Hugging Jamie Forta is both safe and dangerous. You feel in the strength of his arms that he’ll protect you from anything and anyone. But there’s also the possibility that you’ll lose yourself entirely, just vanish into that embrace and not come back from it. Which might be more dangerous than anything else.
He returns my hug, one hand on my back, the other in my hair, his face against my neck. My eyes close.
There’s a part of me—there is always this part of me, no matter what’s happening between us—that wants to take whatever chances I’d be taking by getting as close to him as one person can physically get to another. But that closeness would cost me something.
Desire always makes me feel like I’m betraying myself.
I let him go and step back, shivering a little—the sun is almost gone from the now dark-blue and purple sky, and it’s getting colder. “I’ll make you a deal,” I say. “I’ll tell you when I’m going to watch the video if you figure out a way to take Camber’s class.”
He reaches out and puts a hand low on my hip. “You said you didn’t know if you were gonna watch it.”
“I don’t.” The wind picks up, whipping my hair around, and he brushes it out of my eyes in a way that makes me want to forget just how complicated it is to be in Jamie’s life. “But if I decide to, I’ll tell you.”
“No. If you decide to, you make sure I’m there.”
When I don’t answer right away, he pulls me toward him and lowers his head, forcing me to look in his eyes. “Okay,” I concede, suddenly unsure if this was such a great idea after all—maybe I don’t want to watch the video. And maybe I don’t want Jamie to have to watch it either. “I’ll help you with the class, you know.”
“You’re not gonna waste your time studying with a dropout.”
He says it like helping him could somehow make me less smart. “You didn’t drop out—you got kicked out,” I remind him.
“Same difference.”
Something in his tone makes me wonder if Jamie regrets letting himself get expelled. I don’t think of Jamie as regretting anything—he always seems so sure of himself, like every decision he makes is the right one, no matter what the outcome. I’ve always wondered what it’s like to live with that kind of certainty.
“I’m helping you because I like you. Remember?”
“Yeah, I do, sort of.”
There’s a familiar smile in his eyes. It used to make me crazy in a bad way when he smiled at me like that, like he was humoring me, amused by a kid who had a crush on him. Maybe it’s because I don’t see myself that way anymore, but there’s something completely different in his eyes when he smiles that way now.
I can hear the first few chords of “Sour Cherry” echoing in the garage, and I step back, causing Jamie’s hand to drop from my hip. Even through my jeans, my skin is warm where he was touching me, and I imagine that if I checked, I’d find his handprint. “I’m going back to rehearsal now.”
“Text me if Angelo needs his ass kicked,” he teases.
I turn away so I don’t kiss him.
His eyes are hot on my back as I head into the garage, and I curse at myself. No amount of reading Killing Cinderella can help me. I can’t stay away from this guy even when I want to.
I slam the metal door shut behind me.
“Lovesong,” 21, Adele
_______________________
Chapter 6
My mother stands in the center of the kitchen, flipping her house keys in a circle on her finger. She’s had her hair blown out and her makeup professionally done, and she’s wearing a tight scarlet dress that is not her style in any way, which means some salesgirl talked her into it.
If my dad were here, he’d say she looks “va-va-VOOM.” And he’d be right.
There’s a black town car in our driveway, waiting to take her into the city to make her first official appearance as Dirk Taylor’s girlfriend at a press junket for his new show. He wants her to walk the red carpet with him; she wants to stay home with me and the ironic chocolate chip cookies that are baking in the oven.
Her keys clink in a steady rhythm as they go around and around while she eyes the glasses of milk I’ve set on the table. She has no clue how to interpret them.
“I don’t know if I’m comfortable with you having a 19-year-old over while I’m not here, Rose.”
“Mom, he’s not ‘a nineteen-year-old.’ He’s Jamie. You know him. Really well. Weirdly well.”
“Yes, I do,” she says, her tone implying that her knowing him doesn’t necessarily work in my favor here. “If you remember, after Dizzy’s, we discussed you not seeing Jamie for a while—or, actually, at all.”
“I’m not seeing him. This isn’t a date. I mean, look at what I’m wearing,” I say, snapping the waistband of my favorite old sweatpants and pointing to my holey Jack White T-shirt. “I’m just helping him. He’s taking Camber’s GED class and we’re going over some stuff. It’ll be good for me. Part of my SAT prep.”
She gives me her “I call bullshit” look.
“Mom, you like Jamie,” I insist. “And it’s my fault that he didn’t graduate—”
“It is not your fault. Jamie had two strikes against him long before the parking-lot incident.”
“Still, I’m part of why he got expelled. This is a good way to make it up to him.”
“He made the decision to walk away from the police, not you. He could have made a different decision.” She stops flipping her keys and sighs. “If you can convince Cal and Holly to hang out here tonight instead of downtown, I’ll allow it.”
I know what Holly’s plans are for our unsupervised evening, and they most definitely do not involve hanging out at home. I also know that my mother is going to New York regardless, so her laying down the law is just for show, for herself.
The kitchen timer goes off. I grab some hot mitts. “You realize the hypocrisy of that, right? Holly is dating a 20-year-old.”
“Holly is not my daughter.”
“Yet,” I tease.
My mother looks stricken—the opposite of the effect I was going for. I’m not sure where things are headed with Mom and Dirk, but I think the video has set her back in her “moving on” process. I open the oven and slide the chocolate chip cookies out as I review the pros-and-cons list I’ve been composing in my head recently.
If Mom and Dirk were married, Holly would be my stepsister, which would be awesome. I’d have a movie star for a stepfather, which would be cheesy, but not without some serious benefits. On the con side, my mother would be married to someone who is not my father, whose career is on the other side of the country.
I slide the cookies onto a cooling rack and grab one, knowing full well I’m going to burn my fingers and then my mouth. I blow on it, take a bite, burn myself, and offer the rest to my mom.
She looks down at her tight dress, then declines my offer with a sigh. “Rose, have you decided what you’re going to do about the video?”
I open my mouth and wave my hand in front of it, trying to cool off what’s going on in there. When that doesn’t work, I just swallow. The cookie scalds my throat on the way down.
“Not yet,” I lie, taking a gulp of cold milk from the glass on the table.
“I keep expecting them to take it down, but it’s still there,” she says, her eyes fixed on a point on the wall as if she can see it right now. “I called the lawyer. It’ll be gone soon, I’m sure.” She looks at me, possibly doubting the wisdom of telling me that. “You’ll be okay tonight?”
“Don’t worry about me,” I say. “Cal and Holly will come over and we’ll order pizza, eat cookies, and watch the Disney channel. Then Holly and I will send the boys home and be in bed with our hair in curlers by 9:30.”
“I’m sure that’s exactly what will happen,” she says drily.
“We’ll even Skype you later to prove it,” I add.
She says exactly what I expect her to say. “That’s all right. Just get some studying done. And nobody sleeps
here tonight but you and Holly. You got that?”
“Got it. You better go. Don’t miss your red carpet.”
“I am not setting foot on that thing, no matter what he thinks.” She shakes her head as she pulls down the hem of her dress. “Dirk and I will be back for brunch tomorrow, and we’ll take you girls downtown, okay?” She studies me before adding, “I’m deciding to trust you.”
Her wording is not lost on me.
*
When the doorbell rings, I’m in the living room with my guitar, playing that damn F chord, wondering why I’ve been so lame about practicing when I know I need to—Angelo never misses an opportunity to make that clear.
I jump up and go to the hall mirror, asking myself for the millionth time if I’m making the right decision. I pinch my cheeks because that’s the last thing Tracy always does when she looks in the mirror—she says it adds color. Then I roll my eyes and dash into the kitchen.
I slide the cookies onto a plate and set them on the table between the glasses of milk. When I invited Jamie over, he made fun of me for saying it would be a “study date.” I ran with it, explaining that it would all be very aboveboard with milk and cookies and such. So I thought it would be funny if I actually made the cookies.
“Hey,” Jamie says when I finally open the door. It takes me a second to figure out why he looks different. Then I realize it’s because he’s holding a GED test-prep book. It’s the first time, in the four years that I’ve known Jamie, that I’ve seen him carrying a book. But even though I want to get him back for making fun of me, this is not an appropriate time to mock him for holding a book.
“Come on in.”
As usual, Jamie has to be invited in more than once. “You sure your mom’s cool with this?” he asks.
“As long as you don’t spend the night.”
I’m trying to be funny but then I realize that Jamie could, in fact, spend the night. In my bed.
I blush. He looks mildly amused.
“Joke. Sorry. Let’s start over. Hi! Come on in. Let’s go have some milk and cookies.”
When I lead him into the kitchen where the milk and cookies sit on the table, he laughs a little. “You weren’t kidding.”
I grin and offer him the plate. “Cookie?”
He takes one and sits, biting into it. I have an out-of-body experience as I watch Jamie Forta eating a cookie that I made for him, while sitting at my kitchen table so we can study together.
It’s a beautiful little parallel universe. Too bad I’m about to trash it.
I wish that we could just have our study date and eat cookies like a normal high school couple, but Jamie’s not in high school and there’s never been anything normal about us.
“So, um, before we start, I wanted to tell you that I’ve been thinking about the deal that we made and…I need to watch the video.”
The kitchen fills with silence, except for the world’s loudest oven clock. He watches me, his hazel-gold eyes assessing. “You sure?”
I nod, looking away, unwilling to be assessed at the moment.
“When?”
“Maybe…after we study?”
He takes me in for another few seconds, then looks at my laptop sitting on the far side of the table. He reaches for it. When he puts it down in front of me, I’m suddenly less than sure about this whole thing—it seems like a bad, bad idea. My stomach starts to churn.
“Wait, now?” I ask. My voice sounds small, meek.
He nods. “Now. You said you need to so…now.”
“But if it’s…if I can’t…I might not be able to study after.”
He reaches over and opens the laptop, then sits back in his chair. I stare at the waiting screen, thinking about my mother saying that I can never unsee the video. Will it change the way I remember my father?
I watch my hands start tapping at the keys despite what’s going on in my brain. I search for the video in a haze, and it doesn’t take long to find the thing. There’s a torturously long pause as the video loads, and then, after wondering about it and thinking about it and being afraid of it, I’m watching it.
The quality of the video is much clearer than I imagined it would be, and as faces come into focus, I start to feel the claws of panic around my throat. I’ve had my panic attacks under control for a while now, but this one already has me in its clutches—I’ve passed the point of being able to stop it. As my heart skitters around, pounding double time and then sometimes not at all, I hear people talking, and then I see him, sitting inside some kind of truck or SUV. He’s with people I don’t know, smiling, taking a drag off someone’s cigarette and handing it back. I’ve never seen my dad smoke—it never occurred to me that he knew how.
The person shooting the video—it must be Gabriel Ortiz—pans around, getting everyone in the truck, all of them in uniform except my dad and another contractor. They’re wearing civilian clothes and lanyards with ID badges.
A voice says, “Smile, dudes, you’re on Candid Camera.”
And they do—they smile. Just before the explosion. It’s too loud for the mic and the sound cuts out. The camera shakes violently and falls, and everything is beige dust with a bright ball in the center. It’s the sun—the sun is somehow still shining in the middle of all that destruction. We think that the sun is ours, that sunny days exist for our happiness, but the sun doesn’t give a shit about us one way or the other.
When the sound comes back, there’s screaming, groaning, gasping—the pain is raw. My throat is closing and I’m hyperventilating—I can’t tell the difference between my breathing and the breathing in the video.
I try to make out my dad’s voice but I can only hear someone rasping, “Ohmygodohmygod,” over and over again, and the crackling of flames, and gunfire in the distance, getting closer. Someone—Gabe?—finds the phone and picks it up. He tries to steady his hands and keep shooting.
He focuses on the jumble of bodies and limbs as the beige dust clears. The men are tangled together in a pile in what’s left of the truck. There’s blood. Everywhere.
Bombs are the great equalizer. Our differences and our similarities mean nothing when we are in pieces. We’re the same underneath our tissue-paper skin.
With one last broken cry, the video goes black.
All the muscles in my body give way. I slide off my chair. Tears and sweat stream down my face as I clutch at the floor with my fingers, looking for something to hold onto. Everything spins.
I thought I was done with this.
Jamie is on one knee next to me, pulling me back against him. He slips one arm around my shoulders and the other under my knees, lifting me off the floor. My tears are like ice on my burning face, running into my hair as Jamie carries me to the living room and lays me down on the couch.
He tries to let go of me but I won’t let him. I’m on overload, unsure what I’m doing but desperate to hold onto him, to know that he’s real and alive and here and whole.
I pull him toward me, and then I’m trying to kiss him, which makes no sense because I’m still just trying to breathe and it’s impossible. But maybe he can help me breathe. Maybe he has the air I need…
“Rose—”
“Just…please,” I gasp. I hear myself begging and I know what it sounds like but I don’t care.
“You gotta—”
I kiss him like it’s the end of the world, like he is oxygen. My hands are in his hair, then on his back, pulling him onto me, getting as much of his body against me as I can, using him as a shield against the terror and horror that’s everywhere, all the time.
“Rose. Stop.”
Now I’m shaking—it’s adrenaline from the panic attack. It’s so violent that Jamie stops pulling away and wraps his arms around me, holding on, trying to stop it with his weight, his strength. “Breathe,” he whispers into my ear, over and over and over again, like a mantra. I close my eyes, I do what he tells me—I breathe in, I breathe out. In, out. My eyes close, the shaking subsides. I no longer have the strength
to talk or move.
Jamie carries me upstairs to my bedroom.
At some point in the middle of the night, I wake up, confused about where I am and how I got there, and wondering if I’m the one who died, if it was me in that explosion, in that pile of bloody bodies.
But then I see Jamie crashed out in the chair across the room. I think he’s asleep until my eyes adjust, and I see him watching me. He lifts his chin in greeting like we’re just passing each other in the hallway at school or something.
I smile, or at least I try to. And then I sink into the deepest sleep I’ve had in more than two years.
WINTER
“Comeback Kid,” Reign of Terror, Sleigh Bells
_______________________
Chapter 7
I’m a few seats down from Cal but I can see the look on his face just fine. He’s three seconds away from climbing onstage to murder Robert. It’s a familiar look to me now—I’ve seen it a few times when Cal and Robert end up in each other’s orbits—but tonight has the potential to bring things to a boil.
Robert was amazing as Salieri in Amadeus, so he got the lead in the winter musical—opposite Holly. They are playing Matt and Luisa, the lovers in The Fantasticks, who are, of course, supposed to be madly in love. Holly’s a total pro—she’s completely believable without over or underselling it. But Robert is pouring his heart into every word of “They Were You”—the bittersweet love-song finale—as if it’s the last chance he’ll get to express his feelings before facing a death squad later tonight. In other words, he’s not bothering to act as he and Holly stare deep into each other’s eyes.
It’s the wrong move, for so many reasons.
Cal’s an actor, too, and on some level, he knows that Holly and Robert are just doing their jobs. But he also knows when an actor is using a character as an excuse to say what he wants to say—what he’s not supposed to say.
The meta aspect of the whole thing is a little hard to untangle.
Jamie stifles a yawn. I talked him into taking the night off from Dizzy’s and coming with me to see Holly and Robert in the show. I told him it wasn’t your average lovey-dovey musical—that The Fantasticks goes past love, to being disillusioned with each other, to finding your way back to each other again with a new understanding about what it means to love someone.
No More Confessions Page 5