“So are you,” I replied. Because he was. He had delicate features and long eyelashes. He frowned when I said it, but he still kissed me. He leaned in and pressed his heavy lips to mine, his tongue like a doctor’s probe.
I kissed him back and maybe that’s the same as saying yes.
He leaned onto me on the chaise. I shifted away and said, “Whoa there, cowboy.” I knew it was stupid as I said it. I wasn’t even sure where the words came from. Whoa there, cowboy? How could Seth Winthrop like a girl who said such stupid things? He smiled, but his eyes were elsewhere. His pupils were so large they nearly eclipsed the color in his irises.
With one hand, he stroked my forehead. With the other, he still held my wrist. “So pretty,” he said again.
We’d kissed a hundred thousand times before, but this was different. It wasn’t just being in Gwen’s pool house with the smell of chlorine all around us. It was the way his voice sounded like he was sucking on pebbles and how his eyes made him seem like he was too much there and not there at all. He looked around me and through me and within me.
He slid his body on top of mine.
“No, thank you,” I said, digging up words from my toddlerhood. It was what Mom always said to say to Charlie when he hit me or pulled my hair. It was as ineffectual now as it was then.
Still the smile. Still the blank eyes.
And still the chirping cricket.
I tried to move out from under him. He shook his head. His lips ranged over my neck while his hand moved from my forehead to fumble with the snap of my jeans.
No, thank you, no, thank you, no, thank you.
His hands pressed into me through my underwear, rough and thick. “You’re hurting me.”
Still the smile: parted lips and round teeth.
He tugged and my pants and underwear were around my thighs. “Seth.”
“Lexi,” he sighed.
He kept one hand on my wrist. His chest pressed against mine and I couldn’t breathe. “Seth, please.”
He chuckled. He struggled against my clothes and got them off, mostly. My underpants hung on my ankle.
I started to squirm. “Shh,” he said. Like I was his baby and he was soothing me. “Shh.” And then he was inside me. Sharp. I breathed in. The scent of chlorine filled my nose.
The cricket chirped faster and faster.
When he was done, he lay beside me with his arm across my chest. “Thank you,” he murmured, like I had given him something. He brushed my hair from my face. It was all so tender I wondered if I was the one who had misunderstood.
I slipped from beneath his arm and put my clothes back on. There was blood, but just a little bit.
He left the condom on the chaise longue. I hadn’t even realized he had put one on.
NOW
There is something heavy on my chest. Heavy and itchy. Like hair. Like the couch in our grandparents’ basement rec room, the one that smells like mildew and pine air freshener. That same smell fills my nose now. My skin is burning, but inside my body feels like it is packed with snow, the kind that’s been on the road for three days and turned thick and brown.
I’m naked and I’m afraid to open my eyes.
“Lexi?” It’s Charlie. Charlie whispers my name.
I blink open my eyes. He’s sitting beside me wrapped in a blanket. I think maybe he’s naked, too, because I can see his chest and the weird little hairs that sprout there. I can’t make sense of this at all. “Charlie?”
His body relaxes.
“You fell into the lake,” he tells me.
Zack stands behind him. His arms are wrapped around his chest. His whole face is as pink as prom carnations.
“I know,” I say. I remember slipping down, the shock of it, and then the way it felt so easy to just let go and watch those ferns and vines come to me. It felt like slipping into some other plane of existence, an actual magical world.
“Charlie pulled you out,” Zack tells me.
“We almost both went under,” Charlie says. His eyes are wide and wild and confused. Did he see that world, too?
I know I should say thank you. I know. Someone saves your life—they pull you out of a frozen lake—you say thank you. But I can’t. Because a part of me wishes I was still slipping back into that other world. That peaceful world. And so I close my eyes again.
“Lexi,” Charlie whispers. “Come back.” But it feels like he’s saying, “Take me with you.”
“You’re too late,” I tell him. “You’re always too late.”
“What the hell?” The voice comes across the room followed by a cold burst of air. There are two men standing in the doorway.
“She fell through the ice,” Zack says.
Then the two men are running toward me and as they come into focus I realize it’s the Angel Boy and his friend from the store. Angel Boy skids to a stop in front of me. His face is inches from my own. Maybe I am dead after all. Maybe this is heaven? His curls fall across his forehead. He has buttercup eyes and rosy cheeks. His breath smells of a baloney sandwich, which seems rather un-angel-like, but so it goes. I do like baloney sandwiches, especially fried baloney with ketchup and American cheese, so maybe there’s been some sort of mix-up in the design of my own personal heaven.
Which is another goddamn awful Adrian Wildes song.
My skin burns all over: fire three levels of skin deep.
Maybe this is purgatory.
I’ve never really paid attention to all those religious things, but it seems I am a good candidate for purgatory.
Angel Boy blinks. I didn’t know that angels blinked.
“Are you awake?” he asks.
“I’m dead,” I tell him. “Let me sleep.”
I close my eyes again, but I can still feel his breath (angels breathe?) and smell the baloney. Then I feel his fingers on my wrist, pressing hard.
The rough weight is still there, like a sweater, and the body inside of it pressing down on me. On my bare skin. I am naked, I remember. I am naked. I squirm my body backward but there is nowhere to go, just a wall and anyway the Angel Boy follows me.
My throat closes. I can’t breathe, I scream in my head. But it’s only in my head so no one hears me. I squeeze my eyes shut because this cannot be happening again.
“Her pulse is going back to normal,” he says. “Open your eyes. I need to look into your eyes.”
I blink open my eyes. “Good line,” I tell him. He uses his fingers to spread my eyelids back.
“What are you doing?” the boy behind him asks.
“Checking,” he says.
“For what?”
“Hemorrhaging and stuff. I can’t remember all the details from the class I took. Let me see your toes? I know I need to check the extremities.”
Without meaning to, I tuck myself into a ball.
“I just need to check for frostbite and stuff,” he tells me, annoyance creeping into his voice.
I shake my head. “Could you get me some clothes first?”
It isn’t Angel Boy who moves. It’s his friend who shrugs his heavy brown jacket off and lets it fall to the floor. He pulls his sweatshirt over his head, revealing an angry scar down the side of his torso. He tosses the sweatshirt in my direction. “Put this on,” he says. “I’m going to see if I can find you guys more clothes.”
I hear his feet stomp away as I pull the sweatshirt over my head. Licorice and gasoline smells embrace me. My head pops out into the hood and I wriggle the shirt down over the blanket then slip my arms through. Angel Boy is still there, feet or inches or breaths away from me, and he watches the whole thing like I am some strange specimen. I feel like eyes will always be on my body.
Angel Boy picks up my fingers and looks at the tips. His hand is gentle but hot, and it’s all I can do not to yank my hand away. “So what happened?” he asks.
“She fell through,” Zack says. “Charlie went out after her, but I told him he needed to go on his belly.”
“Smart,” Angel Boy says.
<
br /> “I held his ankles and he reached down in the water and pulled her up. We got her back in here.” He turns to me. “We pumped the water out of your lungs. You barfed rotten fish,” Zack says. “Practically, I mean.”
They carried me into the dining hall, where they found some blankets and started a fire. “Forgot to open the flue at first. Nearly smoked us out of here,” Zack tells me.
But they got it going, and put me in front of it, but not too close. Zack couldn’t exactly remember what you were supposed to do about bringing someone up to temperature, whether you should try to do it slowly or not. “All I remembered was the best thing was to have skin-on-skin contact. Like in this series with Ben Affleck like before he was Ben Affleck. We watched it in elementary school.”
“Voyage of the Mimi,” Angel Boy says.
“Yeah—exactly. You watched that, too?”
The boy nods and Zack comes and sits beside me. “So that’s, you know, what we did. You were out of your clothes anyway, since they were so cold. And Charlie, too, of course. So I took one for the team.”
“I knew you were trying to put the moves on me this whole trip,” I say. I want to sound cool and hip and flippant, like being naked under a blanket around strangers is no big deal. But my voice comes out flat and dusty. I tug my wool blanket up around me. The fire crackles behind Charlie.
“It’s true,” Zack says. “I actually went out and cracked the ice before you got out there. Last night, I mean. And then I crashed the car in the snowbank. Well, first I made it snow to cover up all my tracks. And while you were sleeping, I whispered, ‘Go on the ice. The lake is nice. Go on the ice.’ I whispered that in your ear all night long. Then I crashed the car. And the rest you know.”
Angel Boy watches this conversation. His big eyes with their impossible lashes shift back and forth between us, and his cherub mouth looks like it’s not sure what to do with itself. Gabe. That’s his name. I remember from the store.
“Everything hurts,” I tell them. I turn my head away from the fire. I don’t want to move too much. I don’t want the blanket to fall off my lap. Across the room, I see a girl. The girl is tiny to start with, and then she’s got herself all curled up on a bench across the room, which makes her look even smaller. She’s like one of those gargoyles up on top of an old building. She even has a gargoyle-y expression, with her lips all twisted and her eyes narrowed into laser slits. Lasers that, I realize, are pointing at me.
“Is there really a small gargoyle girl over there?” I ask.
Gabe starts laughing then. “Arabella, she thinks you’re a gargoyle!”
The girl—Arabella—unfolds herself. “Easy for a stupid girl to say. Only a pineapple would be stupid enough to walk out on the lake after it’s been warm for three days.”
“We’re not from around here,” Zack tells the girl.
“Clearly,” she says.
“Your name is Arabella?” I ask.
“She’s Clayton’s sister,” Gabe says.
“Who’s Clayton?”
“Me,” the other boy says. He clomps across the floor in his work boots.
“She asked if Ari was a gargoyle,” Gabe says, laughing again.
“She thought you were an angel, too, so clearly her judgments are not to be trusted,” Clayton says.
I tug the blanket around me. Arabella’s face is getting darker and darker. I always thought it was just an expression that people’s faces got purple—“figurative language,” Dewey DeWitt would say—but she is getting redder and redder like a fat seedless grape. Her stringy, straight blond hair doesn’t help matters. “I’m not stupid,” I say.
“Sure,” the girl says.
“Anyway, I got you some clothes,” Clayton tells me. “Storage room was stocked with this camp gear. Guess they just cut and ran.”
“They died,” Gabe tells him. “Remember? The fire?”
Clayton takes a T-shirt, sweat pants, and a sweatshirt from his stack and hands them to me. The camp’s color must have been red, because the sweatshirt is a deep burgundy color, like blood. “There’s no, like, undergarments or anything. I got the guy some shorts, but I wasn’t sure if a girl would like those.” I see red appearing on his cheeks.
The guy.
I crane my head around. Charlie didn’t speak through Zack’s whole tale of what happened to me. He hasn’t even snorted again. Now he stares at a space on the floor between his legs.
“Here you go,” Clayton says.
Charlie looks up. “Sure,” he says. “Thanks.” He drops his blanket, pulls his T-shirt and sweatshirt on, then wiggles into the gym shorts and pants, like we haven’t all just been lying naked together.
Zack clears his throat.
“Oh, right,” Gabe says. Then the guys all turn their backs on me.
It’s hard to move my limbs, like they are still frozen in the ice, even though I can feel every square millimeter of my skin. I shimmy into the pants first, the fleece soft against my skin. I bet this was what it felt like when you were a baby, all wrapped up in a flannel blanket. I don’t like to go without a bra, but I don’t have much choice, at least for now. The T-shirt is a little tight, though, so that feels good. The sweatshirt, on the other hand, is huge, like Zack’s was on me. I pull the hood up over my hair, which is nearly dry but tangled beyond repair. When we get out of here, maybe I’ll just cut it all off.
“Here,” I say, and hand Clayton back his shirt. “Thanks.”
“We saw your car,” Clayton says. “In the snowbank at the end of the road. Did Gabe tell you that? He wanted to keep driving.”
“I didn’t.”
“You did. You guys are lucky we found you.”
“We should have kept driving,” Arabella says.
“Here’s the problem,” Clayton says. “It’s snowing again. A lot.”
“Meaning?” Charlie finally speaks.
“Meaning we might just need to tuck in here for a while.”
Gabe plays the piano in the corner of the dining hall. He’s really good and his fingers dance, like Remy with the clarinet. I lay by the fire and watch him and it’s a few minutes in before I realize he’s playing an Adrian Wildes song. I look across the room to where Charlie is lying on an old leather couch. His eyes are closed and he’s got his arm flopped over his forehead, but I don’t think he’s sleeping. I think he’s listening and wondering where Adrian is now.
Arabella watches Gabe, too. Up close she doesn’t look like a gargoyle. She has big eyes with long lashes that make her look more like Gabe than Clayton. Her lips are full, but chapped. She keeps biting on the lower one.
“I’m sorry about the gargoyle thing.”
“It’s the pimples, right?”
I scan her face. I guess there are a fair amount of pimples. Mostly on her forehead, though, underneath her bangs. “No. It was the way you were sitting. And that you are so tiny. And the awful expression you were looking at me with.”
“Dagger bolts,” she says.
“He’s not worth dagger-bolting anyone over,” I say.
“Who?”
I raise my eyebrows. I wish I could crawl into her skin and help her straighten herself out, to not be so angry at herself and everyone else. I guess that’s a little bit hypocritical coming from me. But watching her, it’s painful. I know what she is going to say and what she is going to do, and she might as well be taking a knife and slashing her skin. That’s how this anger will feel for her. That’s how it feels for me.
“I had a lot of dagger bolts for this girl Remy Yoo.”
“What kind of a name is Remy?”
“You’ve got a small island to stand on there, Arabella.”
She blushes. “It means beautiful lion.”
“Really? That is kickass.”
She shrugs. “So why the dagger bolts for this Remy girl?”
“I thought she wanted to steal my boyfriend, but really she was just trying to warn me.”
“Warn you what?”
“It does
n’t matter.”
“I don’t need to be warned about Gabe,” she says, then stands up and walks across the room. She sits next to him on the piano bench and together they start playing “Chopsticks.”
I know she doesn’t need to be warned about Gabe the way that Remy tried to warn me about Seth. I don’t think Clayton would let Gabe within seven miles of his sister if he thought that was even a possibility. But it’s clear to anyone that Gabe sees Arabella like she’s his own little sister. And so she’s setting herself up for heartbreak, but she kind of knows it, so she’s building that wall around herself and all that’s going to do is stop the people who actually care.
Words itch beneath my skin, but I can’t find the right ones to tell her that it doesn’t do any good to tear down other girls or herself or anyone or anything. It doesn’t do any good to try to protect yourself, because you can be as hard and sharp as a mace, and someone will still find a way to get in. Even if you have a code like Harper, sometimes it seems like the whole world is set up just to hurt you, a pinball machine made of glass shards, and you have to find a way to get through each day. I can feel those words tingling on my lips, but it’s not what she wants to hear. Isn’t what she is ready to hear. And so what can I tell her? She won’t listen. I mean, I didn’t either, right?
“I think we’re going to need more wood for the fire,” I say. I say it like a thought. Just throwing it out into the ether.
Without a word, Clayton picks up an ax and goes outside. He comes back with his arms loaded with firewood. He carries it across the dining hall, his boots clomping in time with Gabe’s piano playing. When he gets to the fireplace, I stand up and take the logs from his arms and lay them in a line on the stone hearth. Some of them are still dusted with snow and ice, and I figure this will give them some time to dry out.
“You always like this?” I ask.
“Like what?”
“Getting stuff done.”
He kind of smiles, but also looks confused, like he’s wondering if we actually speak the same language or something. “I guess. We needed more wood, so I got it.”
Seth would not have gone to get more wood. Charlie wouldn’t. Zack might think about it, but I’m not sure Zack knows how to use an ax without cutting off his own fingers. “Okay,” I say, feeling about as stupid as a stone. “Thanks.”
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