But that was a while back. Because once Heather and I got together, there wasn’t anyone else. And once Heather was gone, there was just no one at all. I didn’t know shit after that.
“You want a refill?” I finally asked.
“Sure.”
Hackett had told me he’d hidden bottles in crevices all around the base of Horn Rock, and we wandered over to the far side, where no one else was around. We found a bottle under a couple of smaller rocks and dug it out. The moonlight played on the glass as I poured out a little into each of our cups, and I liked the way the reflections wrapped around our hands, too, like a long, pale scarf.
We clicked cups and sipped. Aileen leaned back against the rough slope of the horn. Two girls squealed in the shadows behind me. I jumped and Aileen laughed. The girls sprang out from behind a tree, chased by one of the guys on the hockey team.
“Are you scared?” Aileen asked me.
“No.”
She laughed again. She finished the little bit I’d poured in her cup and asked for more. I wasn’t sure how many drinks she’d had already.
“You sure?”
“What? Are you watching me?” She pulled herself forward from the rock and held her cup toward me. “Please?”
I poured her a little more and set the bottle back down in the little hole in the ground. When I stood back up, she leaned into me, one hand resting on my hip.
“The Buckeye,” she said softly. “Do you like that nickname?”
“No.”
“What would you rather be called?”
“Bax.”
“Is that what they called you back home?”
“Yes,” I lied.
“Did your girlfriend make that up?”
I didn’t say anything—just let the silence hold us for a moment.
Aileen pouted and her blue eyes floated, glistening as she looked up at me. She bit part of her bottom lip and nudged me with her shoulder. “You’re as big as a tree, Bax.”
This pulled me out of my daze and made me smile.
“Oh,” she said. “He’s alive after all.”
“I’m alive,” I said. I liked being there with her. It felt good to feel another body so close to mine again, the jitters in my stomach popping out into my limbs, working their way down to my fingertips. But I also knew I didn’t want this to continue. Or, rather, I did and I didn’t. I wanted it. It. But not now. There was a difference, and it was suddenly clear to me. My hands trembled. Not here. Not now. It didn’t seem right—even if she wanted me.
I leaned back and she had to catch herself from falling forward. She took a step toward me again and I held her at the elbow. “Maybe we should go find everyone else?” I was blunt and stupid, but I didn’t mind because something about being alone with her now didn’t sit right in my gut. She stumbled, and I tried again. “Yeah, let’s go find everyone else.”
Aileen gave me a puzzled look. “You want to go find people. Who?”
“You know, our friends.”
She nodded. “Oh,” she said, and smiled. “Wait a second.” She took my hand and pulled it around her back. “You’re scared,” she continued.
“No. That’s not it.”
But there it was. Those hands. Those hands Heather had stared at, hands that could break someone. It felt like I needed to tell Aileen. I’d been hiding it from her, from all of them, really, Jules and Javi, too. If they were my friends, I needed to be honest with them.
She reached around with her other arm and pulled us together. Squeezed. Before I could speak, she kissed me. I pulled back, but she remained close and locked around me. “Don’t worry, Bax,” she said. “I like you too, you know.”
“What?”
She giggled. As she did, I noticed something shift from the corner of my eye. A shape or shadow leaned against a tree at the edge of the clearing. Aileen giggled again, because she didn’t notice. With her fingers she gently turned my face back to hers. Then the woods exploded behind us.
“Hell, yes!”
Two guys from the hockey team came blasting out from behind a tree, snapping branches and kicking rocks as they came at us. “The Buckeye and the Viking—getting it on!”
“Jesus, guys,” I said. “Take it easy.”
They rushed me and bounced me with their fists. I could smell the sourness in their sweat. They were wasted. Tucker and Zak. Tucker turned and whistled, and another two guys from the team came stumbling out. “Oh,” one of them said, eyeing Aileen. “Just us and the Viking?” He grinned.
“Fuck off,” Aileen told him.
“Guys,” I said, trying to keep things as calm as possible. “I’ll catch up with you later.”
Tucker whistled again. “Yeah, right, you need a little privacy.” He laughed.
“Or,” Zak said, “I mean, we are a team, right?” He shrugged, and the other guys laughed.
I shoved him back into the guys behind him. “The hell’s the matter with you?”
Aileen slipped behind me, sliding along the rock toward the little path that led around to where the rest of the party was happening. I reached for her hand but she batted it back. “These are your boys?” she snapped. “Give me a break.”
She stormed off, making her way toward the party. Zak called to her again, but she ignored him, and I stood in the path, blocking their way. They could have circled around me, but no one did. “Seriously,” I said to them. “Try me. Just try me.”
“Yo, Buckeye has some fight up in him,” Tucker said. He threw a shadowboxing punch in the air between us, and I almost took him up on it. I had to clench a fist just to let out some steam.
Tucker relaxed. “Sorry, man. Didn’t mean to bust in on you. I mean, I didn’t think she’d take off like that. We were only joking.”
“Fooled me,” I said. He heard the venom in my voice. These guys were so damn Fullbrook. They fucked around as they pleased and just said sorry after, but only if someone took offense. They wiped their hands and kept it moving. Never a damn care in the world.
“Let’s go,” Zak said. “We’re out of vodka. Come on, Buckeye. Take one with us, before you go find the Viking. She’ll forgive you, don’t worry.”
“Zak,” I said. “Stop calling her that.”
“Oh shit,” Zak said. “He actually likes her.” He laughed. “She’s not a girl for liking, man. She’s, well . . .” He nodded his chin at me. “You know.”
I was about to lose it, but Tucker stepped in the way. He nodded to me like he was doing me a favor. Maybe he was. At a place like Fullbrook, the smallest, most insignificant gestures passed for actual concern.
“Let’s go,” Tucker said to the guys, leading them back the way they’d come—in the other direction, not after Aileen, so I stomped off into the woods to find her.
CHAPTER 18
* * *
JULES DEVEREUX
All I wanted was to figure out how to get down from the ridge without having to nose-dive the steep slope, or walk past anybody on my way to the easy path back to the boathouse, but it seemed like that was just going to be impossible. Two hockey players were having a literal pissing contest to see who could hit higher up a tree; another guy was giving a girl a piggyback ride up the path while she whacked his chest like a jockey on a horse. I almost plopped down next to two girls I saw huddled under a tree, whispering, but when one of them pulled out her phone and the screen lit their faces, I realized it was Gillian and Shriya, and I backed away silently. I wanted nothing to do with them especially.
Another set of footsteps crashed down the path toward me, and I almost hid behind a tree, until I recognized the outline—it was Bax. He looked frantic, nervous, eyes scanning, and when he noticed it was me, he paused. “Did Aileen come this way?”
“No. Why?”
He let out a breath and looked back the direction he came.
“Bax. I was kinda thinking I was supposed to leave the two of you alone. Is everything okay?”
“No, no,” he said. “It’s good. It�
�s just.” His shoulders slumped. He paused. “I feel like I need to tell her something first. But I couldn’t.” He nodded at me. “Actually, I feel like I need to tell all of you. Javi, too. It’s been burning up inside me all year.”
He took a deep breath, leaned back, and let it go into the air above him. “I mean ever since last year, I’ve just been trying to figure out how.”
I was a little scared by the seriousness in his voice. “Is this like a confession, Bax?”
“No. No, it’s different. It’s just, I feel like if I don’t tell you, then I’m not being fully honest. And I want to. Be honest. Do the frigging right thing. Especially after what happened last year.”
His expression changed and he looked like he drifted away a little, lost in the memory.
“You know how I used to play football? There was this kid named Vinny Dawson. A friend of mine. There was an accident. It was my fault.”
As he told me the story, we stood there on the path with the voices of the party circling like bats, never landing, never appearing, just looming in the darkness around us. I took his hand as he told me about the ambulance pulling away from the football field. “That’s just it,” he said, turning his hand in mine, but letting me still hold it, so we were both staring down at his palm. “That’s what Heather said. ‘Those hands could break somebody.’ ”
For a moment, we just stood there, and I tried to smile and let him know I was glad he’d told me, glad that he could, but I didn’t know if he could even see it. I nodded and was about to say something, anything, to let him know I cared, when I heard someone laugh behind me.
“Aw, Bax. Now, I thought you said you weren’t barking up that tree?”
Bax pulled his hand out of mine and the fist he made so quickly actually did frighten me. I turned, and Freddie Watts elbowed one of the guys next to him. There were three of them, and Freddie was holding a bottle of vodka. “I was looking for you, to come share it with you and Aileen. Heard you two were together.” He laughed. “But then I find you with Jules. Fine with me. I don’t care.” He held the bottle up. “Shots for the road, kids?”
Bax stepped toward Freddie, his massive shoulders like a wall between me and the other guys. I was too damn tired for all this. All this macho nonsense. All the senseless teasing. I was exhausted. I didn’t need to stick around for the cockfight. I was pretty sure, after what he had just told me, choking back the tears, that Bax didn’t want to get into any fights. He was a mess inside. But the violence didn’t even have to be physical. Freddie’s tongue could still lash out any string of words that would slip around and bite me. I wanted to stick by Bax, but I couldn’t. I was too raw for any more that night.
I felt bad, but as Bax stood his ground telling Freddie and the guys to go back the way they came, I snuck away down the path toward the last clearing.
The tree was still there. My tree. The tree out on the edge of the bluff, still clinging, not letting go. One day it would fall, or the ground would crumble beneath it, but for as long as I’d been at Fullbrook, it had been just as it was now—tenacious, determined, leaning like a body into the breeze, bare branches extended toward the sky. The trunk twisted like the arm of a dancer, and below, on the lip of dirt, the base widened. I curled up into it like it was a lap. I’d never needed to get high here. I’d taken breaths as big as I could and just held them until they burned, and then watched the cool air mist like smoke when I exhaled. And even tonight, even with the shrieks and the screams and the laughter that all cut and swooped through the night like invisible birds, there was a momentary lull and silence, I was alone, and the moonlight was enough to hold me.
If I could have wrapped the curl of tree trunk around me, I would have, because after only a few moments alone, I heard someone stumbling from the path into the clearing, and I didn’t have to look to know who it was. I could tell by the way his weight fell with each step. I knew the rhythm of his steps sober, I knew them drunk, and in truth, I still knew the outline of his body in my hands, and I could have drawn it in the dirt with my fingertip.
“Hey,” he said, wiping his hand through his hair. “It’s you.”
He hid his surprise the way he always did, with that lazy squint, that retreat into quiet, his sleepy smile, the way he waited for a girl to speak to him first so he could play with her. I wished it wasn’t me.
“Your party’s a success,” I said. “No need to look so mopey.”
“It isn’t raining,” he said. “That was my only worry. Now . . .” He stepped back and waved his hand out in the general direction of everybody huddled around Horn Rock behind us. Some whiny emo music echoed from the other side. There was something so much cockier about him this year, even the way he stood and walked, like there was more weight in his gait—he never hurried anymore. “I promised everyone,” he continued, “this year’s party is going to be so much better than last year’s.”
That he’d smuggled bottles in his own bags from home didn’t surprise me, but that he’d found a way to have even more mailed to him right on campus did. I’d seen guys mail themselves marijuana from back home, which was already crazy, and Ethan had done it too, but he never worried about any of that, it was all a game to him and he was confident he’d always win. That was what I was thinking about, actually, when he brought up the party from the year before. That confidence. Confidence doesn’t have to be cocky. It hadn’t been last year, when he’d lit the joint right there in front of everyone and passed it to me. What I’d really wanted when our fingers rubbed each other’s as I took the joint from him, when I’d smoked it and stared straight into the crowd of seniors, was that same sense of confidence. I’m not afraid: That’s really all I wanted to be able to say, and to say it without posturing. He seemed to say it all the time, even when he merely wiped his long hair back over his head like a rock star and remained silent.
He dripped with it, always, just as he did as he stood there by my tree. His sapphire eyes settled on me and stayed there. “I mean, last year was awesome too,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said, standing. And a small part of me went zipping back a year when, stoned and sloppy, we’d first kissed.
But that was history. It was too easy to remember the good stuff like that and forget about the boredom and annoyance and about realizing that without the weed, we had a hard time talking to each other, not to mention the hard time I had listening to him spout off in class, or worse, when we were all hanging out for lunch or something. It’s just hard to take a guy seriously when he talks about his family pulling themselves up by their bootstraps while he’s wearing his own five-hundred-dollar pair of shoes.
He stumbled over one of the bulging roots, and out of habit, instinct, I reached for him and caught him. He smiled. “I’m fine,” he said.
“I don’t think so.”
“I am.” He paused, his head wobbling slightly. “You know earlier? I wasn’t kidding.” He pointed at my chest. “I love that shirt on you.”
He hadn’t touched me, but it felt like he had. I zipped up my sweatshirt all the way. “Come on,” I said, stepping away. “Let’s get you back to someone else.”
“But hold up,” he said.
I ignored him, and then he slumped again, sliding partway down the tree. I turned and lifted him up again.
“It’s like you were just waiting here for me. At our tree,” he said softly.
And it was that easy, wasn’t it—the way he could just take it like that and call it “ours.” His arm was around me tightly in an instant, and I stood as straight as I could so he wouldn’t loom too much over me.
“It’s so funny.”
“What is?” I said, trying to get out from under his arm.
He bent close, and I shifted to the side so that he rested against the tree, not me. “You and me, here, again.”
“No. It’s not.”
“But this is our tree.”
“All right, enough. Let’s get you back to Gillian. You’re her responsibility now. Not
mine.”
I tried to walk away, but he held my hand and pulled me back alongside the tree. “Hey,” he said quietly, his hair swinging down in front of his eyes. “Look at that. We’re all alone out here.”
“No we’re not. Come on. Let’s go.”
“No. We are.”
“Ethan.”
“But this is our tree.”
CHAPTER 19
* * *
JAMES BAXTER
By the time I’d gotten Freddie and the guys to clear out, Jules was gone and I was on my own again, so I went looking for Aileen. I was only two feet into the darkness when I nearly tripped over Gillian and Shriya, who were both giggling as they scrolled through a couple of photos on one of their phones. They were sitting at the base of a tree.
Shriya looked up first. “Buckeye?”
“Yeah.”
“I could tell by your outline.”
I realized I was standing between them and the moonlight.
“Or you could be a bear,” she continued.
“Thanks.”
“What are you doing?” Gillian asked.
“What are you doing?”
“By yourself, I mean.”
“Looking for someone.”
“Oh, did she actually come?” Gillian said, without missing a beat. “She’s gone a little crazy this year.”
“Jesus. I meant Aileen. But you don’t have to go after Jules all the time either.”
“Oh, don’t get all grumpy,” Gillian continued. “You haven’t been here for all of it. You have no idea.”
“You’re dating her ex-boyfriend. It’s not rocket science.”
“No. See, that’s just it,” Gillian said. “That’s not the whole story. I told her I liked him. I told her I was going to tell him, and then next thing I know they are totally scoring.”
Tradition Page 12