“I won’t, Vic, I promise.”
“All righty, listen, I’m gonna go find that boy before he gets himself court-martialed or dishonorably discharged or strung up by his ankles.”
I sit up, the scissors gaping open in my hand. “You’re worried about him? After what he did to us? What the hell?”
Although I’m pissed off, I cringe at my choice of words and my tone of voice—I’ve never talked to Vicky like this before. But she doesn’t miss a beat.
“Rosalita, that boy ate at my table almost every night of his life until he enlisted. He’s a few wings short of a bird right now but Travis would want me to help him and that’s what I’m gonna do. Now stop butchering your hair and go to bed. And do not—I repeat—do not watch that video.”
I hear her setting her old-school handset in the cradle as she hangs up. And then, dead air. I feel like I’m falling backward with nothing to stop me.
Things were almost normal again for the first time in two years, and then…Smartphone Jackass. Who does he think he is? What gives him the right to put that video online for anyone to watch?
But even as I curse Gabriel Ortiz’s name, I know I’m one of the people who’s going to watch the video. It’s just a question of when, and whether or not Jamie’s going to watch it with me.
*
The outside of Jamie’s house is bleak, with paint peeling off the shutters and flaking onto the dead grass. I’ve never seen the inside, but I bet it’s not much better.
It’s the middle of the night, and I’m sitting in my mom’s car. She has to take an arsenal of sleeping pills at night so the chances of her waking up, realizing I took the car again and making good on her promise to ground me for the next two years are fairly slim. It’s a selfish risk to take, given the state she’s in tonight, and possibly a pointless one since Jamie’s car is not here. But it’s a risk I’m taking anyway. I can’t shake the feeling that he can help me with this.
I don’t know what time Dizzy’s closes, but it’s almost 2 a.m. He’ll probably be home soon. Unless he’s not coming home at all. Which is his business, not mine, I remind myself.
I look up at the house where Jamie has lived with just his dad for the last few years since his mom died in an institution. She was schizophrenic, something that Jamie and I have talked about exactly twice for a grand total of three minutes. As I’m trying not to picture him in Cargo Pants’ dorm room, headlights sweep across the front porch. He pulls into the driveway too fast and overshoots on one side, his tires tearing up the scraggly, parched lawn. He turns the car off but doesn’t get out.
After a minute, I go look in the open passenger-side window. Jamie’s leaning against his door, his eyes closed. “Jamie.”
“What?” he says without opening his eyes. Either he recognizes my voice, or he doesn’t care who’s talking to him. It’s probably the latter.
“Are you going to sleep in the driveway?”
“Good a place as any.” His words slur.
“Are you drunk?” I ask.
He opens his eyes, and it takes them a second to focus. “I work in a bar,” he says. He shoves open the door and steps out, steadying himself on the hood before heading toward the porch. He fumbles with his keys and drops them. When he gets the door open and looks over his shoulder, he has trouble finding me, though I’m five feet away.
I’ve never seen Jamie drunk. It’s not pretty.
“I need to talk—”
He cuts me off. “Yeah, the stalking sort of gave that away.”
Not only is he drunk, he’s in a shit mood. But he’s right—I showed up at his work uninvited, and now at his house at 2 a.m., also uninvited.
“I’m sorry.”
“Can’t stay away, huh?”
“Oh, get over yourself,” I answer. I sound tough but I feel strange—if he were sober, he’d hear uncertainty in my voice. “What are you doing driving like that?” I step closer, and the beer and whatever else comes off him in a stale wave. I didn’t think it was possible to find Jamie unattractive, but it turns out it is. There’s a life lesson in here somewhere but I’m too pissed off to parse it right now. I lean in to make sure he gets every word. “This is an emergency. Do you understand? Or do you need me to spell it out for you because you can’t understand English right now?”
My harsh words have an impact and I glimpse the Jamie I know behind the haze, concerned. I wonder if it’s possible that Jamie and I only know how to be around each other when I need rescuing. That would suck—according to Killing Cinderella, the only thing worse than buying into the Lip-Gloss-Begets-Boyfriend Myth is the Damsel-in-Distress Myth. Have I been chasing him all night because some part of me knows I can use this to get him back?
But I don’t want him back. Right?
Jamie holds the door open for me, and as I step in it feels like we’re crossing a line. Access to the inner sanctum at the Forta household. There’s a first time for everything.
The air inside is still. He leads me through a dark living room with furniture that sags to the floor, into the kitchen. He flips the light switch, revealing disaster. It’s not just that there are food-encrusted dishes piled high in the sink, it’s that everything is covered in grime, as if no one has cleaned in a long time. A seriously long time.
“Been working a lot,” he grumbles.
I know enough about his dad not to ask why it’s solely Jamie’s job to take care of the house. “Drink?” He braces himself against the wall as he takes clean glasses out of the dishwasher.
“Water,” I say, hoping he’ll drink some too.
He fills both glasses, hands me one and opens the sliding doors. They lead to a patio that is way cleaner than the kitchen, with an overhang and a shiny grill next to a set of outdoor furniture that looks new. On the table sits a sketchpad. Jamie closes it, shoving it onto a chair before I can see what he was drawing. He sits, leans back and closes his eyes.
I forge ahead. “Sorry—again—that I just showed up at your job.”
“Your brother know about that ID?”
“His girlfriend got it for me.”
“It’s shit.”
“It worked.”
“Dizzy looks the other way for cute girls.” His words are 100-percent scolding, zero-percent compliment.
“I shouldn’t have expected you to have time. You definitely looked…busy.”
He doesn’t take the bait. My glass of water sweats in the late-night humidity, rivulets pooling on the table. As he sits there, eyes still closed, I look at what he’s wearing—a T-shirt and jeans like always, but they’re nicer versions, a step up from what I’m used to seeing on him. His dark green T-shirt shows off his body, which I’m sure helps the tip jar fill up faster.
“Should we talk about last spring?” I finally ask. He just shrugs. “She asked me not to tell you.”
He opens his eyes and tries to stare me down, which isn’t quite as effective when he’s hammered. “Parrina was hitting her. I know she did some serious shit to you, but you shoulda told me.”
“Regina asked me not to tell you because she knew you’d go after him and get expelled. And so did I. I chose you over her.”
“I never asked you to do me any favors.”
“You get to protect everybody but nobody gets to protect you?” He has no comeback for this. “I told her she had to tell you herself. I would never intentionally betray you. Not after everything you’ve done for me.”
He downs the rest of his water in one gulp. “I gotta go to bed. I’m working every night ‘til I die.”
I’ve never heard Jamie say anything self-pitying before—ever. “Why are you working so much?” I ask.
Embarrassment flickers across his face before anger. “My dad lost his job.”
There is nothing about this situation that will be good for Jamie. Nothing. I try to climb down off my high horse. “When?”
“‘Early retirement’ last month. Without a full pension. Too many strikes against him. He asked Dizzy to
hire me off the books.”
Given the stellar citizen I now know Dizzy to be, I’m sure he jumped at the chance to hire a cop’s underage son to bartend. What a great insurance policy. “Jamie, I’m sorry—”
Jamie’s phone buzzes and he pulls it out of his back pocket. It takes him a while to read the screen. His face gives nothing away but I’d bet money Cargo Pants just sent him a text. He starts to stand.
“I didn’t track you down at work to talk about Regina and Anthony Parrina. I found out something about my dad, and I needed…advice. You were the first person I thought of.”
His eyes lock onto mine. Then he slowly sits back down.
The hardness in his eyes slips away as I tell him about the video. “My mother watched it. I haven’t talked to my brother yet. I don’t know if I should watch it. How messed up is it that the three of us aren’t deciding what to do together? It’s like we’re in different families.”
“Some families don’t get put back together.”
At first, I dismiss what Jamie is saying because he’s talking about his own family. But is there a universe in which what he’s saying applies to my family? Why wouldn’t it? Because we’re more privileged than the Fortas? I don’t have it in me to examine that right now but the bottom line is, I still think of my mom, my brother and me as a family, even though we lost Dad. Do they, I wonder?
“Would you watch it, if you were me?” I ask.
He leans back in his chair, tipping the legs off the ground. I stop myself from grabbing his arm so he doesn’t fall. “Doesn’t matter what I’d do.”
In his pocket, his phone buzzes again. His chair lands back on the ground with a thud. So much for the wisdom of Jamie Forta.
I’m not going to sit here and watch him read another text from her. “I have to go,” I say.
I head back through the house, Jamie following me. And just when I think it was a mistake to come here and that he no longer cares about me—just when I’m ready to write him off entirely and get on with my life—his hand lands on mine as I reach for the door. He takes a step closer. I can feel the heat from his chest on my back. I can smell him—not the alcohol, but him.
“You call me if you’re gonna watch that thing, Rose.”
When I turn to tell him thanks but no thanks, he’s looking down at his phone, so I say nothing. I leave him leaning against the doorway, the glow from the screen lighting his face.
“Heads Will Roll,” It’s Blitz, Yeah Yeah Yeahs
_______________________
Chapter 4
I’m trying to get Tracy’s attention in Camber’s class so I can pass her a note, but she can barely keep her eyes open. She’s still writing The Sharp List—the fashion blog that made her a Union High celebrity—and going into the city on the weekends for the Fashion Institute’s intensive program, and having a long-distance relationship with my brother, and doing her regular homework, with a little help from me.
Trace and I used to hang out every day, but so far this year¸ I only see her in class or when I’m driving her to the train station. She’s usually so stressed out that she doesn’t have time for regular stuff, like talking. I’m proud of her, and it sucks.
The way I’m handling this is to stop telling her things, which I’m pretty sure is the first step toward ending a friendship. I don’t want that to happen, but the urge I have to shut her out—to punish her—is hard to resist.
She has no idea what happened last night. But when she finds out, she’s going to realize that I didn’t call her the second I learned about the video. And then we’ll have to have a conversation about our relationship. I definitely need to head that off at the pass. Peter sent me a text earlier after he finally talked with Mom this morning—all it said was, “WTF?” I didn’t text him back.
It seems like he hasn’t told Tracy either. I’m guessing he wants to talk about it as much as I do.
Camber notices the note in my hand and gives me the stink eye. He’s Union High’s hottest teacher—tall, blue eyes, dark curly hair, nerd-chic glasses—so he has to be a hard-ass to keep his amorous students at arm’s length. It’s a Union High tradition to bombard Camber with love notes on Valentine’s Day. Most of them are hilarious fakes, but a handful of them are real. He’s the kind of teacher who inspires devotion not just because he’s hot but because he gets completely worked up about great literature and how it applies to his students. Even kids who would rather pull out their eyelashes than read Hemingway like knowing that Camber cares about their lives.
Right now we’re reading The Awakening by Kate Chopin, which is not a happy book. It’s about a woman who kills herself because she finds the limitations placed on her as a 19th-century woman unbearable. Camber reads passages to us until his eyes fill with tears, and his fans nearly pass out with adoration. He’s the only teacher who understands why reading William Faulkner makes me a little swoony sometimes.
English class has been pretty fraught so far this year, between Camber tearing up over The Awakening, his fans having mini-crises every time he calls on someone, and my friend Robert—heartbroken over screwing things up with Holly last spring—staring at her like a man in a desert looks at an oasis. Holly tries not to encourage him, but he takes even accidental eye contact as a positive sign so there’s not much she can do.
When the bell rings, Camber lifts an eyebrow at me—code for “Come to my desk.” Heads swivel in my direction and disappointed members of the Camber Club speculate in hushed voices as they drag their feet toward the door, wishing that they were the ones about to get reprimanded for trying to pass notes in class. In some circles, Camber’s eyebrow will be a topic of discussion for the rest of the day.
Once I tried to joke with Camber about his fans. He wouldn’t even acknowledge that he knew what I was talking about, but still, I know he trusts me more than the average student because Camber and I have something in common: we both care what happens to Jamie.
Camber taught Jamie in remedial English and I guess he saw something in Jamie that made him want to get Jamie through high school. He was in the parking lot when Jamie and Parrina started trying to kill each other—he knew it would be Jamie’s third strike, and he tried to keep Jamie from getting expelled. When he saw me standing there holding an ice pack for Jamie’s busted up face, I think he recognized a kindred spirit of sorts.
I make my way to his desk as he looks at me sternly over the top of his glasses like a grandfather. “The note never even left my hand,” I protest when the room is finally empty.
He cuts right to the chase. “You need to get Jamie to take my GED class.”
I accidentally snort with laughter, thinking of how hard it was to hold Jamie’s attention last night. Especially when he was getting texts from Cargo Pants.
“Camber, I can barely get Jamie to talk to me right now.”
“If he doesn’t get his GED this year, he’ll never do it.” His eyes bore into me, implying that this is my responsibility. And in a way, it is. I’m the reason Jamie blew off the cops who were giving him a chance to do the right thing—he was so mad at me that he had to walk away. But I don’t hold any sway with Jamie anymore, or at least I didn’t last night. Then again, he was drunk enough that he might not even remember last night, which could work in my favor.
“Jamie doesn’t do things unless he wants to,” I say.
Camber is not interested in my excuses. “It’ll be a serious waste of a good guy if he spends his life brawling in parking lots. Without his GED, he stands a much higher chance of landing himself in prison.” Camber lowers his voice. “The guy has mental illness on one side of his family, and alcoholism on the other, based on what I’ve seen of his father. Jamie needs every ounce of support and encouragement he can get, Rose, especially from people who know him—” and here Camber goes in for the kill, putting his hand on my shoulder “—and love him.”
Man, he is good. And I’m easy. All it takes is someone else to say that I love Jamie, and all the work I’ve been
doing to convince myself that I don’t just evaporates.
Jamie has missed out on a lot of things because of me—two proms, and graduation. He’s defended me a bunch of times at risk to himself. The only thing I’m risking by trying to convince him to take Camber’s class is getting shut down or ignored or told to mind my own damn business.
In other words, my pride.
Even if we’re not going to be together, I can still help him. I ignore the déjà vu telling me I’ve been here before and say, “I’ll try.”
Camber claps his hands once, victorious, and writes me a late pass for trig as a wave of freshmen superfans comes rolling in, tossing curious and hostile glances my way.
I barely even see them. Camber’s words about Jamie’s potentially bleak future—and the implication that I, as someone who loves him, could somehow change the course of it—ring in my ears.
*
After the last bell, I head to the parking lot to meet Tracy. Gone are Friday afternoons lying around her room pretending to do homework before going out for pizza with the rest of Union High at Cavallo’s. Our Fridays are a shadow of their former selves, reduced to 20 minutes in her car on the way to the train station before she heads into the city to stay with her aunt for her weekend classes at the Fashion Institute. Then I usually drive her car back to my house—I get to use it until I pick her up on Sunday night. This weekend, I’m going to park her car somewhere besides our driveway so my mother doesn’t decide to apply her no-car-privileges punishment to Tracy’s car.
Technically, this will be the first real chance I’ve had to tell Trace about the video, especially since I was out half the night last night. Today she’s either been behind her camera taking pics for the blog or trying to keep her eyes open in class, both of which give me a good excuse for not bringing it up yet. I have no idea what my brother’s excuse is going to be.
On my way up the hill to the lot, I see Robert waiting at Tracy’s car. Robert grills me daily for information about Holly, and I never know what to say other than, “Yes, she’s still going out with Cal. No, I’m not going to tell you if she’s having sex with him.” When he sees me, he gets that hopeful look on his face, like this time I’ll have something to tell him that will help him fix the biggest mistake he’s ever made.
No More Confessions Page 3