Third. I came in third—and I’ve beaten my old best time by two seconds.
I gulp breaths and fight back a smile. As I clamber out of the pool, my muscles tremble. The team claps, some of them, and echoes ring off the arched ceiling. My toes squelch through puddles on the tiled floor. The announcer yaps on, deafening.
I shiver my way into a towel. Usually the guys would be clapping me on the back, but they’re keeping their distance today. Doesn’t surprise me. I gather they’re not taking the innocent-until-proven-guilty approach. If I’d been accused of being with Dr. Meyers, the very hot, very female econ teacher, would this be happening?
The meet closes well. Coach swaggers out of the building as if he swam every event himself. He whistles out of the auditorium onto the bus for the forty-minute drive home.
I’m one of the last up the bus steps. I edge down the aisle, the black-ridged rubber path, and nobody’s eyes meet mine. Every so often, a backpack occupies a seat. Derek Cooper and Alison Gardner’s bags. I could be sitting there, but they don’t move their things.
I bring silence rippling up with me row by row, a cloak trailing from my shoulders, a sweep of averted eyes and concentrated texting. No room at these inns. As I pass Dean Prince, whose nose is weirdly swollen, he gives me an outright filthy look. I frown and move on.
Herman from Chemistry. Layna from Calc. Bailey, my relay partner. None of them says a word. My heart is deflating, a sad, old balloon.
I sit down in a seat in the back left corner, alone with my journal.
Everything I did to make these friends. Two years’ worth of work, with no result. This might as well be my first day again. Fresh off the plane. A reset button, and I wasn’t the one who pushed it. I wasn’t the one who made the choice.
I grit my teeth and look down at the phone cupped in my hands, thinking of Valentine.
When I glance back up, I catch Sophie Crane looking away, whispering something to Bailey. Do they believe it? The accusation is so ridiculous. Under the layers of worry and hurt, I’m a bit offended that people don’t think I have better taste than Dr. Norman.
I stare out the window as the bus snails through the parking lot. Why would somebody do that to me? Make that up. Who would do it? Someone who wanted to out me, maybe? But if Matt only told Olivia, and Olivia only told Claire—
She wouldn’t.
Claire wouldn’t.
She wears her grudges like armor. But she wouldn’t . . .
Would she?
The key’s teeth chew down on the lock.
His door swings wide, an opening lid to a treasure chest. Light spills out like liquid gold.
Hood down, head up—check around, make sure nobody saw—
Slow down, heart.
I shut the door behind me and head down the hall.
Hello? Someone there? A familiar voice, a familiar smell.
I round the corner, and it’s the most familiar sight, isn’t it—
a coffee mug on a glass table. Evening light in his tired eyes. His patched gray sweater on narrow shoulders, rolled up to his elbows.
Shock slathered onto his expression.
Surprise, I say.
The room expands, unfolds, unpacks.
There are miles of gray thread coiling between us.
Cavernous silence and those eyes,
those eyes.
June. What are you doing here?
(I have missed so badly the sight of you saying my name.)
It’s freezing. Everything is freezing. My toes and fingers, long and pale. I had to see you. With what they’re saying about Norman—I had to make sure you’re okay.
He opens his mouth, showing nothing on his tongue but quiet.
The man of words, a dry inkwell at last.
He walks step by step my way, and I watch his
purposeful strides,
worn sneakers, grayed from morning runs,
stopping inches from mine.
I don’t know what to do, he says. I don’t know who said it was that McCallum kid and Neil Norman, of all people, but it’s only going to get people more riled up. I . . . God, if he gets in serious trouble—the guy has a wife and kids, there’s—
It has to blow over. They have zero proof.
I guess. His voice cracks. He licks his lips. June, I’ve been thinking.
Yeah?
We can cut ties. I can delete your number, texts, emails, everything—I can make sure nobody ever finds out. I can’t fix what’s happening at school, but if it’ll help you . . .
His ocean eyes, deep black tumults, lightning storms.
My three words, three drops of rain. Don’t you dare.
But
If something happens, I am going to be there with you.
I can see his heart beat faster. Are you—
Of course I’m sure. My chest is so full, I think my ribs are cracking. I didn’t come here for a good-bye, David.
I know.
I came here to . . . I wanted . . .
I know, he repeats.
His words light a fire under my lungs. My breaths are thick ash.
So what do we do? I ask.
I don’t know.
But you love me?
Of course I love you.
The top of my heart, hinged, cracks open,
and my fears, ravens, fly out.
They spill away like black paint,
leaving me empty and pink and new.
Hopeful.
He’s reaching out. I’m reaching up to take his hand,
passing through a veil of guilt,
swaying two inches before his eyes. David.
His hands rest on my shoulders, lightly as wings.
(your lips fall to mine, natural as gravity,
close on my lower lip, rough and sweet.
i touch, i bite, i taste.)
I consume him.
(the sounds at the back of my throat are yours. everything,
everything is yours.)
I press tight to his body. Between us is a hair-fine fault line,
hardly a fault at all.
His slender hands settle on my back and draw me in, close, closer.
Heat tingles in every inch of this skin,
dense, thick awareness, pins and needles and blisters.
I need you, too, I murmur, flushed, aching.
His lips are a balm on mine. Gentle. June, he whispers, that’s all.
Radiance and setting sun, bliss and blinding want.
(i feel you, cradle you, cherish you.)
When finally we break—
Missed you—
So much—
our shared words whisper and blend and merge.
A kiss, a rough kiss, the stamp of it is raw heat.
He pulls back, pulling half of me with him,
and smiles.
My own smile shrugs itself on,
wrapping me in comfort.
For weeks I have sweated,
labored,
aching to drive Sisyphus’s stone up this eternal mountain,
and here: the summit.
Here they are. Here are his eyes. I have arrived
in the sunlight of his regard.
It’s one in the morning when I lock us in for our thousandth test of willpower.
His room hasn’t changed an inch: bare surfaces, empty desk, closed drawers, furniture sparse and simply made.
Blank, save his shelves of roommates:
Hemingway and Beukes, Christie and Martin, Márquez and Morrison, Rowling and—his best friend—the Bard.
Every flavor of word treated
tenderly, every corner soft from extensive paging.
I slip into his narrow bed. We lock tight,
two-lane traffic on a one-lane street.
I trace his jaw; the stubble nips my fingers.
He brushes my hair back. What did you tell them?
I’m at Olivia’s for the night. I don’t know. We should tell them.
Yo
u’ve said that eight thousand times, June.
Eight thousand and one.
I curl into him. He is a brazier, blazing,
lighting me mercilessly.
He smells like apple and a touch of alcohol. My feet fold against his calves.
I know we should, he says. But do you want to tell them?
Of course not.
His chest collapses in a sigh under my hand. Then there we go.
Yeah. I guess. I touch my lips to his collarbone, his throat. He hums with contentment.
I’m excited, he whispers. A confession. I’m excited for us. I keep thinking stupidly far into the future, you know?
I tilt my head up, surprised. This is an edit of the usual sentence. David is the here-and-now; David is grounded and pragmatic; David is not fantasy and imagination.
Where is this coming from?
Me too, I whisper, and wonder.
I think about it all the time. After you finish college, us traveling. Brazil. India.
I smile. Let my questions fade
to haze and hope.
Greece, I say sleepily. Mount Olympus.
The world is here in this bed with us, continents quilted together,
the cosmos tucked against the headboard.
His finger traces my wrist, a figure skater flying in lazy figure eights. Venice. A room this size that smells like the sea. Alaska. Lit candles, and fighting off an eighteen-hour night.
The Great Wall, I say. Stonehenge. The Sydney Opera House.
He kisses me. The moon. Again, he kisses me. The moon.
Wednesday morning dawns. The air is as chill and damp as drying tears,
Autumn’s last battle. (Smells like brittle sap and old fires and cold sun.)
That sun in the sky is a dream, when I leave him, when I head home.
I push the oaken door, built to loom;
my feet on the hardwood are parcels of potpourri,
featherlight and inconsequential.
I grab my backpack and stop in the foyer. My parents have materialized on the steps.
They stand like stone sentries,
unfamiliar rubies set in their eyes.
My father: Juniper, sweetheart, we need to talk.
But I need to go to school.
My mother: You left your change of clothes here last night. So I called Olivia’s house.
I turn to ice limb by limb. I . . . it’s . . . I’ll explain after school.
Juniper—
After. I turn on my heel. I totter out. Shell-shocked.
Three periods’ worth of thought gets me nowhere. They noticed. They’re asking, finally.
Will I push them away? Cocoon myself in lies again?
In the hall between classes, I pass the door to his room. I glance in,
see his fingers wringing clouds of dust out of the chalkboard.
He catches my eye for the briefest second.
Some hand is at my throat,
choking off all sound, all breath, all air.
It should be branded on my forehead—I’m going to tell them—hideous, fiery letters.
I continue down the hall, gaining momentum as I go.
ON WEDNESDAY, IT RAINS AND RAINS. I CAN’T FOCUS in any of my classes, watching the droplets trickle down the windowpanes. I’ve hardly slept since the rumors broke on Monday about Lucas. Of course I can’t turn Juniper in, but what am I supposed to do, knowing that’s a lie? Lucas doesn’t deserve that. Even Norman, douchebag of the century, doesn’t deserve that.
García has avoided my eyes all week, and I keep busy trying not to imagine Juniper at his side. They’d be an unbearably photogenic couple, which makes it about eight times weirder. I don’t think of teachers as having relationships, even friendships. In my mind, they exist in their own space: that twenty-foot stretch at the front of the room, where they’re omniscient and all-powerful, where they rule our miserable lives. Everywhere else, they do not exist.
But since Sunday night, I’ve been thinking: what would it be like to talk to García as if he were our age? Talking about our lives and our interests and the future? It would be so weird, seeing him through that lens.
Though I guess since Juniper dropped his class, she doesn’t know him through the omniscient teacher-lens. And that, more than anything, reassures me.
· · · · · · ·
IT’S STILL RAINING WHEN I GET HOME. I SHUT THE door on the sound of it, sighing.
Coming home today is the dull pain of a headache. Besides a glimpse of Kat on Monday evening—she looked frighteningly numb—I haven’t seen her at all. All I have is the recorded messages from yesterday, and now today: We are calling to inform you that Katrina Scott missed one or more classes today.
My phone buzzes. I pull it out, expecting Juni, daring to hope it might be Claire or Matt. But the screen reads: Daniel.
Frowning, I pick up. “Hello?”
“Hey. Olivia.”
“Dan?” I dump my backpack and my bag from the pharmacy on the kitchen table. “How’s, um, how’s it going?”
“Pretty good, pretty good.”
“That’s . . . good?” Why are you calling me?
“Look, I heard about Juniper landing in the hospital. That blows.”
“It does.”
“She doing okay?”
“I . . . yeah,” I say in my most discouraging monotone, still wondering what the point of this call is.
“How about you? You must be stressed.”
“Sort of. I mean, she’s better now.” I wander into the living room and sit on our sofa. The springs creak. “Dan—”
“What are you up to?”
“What?”
“Because if you wanted to come over later, you could. You know, for stress relief.”
I take my phone from my ear and stare at it, half floored, half repulsed. “Excuse me?” I splutter, crushing it back to my ear. “Wait, slow down. Are you seriously asking what I think you’re asking?”
“I . . . don’t know?”
“Okay, I’ll simplify: is this or is this not a poorly disguised booty call?”
“Well, my parents aren’t home. House is empty.”
“Oh my God, Daniel. Let me make this perfectly, utterly clear. No.”
He’s quiet for a second. Then he says, “What, are you with Matt now?”
“That’s not—”
“Because he’s not even a good guy, you know.”
“He’s not a good guy? And yet you’re the one still trying to hook up with someone who has told you no, like, three times? You could ask out any other human being. What do I have to do here?”
“So the other weekend meant nothing to you. At all.”
I close my eyes. “Look, this has got to be some sort of communication issue. It was fun, okay? I had fun, but it was a onetime thing. I thought we were clear on—”
“It doesn’t have to be.”
“But it does. A, I don’t want to hook up again, and B, I like someone else, so—”
“So it is Matt. What’s the difference between screwing him and screwing me?”
My mind stops. I have no idea what to say, but that’s A-okay, because, God bless him, he keeps on going: “Besides, if you’re going to let everyone and his brother get it, can’t blame me for assuming you’re down.”
When I find words, they rush out in a waterfall. “So by sleeping with more than one guy, I’ve forfeited my right to hook up with who I want? Or are you saying that by having sex with multiple people, I’ve become, like, emotionally incapable of falling for one person? Either way, are you insane?”
“Hey, all I’m saying is, you can’t act like a slut and expect people not to treat you like a slut. It’s just false advertising.”
Sweet Jesus.
I’ve felt my share of anger. There are some kinds you can’t hold in your body. Some types burst out of your every pore at once, and you feel yourself expanding and twisting and turning into something that isn’t human. You feel hot waves of ra
ge punching their way out of your skin. Right now, I swear I could melt metal just by breathing on it.
False advertising? I am done. I’m done with the stares and the rumors and the lack of basic human decency, let alone privacy. I’m so done with being defined by this single part of me.
“I’m not advertising anything!” I yell, my words ringing off the living room walls. “My body is not yours. I don’t owe you, I don’t owe boys some fucked-up compensation for my reputation, I don’t owe the public an apology for my personal life, I don’t owe anyone a goddamn thing, so get out of my life and stay out!”
I punch end call so hard, a discolored spot shows up on the phone screen. For a second I tremble, my teeth buried deep in my lip. Then I make for the stairs, my hand pressed against my mouth. I feel ill.
I walk into my room, shut the door with agonizing calm, and twist the lock. I fling my phone at the Star Wars pillow on my bed. The muscles in my arm ache in recoil, the phone sinks deep into Han Solo’s face, and I let out a strangled, animal noise of rage. I stand there staring at myself in the mirror, my red cheeks, my sleeve askew, my torn expression. My face is hot and swollen and furious, and I feel like a melting wax candle.
Lightning flashes like a strobe in the window. The overcast day has turned thunderous.
A photograph sits on my dresser. It faces the wall 365 days of the year. I’ve gotten used to the sight of the black backing of the frame, a cardboard square collecting a gentle sheen of dust. But now I turn it around.
Mom, Dad, Kat, and I stand behind the glass, preserved in a summer afternoon. Every year, Dad insisted on taking our Christmas photo six months before Christmas to the day, to mark the point at which we started getting closer to the holiday. Kat’s smile is radiant, Dad’s grin pushes dimples into his cheeks, and I’m in the middle of a huge laugh. Mom always got a joke ready so our smiles weren’t canned. That year, it was, “What do you call Santa’s helpers? Subordinate Clauses.”
God, I want our family back. I would kill right now for Kat’s quiet understanding or Dad’s gruff reassurances. I want Mom to tuck my hair behind my ear, or make up a bedtime story on the spot, or rub my back and promise it’s going to be all right. She could speak quickly, quietly, for hours on end, until there was nothing but her voice wrapping me up in warmth and acceptance. I used to have the knowledge that the world could hammer at me all it wanted, but she would always be there to lift me up. Mom with her bitter-smelling perfume and her jangling bracelets and her full, wild laugh.
Seven Ways We Lie Page 22