Tell

by Carrie Secor

  Susan’s blathering fell on Cadie’s deaf ears as they drove to pick up Stacy. They pulled into her driveway and Cadie leaned on the horn. Her heartbeat sped up as she watched Stacy walk to the car, her head down as she perused through her purse for something.

  As she climbed into the car, she said, her face still downturned, “Does anybody have any gum? I’m out.” Stacy’s eyes flicked up to Cadie, and her jaw dropped. “Holy shit,” she said, echoing Cadie’s sentiment from that morning.

  “What do you think?” Cadie asked. “Seriously.”

  “Seriously, you look phenomenal.”

  “What? Why?” Susan leaned her head around the seat to look. “She looks the same.”

  Stacy shot Susan a dark look. “You’re a douche bag. She looks fantastic.”

  Whether it was the fact that she knew she looked good or the fact that Stacy had called Susan a douche bag, Cadie was in an exceptional mood when they pulled into the school’s parking lot. She saw that the orange Camaro was already there, but Shane and Felicia were nowhere in sight. As Melody and Susan headed off toward the school together, Stacy grabbed Cadie’s wrist before she could walk away.

  “This is because of Shane, isn’t it?”

  “Crap,” Cadie said under her breath, making no attempt to deny it.

  “I knew it,” Stacy said triumphantly.

  “How did you know it? And more importantly, do other people know it?”

  “I doubt it. I could just kind of tell something was going on at the party.”

  “You were hammered,” Cadie shot back.

  “I was tired,” Stacy answered defensively. “Besides that, I saw you two leave eighth period together every day last week.”

  “We have calc together.”

  “I know, but that doesn’t mean you have to leave together, but you always do. You always walk out together and you’re always talking when you do.” Stacy’s last period French class was only two rooms away.

  “I hadn’t noticed,” Cadie said honestly. Now that Melody and Susan were a safe distance ahead, the two of them started walking toward the school.

  “And everybody knows that he keeps blowing off Amanda.”

  Cadie looked at her sharply. “What?”

  “Well, on Friday after the game, she was trying to get him to go home with her and he wouldn’t go. He told her that he had to go straight home, but I know for a fact he went to Fort Beast afterwards, and everyone else knows too. And he was supposed to go home with her after the party at my house, but he totally peaced out without even saying anything to her.”

  Realization dawned on Cadie. “Oh, my God, he left with me that night.”

  “What?” shrieked Stacy, causing some underclassmen to turn and stare in their direction.

  “Well, he didn’t leave with me,” Cadie amended. “I didn’t mean it like that. He left at the same time we did and we talked outside before we left.”

  Stacy shook her head, a smile on her face. “I don’t suppose Felicia knows any of this.”

  “No.” Cadie sighed as the two of them stopped in an alcove before turning down the hallway to their lockers. “I didn’t think there was anything to tell.”

  “I wouldn’t tell her, either.”

  Shane stood next to Will’s locker that morning, absently twisting a Rubik’s cube that he had found in his room and was determined to solve. “Where’s the party this week?” he asked, not looking up.

  “I think it’s at Amanda’s,” Will said, pulling a book from his backpack and shoving it into his locker.

  Shane nodded. He had gotten one side of the cube entirely white, but as the rest of the sides were still completely mixed up, this was of little help to him. He sighed and looked up from the cube to find Will staring at him. “What?”

  “Trouble in paradise?” Will asked him.

  “What are you going on about?”

  “Are you and Amanda fighting?”

  Shane furrowed his brow. “What would we have to fight about?”

  “I don’t know. But I heard she was pissed at you.”

  “For what?” Shane demanded.

  “Well, for apparently telling her that you couldn’t see her after the game on Friday because you had to go straight home, but then you came out to Fort Beast with us.”

  Shane looked back down at the Rubik’s cube. “Oh. I guess she found out about that.”

  “Yeah, I guess so. And I guess you were supposed to hook up with her after the party at Stacy’s, but you blew her off then, too.”

  “Damn, how does everybody know all this?”

  Will raised his eyebrows at him. “Seriously, what high school do you go to?” He shoved his backpack inside his locker and slammed the door, twisting the combination lock a few times to make sure it was locked. He leaned against the locker door. “And what gives? Is there a reason you keep avoiding getting laid?”

  “I’ve just been busy.”

  “Why do you even try to lie to me? You can’t bluff to save your life.”

  Shane sighed. After the party at Stacy’s, he truly had forgotten that he had made plans with Amanda. He had texted her and apologized, but apparently she was still pissed at him. Now she had found out that he had lied to her about Friday night, too. This was a piece of unfortunate luck. He would have to think of some excuse to give her later.

  But what excuse was he supposed to give to Will? Why had he blown her off on Friday night? She had approached him after the game, asking him for a ride, saying that her parents were not going to be home and they would have the house to themselves. And he had lied to her, saying that he had to be home by midnight, even though he could have easily stayed out past curfew since his parents did not know what time they would be getting in from the game. And he had stayed out past curfew anyway, drinking with the team. But why had he avoided Amanda?

  The truth was in the corner of his brain, speaking quietly but still demanding to be heard. Shane pushed it further back into his brain, refusing to listen. He wondered how long that was going to work. He was still carrying the tube of raspberry lip balm in the outer pocket of his backpack.

  Shane looked back at Will, prepared to make up some lie about why he had not wanted to see Amanda on Friday night, but he was momentarily distracted by the look on Will’s face. He was staring down the hallway, his face slack, wearing an expression of utter disbelief. “What?” Shane asked.

  “Holy shit,” was Will’s reply.

  Shane turned, and he knew his expression had to have matched the one on Will’s face. For a moment, he was struck dumb. He did not even realize that he had dropped the Rubik’s cube.

  Cadie was at her locker, only four away from Will’s, but it took Shane’s brain several minutes to register that the person he was looking at was actually Cadie Dawson. Her hair was down, for one thing, and it was a lot straighter than he remembered it being before. She was also wearing clothes that were a lot different than the baggy shirts and jeans she normally wore. A pair of high heels had replaced her regular boots. Had her legs always been that long?

  “Told you she had a body under there,” Will muttered.

  Shane elbowed him, a lot harder than he had intended, because Will grunted and doubled over for a second. At this, Cadie looked up.

  Her eyes met Shane’s for a long, agonizing moment. Finally, she glanced down, and Shane realized she was looking at the Rubik’s cube.

  “Oh,” he said stupidly.

  He started to retrieve it, but she beat him to it, bending at the waist to pick it up. Shane realized he was staring down the front of her shirt and instantly averted his eyes, feeling his face heat up. Then he realized Will was staring down the front of her shirt shamelessly, and he elbowed him again.

  Cadie held out the Rubik’s cube, stepping forward and closing the distance between the two of them. Four lockers had been okay, but once she got within arm’s length, Shane found it very difficult to suppress the urge to touch her. Or possibly kiss her. Or maybe drag her into a cu
stodian’s closet and have his way with her.

  He settled for taking the Rubik’s cube from her hand, though this was a painful compromise. Their thumbs touched briefly before she stepped away.

  “Thanks,” he said lamely.

  “Sure,” she answered. The two boys watched her take her history book out of her locker, then slam the door with her heel-clad foot. “See you in calc,” she said to Shane before disappearing into her homeroom.

  Shane just nodded.

  “Holy shit,” said Will again, once she was out of earshot.

  “I know.”

  “Holy shit.”

  “I know, Will. I saw her.” Shane took a deep breath. The truth in the corner of his brain began to speak up, demanding to be heard. He was still determined to protect Felicia at all costs, but it looked as if Cadie was determined to make that as difficult for him as possible.

  Fifteen

  Felicia had been a ballet dancer since the age of four. One of her first memories was having her mother take her by the hand and lead her into the same dance studio that she frequented now. After receiving a Ballerina Barbie as a birthday present from her aunt, she had announced that she wanted to be a dancer, too. Later, her parents told her that this announcement had come as a surprise—before then, Felicia had taken to roughhousing with Shane all the time, and they thought she would be a tomboy. But she took to ballet immediately, and dancing seemed to agree with her.

  She had always considered herself athletic, and ballet held an athleticism that was more graceful, more structured than any organized sport in which she might have been interested. Besides that, she hated to get dirty. She had tried little-league softball at the age of ten and had aborted this mission quickly after coming home from a few practices covered in dirt, with grass stains on her nice new sweatpants. She did not mind being covered in the sweat of a good workout, but shrunk from the idea of defiling new clean clothes. Felicia enjoyed cleanliness in her life as much as she enjoyed cleanliness in conversation.

  To her, dancing was a fresh, exhilarating experience that could not be replicated anywhere else. Unlike the other girls, she sought neither praise nor attention from ballet. The other girls in the class would compete tirelessly over dance solos while Felicia quietly auditioned and never complained if a better part was given to another girl. However, this rarely happened. Her love of dancing was written all over her face and in the naturalness of her movements, and everyone who had the opportunity to watch her dance was fully aware of it. This made her more talented than most of the other girls in her class, and no matter how hard they worked to surpass her, they could never quite meet her level of passion. Not only that, but when the other girls danced, they tended to be self-conscious; when Felicia danced, she could feel the audience fade until they became indistinguishable from her surroundings and nothing else seemed to be in the room besides the music, the stage, and herself. This was not a skill, but simply a side effect of her love of ballet.

  It was an effect that had been unmatched in any of the other girls until Elliot joined the class. It was one of the reasons the two girls felt a strong kinship to one another and a further distance between themselves and the other girls. She thought it might also have been one of the things that had drawn them so close in such a short amount of time.

  Something else was drawing them close, and though Felicia’s mind refused to grasp it, her body was fully aware of it. It was the way her heartbeat seemed to speed up whenever she saw Elliot’s smile. It was the way her breathing seemed to come faster whenever she saw Elliot dance, her slender arm extended toward the ceiling, her long leg stretched gracefully out behind her as she stood en pointe. It was, most of all, the jolt of electricity that seemed to go through her every time they might touch hands.

  It was why Brian’s departure had scared her so much. Without the safety of her boyfriend, she was afraid of confronting these feelings head-on. She pushed them from her mind every time her brain tried to think about it.

  She and Elliot dressed after dance rehearsal, pulling yoga pants and t-shirts on over their leotards and packing their toe shoes into their bags. As Felicia reached back to let her hair down, Lauren Andrews approached Elliot from behind and placed a hand on her shoulder. “You’re still coming on Friday, right?” she asked.

  Elliot nodded. “Sure.”

  “Okay, cool. Good to know. I’ll see you girls later,” she called as she walked out the studio’s front door.

  “Where are you going on Friday?” Felicia asked curiously once Lauren was out of earshot.

  Elliot sighed. “I told her I would go to the post-game party.”

  “What?” Felicia exclaimed incredulously.

  “I know, I know. But after you left rehearsal on Saturday, she started talking to me and she was being really nice, and she asked me for my phone number. Then yesterday, she called me out of the blue and said I should go to the post-game party on Friday. I said I would.”

  “Why?”

  “Because, she’s been the only person to invite me somewhere—other than you—since I’ve moved here,” Elliot responded. “And, no offense, I love you and everything, but I need to get some other friends. Friends who don’t care when I drop the f-bomb.”

  Felicia was silent for a moment, though her face had warmed at Elliot’s proclamation. She also could not help but feel a twinge of jealousy that Elliot was making plans with someone else. “Well, if the purpose of this is to make other friends, I don’t suppose you’d want me to go along.”

  Elliot’s eyes widened with delight. “Would you go with me?”

  Felicia barked a laugh. “Nope.”

  Elliot sagged in disappointment. “That’s what I figured you’d say.”

  In the remaining days of that week, one might have noticed a subtle shift in sexual energy in some of the kids at the high school.

  Shane had been known to eye girls in the hallways—Amanda if he had the opportunity, though it was rare that an attractive girl would escape his attention if she happened to walk by him. He had perfected the use of peripheral vision in checking out girls. Mr. Bell would yell tirelessly at the band members to use their peripherals on the field in order to determine their whereabouts in reference to their peers, but nobody had perfected this skill more than Shane.

  Will was not quite an expert at it, but he used it regularly enough to know when to recognize it in one of his friends, and he saw Shane execute it more and more that week, and it was always aimed toward Cadie. He mentioned this in passing to Stacy, then immediately regretted saying anything at all. Stacy had pounced on this piece of information and had instantly succumbed to pestering him with questions about what he thought Shane’s feelings were toward Cadie. Will had grunted and shrugged her off and tried to hide until her curiosity had died away, but this had yet to happen. He would never understand this need girls had to hear and spread gossip.

  So, Shane’s eyes were trained on Cadie instead of anyone else. And although Cadie’s glances at Shane were rare and brief, they still occurred, and Stacy noticed them each time they did.

  Melody had never been subtle about looking at Andy all the time. He sat in front of her in band during second period, and he sat next to her in music theory. She had his spots on the field memorized as surely as she had her own, and her eyes could find him easily in any set.

  But three things had happened this past weekend that made him, to her, less desirable to look at. The first was that he had ditched her as a seat partner without explanation. The second was that he had wounded her when he had snapped at her in the stands at the game and had never apologized. And thirdly, she had laughed a lot with Lucas when she shared a seat with him on the bus instead.

  Now, she found it difficult not to notice that Lucas was often paying a lot of attention to her, a fact that she had never realized before. He looked at her often during band practice, though she always pretended not to see. He was quick to come to her aid if she needed help with anything, and thinking back, it oc
curred to her that this might have been his reason for staying after school that day to help sort music. Twice he had left notes in her locker that contained jokes that were even sillier than the ones he had told her on the bus (“What would you call it if everyone in the country painted their cars pink? A pink car-nation”), but they always made her smile.

  So, Lucas’s eyes were trained on Melody. And when she noticed, she had trouble suppressing her smile.

  Felicia had never taken the time to look at anybody when she was at school. The only people she ever talked to were Cadie, Elliot (though this was a recent development), and occasionally Shane, but only in the case of an emergency; she did not like it publicized that she was related to him.

  She still did not take the time to look at anybody when she was at school, and any new infatuation that she had would probably not change this aspect of her personality. But her mind was constantly swamped in thoughts of Elliot, thoughts that she could not explain to herself, thoughts that seemed irrational to her.

  So, Felicia’s eyes were trained inward at her own personal transformation. And nobody noticed, leaving Felicia feeling more alone than she had ever felt in her life.

  A lot of people were planning on going to the party at Amanda’s on Friday night.

  Stacy was going because she was a cheerleader and they were expected to make appearances at these things. Also, her birthday happened to be that Friday and she wanted to have a good time.

  Cadie was going with Stacy. Despite her desire to see Shane, she had felt somewhat reluctant about going to another post-game party, still feeling like she did not belong. However, since Stacy’s birthday was on Friday, she had laid a guilt trip on Cadie the size of Texas, so Cadie eventually agreed.

  Melody was going because Cadie invited her. She and Andy had seemed to have a good time at the last one, and Cadie felt that her sister should not need to rely on Susan for invitations to parties. Melody accepted the invitation, though (unbeknownst to Cadie) did not ask Andy to come along. His sour behavior toward her had also soured any future party invitations that she might bestow upon him.