by Andrew Smith
“Call it back,” I said.
“What?”
“Call the fucking number back and see who it is.”
Conner took the phone again, fumbled with the screen.
He listened.
“Okay. Here. Go ahead and tell me what you hear, Jack.”
He handed the phone back to me. I looked at the display. The same number that showed when Henry called me.
There was nothing. No connection at all.
Nothing.
I closed the phone.
This is real.
Isn’t it?
My voice was just above a whisper. “Sorry, Con.”
I sank into my seat, shoved the phone into my pocket.
“Okay, so first, we really need to do something about those fucking glasses, Jack. I thought about it for a long time and I know that shit isn’t real. If that guy’s really doing this, then maybe he’s trying to do some kind of fucking experiment on us to see how those things just fuck with people’s brains. It’s gotta be some kind of secret research or shit like that, but it is not real. So let’s fucking throw that shit away.”
It was amazing how simple Conner could make things sound sometimes, and how, once he made up his mind about solving a problem, that was it, and he wasn’t going to consider anything else. I suppose those were some of the things I liked, and counted on, most about Conner Kirk, even if I couldn’t ever be like that.
Fuck you, Jack.
“Yeah. You’re right, Con. That shit can’t be real.”
The phone went off again.
I sighed, relieved.
Nickie.
The girls stood on the sidewalk, their bare feet showing in painted sandals, waiting for us as we stepped down from the bus, carrying our packs. Conner smiled and whispered, “That’s what I’m talking about, Jack,” when he saw them, and Nickie came right up and gave me a kiss on my mouth.
I saw Rachel give Conner a hug out of the corner of my eye, then she hugged me, too.
“Thanks so much for coming up to visit us. I think we’re going to have a very fun time together,” Nickie said.
“Do you think we’ll be able to get a room at the same place you’re staying?” I asked.
Nickie held my hand. “Come on, it’s this way. And our room is big enough for the four of us. You and Conner have to stay with us.”
Conner elbowed me. I dreaded that he was going to say something totally embarrassing, which he did. Thankfully, it was just a whisper in my ear.
“Massive hard-on, dude.”
But there were only two beds in the room, and double beds, at that, much smaller than the king-size one Conner and I were stuck sharing in London. And Nickie made it clear which one of them was going to be the “boys’ bed.” Then she and Rachel stepped out into the hallway so Conner and I could change out of our clothes and into stuff for the beach.
And I already knew what Conner was thinking, so I said, “They’re nice girls, Con. Don’t screw this up.”
All his clothes were off him and scattered at his feet, and Conner began digging through his pack for some shorts. “Yeah, we’ll see how nice they are after we get them back here tonight. Besides, this bed is way too small for me and you both. I don’t know if I can trust myself with you snuggled up against me in that micro sleeping bag.”
“Well, you’re going to have to try some self-control for once, Con.” I pulled on some shorts and slipped my feet out of my socks and into my running shoes. “Maybe we could go run a few miles on the beach before dinner.”
“And leave Rachel and Nickie alone? Just so we can go running? Dude, you are a homo.”
I put on a fresh T-shirt. I was ready to go, and I noticed that Conner had his running flats on, too.
“Homo,” I said, pointing at his shoes.
“Whatever. Anyway, I think we should activate Plan J as soon as the lights go out tonight.”
“Okay,” I said, knowing it was going to be something entirely ridiculous. “What’s Plan J?”
Conner smiled wickedly. “About five minutes after we say good night to them and it’s all dark and quiet, I’ll yell at you, ‘Jesus Christ, Jack! It is totally inappropriate for you to be jerking off right now with these girls in the room!’ And so the girls will, like, feel sorry for the pathetic and horny American virgin I have to sleep with, and they’ll offer to switch bedmates so they can give us both some righteously hot sympathy sex.”
Conner started laughing.
I knew he wasn’t serious, but I also knew that if I didn’t say something, he’d probably actually try it.
“Con, you’re my best friend, and you always will be my best friend, but if you pull anything that’s even close to that, I will punch you in the fucking face without even thinking twice about it.”
Then he laughed again.
Knocking on the door. I heard it creak open just a few inches, and then Rachel asked, “What’s taking you guys so long?”
Conner started, “Jack’s—”
I made a fist at chest level, and Conner finished his answer, “Jack’s giving me a lecture about proper manners. Jeez!”
“You can come in, girls,” I said. “We’re ready to go.”
Forty-One
I took off my shoes and shirt and sat in the cool sand beside Nickie, facing out at the ocean, our knees bent up so our legs crossed over each other’s and the brace of my left arm rested against her waist.
It was nice.
We could see Conner and Rachel walking nearer the water, toward the pier. They were laughing about something.
“They look as if they like each other,” I said.
“What are you going to do? I mean, after the summer, Jack?” Nickie asked.
“I don’t know. Go to school, I guess.”
“Are you going to come back? To Kent?”
“Oh, I’ll definitely come back. I don’t know if I’ll go to that school, though. I wouldn’t want to go alone, and I don’t know if Conner wants to do it. But I’m coming back.”
“You like being in England?” she said.
I gulped. “I like hanging out with you.”
“Kent isn’t very far from London,” she said. “I’d imagine if you were at St. Atticus, we’d see each other every weekend. I mean, if you wanted to. You’d always have friends.”
“Will I?” I looked out at the water. “What do you see in me, Nickie?”
“Oh,” she said, “I see someone, I think, who is very genuine and honest. And I believe that you are a young man who values his friendships more than anything. I can see that.”
I felt myself turning red, so I lay back in the sand, and my head came down to rest on Conner’s cast-off shoes. I pushed them away.
“I am so tired,” I said. “I haven’t really slept in two nights.”
Nickie stretched out next to me. She lay on her side with her head propped in her hand so she was looking down at my face. Her breast was touching my left arm, and I thought she had to be aware of it. I froze, keeping perfectly still, hardly breathing. I think she sensed my tension.
“Have you and Conner been staying out all hours?”
When she said it, I couldn’t help but think about the real reasons: Marbury, about Ben and Griffin, but there was something powerful, magnetic, in feeling her warmth beside me, and it kept me from drifting too far from that spot on the beach.
“I guess. Yeah.”
“Well, we’ll have you in early tonight, in that case. I promise.”
“No. I’m okay.” My voice cracked saying it, and I noticed that it made her smile.
Nickie was seventeen. She was smart, so must have known how nervous she made me. After all, I already confessed to her that I’d never even kissed a girl until that day we sat together in Regent’s Park. She couldn’t possibly be wondering, I thought, about whether or not I’d ever slept with a girl.
I hated being sixteen. It was worse than anything. For all the crap I’d ever read in “teen issue books” about the clumsy
awkwardness of my age, how a guy’s voice changes, how goofy we act, and how we are enslaved by embarrassing and involuntary bodily functions like wet dreams and unmanageable boners at the least convenient times, being sixteen was never comfortable, cool, or even remotely humorous for me. I couldn’t stand having to deal with all this shit—guys who hit on me; guys who actually tried to rape me; my over-confident best friend who could have sex whenever he wanted it.
And now, here I was with this most incredible and brilliant girl, lying next to me, touching my skin, and at the same time, I was feeling like such a monumental failure.
I hated every imaginable thing there was about being a sixteen-year-old boy.
Fuck you, Jack.
Fuck you, Freddie. I killed you.
She moved, so that her eyes were straight above mine and her hair fell down on either side of my face. “Look at you,” she said. “You look as though you’re in another world, Jack. What are you thinking about?”
She put her arm across my body. Both of her breasts pressed into my bare chest.
I stared into her eyes, didn’t blink.
“Sometimes I don’t like being me, Nickie.”
She sighed and rolled onto her back, lying beside me in the sand, staring up at the gray-bellied clouds above us. She held my hand.
“If you could be anyone else, who would you be?” she asked.
I thought about it for a few silent seconds.
“Griffin Goodrich,” I said.
“Who’s Griffin Goodrich?”
“He’s just a kid I know.”
“What is it about him that you admire?”
I squeezed her hand. “He’s tough. He doesn’t take shit from anyone. And he’s not uptight or self-conscious about anything.”
She turned back onto her side and put her hand flat on my belly, gently sweeping bits of sand away from my skin with her fingers. It felt better than anything.
“I believe you’re all those things, too, Jack.”
I wanted to kiss her so much, but I didn’t.
“I think it’s going to be quite a project for me to prove you’re right,” I said. “I want you to be right, Nickie.”
“You two definitely should get a room.” Conner appeared at my feet, smiling. He was holding Rachel’s hand. “Oh, wait. We do have a room. Hey, I just got a daring idea concerning that particular room and the four of us.”
I sat up and threw one of his shoes at him. “I got an idea, too. Time for our run.” Then I looked at Nickie and said, “We’ll meet you at the room in an hour or so. You can both get ready for dinner without Conner drooling all over the place.”
I slipped my shoes onto my feet and began pushing Conner toward the packed wet sand. “Let’s go.”
The tide was out so far from shore, it was easy for me and Conner to run on the flat of the gray beach that seemed to stretch endlessly before us.
“What do you think?” I said.
Conner slapped my shoulder. “I can’t believe that Jack actually scored this setup on his own. I have to say I have totally reconsidered my assessment of Jack Whitmore’s sexual orientation.”
“Asshole.”
“Rachel is incredible,” Conner said. “It’s kind of scary, Jack, to be honest, because I’ve never really hung out with a girl who wasn’t, well—” He trailed off.
“A slut?” I said.
“Basically. Yeah.”
“What are you going to do about Dana?”
“There’s a reason why my phone hasn’t been ringing since I got here,” Conner said. “I broke up with her the day before I left.”
“Lucky you,” I said.
Conner smiled. “My thoughts, exactly. I owe you. Big time.”
“I’ll remember that,” I said. “I’m really thinking about coming back to do that semester here, Con. Maybe the whole year.”
He reached his hand out to shake mine and said, “If you do, I’m in, too. I could put up with the boys-only and neckties-at-school bullshit as long as there’s non-boys like Rachel to hang with afterwards.”
“I’ll give Wynn a call this weekend. Let’s see how things go the next couple days.”
“And get rid of those fucking glasses.”
“Yeah. Done.”
“I’m not kidding, Jack.”
“Okay, Con.”
I just kept lying to him. It was getting easier.
I sat with the girls and watched television while Conner took his shower. Predictably enough, he came out wrapped in nothing but a thin, sodden towel, dripping water all over the place. He opened his backpack.
“Sorry,” he said, “I forgot to bring my clothes in there with me.”
Then he lifted a pair of boxer briefs from his bag, shook them out, slid them onto his legs, and, just before pulling them up, he let the towel drop onto the floor around his feet. And he stood there like that in his underwear, after flashing everyone in the room, nonchalantly digging through socks and T-shirts, trying to choose what he’d wear for our date with the girls. I watched Nickie and Rachel, but they didn’t react to the Conner show at all.
I didn’t get it, how he could do stuff like that, because I was already feeling a little nervous and scared just thinking about bedtime and undressing in front of Nickie and Rachel, since, among all the things I’d never done, stripping down to nothing but my underwear in front of a girl was somewhere near the top of the list.
I rolled my eyes at Conner, picked up my pack, and went into the steamy bathroom.
I closed the door behind me.
The silence, the isolation, was sudden and overwhelming.
I knew it was starting to happen again.
You’re a fucking liar, Jack.
You’d lie to your best friend, wouldn’t you?
Something rolled around in the bottom of the tub.
I looked. A shampoo cap, spinning in a small circle like it was on some kind of track.
Not now. Please.
Roll. Tap. Tap. Tap.
Freddie Horvath did something to my brain and there’s nothing I can do about it.
Fuck you, Jack.
You have to control yourself.
I sat down on the toilet. My body shook. Seth was signaling from somewhere I wanted to be so bad that I started feeling sick again.
What the fuck is wrong with me?
“No!” I whispered it aloud, urgent, pleading.
Maybe Jack should fill the tub.
Maybe he should fill it up and stick his head in it so he can end this shit.
I opened my backpack, tried to concentrate on picking out the clothes I’d change into, but my sick hands went straight for the glasses. I had to feel them, know that they were still there, tucked safely away along the metal framing inside the pack. Maybe I could just put my finger on the lens. Just a touch. I had to know they were still there.
Quit it, Jack.
I begged myself, Seth, whoever. “No!”
I hammered my fists down into my thighs. I stripped naked, shaking, stood in the tub, turned the shower on full cold.
Cold, like Ma giving me a bath in the well water.
Quit it, Seth.
Roll. Tap. Tap. Tap.
Come on, Jack. It’s only going to be for a second.
Come on.
“No! Please!”
It’s too easy.
Sitting in the bottom of the tub.
Shivering.
The water rains loudly down, spatters against the tiles on the wall, the white porcelain of the tub, my cold skin.
My hand touches the glasses.
I slip them on.
Just for a second, Seth.
Please.
Forty-Two
Once our horses made it to the top of the mountain range, the air became damp, and fanned us with a constant breeze from the west. It felt like there was an ocean out there, I thought, even though all we could see was the constant white haze that made the horizon vanish as though we were riding toward the end of the world.
And the end of the world was constantly receding away from us, tempting us: You’ll have to try harder if you want out of Marbury.
On the other side of the divide we found more water. Things grew here.
It had been two days since the ambush of the soldiers in the pass, and we all shared a tenuous confidence that, maybe, we were no longer being pursued. All three of us were weary and sore from the riding, so when we found a suitable place in the basin of a flat canyon, we agreed to settle in and camp for at least a day, so we could rest the horses and think about our next steps.
The shape of the canyon followed the bending path of a wide stream. There were thick stands of cottonwood and willow along the banks, and signs that game lived here, too. It was the most decent place any of us could remember seeing, but we also knew that we couldn’t stay here by ourselves for too long.
We had to keep moving.
There would always be more Hunters.
We kept the horses on lines that were long enough to allow them to eat and drink. Ben unloaded the bags, still full of what we’d taken from the train. We hadn’t stopped for rest or food for more than a few hours at a time since the ambush. Griffin, barefoot as always, scrambled to the riverbank, stripped off his guns and pants, and jumped into the water while the dog, eyeing him, stuck trembling forepaws into the stream and yipped confused and pleading cries at the boy.
Ben unhooked his gun belt and sat next to me. We leaned our backs against a smooth and split-trunked cottonwood, facing out toward the river so we could watch Griffin while he swam and thrashed in the water.
“I could fall asleep right here,” I said.
“I’m not going to lie, Jack, this is about the nicest place I ever seen in my life, I think.”
“Yeah.”
Beyond those tall mountains, in the colorless world of Marbury, we had stumbled into something green and alive, if only pale and temporary.
I watched as Griffin’s head disappeared beneath the slate surface of the river, counted silently to myself, and saw him pop up again, fifty feet downstream. The anguished dog howled at him, but Griffin laughed and slapped rooster tails from the water. He spit a mouthful into the air and waved a scrawny arm at us. “Hey! Come on! You two stink like shit, anyhow! I never seen water like this. Ever!”
