“Are you okay?” I asked, running over.
“Can we get you a towel or something?” Javi said. He stepped past her into the stairwell without waiting for an answer.
I held her coffee and she brushed her skirt and tights. “The one frigging day I wear this shit.” She glared at me, knowingly, because she and I were both pants girls. None of the cocktail dress attire so many of the other girls around Fullbrook wore. The school had abandoned uniforms a while back, but the dress code was still pretty strict. Aileen and I were the kind of girls who pushed it to the limit.
“At least it’s black,” I said. Because of course it was. Almost everything she wore was black, and if it was one of those times we could dress down, it was just a hoodie, or some T-shirt of a band that looked like it practiced Satanic rituals on stage during a show. Everything was black—except her hair, which she often wore in two long, thick blond braids that hung on either side of her head.
I tried to smile as I said it, but she gave me her hard glare back. “At least.”
Aileen and I weren’t friends, exactly; we’d only partnered on a few art projects together over the years, which I’d been grateful for, because she was the real artist, and I was more of a paint-by-numbers kind of girl. I’d always wondered why she hadn’t joined the Social Consciousness Club, because I knew she cared about all the things I did, and it would have made it so much easier to be friends, but she roamed mostly as a loner, only jumping into the mix at parties here and there.
Javi rushed back out with napkins from the center, which he handed to Aileen. She dabbed at the coffee. “Goddamn, that was hot,” she said.
“Are you burned?” I asked. “We can walk you to the health center.”
Javi nodded along.
“I’m fine,” she said. “Besides, I’m supposed to be introducing the arts center to the tour groups.”
“Really?” As soon as I said it, I wished I hadn’t spoken my first thought out loud. I hadn’t meant it the way it came out.
“Yeah, really.”
“Skip it,” Javi said. “We’re heading to Horn Rock. Want to come?”
“Right now? No.” She stuffed the napkin wads in the barrel next to the door. “I’m a host.”
“Yeah, but others will be there. Come have some fun.”
“I’m not getting stoned with you two in the woods.” She made it sound like it had never happened before—which it had, a few times, but always at night, always at one of the parties where everyone slipped through the shadows until the earliest hours of morning. “Too bad, huh?” she added. “Gillian and Shriya wouldn’t let you lead the tours with them.”
That stung. I wanted to say more, but I couldn’t find the words. She had no reason to be extra nice to me, but I’d never been outright mean to her. I thought back, though. I guess I hadn’t said anything when I’d seen others be that way to her. Collateral damage is real. What about collateral accountability? I hadn’t thought about that.
Aileen walked off with a curt good-bye, and Javi and I didn’t linger. The bluffs were off-limits, and it was one thing to sneak up there under the cover of night, but it was another altogether to go there during the day. We hustled to a narrow clearing at the far end of the bluff. Most of the late-night parties happened at the other end, at the wide patch of dirt around Horn Rock, but here, a slim pale elm clung to the edge, its roots fingering into the sandy rock, its trunk leaning out over the precipice. My tree. My favorite spot at Fullbrook. I’d discovered it my first year.
Javi pulled his vaporizer from his pocket and, as he’d done so many times before, pointed it at me.
“No.”
“All right.” He shrugged. “Whatever you say.”
He took a hit and smiled. “Aaaand,” he said, exhaling. “Let me tell you what happened this summer. This boy. I just wanted to climb up and down and all around him.”
Javi was probably the most attractive guy at Fullbrook: a man’s head of hair, thick and full, not curly, always groomed, and he was built like a man in his twenties too—not in some cartoonish way, just enough so you could see the lines of muscles slipping around his body. He’d always looked like that. He’d always had a smile that everybody bent toward like the sun. We’d made out on my very first night at Fullbrook. “No parents around?” we’d both said to each other. “Is this a dream?” And we snuck around that whole first year, finding places to make out every chance we got, until later, when he told me he was gay. We’d been sneaking around ever since, just hooking up with different people.
Javi unloaded about the clubs his older sister had gotten him into back home in Miami. E11even, Blackbird Ordinary, Bâoli, bars with swimming pools and fountains, beautiful men, lights flashing everywhere overhead, beneath your feet, in the corner of your eye. I loved Javi, and he loved that scene, but the endless party wasn’t the be-all-end-all for me. There was something more. Hence, the rules. Like no smoking pot. I had to be sharp. Everything mattered. One more year. One more year.
While Javi smoked and talked, I looked out over the river and the dense, undulating carpet of trees rolling over the hills and the low, blue peaks beyond, as if there was nothing but wilderness out there, a vast and endless unknown, and Fullbrook, behind us, was the school that sat on the edge of the world.
Javi interrupted himself and nudged me. “Is someone down there?” he asked.
He pointed toward the river. Boys hollered from below, their yelps leaping up the cliff face. The boys shouted again. Loud whoops. Howling.
Javi and I crept toward the cliff edge. Below, and far to the right, closer to the boathouse, three boys stood on the rocks at the foot of the bluff, one of them holding what looked like a ball of fire.
“Insane,” Javi said.
“It’s Ethan.”
“What?”
I could recognize him, even from that distance. His silhouette, long hair, the timbre of his voice echoing up to me. I knew I’d see Ethan as soon as I was back, but I didn’t realize how much seeing him again would sting. I didn’t miss him. It was almost like seeing him reminded me of a part of me I’d shed and no longer wanted but that still clung to me, not completely shakable, too close to be forgotten.
“How can you even tell from all the way up here?”
“I just can.”
He poked me. “Don’t you dare tell me you’re still thinking about him.”
“No.”
“You don’t miss him?”
“Good God, no.”
“I’m telling you. I always said, ‘That guy? He’s a snake.’ ”
The fire flared for an instant and then dropped, smoke and steam rising and disappearing in the air above the river, and the boys quieted, scrambling off the rocks toward the beach. Javi and I crawled away from the edge.
I whacked the dust off my skirt. “We should probably get out of here,” I said. “All the fuss down there might get people looking toward the woods.”
“No weed, girl, and you’re still as paranoid as ever.”
“Ha and ha.”
He threw his arm around me.
“I’m not paranoid,” I said. “I’m observant. Quick-witted. Quick-footed.” I ducked out from beneath his embrace, sprang into a Superman pose, and beamed a ridiculous cartoon smile.
“Nice try,” he teased.
Instead of scrambling back through the brush, we decided we’d take the narrow path behind Horn Rock down to the main boathouse road. Javi pulled me along, almost a skip in his step as he explained why he was so excited about everything coming out of Ultra and Electric Zoo this year, and I nodded along, just so incredibly glad to ride the wave of someone else’s enthusiasm, because it was only the first full day back and I was already feeling exhausted and overwhelmed, and I hadn’t realized how much I needed someone else to breathe a little joy into me.
But Javi stopped us when we reached the top of the downhill path. “What the hell?” he said.
He pointed into the trees off the path. A bra hung from the
stub of a broken branch on an old fallen log. I stepped over and inspected the area around it. I couldn’t find anything else. No other clothes. No other signs that someone had been there. Thin lines of moss and mold threaded through the cloth so the bra clung to the dead wood more than hung from it.
“Wait, do you think someone’s already had sex on the first day of school?” Javi laughed. “Oh my God, I think I’m actually jealous.”
“It’s too dirty.” It was. The mold and grime had stitched a kind of camouflage over the fabric. I was surprised he’d even seen it. “How long has this been here? Since last year?”
“How does that even happen?” Javi asked. He stifled a giggle, poorly. “Like whoops, where are my pants?”
“Are you serious?” I shot him a look. “Nobody just leaves this behind on purpose.” I had the strangest urge to take it, and try to find out who’d lost it. Was she still here? Had she graduated? But I wasn’t really going to touch it. Only the underwire and the plastic clasps were keeping the fabric from tearing apart altogether.
He cocked his head. “Jules, just leave it. Who knows what the hell happened.”
“Might be from one of the parties at the bluffs last year. But I can’t believe I didn’t hear about the girl who lost her bra,” I said. Last year, at least before I called it off with Ethan, I had assumed I’d been plugged into everything.
“Oh, really?” Javi cracked. “Like you think you know every little thing that happens at every party?”
“Don’t you?”
He laughed and extended a hand to help me step back out onto the path. “I don’t want to know it all.”
He was right. We walked back down the path together, and Javi, because he was Javi, just instinctively knew I needed a hug, so he looped his arm through mine and squeezed me close as we walked. He could sense it. I didn’t know why I was so shaken, but I was, just imagining all that I didn’t know.
CHAPTER 5
* * *
JAMES BAXTER
Hackett held us up on the way back to look through the windows of the boathouse and point out the single sculls and the eight-man longboats. I tried to act excited, but I was with Freddie on this one. These sleek boats seemed worlds away from me.
Hackett put his arm around me. “All right, I get it. The finer things in life are lost on you.” He laughed it off like he meant nothing by it. He steered me around so we faced Freddie. “We have to get this guy back,” he continued, tugging at the yellow eye of my sweaty Cleveland Monsters T-shirt. “So he can get dressed for dinner.”
What a school. The idea that I would change clothes for dinner. It freaked me out thinking about the vast number of formalities I’d have no clue about.
As we walked back, Freddie kept nagging Hackett, asking him to have Gillian put in a good word for him with Shriya. We were only a hundred yards down the road when I heard a branch snap up the hill. A boy and girl stood still on the path that went down the back side of the cliff. They stared at us. Freddie and Hackett hadn’t noticed, so I stopped them.
“Hey,” I said. “Who’s that?”
They looked toward where I pointed. Hackett took a deep breath. “Oh, man,” Freddie said. He waved, and when it seemed like they weren’t moving or coming down, he shouted back up: “It’s all good. We’ll just wait for you here.”
They said something to each other and then began to make their way down the hill, and when they got to us, the girl looked right at me for a moment, and I had the strangest jolt of homesickness. It had nothing to do with the way she was dressed, or what she looked like—it was the way she looked at me that reminded me so suddenly and powerfully of home. Everybody I’d met or seen at Fullbrook had had an air of knowing confidence, or if not that, then a loud, bright, electric joy, that made me want to pull back and get some space. Not her. She held her face tight, stared at me with a kind of intense skepticism, and I didn’t mind it at all. It felt familiar.
“What’s up, guys?” she said. It wasn’t husky or low, but her voice broke occasionally, as if her throat was dry, or she didn’t want to let the whole word out.
“Hey,” Hackett said. He hesitated; then, as if he was going in for a hug, he leaned toward her, but she stepped closer to the guy next to her.
“This is like one of those moments where two people are walking alone on two different sidewalks, but they are approaching the same point, so then they have to suddenly walk side by side, even if they don’t want to, right?” the guy with her said.
“Yeah, exactly,” she replied.
“Relax, Javi,” Hackett said.
“Oh, I’m relaxed,” Javi said.
Hackett laughed. “I bet. Javier Alvarez. Day one and the dude is already stoned. I should have joined you two.”
“Whatever,” the girl said, glaring at Javi. She reached for his hand and started to pull him forward. “We’ll just run ahead.”
“Hey,” Hackett said again, this time more forcefully. He stepped in front of her. “Jules.” She wouldn’t look at him. “How’re you doing?”
“I’m busy,” she shot back. “I have a college to get into.”
Freddie belted out a laugh. “Oh, yeah. Like you won’t get in everywhere.”
“Easy, Freddie,” Javi said. His face suddenly got still.
Freddie just shook his head and shuffled his feet, grinning at Javi.
She glanced at me again, obviously trying to ignore Freddie and Hackett. “You new?”
“Why don’t you join our tour?” Freddie said. “We’ve been showing the Buckeye around.” His face lit up. “We’re his mentors.”
“Lucky you,” Jules said to me.
“Why are you acting so cold?” Hackett said. “I’m just trying to say hello. I can’t even get a hello back?” He stepped away to let her pass. “So intense.”
Jules grabbed Javi’s hand again and pulled him past us. “Seriously,” Hackett called after her. “That’s how it’s going to be this year? We can’t even have a normal, everyday conversation?”
“It’s not personal,” Jules said over her shoulder. “Get over yourself, Ethan.”
“What the hell?” Hackett said quietly. He looked stunned and hurt.
“Nice to meet you,” I shouted after them.
Jules didn’t turn around, but she shot a peace sign in the air as she kept marching them forward. “Thanks, Buckeye,” she yelled.
Hackett and Freddie gave me a look.
“What?” I asked.
“Don’t be an ass.” Hackett glared at me.
“Who’s being an ass?” I asked, but he ignored me. “Who was that?”
“Jules?” Freddie said. “Don’t mind her. She thinks she runs the school.”
“Yeah, but seriously.”
“She and Hackett?” Freddie said. “They were scoring last year.” He slapped my back and pushed us forward, but Hackett kept us moving slowly. Jules and her friend were walking so quickly, they disappeared behind the bend in the path back to campus.
“Scoring?”
“Yeah.” Freddie grinned.
Hackett threw me another one of those lazy smiles. “You know.”
“Gotcha,” I said, picking up Freddie-speak. Everything was happening so quickly. I needed to stick my finger in a socket just to keep up with these guys. “Hooking up or whatever. You’re a thing with someone.”
Hackett laughed through his nose. “A thing. Yeah. Just like that.” He dropped a hand on Freddie’s shoulder. “Well, no longer. Me and Jules, we’re no longer a thing.” He grinned. “She’s all yours,” he said to me.
I nodded, as if I agreed. No one said anything else for a bit, but as we got closer to campus, Freddie turned to me, frowning.
“But seriously. Buckeye, you gotta be thinking about it.”
“What?”
“Girls, right? You’re the new guy. Girls love that shit.”
Actually, no. That wasn’t the first thing on my mind. At that moment, I was mostly worried about what the hell I was doing at
this school. I hadn’t thought about girls since Heather and I had broken up. But now, at the thought of her, I couldn’t help but remember the language of her drawn up knee, so dark and beautiful and brown, rising and falling as it rested on the shocking paleness of my belly. And how that was gone. How I’d lost her.
“Yeah, man,” I said. The words just fell out of my mouth automatically. “Always.”
“See,” Freddie told Hackett, “Buckeye’s going to fit right in. We just have to introduce him to the right people first.” He grinned. “Like the Viking.”
“Oh God,” Hackett said. “Although?” He paused and raised an eyebrow. “Hell of a way to start the year.” He and Freddie laughed.
“For real,” Freddie said.
“Who’s the Viking?”
“We’ll introduce you,” Hackett said.
“And first party we get you to,” Freddie continued, “we’ll find a way to get the two of you alone somewhere.”
“The Viking?” I repeated, trying to sound as interested as they were. “All right.”
“Oh, yeah.” Freddie cupped the air in front of his chest. “Good times.”
He and Hackett went on about how parties worked at Fullbrook. Nothing like home. There were no older brothers buying kegs and there were no empty houses. Curfew was taken seriously, and the faculty lived in the dorms. Security patrolled campus every night. Parties were harder to throw. But they had them all the same. They just had to be subtle and clever about it. “We have our ways,” they said.
“Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” Freddie said.
“Where there’s a wallet, there’s a way,” Hackett echoed.
“Where there’s a window, there’s a way.” Freddie and Hackett slapped hands.
Everything about life at Fullbrook was different. Different language. Different way of walking, of shaking hands, of holding yourself when you spoke to other people. I felt like a goddamn alien. Like I’d crash-landed on another planet and I was too far away from home to ever get back. And I couldn’t go back. There was no way I could go home, and it felt like there was no home anymore anyway. Home was only home when it had still made sense, the home where I’d floated through school not worrying about a damn thing, because I didn’t have to. Everything so familiar I could get from here to there with my eyes closed and talk to everybody I knew with my ears closed, so to speak, because I already knew what they were going to say. The home where I knew all the traditions and didn’t have to slam scotch I’d never heard of, where I didn’t have to wear a tie to dinner, home where girls wore jeans around school, just like I did, not dresses and skirts.
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