by Anna Jarzab
I was bent out of shape about the journalism class—more than I should have been at the time, although, looking back, less than I ought to have been. But Carly loved it. She had never shown much interest in writing or investigation before, but suddenly all she could talk about was her articles and applying to journalism schools when she graduated.
“I was thinking about Columbia,” she gushed one morning. “Or maybe Northwestern. I can’t make up my mind.”
Without looking up from my chemistry book, I said, “You know that we’re freshmen, right? You’ve got a couple of years to make a decision.”
“Well, not if I graduate early.”
“Are you serious?” I shook my head. “Do you really want to be one of those freakish sixteen-year-old geniuses who can’t even live in the dorms?”
“You’re right. It’s much better being a freakish sixteen-year-old genius here.” She rolled her eyes. “Anyway, Villette says I’m a good writer.”
“The journalism teacher’s name is ‘Villette’?”
“Yeah. What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing. Except that ‘Villette’ is not a real name.”
“Sure it is.”
“No, it’s not.”
“It’s a creative name. Much better than Carly, anyway.”
“I like your name.”
“Don’t you ever get tired of that?”
“What?”
“Never mind.” She opened up her books and turned away from me.
“No, tell me. I want to know what you meant by that.”
Carly sighed. “I just meant that you’re awfully judgmental for someone so obsessed with the idea that he’s being judged by the world.”
I tapped my nose twice and she smiled sheepishly. “I’m sorry. That was out of order.”
“It’s okay,” I said. It was yet another indication that I was starting to lose her.
Audrey ate lunch with us every day. We had our own table near the edge of the quad, and they would join me there after journalism class. One afternoon in early November, both of them were late. I was sitting by myself, reading a Neil Gaiman novel my mother had given me for my birthday and absentmindedly poking at a bowl of cafeteria chili. I heard Carly laugh, and looked up. She was standing in front of the science building, clutching a stack of books to her chest and rubbing one foot up and down the back of her other leg. Her long hair had been pulled back into a low ponytail when she left the library for class, but now it was loose, falling over her face and shoulders in a soft cascade. She was smiling with teeth, smiling at Adam Murray.
Her body language was all over the place—flattered head dips, nervous hair tucks, flirty smiles. I squinted into the sun, shading my eyes with my hand to get a better look. I had never seen her act so childish before, like an awestruck fan meeting a teen idol for the first time. When they finished their conversation, Adam gave her a hug and a big toothy grin. She nearly sailed over to me.
“Hey,” she said, sitting. I leaned in to kiss her, but she bent down to fish around in her bag for something.
“Carly.” She looked up.
“Oh, sorry.” She gave me a quick kiss and flipped open her French book.
I shook my head slightly, trying to convince myself I wasn’t jealous. “What was that about?”
“What?”
I gestured at Adam, who had joined his posse in the middle of the quad.
She shrugged. “Oh, that. Why is it so weird that Adam Murray would want to talk to me?”
“He hardly knows you,” I pointed out.
“What are you talking about? He’s known me since kindergarten.”
“Okay,” I said slowly, “but he’s never had a conversation with you before.”
“So?” she said. “There’s a first time for everything. Lucy Miller talked to you in computer lab yesterday and you don’t see me getting all jealous about it.”
“She asked to borrow my pencil,” I said. “She wasn’t all over me like Adam was with you just now.”
“He was not all over me,” she scoffed.
“Uh, then what was this?” I asked, giving her a big bear hug and shaking her.
“He was just being friendly,” she said, laughing as I released her.
“Way too friendly,” I muttered.
“Seriously, Neily? You have no reason to be jealous.” She leaned over and kissed me, nuzzling my nose with her own. “Besides, Adam only wanted to talk to me about Audrey.”
“Really? Why?”
“Well,” she said, whispering conspiratorially, “it turns out that Cass Irving has a crush on dear old Aud. He’s taking her to the Loon on Friday night.” The Loon was Empire Valley’s outdoor mall and entertainment center. Its actual name was Luna Gardens—an odd name considering that the only bits of greenery in the whole place were wads of spearmint chewing gum, and the moon was often blotted out by the glare of thousands upon thousands of watts of neon light—but nobody I knew ever called it that.
“Really?” I was surprised, but then again it wasn’t hard to see. Audrey was hot, approachable, and agreeable. The Brighton social scene had given birth to stranger couples. “Good for her, I guess.”
“You guess? Cass is really sweet and cute, and Audrey could use something good in her life.”
“So good equals a guy?”
“Exactly.”
“You girls and your priorities.”
“Look, Audrey’s not stupid, but she’s never going to find real pleasure in school, and she’s hopeless at sports. Sometimes the only thing a girl’s really good at is guys. And if I’m in the position of helping her out in that area, then what’s the harm?”
It seems so funny now, remembering this, but what Carly said about Audrey was true. She was a very good girlfriend to Cass Irving. That Friday night at the Loon turned into a pretty serious relationship for them—one that lasted for almost two years.
Somewhere around Thanksgiving, Miranda Ribelli’s health took a turn for the worse. The chemo that had given us all so much hope had stopped working, and the cancer was spreading more quickly than the doctors could burn or blast it out of her. She’d been forced to have a radical hysterectomy after her diagnosis, but now the disease was invading her other organs, devouring her from the inside. She went into the hospital for an indefinite stay at the beginning of December, and by New Year’s Day she had died.
They held the funeral at the cemetery adjacent to the Catholic church in the valley. After the Mass and burial, people returned to the house for a reception arranged by Mams. The venerable dowager floated around in a cloud of sticky perfume, presiding over the event like the First Lady at the White House Christmas party, giving Carly plenty of time to slip away from the crowd of those offering condolences. Audrey was there, but Enzo was conspicuously absent.
I found Carly upstairs, curled up on her perfectly made bed, clutching a pillow to her chest. I leaned against the door-jamb and said, “Hi.”
She drew in a deep breath and rubbed an eye with the heel of her hand. “Hi.”
“Can I come in?”
“Sure.”
I sat on the edge of the bed and stroked her hair. She closed her eyes, tears dripping onto the pillow. “I’m so sorry,” I said, knowing how stupid it sounded, how small.
“Thank you,” she said quietly, her voice muffled by fabric.
“Is there something I can do?” I asked.
She nodded and reached out her hand. I took it, and she tugged at it, drawing me closer so that I was lying down next to her. She shifted over to make more room for me. I leaned in and kissed her, pressing my lips softly against hers. She put one hand behind my head and rolled over onto her back, wrapping her other arm around my waist and pulling me on top of her.
“Are you sure?” I whispered.
“Yeah,” she whispered back. “I’m sure.”
I leaned down to kiss her, feeling the warmth of her skin rise up to greet me as our lips met. She tugged my bottom lip gently with her teeth an
d her fingers snaked over my shoulders, pulling my suit jacket off and letting it drop unceremoniously. She untucked my shirt and slowly, deliberately slipped each button from its hole until it came off and joined my jacket on the carpet.
It was at this point that I hesitated. She had undressed me—shouldn’t I undress her? But she was grieving—we were both grieving, only she had the look of someone who had just seen her dog shot in front of her, that great love mixed with horror mixed with rage mixed with sentimentality and loss. Wouldn’t it be wrong of me to do this, wouldn’t someone else—someone outside the situation, an adult, my mother—call this “taking advantage”?
I stopped kissing her. “Carly, I don’t want to take advantage.”
She narrowed her eyes at me. “What?”
“You’re—”
“Don’t tell me what I am,” she said sharply, turning her head away and sighing. She stared out the window, at the deep gray, funereal sky, then turned back to me as if renewed. “I need this,” she said. She ran her hands up and down my back. “Don’t you?”
“No,” I said. “But I want it. I just thought that you needed more time.”
She shook her head. “Well, I don’t.” I touched her chin, ran my thumb up and down her jaw. She was trembling. “Are you afraid?”
I swallowed hard. “No.”
She smiled. “Me neither.” She kissed me again. We sank into each other. I savored everything, like the last deep breath you take before plunging into the ocean. The smell of her skin, the feel of her breath on my face, the force of her arms around my neck—every sense was amplified a thousand times, and my mind raced with a million fragmented thoughts. Here was Carly, the girl, if you’ll pardon the cliché, of my dreams, and here I was, finally doing what I’d wanted to do for months, for over a year if I’m honest. I tried not to think about the consequences of our actions—consequences that, in hindsight, would be drowned by waves of other emotions, anyway—but to keep focused on Carly and what she needed.
CHAPTER TEN
Freshman Year—Spring Semester
For a while, things with Carly and me were calm. That isn’t to say that things were easy—Carly was still reeling from her mother’s death, and her normally wry, pleasant everyday attitude was now punctured with long silences, sudden crying jags, and erratic bouts of inexplicable anger. We had only had sex a couple more times since January, but it seemed to make our feelings toward each other more tender, our behavior more understanding, and our gestures more loving.
Other changes crept in as well. Whereas Miranda’s diagnosis had transformed Carly into a softer, more sentimental version of herself, Miranda’s death hardened her. She was sharper with her father and Audrey, and delinquent in her studies. Audrey, unaccustomed to such harsh treatment, sought my opinion on it regularly, to my dismay.
“I just don’t understand why she acts like this,” Audrey complained one day at lunch when Carly was home from school with a stomachache. Ever since hooking up with Cass in November, Audrey had been neglecting our lunch table for his, and Carly was giving her the cold shoulder as punishment. “She’s being so mean.”
“She’s hurting,” I said, shrugging. Audrey’s confidence made me uncomfortable; I felt as though, by saying anything, I was conspiring against Carly. And anyway, I didn’t really have time to mediate their stupid girly problems—I had plenty of schoolwork to keep me occupied. “You have to be patient with her.”
“Easy for you to say,” she pouted. “She’s great to you.”
“I just know when to shut up.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
I sighed. “You always want to argue your way out of a fight with Carly. That’s not smart. Whether or not you think you’re right, you shouldn’t participate.”
“So I should sit tight and say nothing while she accuses me of things I didn’t do?” Audrey insisted.
“If you want to preserve your relationship, you might want to get over the need to have the last word,” I advised.
“That’s it?”
“I don’t know what else to tell you.”
She grimaced. “I hate when people say that.”
I shouldn’t have been so dismissive of Audrey, because later, when Carly began to act similarly toward me, Audrey wasn’t disposed to offer me any solace. But by the time I had become desperate enough to seek Audrey’s sympathy, things had gotten completely out of my control.
As the months passed, Carly and I began to fight. She darted away from me faster than I could pursue her, and soon I started to see her less frequently outside of school. Entire weekends would go by without a phone call, and I would go places in town—anywhere, really, that she might have gone—in the hopes of running into her, of catching a glimpse of her as if she were some rare bird in the jungle.
I knew what she was doing. She told me herself.
“I missed you this weekend,” I said to her one morning, catching her hand. “I called you. Where were you?”
She shrugged. “I went out with Audrey and her friends.”
“What, you mean Cass and all them?”
“Yeah, Cass and Audrey and Adam and Lucy,” Carly said, acting as though it were no big deal.
“Adam? You’re hanging out with him?” I bit the inside of my mouth anxiously. “I wouldn’t do that, Carly. He’s bad news. You know, he’s a drug dealer.”
She shook her head. “He’s fine. He’s great, actually.”
“You aren’t—doing drugs, are you?” I asked cautiously.
“Excuse me?”
“Hey, I had to ask.” I held my hands up in surrender.
“Oh, really? What is that, like, Question Number Five in the Jealous Boyfriends’ Handbook?”
“You’re avoiding the question,” I pointed out, knowing what that meant.
“That’s because it was offensive,” she snapped. “I don’t do drugs, and, in case this was Question Number Six, I don’t cheat.”
“I wasn’t accusing you of—”
“Yes, you were, or you were about to. Either way, I can’t have this conversation with you now. We’ll talk later.”
“Yeah, we will,” I said stiffly. We turned our backs on each other and walked off in opposite directions.
Things steadily deteriorated. Carly spent more time with Audrey and her group, and I started to hear people whispering about her and Adam Murray. Adam was by far the worst person I had ever met, and it made me sick to think of her with him, but every time I asked her about it she brushed off the rumors, telling me that I was being paranoid.
“We’re just friends,” she would tell me. She had started dressing differently—she wrote off her old clothes as frumpy and put thousands of dollars of tight, expensive jeans and low-cut tank tops on her father’s credit card. She cut her hair, which had once reached way past her shoulders, and started highlighting it—streaks of mustard yellow, which looked like tarnish over her natural dark color. She began to wear more makeup, and one day I mistook her for Audrey from far away. She took it as a compliment.
Then she stopped talking about her mother. Right after Miranda died, we would have long conversations where Carly would tell me stories about what it was like growing up. Miranda had always seemed kind and generous, but Carly remembered her differently—a little judgmental, cold on occasion. Everything Carly did as a child was meant to impress Miranda, every decision was weighed against what her mother would do or say. Carly missed her mother desperately, but part of her re-sented being left behind, and that part refused to canonize Miranda just because she was dead.
But now, when I tried to bring her mother up, Carly would give me a dark look, like I had betrayed her.
I let it go on far longer than I should have, but it’s not hard to see why. Carly wasn’t just my girlfriend; she was my best friend. She changed my life. The shy, anxious, and lonely boy I used to be had grown confident because of her; I began to see value in myself because she saw value in me, and if all I had to do to keep the ill
usion of that feeling was turn my head and ignore who she was becoming, well, that was something I was willing to do. It wasn’t easy at first, but then I started running; I pushed myself harder and faster every day, and the pain and exhaustion of suddenly becoming active after years of sloth was a welcome distraction from my tangled relationship with Carly.
About a month before the end of our freshman year, however, things started getting better. Carly spent more time with me than with anyone else; her partying days were a thing of the past, and she assured me that she was on my team again. She didn’t go back to the way she used to dress, but she toned down the makeup and let the highlights grow out, and she started working hard in school again. I felt that I could finally stop worrying about what was happening to her, because she had come back to me.
I don’t know how she convinced me to go to Cass Irving’s School’s Out for Summer party. I wasn’t used to denying Carly anything, but it wasn’t something I would ever agree to under normal circumstances. I hated Cass and Adam and their whole gang, and I could think of nothing worse than hanging out poolside with my classmates while they puked in the bushes. But I wanted to make Carly happy.
“It’ll be fun,” she promised, brightening when I said I would consider it. “Don’t think too hard—just say yes.”
She even drafted Audrey for the cause. “You should come to Cass’s party, Neily,” Audrey said to me suddenly in the hallway the day before school let out for the summer. “Cass’s brother, Jerod, is coming up this weekend from L.A. and promised to buy all the alcohol—he’s getting us three kegs. It’s going to be so great.”
“Sounds like it,” I said, unconvinced.
“You need to lighten up,” Audrey told me, leaning up against a bank of lockers. “You’re always so serious. How much fun is that?”
“Tons, actually. You people are idiots, and I get to sit back at a distance and watch all your stupid drama unfold.”
