“Where’s Kris?”
“Trapped in a tower, waiting for a white knight.” She motioned to the sky, rolling her eyes. “Who cares?” she asked, holding out her hand to me.
I didn’t take it. “For real.”
“Real?” Jolene laughed. “Since when do you want that?”
“Where is she?” I asked again, the temperature in my face and cheeks rising way above the August heat.
Lightning bugs flew lazy circles in the dead air around us. Screams and laughter sliced the night.
“I think you spend enough time with her already, working on that poor excuse of a paper. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you liked her more than me.”
Choose.
Jolene slid the smashed half of our shared necklace back and forth along its chain.
Since I’d walked to her house at midnight, Jolene had fixed it so we were all best friends again. But it wasn’t the same. Inevitably Bella would bring up something that had happened “back then,” which is how she referred to the time I didn’t exist. And if Kris and Jolene were opposing magnets before, they weren’t anymore—sometimes off talking in a corner, other times eyeing each other in silence. I’d wondered once or twice what had changed to make them this way, but I didn’t wonder for long. Obviously, things were different now. Including me. I’d lain in the grass with Hudson, star naming. I’d kept working on the paper with Kris. This wasn’t the first time Jolene had mentioned it.
“That’s for school.” I tensed my neck, felt my own gold chain strain against it. “It has nothing to do with you.”
Jolene dropped the necklace. It stuck to the damp skin on her neck. “This night calls for air-conditioning and ice cream,” she said. “Come on.” She reached for my hand again.
Choose me.
Cinnamon rose from her skin—the scent of our sleepovers. I didn’t want to be real. Boring. Mapped out. Made of lists. The way I was before I met her.
I didn’t want to be me without Jolene.
But I couldn’t leave Kris, either. She’d never left me.
“You go ahead,” I said. “I’m good.”
Jolene snapped her hand shut and dropped it to her thigh. She lifted her chin until her eyes formed slits.
“I picked you, you know. Out of everyone.”
A rare breeze blew through the thick air, lifted my hair like it did on the cliff that day when Jolene grabbed my hand and we ran above the streets so far below.
“I know.”
“Well,” she said, less a sound than a slow sigh. She lowered her chin. For a second her forehead creased and her thin-slitted eyes dipped at the sides. Then she took a deep breath, and her face brightened again, like a hard reset. “More for me, I guess,” she said, before sauntering down the cement path back to Cal’s.
It didn’t sound like she was talking about ice cream.
The voices in the distance grew layered. Concentrated. People were gathering. The game was ending.
I pictured Hudson leaning against the wrought-iron railing in front of Cal’s, tiny beads of sweat on his upper lip, hair puffed out and curly in the heat. Waiting for me. The last time I’d found him at Cal’s, he’d been on the
couch, bathed in blue light. An hour later I’d been with him, the two of us silent and fused in front of the TV. That’s what Jolene had seen. She’d been looking for me. She’d found us. She’d find him, tonight. This time it would be Jolene who showed up first.
It was supposed to be me. I wanted it to be me.
Instead I stepped into the soft, wet grass and ducked into the narrow alley Jolene must have taken that cut through the town houses to the parking lot.
I told myself Hudson would understand. That he’d hear me out. But the farther I got down the alley, the harder it was to think. The distant murmurs of the group back at Cal’s stoop faded, overtaken by the whirr and click of crickets and the plink of water dripping. Darkness and brick rose up around me. Halfway through I held my breath. The heat trapped between the town houses was thick as syrup and smelled like piss. When I reached the other side, I breathed again, then skipped down a steep angle of grass to the edge of the dimly lit parking lot in time to hear a flat slam, a loud bang, and the clicking sound of metal on metal. The few seconds that followed were filled with buzzing insects, grumbling garage doors, high-pitched barks, and girly squeals.
Then I heard it again.
Slam. Bang. Clickclickclick.
The storage shed. Of course. Nothing else in this complex was made of metal, or had a reputation worthy of Jolene. In intermediate school we used to dare each other to open its doors, take a step in, stay for one minute, two. We’d heard stories: A nest of bats. A haven for stray cats. The stink of rot. The rounded shape of an animal corpse covered in maggots.
I’d touched my nose to the cracked plastic of its single small window once, after cicada season. The inside of the window, usually obscured by a thick film of dirt and oil swirls, was covered in bug husks: the spindly legs and shed skins of millions of insects. As if they’d fled to the inside of the shed, known it was wilder and darker than any suburban summer night.
Slam.
I ran.
My lungs weren’t used to it. Every sound got drowned out by the whoosh and blow of my breath in my head, and somewhere beneath that a steady beat: the bang of my heart, the slap of my feet.
A few minutes later they came into view: five small steel sheds. Four clean and strung with shiny combination locks. The fifth crooked, dented, dirty, its doors sunken and bowed into a sick smile, with rusted teeth biting a branch where the lock should be.
Slam.
The doors pushed against the branch.
Bang.
A hit from inside the shed. On the side. It shook the next shed over and swung its shiny silver lock.
Clickclickclick.
“Kris?” Slam. “Kris! Stop. I’ll get you out, but you have to stop hitting the door, okay?”
Silence.
I pulled at the branch, but my hands slid right off, scraping over the rough bark. I wiped my palms on my jeans and tried again: a hand on either end of the stick, my feet shoulder width apart, pulling with my whole body. The stick didn’t budge. Then, just as my hands started to burn from sliding on splintered wood, a thin strip of the branch peeled away, and the rest of it sailed through the metal slots. I flew back, then found my footing and dropped the stick. My fingers were stiff and sprinkled with bits of bark. My palms were raw and red, like my wrists had been from the ropes. I panted, sweat drenched, as the metal doors swung open.
Kris burst out—along with a matted brown rat and a swarm of mosquitos—swatting at enormous flies. They flew out of her curls and lifted from her scratched, bitten skin in fits and jags. When she was finally free of them, she found the stick that had locked her in. It lay near my feet. She picked it up, then smacked it down so hard, it split in half and skidded along the pavement.
“I’m leaving,” Kris said. She dropped the end of the stick and stalked away. At the sudden movement, two more flies shot out of her hair.
“Me too,” I called, running after her.
Kris spun around and studied me like I was a glass-trapped specimen.
“You sure?” she asked. “Because this is it. I’m finished. With her. With all of it. And Jolene can spread whatever brand of fucked-up shit she wants about me, because people might be interested now, but they won’t be for long. I’m going to fall so far from popular, no one will care what she says about me. No one will care about me at all. But it’ll be my choice. It’ll be perfect. Because I don’t care about them. I care about me, and you, and getting through the next two years of high school on our terms.”
Was I sure? As if I still had a choice. I’d already made my decision, up on that cement path, when I’d left Jolene empty-handed. I’d chosen Kris. There was no going back. Not with Jolene. When she did something, she did it completely. Being her best friend wasn’t a pinkie-swear kind of thing. It was rabid: a deep cut instead of a drop of blood; smashed glass instead of a store-bought necklace. It was thrilling, the lengths she’d go to for me. The violence. The intensity.
But dragging Kris into it, that was something else entirely.
I knew Jolene would be furious. That she’d turn on me as completely as she’d once clung to me. But I’d survive. I’d done it before, thanks to Kris—I owed her this.
“You were leaving. What was I supposed to do?” I ask Kris.
The bell rings, and suddenly the rest of the world exists again. The sweat on my neck turns cold and clammy. I swallow back the lump in my throat. Swipe my sweater sleeve across the stray tears on my cheek.
“You were supposed to make a choice,” Kris says, “and congratulations! You did. You walked away all by yourself.” She shoves open the car door to demonstrate.
CHAPTER 27
DOORS OPEN, CLOCKS tick, chalk squeaks, hands rise, people speak, bells ring, doors close. My morning classes pass in the usual sequence even though I feel out of sorts. After gym, sweat from the fitness tests coats my cheeks and beads on the back of my neck as I head to psychology. I let it drip.
Kris didn’t wait for me after she slammed the car door this morning. We didn’t walk into school together. She didn’t meet me after homeroom or before history.
I wanted space. She gave it to me. But even though I ditched my routine weeks ago—even though Kris and I haven’t been as close lately—I didn’t realize how much I counted on certain things: an arm swinging beside me, a seat in the cafeteria, a sideways glance that no one else understands.
Without them I feel dangerously weightless, like if I take too big a step, I’ll bounce up off the surface of the earth and into the atmosphere.
So when Hudson catches me in the hall before physics—rough skin on my fingertips, the cuff of his flannel brushing along my wrist—and tells me he can’t meet at the bike racks, I grip his fingers hard and press my heels into my sneakers.
“Come over after school,” he says, cupping his hands around his headphones. “I’ve got something to show you.” He squints his eyes and kisses my lips, and he’s off again.
I walk into physics. I feel better in a desk, with a pencil in my hand, copying diagrams from the board. But as soon as I finish, I’m drifting again, through lectures and bells. I skip lunch—obviously Kris doesn’t want to see me—and walk the halls, pretending I’m late for class, or going to the bathroom, or on my way to the nurse. I coast through calculus. It’s not until I’m on my way to study hall that I realize I’ve felt like this before. It was during that first day after Thanksgiving break, when Jolene wasn’t in school. I’m struck with a sensory memory so strong I stop walking: a whiff of spicy sweetness; the deadweight of Jolene’s arm around my neck; the night air, cool and brisk, with a burning tinge, the hint of true winter—a warning of the things to come.
A fluorescent light flashes over my head and blinks out, and I’m back again. I didn’t stop walking after all. And that’s what’s different about how I feel now as opposed to how I felt then. Before I was untethered, a kite with a cut string. But this is different. I’m not floating aimlessly. I have a destination. And when I sink down with a squeak into the mus
ty, faux-red-velvet seat under the eave in the auditorium, I feel anchored. This is what’s left of my routine: A darkened hall. A stage full of scenery. A chorus of voices.
Jolene.
I close my eyes, rest my neck on the curved metal rim of the seat back, and wait. Jolene’s always a few minutes late.
She’s been telling me stories. Ever since study hall switched from the library to the auditorium, I haven’t gotten any notes—nothing to clutch during classes and unfold in my car. No more memories. Something better. The old stories, the original magic, before fights and ropes and manhunt games. Before boys.
Queens and kings and talking things. Lorraine and Jane. The two little girls. I close my eyes. She plays with my hair. The world disappears. Sometimes songs seep in—lights, laughter, voices—but Jolene always makes them part of the story, a seamless landscape painted in the throaty tone of her voice.
At first I worried that other people could hear. I listened without speaking for fear someone could see. But no one ever turned around, no one found us. So I began to add details. Just a little something here or there. A whisper, a name, a shade of sky. They’re never as good as Jolene’s, but it doesn’t matter. It’s still our world. Our escape.
Something I need today.
There’s a rustle in the row behind me. Feet. A soft squeak. The smell of cinnamon. I shift in my seat, sit up a little bit, making sure to leave my hair draped so she can play with it. My skin is already tingling in anticipation.
“Lorraine,” she says. It’s how she greets me now.
“Jane,” I reply.
I wait for her voice, raspy and low, to take me to another place. But instead she grips the back of my chair with both hands and leans forward until we’re cheek to cheek. She blinks, and I feel her eyelashes flutter. She smiles, and her skin curves a path up my cheek. She turns her head left, and it turns mine too.
We’re facing the opposite corner of the auditorium, where the straight kids sit: straight spines, straight As, straight to bed.
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