by Deb Caletti
His voice woke me that night.
“I don’t know, I don’t, boy,” he said. I thought I was dreaming it. Through my open window, below me, rising from the night, I heard the truck door open and close, and then the rustle of cellophane. The flick, flick, flick of a lighter. He was having trouble getting it to work. “Fuck,” he breathed. And then flick, flick, flick again.
I didn’t care that I was only wearing my long T-shirt, the one Nicole had brought back for me from Las Vegas, the time her mom took her on a pissed-off spending-spree trip to run up her dad’s credit cards. I didn’t stop to check how I looked, only swiped on a quick fingertip of toothpaste as I went past the bathroom and headed downstairs. I knew where Mom kept the matches gathered from various restaurants over the years or from somewhere—I didn’t exactly even know where they came from, because I doubted she’d ever been to those places. I grabbed a red box labeled The Flame. No restaurant by that name around here. Some objects—pens, matches, coins—liked to travel.
The air was wet and thick and it smelled like it had rained, even though it hadn’t yet—that wet earth smell, wet streets, wet evergreen boughs, wet, simmering campfires.
I threw the book of matches and he caught them against his chest. “Here. In spite of the fact that it’s not who you are either.”
He was shirtless again—the night was warm. My whole body noticed this, the valley of his chest, the curve of his muscled arms. The noticing surprised me—it was a bold feeling, and I was not exactly known for being bold. Want, even, and I was not known for wanting.
“I woke you,” he said. “You shouldn’t have gotten up. And you’ve got school tomorrow.”
“Hmm,” I said. “I didn’t look at the clock, but if it’s past midnight, it’s officially Saturday.”
“Jesus,” he said. He shook his head as if it needed clearing. He struggled with the matchbox, lit his cigarette. He inhaled deeply. Zeus lay down at his feet, as if it were okay to rest now that someone else was on duty. “Another week gone by,” he said.
“Time flies when you’re having fun,” I said.
“Ah. You heard.”
“She’s not the easiest person in the world.”
He blew smoke up to the sky. “This isn’t the easiest way to begin a relationship.”
I thought about what to say. I looked down at my feet on the cool cement, curled my toes under so I couldn’t see the polish and then out again so that I could. I wanted to be careful. The moment was careful. The night held its breath.
“Maybe you shouldn’t love her so much,” I said quietly.
He looked at me, straight on. Hs eyes were direct, his gaze shooting straight inside me. My stomach dropped. It was like he was staring right in, seeing the way I worked; seeing, maybe, all the things I wanted to hide and couldn’t say and might never say.
“But that wouldn’t be the truth,” he said.
“If you knew her … I don’t mean to say you don’t know her, but if you knew-knew her … She likes the cool, distant thing, right? You hold back, she chases, you get; she pulls back again, you pull back, she chases… .” I was talking fast. He needed to know these things if Juliet was ever going to love him like he wanted. “It’s dangled, I think. Out of reach. Somehow she wants it more then.”
“If I did that …” He thought. “I’d be acting more out of fear than love, wouldn’t I? Fear would make me a liar. I shouldn’t have to be a liar to make someone love me. I shouldn’t be so afraid of losing someone that I’ll do anything to make them stay.”
He was looking right into my eyes, and all at once my throat closed up. All at once, I felt the hot press of tears. They came out of nowhere, and I swallowed hard. I didn’t feel ashamed about what I’d said. I didn’t feel like I’d been stupid to give him such unwanted advice. No, instead, I saw his compassion, and the way he understood things about himself and about me, too. He’d seen it in me, or just felt it himself, the way you try to do certain things and be certain things and give and give more and change and fix and hold back and not hold back all in order to keep people close. A million little lies to get that one thing.
I felt a clear truth, and that truth hit some deep part of me, the deepest, most secretive part. The part of who I most am and why I am that way. You can hold a secret, hold it so far in that it drives nearly every thought and every move you make, your very heartbeat, almost. And then someone can come along and name it, gently name it, call it forward in kindness, and when that happens, all you can do is stand there in the night doing everything you can not to cry.
“I know, Scarlet Ellis,” Hayden whispered. “I know exactly.”
Chapter Sixteen
Maybe Mom was right, maybe Juliet just needed to work out things on her own, because for the next few weeks before the end of the school year, Buddy Wilkes seemed mostly gone. There was no yellow dress in the cemetery after school, no laughter filtering through leafy trees. Maybe Juliet had just needed to see him to get him out of her system the way you need to eat a little chocolate to get over your craving.
Jitter was growing—Juliet’s form was becoming blocky, and, according to my book, at over five months, Jitter had eyes and eyelashes. I would find Juliet with her hand at her back from her growing weight, and she said she could feel flutters like a butterfly let loose inside. I had heard her once on the phone, muffled voice through her bedroom wall, angry words that were not directed at Hayden, who had come through our front door not a moment later, whistling. Juliet had greeted him with a long kiss, and he had put one hand in the back pocket of her shorts. She seemed so happy with him sometimes, the real and true kind, not the Buddy Wilkes anxious and uneasy kind. The butterfly candleholder by her bed had gone missing, too. There one day. Then, not.
I saw Buddy Wilkes during that time, not at school in his El Camino, not driving down our street but, oddly, at the library. The library was one of the most beautiful buildings on Parrish Island, and I liked that about it, it seemed fitting. The library should be the best building. It was a tall white structure with a long set of steps and a pair of elaborate columns; inside, the floor was shiny and wide, and the stairwell curved toward a domed ceiling painted like the sky. It was a place for book reverence, reverence for ideas and words and thoughts, not a place for boys with narrow hips and thin, sallow cheeks—manipulative boys whose only special talents were unhooking bra straps with one hand and talking middle-age grocery clerks into selling them beer.
But there he was. Sitting at one of the dark, solid tables, right there where I wanted to be, in fiction. Creeps didn’t belong near fiction. I could smell already-smoked cigarettes coming off his jacket. He might as well have been a rank-smelling animal in an art museum. He had a book open in front of him, but he wasn’t reading. It was a big book, with glossy pictures of Victorian furniture—red velvet sofas and heavy chiseled chairs, nothing he’d be interested in. I looked around for the real reason he must be there. One of his friends was in the stacks, maybe, Jason Dale or Kale Kramer, preparing to pull some kind of practical joke on the respectful people there; or maybe some girl, some Alicia Worthen, trying to graduate in a hurry before it was too late. I’d know her when I saw her—she’d be wearing a tiny tank top and the shortest shorts possible, clothes somehow not fitting for the religious place that was the library.
But I didn’t see anyone who might be with Buddy Wilkes. No Jason Dale or Wendy Williams. Only Elizabeth Everly with her cart, shelving books. Sweet and quiet Elizabeth Everly, who’d graduated with my sister, with her whispered voice and teacup-fragile wrists—not exactly Buddy Wilkes’s type. Most likely we’d be reading in the morning about some crime that had been committed at the Parrish Library, and I’d know who did it.
I walked by Buddy’s table, but he didn’t look at me. I don’t know why I did it, but I knocked my hip into the chair across from him so he’d notice me. Maybe it was some useless attempt at warning on my part; I needed him to know that I was aware of things, and that he couldn’t always d
o as he pleased simply because he wanted to. The wood chair bumped hard against the table and Buddy Wilkes looked up. He saw me and I stared back at him, but it was as if he didn’t even recognize me. He did not hand me some note for Juliet, or speak to me, or even give me a look that said we knew each other. I’d seen him countless times—in my driveway, my kitchen, hopping around half-naked trying to get his pants back on in a hurry, but his gaze right then was as blank as if we’d never met. It made me wonder if he only saw you when he wanted something. Some people are like that. You don’t exist, unless you are of use.
I didn’t tell Juliet about seeing Buddy Wilkes at the Parrish Island Library. I had learned my lesson about opening closed doors that snakes and thieves stood behind. Anyway, Hayden seemed to be managing Juliet on his own, and full-time managing of Juliet was part of life with her; I knew that. Hayden seemed to have taken two pieces of my advice, and it appeared to be working. He was giving her both compliments and presents—flowers and soft words and little books of poetry and elegant slices of desserts from Alice’s Bakery. She opened them with delight as her stomach grew, the smallest mound forming into a more distinct rounded hillside. I had to go downstairs to find the letters now, into their basement “apartment.” The letters were usually left on the nightstand, which was made out of the old crate that used to hold Mom’s college textbooks, and before that, according to the label, Valencia Oranges. I would hold the letters and try to breathe and let my secret be its own, full self for a while. I’d let my feelings out into the room, the way you might let out an animal who’d been traveling too long in a cage so that he could be free and remember how good that was.
Juliet—
Some decisions are a struggle, a thrashing effort of back and forth, the tormented wakefulness and night sweats and tangled sheets of a bad night’s sleep. But other decisions—there’s a purity. There is a simplicity and rightness about the decision. It’s the simplicity and rightness of air, of snow, of apples. Marrying you, Juliet, was that kind of decision for me. I made it with the straightforward ease of taking a drink of water, closing one’s eyes to rest.
I wondered about Hayden’s words. Straightforward ease. He didn’t seem to be feeling very easy. He seemed to be working hard, and what I was learning, beginning to learn, since he had come was that there were relationships that were hard work and relationships that weren’t. Most often, you worked hard like that when you were really worried you weren’t going to get what you needed back. Maybe he thought that working hard was honorable somehow, an honorable thing, but I saw something different. I saw him making himself small for her. Making himself less than and lower than and below. He said he didn’t want to be a liar to make someone love him, but he was being a liar by doing those things, by trying so hard to get her to love him. Working hard with someone else—it was a sign of serious trouble ahead, bumps and heartache and things going unexpected directions; doom, even.
It was coming. We should have known that.
“Oh my God,” I said out loud when I saw my locker.
“It is dripping,” Nicole said. “This reminds me of people who write in blood in those awful horror movies.”
We stared at the metal door, with I love you 4-ever written in shaving cream, now sliding toward the floor. It looked less like blood and more like the time I made a milkshake in the blender with the lid loose. “This is so humiliating,” I said.
“I’ll get some paper towels,” Nicole said and hurried off. I think she just didn’t want to stand there any longer than she had to.
“You’re the one for me,” Reilly Ogden said.
“God, Reilly!” I hated how he appeared out of nowhere. His eyes were big and his breath smelled like a mix of onions and spearmint gum. He wore a U2 World Tour T-shirt tucked into his jeans that were cinched with a cloth belt.
“Reilly … ,” I said. I tried to make the word say everything I needed to.
“You’re mad,” he said. “I can’t believe you’re mad.”
“It’s a little embarrassing,” I said. The words oozed and seeped. Nicole had been right.
“Why would you be mad after what happened the other day?”
“What? What happened?”
Nicole showed up with the paper towels. She gave Reilly a look of disgust and began to wipe up the mess.
“I gave you some notebook paper in AP English and you took it.”
“I said I was out, and you offered!”
“You could have said no. That means something. You can’t tell me it doesn’t.”
“Reilly,” I tried again.
Nicole clapped her hands like he was a bad dog on her lawn. “Get. Out. Now,” she said firmly.
He turned and left, just like he was that bad dog. Just like that. He slunk off. His jeans were too high on his hips.
“Just like that,” Nicole said, reading my mind. She handed me some paper towels. “Watch and learn.”
“So I know he comes out of the gym after second period,” Nicole said. We all knew who “he” was. “I wait there, over by the garbage cans? Every day. I pretend I’m throwing stuff away, and when I see him coming I turn and smile, and he smiles back.”
“You never told us,” I said.
“I know. It was just this thing I did. On my own. I didn’t want to tell you guys. But for the last three days, he hasn’t been there. We know he’s been at school. I think he’s taking a different way on purpose.” She looked a little sick. “Do you think it’s because he likes me? Maybe it’s just because he likes me, and he’s too afraid to show it.” Her eyes pleaded. It was one of the really bad things about rejection, the pleading that came with it. Maybe we should all have a personal law against pleading. We should forbid ourselves from doing it. That smallest person inside who was the one doing the pleading—they deserved our protection. They should be guarded to the best of our ability and only let out under certain careful conditions.
“Maybe he’s been hurt. Do you think that could be it?” she asked.
“Probably,” I said.
“Definitely,” Jasmine said. “Stupid bitch, whoever she was.”
“Roses?” I asked. Mom snatched the little tiny card in its little tiny envelope out of my hand.
“Don’t look,” she said.
“Who are they from?”
Mom looked puzzled for a moment, then made a funny little gasp. “Oh my God, I can’t believe it. I almost forgot his name! I was drawing a total blank. Dean.”
The psychology books would really have something to say about that. “I thought Dean didn’t believe in wasting money on flowers,” I said. “I even heard him say so once, after you bought tulips.” I felt a small prickle of dread. I hoped flowers weren’t enough to veer Mom from the iciness she’d been showing Dean lately. Flowers may have worked for Juliet, but I thought, hoped, Mom was different.
“People change their minds,” Mom said. The vase of flowers still sat in the cardboard delivery box. She flicked this box with her fingernail. It was the trying-to-decide gesture people used with grocery store melons.
“But why did he change his mind?” I asked.
“There doesn’t always have to be a why.”
Maybe there didn’t always have to be a why, but there almost always was a why. If I had learned one thing from all my psychology books, it was that.
“Huh,” I said. And, then, just like that, I got it. “He’s afraid he’s losing you,” I said. Those were the kinds of things you did when you were afraid of losing someone.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said.
But she kept those flowers in that box, and that told me everything I needed to know.
Kevin Frink’s Volkswagen was parked on our street every day after school. The chalk drawings had disappeared. Kevin Frink would drive Fiona Saint George home, and they would sit inside the small curved space of his car. I could see his big head and her small dark one, and she was talking, the girl who didn’t talk. Sometimes they would get out; Fiona Saint George would
sit on the rounded hood of Kevin Frink’s car with her ankles crossed in a way that was flirtatious, and Kevin Frink’s bare arms would be exposed to the sun. Once I saw him disappear into her house; he followed behind her, their fingertips touching. The Saint Georges were not home, and I imagined the empty house. Orderly rooms. Buster, the sausage-fat bulldog, too lazy to follow them up the stairs. And I stopped my imagining there. They were due their privacy, even in my mind, and I later saw Kevin Frink leave the house with his head down as he zipped up his jacket and headed to his car. He was smiling. The curtains of Fiona Saint George’s room were open just enough for her to watch him drive away.
The romance between Kevin Frink and Fiona Saint George was going better than I could have ever expected. I was actually happy about it. I didn’t stop to think about the things that might happen when you lit the personal fuse of a Bomb Boy, when you led two breakable people into the dangerous territory that was love.
If everyone right then was working hard for love, if Hayden was and Nicole and Reilly Ogden and Dean Neuhaus and Kevin Frink, well, I guess I was too. Or working hard not to love. Because that’s what my feelings for Hayden were, love. Wrong or stupid or forever hidden—still, love. I would watch the way his thoughts showed themselves across his face like a movie screen, notice how the sun made his hair turn from brown to gold. He took care of things—fetched cold drinks and watered forgotten plants and noticed when Zeus’s feelings were hurt. Crush was flimsy and unfair and inaccurate. I knew why I loved him.
The feelings were good and awful at the same time, pressing against my insides, begging to be let out. I knew when you had that particular combination, the sweet and the terrible, the terrible always won out eventually. So I would write postcards and letters for the Clive Weaver project and try not to become distracted by that photograph on my wall—Hayden with his eyes closed and his face full of that moment when we sat on the rocks. I folded paper cranes for Clive Weaver and began to fold them for myself. I stood on my bed and hung them from my ceiling with strings and small bits of tape.