by Shen, L. J.
“You’re drunk,” she accused.
I may have had a whiskey brain, but my dick, for all intents and purposes, was sober as a priest and admiring my best friend’s feisty nature.
“Okay, Saint Luna,” I threw Daria’s nickname for her in her face.
“Maybe you have an underdeveloped frontal lobe. That’s why you take so many risks.”
She was babbling. She hardly ever talked, let alone about fucking lobes or whatever it was.
“Thanks for the medical assessment, but I don’t think there’s one thing about me that’s underdeveloped. Of course, you would rather slap me around than find out, wouldn’t you? Anything but allowing yourself to fucking feel.”
My good-natured smile was on full display as I advanced to the door. I didn’t stop on the threshold like I’d wanted. The beer, or the joint, or whatever the fuck it was, took charge and told me Luna could use a taste of her own medicine. I breezed right back down to the party, my cheek still stinging from her slap.
Come after me, my heart begged. I need you. Mom feels like shit. I don’t know how long she’s got. I need you.
I looked behind me. Luna wasn’t there.
I grabbed Arabella’s ass as soon as I reached the kitchen, dragging her toward me and slamming my groin against hers. I was rock hard, mainly because Luna had touched me, but as I smirked down at Arabella, I realized that for tonight, she’d do.
“Someone’s ready for round two,” she hummed.
I leaned down for a pucker, showing PDA for the first time since…ever. I didn’t kiss girls in public. It was one of the many things I didn’t do in public to be considerate of a girl who couldn’t bring herself to tell me how the fuck she felt about me.
Vaughn and Hunter were right. I was possessed, and it didn’t matter that I’d grown up with her. I needed to come to terms with the fact that it was possible Luna and I weren’t going to happen.
I closed my eyes, and Arabella did the rest of the job. Our open-mouthed kiss was drowned out by the sounds of her squeaking friends, deafening music, and the squealing of Luna’s sneakers as she pushed past people on her way to the door.
I recognized the sound of her running away from me like it was my first language.
And I vowed, that night, to stop doing the chasing.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
I slapped my forehead as I dashed out of Vaughn’s house, so embarrassed I wanted to throw up.
It wasn’t supposed to go down this way.
I was supposed to muster up the courage to go there and tell him I wanted to stay in California. So I could be near. Near him. And Rosie. And everyone I cared about.
I’d been waiting for him to bring it up all summer, but every time we talked about my college plans, Knight yawned his way into another what-are-we-eating question. There was an air of dismissal about his behavior that rubbed me the wrong way. Almost as if I was asking him if he thought I should become a space cowboy or unicorn vet—like the option of my going elsewhere for higher education was so farfetched, giving it thought was ridiculous.
He’d never once said anything about us. Maybe us didn’t exist anymore. Maybe he’d finally given up on the idea of us, and I had no one to blame but myself. I’d done this. I’d pushed him away.
What killed me the most was that deep down, I knew he’d been right. I hadn’t done my own thing my entire duration on this planet. I was frightened, dependent, and completely out of sorts whenever he or my parents weren’t around. I’d managed to sail through life with no friends—no human connections outside of him and our families, and minimum communication with the world. I was, for lack of better description, a glorified bubble girl. Knight was a friend, but he might as well have been my babysitter. So even though I was angry at him—for the one-night stands, for taking me for granted, for being right about my insecurities—I also couldn’t resent his dismissal.
I wanted to prove him wrong. To go to Boon, just to make a point.
We were growing apart anyway, going in completely different directions.
He was growing upward, in full bloom, while I was developing deeper roots, chaining myself in place.
Besides, what was the point of staying? We were never going to be together.
He was always surrounded by girls. Girls who were nicer than me. Who spoke with real words. Some of them even had great voices. Girls who wore makeup and trendy clothes and curled and flat-ironed their shiny hair. Girls who had sex with boys and knew how to use their bodies to seduce him.
Girls like Arabella.
Those girls were always going to be there, swarming around him, competing for his attention. I couldn’t imagine myself being with him without being eaten alive by the notion that my competition had more to offer. Problem was, not being with him hardly made any difference. Jealousy still wrapped its green claws around my neck and squeezed every time I had a front-row seat to just how enchanting he was to others.
Case in point, I’d slapped him after seeing him with Arabella. Shame and embarrassment flooded my cheeks with heat. I rushed through the Spencers’ front yard, skipping over people making out on the lush lawn. Twisting my head back to see if Knight was chasing me, I bumped into a hard chest. I stumbled backward, then looked up, and of course, it was Vaughn, propping a fresh keg on his ripped shoulder, his dirty black shirt riding up to expose his lower abs and glorious V-lines, peppered with red-lipsticked kisses.
Just your luck, Luna.
Vaughn shifted the keg to his other shoulder and gave me a light nudge back toward his door. His mouth, forever pressed in a disapproving scowl, twitched with a taunting smile.
“What’s the hurry, Rexroth?” He waited expectantly for my response.
Vaughn knew sign language and could read my lips and hands easily. All my parents’ friends’ kids had learned so they could communicate with me. Seeing as he made it a point to stress how little he cared for people in general, I was surprised Vaughn had made the effort. Then again, it was hardly an effort to him. One day his mother gave him an ASL book. The following weekend, he was fluent.
He looked behind my shoulder. I instinctively followed his gaze. Through the glass door to the kitchen, Knight stared at both of us, a beer in his hand, an arm draped over Arabella’s shoulder. She kissed his neck, dragging her hand past his belt and into his…I snapped my gaze back to Vaughn, squeezing my eyes shut.
“Oh, that’s the hurry,” Vaughn finished in his signature arsenic voice.
I wanted to throw up. I took a step sideways, trying to get around him, but he clasped my shoulder on a dark tsk.
“Now that the knight is not here to save his princess, let’s have a little talk.”
He led me like a captured animal, his hand on the back of my neck—caught prey dragged through the savannah—until we were in his cobblestoned courtyard. He spat me out on a curved stone bench tucked into a darkened corner between the tall walls of his mansion, nestled between carefully clipped pink rosebushes.
The Spencers didn’t have a pool at their manor. Instead, they nurtured elaborate gardens that would leave Versailles’ landscape pale in comparison. But the absolute best thing about the Spencers’ estate was the heavenly slice of lush green grass with a white gazebo, surrounded by cherry trees their landscaper treated with hysterical delicacy.
Vaughn crouched before me, like a father figure would, not a friend. But he had never been either of those things to me. He was Knight’s cousin and best friend. His fondness of me—or lack of blazing hatred, more like—stemmed from familiarity and solidarity with Knight. We weren’t as close as people thought we were. I knew where his loyalties lay. He cared for me, but he’d tear me limb from limb if I hurt Knight, and would dump the rest of me like roadkill.
“You haven’t picked a college yet,” he pointed out.
I stared at him, waiting for the punchline. I felt like a punished kid under his scrutiny. Usually we only hung out when Knight was with us, and then Vaughn took his Vaughnness down a notc
h or two. Now we were alone, leaving him free to unleash the demons lurking behind his aqua eyes.
“Are you waiting for a special invitation from the Queen of England?” he asked in his usual aristocratic, flat-lined manner.
Privately, and only to myself, I could admit that Vaughn scared me. He seemed incapable of so many basic feelings. I’d never seen him cry, even though I’d known him since he was born. I’d never seen him laugh—fully, wholly, without abandon. He’d never had a crush, and he never spoke about, or to, girls. He was, in a lot of ways, like Lot’s wife. A hard statue, made of salt and stone, standing on a cliff, emotionless and proud after watching with glee as Sodom—or Todos Santos—was set aflame by its sinners.
I couldn’t answer Vaughn’s question without looking like a complete, pathetic lunatic.
I was waiting for Knight to tell me to stay.
I was waiting for him to realize I could do it.
I could move.
I could leave him.
I could, I could, I should.
Signing nothing, I fingered invisible lint from my crop top. Vaughn shifted his weight to his toes, leaning forward. He pinched my chin with his free hand, tilting my head so our eyes met. His pupils pierced through mine, rummaging inside the dark forest of my mind, turning every stone and tearing every tree in search of my secrets and truths. I wanted to blink, but didn’t want to cower in front of him like everyone else. So I set my jaw, staring at him, unblinking.
“What’s your game, Luna Rexroth?” he whispered.
Swallowing, I arched an eyebrow.
“Is it the power? Control? What’s your kick?” A cold, dead smile spread across his pink lips. “You’re never going to be with him. You don’t have the balls.”
Something deep inside me screamed at Vaughn to shut up. But I couldn’t deny the truth in his words. I had no plans to be with Knight. Not when he was with everyone else. Now Vaughn was clutching my jaw, no longer gentle, but far from the realm of hurting me, either. He touched me clinically. Like a doctor would.
“Move to North Carolina and get far away from here. Go to Boon, Luna,” he clipped. “End the fucking, never-ending shitshow of Luna Rexroth and Knight Cole. The cat is tired, and the mouse is diseased. It’s a fairy-tale love story that took many fucked-up turns and ended as a parody. I know the general assumption is I don’t have a heart. Perhaps it’s true. My brain, however, is fully functional, and I can see exactly where this is going. Save whatever’s left of Knight’s high school experience. He’s a senior now. Go to a place where you won’t shit on his parade every time he shows signs of getting over you. Let him move on with his life. As for you? Find out who you are. Live. Unchain yourself from your parents and him. It’s high time, Rexroth.”
“But I—“
He took my hands, drawing my curled fists to his chest and coiling his long, pale fingers over them. His chest was warm. I don’t know why it surprised me. He looked cold as a tombstone. I’d always thought of him as a cold-blooded creature. A brutal, callous crocodile.
“Stop,” he hissed. “You’re good, Luna. Anyone can see that from a mile away. You volunteer at shelters. You take care of your own. You’ve always done right by people. I bet if your shitty mom showed up, you’d give her a free pass, too.”
I winced at the mention of Val.
“He pities you.” He let the word roll across the ground. It exploded between us like a smoke bomb, and I found myself coughing. “By the same token, you should show him mercy.”
I couldn’t believe what Vaughn was asking me to do. Except I could. I was frightened that if I let my guard down and truly let Knight in, he’d use me and dump me, and there’d be no escaping him, because he was everywhere. We’d grown up together, and our parents were best friends. Our families were tangled like a tight French braid, with no beginning, middle, or end. And if I stayed, it would be more of the same: us circling around one another. Always in the same universe, never on the same planet.
Vaughn noticed the shift in my expression, a cunning smirk playing on his face. Boon College had a good creative writing program. He knew it was my passion and hit the final nail in that coffin.
“Artists are terminally dissatisfied. With life. With love. With their work. You like being tortured, don’t you, little Luna? Sadness has a bittersweet aftertaste. Keeps us going.” He lit up his joint. “Being an artist is a miserable job. You’re pregnant with your work, only to give the baby away. An entire year of careful strokes of a brush, just to have someone else buy the painting. You can be miserable anywhere, Luna. But Knight? Knight could be happy. Right. Fucking. Here.”
On one hand, I was scared to death. What if I was like the Bubble Boy of Houston? He came out of his bubble to be touched by his mother for the first time, only to die moments later. What if I couldn’t survive outside my bubble?
On the other, I wanted freedom. To make my own choices. Even if just to show Knight I wasn’t a permanent feature in his life, like a piece of furniture. And to shut up arrogant, awful Vaughn Spencer.
He was right, though. The only way to deserve Knight was to outgrow my need for him.
“Put yourself out of your misery.” Vaughn straightened up. His clothes were holed almost as much as his heart. “Because he never will.”
That night, Knight didn’t show up to hold me.
To protect me.
To save me.
The moon shone, peeking back at me, asking why?
I turned around, giving it my back, ignoring its invasive question.
The sun will rise tomorrow, I reminded myself. It has to.
September, one month later
“She doesn’t even speak in sign language much. Dude, she doesn’t speak at all. Trust me. I’ve tried. She’s a freak. A genius freak, because hell, she hardly ever studies and apparently aces all her courses. She straight up has a seahorse poster on her wall. I can’t even tell you what insane Rain Man vibes I’m getting from her. Oops, I think there’s someone at the door. Gotta go. Bye.”
April, my high-pitched roommate, swung the door open. When she saw it was me fiddling with my key, her face fell.
Initially, I’d been a little worried about my multicolor-haired roommate. Dad and Edie had prepped the college prior to my arrival, so they’d roomed me with someone whose mother was deaf. April spoke sign language fluently, and was a tiny thing from Montana with eyebrows so blond you could barely see them. She liked Dierks Bentley and soul food and whistling loudly when attractive guys walked by, which I found horrifying and amusing in equal measure.
“I didn’t think you’d come back so early.” She didn’t sidestep to let me in.
I checked the time on my phone and shrugged, shouldering past her. My daily meeting with my counselor, Malory, had been canceled. Apparently, she’d come down with a stomach bug. But who knew? Maybe she, too, had gotten tired of trying to reach a breakthrough with me.
I flung myself on my bed, opening my message box with Knight.
Nothing.
I didn’t know which part shocked me the most: the fact that I’d actually taken the step and gone to Boon, or the fact that Knight had disappeared from the face of the Earth since I had.
I was dwelling. Obsessing. Fixating.
I swung my legs sideways and perched in front of my typewriter. Dad had gotten it for me last summer after I decided to go away to school in the hopes it’d inspire me to write. Typewriters are everything laptops are not: authentic, romantic, and unforgiving when you make a mistake. If you spell a word wrong, you must start over.
Dad knows I love a good challenge, but right now I was also wildly out of my element.
Write.
Write what you know.
What’s bothering you.
What you love.
What you hate.
Just do it.
My fingers hovered over the keys. I needed an outlet. April, in my periphery, squinted as she examined me like I was a wild raccoon that had burst into her dorm room
.
“Right. Heading out now, Raymond. Ping me if you need anything. Not that you would, you little vampire, you.”
She had compared me to Dustin Hoffman’s character and Twilight in one sentence. Awesome. I wondered if she knew just how offensive that was to both autistic people and myself.
“Yo. Earth to Raymond.”
That’s it. I flipped her the finger. Screw that.
“Whoa. There she is. Alive and kicking. Digging it.”
I stared at my blank page, waving her out.
“Okay. Okay. I’m going.”
I heard her on the phone as she blazed through the narrow corridor of our dorm, laughing and laughing and laughing, and I smiled to myself. April was so happy.
Clearly, she wasn’t an artist.
October
Anxiety laced my legs like ivy, climbing all the way up to my neck. Some days, it felt like I couldn’t breathe. I still attended my daily meetings with my counselor, but whatever courses I was able to switch to online, I did. One of my promises to Malory was to study at Starbucks at least twice a week. Be out and about. Let the world stain my otherwise pristine, sheltered life.
Knight was still MIA. He wouldn’t answer my messages, and I wondered if he’d truly moved on, if all he’d needed was a bit of space from me.
I sent an email to Edie every week, and every week I received one back, always saying the same thing:
Make mistakes.
Be free.
Be bold.
Treat teenage as a verb, Luna.
Love you,
E
It felt like life continued without me, and my bubble hadn’t just burst…
It had exploded all over my face.
Malory insisted I ask April to have lunch with me.
She said otherwise she’d have to report to my parents that despite my amazing grades, I was not making any real progress in the ways that mattered.