The SUV screeched to a stop near Chloe, reminding Edy that they were moving at all.
“You must be heading to the party,” Matt said. “You should be riding with us.”
Chloe peered into the Rover.
“Is there even room?”
“Sure. You’ll just have to, uh, squeeze onto Lawrence’s lap. No biggie, right?”
Chloe took a step back, face a shade pinker than her makeup allowed.
“I guess not,” she said.
She peeked at Lawrence, whose head snapped left, treating her to his back instead. Matt shot his little brother a look of impatience before jumping out and opening the back door. He flexed arms that were the subject of schoolgirl whispers and lifted Chloe up in a show of bravado, making her giggle. Edy pursed her lips and looked away. For a girl with apparent reservations, Chloe Castillo settled into Lawrence’s lap easily enough.
Edy looked up to discover a silent head-jerking argument underway between Mason and Lawrence. It grew wild as the seconds ticked on, with the older boy eye popping, neck jerking and wheel barrowing emphatically, urging Lawrence to put his arms around Chloe. When the younger Dyson lifted his hands in slow surrender, he placed them ginger as two broken limbs at her side.
They ventured six blocks over before Mason whipped a U-turn in the middle of the street. He parked at a three-story Victorian the color of a setting sun. Teens pressed into the yard fence to fence. Lights and bass-laden hip hop spilled from yawning windows and a wide-open front door, as a gyrating rainbow of adolescents crowded round a keg on the northwest side of the house.
Chloe eased out the Rover, followed by the boys, who were met with an uproar of shouts and greetings. Football players swarmed, swallowing them in an intricate exchange of handshakes. They disappeared into the crowd, and Edy hung back, unsure of what to do in a melee of testosterone.
Long seconds passed, and Edy exchanged a look of quiet awkwardness with Chloe. The two hadn’t had words since sixth grade. No reason to change that now.
Chloe’s lips parted just as the team’s quarterback slipped between them, dividing the space between the girls with his back to Edy. Great. She counted the moments with her gaze on his broad expanse, knowing that her view would be brief.
“Oho! My QB, the man I’ve been looking for.” Mason Dyson swept an arm around the smaller boy’s shoulders and whipped him in an arc away from Chloe. His twin appeared in the quarterback’s place.
“He smells,” Matt announced, then blinked as if just noticing Chloe. “Thinking out loud. Sorry. But he’s not your type, is he?”
Edy smirked. Of course he is. Of course, they were. For all the obvious reasons.
“You mean Jeff?” Chloe said. She hesitated as if still trying to figure out if the quarterback had B.O. “I don’t really know him. I—”
Matt flicked an impatient hand. “Tell me what you think of Lil’ Dy—er, Lawrence,” he said.
“Think?” Chloe echoed.
Oh Lord.
“You do think of him, don’t you?” he said.
Matt smiled as if he knew some well-shrouded secret. Chloe blushed, though whether from his presence or some homed-in thought was impossible to tell.
Edy supposed it made no difference to a girl like Chloe Castillo. It made no difference whether she won over Matt or Mason or Lawrence. Lawrence, like his brothers, was a starter. He could talk to Chloe or any one of the mindless girls that infested their high school, and he could snag her with minimal effort. She, in turn, would be hysterical with glee.
“Coming?” a voice at Edy’s ear said.
She lurched at the sound of Hassan, then scolded her skittering pulse. He was close, close enough to dampen her ear with his lips. Edy yanked the reins on her runaway heart, urging it to steady. He was the same boy he’d always been, and she, the same girl.
But her buck wild heart begged to differ.
He startled me, that’s all.
Edy turned to face him a moment too late. She spied the top of his hair amidst a second rush of teammates as they swept Hassan up and into the house.
Eventually, Edy made her way in, ushered by the cold. In a living room that stood grand even while defaced with the presence of drunken teens, she had her back to the wall, eyes on a solid mass of dancers rocking to hip hop. A decade of professional instruction in ballet made it no easier for her to go out there and join them. She wasn’t trendy, nor did she keep up with the latest dance fads. They moved with the jolts and jerks of the untrained.
But it wasn’t just that. For Edy, anything not intricately choreographed belonged to the theater of her bedroom. So, she would keep to the wall, watch and wait. For one song, two songs, ten.
Only then did she see the slender redhead ascending the stairs, hand laced with Hassan’s.
Edy’s heart stilled and her lungs flattened, waiting for him to pull away.
When they disappeared from view together, she fled.
~~~
Matt and Mason were at the center of a crowd, executing a series of jerking and improvised shuffle- -steps. They perfected grinds and lurches, stopping only to consult each other, before pulling out a pair of giggling girls to regurgitate their choreography.
It was easy for them. Little more than a double dose of nonsense, Matt and Mason could get serious about nothing but football. Tall and dark, lean and athletic, lithe and dependable, somehow, Matt and Mason could make a girl want them even when she shouldn’t, even when she ought to know better.
Hassan took a sip of beer–his first ever—and cringed at its rankness. He imagined his father catching him just then, voice thick and rippling with the accent of his homeland. He’d rage for an hour and smack him upside the head to make sure that the message stuck. It wouldn’t. What he did with the beer afterward would depend on whether or not Hassan’s mother was around. If so, Hassan’s father would toss it away. If not, he’d tackle it in a mouthful of enthusiastic swallows.
Hassan made eye contact with a red-haired girl that was older and definitely staring. She licked lush, wet, pink lips, causing him to look away. Was she putting on a show for him? A second glance said she was.
“Aimee,” Matt announced, and Hassan jerked as if caught. “Aimee Foss, a junior.”
He took the beer from Hassan, gulped it, and handed it back.
Hassan risked another look. Weeks ago, before he made the game-winning touchdown against Madison, he would have found it hard to believe that a junior would look in his direction, let alone have interest. But twenty-two days of post-Madison fervor had shown him teachers who shrugged at late homework, girls who kissed him on dares, and all the back slaps, handshakes and fist pounds he could stand. He hadn’t made up his mind how he felt about any of it yet.
“You’re a coward,” Matt announced. “I’m gonna talk to her for you.”
Hassan choked. “No! Matt—”
Too late. Already, Matt parted the crowd.
Rushing over would make Hassan look stupid, especially if he wound up crashing an otherwise harmless conversation. Staying put might result in humiliation, considering embarrassment was the Dyson twin specialty. He had speed and could bolt for the door, but leaving would mean he ran from a girl.
Hassan gulped the bitter brew and waited. He shifted, resisting the urge to fidget. One second, two seconds, three.
She made her way over. Head high, gaze even, confident in her stride.
They could’ve been in a beer commercial. Him standing there, looking dumb, with some specialty brew in his hand, her parting the crowd in slow motion, hair fluttering from the blast of an A/C vent. This was the part where he discovered she wanted the beer and not him.
“Hassan.” She made his name sound like a whisper of silk against satin, the rustle of imported fabric. There it was again. A dip of the tongue, subtle. She smiled at him and his cheeks grew hot.
“Aimee,” she offered.
She surprised him by extending a hand, ultra-formal for a bunch of teens. He took it, and sh
e didn’t let go.
“Will you come with me?” she said. “Upstairs?”
His Adam’s apple bobbed, thick in his throat. She didn’t mean anything by the offer. After all, lots of things were upstairs. He just couldn’t think of any.
“Alright,” Hassan managed. He cleared his throat and set the beer on a table.
Aimee led him by the hand through the crowd. Upstairs and a single left later, they arrived at a bathroom, large and luminous. Hassan blinked. Aimee pulled him in and shut the door behind them.
“Number twenty-seven” she crooned, just a hint of slur in her voice. She stepped forward, copper curls spilling into damp, hooded, and shadowed green eyes. “Ninety yards against Madison. Two touchdowns against Southie. Three against Charlestown,” she announced. The girl leaned forward, lips parted, and ran a red-tipped finger from Hassan’s nose downward, eyes never leaving his mouth.
“Kiss me,” she said.
He froze. Had the girl never heard of small talk? Already, he’d forgotten her name. Even if she wanted to . . . do things, it seemed to him that she should wait for his advances. Maybe he was old fashioned. How many guys did it take for a girl to do away with the formalities?
She turned her back on him to flip out the light switch, bathing them in darkness. Hassan opened his mouth, only to find that words wouldn’t come. Soft lips and the nip of teeth grazed his ear. Her mouth dragged lower, paused, and devoured.
She kissed hard, punching her tongue between his lips, blazing the cinders of cigarettes there. He’d kissed before, easy, meaningless flirting that was never so demanding, and never with a girl that made him feel smothered, or made him feel like he needed to reach out and grab a buoy. Before he could get the hang of it though, she’d backed away. Now she had fingers at his zipper. Fumbling.
The beer muddled what was already a jumble of confusing, contrary thoughts: that he should say something, that he didn’t really know her, that he was sorry if he was supposed to, that he couldn’t even recall ever having seen her. And what the hell was her name?
He shoved her back, then snatched for her when she pitched, only to ease her clumsy head crash to the door. He’d never put his hands on a girl and hadn’t meant to that time. If he’d hurt her, he didn’t think he could deal with that.
The redhead clutched the back of her head and let loose a stream of gutter rude insults, before finding her footing enough to slap him and barge out the door.
What the hell just happened?
He splashed water on his face and pushed the image from his mind, before forcing himself out of the bathroom. Once at the top of the stairs, his gaze swept the crowd and met that of a slender Asian girl who blushed in response. Her smile made him think of Edy.
“I see you met Hungry Hungry Hippo,” Matt said, appearing at his side.
Hassan started. “What?”
“Hungry Hungry Hippo. Come on. You must have seen that mouth work.”
When shrugging into his shirt didn’t work, Hassan buried his embarrassment in an attentive sweep of the crowd. Obviously, Matt had expected something to happen upstairs with the redhead. He wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of confirming or denying it.
“Where’s Edy?” he said instead.
A casual question, yeah, but even as he asked it, he realized that he hadn’t seen her for awhile.
“Seriously, I don’t see her.” His gaze began to comb the crowd methodically.
He ventured downstairs. Two, three dozen kids grinding on the dance floor, but he knew better than to look among them. Along the walls, she wasn’t there. In the kitchen, not there either. So, he backtracked, winding through the dancers on second thought.
“Sawn?” Lawrence asked, appearing with Chloe by his side.
“Edy,” Hassan answered and kept moving.
He thought about the girl and the bathroom and how easily that had happened. He thought about the teammates all around, guys who poured beer down the throats of girls and shrugged at the outcome. Edy had better not be drinking, he thought, knowing it to be hypocritical and not caring.
He weaved his way back to Lawrence just as Matt showed up, then Mason. All three wore the same worried expression. They split up, with Mason heading out front to search the yard and Matt upstairs. Hassan and Lawrence searched the bottom floor in vain.
The twins returned empty-handed, leaving the boys to ponder what would happen should they go home without Edy. Once, they’d lost her in the old Jordan Marsh downtown at Christmas time. All four boys had abandoned her for a WWF Wrestling display with authentic replica belts. They were halfway through an improvised bout when they upturned a row of mannequins and realized she was no longer at their side.
It hadn’t mattered that they’d been found, safe and playing in a clearance rack of plus size blouses. It hadn’t mattered either, that she had had no interest in wrestling. They were like a family, each responsible for the other. Edy’s father had seen fit to remind them. No faux gold, glitter, or cheap enticement should ever make them forget it again, he’d said.
The sight of Lorenzo Carpenter descending the stairs jarred Hassan from the memory. Lorenzo was the team linebacker, party host, and guy most likely to slink away to dip Liquid X in some girl’s drink. Dudes like him had a way of sensing diminished capacity in a six-mile radius, or helping it along, at any rate. If he knew what was best for him, he’d turn up Edy unscathed and on demand.
The Dysons beat Hassan to Lorenzo, minds with him, on one accord. Together, the twins seized him by the collar and slammed him into the wall. They were backed up by Hassan on the right and Lawrence on the left. So much as a flinch from the linebacker would bring down a fury of fists.
“Edy,” Matt demanded. “Now.”
What the hell were they thinking, bringing her to this guy’s house and letting their guard down? They had pakhana for brains. Shit, to be exact.
Lorenzo stared back at them with eyes too far apart.
“Edy Phelps?” he said and choked on a laugh.
Matt cocked back his fist.
“Wait! Hold on,” Lorenzo hollered. He struggled against the hold on him, face twisted in irritation, limbs grappling, flailing, before coming to a final, frustrated rest. A look left and right confirmed that no teammates would come to his aid. Instead, they watched, as if the party finally kicked up a notch.
“I saw her,” Lorenzo said. “Earlier.”
“Where?” Hassan said.
Mason slammed the boy into the wall.
“Stop screwing around and tell us where she is,” Mason said. “Drunk? Upstairs? You know better than to touch her, don’t you? If you so much as—”
“Yeah!” Lorenzo said. “I mean, no. I didn’t touch her! Like somebody would even bother.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Hassan said.
Lorenzo turned to him, wincing.
“Come on, Sawn. We all know—”
Matt shoved him again.
“Face forward. Talk to me.”
“Fine!” Lorenzo grinned. “What’s the problem, anyway? If Edy wants to give a little something something to somebody—”
He choked on the rest. Mason caught him by the throat, squeezing, then releasing, just enough to warn. Just enough to slide the smile off his face.
“Where is she?” Matt said, calm despite the elevating assault.
By Monday, they’d all have to find some semblance of normalcy on the practice field. They’d deal with Monday when it came.
“Gone, you idiots!” Lorenzo yelled. “And she’s been gone! She walked right out the front door. Now get off me.”
Lorenzo’s arms battered the wall of bodies around him. But Matt and Mason released him on hearing what sounded like the truth. The group exchanged an uneasy look.
Gone.
And they hadn’t even noticed.
~~~
Mason muscled the Land Rover over a bed of shrubs and into the street, knocking his passengers left then right with the hustle. Just as Matt yell
ed for him to head in the opposite direction, Lawrence demanded to know if he could possibly hurry up. Hassan’s eyes kept to the street, desperate for a glimpse of a just-departed Edy.
He supposed to an outsider their panic looked silly. But none of them cared. Edy was one of them, and they didn’t need her father to remind them.
“Why would she leave like that?” Mason said, halting at a red light and chewing on the side of his thumb.
“Maybe someone tried something,” Lawrence said.
“Tried something?” Matt echoed.
Silence filled the cabin.
Hassan’s face tightened, teeth sealing with the weight of wet cement. That image didn’t work for him. It didn’t work for him one friggin’ bit.
“If someone had tried something, Edy would’ve come to one of us,” Mason said.
Chloe, who sat wedged between Hassan and Lawrence in the center backseat, cleared her throat. “Maybe she didn’t want to,” she offered.
That had everyone’s attention.
“And why wouldn’t she want to?” Matt snapped.
“I don’t know,” Chloe said. “Maybe . . . if she liked it.” She looked from one face to the next, each cold, hard, unappreciative.
“Maybe you oughta be quiet,” Lawrence muttered and turned to face the window.
Hassan rode with the company of his thoughts, now violently intruded on by Chloe’s assertion. Meanwhile, he kept dialing Edy’s cell and it went to voicemail each time. Tension hung like a threat in the air.
“Who saw her last?” Mason demanded.
“Oh, don’t start that again,” Lawrence said. He turned to Hassan, eyed the cell in his hand. “Keep trying. Keep calling.”
Hassan sighed. He pushed away a thousand crazy thoughts: that Lorenzo Carpenter had been lying to them, that Chloe had been telling the truth, that Chloe had been talking about Lorenzo when she told them the truth.
“We have to check her house,” Mason said. “It’s the only place left.”
“Right,” Matt sneered. “We just walk into her living room and ask Nathan if he’s seen the daughter he left with us.”
Love Edy Page 2
