I lift my arms and close my eyes. Fingertips skim the swoop of my waist, my breasts, grip the back of my neck. When I open my eyes again, Jolene and I are nose to nose, hip to hip, lip to lip. Smiling. Then the strobe light flashes, and Jolene’s hair flows forward. No, that’s the back of her head. She’s facing away from me. I recognize the small pull in my sweater, just above her shoulder blade. Until a boy’s hand covers it. Another flash and there are hands on my back too. They aren’t soft like Jolene’s, but they’re warm. And when they slip under the hem of my sweater and onto the slick skin of my stomach, I twist into them. They belong to the boy in the striped shirt. The girl from I Never. One of the Hurley twins. They are Kris’s fingers twined in mine. Hudson’s hand edging under the waist of my jeans. Jolene’s palm on my pounding chest. Her lips against my ear.
Lips against my lips. Sweat gathers between my shoulder blades and breasts, drips from the curve of my lip into a kiss.
It’s like now that I’ve opened myself up, I don’t want to stop opening. I’d turn myself inside out if I could; claw open my skin; expose my blood, my soft pink organs, and all the secrets stuck between them. So I’m not surprised when my skin seems to stretch away and snap. I’m not fazed when I hear the howl of material ripping. It’s not until I feel a splash of air on my stomach and chest instead of the sweaty stick of thin knit that I realize what’s happened. And who’s watching.
The crowd has carved a circle around us.
Me and some guy I don’t recognize. At least not with his mouth pressed against mine. I push him off me. He wipes his lips with the back of a doughy hand, and when his eyes finally focus on me, a mix of delight and confusion dawns on his half-moon face.
Jolene’s sweater hangs in ragged folds along my sides, like curtains to a show.
“Oh, shit,” he says. “Hard-core.”
Hard-core. Not strong and sought after, but stripped down, rough, senseless.
The music turns shrill, a repeated scream. My stomach sours. Liquid climbs its way up my throat. It wants out like everything else. I swallow back a mix of bile and whiskey, but what’s left in my mouth afterward is even worse: smoke, stale and bitter, stuck to my tongue. Not the earthy aftertaste of weed anymore. Something acrid.
I grab the jagged edges of my sweater, cover myself with a tight hug, and dive into the huddled crowd that surrounds us.
For the first time tonight I don’t want to be seen. I don’t want the crowd to cleave for me. I want to melt into it.
I want Jolene.
But it’s impossible to see anything in the flashing dark other than a split-second freeze-frame of open mouths and closed eyes, nodding heads and slinking hips. Teased bangs. A shock of red curls. Bella? Kris? I turn around and get knocked forward. A girl in a tight white cami and loose cargo pants dances away from me, toward the boy with the striped shirt. My head pounds in time with the bass beat from the speakers. I turn sideways and shoulder my way through the moving bodies.
The air from the kitchen window cools the sweat on my forehead and tickles my uncovered belly button. Trembling, I angle my neck to see past the crowd and around the keg. Cups and hands and elbows cover the countertops, but none of them are Jolene’s. I turn back toward the living room.
I’ve been in Bella’s house a million times. I know the placement of each wall and the pattern on every floor. I try to bring up the map in my head, but I can’t see it. Between the shots and the beer and the weed and the dancing, everything’s fuzzy. I stop short of the thick living-room carpet and squint to see between all the people. I search from neck to mouth to face. I catch a flash of honey skin here and a dark-purple nail there, the slope of a shoulder, the curved corner of a wide smile, but never the whole of her. It’s like Jolene’s scattered around the room in pieces, and I can’t follow any of them. Because it’s thirty minutes to midnight on New Year’s Eve, and the sequins and polos and cups of beer crowd closer and closer and closer together until they’re packed and pulsing and pushing.
I squeeze the fine knit of Jolene’s severed sweater in my fists and step backward. And back again. And then I hit something solid. A seam in the wall. The invisible door. Bunching both ends of the sheer material into my left hand, I pull open the white door and slip into the damp air of the basement.
It’s quiet down here compared to upstairs, but I can still feel the music. The bone-rattling bass in my chest. The quick fades in my head. I dig my knuckles into my ribs and screw my eyes shut, but that only amplifies the sounds.
I sit down and clap a hand over my mouth as my stomach roils, convulses. When I’m sure I’m not going to be sick, I stretch the dangling sides of the sweater across my stomach again and force myself to breathe through my nose.
In. Smoke. The sticky, sweet kind.
Out. Techno beat and DJ fades. Go away.
In. Focus on each floating stair.
Out. Hard-core.
In. Jolene.
Jolene. Jolene. Jolene.
Where is she?
And then—as if I’m under the eave in the auditorium again, with her hands in my hair and her words in my ear, telling me—I know.
I know exactly where to find her.
CHAPTER 37
I RUN UNDER the black-blue sky, crunching frozen blades of grass beneath my boots. One hand grips my gathered sweater, the other pumps back and forth. Icy air sweeps past me, filling my ears, until I can barely hear the faint noises from the house—a solo cheer here and there. It must be close to midnight.
When I get to the far end of the backyard, I drop the sweater, arrow my hands in front of me, and cut through the bushes. Pine needles scratch at my ribs, grab at the knit, pull at my cheeks like thin fingers. When I’m free of them, I see her—lying on the lounge chair, legs splayed, like after the bonfire. Except this time she’s awake.
“I saw you in there,” Jolene says to the single cloud that ghosts the sky above us and the stroke of stars to its right. “Everyone did.” She circles her lips and blows her own cloud into the air above her face, watches it disappear. “Did you like it?”
I wrap my arms around my bare stomach.
“No.”
Jolene props herself up on her elbows and considers me. Her eyes don’t look hazel in the moonlight; they look like light. Like her irises are on fire. She stands up, walks toward me, and stops just short of stepping on my feet.
“No?”
I think of earlier on the dance floor: The lights becoming the sky above us. The music through my body. The collective energy. Her arms reaching for me.
“Yes,” I admit.
Jolene nods, satisfied.
Shouts and noisemakers sound from the house. We turn toward the lit windows.
“They liked it too,” she says, as if she’s translating for them.
“What about you?” I ask.
“What about me?”
I face her. “Did you like it?”
She keeps her eyes on the house, her profile set off by a thin shine of moonlight. Until she turns and the light is behind her. The crooks of her face are dark caves as she lifts the loose ends of her sweater that flap against my waist. She rubs them between her fingers. I half expect her to rip them off and roll them the way Hudson does. Instead she holds both sides open so she can see every inch of my winter-pale skin. I breathe deep, feel the gooseflesh of my breasts press against my bra and go slack again under her gaze. I wait—chin up, eyes steady—as she makes her way back to my face.
Jolene drops the edges of the sweater, fastens her eyes on mine. “No.”
The breath from her word warms my lips. Maybe that’s why I kiss her. To prove she’s lying.
She kisses me back, at first: mouth open, tongue strong, lips soft. She tastes bitter and sweet, a mix of burned cocoa and sugar.
Behind my eyelids, the darkness folds and shifts, like covers for us to burrow under. I clutch her hand and curve into her. I tilt my head so I can taste her better. And when her chin doesn’t turn with me, I claw at h
er jaw, dig my thumb into the skin on the side of her nose and force her head to the side. I push her, for all the times she pushed me. I’m the rope on her wrists. The hand on her mouth. The glass through her skin.
Until Jolene jerks back again, and I lose my grip. When she breaks the seal of our kiss, there’s a hiss—a shared breath escaping.
“What?” I grab the tattered edges of the sweater and cross them like a cardigan over my stomach. “You want this.”
Jolene smoothes her hair and squares her shoulders. “I don’t.”
“Then why—?” My head is spinning, and this time it’s not from the pot or the alcohol. It’s from the memories: her hand in my hair, her palm covering my mouth, the curve of her back as she pulled me close. Those things were real. They happened. She has to want me. She has to want this. But if she doesn’t— “Then why did you do all those things?”
“What? Up there?” She flicks her head toward the crowd of silhouettes gathered in the living room, backed by blue light from the television. “I did those things because I can. Because that’s what I’m good at. I can dance and drink and lie. I can give guys what they want. And girls too, apparently.” She sighs. Her breath steams like smoke in the cold. “And now you can, too,” she adds with a smile.
“No, I mean . . .” An ache grows in my throat, but I force the question around it. I have to know. “Why did you do all those things to me?”
Jolene’s smile shrinks but doesn’t disappear. It almost seems appreciative. “Because you like it.”
“You think I like being tied up and suffocated and lied to? You think I like losing all my friends, and my boyfriend?” I’m shaking now, not shivering. It’s almost like my skin is vibrating.
“Yeah. I do,” Jolene says simply. “I think you like the fact that something finally happened to you.”
“I like you.”
“No you don’t. You don’t even know me, and you don’t want to. Why did you want to be friends with me in the first place? Think about it.”
I see the cliff, feel her hand, hear the rocks falling beneath my sneakers. I was scared and excited at the same time. I felt alive. But it wasn’t just that, was it? It couldn’t have been.
“Let me remind you,” Jolene says. “It was because you hated yourself. When I met you, you were making lists and checking boxes. You had a million maps of the same place. You were trapped. You wanted out. You wanted to be new, and you figured I could give that to you. And you were right. Though I have to say, I think you made a real mistake running away on the dance floor like that. Not that it can’t be fixed.”
I wiggle my fingers. I haven’t felt them tingling for the last few minutes, and I’m afraid they’re going numb. Then I realize I’m having a hard time feeling anything. I let my hands go slack at my sides.
“So this is all a game to you?” I ask. “I’m just this thing you’ve been playing with? You saw that I was weak—an easy target—and that gave you the right to take advantage?”
“You’re not paying attention.” Jolene shakes her head and clucks her tongue. “I wasn’t using you, Mattie. You were using me. You came to me every time you needed a little something interesting, and when someone else looked better, you left.” She clamps her jaw shut, as if something big, or bitter, has landed on her tongue. Then she grimaces and swallows it whole. “You were only in it for yourself. You used me. And look what you got out of it!”
“What I got out of it? Are you kidding?” I pick up the ends of the ripped sweater. I think of Hudson storming out, and the tone of Kris’s voice when she called after me: Angry. Shocked. Full throated. The same way I sound when I say, “I lost everything!”
“Not everything,” she says, swiveling toward the house. And as if everyone inside can sense Jolene’s attention, the hollers get louder. “You’ve got them.”
“But they don’t know me. They’re not my friends. What I did up there—what they saw—that wasn’t me.”
“It sure looked like you.”
“Okay, I mean, obviously it was me, but—”
“Then own it,” Jolene demands. She huffs out a hard, impatient breath. “Do you really think what happened at Bella’s party broke me? That I stayed home, sulking about some stupid fight, some dumb breakup, until I could drag myself back to school the next day to live in the shadows? That I just let it all happen?”
I open my mouth, but only air comes out.
What did I think when I slid into my old seat in the cafeteria and Jolene slid into the seat next to me in the auditorium? That we’d switched skins? That the world had finally righted itself, decided I’d served my sentence? That it was time I reclaimed what was rightfully mine?
Or was that just the version I wanted to believe?
I swallow a mix of whiskey, shame, and spit.
Because I knew, didn’t I? That Jolene had something to do with it? As soon as she missed school on Monday, and then again when she came back changed, no longer full of bite and blaze. I knew, and I buried it. Because I wanted to believe it was mine. That I earned it. That I deserved it. That I was worth it.
But if she orchestrated it all, why?
And if that’s not the real version, what is?
The questions kick at my closed lips, but Jolene’s not finished.
“Tell everyone you were drunk and wanted to put on a show. Or tell them you went home with me. Tell them something, and it’ll be your story instead of theirs.”
“I don’t care about the story.” I step in front of Jolene, cutting off her view of the living room, where every arm is raised, black strips against the blue light. “It’s not about the story.”
She laughs. It’s a sad, sorry-for-me sound. “It’s always about the story, Mattie.”
As soon as she says it, something in me settles, clicks, like the metal ridges of the flint wheel. Jolene and I, we’ve never been the real thing. We’ve always been a story. Our story. “The Two Little Girls.” That’s how we were born, and that’s how we’ve lived. I think back to the auditorium and the early parties, where Jolene always made people into fantasies. I think of her face, grim and determined, as she stared at me in the bed and held her breath. I think of the ropes and the cliff and the shed and the texts. Hudson. Even these last few weeks when she played dead.
Jolene told me the night I walked to her house at midnight. She said it: Maybe we’re both not here. What if we’re both not real?
I look hard at Jolene—at the curve of her lip and the line of her chin, the angle of her neck and the bend of her elbow—trying to find something genuine. For a second I think I glimpse something—the rope-throated version I saw inside the party—but then it’s gone, buried beneath a veneer of dark hair, auburn streaks, and gleaming teeth. It’s a practiced pose, but not the real thing. More like some kind of covering. And it occurs to me now that maybe Jolene was right. Maybe I don’t know her at all. Maybe I’ve never seen what’s underneath. But if I could just lift the film . . . if I could just see—
I reach for her cheek.
She pulls back a fraction of an inch.
And suddenly I’m struck cold. Not from the weather or the wind but from fear—fear that the story is all there is. That she’s as insubstantial as a collection of words and phrases I could erase. That if I reached out and pulled off the covering, she’d cease to exist.
Or, worse, that one pull wouldn’t be enough. That I’d peel and peel and peel only to reach another layer. Another lie. Another story.
“Is anything about you real?” My voice shakes.
Jolene doesn’t respond right away. She waits until the voices lift through the open living-room window and float across the lawn toward us.
“FOUR!”
“THREE!”
“TWO!”
But she keeps her eyes on me. They shine like wet paint when she smiles.
“You used to be.”
One.
CHAPTER 38
I STAMP THE snow from my boots, peel off my knit hat, and pad up
the steps to my room, where hundreds of crumpled pieces of paper—yellowed at the edges, brittle to the point of breaking—carpet the floor. I step between the stacks, around clear, curled balls of packing tape piled like popcorn, and sit down on the only spot of open carpet. Then I reach into the worn cardboard box sitting next to me and slowly slide out the final sheaf of thin sheets.
Since Bella’s party I’ve kept to myself, and so has everybody else. I drive to school. I eat lunch alone. And when I get home, I hang out with happyelizabeth’s grandmother in 1901.
Turns out I won the auction. The beat-up box was sitting next to my bed New Year’s Day, with a Post-it that shouted, “THIS CAME WHEN YOU WERE OUT YESTERDAY!” in my mom’s handwriting. The caps alone had caused me pain. I’d woken with a raw throat and a heavy head, wearing a black thermal. I’d tried to crawl back into sleep, only to wake again with a bucking stomach, tasting whiskey and cocoa, fending off flashes of shot glasses and strobe lights, smoke and liquor, sweat and secrets. Me: dancing. Jolene: leaving. I’d turn over in bed, only to feel the cold creeping over my skin again. The hands between my back and the stretched rubber strips of a lounge chair. Kris’s curls covering my face. Curses. A flannel shirt. The scenes had faded in and out like the music had on the dance floor. And for a few hours I’d felt like I was fading, too—skin papery thin, vanishing, then solid again. But eventually the sensation had gone away. It wasn’t until noon that day, when I’d finally gathered the courage to sit up straight (elbows dug into my thighs, head in my hands), that I’d seen the stained box.
I’d opened it immediately—picked and pulled at each long piece of clear tape until it screamed with release, even though the sharp smell of glue and plastic turned my stomach.
My room doesn’t smell like that anymore. Now it’s a musty mix of oil and wood, grass and vanilla, same as my Sanborns. I haven’t found any maps so far. I’ve sorted handwritten letters and transcribed telegrams. Loose pages of old newspapers. Medical information. Lists of food and supplies. Political flyers. Theater playbills. A pencil drawing of a farmhouse (on a piece of paper so old, I thought it might be woven, but no; when I brought it to my nose, it reeked of vinegar—a sure sign that the paper was wood pulp).
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