Wicked Games

by Olin, Sean

  “I mean,” he said to her as they reached the dead end where Magnolia ran into the beach and turned onto Shore Drive, “you haven’t gone off your meds or whatever, have you?” he asked quietly.

  Lilah’s face fell in disbelief. “Are you really asking me that?”

  “Like I said, I’m worried about you,” Carter said.

  “Well, don’t. I can take care of myself.”

  It occurred to Carter that she hadn’t answered his question. “But have you?” he said.

  Lilah didn’t answer. In fact, Lilah didn’t say a word to Carter for the rest of the ride to Jeff’s place.

  They made their way up Shore Drive past the neon-lit entrances to the glitzy hotels, and on to the north side of town, where the beachside mansions and the weathered gates leading to their private beaches paraded past.

  When they pulled into Jeff’s circular crushed-shell driveway, they had to navigate around the tangle of everybody else’s cars, and then seeing that all the good spots were already taken, they looped back out and parked a ways away down the sand-strewn street.

  “We’re here,” said Carter.

  “Looks like it,” Lilah responded sarcastically.

  They sat there, neither of them moving for a moment.

  “So, listen,” Carter said. “Before we go in, I want to say—” She was fiddling with the red plastic bracelet she’d been wearing every day since she’d gotten her job as a lifeguard last summer. “Will you look at me a sec?”

  She did, and Carter caught her chocolate eyes and held them. She seemed so fragile, so scared, in that moment in the car. He took both her hands in his and held them out in front of himself.

  “The girls from the swim team might be here, and—”

  Lilah’s head bobbed forward and she covered her face with her hands but Carter pressed on.

  “—I know you think they hate you, but really, they don’t. I promise you. Just . . . try to relax and let yourself have a good time. And if you can’t, then let me know it’s too much for you and we’ll leave.”

  “Okay,” said Lilah, glancing back up at him with a sharp glare. “Are we gonna go in, or what?”

  “Yeah. Let’s go in.” Carter carefully tucked a loose strand of wavy light brown hair behind her ear. He cracked a sad grin. “This is going to be fun. You’ll see.”

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  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  2

  Inside Jeff’s house, the party was blazing at full speed. The music—Nelly and Mac Miller and Nas—blasted from the surround speakers mounted in the corners of the cavernous, arch-ceilinged main room, and the whole senior class seemed to have already arrived. People Carter and Lilah recognized and people they didn’t raced barefoot around the swimming pool, pushing one another in, swatting at one another with neon-colored pool noodles.

  She squeezed his arm, hoping he’d notice her insecurity and buck her up again like he’d done in the car, but he was preoccupied with searching the faces in the crowd, looking for Jeff, probably.

  “I’m gonna go find the drinks table,” she said.

  “Lilah,” he said, the concern for her showing all over his face, “you know you can’t mix—”

  “I’ll have a Diet Coke, Carter. Stop monitoring me already.”

  The worry on his face relaxed. “You’re right,” he said. “Sorry.”

  “You want something?” she asked.

  “Yeah, sure. A beer?”

  “Where will you be?”

  “I don’t know—” Carter was up on his tiptoes, ducking his head back and forth to see over the crowd. “Oh, wait, there he is.”

  He pointed across the house and out the window, to the backyard patio where Jeff was stationed with a bunch of other guys. He was wearing a pair of gargantuan red sunglasses—each lens must have been six inches large—and doing some sort of goofy dance that had the other guys buckled over with laughter.

  “I’ll be out there,” Carter said.

  Before she could say, “Okay, I’ll meet you in a minute,” he was gone from her side, down the marble steps and ducking around people on his way toward the sliding glass door that would lead him outside to his comedian friend.

  Lilah made her way into the massive open-plan living room. As she headed toward the kitchen island where the drinks were set up, she saw that a Ping-Pong table had been erected in the corner of the cavernous space, and Kaily and Teresa, her old swim-team friends, were playing a girls vs. boys doubles match against two guys from the football team who’d carved their uniform numbers into the sides of their faux hawks.

  Her heart sank.

  Before she could duck and hide her face with her hair, Teresa saw her. “He-e-ey!” she shouted, her almond-colored face breaking into a smile. She pointed her Ping-Pong paddle out toward Lilah like a gun. “Look who’s decided to grace us with her presence.”

  Kaily looked, too. “L to the ah,” she said. “Where’ve you been? Get yourself over here, girl! We need help whipping these guys’ asses!”

  Lilah waved. She forced herself to smile. Part of her felt the urge to take Kaily up on the offer.

  One of the football guys, number sixty-four, beat his paddle rapidly against the table and said, “Come on. It’s your serve. Are we playing, or what?”

  Kaily unleashed her long red hair from its hair band and bent forward to throw it in a wave over her head before rebanding it loosely behind her back again.

  “Oh, are we ever playing,” said Teresa. She held the ball up and readied herself to serve. “Zero-six,” she said.

  And just like that, both she and Teresa forgot about Lilah. Figures. Lilah knew that they didn’t really want her to join them. They’d been inseparable when they’d all been relay partners together, but they’d barely spoken or even texted with her in over a year, not since she’d been kicked off the team and gotten so depressed.

  Feeling slighted and a little bit humiliated, Lilah slunk over to the drinks table.

  She still wasn’t up for this, she realized. She felt totally trapped. And despite Carter’s many reassurances that he wouldn’t be upset if she wanted to stay home, she knew—she just knew—that he would be. She wanted to please him, but the more she tried to do so, the more she resented the effort it took. What if this was the night when everything fell apart for good? She couldn’t bear the thought. But she couldn’t get rid of it, either.

  Squeezing through the throng, she pushed herself to the front of the line.

  She knew what she was going to do, even if she wouldn’t admit it to herself. She was going to get drunk. If the alcohol mixed wrong with her antidepressants, well, she just didn’t care. Not tonight.

  Jeff had really stocked up for this party. There were two kegs of beer, and a whole mess of bottles of vodka, rum, gin, and bourbon, along with any mixer she could have possibly wanted. There was even a bottle of Moët champagne.

  She poured herself a Captain Morgan and Coke and poked a straw into it. Then, knowing she’d need even more fortification, she splashed an extra dose of rum into her cup.

  Carter would want beer. He wasn’t a big drinker, and one beer, hidden inside a red cup, could last him for hours.

  She staked out a place in the scrum that had formed around the kegs, and waited for Paco Bermudez, a cool kid who was already making money spinning records sometimes and who dressed just a little more fashionably than anyone else in the senior class—tonight he was wearing a Gucci fedora and a pair of clear Ray-Bans—to finish pumping the foam out.

  While she waited, she sipped at her drink, sucking it through the straw she’d stuck inside. Then, still waiting, she realized that her drink was gone, and she wasn’t feeling any different, so she ducked out of line and poured herself another.

  By the time she’d managed to get Carter his beer, her second drink was almost gone as well.

  Finally, a slight buzz had kicked in. But looki
ng around the room, she saw all these people, her classmates, kids from all walks of life—from the lowliest stoners in their torn army jackets and heavy-metal T-shirts to the slickest, most glamorous, Prada-wearing divas in school—having fun together like they actually liked one another. It was all too unbearable. Especially Kaily and Teresa over there, flailing after the Ping-Pong ball as it soared past their paddles, pretending that they didn’t know how to play in order to impress a couple of linebackers.

  She pushed past Paco Bermudez and squeezed back up to the drinks table, refreshing her rum and Coke one more time.

  A drink in each hand, she slid the screen door open with her foot and stepped out onto the patio to deliver Carter’s beer to him. She had to watch out for flying beach balls and diving revelers as she walked past the pool, and each time she stopped, she took the opportunity to gulp down another swig of her drink. Part of her worried that by the time she got to Carter, her cup would be empty again. And then what? She’d be left with her worries and nothing to knock them out.

  So she took another swig of rum and Coke. She couldn’t get drunk fast enough. It was the only way she knew how to escape the feeling that everyone here was laughing at her behind her back.

  When she arrived at his circle of friends, Carter held out his arm, beckoning her to his side and inviting her into the group. She handed him his beer.

  “Mmm. Warm beer. My favorite,” he said to her, putting his cup to his lips. She knew he wasn’t criticizing her—he was just trying to be funny, or cute or something. But she couldn’t help but feel like he should have just said thank you.

  His core group was all there. Jeff, of course, and Andy and Carlos and Reed. They were a multicultural group. Carlos was Cuban, Andy was African American (his mother was white and his father was black), and Reed’s real name was Ranjit—they called him Reed because he was so skinny. What bound them together was their sense of humor, goofball stuff—they loved Seth Rogen especially—and the fact that they were slightly smarter than their classmates.

  “You doing okay?” he whispered to her, ducking his head toward hers for some small semblance of privacy.

  She shrugged and adjusted the dress strap around her neck. “We’re here,” she said. “So . . . whatever.”

  Carter smelled the alcohol on her breath—she could tell by the sour face he made, the sharp look of disappointment in his eyes—but he didn’t say anything about it. Instead, the two of them turned their attention back to the guys.

  Jeff was a great mimic, and Lilah recognized that right now he was doing his Paco Bermudez imitation—thus the oversized glasses. He arched his back so he looked like he was sitting in a convertible, slowly bobbed his head, looking from side to side, and mumbled with a slight Latin accent, “Yeah, man. Yeah, man. Killer beat, man. Yo, that’s how we do. Yeah, man.”

  Even though Carlos and Andy chuckled, Reed knocked the giant sunglasses off Jeff’s nose and frowned. “That shit is so stale, dude. You need to broaden your range.”

  Carter leaned in and whispered in Lilah’s ear. “Aren’t you going to miss this?”

  “Yeah,” she said, trying to be cheerful. In truth, she looked forward to the day when Jeff made good on his promise to move to LA and try his luck in the film industry; then she and Carter could be alone, building a life together without the constant distraction of Jeff gobbling up all of Carter’s attention.

  She went to gulp down some more of her drink and discovered that it was empty again.

  Carter, who was always conscious, carefully attentive of Lilah at his side, watching her out of the corner of his eye even when he seemed to be giving all his attention to something else, noticed that she stabbed her cheek with the straw before finding her lips.

  “Do Rollo,” said Andy, egging Jeff on. Rollo was the captain of the wrestling team, a legend around school for his excessive appetite and his exceedingly small brain.

  “Me Rollo,” said Jeff. “Me eat. Me eat you.” He held his arms out Frankenstein-style and went toward Lilah with them, but then seeing that she wasn’t into the game, he stopped and said, “Man, you know? Sometimes I wonder. How’s Rollo ever going to survive once he’s got to be out there in the real world?”

  Lilah didn’t hang around to hear the answer to the question. “I’m going for a refill,” she said.

  “You sure?” Carter said. “It’s going to be a long night.”

  “Yes, I’m sure. Anyway, you’re the one who told me to have fun and relax. That’s what I’m doing.”

  “It’s just—”

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” Carter said. “Go ahead, get your drink.”

  “Thanks, I will.” Lilah could feel her face turning red.

  Reed, who was quieter than the rest of the guys, and always attentive to the subtleties of what was going on around him, looked at her with his wide, dark eyes, confused. Jeff, seeing Reed look, started gawking at her, too.

  “That’s right, drink up, dude,” said Andy, always ready to lighten the mood, even if he did so in all the wrong ways. “Par-tay! Par-tay! Par-tay!” To prove his point, he tipped his red cup to his mouth and guzzled his beer, spilling half of it down the sides of his chubby cheeks.

  God. It made her want to die. And though she knew he hadn’t really done anything wrong, she couldn’t help blaming her boyfriend. “You know, we can’t all be perfect like you, Carter.”

  “Come on, Lilah,” he responded. “I didn’t—”

  But she’d already stalked off for more rum and Coke, determined this time to get the balance right—ninety-nine percent rum, and a splash of soda.

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  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  3

  Twenty minutes later, Carter and the guys were still hanging around on the deck and Lilah still wasn’t back. Though the party continued to swirl crazily around them, they’d moved into a lower key, sitting on the cushioned wooden platforms of the chaise lounges and feeling the sea breeze on their sweaty heads as they compared notes about their college-admissions statuses.

  “Looks like I’m down to my safety school,” said Andy with a sigh. “Tallahassee, here I come.”

  Jeff smirked and leaned back onto an elbow. “Tallahassee’s not so bad. Maybe you’ll come home next summer with a mullet.”

  “At least I get to major in alligator wrangling, like I’ve always wanted to,” said Andy, trying to laugh off his disappointment.

  “Jeff can come out from UCLA. And I’ll drive down from Duke,” Reed said. “We’ll film you getting your arm bitten off. We’ll be like the next wave of Jackass.”

  “Ha.” Jeff slapped the cushion next to him and fell over himself laughing. “The United Colors of Jackass,” he said.

  Carter tracked all this with half an ear. Mostly he was wondering where Lilah had gone, and fighting the urge to go find her. He sat slightly apart from the guys, his chin on his forearm on the deck railing, gazing out at the water. It was calm out there tonight.

  Noticing Carter’s mood, and wanting to bring him into the group, Jeff asked, “What role would Carter play?”

  Carter smiled out of the side of his mouth. He ran his hand through his sandy hair and pulled his attention back to his friends. “I’d be the one who scientifically explained to you all the possible ways the alligator could kill you. Just so you’d know.”

  “They couldn’t kill me,” said Andy, grabbing his belly with two hands and shaking the rolls he trapped there. “It takes a whole lot more than the razor-sharp teeth of an alligator to get through all this.”

  They all laughed, and then one of those natural pauses in the conversation fell over them. They listened to the thwacks of pool noodles on bare skin and watched the bikini-clad girls in the pool, doing battle with one another from the shoulders of Rollo and his wrestling buddies.

  Reed was looking around, taking everything in as usual, his head bobbing
on his thin neck like it did. Gradually, his attention settled somewhere up high above them. His wide eyes widened even farther. Touching Carter’s elbow, he whispered, “Don’t look now, but you might want to check out what’s happening up there.”

  When he looked up, Carter couldn’t believe what he saw. There was Lilah, scrambling clumsily on her hands and knees over the curved terra-cotta shingles of the steeply angled roof, her white sundress streaked in places with thick, black grease. She appeared to be trying to raise herself up to stand from a sitting position, but Carter could see that she was too drunk to do this with any confidence.

  “Jesus,” he said. He stood up and studied the stucco walls of the house, searching for a climbing path to the roof.

  “Jeff, you seeing this?” asked Reed. “You might have a liability issue on your hands.”

  Jeff and Andy both saw it now. They all stood up. They all craned their necks to stare at Lilah, three stories up on the roof.

  “How’d she even get up there?” asked Carter. He had both hands to the top of his head, holding his hair back as he tried to figure out what to do.

  “There’s a ladder built into the wall around the side,” said Jeff.

  Lilah had now managed to get herself into a standing position. Her sandals swung from one hooked finger, sometimes slapping into her thigh. She gazed out over the deck, swaying drunkenly as she surveyed the scene down there: the chicken fights in the pool, the clusters of people in the corners of the deck, the wet, tattooed guys in their knee-length, tropical-print swimsuits ducking in and out of the pool house. And of course, Carter and his friends, staring up at her as though they really cared. As though Carter really cared, she thought.