Chapter 8
Last New Year’s Eve
Things we want to remember; things we try to forget
There were a lot of things I’d pretended not to notice since last New Year’s Eve—the looks, the whispers, Adam’s subtle maneuvering to shelter me from the worst of the gawkers after I returned to school, others carefully shielding me from anything that might remind me of that night, including views of the scene of the crime.
That last day of December, as well as my belief that the worst thing that could ever happen to me was being degraded by my own father, both had ended for me on the Ratliffs’ patio.
But it had begun in Adam’s room. What had ended as one of the worst days of my life, had begun as one of the best.
Because Adam was home from his first trip to New York. A Christmas vacation with his family, and an excruciatingly long week for me, one that I thought would never end. But it did end.
“We’ll be in my room,” Adam called out to his mom and stepdad as he bounded up the stairs with his bags and me in tow.
“Keep the door open,” his mom called back from the kitchen.
He threw me a look over his shoulder that said, “The hell we will.”
When we got to his room, Adam tossed his stuff on the bed and kicked the door closed.
I raised my eyebrows and laughed.
A week hadn’t cooled our passion for each other one bit. Fortunately, no one came upstairs to check on that door thing. I wondered for a moment if maybe his mom and stepdad knew what they would find and opted for the ol’ head-in-the-sand method of parenting: What you didn’t see, didn’t happen.
Once we’d quenched the fire, somewhat, there were a million things to talk about. That tattoo that I had seen almost immediately on Adam’s side for one. I made him hold his arm up, and I raised his shirt again so I could get a good look. I traced my fingers across the graceful black letters inked into his sunburned-looking skin: Gnothi seauton. He shivered.
“It’s Greek,” he said, looking at me looking at him. “It means ‘Know yourself.’ It’s kind of a coming-out present to myself.”
“It’s awesome,” I said. I was completely fascinated by the artistry of the tattoo. His body made a beautiful canvas. I traced my fingers over each letter again. “Know yourself,” I said softly as I did.
“Okay, enough.” He laughed and pulled down his shirt. “Keep that up and I’m going to have to disobey Mommy Dearest again. Besides, I have a present for you.”
He slipped a small black box from his pocket and handed it to me. Inside were two tiny silver hoop earrings.
“Do you like them?”
I swallowed hard around the lump in my throat. “Yeah. They’re great.”
He reached up and removed the standard new-pierced-ears studs from my ears (my response to his do-something-crazy-while-I’m-gone suggestion) and deftly replaced them with the hoops. I watched his face as he did, ignoring the dull pain in my earlobes and feeling like my heart would burst. His eyes flicked to mine when the last hoop was in place.
“I missed you so much ... it scared me,” I said.
His face grew serious and he fingered one of the hoops in my ear. “We went to the World Trade Center site one day.” He kept his eyes focused on my ear. “I was standing at the edge of the memorial—really just a big hole in the ground—trying to imagine how it must have felt to lose someone you loved that day.” He bit his lip and shook his head, his eyes sliding back to mine. “I couldn’t bear losing you, Nate ... ever.”
I reached up and took his pendant in my hand—the yin, a white, comma-shaped figure, surrounding a black eye. The yang—black with a white eye, his Christmas gift to me—hung from a thin leather strap around my own neck. He’d given it to me, wrapped in snowman paper, before he’d boarded the plane a week ago, with instructions not to open it until Christmas. I opened it in the parking garage. I turned his pendant to look at the back: Nate. I looked into his eyes. “Why do you get to be the girl?”
He laughed so suddenly that he blew spit in my face. He wiped it off, then pulled the pendant from around his neck. “Here, you want to be the girl for a while?”
I smiled and pushed it back over his head. “Nah. I’m good.”
“Do you like it?”
I decided to take a chance. “It means we complete each other. Together we make a whole.”
He nodded.
“I googled it.”
“I thought you would. That’s how I feel about us, Nate.”
Tell him. But I couldn’t get the words out.
It was such a relief to be out. At school, we’d stayed on the down low. But Juliet’s New Year’s Eve party wasn’t school. It would be the first time we showed up somewhere as a couple and no one’s jaw hit the floor. I had never been happier or felt more whole in my entire life. There wasn’t anything more I wanted from the world at that moment, except maybe a few more minutes alone with him. But there’d be time for that.
By nine the party had ramped up and Juliet’s parents retired to their room to wait out the New Year. We kept everything indoors since the weather had finally turned cold. We’d put on our jackets later, after midnight, and shoot off some fireworks.
“Come on, lover boy,” Juliet said, cutting me from the crowd and hustling me to the kitchen. “You can help me with the margaritas.”
“Virgin?” I asked.
“Of course,” she said, then pulled a bottle of tequila from a brown bag in the cabinet and unscrewed the lid.
“Quite the little rebel, aren’t you?” I smacked her lightly on the ass.
She pinned me to the cabinet with her body and laughed. “No teasing the redhead tonight.”
“Pleasant ... but not my type.”
She sighed wistfully. Then she shook her head as if to clear it. “Come on, let’s rock these margaritas.”
“Are you trying to get me fired?”
“My dad loves you. It’s just a little tequila. Pace yourself and nobody will know.”
She showed me how to rub the rims of the plastic cups with fresh lime slices and then dip the cups in salt she’d poured into a little dish shaped like a donut sliced in half. I rimmed and she blended, and then I held the cups while she filled them. We loaded them on a tray. I took two and followed Juliet into the family room.
Adam was telling Mike all about New York. I slipped in behind him and handed him a drink over his shoulder. He took it and turned his head back for a kiss. Once my hand was free, I wrapped my arm around his waist and pressed close to his back. He reached around with his free arm and held me to him. He felt so good, so solid, so real, and so here. I held on to him and sipped my drink and soaked up the sound of his voice.
Eventually Juliet had passed out all the drinks and came to claim Mike. She gave me a wink as she dragged him off to dance with her.
“I still can’t believe you’re really here,” I said, once they’d gone.
“I’m really here.” He laced his fingers with mine. “Will you promise me something?”
“What?”
“Promise me when I take you home tonight, you’ll get your guitar and play me my song?”
I nodded, my heart swelling at the request. I had envisioned playing it for him in a room lit by only candles in a house occupied by only the two of us. Tonight wouldn’t be ideal. We wouldn’t be alone. In fact, with Grandma just across the hall, I wouldn’t even be able to play without waking her.
We’d figure something out.
We walked over to where the other kids were dancing and he pulled me to him. We danced, holding each other, experiencing each other all over again. After a while, he pressed his mouth to my ear. “I love you, Nate.”
Before I could respond, Juliet had me by the arm, dragging me back to the kitchen to mix up another batch of margaritas. He watched me go with a combination of frustration and longing.
“Are you having fun?” she asked, unscrewing the cap on the margarita mix.
“Yeah.”
“He better be.”
“Stop!” she whined, shoving a stack of plastic cups in my chest. “Now you are flaunting it.”
I laughed a little and separated the cups and set them out while she poured the mix then filled the blender with crushed ice from the freezer door. “I can’t help it, Jules. I’m in love with him.”
She seated the blender jar onto the base and looked at me, her face a question I understood perfectly.
“I’d be declaring myself right now if you hadn’t interrupted.”
“Really? Well, what the hell are standing in here for. Go! Finish the job. Tell him.”
I laughed. “In a minute.” I pressed the button for her and the blender crunched, then whirred, drowning out any possibility of conversation for a minute.
“Are you still here?” she said when the ice was crushed and smooth.
I removed the jar and poured. “I’m going to get him all liquored up so I can have my way with him.”
“Like you need alcohol for that.”
I started to make some clever remark, but loud voices in the living room stopped me. “Nah, man. We just came to party.”
“What the hell?” Juliet said.
We hurried back to the living room. In the entryway, Juliet’s dad was holding his ground against three boys. They pressed up against him, chests puffed out in some primal display. I recognized Andrew Cargill immediately. The two others I knew only as troublemakers. Juliet’s mom hung back, clutching a phone in her hand.
“Leave now or I’ll call the police,” her dad threatened in a voice that commanded a lot more respect than his slender, pale, and freckled frame. He was hardly a match for the three thugs looming over him. Still, he blocked their passage, his jaw clenched, and he wasn’t moving.
“Aaah, come on,” Cargill slurred, “we just want to party with our faggy friends here.” He locked eyes with me.
I stood next to Juliet and felt the temperature rise in my veins. Adam, Mike, and a couple of the other guys Adam knew from theater arts—Warren Calicutt and Traveon Smith—positioned themselves behind Juliet’s dad. I joined them. Cargill took it all in, then seemed to reconsider. He let loose a string of homophic slurs, then backed out the doorway with his little band of thugs. Mr. Ratliff calmly closed the door and locked it.
After that, we all needed a little tequila. The drinks were melting on the kitchen counter, and any guilt I might have felt about the alcohol—Mr. Ratliff would not have been happy—was forgotten. Adam leaned against the edge of the counter and handed me a drink. My hand trembled slightly as I took it. He wrapped his fingers around mine for a moment, then he picked up the tequila bottle and topped off my cup. I looked at him.
“I’m the designated driver tonight.”
“What is it with those creeps?”
He shook his head and pulled me close. “Don’t worry about them.”
I leaned against him, enjoying the feel of my body pressing against his in all the right places. I drank half my margarita, set my cup on the counter, and put my mouth close to his ear. “Do you think anyone would notice if we disappeared for a while?”
“Do you care?” he asked, grinning.
Not even a little bit.
We left the chatter, and the laughter, and the music behind and locked ourselves in Juliet’s room. My pulse still raced, but for another reason altogether.
It was close to midnight when we slipped back into the living room. Juliet was passing out hats and horns and poppers that shot out long paper streamers. “Did you bring the sparklers?” she asked Adam.
“Yeah. I left them in my car.” He gave me a quick kiss on the neck and fished his car keys out of his pocket. “I’ll be right back.”
Juliet watched him go, then looked back at me. She drew in a deep breath, then let it out in a loud sigh, shaking her head slowly back and forth.
“What?” I asked.
She raised her eyebrows. “Enjoy my room?”
I blushed. “You saw that?”
“You’re not exactly stealth.”
Adam had been gone too long. I expected to see him immediately when I stepped out onto the front porch, but I didn’t, even though his car was parked in front under a street lamp. I walked toward it. “Adam?” The car interior was dark, but I peered in through the window anyway. Nothing. A prickly sensation crept up the back of my neck.
“Umph.”
What the hell? The noise had come from the backyard. I started toward the side of the house. “Adam?” Another “Umph,” and I broke into a run, icy fear closing around my heart, blood pounding in my ears, my fingers tingling from the adrenaline screaming through my veins.
The gate was slightly ajar. There were voices now, low but menacing. Another grunt.
Adam.
I burst through the gate and into the backyard.
Chapter 9
It was after midnight when Adam Skyped. I’d fallen asleep with my head on my arm. I wiped the drool on my shirt and clicked the Answer with Video button. Adam’s face appeared on the screen. He looked tired and disheveled. It had been less than twenty-four hours, but already I missed him so much it physically hurt. I grimaced a smile. “Hi.”
He smiled back, then raised his eyes to his webcam so he was looking directly at me through the camera.
It sounded like a party in the background. I lowered the volume, then changed my mind and raised it again.
“I’m sorry it’s so late,” Adam said.
I checked the time in the lower corner of my screen: twelve thirty. That meant it was one thirty in New York. I’d been sitting at my desk since seven—five and a half hours. I shifted around to get the blood flowing.
As if answering my unspoken question, he went on: “We dropped my things at the apartment after the cast meeting, then dinner, then back to the director’s apartment for drinks. It’s been crazy.”
“I’ve been waiting for you.”
“I know, baby. I’m sorry. My phone died.”
“Couldn’t you have borrowed one?”
He bit his lip and that crease formed between his brows again. Before he could respond, a shirtless guy slipped an arm around Adam’s shoulder and leaned close to the screen. “Is this your boyfriend? Hi, boyfriend.” He waggled his fingers at me, then picked up a drink I hadn’t noticed on the desk next to Adam and took a sip. “Come on, baby,” he said to Adam and tugged at his arm.
On the screen, I watched Adam laugh and push shirtless guy away.
My skin prickled.
Adam turned back to the screen and said, “Ignore him,” still smiling.
I was not smiling. “Who’s that?”
“That was Justin.” He rolled his eyes.
“That was Justin? Roommate Justin? I’ll-pick-you-up-at-the-airport Justin?” I guffawed and looked off into a corner of my room. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”
“Nate.” He glanced around, then told me to hold on a minute. The image on the computer jarred and blurred, and I could tell he was moving the laptop somewhere else. When his face appeared on the screen again, he told me he’d moved to the bathroom, then turned the screen around so the camera could catch the fixtures.
“It’s the only place I could find,” he said, a little apologetically. “This apartment is small. Small small. Everything in here is like miniature. You should see the kitchen. It’s half the size of my closet back home. The refrigerator looks like one of Mea’s toys. And my side of the closet—”
“You’re sharing a closet too?” Just the thought of his things brushing up against someone else’s felt all kinds of wrong.
“A closet, a room, a bathroom, and everything else in this matchbox.” He sighed wearily and looked right at the webcam. “Nate, you know I have three roommates.”
“Looks to me like Justin might want to be more than just a roommate.”
“Whatever. You know I love you.”
“Are you still wearing the green underwear?”
He must have known from the sound of my voice that it wasn’t one of those sexy what-are-you-wearing questions. “What is it with the green underwear?” he said. “Yes, I’m wearing the green underwear. I’ve been wearing them all day. More than eighteen hours. I thought you liked them on me.”
“I do. I just don’t like them on you ... there.”
He huffed. “I’ll burn them if it makes you happy.”
“I don’t want you to burn them.”
“Then what do you want?”
“I wanted you to call me earlier. It’s one thirty in the morning there, Adam. One fucking thirty. I’ve been sitting at this desk for hours. And then you finally Skype and some half-naked guy is hanging all over you. Do you know how that makes me feel?”
He ran his hands through his short hair and sighed again. “I’m sorry. Okay. You’re right. I just got caught up in all the craziness. Will you forgive me? I promise I’ll make it up to you when I get back home.”
“How?”
“You’re gonna be like that, are you?” He laughed, just a little. “Well, hmm, I’ll give you one of my lava lamps.”
“Uh-uh. I already stole one anyway.”
“I’ll paint your toenails again.”
“Sexy, but not good enough.”
“I’ll take you parking again at Ridgewood Park.”
Ah, Ridgewood Park. The place where our first fight had ended, and our first makeup session had begun. And Adam was very good at making things up to me.
“Tempting,” I said, “but you know sudden flashlight beams still send me into a panic.”
He laughed again, more like the Adam I remembered, then came up with an idea so graphic and naughty that I actually blushed.
Chapter 10
Last November 10
Making up and making out
The cast party was held in the Black Room behind the stage, the small room packed with family and friends who waved flowers and shared hugs and kisses with the heavily made-up cast members. Juliet dragged me around and introduced me to everyone. I discreetly tried to keep my eye on Adam, but he was always surrounded by friends I’d never even met, especially girls.
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