The Last Time We Were Us

by Leah Konen

  Of course Lyla would have had free rein of the main house. She’s Lyla. “Yeah,” I say. “I told you, I’m not his girlfriend. I haven’t properly met his parents or anything.”

  “Still seems weird,” she says, but she sees I’m hurt and tries to lighten the mood. “Well, the house is out of this world. Seriously.”

  “If I ever make it in, I’ll let you know what I think.”

  “You will,” she says. “I’m sure Innis is just different about things like that, that’s all.”

  I lean forward, rest my elbows on the table. “So would it bother you? If we were actually dating?”

  Lyla pretends to be fascinated by her hands. When she finally looks up, her lips are pressed together, determined. “He’s a good guy,” she says. “From a good family. If he’s the one you like, then, no, it wouldn’t bother me at all.”

  Guilt hits me first, because she’s no good at hiding the pain on her face, but then thankfulness, that in spite of everything, she supports me in this, even though I don’t know what “this” is yet.

  “Are you going to bring him to the wedding?” She forces a smile.

  I am nowhere near asking Innis to any kind of official function, much less my sister’s wedding. “Wouldn’t that be a little weird?”

  She shakes her head quickly. “It’s been two years,” she says. “All that stuff with Skip is behind me.”

  For a split second, I wonder if I could tell her about Jason, if it really is behind her.

  But I think about Lyla at seventeen, about those first months after that horrible night, and I decide that telling her is not for the best.

  Chapter 2

  MACKENZIE AND I GET TO INNIS’S JUST AFTER NINE.

  Crawford Hall stands in front of us, gorgeous in the evening dusk, a rich, buttercream yellow that only gets more beautiful with age. Shutters flank every window—deep hunter green—and not the kind that are tacked on for show, like the ones on my house. These ones have purpose, clapping together when you want to shut out the world.

  We park on the street, just off to the side, because we still aren’t sure what we’re supposed to do with the circular driveway that leads to the huge garage behind the house.

  Kenzie reapplies her lip gloss before hopping out of the car and striking a ridiculous model pose just for me—leave it to the girl to always make me laugh.

  We walk past a screened-in wraparound porch full of white wicker and oak rockers. The screens are speckled with thirsty mosquitoes and horseflies. It’s the right time of night for lightning bugs; one buzzes by me, and out of habit, I cup my hands together, catch it on the first try.

  “You’re strangely good at that,” Kenzie says.

  “I just have a lot of practice. Don’t tell me they don’t have lightning bugs in Ohio, either.” Kenzie moved here from “up North,” as Mom calls it, last summer.

  “We do,” Kenzie says. “And we call them fireflies like normal people.”

  I peek at the yellow-orange light that fills the cave of my palms. Jason and I used to spend hours filling jelly jars, seeing whose could shine brightest. I let it go, and in seconds, its light goes out.

  “So what’s so great about the inside of the house anyway?” Kenzie asks. “Why is your sister freaking out about us only going to the basement?”

  I put on my best tour guide voice: “Lorne Crawford—that’s Innis’s great-grandfather a bunch of times over—was an inventive businessman who was able to turn his thriving tobacco business into a successful investment firm after the Civil War. Crawford Hall has been in the family since seventeen-hundred something-or-other.”

  She looks at me. “What are you, a stalker? Did you study up on his house?”

  I laugh. “It’s on a plaque in the library, next to something they donated. Although the more informal version is—‘The Crawfords used to grow tobacco. Now they grow money.’”

  Kenzie laughs, too. “Toto, I’ve got a feeling we aren’t in Ohio anymore.”

  We walk a little farther, and the sweeping daylight basement comes into view.

  “Did they have slaves and everything?” Kenzie asks, as if the thought’s only just dawned on her.

  “Probably,” I say, and it leaves a bad, bitter taste in the back of my mouth, like the whole place is tainted. Mom says we shouldn’t judge the dead, different time and all that, but I can’t help but be glad that my great-great-great-whatever-grandfather was in Ireland, and not lording over a Southern tobacco plantation, way back when.

  “God,” Kenzie says. “That’s terrible.”

  “It is,” I say.

  When we get to the basement, the subject drops, and the mood changes. Through the windows, I see the glow of electric violence on the flat-screen: Innis’s latest steal-cars-and-chase-girls video game.

  He loads the characters on-screen with bullets and doesn’t look up as we let ourselves in.

  “Ladies.” Payton Daughtry flashes a hundred-dollar grin and raises his beer in a mock toast. His buddy, Alex McGuiness, follows up with a loud, thick burp.

  The screen villains are dead now, and Innis pulls his gaze from the TV. He looks me up and down, smiles wide. He doesn’t do gushy compliments—at least not in front of other people—but I can tell he thinks I look pretty.

  “We can thank Miss Grant for the provisions,” he says.

  Payton hands us each a beer, and I follow MacKenzie to a couch along the wall. Innis gives my freshly shaved legs another quick look before he goes back to his game.

  So far, we’re the only girls here. Since the beginning of summer, our bad fake IDs, courtesy of Kenzie’s shady second cousin in Ohio, have been our ticket to Innis’s weekly hangouts, but we’re usually surrounded by at least a few other girls: Alexis Clairemont, Innis’s freshman-year girlfriend who still hangs around. Marisa Wong, Alex’s on-again, off-again, who loves Goldschläger—“it’s like drinking jewelry!”—Jessica Jackson and Nicole Tully, two cheerleaders who practice together, tan together, and even hooked up with Blake Edgeworth together last summer.

  Kenzie and I are usually the final stragglers, and the last three times I was here, Innis and I ended the night by making out on the couch while Payton and MacKenzie slipped away to Payton’s car or the pool or wherever. Still, it’s annoying to have all the other girls around, a little reminder that the boys would be just fine without us.

  “You think anyone else is coming?” I whisper.

  Kenzie leans in. “Fingers crossed, no.”

  “Seriously?”

  “I told Payton we were tired of providing beer for basically every other girl at East Bonneville. From the looks of it, he got the hint.”

  If MacKenzie could apply half her acumen for breaking into the popular crowd and “getting us hot boyfriends” to school, she’d be one of those freak geniuses who graduate Harvard at sixteen. To her, there’s no love or luck. Just challenges to be solved.

  I take a sip of beer and try not to get my hopes up, not too much, at least. If boys are challenges, Innis is Mount Freaking Everest. He’s not just high school royalty, he’s town royalty. And when he grows up, he’ll still be royalty. Just the banker-doctor-lawyer kind. He’s got an almost guaranteed admittance to Duke, where both of his parents are big donors. He’ll be popular for the rest of his life. Maybe it’s the money or the breeding or that he lives in the town’s most famous house. Or maybe it’s the fact that, in everyone’s eyes, he’s the ultimate brother. No one will ever forget what happened to Skip, because bad things don’t happen to the Crawfords and the Taylors of this world without there being a villain and a hero.

  Innis is the hero.

  He looks like one, too. His hair is dark and curly, a mop of ringlets set off with cool, gray eyes. His cheeks have a hint of red, and his jaw is strong. He wears a rotation of bright polos and too-tight khakis, like he just stepped out of a preppy photo shoot. And when he’s not trying to be a badass, yelling at a guy on the lacrosse team or bragging about a video-game score, when it’s just th
e two of us and he looks at me like I’m his, I have to remind myself to breathe.

  “When do I get to play?” MacKenzie asks Payton with a well-designed pout. He gives her a half look, his eyes still glued to the screen. She’ll get his attention eventually, though. Always does. I wish I could convince her that there are better goals than Payton Daughtry, who has the makings of a beer belly at just seventeen and is quite likely to outlive his IQ, but she wants him, and what MacKenzie wants, MacKenzie gets. It only took her five short months at East Bonneville before she moved Veronica and me to a centrally located cafeteria table, buddied up to the popular girls, joined the softball team, and started getting invites to parties.

  “Yeah, how about letting someone else have a turn?”

  The voice is dark and coarse, like the growl of a dog left in the crate too long.

  Skip Taylor leans against the wall behind us, his face partially lit by the flat-screen and low lights. His eyes dart to mine, a mix of recognition and surprise. He’s seen me here before, but never when there aren’t other girls around, too. I look down at my hands, imagining all the things he could be thinking—about Lyla, the wedding, how she and I have the same nose, how he and I used to be friends kind of, in that weird way you’re friendly with your older sister’s boyfriend. When I get the nerve to glance up, he’s staring at his brother, waiting for an answer.

  “I’m almost done,” Innis says, before turning back to the screen.

  Skip crosses his arms but doesn’t move otherwise. From this angle, his nose is strong and sharp, his hair thick and barely waved, his eyes look-at-me blue. Physically speaking, Skip is the ultimate illusion, a cold glass of milk with your cookies before you know it’s gone sour. I can’t not stare at him, wait for him to turn his head, remind me what Jason did.

  On the screen, Innis shoots a passerby and hops into a new car. Payton turns the volume up, and a hip-hop song blares.

  MacKenzie scoots towards me, her voice a whisper. “Did you hear about Jason?”

  I flinch at his name, like it’s a bad word in church, something not to be spoken, especially not here. “Hear about him?”

  “He’s out, like hanging around town.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Payton texted me. Said he heard from Innis.”

  I search her face to see if she knows the whole story, but some of it must have gotten lost in translation. “Can we talk about this later?”

  “Whoa,” she says, reading me all too well. “You’ve already seen him.”

  “For a second,” I say quickly.

  “Oh my God. Where?”

  “When we were buying beer.” I lower my voice even further. “For literally three minutes. It’s not a big deal.”

  She stares at me like I’ve just said two and two is three. “How is it not a big deal? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  I shrug. “Why are you so worried? You didn’t even know him.”

  “I know enough.” She scoffs. “In my book, brutally attacking another person is enough to make me want to steer clear.” She leans in closerand speaks so quietly I have to read her lips. “What if he tries to see you again?”

  “Geez, Kenzie, you are so paranoid. He didn’t try to see me in the first place, and we weren’t even friends before he left.” Kenzie already knows that it wasn’t Skip or juvie that ended my friendship with Jason. It was so many other things. His instant rise to popularity. My middle-school shyness. The first time he pretended not to know me, right at the end of eighth grade.

  “But you were like besties forever before that.”

  She’s right. Mom even used to say we were friends as babies. That she’d invite Mrs. Sullivan for coffee, and Jason and I would rock, side by side, in our carriers. I remember us sitting in front of the TV, Wyle E. Coyote’s anvils zipping across the screen, electric orange Cheetos flecks on our fingers, awash in the kind of joy only kids seem to have access to. As soon as the memory comes, I push it back down where it belongs. Bury it deep.

  “That was a long time ago,” I say.

  “Thank God for that.” Kenzie takes a sip of beer. “Anyway, you promise you won’t do anything stupid? Your capacity for forgiveness is about ten levels too high.” She’s talking about Veronica, about what she refers to as the “Cafeteria Incident,” but I don’t pursue it. Not now.

  “I promise.”

  There’s a rush of expletives from Innis, then he stomps his foot and throws the controller down. The screen goes black, and we’re back at the beginning of the game. Skip comes forward, taking the back way around the couch so the right side of his face is the only one we see, but when he grabs the controller and sits down, there’s no hiding it.

  I used to think Skip might one day be my brother-in-law. I was young, caught up in how in love Lyla was, sure it was going to work out for them.

  But that was the before Skip. A different Skip than I know now.

  I’ve seen his face plenty of times since it happened, but it still manages to shock me. His lips are red and puffed. His cheek is too smooth in parts, then wrinkly and raised, almost bubbling along the edges, dark ridges etched across. The side of his chin is achingly white, and his nostril is wide. But it’s his eye that is the worst, drooping and sad, the lids mottled like candle wax.

  He drives, swerves, speeds up, does everything right. He’s clearly better than any of the other boys. Maybe it’s because his fake-o job with his dad leaves him plenty of free time. Maybe it’s because the games don’t know what he looks like.

  MacKenzie shakes her head as I take a big gulp of beer.

  “I still can’t believe Jason had the nerve to come back.”

  IT’S DARK IN the basement, the glow of the video-game home screen our only light. I can hear MacKenzie and Payton messing around in the pool, shrieks and splashes, and then the quiet as they inevitably come together.

  Innis and I have been making out awhile, when he pulls back midkiss, traces a finger along my jawline. “You’re special, you know?”

  My heartbeat quickens, but I try to keep my cool. “Why do you say that?”

  He runs a hand through my hair. “You’re not like other girls.”

  Does he know this line is straight out of every high school movie ever? Either way, it’s too sweet for me to call him on it.

  He looks at me, like I really am different. “You don’t care about the stupid stuff like makeup and shopping and all that.”

  “What, are you saying I don’t look pulled together?”

  He shakes his head. “You know that’s not what I meant.”

  He presses his lips against mine, his tongue darting inside. His hands wander, over my chest, down the curve of my waist, around the back, underneath my bra, onto my bare skin. I feel the chills all the way at the tips of my fingers. I’m one of those coloring book mazes, and he’s got the crayon, and he’s drawing his way to the prize at the end.

  Part of me wants to go there. As he kisses me harder, I imagine him pulling off my shirt, unhooking the button of my jean skirt, us doing more than we have before.

  And then I think about what Mom used to say—“Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?”—and I worry that, as awful as it is for her to compare girls to cows, our lady bits to dairy milk, is she a little right? What if I’m just something new for him? What if he gets tired of me after this? I always imagined all the sexy times happening after I had a boyfriend, not before. I pull back.

  “Maybe we should go find Payton and MacKenzie,” I say.

  He tries to disguise a groan but then leans back in for a light kiss. “They definitely don’t want to be found,” he says deeply, under his breath. “Neither do we.”

  He starts kissing me again, his hands pressed into the small of my back, but I push him again, taking a deep gasp of air as our lips part.

  “I don’t think I want to do anything more tonight,” I say.

  He groans, louder this time, but he scoots over, gives me space.

  I sit up str
aight, pull down the edges of my skirt, and try to catch my breath.

  “What is it?” he asks, his voice kind. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing’s wrong,” I say.

  “Then why?”

  “I’m just not ready.” I hate how much I sound like a PSA.

  I wonder, briefly, if he’s angry, but then he just shrugs. “All right.”

  “We’re good?” I adjust my top awkwardly.

  He nods. “Course we’re good.”

  Innis never asked me to be his girlfriend, and I never asked to be it, but now I wonder how long this whatever-it-is will go on if we don’t go any further.

  But he leans in again, and his voice is soft and smooth, like it is when he wants to please. “We can wait as long as you want.”

  And I smile, feel myself blushing, though he won’t be able to see it in the dark.

  Innis could have anyone.

  But lately, it seems like that anyone is me.

  Chapter 3

  MACKENZIE DRIVES US HOME SO WE CAN GET BACK IN time for curfew, giving me an extremely detailed play-by-play of her and Payton’s night.

  “How’d it go with Innis?” she finally asks, when I know a bit more about both of her and Payton’s anatomies than I’d like to.

  “Good,” I say. “Really good.”

  “Really good? Don’t tell me you did it on the couch and are only now getting around to telling me.”

  “Actually, we barely did anything. Just kissed.”

  “And that’s good news?” she asks.

  “You know, sometimes, I think you have a hard time understanding that I’m not you.”

  “What can I say?” MacKenzie turns onto our street. “You’re my first repressed Southerner friend.”

  “Ha ha,” I say as she pulls up to my house.

  “Anyway, sleep well. Dream of all the things you didn’t do with Innis.”

  “You’re such a jerk.” I laugh. “Talk tomorrow.”

  I hear the shuffle of footsteps above as I close the front door behind me, then the creak of the stairs.