by Olin, Sean
She held her breath and soldiered on. She just wanted her yearbook. A quick in and out and then she’d race back to the theater building to collect her signatures. She could find someone there to tell. God, it was gross.
Gulping air through her mouth, she ran the combination on her lock. She threw the door open, and it was like she’d opened the gates of hell. The intensity of the smell quadrupled—it was coming from her locker.
The stench was overwhelming, acidic and sweet and putrid like rotting meat. It made her light-headed. Her stomach rioted and she willed herself not to throw up.
She could barely see straight, it was so intense, but she could see enough to know that someone had been inside her locker. On the shelf where she stacked her schoolbooks this someone—and she knew who it was—had lodged a leaky plastic bag full of heavy, orangey-brown liquid. It was dripping all over her yearbook, down the stack of books under her yearbook. It pooled on the shelf and drizzled down the wall of the locker.
There was a sheet of lined notebook paper taped to the bag. Someone—Lilah, it had to be Lilah; goddamned Lilah, again—had written on the sheet, block letters in ballpoint pen. Jules could see the force of her rage in the way she’d traced over the words, heavy scribbles and stabs.
It said:
EAT MY PUKE, BITCH!
The rage and despair surging through Jules’s body were so overpowering that the things she did next were more animal instinct than considered choices.
She whipped the bag of vomit out of her locker and threw it with all her might across the lawn, out into the middle of the quad. As it flew, its nasty liquid contents were let loose in a spray, like from a runaway hose. Flecks flew everywhere. They got on her shoes, her legs, her skirt.
It was revolting. Her stomach turned over like something angry and alive was kicking inside her, trying to get out. She could feel the acidic taste working its way up the back of her throat.
And she realized then that waiting and hoping was never going to make Lilah stop.
She pulled her phone out of her purse and made the one call she’d been resisting all these weeks, the one she both most and least wanted to make, the one that terrified her because it required a trust she wasn’t sure she could believe in—it could easily solve her problem, and just as easily make it worse.
She called Carter.
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“You smell that?” Jules shouted, while Carter was still half a quad away.
“Yeah, what the hell?”
“You see that plastic bag there? Go pick it up.”
Carter did what she said. He fought through the stench and wandered out to the bag and picked it up by the tied handles. Then, realizing what it was he held in his hand, he dropped it with a shudder and looked back at Jules.
“Nice, right?” she said. “Welcome to my life.”
When Jules had called, she hadn’t told him why she wanted to see him. She’d just said, “Come to my locker. I have something to show you.” He hadn’t imagined that this was what she’d meant. Since the incident with her car in the parking lot, he’d resisted contacting her out of respect for what he thought were her wishes. He knew nothing about the torture she’d been through since then, and throughout the walk across campus his head had been full of visions of her maybe having some kind of a peace offering for him. He’d hoped that this would be his chance to explain his feelings to her and maybe find out why his texts had made her so mad.
“Where’d it come from?” he asked her.
“It was in my locker.”
“Jesus.” He ran his hand through his hair as he tried to come up with the right thing to do in this situation. “This is horrible, Jules.”
“‘Jesus? This is horrible?” That’s all you’ve got? Weak, Carter. Very weak.”
“Jules, I swear, I would never do something like this,” he said.
“I know it wasn’t you!” She was shouting now. Carter couldn’t quite tell if she was mad at him specifically, or blind with rage at the whole situation. “It’s your fucking girlfriend. You want to know what else she did? She took a baseball bat to my car, and then she broke into my car a second time to write nasty notes in lipstick for me to find. And she sends these awful texts. My God, you should see the texts.”
As Jules rolled through the rest of the list of Lilah’s crimes—the various confrontations they’d had, the stalking in the theater, all of it—feelings of horror and shame surged through Carter’s stomach. He berated himself. How could he not have known? How could he not have guessed that Lilah would do something like this?
“I’m so sorry. I didn’t know,” Carter said, his pulse racing. “I wish I had. I would have stopped her.”
He tried to take Jules’s hand, to comfort her, but she was worked up and didn’t trust him to console her. She yanked her arm away.
“Why didn’t you tell me about all this before?” Carter asked.
He caught her eye and held it.
“Why would I do that?” she said. Tears were brimming below the surface, but she swallowed them down. “You chose her.”
An ache plunged through Carter’s heart. There’d been so many misunderstandings. So much misplaced ill will. How could he ever begin to peel it all back and allow the deep caring buried beneath to show through again?
“But I didn’t,” Carter said, finally. “I broke up with her. I mean, it took me longer than it should have, but . . . that’s what I’d been hoping to tell you that night when I went to your house and—” He caught himself. Now was not the time for declarations.
For a moment, the two of them stared at each other. The miscommunications of the past few months hung between them in balloons of regret. Jules’s rage had melted a little, but Carter sensed that she still didn’t want to be touched.
“This is all my fault,” he said.
She shook her head. “No. It’s not, but . . .” She didn’t see any way to ensure that he understood how cruel Lilah had been without telling him about the video. “Look, there’s this stupid video I made last summer. It’s—it’s X-rated, okay. It’s a video of me touching myself and whatever. It was stupid. The second-stupidest thing I’ve ever done. And Lilah somehow got her hands on it. She’s been threatening me with it.”
She yearned for him to tell her that he didn’t judge her. Her every muscle was tense with the effort to hold herself together.
Carter placed his hands on her tanned shoulders, holding them firmly but tenderly.
At his touch, Jules flinched. She felt like she might turn into a puddle of water.
“That’s terrible,” he said. “I wish you would have told me.”
“You don’t think I’m a slut?”
“No. Why would I?”
“I thought, because of the video . . .” She wanted to give in to his warmth, to let him comfort her, but she knew she couldn’t—she shouldn’t—not right now, not like this. She could feel her body pushing itself toward him.
Jules looked away, out toward the plastic bag leaking into the lawn. Then she lifted his hands off of her and said, “I’m not sure I can trust you right now, Carter.”
“I’ll get the video back,” he said. “I promise I will. But you just have to understand. Lilah’s—she’s very unstable. She must have stopped her treatment or something. And her parents are pretty clueless. I doubt they even notice anything’s wrong.”
Carter didn’t want to sound like he was defending Lilah at all—he just wanted Jules to know that she hadn’t done anything to deserve this.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Jules asked, her voice cracking.
Carter knew he had to back-peddle here or risk losing even more of Jules’ trust. “I’m so sorry. I should have. From now on, let’s tell each other everything, okay?”
Jules recognized that disarming earnestness on his face, that se
nse she’d had before of his inherent goodness, his desire for all good things to be given to her. All the things about him that tugged at her heart. She wanted to believe in him. She didn’t have any reason not to—no reason except her fear of Lilah.
“I’ll get her to stop,” Carter said, with a sudden vehemence. “I swear to you, Jules, I won’t let anything bad happen to you. Ever again.”
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Lilah could tell that the shadowy figure trudging across the beach toward her was Carter long before she could make out his features. She recognized his adorably slouchy posture, the cute way he kept his hands buried in his pants pockets, the way he periodically pulled his mop of hair across his forehead.
When he was finally close enough for her to make out his features, she stood up on the platform of her lifeguard chair, waving at him, willing the pitter-pat of her heart to stay calm. He’d returned to her like she knew he would.
There was worry on his face, a wary nervousness. But of course. After everything he’d put her through in the past few months, he must wonder if she would ever forgive him.
Didn’t he know she would?
Didn’t he know there was nothing he could do in the whole wide world that she wouldn’t eventually forgive him for?
She’d dreamed of this moment. She’d always known it would come. If she just waited him out, if she held sturdy and tight to the rock of their love—it was a mountain; it was immovable—he’d come slinking back carrying his regret and shame heavily on his back.
He was her prince, and he’d made her a princess. Finally, he was remembering that.
She did a quick survey of the people on the beach: a couple of middle schoolers whipping a tennis ball back and forth in the surf, a prematurely balding dad building a sand castle with his daughter, a large group of Cuban twenty-somethings camped out under a tangled mass of umbrellas, blasting their reggaeton and drinking something out of red cups. The Frisbee throwers. The boogie boarders. There were a lot of people here this afternoon, actually. But she didn’t care. They’d have to fend for themselves. She had bigger concerns today than their physical safety.
Hopping down from the lifeguard stand, she ran to Carter. In her mind, she’d already forgiven him, they’d already made up, the tears had already been shed, and the apologies had already been accepted. There was nothing left to do but embrace each other now, wrap each other up tight and kiss and kiss and kiss, press their foreheads together and gaze into each other’s eyes and promise and swear that nothing—not Jules, not college, not anything in the world—would ever again come between them and their love.
When she was close enough to touch him, she leaped and clasped her arms around his neck, wrapped her legs around his waist. He instinctively held her up and she went in for the romantic, end-of-the-movie kiss she’d been rehearsing in her mind over these past few weeks.
“It’s okay, Carter,” she said. “I’ve been waiting for you come back to me.”
And nothing. Carter’s lips didn’t part for hers. They tightened, actually. They clamped shut. He didn’t whisper I’ve missed you or I’m sorry or I’ve finally realized I can’t live without you. He leveled a cold, hard stare at her. He went stiff under her grasp and released her thighs from his hands, and she fell under her own weight to the sand.
Then he didn’t help her up. He dug his hands back into the pockets of his pants and gazed down at her with an expression on his face that scared her. There was no love there—just a cruel, hard, and spiteful bottled-up rage.
For a brief instant Lilah was in shock.
“What the fuck, Lilah?” he said.
“You’re not happy to see me?”
“No, I’m not fucking happy to see you.”
She didn’t need to be told what he was angry about. Part of her had known that he wouldn’t understand the fierce beauty in what she was doing for him. Before he could build his case against her, she launched into her defense. “She’s going to cheat on you. You know that, right? Jules is a sex addict. She sucked off the whole football team last year—I know because her ex-boyfriend told me. Todd Norris. He told me how disgusted he was when he found out.” Why wasn’t he responding? When had he started hating her so much? “I’m protecting you, Carter. Don’t you understand?”
“I don’t want or need you to protect me.”
She pled with him. “Carter, please. You have to believe me.”
“I believe that you think you’re protecting me, Lilah. I believe that you’ve got yourself so twisted around in your head that you seriously believe that this is what you’re doing, but you’ve got to stop. And I want you to leave Jules the fuck alone.”
A fresh surge of outrage went tumbling through her.
“She’s a total whore,” she said. “Here. I’ll prove it.”
She climbed to her feet and whipped her phone out of the waistband of the shorts she wore over her swimsuit and cued up the video that Todd had given her. As the video began streaming, she shoved the phone in Carter’s face. He tried to grab it, but she yanked it away, held it above her head taunting him with the writhing, jiggling image of Jules on its screen.
“You see? Carter? You see? Internet porn. She’ll be doing videos for the Bangbros by the time summer’s over.”
The emotions were swirling around on his face, changing shape and texture. He seemed about to cry, and she interpreted this as proof that he finally understood she was—even in his betrayal—looking out for him, shielding him from the dangers in the world, loving him.
But this wasn’t at all what was going through Carter’s mind. He wasn’t going to cry. The emotion Lilah saw on his face came from a place of horror—at himself, at her, at the fact that after all the time he spent trying to be good to her, Lilah was way beyond his or anyone’s help.
The video itself wasn’t so disgusting. It was just a sweet, slightly awkward girl exploring her own sexual boundaries. That Jules had dared to try this made him love her more. But Lilah had taken something private and innocently misguided and turned it rancid and ugly. In Lilah’s hands this video became something frightening, a bunker buster aimed at Jules’s future.
“Give it to me.”
“Ha.”
He leaped forward, grabbing at her hand, and waving the phone above her head, she took a step back.
“Lilah, give me the fucking phone.”
He jumped and slapped at her hand until finally he connected and sent the phone sailing across the beach. Scrambling, they both dove for it. Carter got there first. Holding it out like a live grenade, he ran into the surf, high-stepping through the water in his shoes and socks, and he threw the phone with all his might into the ocean.
He kept his distance from Lilah as he turned back to the shore. She was clearly stunned. Her mouth hung open and she had that cock to her head like she got when the events she was witnessing overwhelmed her sense of what was possible.
He jabbed his finger at her as though this would somehow make his words stick more successfully. “I’m serious, Lilah. If I find out you’ve got another copy, I’ll report you.”
As she watched him trudge away in his wet, sand-caked Adidas, this refrain circled through Lilah’s brain: Don’t you understand, Carter? I love you. I love you. Carter, don’t you understand? I love you.
She’d make him understand—and everyone else, too.
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Graduation day finally arrived.
The auditorium had been decked out in the red and gold school colors. After dark, rolling clouds threatened early, the sun had come out and the humidity and heat sank to levels that seemed almost miraculous for South Florida. It was a perfect day for the pageantry and pomp th
at marked the life change everyone was about to make.
People’s spirits were high. Parents sat in back, brandishing their cameras and video cameras. The hipper among them held their smartphones in the air. They found their friends, waved, mouthed their wows and their Can you believe they’re so grown up alreadys. Carter’s mom had brought her best friend from work, Sue, so she’d have someone to sit with, someone to lend a hand that she could clench when her son walked across the stage and she was inevitably overcome with emotion. (His father, true to his word, had skipped out on the proceedings.)
Jeff’s parents came dressed like they were at an art opening—his father wore Tom Ford, and perfectly round, plastic tortoiseshell glasses; his mother wore a Stella McCartney pantsuit that women half her age might not be able to pull off. Lilah’s parents had arrived two hours early to stake out seats in the front row of the balcony, and once the ceremony began and the seniors marched in, they clutched the railing, tracking her every move below them like if they lost track of her, even for an instant, she’d somehow get lost and not end up graduating. Jules’s mother, laid back in a diaphanous pastel-blue dress, kept herself apart from the other parents. Watching her daughter graduate—and go to college, no less—was a special gift and she wanted it all to herself.
The 462 graduating seniors, penned in like chickens in alphabetized rows in the orchestra seats, squirmed under their robes and fidgeted with their caps and joked and rolled their eyes through Ms. Robison’s corny, quasi-uplifting speech. It touched on all the usual points about how special this particular group of students was, and how much they’d be missed, and how, though they maybe didn’t know it now, their lives would continue after they graduated, they’d go on to have all sorts of interesting experiences, and eventually, maybe they’d come back to Chris Columbus having accomplished things they couldn’t even dream of now. It was a fine speech, if a little rote, and though they pretended they didn’t care about the words they were hearing, the students were glad to be told these things today.