Wicked Games

by Olin, Sean

  Where were they? Lilah peered closely, trying to figure it out, but the flash on the photo lit up their faces so much that whatever was behind them had gone totally black.

  There was a possibly innocuous explanation for the photos. Lilah realized this. “ALL HAIL UPENN DORKS.” The two of them mugging for the camera. It was totally possible that they’d been talking and they’d discovered that they were both going to the same college and they’d simply taken a photo to commemorate this fact. But really? There must be more to it than that.

  And why had this Jules bitch already received her acceptance letter when Lilah was still on the waiting list? Keeping this secret was tearing Lilah up inside, and here this girl was, latching on to Carter and flaunting her precious accomplishment in Lilah’s face.

  Lilah wanted to throw the phone at Carter’s head. Then once he was awake and she had his attention, she’d throw more things at him. Curses. Accusations. She’d demand to know exactly what was going on. But just then, heard the screen door to the main house slide open.

  Closing out of the text screen and turning Carter’s phone off as fast as she could—not an easy task, given her overwhelming panic at maybe getting caught—she put the phone back on the windowsill and stepped out onto the deck.

  Jeff. That’s who had come out of the house. She made sure to screw her face up into a smile, to wave at him in the most innocent way she could muster.

  He’d unhooked the skimming net from its hiding place along the baseboards of the pool house, and seeing Lilah there with her outsized, frightened smile, he threw her a loose-limbed wave.

  “Feeling better?” he asked.

  Lilah pushed her smile even wider. “Hi, Jeff,” she said. And then, since she couldn’t think of what to say next that wouldn’t sound aggressive and resentful, she just stood there and focused all her attention on her smile. His eyes were hidden behind his Ray-Bans, and she couldn’t tell what he was possibly thinking.

  For the next fifteen minutes or so, Jeff went about his business of checking the chlorine levels in the pool, putting new cartridges into the drains, and skimming the leaves and palm fronds from the surface of the water.

  Lilah lingered around the deck chairs, watching him. She managed to smirk as he balanced the long-poled skimming net on his finger until it toppled into the water. But always, there was a slight tremor of nervousness to her, twitching, barely visible below the surface.

  “You guys have fun last night?” she finally asked.

  “Foosball. Futurama,” Jeff told Lilah. “We didn’t end up crashing until, like, five a.m.”

  “Yeah?” she asked. “Who all was there?”

  “You know, the usual. Me, Andy, Reed.”

  Lilah changed tactics. “When did the party wind down?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” Jeff said. He was getting annoyed; Lilah could tell by the jerky way he was jabbing the skimmer at the water. “Right around when you left, I guess. It’s not like I spent the whole night staring at the clock.”

  “And then it was just the four of you, huh?”

  “Just the four of us. What’s with the interrogation, Lilah?”

  She climbed out of the deck chair in which she’d been sitting.

  “Nothing. Forget it. Listen,” she said, “if he ever wakes up, tell him I stopped by. Let him know that I’m feeling much better, okay?”

  “Sure,” Jeff said. “He’ll be happy to hear that. If you only knew how torn up with worry he was last night.”

  The shit-eating grin on his face as he waved good-bye made her want to kill him.

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  11

  On Monday after school, as she made her way up the grassy hill toward the gleaming, modern theater building, Jules saw Carter sitting on one of the brushed-steel benches out in front of the massive glass entrance, his headphones on, his head bobbing to the music only he could hear. She knew he must be waiting for her. And despite her mother’s warning that she should be careful, she couldn’t stop her heart from beating just a little bit faster.

  He was all alone up there, bent forward, resting his arms on his knees, his eyes hidden behind sunglasses, his messenger bag slumped on the bench beside him.

  Continuing up the path, she tried to play it cool and pretend she hadn’t noticed him. When she was halfway there, he threw her a wave, and she waved back, casual, like he was just some guy she knew.

  Not the guy she’d been secretly fantasizing about since that day sophomore year.

  “Jules?” he said, when she was almost on top of him. He pulled his headphones down so they dangled around his neck. “You have a sec?”

  She paused in front of him and adjusted the duffel bag full of dance clothes off her shoulder, but she resisted the urge to sit down next to him.

  “A sec, sure,” she said. “But I’ve got to meet Lauren for jazz practice in, like, five minutes, so . . .”

  “No, that’s cool. I just—” Carter said. He took his sunglasses off and hung them from his shirt pocket by one arm. He caught her eye and held it. She was transfixed by the facets of color in his hazel iris, the way they seemed to expose a tender sensitivity hidden inside him. She could have gotten lost in them for hours. “How are you?” he said.

  She could hear a slow-groove hip-hop beat pumping faintly from his headphones.

  “I’m . . . I’m great.” She reminded herself not to forget he had a girlfriend, no matter how sweet he might sound.

  “That’s good to hear. I—sorry, let me turn this off.” He fumbled with the controls on his iPod and the music went silent.

  “I figured we should talk. You want to sit down?” he said.

  When she did, he grew bashful. He fumbled with the strap of his bag, and if anything, he seemed embarrassed—ashamed. She could sense what a risk it had been for him to come find her. Sitting next to him on the bench, she waited.

  Finally, he looked directly at her again. “I just . . . I want to be . . . honorable, I guess,” he said.

  “I’m listening,” she said.

  “So, look. Things with Lilah are—I don’t even know what they are. We’re going to talk later this afternoon. So, we’ll see. I need to figure things out in my head . . . and . . .” He blushed. “I mean, I should get my shit together before I start messing with yours. It’s not fair. It’s not fair to you and it’s not fair to Lilah. You know what I mean? I shouldn’t be starting new things with new people when I’m in the middle of a great big confusing thing already.”

  He pulled his floppy side-parted hair out of his face, and he looked at her again. There was something so earnest, almost tortured about his expression.

  “What I’m saying is—”

  “I get it. Hey, I don’t want to get involved in some crazy cheating thing, either.”

  “So,” he said. “Friends?”

  She wanted to take his hand in hers and tell him to let her know if he changed his mind. But she knew better than to do that.

  Instead, she smirked. “Friends,” she said.

  Jules held out her hand mock-formally and waited for him to shake it.

  He did, one stiff pump, and then he let it go.

  “Really,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” she said. “Friends means not having to say you’re sorry. Haven’t you heard?”

  “That sounds sort of familiar. I think I did hear that somewhere.” He strained to smile. “But, still. I am.”

  “I hope you figure everything out,” she said.

  He stood up and nodded. “Anyway,” he said, “duty calls. I gotta go find some starfish for my senior project.” Seeing the confused but quizzical expression on Jules’s face, he explained. “Their limbs. I’m trying to figure out how they regenerate.”

  “Ew, gross,” she said, shuddering.

  When he laughed, she felt amazing, perhaps ev
en better than she did when he first put his hands on her in the ocean.

  “See ya, Jules.”

  Throwing his bag over his shoulder and across his chest, he paused for a second, taking her in. Then he galloped away down the hill.

  “Hey,” she called after him, “another thing friends means. Doing stuff together. Like hanging out. So give me a call sometime, okay?”

  He turned around and ran backward for a stretch.

  “You got it,” he replied.

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  12

  The first thing Lilah said when she saw Carter padding through the hot sand toward her lifeguard station later that afternoon was, “Where were you?”

  “I was working on my project,” he said. “Look.” He held up a plastic bag containing three small spiny starfish that he’d collected from the shallow water down by the old piers on the south side of town.

  “Well, you’re late. You said in your text that you’d be here at four. I’ve been sitting here bored out of my skull.”

  “Lilah,” Carter said, squinting up at her, high in her chair, “come on. Give me a break. I said around four. It’s four thirty.”

  She nodded at this, guarded, skeptical.

  “I’m here now,” he said.

  “I see that.”

  He dug at the sand with his toe, staring at the middle schoolers out in the waves on their boogie boards, wondering how to approach the conversation he knew he had to have with her. He still hadn’t decided whether it was better to stay with Lilah and try to work it out, or to break up. She was the only serious girlfriend he’d ever had, and he’d never considered how to deal with what happened when their relationship began to fall apart. What he knew was that he didn’t want to hurt her.

  “You think maybe we should talk about what happened at Jeff’s party?” he asked.

  “Sure,” she said. “Talk.”

  She pulled her phone out of the oversized white bag she kept next to her on the lifeguard platform and started fiddling with it.

  Carter waited. He told himself to control his annoyance, to have patience. Finally, he said, “Lilah? What are you doing now?”

  “Playing Angry Birds,” she said without looking up.

  “So you don’t want to talk.”

  She looked at him pointedly. “Go ahead, talk if you want,” she told him. Then she went back to her game.

  “Can you put the game down, then?”

  She ignored him.

  In the silence that followed, Lilah’s punching and sliding at the screen became more and more emphatic, like all of her anger and sadness and fear were trapped in her finger, trying to get out. It took Carter a moment to realize that she was trying to hold back her tears.

  “Lilah?” he said, trying to show his concern with the tone of his voice.

  “I mean, you could have at least answered the phone,” she hissed.

  “I was busy!”

  “Yeah, Jeff said. Busy watching Futurama.”

  “I guess so, yeah.”

  “You didn’t have one second to say hi? I was trying to say I was sorry!”

  “Lilah, I was upset. I mean, think about it. You’d just told the whole school that you thought I was an asshole.”

  “God,” she sighed. “I must be horrible. I must be, just, a horrible human being, if you’re afraid to even talk to me on the phone.”

  Carter winced. “I’m not afraid to talk to you on the phone. It’s just . . . the things you do and say sometimes. It’s like you don’t want things to get better.”

  “I do,” she said softly. “I do want things to get better.”

  She struggled with all her might to stop the tears from falling down her cheeks. She understood that he felt he had been wronged. But didn’t he understand that she’d been wronged, too? She ached all over from how badly she’d been wronged.

  “Do you want things to get better?” she asked, her lower lip quivering.

  He wasn’t sure how to answer that. Of course he wanted things to get better. But he wasn’t sure that was possible anymore. And he couldn’t get the memory of the night he’d spent with Jules out of his mind.

  Lilah suddenly seemed so fragile up there on her red wooden stand, so exposed. Her freckles had proliferated from the hours she spent in the sun. They covered her arms and shoulders in a heavy patchwork of brown. Her legs, too. If he was honest with her about the doubts he was feeling, this might be the last time he ever looked at her this closely. He tried to memorize this image of her so he’d be able to hold it in his head years later when he thought back on his high-school years and his first love.

  Then he noticed that there were small, one-inch-long scratches on her thighs. Six of them. Two tight parallel rows of three.

  “Lilah,” he said. “What happened? To your legs?”

  She quickly covered her cuts with her hand. “I thought you were going to leave me. After what I did,” she said.

  The thought of what she might do if he broke up with her sent a cold spike plunging through his heart.

  “I do want to try to make things better,” Carter said, trying to convince himself that he meant it. “I’m not going to leave you.”

  “Really?” she said. Her voice broke with the word and the tears finally began to stream down her face.

  “Yeah,” he said. “But, Lilah, if we do this, you have to be honest with me, okay? It can’t be like the past few months. You have to talk to me. And . . .” He nodded toward the cuts on her thighs. “You have to find a way not to go to that place in your head anymore. Can you promise me that?”

  She nodded.

  He reached up and held his hand out to her. He gave her fingers a couple quick, comforting pulses and then let go.

  “I should be paying attention to what’s going on out there on the waves. Don’t want anybody to drown on my watch,” she said, glancing out toward the kids on their boogie boards.

  “You’re right,” said Carter. “Lilah, just remember. It’s all going to be okay.”

  Standing on her lifeguard chair, Lilah watched him go. As he grew smaller and smaller, his blue-and-green striped polo shirt shrinking into just a speck of color at the edge of the promenade, she wondered why she hadn’t mentioned Jules’s name to him. Why hadn’t she asked him about the photo on his phone?

  She’d been afraid that if she did so, she’d make everything worse. Now that he was giving her another chance, she swore to herself that from here on out she’d be the best girlfriend ever. She’d find some way other than pressuring him to vigilantly protect what was hers. And, who knows, maybe she really had misinterpreted the photo.

  Maybe . . .

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  13

  A week later, Carter waited for Jules on a bench under the massive iron sculpture of the Seminole warrior wrapped in blankets and cocooned in a canoe, about to be sent off to sea by his mourning tribe. It towered over the lush green mall where Shearwater circled around and met the beach. He felt he owed it to himself—and to Jules—to make good on his promise to be friends with her. He’d told Lilah he was going to be hanging out with his “buddies”—not quite a lie, but not the whole truth, either.

  When he saw Jules heading down the boulevard toward him, dressed casually in a tight aquamarine top and a pair of low-rider jeans that she’d cuffed high and turned into waders, he was struck again by how beautiful she was. The desire he’d tried to forget came flooding back. He could feel it in knees and his elbows, a tingling weakness. Reminding himself that he needed to control these feelings, he stood up and waved.

  “Hey there, friend,” he called.

  She made like she had a pistol in her hand and aimed it at him. “Ptewt-ptewt,” she said, imitating the so
und of a silencer.

  Identical grins cracked over their faces. Then they glanced away, Carter staring at the toe of his red-and-white old-school Air Jordans, Jules biting her lip and flipping her long, black hair over her shoulder.

  When she reached the sculpture they struggled to negotiate their greeting. Carter went to shake Jules’s hand at the same time as she leaned in for a hug. Then, each of them seeing what the other had done, Carter went for the hug and Jules for the handshake.

  “Well, whatever. We tried,” said Carter. “How long has it been since you’ve been to Harpoon Haven?”

  “I can’t even remember. I used to hang out there in middle school, I guess. You?”

  “I’ve been there once. Freshman year.” Carter paused, unsure if he should say more, but in the service of friendship, he felt he should be honest. “With Lilah.”

  Jules secretly winced, but she didn’t push the topic.

  As they wandered up the promenade toward the lights of Harpoon Haven, they made sure to keep a couple feet of distance between themselves. They breathed in the warm salt air, soaked in the cool breeze coming in off the ocean.

  Then, once they were inside and making their way through the first arcade of games that ringed Harpoon Haven’s small collection of rides, they let the carnival atmosphere carry them along.

  Jules pointed at a stand surrounded by children. “The goldfish game!” she yelped, and she raced ahead of Carter toward it. They put all their energy into getting the Ping-Pong ball into the goldfish bowl, taking turns, lobbing the balls at various arcs and angles, laughing and cursing each of the balls as it ricocheted off the lip of another bowl.

  And when they gave up on that they moved on to throwing darts at balloons, dropping basketballs into the undersized hoop, shooting the cutout ducks with the air rifle. Jules pretended that she wasn’t as touched as she was by Carter’s careful, protective way of navigating her through the throngs clogging the alleyways, that she took less joy than she actually did at watching Carter flare with competitive spirit as he tried to get the beanbags into the fifty-point hole.