Tears were slipping down my cheeks now. Hurt pushed its way in like a splinter beneath the skin. Why would he do this? Why? I wanted to know. This place wasn’t meant for her. It was mine.
I found a rock and I threw it hard at a tree but it missed and thudded without a bounce into the ground.
But then I knew. I knew the answer. Following them had shown me the answer. It was Honor. She wasn’t my pawn. Or if she was, she’d become not the pawn but the problem. I scrabbled back around, onto all fours. The coolness of the wet dirt cleared my head. I crawled low to the closest window and lifted my nose above the ledge to peer inside.
Honor was sitting on a rocking chair, a mug wrapped coyly, so innocently, between her delicate hands. She tipped her head back, revealing the soft, white underbelly of skin there. And she laughed.
She was the temptress. A siren. Like the sisters of Keres from Greek mythology. I should have known. Of course, of course, I should have seen it. Chris wouldn’t do this. He would never ditch me. It was just as the sirens had led the sailors to crash into the rocks. I ducked back below the lip of the window and safely out of sight. Honor was tricking him, trying to get him to break the first of all his rules, which was a capital N, capital G, No Girls. In her Peter Pan collar and sweater-vests. Her argyle and socks.
But … I knew something. Honor wasn’t perfect. And I could prove it. I could break her spell. And this time it was as easy as the click of a button.
SEVENTEEN
Chris
The world didn’t exist in this cabin. Or if it did, it had transformed into one of only pine trees and chirping birds and acorns dropping on a wooden rooftop and Honor curled up in a chair, a steaming mug resting on top of the script in her lap. I could almost pretend that nothing bad had happened.
I hoped Lena wouldn’t mind us borrowing her cabin for the evening. But just the same, I wasn’t planning on mentioning it to her and I knew somehow that made what we were doing—what I was doing—at least a little wrong.
Honor’s eyes glowed in the candlelight. Her cheeks were tight like she was holding in a smile. “What?” I asked. She arched both eyebrows. Her shoulders hiked into a shrug of faux-innocence. “What?” I repeated. “You’ve been wanting to say something since we left school, so out with it.”
“You know this changes everything, right?”
“What does?”
“This.” She tapped her pointer finger on her script. “You playing Mark Antony.”
“No, it doesn’t.” I turned away, rested my palms on the rough surface of the kitchen countertop. “No, it doesn’t.”
“See!” she snapped and pointed at me. “I knew you were thinking about it already.”
“I wasn’t.”
“Then whey didn’t you ask what I meant?”
I crossed the room back toward her and pulled the other chair up close, across from her so that our knees were nearly touching. I rested my elbows on my legs, flattening my hands together like in prayer and pushing them to my mouth and nose. “Okay, I thought about it. But—”
“Chris, you’re good.” She leaned forward. “You’ve watched all the greats. You’ve studied theater your whole life even without knowing it. There are three spots at Poncy Sebastian Studio this summer. Why do you think I wanted Mrs. Fleury to give you the role of Mark Antony?”
“So that you wouldn’t have to make out with Luke or Taylor?”
“You get it. You’re unlike anybody else here. You get that there is a whole world outside of Hollow Pines.”
Instead of seeing Honor as a potential slipup waiting to happen, a kink in my plan to make it back to Manhattan, I was seeing her as a ticket back. I saw her face reflecting the love of everything I loved back, and it made me feel closer to home already.
“I could get back to New York.” I pictured the sound of my dad’s breathing over the phone when I told him. Mom would be proud. Of course she would. I would prove to them both that I belonged back in the City with them and that I could make something of myself there. I would stop screwing around.
“We can both get out of here,” Honor whispered. Her fingers wrapped themselves into mine. They were cool and smooth.
“I told myself I wasn’t allowed to like you,” I said.
“How good a listener are you?” she asked, scooting farther up to the edge of her seat. The bones of our knees pressed into each other.
And then her ear was fitting like a lost puzzle piece between my thumb and pointer finger and I was brushing light circles with my finger along the peach fuzz on her cheek and the steam from her mug was curling around our chins, which were drawing closer and closer together. There was the smell of sawdust and there was me telling her, “Honor Hyde, I have only three rules: One, no girls. Two, no fast cars, and three, absolutely no trouble.”
Her breath was against my lips. “Two out of three isn’t so bad,” she said.
The pulse in her throat throbbed against my thumb tip. “You know, I never pegged you for an underachiever,” I said. To which she gently shoved my chest and I pulled her by the waist across the distance between us so that she was sitting on my lap. “I like you,” I said, and it felt so true that I knew I’d known it for much longer than just tonight.
* * *
IF ANYONE THOUGHT teenage boys were immune to that heady glow of a first kiss and the desire to play it back over and over and again and again, I would like to kindly say to them: Come on. I rolled onto my side and, sighing, opened my eyes. I chewed on my pillowcase to keep from smiling like a maniac. I had kissed Honor and the world hadn’t ended and the two of us were going to find our way to New York this summer where everything would be right again. More than right.
On my nightstand, I saw the light on my phone blinking with a new message. I sat up and felt around for my glasses, nearly poking myself in the eye in my clumsy one-handed effort to get them onto my face.
The “from” line of the text was blank, but the “to” line had a long chunk of phone numbers to scroll through. Curious. I flipped through the numbers. At the top of the body of the text, a line read simply: From a friend.
And below was a picture. A girl in barely there lingerie, her hip thrust out, milky white ass cheek on display. I did a double take. The girl with the milky white cheek was Honor. My throat tightened.
The next photo was of Honor leaning forward, inner arms squeezing together a line of cleavage, her bra pulled down so that it covered nearly nothing. Her eyes were half-lidded. Her lips pushed out into a pout.
When I saw that there was another picture below, I couldn’t bear to look. Heat was creeping up my neck. I checked the “From” line again and confirmed that it wasn’t from Honor, which meant it had originally been sent to someone else, which meant that it wasn’t for me and sure wasn’t taken with me, which in turn meant that there was someone else that Honor would be sending these kinds of pictures to and so it turned out I wasn’t that bad at math after all.
I threw my phone against the wall, denting it.
She didn’t. She wouldn’t.
Now the image that I couldn’t erase was of Honor and the lace of her thong and, oh god, I didn’t want to think about it. I shoved my knuckles into my eye sockets. What the hell, Honor?
In a flash, the feeling that I swore I never felt was there. I wanted to fight. It was the feeling of blood turning into a rushing river waterfall but without a cliff so instead it was all just gushing around inside of me, gurgling and making me crazy in the head. I ground my teeth together so hard I bet I’d have a tension headache by first period.
And the thing that pissed me off most was that I felt like this at all. I was from New York goddammit. I wasn’t a lock-her-up-in-a-tower Neanderthal. Okay, yeah, I hadn’t had sex and for some reason I had this idea that maybe my first time would be with someone who hadn’t, too. And Christ, I didn’t like the idea that other guys were looking at parts of the girl I liked that I hadn’t even seen yet. And god yeah, I was pissed because even though we just ma
de out last night, I felt like we’d had something before then and sure, that probably made me a hypocrite because up until last night I’d been a self-proposed Rule Number One monk. But even if all those thoughts made me a total dick, what I hated the most was that I’d believed her. I’d thought she believed in me and only me, that we were going somewhere together. She’d made such a big deal about how everyone avoided her except for me, and she’d made me feel special.
Maybe I wasn’t special.
Girls made you feel stupid things, made you do even stupider ones.
I left the house that morning without even brushing my hair for school. My script lay on the passenger seat next to me, open to a scene that I shared with Honor. I tried to recite the words in my head, but they just kept getting scrambled. What had I been thinking agreeing to play Mark Antony? I threw the script onto the floorboard.
The production was days away. Honor probably didn’t even really like me and, what, I’d taken her word for it that I should play the lead role of a musical? I had to be out of my mind.
* * *
THE FIRST CLASS of the day was more or less a blur in which I tried to pay actual attention to keep from thinking about anything else. It worked—sort of—but what I was left with was this sense of dread that coated everything like a layer of oily slime so that I felt unclean and slightly nauseous.
The uneasiness grew, taking root and scaling my ribs. When I walked the hallways, I swore I could feel eyes on me. Unwanted eyes that could see through to the shame wrapping my throat in a stranglehold. But when I glanced around, no one was paying attention to me at all. And yet I couldn’t shake the watched feeling no matter how many times I glanced back.
Nerves, I figured. Because when I pulled on the door to the auditorium for drama, my blood pressure spiked at the thought of seeing Honor there. In person. With her clothes on.
I blew my cheeks out and shook my head slightly as I made my way to the stage for Mrs. Fleury’s first call. I wasn’t sure what I was doing. Part of me had considered quitting and the other part of me had thought: Screw that, I’m doing this despite her.
Honor was already there, her feet dangling off the stage. She didn’t have on a stitch of makeup and her hair was tied up in a knot at the base of her neck.
When she saw me—and trust me, I was trying not to be seen by her—she tucked her legs under her and stood. “Chris—” She started toward me and my stomach did a weird lurching thing like it had just realized I’d eaten day-old mayonnaise.
I held up my hand to stop her in her tracks. “Look, you can save it, okay?” I said. Because the thing that I really just hated about all of this was the feeling of being lied to. “Let’s just rehearse. And get this thing over with,” I added.
I couldn’t look at her. I knew it would make my cheeks get all red and splotchy and honestly that was just too embarrassing in front of a girl who had fancy lingerie and could pose like she was on the cover of a magazine. I hated that I was wondering to whom she’d sent those pictures. Did they laugh at my silly chaste kiss? Did they think I acted like I was twelve years old for not sending dirty messages?
Don’t think about it. Don’t think about it. Don’t. Think. About. It.
I crossed the stage and took my place, managing to stare at the ceiling long enough for Mrs. Fleury to appear and announce “Act Three. Scene Eleven, Cleopatra’s Palace” as our start today.
I glanced down at the now well-worn pages of the script in my hand to prompt the lines. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I muttered.
Deep breath. I closed the gap with Honor and before I started I leaned in to whisper in her ear. “This sucks, but let’s be professional, okay?” I said. I actually did like playing Mark Antony.
She looked away from me.
Right then. So I began. “Fall not a tear, I say; one of them rates. All that is won and lost: give me a kiss; even this repays me.”
Honor held her script in front of her face, which I took as a pretty clear sign not to lean in and kiss her.
I let out a dramatic sigh. The paper stayed between us, a flimsy wall that I had zero intention of breaching. Five long seconds I waited while everyone watched me being rejected on stage. It was a real treat.
I was just about to tell her to cut it out, that I wasn’t going to “lay one on her” right now, but then without uttering one word from the script, she ran offstage.
“Cleopatra! Cleopatra!” Mrs. Fleury yelled after her before chucking her glasses down.
I stared at the spot where she’d disappeared, feeling my stomach turn itself inside out. I ran my fingers through my uncombed hair, and they got stuck in the knots.
I didn’t know what to do now that my partner in Scene Eleven had pulled a vanishing act. And somehow I felt like every cast member was looking at me as though it was my fault.
With the crew and actors in disorder, Mrs. Fleury was fluttering about saying, “Someone go see what’s wrong with our Cleopatra. Someone?”
Hushed murmurs ran through the assembled cast as people devolved into side conversations. It was clear everyone was sharing the same topic of conversation, though, and that was Honor and the pictures.
I pretended to read through my script.
Words like “crazy” and “runs in the family” and “slut” separated themselves. The tops of my ears burned.
I strained harder to listen while trying to feign more convincingly that I wasn’t when I heard a guy say, “Who would have sent them again?”
I whipped around. “Again?”
Zayn, a former fellow chorus member, was talking to the other members of the chorus. We hadn’t gotten close exactly when I had been a member, but Zayn, a lanky guy with bushy black hair, had been nice and supportive enough. He’d never been an ass when I messed up so I liked him instinctively.
“Yeah? So?” he asked.
“What do you mean by ‘again’?” I asked. He glanced at the others, but no one moved to answer me.
“I just meant you have to feel bad for her,” he said, staring off in the direction she’d gone.
I grunted. Truthfully I’d been pretty busy feeling bad for myself.
“It’s like she can’t escape those pictures, man.” He shook his head in a wise-beyond-his-years way. “Whoever sent them out again is an asshole. This school is full of assholes, though, so plenty of options.” The other members nodded in agreement to that. “It wasn’t you, was it?”
My brows hunched together. “I don’t get it. These aren’t, like, new?”
“Shit, don’t think so. Can’t imagine. Honor’s pretty, um, buttoned up these days since her sister. Teddy Marks sent those around last year.” He rolled his eyes. “After she sent them to him. I guess someone decided she needed to be brought down a peg and fast. Shit, I mean, maybe Drake has access to a phone or something.” He looked around the room as if searching for other suspects.
The girl next to him shoved Zayn’s arm. “Hush, we shouldn’t be talking like that about Drake. I think he’s been through enough.”
“They’re the exact same pictures?” I asked, piecing together a picture of myself that was quickly turning unflattering.
Zayn toyed with the fringe of his scarf. “I didn’t study them in detail, but yeah.”
“So not new?” I said more to myself than to anyone else.
Zayn peered at me through his peripheral vision and lifted a well-maintained brow. “Do you and Honor have something going on?” he asked.
I tilted my head back and groaned. “God, I am such an idiot,” I said, tensing my fingers. “Mrs. Fleury!” I held up a hand. “Gotta take five.”
“Not you too, Mark Antony!” she cried from where she was conferring with the piano player. I didn’t listen and Mrs. Fleury pounded her fist on the piano keys, causing a mash of discordant sound. “At the seams! This show is falling apart at the seams,” she shouted.
I jogged across the stage, jumping over a gold spray-painted chaise lounge being rolled out by one of the
set designers. I nearly ran over Lena, who caught me by the elbows, steadying me. Her eyes were pools of darkness in the backstage wings. “Sorry,” I said. “It’s Honor.” I was already peering over Lena’s shoulder, looking for signs of Honor. “She ran off.”
Lena frowned and tilted her head, looking concerned in a way that felt like a badly acted part. Like gold spray paint instead of the real thing. “Not so perfect after all, is she?” said Lena without a hint of inflection in her voice.
I shrank away from her, wrenching myself from Lena’s grasp. “Shut up, Lena,” I said.
“What, are you, like, dating her?” Lena asked and again, her inflection, the use of the word “like” was as though she was copying a girl in a movie.
“Yeah, I am, but it’s really none of your business right now.”
Her mouth dropped, but no sound came out. And anyway, I didn’t have time to care whether I’d hurt Lena’s feelings. Part of me even hoped that maybe I really had. “Yes, it is, Chris.”
My lower jaw jutted past my upper teeth. I shook my head. “Not right now, Lena. Not right now, okay?”
Then I pushed past a half-finished sphinx head and rounded the corner. “Honor?” The costume designer looked up from threading a needle and pointed toward the dressing room where the door was closed and now that I was close enough, I could hear hiccups and the distinct sound of crying. I banged my fist on the door. “Honor! Open up.” No answer. “Honor.” I leaned my arm across the door and lowered my forehead onto the surface. “Honor, I’m sorry,” I lowered my voice. “Just open up. Please? Honor?”
On the other side of the door, I heard the latch turn. I stood up straight and the door swung open. There was Honor, no less beautiful for the snot smeared under her nose or the red rings around her eyes. Okay, fine, she was a little less beautiful. But still really, really beautiful in the grand scheme of things.
“What do you want?” Her words were angrier than the tone she was able to muster, especially while sliding her hand across the bottom of her nose.
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