Because You Love To Hate Me

by Ameriie

  On top of that, Jim kept asking me questions about you, Jean. What’s it like for her being a senator’s daughter? Has she ever been to the Capitol? Does she ever talk about her mom’s policies?

  I was jealous, and I was pissed. It was the basic recipe for Shirley Losing at Chess, which was why I ended up whittled down to just my king.

  In my defense, though, Jim wasn’t much better off: he had only his king and a rook left.

  We were seriously stuck, and I was tired of running my piece back and forth across the board.

  “Stop chasing my king,” I snarled.

  “If I saw a way to do that,” he clipped back, “then obviously I would. How about, instead, you stop running away from my rook?”

  “Let’s just draw, James. This game is never going to end otherwise.”

  A pause. Then his eyebrows perked up with mischief. “And what would happen if it never ended, Holmes?”

  “I’d miss orchestra, which would be bad.”

  “Why? Will it trigger the apocalypse? Fire! Pestilence! Famine!”

  “Ha-ha.” I snapped my king over a square. The same move I’d been making for a full ten minutes.

  And he scooted his rook after . . . only to pause, fingers twirling across the jagged top. Then his lips curled up. He moved his rook diagonally. Yeah, not sideways, but diagonally.

  I blinked. Then wagged my head like a cartoon who’d just been slapped. “You can’t do that.”

  “Says who?”

  “The rules!”

  “Which we know don’t matter, Holmes. Not if we both agree to stop believing in them.” His grin spread wider and wider, and I knew from the hair prickling on the back of my neck that I had stepped right into his trap.

  But I didn’t care. Because my pulse was picking up speed. My stomach was spinning in a good way. This wasn’t like that time I had salmonella. This was like that roller coaster at Universal Studios.

  And I wanted more of it.

  So when Jim next declared, “From now on, rooks go diagonally, and kings can move like queens,” I didn’t argue. I simply settled into the new rhythm until at last I won. An hour later, right before the bell rang for the end of fourth period.

  And guess what? The apocalypse didn’t come, and Mike told me Aruba sucked anyway.

  In January, Scot’s Yard won the chess match. Of course. Dad was irate (do you remember that phone call? You said you could hear his shouts from the girls’ bathroom), but I didn’t care.

  Oh, the chess team thought I cared. You should’ve seen how they hung their heads on the bus ride back to Baker Street. All of them bracing for my shouts . . .

  But I didn’t shout. I was scarcely thinking about Scot’s Yard or how, yet again, I had fallen for effing Boden’s Mate—my eternal curse, that move.

  No, instead, I was wrapped up in a new book from Jim. Pedro Páramo. A tale swirling with ghosts and purgatory and the lives that could have been.

  I loved the book. Devoured it in a night. Even in all its magical realism and intangible betweens, it felt real to me. Familiar.

  Yet the next day, I said, “I hated it. It never felt grounded.”

  A crooked smile. Jim knew I was kidding, but he didn’t push me for a real reaction. He just eased his pawn to D6.

  A bad start for him, but I was feeling charitable that day. Plus I didn’t want the game to end. Not yet. Not after reading that book and putting the puzzle pieces together.

  Oh, don’t you see? Jim is a ghost. Forever just passing through. That day in the library, he was trapped in purgatory until he found whatever mysterious key he needed to move on. Meanwhile I was just beginning to realize that one day I would blink a heartbeat too long and find that when my lashes had lifted, Jim was gone.

  I wasn’t ready for that. Those stolen moments with him in the library had become precious to me. I’m sorry, Jean, and so ashamed to admit it. But it’s true. We had built an entire world trapped in time, perfect in all its layers. In its dust motes and sunshine. In its broken carburetor to rattle above the sparrows’ cries. In the stink of bio-lab hand sanitizer to burn over the must of old French pages.

  I knew our glass walls wouldn’t last, and that had left my humor foul. “What else do you have for me, Professor? Maybe something with a happy ending this time? Is that too much to ask?”

  His eyes squinted. Thoughtful and perhaps a bit pleased. “So no winter formal for you tonight, then?”

  “Oh,” I said with a flippant shrug. “Is that tonight?” Obviously, I knew when it was. But no one had invited me, and I knew for a fact that no one had invited him, either.

  I won’t lie: I was afraid he might ask you to the dance, Jean. Ever since he’d plied me with those questions about the Watson family, I thought maybe he was into you.

  But now I see the truth.

  And I also see what an idiot I was.

  “I’m not going,” I added, just in case Jim wasn’t aware of my solo status.

  “All right, then, Holmes.” He nodded slowly. “I have a book in mind for you. Where’s your dorm? I’ll bring it.”

  “Boys aren’t allowed in the girls’ wing.”

  “Come, now.” A smug bounce of those eyebrows. “As much as I love when you talk rules and regulations, I’m interested to see a different side of you.” He eased his queen to D7, dragging his thumb across the top. A caress I couldn’t tear my eyes from.

  The movement set off the roller coaster inside me. My throat closed up. My stomach ached with need, loop after loop. And it wasn’t Jim’s words, as flirty as they’d been, that did it. It was the movement—the offer implied in his fingers against the queen: Why be what you’re expected to be? You could be like me, Shirley Holmes, if you just tried.

  The thing was, as much as I wanted it and as much as I hungered for Rebellion with a capital R, I wasn’t ready to be a ghost. Not yet.

  But I also wasn’t ready to lose my world trapped between. So I smiled, cheeks on fire. “Room fifty-four, James. On the corner. But wait until after the winter formal starts, okay?”

  “Your wish is my command, Holmes.”

  If only that had been true, Jean. If only that had been true.

  He came to the window. Not to the door, as I had anticipated. You were (of course) at the winter formal with Marty, and I was sitting at my desk, pretending to do calculus homework. But I’d been staring at the same problem for an hour without getting anything solved.

  I put on makeup with you—do you remember that? While you were getting gussied up for the dance, I made you show me how to create the illusion of cheekbones. Contouring, you called it. But as soon as you left, I wiped it all off. I was afraid Jim would notice and then make some comment on the “myths of beauty.”

  A tap at the window sent me jumping from my chair. The window was right above my desk, but I had the blinds down. I hadn’t seen him approach over the sliver of roof right outside.

  I lifted the blinds, his face coalescing in the darkness. Hazy and terrifying through the glass. I turned off the light before finagling open the window, and then he said only one thing: “Join me.”

  I didn’t think twice about it. I didn’t think about the rules or the sharp angle of the roof or the forty-foot drop beyond. I didn’t even think about how awkward I looked, clambering onto my desk and squeezing through the window.

  But here’s the thing I see now: we all want that vampire from the CW so badly that sometimes we forget sunlight kills.

  The roof is beautiful at night. The asphalt shingles glitter more than you’d expect. A fairy path that Jim followed while I followed Jim. First we crossed the newer roof above the dormitories until that gave way to the moss-covered, wood shingles of the original school.

  Jim was so comfortable and easy in his angled lope across the roof. Meanwhile, I moved as best I could, out of my element but wishing this height, these shadows, and this magical guide could be mine.

  When at last Jim came to a stop, I recognized from the nest in the gutter and the
dark shape of the hedges below that we were directly above our library nook.

  Jim turned to me, glowing in the starlight. “Let’s sit on the edge.” A command in his tone, yet a question in the way he extended his hand—one I answered by giving him my own hand. His fingers were frozen to ice, but strong all the same.

  Jim crouched at the roof’s lip. He helped me sit so my feet dangled over the hedges. Our hedges, always growing despite the landscapers’ best attempts to stop them.

  In hindsight, it was crazy foolish of us to be up there. I mean, a drop that could break my bones plus a cocktail of hormones and neurotransmitters were booming through my blood. My brain. My heart.

  It was exactly the sort of thing I never did, yet all thought and reason and basic Darwinian good sense had shut down in favor of an electric light show in my chest.

  I thought . . . I hoped Jim would ease down beside me. Close. Touching.

  He didn’t. A chasm of two feet spanned between us.

  Clasping his arms to his chest, he lay back. Legs swinging. Shingles creaking. The wind swept over us, damp with the closest thing to seasons we ever get here. Fragrant with earth and yesterday’s rain. With leaves decomposing under the live oaks.

  No winter here. Just one life giving way to another.

  “Your hands are warm, Holmes,” Jim said eventually, and I realized he had curled his own fingers into fists. Holding in my heat, I wanted to believe.

  “Yours are cold. Have you considered gloves?”

  No laugh. He was too wrapped up in his thoughts that night.

  To cover the embarrassment charging up my cheeks, I mimicked his pose and lay back. Then I hugged my arms to my chest and fixed my eyes on the sky.

  The heat fled my face as fast as it had come, and in an instant I understood why Jim had put this space between us.

  When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains must be the truth. It must be what’s real, and I needed that gap between us to feel it.

  I’m sorry, Jean. I know this all sounds so completely unlike me. But that’s why I have to tell you—don’t you see? I’d never felt anything like it. Not then and not now. No drug has come close to it. No adventure. No dreamscape.

  Air beneath my feet.

  Darkness to hug me tight.

  All with the universe spread above me, speckled and humming and so damned alive that there could only be one outcome from it all: a death foretold and my intestines on the dusty earth below.

  Jim’s phone buzzed at nine thirty. I jolted. Lost. Almost asleep.

  He eased it from his pocket. “An alarm,” he explained lazily. “It goes off every night, so I don’t miss curfew-call at ten.”

  I swallowed—my mouth was dry; would he notice?—and eased up onto my elbows. “You come here every night, then?”

  A grunt of acknowledgment as he pushed to his feet, dusted off his hands, and then helped me to rise.

  “Your fingers are still cold,” I said with a smile.

  “And yours are still warm,” he murmured back, offering a grin of his own. But it wasn’t a real one. It wasn’t the one I wanted.

  As before, he guided me across the roof. Transitioning from the thwack and creak of ancient wood to the muffled glitter of asphalt, and finally back to my window.

  Our room was dark, Jean. You were still away, and although I could have asked Jim to join me inside—the formal wouldn’t end until eleven—I knew he would refuse.

  Or maybe . . . maybe I simply knew he wouldn’t fit inside my cage. He was too big for those walls.

  Instead, we sat on the windowsill. He faced outward, feet resting on the roof. I faced in, feet atop my desk. Atop my calc homework.

  Music thumped through the windowsill. A beat that suggested “YMCA” was playing in the gym, accompanied by that torturous dance I know you think is fun.

  Neither Jim nor I spoke. But unlike the silence before, where the entire universe had cradled me and called me friend, this silence was strained. I could feel the tick of Jim’s internal clock, and there was no denying that the bomb attached was about to go off.

  The breeze kicked at his hair while he picked his thumbnail. A halfhearted movement I didn’t have the guts to interrupt. I just watched. I just waited.

  At last, he shifted toward me, and in that instance, the scrape of his jeans was too loud. Too real. Too inescapable, and made all the more so by his eyes, rooting on my face. Dark behind his glasses.

  My heart picked up speed. Not because I thought he might kiss me—though god knows I wanted him to—but because there was something wrong. Something off.

  “What, James?” I said, harsher than I’d intended. Breaking the spell that had fallen over us.

  His forehead tightened. That stare was killing me. That pause was killing me. Until finally: “I saw you got into Harvard, Holmes.”

  Nothing could have surprised me more, Jean. I hadn’t told anyone about my acceptance e-mail. Not you, not my parents. “How do you know?”

  “I was poking through the school’s server.” He said it so nonchalantly—as if it were perfectly normal. As if I shouldn’t care.

  But I did. “Why were you on the school server? And why were you looking at my e-mails?”

  His hands lifted defensively. “It wasn’t on purpose, Holmes. I told you, I came here to find something.”

  “A key,” I said, my tone mocking and harsh. “So you can walk through walls and whatever other nonsense it is you like to do.”

  That hurt him. I saw it in the way his face fell. “Someone has to step outside the rules,” he said eventually. “How else can I help the people enslaved by them?”

  “And why do you have to help them at all? Hacking into the school’s system will get you expelled.”

  “So? So what if that happens? Why do you care?”

  “Because . . .” I stopped. I had to swallow. Had to gather my thoughts and tamp down this heat that strained against my stomach.

  “Because what?”

  “Nothing.” I looked down at my shadowed calculus homework. A slow rhythm was thumping through the walls now, completely at odds with the frustration building in my lungs. It was the same fury I’d felt when Jim had grilled me on becoming a lawyer.

  Irrational. Childish. And bubbling over too fast. I mean, why should I be the one to confess how I felt? Wasn’t it obvious?

  Jim didn’t push me, though. Not yet. Instead, he asked, “Will you go? To Harvard, I mean.”

  “Of course.”

  “Then why haven’t you told anyone about the acceptance? It came in two weeks ago, Shirley. What are you waiting for?”

  My breath caught. He had said my name. For the first time ever, Jim had said my name, and it was all too much.

  I angled my body toward him, one shoulder inside the dorm, one shoulder out. “What do you want from me, Jim?”

  He shook his head. “Don’t make me say it. Not if you can’t.” His voice was softer now. His body, his face moving ever so slightly toward me. “Or can you?”

  “You’re going to leave, aren’t you?” Our faces were mere inches apart now. “Once you find what you’ve come for, you’ll leave. But I won’t.”

  “You could, though,” he murmured. Closer. Closer. “Come with me, Shirley.”

  “Where?”

  “Outside.”

  “I need more than that, Jim.” My forehead scrunched up. “I’m not like you—I like walls and rules and structure.”

  “I see.” He gave a tiny nod, and the bomb finally went off. Detonating in my rib cage, it kicked out a single, booming heartbeat straight against my ribs.

  Then it happened. Finally, and so gently.

  That’s the only word I can find to describe what we shared. The way Jim pulled me to him. The way he leaned in. The way his gaze flicked from my lips to my eyes, making sure I wanted this.

  I did. So badly I thought I would drown from wanting.

  He closed the space between us. Our mouths touched. Just a brush of skin�
�his upper lip grazing my lower. That was all it was, but I couldn’t breathe. Or move. Or think.

  For the ten seconds or ten minutes or however long our lips hovered together, I tasted the outside. The real. The free fall of Jim and me, together for one perfect moment.

  His hands, warmer now, tangled in my hair. My hands, a bit colder, cupped his face. Deep. Long. Starving. Jim kissed me like we were dying.

  Because time was up, and this was good-bye.

  This story ends with a kiss.

  I mean, sure: while I watched Jim disappear across the rooftop, the night folding over him, I prayed that I would see him again. That our time was up for now, but not forever.

  Yet I knew. People don’t kiss like it’s their last, unless it is.

  The next day, a Saturday, I went to the library. I had no other way of finding Jim. No phone number, no e-mail. And though I didn’t think he’d actually be there, I went to check anyway.

  You probably don’t remember, but it was a gorgeous January day. So bright that sunshine cut right through those foggy windows, and the sparrows sent shadows flying across the floorboards.

  On my chair lay a tattered red book with gold letters stamped onto the cover. Grimm’s Fairy Tales, it read, and a chuckle bubbled in my chest at the sight of it . . . until my eyes hit the chessboard, atop which two pieces glowed in the sunbeams.

  A white queen and a black king, tipped sideways.

  Checkmate.

  I didn’t cry. I thought I would, but as I sat there staring at those pieces, no tears pricked behind my eyes. No sobs gathered in my lungs. Instead, something warm shimmered through me. From my toes, it gusted and raced and grew until all I could do was clutch my arms to my chest and smile.

  I smiled so big it actually hurt my cheeks. It hurt my ribs and my lungs, too.

  Eventually, I scooped up the book of fairy tales. There was no message or anything inside—I hadn’t thought there would be since the book and the chessboard were message enough.

  Then I sauntered languidly away from the table, away from the sunshine and the sparrows and the landscaping. Away from that stolen world trapped between. And as I walked—with a very Rebellious angle to my strut, if I do say so myself—I thought everything was going to be okay.