by Ella James
My girlfriend. I snort as I step off the train, but I head toward the tennis courts with a bounce in my stride. I end up arriving early, and I sit under one of the trees and watch the curb. But Elise never shows.
I’m ten minutes late to homeroom.
Elise
I find him at the center of the track at lunchtime. I’m not sure how, but when I couldn’t find him in the cafeteria, I knew he would be here.
I can tell before I’m even close—he’s sleeping. He’s got Pandy in the crook of one arm; his other rests palm up in the grass. His long legs, clad in black jeans, are relaxed, his dark sneakers tilted slightly outward in sleep. His cheek rests against his shoulder.
He looks like the patron saint of high school athletes. Something about his messy black hair and those gemstone blue eyes, the hard jawline and strong nose…that creamy skin. He’s always stood out to me. His name sounds Italian, but I think he looks Irish.
I stand over him with my arms folded, wondering which of my besties squealed. Not that many people know I run at lunch on Thursdays.
I look from him to myself. I’m not wearing running clothes because today I’d planned to find him in the lunchroom. I’ve got on a comfy pair of skinny jeans, my favorite ankle boots, and a flowy, paisley scarf-necked blouse. I dressed carefully for him before the morning went to shit.
Wake up, I tell him—with the powers of my mind.
His lashes flutter, and I can’t help grinning.
Sit up, Galante. Your eye still looks horrific, and it makes you even more attractive. That should be a crime.
He opens his eyes. A gentle smile flirts with the corners of his lips, and then he’s doing what I asked. He pushes up on one elbow, clutching Pandy in the corner of his other arm.
I laugh. “You brought him.”
He smiles. “I did.”
I sink down into the grass beside him, sitting cross-legged, and he passes me the bear.
I thumb one of Pandy’s ears. “Wow, this is crazy. He looks almost new again.” His white spots look beige now instead of faintly brown.
My mother and I had an ugly fight this morning about Pandy and a lot more. But I won. I’m bringing Pandy home, and she said Becca could keep him.
I lay the bear on his back in the grass and trace my fingertip over his fine hairs. I feel Luca’s eyes on me, can sense that he’s still lying partway down, which feels too intimate. My neck and cheeks burn from the proximity.
As if he can hear my thoughts, he sits fully up, crossing his legs and leaning over a little, tracing Pandy’s fur like I am.
“How old is your sister?”
My throat knots, so tight and painful that I don’t know how I’ll get words through. Somehow, I say, “Twelve.”
“Yeah? I’ve got a brother who’s twelve.”
“Really?” I look up, and his gaze holds mine, his lips quirking in a small approximation of a smile. His eye today is shades of deep blue-purple, like petals of a poison flower. As we look at each other, I notice it’s slightly squinted. “Does it hurt?” I whisper.
“Nah.”
He tries to open the eye wider, but his mouth tightens, so I can tell he’s lying. For a heartbeat, I think I’ll run my fingers softly over his cheekbone… I don’t know why, but I feel like this when I’m near him—this guy I hardly know.
“How’d it happen?” My throat tightens on those words, so they’re soft and kind of raspy.
He smiles again, but this time it’s a thin line. “It’s not important.”
“I think it’s important.”
“But it isn’t.”
I narrow my eyes slightly. “What if it’s important to me?”
“It isn’t.”
I frown. “How do you know?”
“Because I know things.” He’s still smiling, only with the corners of his mouth. His eyes are somber.
“You don’t know me.”
“No?” he murmurs.
“Not even a little bit.”
He lies back again, folding his arms behind his head. He’s wearing a thin, white T-shirt, so I can see his biceps and his forearms in great detail. I can see the blueish veins beneath his soft skin. He looks like Michelangelo’s carved marble.
If this were a snapshot, I would think he’s beautiful—a study in ruined beauty, maybe, with his eye the way it is. But I’m living this moment. I can feel things swimming in the air between us. His eyes shut, and I think he needs to sleep.
“Are you a nice guy?” I ask him, impulsively. “Or an asshole?”
His lips curve—and this time, the smile is decadent.
“That’s a game we play, my friends and I—nice guy or asshole. My friend Sheree thinks you’re an asshole. I think it’s too hard to tell.” I smile, even though my heart is beating so wildly that I feel like I might die right here beside him.
He opens his eyes, peering at me with a notch between his brows. “You think I’ll be honest?”
I look down at my nails. “People almost never are. One time I read about something called radical honesty. It was in a magazine of my dad’s, and this man, he tried to tell everybody the whole truth, all the time.”
“That sounds…terrible.”
I nod. “And interaction is performative by nature, so I think it’s never possible to be completely honest. There’s always the echo of the other person influencing your ‘truth.’ Even if they’re like you are right now—just lying there. Your face or mannerisms will give feedback to what I’m saying. And I’ll feel compelled to bend my truth to you.”
I stop to grab a quick breath, my face burning as I realize I’m rambling.
“Um, so anyway, I don’t think you’ll be honest,” I manage. “But I’m asking so I’ll get a chance to try to read you. If you don’t ask at all, then you can be sure you’ll never know.”
I’m so flummoxed, I’m sweating. Under my bra, along my hairline. If my skin were paler, I’d be sporting a bright red blush. But it isn’t, and I’m grateful for that.
“Nice guy or asshole.” He repeats it slowly, like he’s tasting every word. “Lots of polarity there.” And now he’s smirking. Smirking, and he’s so right here that it makes me feel ill.
“You could do percentages.”
“Oh, like ninety percent asshole, ten percent good guy?” He grins, like it’s the funniest thing he’s ever heard.
I wonder if I’m blushing hard enough now for it to show. “Yes. So…” I blink quickly, urging him to answer.
He laughs. “I don’t know. You said you don’t expect me to be honest, but I feel some pressure to be at least sort of honest.”
His eyes on my eyes, pulling my soul up into my throat, where it gets stuck so I can’t breathe. I smile and grab a tiny breath. When I was little, my mom had a parakeet. One time I held it, and its little heart beat just like mine is beating right now. “Try to be as honest as you can.”
He sits up again, biting the inside of his cheek and then his lower lip. He runs a hand back into his hair. Tired eyes, his dreamy smile—a snapshot that I save in my head.
“I’d say at least sixty percent asshole. Maybe more like seventy.” His teeth on his lip again, that luscious lower lip. His brows are thoughtful. “Maybe sixty-five. No…that puts the good at thirty-five percent. But maybe thirty-five is right. I think thirty’s not enough, maybe. I’m more like thirty-five percent good guy.”
“I’d like it to be sixty-forty, at least,” he tells me. “But I think it’s really sixty-five bad guy/thirty-five good guy.”
“Why is that?”
“Why…what?” He blinks, and I can feel his whole attention on me, like an anvil I’d love to be crushed by.
“Why are those your numbers?”
He smiles, fleeting. “I don’t know. I’m not sure it’s a choice. What do you think?”
“I say of course it’s a choice.”
“Is it, though?” He’s frowning again.
“We do have free will. I mean, at least somewhat,” I o
ffer. “Or our illusion of free will is compelling enough that I think we’re safe to call it that.”
“Is it?”
“What?”
“Compelling?”
“I think so.”
“So we choose who we are. Is that it?” He tilts his head, and now he’s all professor—but a nice professor. One who cares about your answers, one who wants to understand you. There’s this moment where he seems a thousand years older than me. Which makes no sense because if any one of us is so old, it’s me…isn’t it? Is he lying awake at night as I am, thinking of ways to tell his dying loved one to contact him from the stars? My sister probably won’t be here by winter, and it’s made me feel at least nine hundred years old. My heart weighs twelve tons all the time, and there is nothing I can do to change that.
“Maybe we don’t choose. But…I think we do—somewhat.” My voice wobbles. I swallow. “We don’t get to decide everything. Maybe not even a lot of things. But the parts we get to decide, those are the parts that are important. And so if I get to choose, I want to be a certain kind of person.”
“What kind?” His eyes tell me I can fall in if I want to.
“A good one. Someone who does the right thing, even if it’s hard.” I think of my mom pulling so far back from Becca. “Maybe especially if it’s hard. I think it matters even more then.”
There are tears in my eyes again, turning all this sunlight into prisms. I blink and a tear falls down my cheek, but I’m not really embarrassed. Maybe because none of this feels quite real.
“I don’t need to talk about it,” I say, swallowing again because my throat is aching.
I wipe my face as he says, “Okay.” His face is gentle…like an angel.
He gets to his feet and holds out a hand, and I take it, letting him pull me up. For a heartbeat, he just looks at me—assessing. His hand squeezes mine.
Then he checks his watch and glances back at my face. “So you don’t—need to. But I need to walk around. To wake up. I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night, and I can’t stay awake today. Why don’t we walk, and you can hold my hand. I wear contacts, but I lost one. This one.” He gestures to his black eye. “Fell out in first period. And now I’m dizzy.” His smile is crooked, and I’m dizzy. “You don’t need to talk. I need to walk. But you could talk, while we’re walking.”
I say nothing as we walk through the grassy field toward the orange-red track around it. I feel nothing. I’m a robot, not a human, my chest locked behind a plate of metal, every part of me attached with screws. I breathe deeply a few times, and his big hand shifts around mine, like he’s giving me a hand hug.
“Did you really lose a contact?” I rasp.
“Yep.”
“I don’t need to talk.” I blow a breath out. “I have therapists for that.”
“Oh yeah?” Again, his fingers move around mine. I feel his thumb stroking my hand, and this time my heart stops and sinks a little.
“Yes,” I rasp. “My family is…a mess. My dad is an attorney, and he’s represented doctors over the years. So of course we see a therapist from his client’s clinic. It’s on Church Street. They have ginormous windows and fake plants. I consider that suspicious, don’t you? All that sunlight and they chose fake plants? Which still have to be dusted—leaf by leaf, I would think, so they aren’t no maintenance. Better to water something that’s alive. So anyway...” My voice wobbles again. I look at our feet, walking in sync. As if we know each other.
“It’s sort of weird to hold your hand,” I whisper. I can feel my heartbeat in my temples, and my throat is so tight it feels raw. It’s weird, and it feels dangerous.
“Bad weird? Or just…okay weird?”
“I don’t know yet.” I manage a laugh. “We might need to keep walking.”
There it is—the easy smile from him. The blue eyes, pale but warm. They’re on me so long my face burns. His arm bumps mine, and his long fingers stroke my shaky ones.
“I’ve been watching you since last year. You were right,” he says. I would climb inside that husky voice if I could. Let it take me under.
“I could feel your stalking,” I tease. “Did you feel mine in our class last year?”
He laughs. “No. Was it…there to be felt?”
“Well, you were in front of me. And I was always bored.”
“Oh, so it’s like that. When you’re bored…”
His eyes close. His black hair is fanning slightly in a breeze that blows over the field between our track and the river.
“I was always bored.”
“You shouldn’t tell me that.” He smiles slowly, and his eyes are on me—making me warm.
“Why not?”
“Because,” he says. “I like it too much.”
His face takes on a dreamy look, the angel look. It’s a look that says the whole world hurts him, but he likes it.
Or maybe that’s how I feel, holding hands with this strange boy as we march slowly around the school track, the river birds cawing and our blood whooshing through our veins, and we’re alive—for who knows how long—but for this moment bound together by…confessions.
“Secrets are the currency of intimacy,” I offer to him. “I read that once.”
He gives me a somber, knowing sort of smile.
“My sister is dying,” I say. It’s like jumping off a bridge. My heart is caught behind my collar bones, my aching eyes half shut.
He lets a breath out, silent. Then he stops and pulls me into his arms, nearly crushing me against him.
I press my cheek against his shoulder, and my heart is beating hard and fast and taunting. “I’m sorry,” he says, and I can tell he means it.
“It’s okay.” I’m on the verge of crying, so we both know I’m a liar. His hand comes to my back, and he starts rubbing. I close my eyes and take deep breathes, trying to get a grip. When I do, I notice he’s pulled me close.
“You make a good boyfriend,” I choke-laugh.
“You can rent me if you want to. If you need a stand-in.”
I pull away, so I can see his face when I look up. I’m surprised at how somber it is.
“My sister always used to want to meet my boyfriend,” I whisper.
He blinks, and I clarify. “I haven’t had a serious one. Now that she’s sicker, my dad went insane—like turbo controlling—and he won’t let me date or go out really. Maybe I could take a picture of you for her. Would you mind that?” Now I’m pretty sure I might be blushing.
His hand on my shoulder feels heavy and warm.
“No.” He blinks. “You can.”
My stomach twists. He’s got a poker face. Probably because he thinks I’m insane.
“Never mind.” I try to laugh it off. “That’s crazy.”
“No, let’s do it. You can take a picture of me. Do you have a camera?”
I assess his face, relieved to find he seems sincere. “I think you’re at least sixty percent good guy, for what it’s worth.”
That brings a quick grin to his face. For once, he looks boyish.
“I don’t have a camera, but I could bring one.”
“Any time.” Luca steps closer to me, reaches out and twirls a strand of my hair around his finger. “Too dangerous for me to stop by your place? I’ll throw off as many good guy vibes for your sister as I can.” He arches a brow and points to his eye. “Might want to wait another four or five days for this to fade, though.”
I frown at it. “How’d it happen?”
He grabs my hand again and starts us walking. His hand in mine is looser now, not exactly slack but almost. And…I don’t think he’s going to answer.
“You don’t have to,” I say. “Tell me.”
“My dad’s elbow. He tripped and went backwards while I was helping him up the stairs. He’s a drunk.”
I blink at the track in front of us, blindsided.
“Listen, I’m just trading secrets. He started drinking when I was in sixth grade. He went to detox, and I think that’s where he
got introduced to tranquilizers. He’s got a pill habit, but it’s not like how it sounds. Most nights he just passes out. He’s harmless. Old man is old and out of shape.”
His mouth moves like maybe he’s trying to smirk, but his lips flat-line. “Anyway,” he says after we walk a few more steps, “it doesn’t matter.”
Yes it does. My hand squeezes his. He squeezes back before his fingers disentwine from mine.
“Secrets, right?” He’s asking—like he isn’t sure I’ll keep his.
“Secrets,” I promise.
The bell peels from the loudspeakers at the corner of the school’s roof, and we both jump.
And that’s how it all starts.
Chapter Three
Elise
“That’s your boy right there. You see him, number thirty-two?” My friend Dani points toward the football field, where a bunch of guys in purple jerseys and tight gold pants are jogging onto the grass.
“Yeah,” I murmur, which is pointless. There’s no way Dani can hear me, as everyone in the bleachers is cheering. My friends and I follow suit. I let my gaze touch Luca; then it falls to my feet. And as we sit back down, it flits back to Dani. Her smiling brown eyes dance over the rim of her concession stand hot cocoa. She takes a swallow and lowers the paper cup, revealing a huge grin.
I roll my eyes, and she elbows me.
“Ow.” I wrap my hands around my own warm drink and try to keep my features neutral as I trace the white lines on the grass with my eyes.
Dani leans toward me. “He’s tall. I didn’t really realize.”
I nod, biting the corner of my lip as our other bestie, Sheree, leans around Dani, slapping my leg.
“Oh my God, he’s stretching!” Dani half shouts. Now it’s my turn to elbow her.
She’s still flailing around like a cracked-out Muppet when I hiss near her ear, “Dani, you are killing me. That’s his friend Leon in front of us.” I nod at the guy with dyed green dreads, sitting with a bunch of skater guys and their girls two rows below. “And look, Max and Franco are right over there.”