The S-Word

by Chelsea Pitcher

  “That’s great.”

  “It is,” he agrees. “It is. And it shouldn’t matter at all, but if they find out I’m not who they thought I was, it’s going to mess with them.”

  “So don’t mess with them.”

  “I know, I just— Wait, what?”

  “Don’t mess with them.”

  “Do you mean that?”

  “It sounds like they really need you. It’s only natural you’d want to be there for them.” Everything I’m saying, I’m saying about me. But he has no idea. I guess he doesn’t know me that well.

  “Angie, you’re amazing.”

  “You said that.” I laugh so as not to worry him. Inside, I feel like my heart is cracking and all the blood is oozing out. Really, there should be a limit to how many times that can happen in one life. “I just want you to be happy, Jesse. You’re the best person I’ve ever met.”

  “I could kiss you,” he says. Yeah, but not in public. “Can I see you tonight? We could just hang out . . .”

  “I’m sorry.” I tilt the rearview mirror down, so I can study my reflection. There’s something fascinating about watching myself slip further into the darkness. “I’ve got plans. Maybe tomorrow?”

  “Sure, yeah. You’re really being great about this.”

  “That’s me.” I give a big fake smile. “Supergreat. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “Have a good night, Princess.”

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  I hang up the phone and call Drake. He answers right away. It’s like he was waiting by the phone. Quite the opposite of Jesse’s disappearing act, I think.

  “Hey, sweetie,” he says in greeting.

  “Hey, I’ve got a question.” Seems to be the theme of the day, doesn’t it?

  “Sure.”

  “Did you read the diary pages you found in your locker last week?”

  “Wh-what?”

  “It’s okay, Drake. I saw them in your hand.”

  He doesn’t say anything. Maybe he knows anything he says can and will be used against him.

  “I got some too.” I’m using the sweetest possible voice. “And I read them. It’s really okay. I just want to know what they were about.”

  “What were yours about?” he asks after a few seconds.

  Ah, so he wants to play that game? Well, how does he like this:

  “She wrote about the play. I guess she didn’t really want to audition. Jesse Martinez convinced her,” I lie.

  But I’m not the only one. He says, “I got the same thing. That guy’s a jerk.”

  Liar. Liar. Pants on fire.

  “Listen, Angie?”

  I hardly hear him. My thoughts are spinning too fast. “Uh-huh?” I manage.

  “I really want to see you. Would you please come by later?”

  This time when I smile, it’s genuine. “I think I’d really enjoy that.”

  twenty-two

  DRAKE TAKES MY coat as I step into the house. The place feels like a furnace. His parents keep it at eighty degrees year-round. I guess it makes swimming in the indoor pool more pleasant.

  “I’m so glad you came over tonight,” he gushes.

  “I figured I owed you a chance to explain,” I say calmly, avoiding his gaze. I’ve walked through this doorway so many times. Seen the pristine, imported furniture and the wood-paneled walls. Through the door to the family room, that awful stag’s head is staring me down.

  “That’s great.” Drake leads me through the foyer. “You’re great.”

  “People keep telling me that.” Maybe I’m baiting him. But he’s either too distracted or too clueless to notice.

  “Did you bring your suit?” he asks. “Dad and Cynthia won’t be home until late-late.”

  I hold up my purse. “Got my bikini.”

  His tongue just barely stays in his mouth. “Good. Great. Are you hungry?”

  “Are you going to cook for me?”

  “I thought I would.”

  I give him my wryest smile. “Seriously?”

  “Come on, Angie, you act like I only think of myself.” He pulls out a chair as I enter the kitchen.

  “Okay, you’re right,” I say, sitting down. He pushes the chair in, to meet me. “Let’s just get the bad stuff out of the way.”

  “Sure thing.”

  “So look.” I cross my legs when I catch him looking at them. My jeans are so tight I can barely move. “I don’t care if you go out with people. It only really bugs me when they’re not conscious.”

  “No.” He pulls up a chair right in front of me. His blue eyes are wide with concern. He looks innocent. The kind of guy you want to believe. “You got that all wrong. Cara came on to me and I told her I wasn’t interested. But she was so wasted she wouldn’t listen. I figured if I got her upstairs, she’d just pass out on the bed.”

  “That was smart of you.”

  “Right? But she got sick before we got to the bedroom. Then you showed up, and—”

  “Oh no.” I put a hand to my lips. “Oh Drake, I thought it was something totally different. I’m so sorry.”

  “No, I’m sorry.” He tucks a hair behind my ear. My skin feels hot where he touches me, but it’s not the heat of desire anymore. “I shouldn’t have gone up there with her. What if she kissed me?”

  “That would have been awful,” I tease.

  “Come on.”

  “Okay, say I believe you. What happens next?”

  “We put it behind us.” He puts his hand on my knee. “I make you dinner. I rub that place on your neck that always gets tense.”

  I giggle, leaning into him. “Then we swim?”

  “Yeah. Totally. I mean, if you want to.”

  “I want to,” I tell him. “I want to so bad, I could slip on my bikini right now.”

  He’s choking on his Adam’s apple. “Sure, do it.”

  “No. No, it’s silly.” I cover my face with my hand.

  “I’ll do it too,” he insists.

  “Okay, but there’s just one thing . . .” I lower my head, like I’m hiding.

  “What?”

  “It’s embarrassing.”

  “Come on, tell me.”

  I peek through my fingers. “I forgot to shave my legs.”

  “Oh.” He frowns. He’s glancing at my jeans like I’m Sasquatch underneath. “It’s no big deal. You can use Cynthia’s razor.”

  “Can I use your shower, though?”

  “Only if I can come.”

  I lean back. “I need to know that I can trust you, Drake. If I can’t trust you, I—”

  He holds up his hands. “Hey, I was kidding. Use my shower. Take as long as you like.” He makes a shooing motion.

  “Thanks, sweetie.” I smile, like the word just slipped out.

  As I lean in, to give him a kiss on the cheek, he turns to try and catch my mouth. “This dinner is going to blow you away,” he says.

  “Can’t wait.”

  I slink out of the room and up the stairs.

  When I get up to his bedroom the first thing I do is lock the door. See, the bathroom doesn’t have a lock. If I don’t block him out somehow, he’ll assume I want company.

  Boys will be boys? No. But Drake will be Drake. Everything is a signal to him.

  I start my search in the bathroom, turning on the water and going through the medicine cabinet. Nothing, nothing. Not even a questionable pill collection. The cupboard under the sink is filled with these perfectly folded towels. Tight-ass Drake has really outdone himself.

  I return to the bedroom.

  A peek under the bed uncovers socks and dirty T-shirts. The mattress is hiding your typical perv-o porn. Inside the closet, his clothes are arranged by color. His shoes sit in a row on the floor. I get down on my hands and knees and feel around inside them. I’m starting to get that pathetic feeling again but I’ve already come so far. And the instinct pushing me to search Drake’s room is just burning in my chest, like a part of me knows I’m getting close. If I’ve learned anything fro
m all this snooping around, it’s that maybe the universe does have some kind of consciousness that’s guiding me.

  Or maybe I’ve gone completely insane.

  Either way, I’m not going to give up until I’ve searched every inch of this room. I’ll pull up the carpet and check under the floorboards if I have to.

  A hand jiggles the doorknob.

  Drake.

  He’s probably got a key. And I can’t yell at him to stay out because then he’ll know I’m not in the shower. I creep into the bathroom and wait.

  After a minute the jiggling stops. I decide to take a chance. I shoot Drake a text to let him know I’m finishing up: “Almost done! I hope you’re ready for this.”

  I figure it’ll buy me another five minutes. With bikini paradise so close at hand, he’ll have to be a good boy and wait.

  Unfortunately, I’m starting to lose steam. I’ve searched everywhere I can except for that stupid antique bookshelf in the corner. I look up at the thick volumes. He’s got Walden and War and Peace and a gazillion other books he’ll never read. It’s this big fat hoax, staring back at me.

  Like a hollowed-out Bible with a flask inside.

  I start pulling books off the shelf like a crazy person, only taking minimal care to make sure they don’t crash to the ground. If I have to, I can tell Drake I fell in the shower. He’d totally believe it. He thinks I’m ditsy.

  I let him think that.

  The top row is clean. No secrets hiding behind any of the books. I start to pull off entire stacks, carrying them in my arms to the bed. The second row is also clean.

  Damn.

  I start to worry I’m going to find a big, fat pile of nothing before I even get to the bottom. For a second I think this feeling is defeat. But tiny fingers are creeping up my back and I realize it’s something else entirely. It’s intuition. I’m looking behind the books and under the books and I should be looking in the books.

  I am, after all, looking for pages.

  I find them slid neatly into his copy of The Time Traveler’s Wife. Definitely ironic. Far be it from Drake to read a love story. I’m guessing the book was a gift from Cynthia. You know, a stepmother’s sad little attempt to bond.

  But never mind that. I’ve got the pages in my hand. Not photocopied, like the ones from school, but real pages. Pages torn out of Lizzie’s diary. I can see where Drake ripped through the perforated edges.

  I glance at the first page, my heart going crazy in my chest. A part of me wants to read them right now but I know I can’t. I recognize the date on the top of the page: April nineteenth. Prom night. If I read them now, my heart will break, and I won’t be able to hide my emotions from Drake.

  I fold up the pages and slide them into my purse.

  Drake knocks on the door just as I’m putting the last of his books on the shelf. I’ve tried to put them back in the right order but my brain isn’t exactly at its best. All these books look the same and I have to get home—I need to get home—I have to get home right now. But I’m scared. I feel completely cold, like the blood has left my body. When I open the door for Drake the tears are already forming.

  “Baby, you’re in for a— What’s wrong?”

  “I’m sorry.” I cover my face with my hands. “I’m such an idiot.”

  “Angie? What happened?”

  I look at him like my heart is breaking. “I brought the wrong bikini!”

  “What?”

  “I just grabbed it out of my closet. One’s blue and the other one’s black. I can’t believe I did this!”

  “Whoa, wait. Did you just put the words wrong and bikini in the same sentence?”

  I smile through my hand. “Stop.”

  “Come on, babe. You’ll look amazing. Just get dressed and then we’ll eat.”

  “I can’t, Drake, it makes me look fat. And if I eat, it’ll get worse, and—”

  “You’re not fat.”

  “I didn’t say I was fat.” I scowl at him. “I said it makes me look fat.” Pushing past him, I head for the stairs. I’m clutching my purse to my chest like a baby. “It’ll take me, like, two minutes to go get it.”

  “No way.” He’s plodding down the stairs after me. “Dinner’s ready. You won’t look fat.”

  “Yes, I will.” My hand is on the doorknob and he can barely locate his brain to stop me. I can see those rusty gears trying to turn in his head. They’re saying: She is a girl, after all. They do crazy things all the time.

  Eye roll.

  “I’ll be right back.” I breeze past the door, tossing it back in Drake’s direction.

  “Angie, wait.”

  It slams in his face.

  I wish I could take back the times I spent alone with him. I wish a lot of things. But as I speed down the block to my house, with no intention of returning to Drake’s for a late-night swim, I have no idea how good I’ve got it. Because once I read the entry Drake stole from Lizzie’s diary, I’ll never be able to go back to this moment.

  April 19th

  Memory plays tricks on me. The more time passes, the less I’m able to get it right. I see the events leading up to my descent like movie stills hanging on a wall. Here, I’m perched on the edge of the bed. Here, he leans in to tell me something sweet. I’m not buying what he says, not completely. But part of me wants to believe.

  I’ve had a best friend for as long as I can remember. I’ve had a father who looks out for my soul. But I’ve never been loved, not really. Never felt the warmth of it. At every turn, there has been doubt.

  Maybe that’s why things happened the way they did. Maybe, at least, that’s why I invited him in. Like a vampire. Didn’t I learn my lesson? Boys who come creeping into girls’ bedrooms at night are only after one thing. First the knock, then the tentative entering. I should have known better.

  That phrase keeps replaying in my head.

  I try to clear some static. This is how it looks inside of me:

  I’m sitting on the edge of the bed. He’s in the chair, opposite me. I remember thinking, he’s giving me space. He probably thinks I’ll break. Everybody treats me this way.

  Foolish me.

  He talks about the dance, makes a joke about finals. I get the feeling he’s trying to relate to me, the way a detective will invent commonality to get you to trust him. But I don’t take offense at his manipulation. I think he’s trying to make me comfortable. Maybe he wants my approval, since he’s dating my best friend.

  Better late than never, right?

  Indeed.

  His dark hair is slicked back, his jacket slung over the back of the chair. He looks like an old-time movie star, the kind that dies at twenty-five. That lifestyle gets under your skin, transforms you. I don’t hear the change in his voice when he’s about to transform for me, but I feel it. The air changes in the room.

  I’m not sure what I say next. I remember paying him some sort of compliment. Maybe I say I like his tux. Maybe I tell him he’ll ace his finals. I’m not saying anything deep. I’m just trying to make him comfortable like he is doing for me. My mouth feels dry. I’m nervous.

  I have reason to be.

  I can see him sitting there on the chair, several feet away from me, and then he’s crawling on the bed over me. I don’t have time to think, or breathe. His mouth touches mine the instant the comforting words are out of my lips.

  I realize, later, that he was waiting for them. I realize he took them as a signal I hadn’t actually sent.

  I don’t stop him in that moment. In that moment, I don’t even realize where I am. And for several seconds after, Elizabeth Hart goes spinning through space and time, her soul seeking a separate dimension in which this series of events would make sense.

  Drake. Homecoming and soon-to-be Prom King. Reincarnated 1950s superstar kissing the most beautiful girl in school’s forgettable best friend.

  Me.

  I need to think, to separate from him, to breathe. The need to breathe occurs to me last, but it’s the best reason I can f
ind to move back. There is something about the words “Get off me,” “What are you doing?” or, the most vicious, “I don’t want you,” that seem utterly impossible to speak.

  Clearly, there has been a misunderstanding, in which he believes I would ever, for any reason on earth, betray the trust of my best friend. Clearly, I need only to move away and remind him of this, and the miscommunication will be cleared up.

  Oh Lizzie of the Past, foolish thing. I do and do not miss that girl. Certainly she looked on the world with brighter, more forgiving eyes, but she was an animal staring down the barrel of a gun. It was only a matter of time before

  She

  Got

  Destroyed.

  I duck away from Drake’s suction-cup lips to tell him, “I need to breathe.”

  He takes this to mean: I need to take a shaky half breath and then you can go back to sucking my soul out through my mouth.

  This is, of course, not what I mean. Neither of us is saying what we’re thinking, but I’m the only one who’ll suffer from it.

  When I try to pull away, he holds on to me. He says, “You don’t have to say anything.”

  What could I possibly say?

  He says, “I know how you feel. How you’ve always felt. I know you’re just afraid to hurt Angie.”

  That last part is true. I’ve spent much of my life trying not to “hurt Angie.”

  “But I’ve seen you looking at me,” he whispers.

  I say, “We’re friends,” or something equally stupid. It doesn’t matter. It’s like he doesn’t hear me.

  He says, “I’ve been looking at you too. You’re so beautiful.” This, from the guy who’s used to staring at perfection.

  The universe has definitely turned on its head.

  But here, for one time only, the confession:

  There is a part of me that likes it. Not the kissing. Not the forcefulness, when I never so much as said “I like you,” which is, I would think, the least possible prerequisite to this kind of coupling. We learned that in, what, kindergarten?

  But I like the compliment. No one ever says that stuff to me.

  And maybe I needed to hear it. Maybe we all do. In this world of models and popstar princesses, is it altogether shocking that I might respond to being physically appreciated for the first time in my life?