“You’re a bully,” I say, not exactly under my breath.
“Is that what you think of me, Layla?”
“How could I not?”
His jaw clenches in anger. “Then, this is all about your Evan Dando or whatever.”
“Evan Dando? Like from The Lemonheads?”
“Yeah, well they’re both singers, right? They look alike. Anyway, who cares what that asshole’s name is. This is about him?”
“Yes, it’s about Evan Deane.” I’d like to deny that Evan is an asshole, but I can’t. I know what he’s like. It still doesn’t justify what Luke did.
“I get that you’re pissed at me for hitting him, but did you ever think I might’ve had a reason?”
“Oh, I know you had a reason. It’s fun for the jocks to use the art freaks for target practice. You’re not exactly a trend setter there, Luke.”
“Yup. You’ve got me all figured out.” His words are sharp. After a pause, he barks out a rough laugh. “You act like you’re so open-minded, so deep, but you’re just as judgmental as anybody else.”
“What do you mean?” The chill of my voice is palpable; I could breathe out ice crystals, even with the truck’s heater cooking me.
“I mean you don’t even want to hear my side.”
“Go ahead, then. Tell me your side. Tell me why it’s okay that you broke Evan’s nose, when you’ve easily got forty pounds and six inches on him. Go on, I’m waiting.”
Luke glares hard enough that it frightens me. As angry as I’ve been at him since the fight happened earlier this year, I’ve been unable to imagine him attacking someone else until this moment. Maybe he really is growing up to be like his dad.
“Forget it.” He shifts his gaze back to the road and, already, the fierce edge is crumbling from his expression. “You won’t listen. If you really think I would beat up some guy just for fun, you don’t know me at all.”
“Maybe I don’t.” The acid has left my tongue. I’ve hurt him, but—worse—doubt has settled into the pit of my stomach. What if my anger isn’t absolutely, utterly, and unmitigatedly valid?
But there was that time, earlier, when Luke crashed into me in school, scattering my books and the contents of my backpack—pens, pencils, tampons, and all. He’d stood there apologizing while his friends laughed, too embarrassed by our old friendship to bother helping me pick up my things. He really is one of them, I’d thought that day. I was right; I know I was.
Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart” starts playing through the speakers and Luke reaches over to switch it off. The song is one of my all-time favorites, so I’m tempted to complain—except I’m no longer in the mood for music. That, or talking.
Two
The Magic in Tree Houses
Luke and I haven’t spoken for a while, not since we argued about his beating up Evan. He’s been driving with his eyes focused only on the road, and I’ve been riding in silence beside him, trying to keep my mind from slipping into the past. It’s been a struggle, and I’m losing.
The face from the photographs keeps floating into my mind, unbidden. That’s another reason I can’t look at those old photo albums anymore. It’s too tempting to forget the state of things. One glimpse of Luke as a child, and I’m back in my newly eight-year-old self, leading him into the woods, asking them to weave their spell around us.
The forest was brimming with life—layer upon layer of it—but the air was still and cool, full of quiet expectation. A wait and see kind of magic.
I’d taken Lucas there to show him the tree house.
“Did you build it?” he’d asked, standing beside me, looking up.
“Nope, it’s old. But I found it.”
The tree house had lost its roof somewhere in its past, but the floor and three sides remained, and that was all we needed. We climbed the main tree supporting the structure, wriggled in through the opening and lay back against the warm, sun-bleached wood.
“I’m not the only one who found this place,” I told Lucas while yellow light dribbled through the leaves above us. I explained how my friend Molly had discovered it with me before she moved. My hair ground softly against the weathered floorboards when I turned to him. “She was my best friend, but now she lives three whole hours away, so I don’t think we get to be best friends anymore.”
Lucas had nodded at me in sympathy, his gaze staying with mine, his head turned so that his cheek almost touched the wood. He had a good face, a nice one, his blue-gray eyes shining like there might be a smile waiting to float up inside them. My eyes were similar in color, but with more green; I was never sure what to answer when people occasionally asked about them. “Blue,” I’d say, thinking, maybe green.
Lucas’s eyes were unblinking, expectant.
I took a deep breath. We were in the tree house, and it was the best kind of place, the kind where forest magic came to rest. “Lucas?” I asked. “Do you have a best friend?”
“Not since I moved.”
I’d smiled, and so had he.
I glance across the truck cabin, see the lines in Luke’s jaw from where it’s clenched. Snow flurries have begun falling; they thicken and drop faster as we reach the small town that’s the gateway to our mountaintop destination. When the snow mixes with ice pellets and changes over into sleet, it only makes the truck’s cabin feel more confining.
I still haven’t opened my mouth, not since our disagreement, but I let out an embarrassing yelp when the truck’s wheels lock up on the slick road and we almost slide off into a ditch.
“Sorry,” Luke says, his voice low.
I glance over and see the deep furrow in his brow, the white lines in his knuckles from his grip on the steering wheel. Sympathy rises inside me, but I stuff it down again. I’ve been mad at him for too long to let go now.
“My truck kind of hates ice,” he says, and I huff out a sigh.
“Great.”
He glances at me, the muscles working in his jaw. “I didn’t know it was supposed to be so shitty out here. Would your car have been better?”
“No, but staying home would have been.”
He snorts in frustration and looks around, peering into the wintry showers. “You see anywhere to stay? I can drop you off somewhere if you want.”
I glare at him. “Sounds perfect.”
He stops the truck in the middle of the road. We slide a few feet and I grip the handle above my door, whipping my neck around, full panic, to scan the lane behind us.
“No cars back there,” he says. “No one else is stupid enough to be out in this.”
“Wasn’t my idea.”
Luke closes his eyes; he doesn’t respond, but he also doesn’t start driving again.
“Are you seriously expecting me to get out?” I make a big show of gathering my bags, in case he says yes.
“Of course not, but I’d be more than happy to take you somewhere. Or maybe you’d rather keep acting like it’s killing you to ride with me. You know, I didn’t make you miss the bus.”
“No, and I’ll be sure not to miss it on the way home.”
“Yeah, well. You’re welcome.”
Headlights bounce off the rearview mirror in the day’s half-light, and Luke edges the truck a little further up the road and onto the shoulder. An enormous snow plow swings around us and continues along the street in the direction we’re headed. We both breathe audible sighs of relief.
Luke glances over at me and the hint of a smile finds its way into his eyes. He always did recover from our fights faster than I could.
“Thanks, Luke—for the ride,” I say, after I’ve turned away. My voice is quiet, but I kind of hope he’s heard me.
After a while, he switches the music back on and Joy Division’s exquisitely tragic Ian Curtis resumes his song about an equally tragic love. Luke’s hunched over the wheel, squinting into sleet, but he skips the CD forward to another legacy of Curtis’s songwriting, New Order’s heartfelt “Ceremony.” When it finishes, a Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ te
ar-jerker, “Maps,” begins. More love songs, more of my music.
“Jeez, Luke, how heartbroken are you?” My thoughts escape my mouth before I can stop them, and something akin to horror widens his eyes.
“What are you talking about?”
It’s too late to clamp a hand over my mouth, so I wade into the trouble I’ve stirred. “Just…if you made this mix for Marissa… No, never mind. Forget it.”
Luke’s stare hardens and he turns back to the road. “I didn’t make it for her. I didn’t make it for anyone. …And forget what?”
“Nothing. It just doesn’t seem like her taste.”
“It’s not, but that doesn’t matter, since it isn’t for her. It’s mine. For me.”
“If you say so.”
Luke turns to me again. “What’s the matter? You don’t like it?”
“I do. It’s just…”
“Yeah?”
“That’s the point. I like this music, so it doesn’t seem like the kind of stuff a football player would listen to.”
Luke glances at me, his brow furrowed. “Well, I’m not just a football player. You don’t really think that way, do you?”
I don’t answer.
“Wow, Layla. What if I thought you were nothing these days, but ripped fishnets and black eye makeup?”
Another sting, whether he meant it as an insult, or not.
I turn away, forcing a sigh. My breath makes a puff of fog on the window and I watch it shrink into absence. Another song comes on, this time a Mark Lanegan duet with PJ Harvey, “Come to Me.” It’s slinky and dark, their voices all smoky, and I let myself sink back into the music to forget how tense things have become yet again.
I’m starting to feel a little better, when the next song catches me completely off guard. It’s The Cure’s “Pictures of You,” and given my history with this song, listening to it feels like a risk. I must have played it a million and one times after I lost Lucas. I’d look through our photo albums and relive memory after memory while the song played on repeat. The habit—ritual, almost—got to be too much for me, so I quit it all, cold turkey. No more song, no more photos, no more memories.
Now look at me: I spend a couple of hours driving around with Luke, and he’s undoing everything.
“No more music,” I say, switching off the stereo. “We’re getting closer; we have to concentrate.”
Luke lifts both hands from the steering wheel like he’s warding off something I’ve accused him of. “Okay by me.”
I guess I should be grateful the song was only “Pictures,” because the one that follows it in my mind—my absolute favorite song, the only song I can never, ever listen to again—is “This Twilight Garden.” It was on a mix my friend Nina made me from her sister’s Cure collection, and it was the song that gave me my first slow dance, my first kiss. Like so many of my firsts, they were with Luke—back when he was still Lucas, still mine.
If “Pictures of You” is hard to listen to, “Garden” would be my undoing.
I have no idea if Luke even remembers that night, but I can still see him as a fourteen-year old, holding me close as the music played, leaning in to give me that kiss—soft and sweet, and as first kisses go, fairy-tale perfect.
I’d hardly seen Lucas after that. Maybe he knew we’d be apart. Maybe that’s what he was thinking while we danced, when all I could focus on was him. The song’s lyrics captured my feelings: I believed Lucas would always have a special place in my heart and mind, a place reserved for him, alone.
When he’d kissed me, I hoped it was proof he felt the same, but to him, that kiss must have meant goodbye.
From there, Luke had found his way to football stardom. Touchdown passes in front of cheering crowds, and touchdowns with top-heavy cheerleaders…possibly in this very seat—if phantom handprints on windows were any indication.
“You okay?” Luke asks, his voice quiet.
I don’t dare look at him. Instead, I dig my nails into my palms to trap the threads of my sadness, to keep them from escaping.
“I’m fine,” I lie.
He’s not the Lucas I knew. He’s a Luke with strong arms and a deep voice and stubble on his face, who plays football well enough to have scholarships thrown at him. I don’t know whether this Luke remembers our slow dance that night in my bedroom, but the softness in his voice sounds familiar, and real. If it’s in his eyes, too, something inside me might crack wide open.
Three
Speak Now, Or
“A
re you sure this is the way the GPS said to go?” Luke asks.
We lost our snow-plow escort about twenty minutes ago; it kept to the main road when we turned off onto a smaller one. We’ve also lost sight of the town, thanks to what feels like an over-abundance of excessively tall trees, but we’re climbing in altitude, which is a good thing for two people in search of a ski lodge. Aside from the pause in sleet and snow, it’s the only promising sign we have.
“I think it’s the way, but I can’t be sure. I didn’t know the GPS signal would drop,” I say, a sharpness to my words.
“I didn’t, either,” Luke responds, his voice every bit as edgy.
He glances at me and my face must show some of the sudden, unexpected hurt I feel.
“Sorry,” he says.
“Same.”
Tension builds inside the truck—not anger, but fear this time—as we keep climbing and the road continues to narrow. I think we’re officially driving up a mountain, but it feels more remote than I’d expected the area around a ski resort to be.
The snow hasn’t resumed, but there’s enough of it piled everywhere to obscure the border between road and not-road, so our biggest clues as to where to drive come from the steep slope of the land: it meets our path just outside of Luke’s window and drops off again beyond mine.
“I don’t think this is the right way.” My voice is quiet, but I can’t bite my tongue any longer.
“Neither do I. It would be crazy to try backing down in reverse, though, right?”
“Definitely crazy, so please don’t.”
“That’s what I’ve been thinking, but it doesn’t look like there’s anywhere to turn around. We might have to go all the way up before we can head down again.”
“That doesn’t sound all that sane, either.”
“Nope. It really doesn’t.”
There’s been no music since I stopped The Cure from playing, and the silence in the truck’s cab has only grown heavier. It’s pressing like a weight on my head and shoulders.
There’s no question that Luke feels it, too. The muscle in his jaw is locked again; his arms and legs seem taut.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I feel like it’s my fault we’re lost.”
“It’s not your fault.” Luke’s eyes never leave the path ahead of us. “I should’ve guessed we’d lose the GPS. I should’ve written down the directions before we left. And I shouldn’t have started climbing this mountain. The road’s only getting worse as we go up.”
I think about how I’ve made things harder during this ride, how right from the beginning I practically seethed with resentment. It would have been difficult for Luke to plan ahead with all of that aimed his way.
I want to apologize for how I’ve been acting, even if I feel justified in my anger. While I’m trying to figure out what to say, the truck reaches an incline it can’t tackle.
The tires slip, throwing loose grit against the truck’s body, and we slide backward, the unstable road giving way under the spinning of the wheels.
“Shit, shit, shit,” Luke says under his breath. I gasp, gripping the door so tightly my fingers cramp.
We slow, almost to a stop. I breathe out, but the slipping happens again, and we speed up, turning sideways, tipping—until, beneath us, the road disappears.
I scream, Luke yells my name, and everything else happens at once. Metallic groans and crunches fill the air to a barrage of roof, floor, roof, floor—maybe the reverse. Flash of white snow, sl
ice of gray sky, and the snow-covered ground races forward, coming too fast, to the jarring rupture of breaking glass.
A tremendous jolt shakes the truck and passes through my body—the sound and feel of thunder—before all goes still. There’s a strange, mechanical sigh, something mournful. The air is a cloud of dirt and dust, swirling and chaotic.
My senses constrict to a tunnel, squeezing out sound, sight, thought.
Then, something: a movement off to my left. A heavy thud.
“Luke!” I claw at the seatbelt cutting into me. “Lucas!”
A hand reaches out from the fog. “Don’t—”
The seatbelt gives way under my scrambling fingers and I crash onto what was the roof. My voice wobbles when I tell him, “We’re upside down.” Maybe he already knows.
He’s a lump of darkness across the cab, close by—he must be—except I feel distant, disjointed. He’s speaking, but his voice seems far away. The only word I can make out is “hurt.” Is he telling or asking?
“Luke, are you hurt?” I try to push the fear from my tone, but I’m shaking, head to toe, and the tremors rattle my words.
His reply is delayed. “Are you?” he asks, without having answered.
“Yes,” I say before taking a mental inventory of my pain. I run both hands over my clothing, finding the shapes of my body beneath. Everything feels all right, aside from maybe some deep bruising, so I correct myself. “No, I think I’m okay.”
The dust is settling as Luke’s hand bridges the gap between us, emerging from the inverted disorder to wrap around my arm and guide me upward, outward. He’s right; we need to get away from here. Visions of explosions, of fire tell me to hurry.
I follow Luke on hands and knees through his damaged window frame, to where square bits of tempered glass lie scattered over the ground like a mosaic, shining a watery green against the churned-up snow and dirt.
We’re alive, this much I know. We’re moving, both of us, crawling through a field of glass to get away from the danger.
Picturing You Page 2