Now, we were headed toward 1995, and the ache of losing Manning wasn’t as sharp, but it’d spread and seeped throughout my body like thick, machine-gun-black tar. The throb lived inside me. I’d thought of one thing with the onset of summer—Manning. Leather car seats gummy from the heat, and wet, salty hair sticking to my arms. I’d lived through an entire week in Big Bear. Campfire-and-pine-needle air took me back to him that night we’d walked to the pool, hedging our words, keeping just enough distance under a painfully beautiful sky. How was it possible to look up and see the same immovable stars I had a year before when so much had changed?
It’d been a particularly bad summer, but it was over now and Manning was coming home soon. Nobody would tell me exactly when. Dexter had said maybe as soon as September, which was now, but that he’d call when he had a date. Manning never answered my letters, and Tiffany didn’t volunteer much when I was around. “It’s not appropriate for someone your age,” she’d say about her visits with Manning, and my dad would agree. She didn’t really think that, I was sure. It was as if the information gave her power over me.
Tonight, my friends were on phase three of the plan to get drunk. We’d been unsuccessful all afternoon. Sun-soaked and sandy, Val and I flip-flopped into a classmate’s house in Laguna Beach, dragging our feet on the beige stone flooring. We’d come with Vickie and Mona, but they had a crush on the same guy and scattered to find him. Everyone showed off tanned arms and legs in tank tops, shorts, and dresses. The kids at my school took sunbathing more seriously than final exams. Even I had stopped slathering on the sunscreen. I looked better with a tan . . . not that I had anyone to look good for.
Val channeled Drew Barrymore tonight in dark lipstick and wild, curly blonde hair. She’d unbuttoned her red blouse a little too far, her cleavage buoying a necklace with a black cross. She called it her Poison Ivy look, because she was always referencing her life back to movies, music, or books. Next to her, I must’ve looked angelic in a baby-blue, short fuzzy sweater.
“I wish my name started with a ‘B,’” Val said. “Everything good starts with a ‘B.’ Booze, boys, books.” She stopped at a stereo and showed me a CD case. “Buckley-comma-Jeff.”
“Beavis,” I added.
“And Butt-Head.”
Val got me. The me I hadn’t known I was before her. Starting school last September had been a struggle. I’d wanted to give up. I’d played the scene over and over in my head, Manning being led away in cuffs because of me. The only thing I’d thought about was writing to him or trying to find a way to visit him. I’d been depressed and lonely when I’d met Val, who’d just moved to Orange County from Seattle with her mom.
“Did you know your sister’s here?” Val asked, nodding through a doorway.
Tiffany sat on a kitchen countertop surrounded by boys I recognized from her grade. Most of them were in college now, not all of them, though. She still hadn’t signed up for classes even though she kept saying she would. “No, but I’m not surprised.”
“Five bucks says she’s telling them about her big, bad prison boyfriend.”
My heart seized and then released, an automatic reaction to anything Manning. “Now you’re just tossing out ‘B’ words.”
“I can think of a couple more.”
Val and Tiffany didn’t get along. Neither had Val and I at first. The principal had asked me to show her around campus her first day, and I would’ve rather stuck my head in a garbage bin after lunch, but as always, I’d done what was expected.
“Is this place a lot different than Seattle?” I asked Val between the math and science buildings.
“What kind of a question is that?” she shot back. “Seattle has music, art, and culture on every corner. This place is as new and shiny as a polished turd.”
I gaped at her. “What?”
“Plus there’s the whole rain versus sun thing.” I must’ve looked pretty disturbed, because she added, “Well, don’t cry about it.”
I had cried in the bathroom twenty minutes earlier, and also during first period, and because of that, I really couldn’t have cared less about this new girl and her attitude. “Like I’d cry over an insult my five-year-old cousin could’ve come up with. You don’t need a tour. The campus is small. Good luck.”
I walked the length of the math building before she caught up to me. “Sheesh. The principal promised you’d make me feel welcome.”
“I’m sure he can assign you to someone else. I’m not in the mood for this.”
“Then why’d you agree to it?”
I picked up my stride, but so did she. “Because I’m trying for Student of the Month this year.”
“It’s only September.”
“If they pick me early, I won’t have to hear about not getting it all year from my dad.”
“Oh. Well, if it makes you feel any better, my dad’s dating someone five years older than me.”
I wasn’t sure why that should make me feel better, but I got the feeling she needed to say it. “Sorry.”
“Is that why you were crying? Your dad? By the way, you seriously need some, like, cucumbers or something. Your eyes are really puffy.”
I hugged my binder to my chest and turned a corner toward the amphitheater to show her where next week’s pep rally would be. “Yeah. I guess.”
It turned out I hadn’t needed to show her the way to the amphitheater. We’d gone to the rally together. I learned that Val’s idea of a good time was Vietnamese food with eighties romantic comedies, and if her mom was out for the night, a glass of rosé. I hadn’t really known what I’d considered a good time but it wasn’t any of those things—until Val.
“There’s my girl.” A familiar, deep voice boomed over the living room crowd. “Move aside, assholes. Let the ladies through.”
Corbin and his sun-bleached hair stood inches taller than anyone else. Even if he weren’t waving both hands overhead, I would’ve spotted him easily.
The crowd parted for Val and me. “Welcome home,” I told him. His nose was pink and peeling, but he was bronze everywhere else. “How was vacation?”
“My brothers and I tore up the shores of Hawaii. It’s unrecognizable now.” He nodded at Val, then looked down her blouse. “What up, V? Nice, ah, necklace.”
“Thanks. Are you the keg master or what?”
“No, but I can be.” Corbin filled three beers. I didn’t want one, but I’d learned if I didn’t carry a red cup around parties, everyone would try to force one on me. “So let’s see this infamous scar,” he said.
I extended my arm, showing the faint, pink circle of raised skin near the inside of my elbow. He ran a thumb over it and shook his head, tsking. “What the hell were you thinking, Kaplan? You can’t just pick up a stray cat.”
“It was a kitten, and it was in pain,” I said. In retrospect, yes, it’d been stupid. We’d been on a class trip to Laguna Art Museum and out front, under a lawn sculpture, had been a little, mewling furball. With teeth. I’d had to go to the emergency room—right away—but Lam, named after the museum—was alive, healthy, and had been adopted out. That didn’t change the fact that I’d gotten an earful from my dad about my weird new hobby.
It had started with the running, and the running had started with a need to burn off the things that ate me up inside. Guilt over what I’d done. Hurt that Manning had neither written me back nor asked to see me. At seven o’clock on a Saturday morning, I’d been jogging by the pier and had nearly stumbled over a beached dolphin. After I’d run to call animal control and waited until they’d arrived to guide it back into the ocean, the handler had told me, “You did good.”
You did good.
It was the same thing Manning had said to me before they’d taken him away.
Since then, I’d been volunteering at an animal hospital a couple times a month.
“I’m going to look for some chow while you two ‘catch up,’” Val said, air quotes and all.
She left us alone. Corbin opened one arm to me, an
d I hugged his middle as he moved us away from the keg. “I don’t want you to go,” I said, looking up at him.
“I really thought about staying,” he said. “But it’s where I want to be.”
Corbin was headed for NYU in three days, but he and I were as close as ever. He’d been good to me the past year. According to the whole school, Corbin and I had been dating since camp. It wasn’t true, but Corbin had been too focused on baseball, surfing, and NYU to date, and having Corbin as a rumored boyfriend was better than having guys ask me to school dances or for Friday night pizza or, God forbid, to the Fun Zone. I didn’t date. Had no desire to. Had no room in my mind for boys when there was only one Manning.
Corbin rubbed the fuzzy back of my thin sweater. “You look good, Lake,” he said. “Real good. You’re a knockout.”
According to my mom, my body had been changing all year, but I hadn’t noticed until recently. Summer had been good to me. I’d finally grown into my limbs, clocking in at five-foot-eight, almost two inches taller than my mom and sister. I’d lost ten pounds in the weeks after Manning had gone away and had started running soon after. My bras got smaller around the back and bigger in the cups. I had real breasts now, not as big as my mom’s and sister’s, which was disappointing, but I had them. Men had stopped looking around me to see Tiffany and my mom. That kind of attention didn’t seem worth all the fuss Tiffany made over it, but I figured I’d understand better once Manning was the one looking.
“Are you nervous for college?” I asked.
“Nah.”
We stood a little too close to the boom box, and Corbin raised his voice to speak over Adam Duritz crooning “Round Here.”
“What about you?” he asked. “You’re a senior now. Lots of responsibility.” Corbin tapped his Solo cup with mine. “How’s it feel?”
“Overdue.”
“Is that Corbin I hear?” Tiffany called from the next room.
Corbin and I exchanged a look. He put an arm around me and led me into the kitchen where Tiffany held court from a granite throne.
“I haven’t seen a Swenson all summer,” she said.
“We were gone most of it.”
“Well, work keeps me busy anyway,” she said gravely.
“Still at Nordstrom?”
“And doing some modeling. Between that and driving all day to see Manning twice a month, I hardly have time for anything else.”
I looked into my cup. What I knew about her visits came from her conversations with other people. I didn’t believe most of it. Supposedly, he’d wanted conjugal visits but wasn’t allowed them. He held her hand while they talked. He shared all kinds of things about his past. I knew my sister. She’d say they’d had sex right there on the visitation table if she thought someone would believe it. Anything to shock people.
“Right.” Corbin nodded, glancing around. Everybody in school knew about Manning thanks to Tiffany’s big mouth, but Corbin was one of the only people who’d actually spoken to him.
I could ask for details now. Sometimes when I tried to get information, Tiffany shut down, but with other people around, she had a reason to blab.
Corbin beat me to it. “So he’s still in the slammer then?”
Tiffany shifted. “Ow.” She pulled up the outside of her thigh. Where her shorts stopped, her skin was red from the counter. “I’ve been up here too long. Help me down?”
Corbin knew better than to argue. He held her hand as she hopped off, her wedges thumping on the floor. She brushed off her hands and said, “He was supposed to get out for good behavior this month.”
Was? Visions of Manning packing up his things, filling out paperwork, making living arrangements, calling me on the phone—it all disintegrated. “He’s not anymore?”
“Her boyfriend’s straight thug,” someone said from behind us. “She told us all about him.”
I shot a glare over my shoulder at the gangly kid from Tiffany’s class who looked as though he’d spent the summer playing Nintendo in a basement.
“What happened?” Corbin asked. Even he perked up, leaning close, and in moments like these, I understood exactly why Tiffany continued to see Manning. He made for a good story.
“I don’t know if I should say.” Tiffany glanced at me from under her lashes and away. “It’s upsetting.”
“You told a stranger,” I accused, gesturing at the guy behind me. He knew more about Manning than I did, which might’ve surprised me if this whole situation hadn’t been backward from the start.
“He got in a . . . fight,” she admitted.
Corbin shrugged. “There are fights all the time in prison.”
“Not like this. He went after a guard, Corbin. And apparently, he almost killed him.”
I sucked in a breath. A guard? That he almost killed? I could barely picture Manning fighting another inmate, much less someone of authority, someone in the uniform he wanted to wear. “I don’t believe you,” I said. “Manning isn’t like that.”
“How would you know? You haven’t spoken to him in a year.”
I pulled back, stung. Would a year in there change Manning? How could it not? Fundamentally, though, at his core, Manning was good. He didn’t even belong in there.
“Did he get in trouble?” Nintendo kid asked.
“I don’t know. I haven’t spoken to him since it happened, but his lawyer said there’d be some kind of trial thing about a misdemeanor? If they decide it’s assault, it would mean more time.”
More time. It knocked the wind out of me, stealing my ability to do anything other than stay upright. But Manning’s good. As tough as he looked, as built as he was, he was a protector, not a fighter. Corbin took my free hand, maybe sensing my confusion. In moments like these, I wished someone knew the whole truth. I’d carried it on my shoulders so long. My only outlet was writing to Manning and even that had begun to feel painful and embarrassing as he continued to ignore me. Val and I talked about boys a lot, and I’d wanted to tell her what’d happened, but I could never convey the story the way it deserved to be told.
“Is he okay?” I asked.
“It took two guards to pull him off.”
Corbin raised his cup to his mouth. “I believe it,” he said before a sip. “He’s a massive guy.”
“But he’s okay?” I asked.
“Yeah.” She leaned her back against the counter. “I mean, Dexter wouldn’t really get into the details. He said Manning had to be subdued, and they put him in solitary confinement.”
“Subdued? Solitary confinement? Does that mean he’s alone?” I asked. “When was this? What does subdued mean?” Plastic crackled under my grip and beer erupted over the sides of my drink, down my top.
Corbin lifted the cup out of my hand by its rim, setting it aside. “Jesus, Lake.”
“I’ll know more after I see him,” Tiffany said. “It’s been a couple months since our last visit.”
That meant he’d potentially been isolated for some or all of that time. The wet spot on my top chilled my skin, and I shivered.
Corbin put a hand on my shoulder. “Let’s clean you up.”
“Why didn’t you tell me any of this?” I asked Tiffany.
Tiffany shifted her eyes to me. “You know why. Dad doesn’t want you to know. He says it’s bad enough I brought a criminal around you.”
I clenched my teeth. Manning wasn’t a criminal, and even if he was, I’d known him first. She had some nerve acting as though she’d brought him around me. “You should’ve told me anyway.”
“He thinks I’ll corrupt you,” she continued. “If only he knew the truth.”
“What’s the truth?” Corbin asked.
My blood ran cold. Ever since Tiffany had said she’d seen me get in the truck with Manning late at night, there was a line to our arguments I couldn’t cross. So far, she hadn’t said anything to Mom or Dad about it. Whether it was for my sake or Manning’s, I wasn’t sure, but I was grateful. I didn’t trust my dad not to go to the police and try to make t
hings worse for Manning.
So instead of fighting her, I closed my beer-sticky fingers into a fist around the mood ring I’d found in Manning’s bag of personal items. Top-heavy and too big, the stone often slid to the inside of my hand. It was real, colossal, and a constant and welcome reminder of him—and of my guilt.
“The truth . . .?” Tiffany said, letting it hang in the air. “The truth is that Lake has a crush on my boyfriend.”
My face flamed. “No I don’t.” It wasn’t a lie. A crush was fun and exciting, butterflies, pink cheeks, lash-heavy glances. My feelings for Manning were crushing. Late night sobs and black holes. Curled fists and fingernail crescents imprinted in my palms.
Regret.
Corbin snorted. “You’re disturbed,” he told her, leaving my side to swipe a dishtowel from the kitchen sink. He draped it over his arm, grabbed his drink, and pulled me away by my hand. “Come on, Lake.”
“Where?” I asked. I tried to gauge his mood, unsure if I should tell him that what Tiffany had said wasn’t true. He didn’t seem bothered by it, though.
“Bathroom.” He laced his fingers with mine as we cut through the party, his thumb rubbing the stone of my ring.
“Stop touching it.”
He glanced over his shoulder at me. “You’re weirdly superstitious about that thing. I’ve tried to tell you, it only detects your mood—it can’t ruin it.”
It did, though. I wasn’t sure how to explain that to him. I hated the idea of anyone else touching Manning’s ring.
Corbin released my hand when we reached the bathroom. “She’s sick,” he said to the people waiting in line, pushing me inside, not that anybody would stand up to him.
He locked the door, and I washed my hands. As I dried them, I looked from the ring to my face in the mirror. Did Manning still think of me in there? How did I look to him? Like I had back then, a young girl who’d made all the wrong choices? I’d been too timid when I should’ve been bold, too impulsive when I should’ve held back.
Something in the Way: A Forbidden Love Saga: The Complete Collection Page 31