by Olin, Sean
The longer she searched, the angrier and more anxious she became. She’d had the bag yesterday; she knew she had. She remembered throwing it over her shoulder and walking up the stairs to the porch with it. The fact that it had disappeared like this seemed impossible to her. It should be right here—but right here where?
Her mother, trying to be helpful, trailed behind her. She held her mug of ginseng tea in two hands, and in between sips, she reminded Jules that getting upset like this was doing more harm than good.
Rubbing Jules’s shoulders, she said, “Let it find you. If you really need it, it’s sure to make itself known.”
“Mom, don’t.”
“Or you could let me help.” She put her nose to her mug and let the scent of her tea saturate her nostrils. “You could at least tell me what it is you’re looking for.”
Jules shot her a look. She didn’t want her mother’s help. She was embarrassed to be this upset about something so insignificant as a bag of smelly clothes. It was stupid, really. But she was fixated, frantic. There weren’t enough Buddhist aphorisms in the world to calm her down.
“My stuff, all right?” she said. “My dance stuff.”
Her mother nodded sagely. She placed her tea on a circular glass-topped end table and took Jules’s face gently between her two hands. Peering into her daughter’s eyes, she tried to will some degree of calm into her body. “Let’s go outside, okay?” she said.
Jules let herself be led out onto the porch.
“Is this what you’re looking for?” her mother asked, picking the duffel bag up from the place where it lay, right there in plain sight next to the sunflower on the porch table.
Jules nodded.
No way would she cry. If she cried, she’d have to acknowledge—both to herself and to her mother—that the reason she was upset had nothing to do with the dance bag. Now that the bag was found, she felt weirdly worse than she had when she was sure she’d lost it. She never lost track of things like this. It was Lilah’s fault. All of this. Lilah and her stalking. To top it all off, now she was going to be late for school.
She snatched the bag out of her mother’s hand and threw it over her shoulder before racing back inside to grab her book bag.
“A little thanks, maybe?” her mother said, calling through the screen door.
“Yeah, okay, Mom. Thanks.”
When Jules returned to the porch, her mother was seated at the table. “Can I have your hand, just for a second?”
“No, I’m late.”
Her mom smiled at her—the soothing one, the smile that meant, Take deep breaths and keep calm. “Well, if you’re late already, you might as well skip first period and sit with me for a little bit.” She reached out and took Jules’s hand in hers. “Is this about that boy? Carter?”
Jules sighed. It was and it wasn’t. Just thinking about Carter made her heart ache. She tried to pull her hand away, but her mother held tight. “No. Mom, it’s nothing. It’s just finals, okay? It’s . . . whatever.”
“You sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure.” Jules looked her mother dead in the eye and lied. “Nothing’s wrong. I’m just anxious about my tests. Can I go now?”
And so her mother released her, but not before letting her know with a crinkle of the eyes that she was disappointed at being kept out of the loop.
She didn’t understand—she couldn’t understand—that Jules was protecting her, and protecting herself. However diligently her mom struggled to live in the now and practiced letting go, Jules knew what a ferocious warrior she could be when she got mad.
And what would that solve? It would just make things worse. This was something Jules had to deal with on her own. School would be over in a week. Then there was graduation. And then she’d never have to see these people again in her life. Ride it out, she told herself as she ducked under the house’s stilts to her car, which still ran, thank God, despite the damage that had been done to it.
Two blocks later, while she was waiting for the light to turn at the corner of Beach Street and Bittern Avenue, she took her mascara brush out of her bag like she did every day on the way to school, and flipped down the driver’s-side sun visor to apply it.
WHORE
The word shouted at her like there was a person sitting on the visor’s mirror. It was written in red lipstick, streaked capital letters. And seeing it, Jules felt like she’d been punched in the gut. She felt that way every day, it seemed. It wasn’t even the word itself that got to her. It was that Lilah had gone after her car not once but twice, and this time she’d figured out where she lived and where she’d parked. She’d managed to get the door unlocked. Sometime last night while Jules had been asleep, she’d crept around, sitting in Jules’s space, invading Jules’s world like she’d invaded Jules’s mind.
It was all too much. Futilely, Jules punched her steering wheel, her dashboard, the visor itself. All she accomplished with this was to hurt her hand. The tears that she’d swallowed earlier couldn’t be kept down. They rose to the surface. They flowed and flowed.
And those texts. Those awful, horrifying texts. It was now more than obvious that it was Lilah, not Carter, trying to humiliate her over and over again. Trying to make her feel like she was nothing.
One more week, she reminded herself. One more week and it would be all over. And then who knew, maybe once she got to UPenn, she’d bump into Carter. Maybe they could start over without all the torture Lilah was putting her through. But this fantasy didn’t solve the problems. If anything, it made her feel so incredibly alone.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
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35
May 11, 9:33 p.m.
NEW TEXT FROM LILAH BELL
U miss me yet?
May 11, 9:37 pm.
NEW TEXT FROM LILAH BELL
I miss you.
May 11, 9:47 p.m.
SENT TEXT FROM CARTER MOORE
I’m busy, Lilah.
May 11, 9:47 p.m.
NEW TEXT FROM LILAH BELL
Busy with your new girlfriend?
May 11, 10:19 p.m.
SENT TEXT FROM CARTER MOORE
No. Starfish regeneration.
May 11, 10:23 p.m.
NEW TEXT FROM LILAH BELL
[photo attachment: CARTER + LILAH]
Forever!
May 11, 10:25 p.m.
SENT TEXT FROM CARTER MOORE
You have to stop this. I mean it.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
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36
After school on Thursday, Jules and Peter Talbot made their way to the theater building for one last look around. It was a trip she’d been both looking forward to and dreading, a sort of a pilgrimage, one last good-bye to the place around which her high-school career had revolved. Tomorrow would be the last day of school. She’d be busy with the graduation rehearsal, and the celebrations and yearbook signings. And the rehearsal was going to happen right here in the theater—there’d be too many people around for her to savor the place the way it deserved to be savored.
She and Peter went through the practice rooms, gathering scarves and leg warmers and forgotten pages of rehearsal scripts. No one, not even Lilah, could ruin her enchanted memories of this place.
As she stood in front of the floor-to-ceiling mirror in which she’d watched herself dance for four years, she ran her hand along the smooth, worn surface of the bar where she’d propped her foot how many hundreds of times.
“I’m going to miss this,” she said to Peter. “You think, maybe one day in the future, other girls learning how to do high kicks will hold on to this bar and think, Wow, Jules Turnbull once did this very thing in this very same room?”
“There’ll be a plaque,” he said. “To make sure they don’t forget. It�
�ll say: This bar was used by the glorious Jules Turnbull when she was a student at Christopher Columbus. Feel free to use it to practice your routines. Maybe one day you’ll be as good as she was. But probably not. She was just that good.”
They vamped together in front of the mirror, did the “I’m the Diva, Watch Me Roar” strut they’d created together after watching Beyoncé in the Super Bowl halftime show.
The beat-up old saddle from Oklahoma was still propped in the corner of the room. Peter cocked a half grin at her when he saw it. “Hey, baby girl,” he said to Jules, “want to take one more spin around the rodeo?”
When she hesitated, he struck a bowlegged cowboy pose, holding his hand out to her, waiting. She curtsied and the two of them began to do-si-do, exaggerating the moves, mocking them as they performed them. They barely got a minute into the routine before they fell into each other, laughing.
“All right, enough of that,” said Jules. “It was stupid enough when we did it onstage. But look at this: they haven’t ripped the Camelot tape up yet.”
“It’s weird, isn’t it?” Peter said to her. “This place isn’t going to belong to us anymore.”
“Yeah. We’ll be off to new practice rooms in new theater buildings.”
“You will,” he said. “I don’t know about me.”
“You’re going to quit?”
“No, I just . . . I’m not sure. You’ve got real talent. I think maybe I’m just—I was good enough for this. Good enough for high school, but . . . ” Peter smiled nostalgically.
“You’ll never know unless you try,” she said.
He winked at her. “Anyway, UPenn here you come.”
“Yeah,” she said. Ever since the night they had their “nondate,” the thought of UPenn evoked thoughts of Carter, who she knew would be there, too. She wondered if things would be different then. Less fraught. Maybe they’d bump into each other at some dorm-room party and get to talking, and then, who knows. The thought brought a wistful smile to her lips.
Peter raised an eyebrow.
“What?” she said.
“You look like you’ve got a secret,” he said.
She blushed. “I guess you’ll never know,” she said. “Come on.” She tugged him by the hand. “We should get our stuff.”
They went through the rooms collecting their belongings: T-shirts, an old bra, a couple books—The Poetry of Robert Frost: The Collected Poems, Twilight: New Moon—she’d wondered where she’d lost that one.
Backstage in the theater itself, they found that the tables in the wings were still piled with the props from Camelot. There were the goblets and the torches and the shields and the swords they’d had so much fun fighting with during breaks in rehearsal.
“Should I steal one?” asked Peter.
“You think?”
He made a face, like to say, Why not.
“How about this,” she said. She took one of the fake roses from the bouquet she’d carried onstage in the final scene, and tucked it into the lapel of the stylish suit jacket Peter wore every day like a uniform.
“I guess that’s it, then,” said Peter. “‘Bye, theater.” He waved at the rafters. He blew kisses toward the balcony. “I hope you save a little dream for me.”
As they headed up the aisle toward the exit door, Jules stopped.
“You know what,” she said. “I forgot my makeup kit.”
Peter glanced at his watch, biting the corner of his lip.
“Sorry, I know you have to go,” Jules said. “Don’t wait for me. I’ll catch up with you later.”
She headed back to the dressing room alone.
A couple minutes later, makeup in tow, she made her way slowly back to the stage, lingering, gazing out at the auditorium, wondering if it would be too corny of her to sing one last song to the empty seats in the audience. She was getting a little teary. There was no one here but her, just her and the ghosts of the characters she’d played, and it was sort of spooky to think that she was all alone in this place that was usually so full of song and laughter. She kept thinking that one of her previous selves, Miss Adelaide from Guys and Dolls, or Cecily from Earnest, was going to step out of the shadows and into the flat, bare-bulb light from the stage lights and start talking to her about the adventures they’d had.
And then, just as she was about to take the leap and sing her heart out, just let the emotion flow, the room went pitch-black and the silence around her seemed to grow even more silent.
A cold chill went down her back. She couldn’t see anything. She willed herself not to jump to conclusions. It was probably just Peter playing a joke on her.
She called out to the darkness. “Peter?”
There was no answer.
“Hello?” she said. “Peter? Not funny. At all.”
When there was still no response, not even the telltale giggles that she would have expected from Peter, she called out again, a little more shrilly. “Peter. Come on. Turn the lights back on.”
A piercing squeal of feedback shrieked through the auditorium.
Jules’s eyes weren’t adjusting to the dark. The panic and adrenaline building in her heart overwhelmed her other senses. Her voice cracked as she called out again, “Hello? Can you please turn on the lights?”
“Where’s your boyfriend, Jules?” A snarling, menacing, whispering voice. “Or don’t you have one anymore? Did you drive him away by sleeping with all his friends?” It wasn’t coming from any one place. It floated around, moving from speaker to speaker. It was female. It was Lilah. Who else could it be? But it didn’t sound like Lilah. It sounded like someone bolder and smarter than Lilah.
“I bet that’s what you did. I bet you thought it would be fun to take them out to the beach when you thought no one was looking, and spread your legs for them, but guess what? People are always looking.”
Jules could almost make out the shadow shape of the edge of the stage, the three steps leading down to the stage-right aisle. She felt her way across the stage, not trusting her eyes, afraid to fall.
“Everybody knows what kind of a skanky whore you are. Those guys you fucked behind your boyfriend’s back? They’re too disgusted to even admit what they did with you.”
She tripped. At least she was down the stairs now.
“It’s gonna be fun to see what happens when you get pregnant. How will you figure out who the father is? They’re all going to deny that they’ve ever met you.”
From here, she could see a little bit better. She ran up the aisle toward the light booth, where Lilah or whoever it was had to be.
“Or maybe some of them will admit that they let you suck them off, but nobody’s gonna be willing to say they’re the father. Why would they? Who would want to help you raise your AIDS baby? That would mean they’d have to hang around with you.”
Jules threw open the door to the light booth and lunged toward the green and white and red blinking lights in the darkness of the room. Her arms stretched out in front of her, she groped at the air, but there was nobody there.
She flicked on the light. No Lilah, no nothing—just the soundboard and the MacBook that controlled it. A sound file. Not a single person in sight.
“Nobody’s ever going to love you. Guys don’t fall in love with whores like you. They just use you and then throw—”
Jules finally got the sound-file streaming from the computer to turn off.
She slumped to the carpeted floor of the light booth and clenched her head in her hands.
Maybe it was a good thing she hadn’t found Lilah there. If she had, there’s no way she would have been able to stop herself from wrapping her hands around the girl’s throat and strangling her. And then what would have happened? She’d have been free of this torture, but her life would be ruined in a whole new way.
This had to stop. It had to.
She’d never felt murderous before in her life. She was a nice girl. A kind girl. She was charming and witty and she tried not to take life too seriously. If this went on
much longer, she was going to lose the best parts of herself. She’d become bitter and angry, a paranoid mess. She could feel the change happening already.
She ached for someone—anyone—she could talk to. Not for the first time, the thought of calling Carter went through her mind. She was sure that he’d understand how she was feeling and know what to do about all this. But that just reminded her of the sexy video she’d made for Todd. It had seemed so playful and fun when she’d filmed it. Now as she remembered the images it contained, she couldn’t help thinking that Carter would hate her forever if he saw it. The whole thing seemed filthy and ugly, a powerful and cruel blade hanging over her, ready to chop her head off if she made one wrong move.
And what if the sound file was right? What if she was all alone and no one cared? What if she really was the disgusting girl that Lilah was trying to make her feel like she was? She admonished herself: Shake it off, Jules. Be tough. Don’t let the hater get to you. But no matter how often Jules told herself to be strong, Lilah was getting to her. Big-time.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
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37
As Jules jogged across the quad and neared the bank of lockers outside Mr. Wittier’s biology room, the air thickened and became sticky with a rancid smell. She covered the bottom half of her face with her shirt, but the smell seeped right through, gagging her. A smell so powerful that it was a physical force, heavy and damp and revolting.
She wondered what Mr. Wittier could possibly have going on inside his classroom to create such a smell. It hadn’t been here three hours ago, when she’d stashed her backpack in her locker before graduation practice. Mr. Wittier was a weird guy—there was something musty and vaguely autistic about him, and he wore the same stained brown cords every single day—so she wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d brewed up some sort of evil-smelling mushroom concoction in his lab, but this quickly? And hadn’t she seen him running crowd control in the auditorium during the rehearsal?