by Olin, Sean
“You don’t understand,” he said. “I really, really, really want that AC/DC mirror.”
“These games are all rigged,” Jules said with a laugh. “Let’s go do the Tilt-A-Whirl and see if we can make ourselves throw up.”
And off they went.
An hour and a half later, having exhausted the rides, they ended up in the food court, standing at a high, round table near an ivy-covered wall of the Harpoon Haven food court, a cardboard box of popcorn between them.
“So, if you could be anywhere in the entire world, doing anything you wanted right this minute, where would you be and what would you be doing?” asked Carter.
Jules tapped her lip with one finger and thought about this. She plucked a few kernels of popcorn from the container and dropped one of them onto her tongue.
“Eventually?” she said. “I’d want to be on Broadway, starring in Wicked. Or the next Wicked, whatever that might be. You know? Working with the writer and the director to develop and put on a new amazing show.”
“You don’t want to be a movie star?”
Jules shook her head. “No.” She dropped another piece of popcorn onto her tongue. “I mean, I wouldn’t turn it down, obviously. But I don’t know. There’s something so narcissistic about Hollywood. I’m not so interested in being famous.” She studied his face for a reaction. “I know, you think it’s stupid. Everybody does. They say, ‘Why do you want to be an actress if you don’t care about being famous?’”
Carter bobbed his head slightly as he contemplated what she was saying. The seriousness with which he listened to her was disarming. She wasn’t used to guys taking the time to try to understand the nuances of her hopes and dreams. “I don’t think it’s stupid,” he said. “But what do you like so much about acting?”
“The craft, maybe? Like, the work. Just being in the room. Exploring the play or musical and working through the hundreds of decisions that have to be made to turn it into a great work of art. It’s hard to explain.”
“I think I get it,” said Carter. “It’s like what happens when I’m deep in an experiment. I see this goal out there ahead of me, like, this possibility that I can’t quite reach. And it’s like time disappears. It’s like I disappear. I can spend hours standing over the microscope, taking notes on every little change going on in the petri dish and putting together all the ways these changes do and don’t prove my hypothesis. The only way I know that time’s passing at all is that I have to choose a new album on my iPhone.”
“Exactly. That’s what happens to me when I’m onstage. There’s a presentness. Like I’m right there at that moment and nothing else exists.”
She looked up at the white lights strung in loops above the food court and realized that right now she was feeling the same presentness she’d just described. She took in this moment, with Carter across from her, amazed at how easy, how natural it felt. She would have been happy if it never ended, and she wondered if Carter was feeling the same thing.
“I’m so glad you get it,” she said. “Todd used to just laugh when I talked like this. He’d tell me I should stop thinking so much.”
Their eyes found each other and she sensed some sort of fire burning in Carter.
She couldn’t stop herself from saying, “Hey, can I ask . . . is this . . . are we on a date?”
Carter blushed. Then he winced and she knew she’d gone too far. A sadness flushed through his face and the skin between his eyebrows furrowed with nervousness.
“Can we call it hanging out? Doing stuff together like friends?”
They locked eyes and a charge of emotion flowed back and forth between them, strong enough for them both to feel it gripping their hearts.
“Sorry,” said Jules. “I shouldn’t have asked that.”
“No, it’s . . .” Carter searched for a graceful way to navigate out of this awkward moment.
He picked up a handful of popcorn and shook it like dice. Then with a glimmer in his eyes, he lobbed one at Jules.
“Popcorn war!” he said, lobbing another one.
Jules grabbed a handful of her own. “Is that how it’s gonna be?” she said. She threw two kernels like darts at Carter. He caught them with his free hand and threw them back. Then he was up, ducking and weaving around the rapid-fire assault of popcorn she was shooting his way.
They were both laughing now. The awkwardness had passed.
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14
Earlier that evening, Lilah had gotten a sense—an intuition—that Carter was hiding things from her again. Hanging out with his “buddies” was just too vague.
She’d been following him from a distance ever since she’d seen him lingering around the Native American sculpture on Shearwater. She’d seen him stand up and awkwardly say hello to Jules. She’d watched them walk along the promenade, chatting, listening so sickeningly intently to whatever each other was saying. She’d watched them turn into the Harpoon Haven amusement park and play carnival games and eat popcorn and laugh at each other’s jokes.
She’d watched and watched and watched and even though they never did anything overtly, never kissed, never held hands, never even really touched each other, there was something in the way they looked at each other, some shyness, some overcharged nonchalance, like they were consciously not touching each other, avoiding the thing that they wanted most, and it made Lilah sick to her stomach. Literally. Her body felt weak and dehydrated. Her stomach acid rode at the back of her throat. She was nauseous.
And yet, she couldn’t turn away. She couldn’t leave. She felt compelled to punish herself for as long as it took for Carter and Jules to prove all her worst fears true. When they did, she’d explode. She’d spontaneously combust, like those Buddhist monks in Thailand or Cambodia or wherever.
When the moment came it was so subtle that she almost missed it.
Carter and Jules had been leaning against a bright-pink, low cement wall, talking—who knows what about. Something had been decided—that was clear from their body language. They’d reached the end of whatever it was. And Carter had looked down his hand for a second; then he’d looked back at Jules. She’d begun digging in her purse, in search of something. He watched her. He just watched her, not saying a word. And then he’d reached up, slowly, and with one finger, he’d tucked a loose strand of her hair behind her ear.
That was it. That was all it took for Lilah to realize that Carter was falling for this girl. That he was no longer hers.
What she felt was fear. And rage. And a despair so huge and heavy she felt like it might smother her, weigh her down, pull her into the ground, where she’d be buried forever. She was dizzy with it. She couldn’t breathe.
Tears streaming down her face, she fled to her mom’s car. She watched her hands shake as she pulled out of her parking spot and drove slowly, slowly, slowly home. She kept losing herself in thought, catching herself just as her car listed one way or another. But she made it eventually.
The lights were on in the family room. Her parents sat in their usual places—mom on the couch, dad in his club chair—watching, probably, one of those tedious BBC comedies they liked so much. No way could she let her mother see her like this. No way could she deal with the hundred thousand questions her mother would ask.
She snuck in, called out—croaked, really, she could barely get her mouth to form the words—“I’m home,” and raced up the stairs to her bedroom.
Locked inside, she turned on the overhead light and looked around the room. It was such a sad place. The bright, happy colors and hopeful decorations just seemed to make it sadder.
She flopped onto the bed, lying on her back, and yanked her pillow toward herself. She covered her face with it, and pressed down. How great would it be if she could hold it there long enough to knock herself out, to stop her breathing. How great would it be if she had that kind o
f courage.
Instead she screamed into the muffling fabric, screamed until her throat hurt.
Then she flung the pillow away and sat up in a daze.
She bounced between searing outrage—how could he cheat on her? How could he have dared? Was she so horrid, so deformed and ugly inside, that she didn’t deserve his love anymore?—and annihilating self-hatred—what did Jules have that she didn’t? Sure, she was pretty, she knew how to do her make up real nice, but what was she really? A loser theater chick. She probably thought having pillow fights with her gay BFF Peter Talbot was what love was all about. And, still, Carter was out on a date with her. It mystified Lilah, baffled her.
She peered into the mirror above her vanity and twirled the mascara brush across her eyelid. When had she sat down here and started putting on makeup? She wasn’t sure. She’d been so lost in thought that the things she was doing with her body were a blank. Apparently, she’d dusted her eyelids with a subtle, shimmering purple eye shadow. She’d covered her cheeks in dark crème blush.
Leaning in close, she studied the pores of her skin and wondered if Carter would think she looked pretty. Not as pretty as Jules, probably. She fished a tube of lipstick out of the mess of makeup and beautifying tools and loose necklaces and earrings piled on the vanity.
Jules wasn’t the only one who could tart herself up. If that’s what Carter wanted, well, she could do it, too. She’d show Carter how sexy she could be.
As she applied the lipstick, Lilah noticed how thin her lips really were. Not at all plump and luscious like Jules’s. She rubbed more lipstick on. And more. And more. Incrementally increasing the size of her lips.
The tears were rolling down her face now, taking the mascara she’d just applied down with them. She’d fix that later. Right now, she had to get the lips right. She stared with tunnel vision at her mouth and applied a little more lipstick.
When she adjusted her focus to assess her entire face, she saw a grotesque clown mask staring back at her. The lipstick was streaked all over her cheeks, a big garish splash of red from ear to ear. The mascara had turned into two huge, polluted deltas beneath her bloodshot eyes. She was hideous. Everything about her. Hideous.
How could she have ever thought Carter would stay with a person like her?
Repulsed by herself, she fell onto the bed and there was Lionel the Lion, the stuffed animal that Carter had won her—her, not that bitch Jules, her—which was the way things were supposed to be. But they weren’t like that anymore. She punched the toy in the face. She punched it again. She punched it until its nose was smashed backward inside its face. Then she flung it away, too.
She knew what she should do. She should pull herself out of this stupor, at least for long enough to take one of the pills that Dr. Timmler had prescribed for her. She didn’t want to. She hated taking the pills. She hated the way they numbed her mind and separated her from the reality of her emotions. But they were meant for moments exactly like this one.
When she reached for the bottle on her bedside table, though, a letter her mom must have placed there distracted her. It was addressed to her, unopened, she saw with relief—for once her mother had resisted snooping in her mail—and the upper left-hand corner displayed the blue-and-red shield of the University of Pennsylvania.
Finally, something good has happened to me today, she thought as she tore the envelope open. But when she read what was written on the letter inside, she just sobbed all that much more.
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15
It was almost midnight. A full moon hung above the water, shining its silvery light across the sand-strewn ground of the Slats. The time had just flown, and Carter and Jules now stood in the shadows under Jules’s house, in among the bleached wood stilts that held it up above the flood line.
Though neither of them wanted to admit it, it was time to say good-bye.
“I’m glad we did this,” said Carter.
Jules cracked that ironic, hard-to-read smile of hers. “We can do it again, anytime,” she said.
Carter ran his hand through his hair in that way that she now realized he did when he was preoccupied with some hidden worry.
“Yeah,” he said. “That would be nice.”
They lingered there. Jules leaned against one of the stilts. Carter held himself a few feet away from her, keeping his distance as though if he got too close he’d fall into her and never be able to pull himself away.
“I guess . . . see ya,” she said.
“Yeah,” he said.
Neither of them knew quite how to leave the other. What was appropriate? Where was the line across which friends became something more? They weren’t sure. It was hard to see the lines on such an abstract map.
With a wry smile, Carter said, “Friend.”
And then he held out his hand to shake.
Jules wilted a little, letting the actress in her perform a deflating gesture that seemed to convey, Really, that’s the way we’re going to play this? But she took his hand and shook.
Their hands clung together, their fingers slipping lightly around one another. Gradually, almost despite themselves, they moved toward each other until they were inches apart, their noses grazing, their eyes locked and searching the depths of each other’s secret selves. It was like their bodies were acting of their own volition, like they had no control at all over what was happening.
Carter pulled his head away briefly, but then he gave in. Their lips brushed against each other. They kissed. A feeling of inevitability and rightness passed between them. Carter could feel the soft give of her mouth against his skin.
Flash memories of that night after Jeff’s party sparked in Carter’s mind, the feel of their naked skin in the water, how they were entwined in each other’s arms. A small ache lit in his heart.
He yanked himself away.
“I can’t do this,” he said. He had both hands to his head, his elbows out at his sides, like he was trying to keep his brain from exploding.
Jules tried not to let her disappointment show. She leaned back against the stilt and waited for his explanation.
“It’s . . .” He lost himself in Jules’s face for a moment. “It’s not fair to Lilah.”
“You’re gonna try to work it out with her, then?” said Jules sadly, trying to appear understanding.
He couldn’t tell Jules he was afraid of Lilah hurting herself. That would have been too much of a breach of trust. But he owed Jules an explanation. He chose his words carefully. “I have to,” he said. “She’s going through something. I’m not even sure what it is, but I owe it to her to see her through it.”
Disappointment ticked at the edge of Jules’s mouth. “Good luck with that,” she said, not sure if she meant this or if she was being sarcastic.
“I can’t, um . . .” He cleared his throat. “We probably shouldn’t hang out for a while.”
Jules nodded in sympathy, but then she pushed back just a little bit. “That sucks. I thought you and I had fun,” she said.
“It’s not . . . don’t get me wrong,” said Carter. “The problem is that I had too much fun. And—”
“Yeah, I know. Lilah.”
Jules quickly stepped around the beat-up old Honda that she’d inherited from her mother, putting some distance between the two of them.
Carter watched her, waited. When she reached the wooden stairs that would take her up to the house, she turned. She was out of the shadows now. The moonlight caught her hair.
Flashing a little wave, just a quick flap of her fingers, a whisper of a smile fluttering on her lips, Jules disappeared up the stairs.
And just like that, their date that was not a date was over.
Carter took the long way through Jules’s neighborhood, past the bungalows and stilt houses. As he wandered along the sand-strewn road, passing shuttered boutiques and fried-all
igator depots, Carter mulled over the events of the night. He’d managed to resist. There was satisfaction in this, but also, weirdly, sadness. He wondered if he’d just walked away from his one true chance at happiness. He wished that being true to Lilah didn’t feel like such a betrayal of himself.
Eventually he reached the edge of downtown, where there were sidewalks and bright streetlights and all the gleam and glitter of a thriving Florida beach town.
Cutting toward the beach, heading loosely toward Shearwater Boulevard, where his car was still parked in one of the rows of public parking lining the turnaround, he allowed himself a small smile. At least he’d had that one glorious night with Jules. He’d be able to keep that memory tucked inside himself forever.
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16
April 2, 5:17 a.m.
NEW TEXT FROM LILAH BELL
Remember this?
Under the word balloon, Lilah had attached a photo. The weathered, wooden planks of a bench on the promenade. A familiar message carved there by Carter’s hand. CARTER + LILAH is what it said.
April 2, 8:02 a.m.
NEW TEXT FROM CARTER MOORE
How could I forget.
April 2, 8:03 a.m.
NEW TEXT FROM LILAH BELL
Luv U!
April 2, 8:38 a.m.
NEW TEXT FROM CARTER MOORE
Me too.
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