Ethan watches me as I wash my hair out in the sink and redo my makeup, trying to pull myself back together.
“C’mon,” he says after, bending over to pick up my still-wet book bag. “I’ll walk you to the office.”
I bend my head down and follow him out of the bathroom.
Some of the varsity cheerleaders are in the hall, decorating a bulletin board, along with Michaela Verday and a couple of student council members. A lot of them are teacher and office aides for this hour. They line our path to the office, and I really don’t want to walk past them looking like this.
“Stop,” I tell Ethan, grabbing his arm. He does.
“You can’t avoid them forever.”
At the sound of voices, a couple of girls’ heads turn. Adrienne’s catlike eyes catch mine and she smiles wickedly, hollers at one of the other girls to toss her a glitter stick.
The look on her face makes me sick. Everything always goes her way, falls into place however she imagines it.
“I know,” I say. “But just.” I take his arm and turn him to face me. Set my jaw. I think about it. Stare at the contours of his face. Whit’s sharp in all the places Ethan is soft—jawline, eyes, nose. Ethan overcompensates with a severe haircut, bulking up on protein shakes and hours lost in the weight room. I remember he used to win me over constantly, make me feel good about myself.
But he never challenged me.
Adrienne is watching us, I know. She hates that Ethan wants me more than her. She always has. Before I’d ever seen him, she’d announced he was beautiful, one day early in our junior year. She hates remembering that, as much as she hates that she can’t change his mind about me.
It’s the one game she can’t win.
I lean my head forward and kiss him. It’s less of a kiss and more of a touch between two mouths, one that has recently been doused in whiskey, until he gets over the initial surprise and presses against me a little harder. I make it last as long as I can, until I feel him realize this is me he’s kissing. At which point he stops, rocking back on his heels.
“What are you trying to do?”
I glance back to make sure Adrienne was watching. When our eyes meet, she turns away to hide her fury. I push my lips together and walk in the opposite direction of the office, knowing everyone else in the hall is watching.
Maybe it worked, but as far as ideas go, even I know that one was pretty terrible.
58
I race out of the front entrance to the school and hear Whit call my name as the door closes behind me.
I stop and turn around to see him pushing through the door after me. “What happened to you?” he asks.
“Don’t tell me you haven’t heard. Surely my popularity hasn’t taken that big of a hit at this school.” I lean against a column holding up the breezeway that leads to the parking lot.
“Yeah, I heard. I’ve been looking for you. I had to go get a hall pass from Mr. Doolittle because your BFF, Adrienne, told on me.” He scratches the back of his neck, and his watch jingles.
The thought of him putting in that much effort kind of warms me. And I’m staring up into his gold-streaked eyes, and I open my mouth and offer, for the hell of it, “Let’s go somewhere.”
“What?” he asks as if I just suggested we fly to the moon, as if the rules are so goddamn important he can’t move to break them.
“Do I look that bad?”
“Well”—he pauses—“kind of, but you did just get showered in Jack Daniel’s. And Dr. Rickards was looking for you. And we can’t just leave and go somewhere in the middle of class. Aren’t you upset, Liv?”
I shrug. I don’t know how much he’s been told, how much he’s figured out, but it’s already more than I want him to know. I don’t want to think about him knowing this.
Not about Ryan.
I lunge forward and grab on to his arm. “Come on, Whit. This past week has been shit for both of us. Let’s go somewhere.” His eyes are still shifting around like he’s standing in the middle of a crime scene. I don’t let go of him. “Aren’t you—aren’t you tired of this stuff? Everything?”
“Where do you want to go?” he finally asks.
“You decide,” I tell him, smiling ever so slightly. I want to kiss him, get the taste of Ethan off my mouth. Get the taste of the day off my mouth. But I can’t do that—just kiss him.
Not again.
His eyes rove down my body. “Come on. I have a change of clothes in my car.”
* * *
According to the T-shirt I have on, I am a South Carolina golf state champion. It smells like dryer sheets and the moment right before it rains and Whit. Mostly like Whit.
“Where are we going?” I ask.
“Somewhere,” he promises, his eyelids fluttering as he watches the road. It doesn’t look like he’s shaved in a couple of days. Stubble is creeping up along his jawline.
We head in the direction of Adrienne’s house, and I start getting nervous so I twist my hands together to stop them from doing anything weird. I think Whit’s watching me for a minute, but when I turn to look at him, his eyes are on the road again.
He pulls onto a gravel road that goes through a tunnel made of trees, the sun spilling through the small cracks it can find in the branches. Whit pulls his car up alongside the trees and gets out. I throw on the sweatshirt he’s loaned me and follow. I sidle up alongside him. “Well, this is special,” I say, because the world would end if I didn’t make a sarcastic comment.
“Never said it was,” he tells me. Then I spot the golf ball in his hand.
“No.” Whit pulls me forward by my fingers with his one empty hand, but I stop stubbornly and cross my arms. “Whit, no. No golf. I’m serious.”
“Can you just trust me?” He rolls his eyes. “I know I’m corny as hell; you don’t have to tell me.”
I tap my finger on my chin for a second. “You’re insulting yourself now. Nice.”
His eyebrow goes up. “Well, you did look pretty tired. Figured I’d do it for you.”
“Fine.” I start walking again, swinging my fingertips back and forth past his. There’s an ache under my skin and all over it. The pain is steady and thrumming, and I think if his hand just grabbed mine again, it would be gone.
It doesn’t make sense to feel so much longing for something that’s right in front of you.
“Where are we?” I finally ask.
“Oh.” Whit shakes his head. “It’s this pseudo driving range our club owns.” He points at the copse of trees in the distance. “The course is over there.”
Pseudo is definitely the word for it. Sloping grass, not mowed carefully like the course. Oak trees towering over us, cutting out a cove to drive balls from. To the far left, a little piece of the course’s lake. “It’s…” I touch the bark on the closest tree. “Nice.”
He shrugs with one shoulder, looking self-conscious. The cove might not look like much, but I can see that it means something to him. “It’s kind of a place to de-stress, you know? I can hit the ball like it doesn’t matter. See how far I can drive it.” He laughs at a private joke. “Cason and I used to do that when we were kids. See who could drive it farther. Me,” he answers the unasked question. “It’s my short game that sucks. I’m too volatile or something to concentrate on those shots.”
I shove him. “Shut up.”
He smiles. It’s fake. Cold comfort for the girl who got doused in Jack Daniel’s. “I used to get so pissed at my dad. He’d tell me no one would ever recruit me if I didn’t stop acting like such an asshole when I played a bad game. It got in my head. I’d get worse and worse.”
“That sucks that he said that,” I say.
“He was right. That’s what golf is—if you fuck up your world on the twelfth hole, you start over on thirteen. You have to play every hole and every shot and every day like it’s the first one ever. It’s just … exhausting sometimes.”
“So why do it, then? If it makes you feel bad? It’s all about keeping up with your
brother, right?” I say, parroting his words back to him.
He thinks about that for a second and shakes his head. “I love it.”
“You tell yourself you love it. To please everyone else.”
His expression changes. He comes forward, takes my wrist, and pulls me toward him. “Come here,” he says, as if he were leading a child into something magical. He positions me in the center of the cove, out over the stretching range. His skin is warm where it meets my wrists. The wind blows my damp hair, drying out the last of the terrible day. “Close your eyes,” he commands. As my eyelids flutter closed, I watch him disappear. Face eager. Nervous. “Now…” He blows out an errant breath, and the warmth of it caresses my forehead. “Listen.”
I do. To the sound of the leaves rustling, to the wind shifting. The sweet smell of honeysuckle permeates the air, tinged with the sharpness of freshly cut grass. When I open my eyes, the ground is so green and the sky is so blue and Whit watches and watches and—
With him there, it’s so beautiful it hurts.
Hurts so much, my throat burns with the pain. Tears threaten again. “I’m going to Clemson,” he tells me, and I stop looking at the sky and look at him. “They all want me to go to Duke, like Cason, but I don’t want to. I’m going to Clemson.”
I lunge forward and hug him, wrapping my arms as tightly around him as I can. And even though I am so, so happy for him, I know part of me is trying to hold him down. Keep him here with me. Keep him from flying away. I’m seeing all the things he loves, and I want to—need to—know: “This is what makes you happy?”
It’s an embarrassing question; I can hear that once I’ve said it. “I guess,” he says, like it’s stupid.
“It’s okay, you know. To say if something makes you happy.”
“What makes you happy, then?” he asks. It’s a challenge. He knows I’d never admit anything.
I sink my teeth into my lip. He’s right. After a long silence, he smiles and leans forward until his forehead is against the top of my hair and we’re staring each other right in the eyes. “Let me go get a club. I’m going to show you how to do it the right way.” Then he grins with all his teeth and lets me go.
I have to admit it to myself.
He makes me happy.
59
I peek from Whit’s garage into his kitchen, giggling. His hand grazes the skin of my hip under my T-shirt. I turn around to meet him, our mouths inches apart. “Coast’s clear,” I say with a smile.
We stand there, grinning at each other for half a second, and then he lunges forward and kisses me. After all the shit that happened today, it feels like we were both waiting for this moment to forget it all and kiss again. We know it’s wrong and we know we should both be worried about a million other things, but neither of us wants that. We just want each other and peace for half a minute.
We stumble through the side door into the kitchen, still kissing. It’s the really good kind of kissing. Kisses that look sloppy and terrible but feel amazing deep in your stomach, the kind where you can laugh between every kiss, where you can smile mouth to mouth, where there’s nothing more you want than for every minute to last longer than the one before. This is what it feels like to be alive. Like kissing and traveling all over the white tile kitchen and past golf awards and family portraits, all the way back up into the beige hallway wall.
Whit stops against the wall, breathing hard. He laughs and I laugh, and then without a word, we start kissing again. My hair still smells like Jack. This morning Adrienne was throwing my brother’s death in my face. I can’t believe I’m allowed this good an ending for a day like today.
I wonder then if I’m allowed to stop hurting. Then we’re still kissing and I stop wondering. In his room, I back into his desk, sacred altar of homework that it is, and a bunch of papers fall to the floor. “Oh, shit.” I start laughing again.
Whit stares at me, then stares at the papers, then me, like he’s about to have a nervous breakdown.
“Oh hell, Whit.” I slide off the desk to pick them up. I catch sight of something then. A photo, its colors bright against the papers. It’s a picture, one I posted online the night of the charity ball so everyone would see the two of us together. Whit’s looking at me, laughing, and I’m smiling at the camera, my hand resting against the front of his shirt. There’s a sticky note on it: “I was ‘researching’ Olivia on my phone. You two looked so great that night, I had to print this off. Love you, Mom.”
It’s so real. His laugh and my smile and the way we’re touching. The note his mom wrote.
This isn’t real.
“Stop,” Whit almost-growls then as if he were sexy enough to pull that off. I pick up and straighten a newspaper article on him and his recruitment that came out before the scandal, sticking the picture under it so he can’t see, slowly setting the stack of papers back on his desk. How could I have let myself forget what this is? Soon it will be over, and I’ll have nothing left to prove he ever kissed me this way. Nothing but the memory of this moment when he wanted me this badly. In two days, there will be no Whit and Olivia.
That’s how it’s supposed to be. That version of me—the girl in that picture, this girl he’s looking at so kindly right now—isn’t real.
He tries to kiss me again.
“I kissed Ethan.”
He stops halfway between us, the emotions on his face blurring like he’s an Etch-A-Sketch I just shook up. His face doesn’t change; it just stops. Stops smiling or thinking or caring. “You did what?”
I stare at him, hard and clear. “I kissed him.”
“Okay.” I wait for his expression to change, to shift in some way. For some hurt to cross those stoic features of his. It doesn’t. Whit’s a professional at holding in his feelings; that’s what he’s supposed to do. If he fucks up his world on the twelfth, he has to go to thirteen and start over. It’s that simple.
I want to ask him if what I just said even affects him at all because some part of me can’t help myself, but I don’t because there’s no right answer.
“So you’re getting back together,” he says, like he’s informing me.
“No,” I reply. I can honestly say the thought hadn’t even crossed my mind. Maybe back then, I wanted to, but not anymore.
“It’s just, like, something I had to do,” I say. I had to remind Adrienne, to prove I was better than her. That Ethan could never love her.
He answers clearly. “Yeah.”
I put my hand on the desk behind me, holding myself up. “So we don’t have to—”
“Let’s just do it,” he says.
I forget to breathe for a second. Then I say, “Yeah, let’s,” like that will fix everything, and he closes his mouth and kisses me and we just do it.
Just like that.
The truth is, I don’t know what I wanted. Him to tell me I had broken his heart, that it was all real for him. Or him to tell me that I was a terrible person and to get out of his life right now.
I like kissing him. I like the feel of his calloused hands against my skin. So I guess that’s why I did it. Because I wanted to. Because I thought it would change his mind, bring him back to me.
It isn’t supposed to go like this, I think before, and during, and after. This smart boy with real emotions is not supposed to be okay to just do it after I kiss Ethan—he was supposed to stop me, to say this isn’t what I wanted at all. He’s supposed to feel something, make me feel something. Who is he, I wonder, looking up at his face, if he’s not that boy?
How can he not care?
I wonder if I finally broke him.
Or if maybe I’m the broken one.
60
I have to talk to somebody. Someone who knows I’m a person with feelings, breakable and complicated and not just some damaged cliché on skinny legs.
I can’t rely on myself.
I sit in the car in Claire’s driveway and listen to my radio. One of Ryan’s favorite songs is on. He used to lie by his stereo, right next to the
speaker, and listen. He’d call me over and demand I lie down in front of it, too, and listen. Listen to the lyrics. Imagine putting that much emotion together, line by line, word by word, enough to lay your entire soul bare. Leave yourself defenseless. Nothing exposes you like words.
Ryan was always full of bullshit like that.
A knock on my window startles me. It’s Claire, barefoot, in a pair of athletic shorts, her blond hair piled up on top of her head. I jump out of the car. “Hi,” I say.
Claire crosses her arms over her stomach. “I’m not allowed to have girls over. On account of my unnaturalness.” She sniffs.
“Does it help that I just had sex with a boy?” I ask.
She shrugs, crossing her tiny goose bump–covered legs at the ankle. “How long are you planning on sitting out here?”
“Can I come in?” I ask.
She stares off at the neighbor’s house.
“Please?” I try.
She starts up the sidewalk, up the porch stairs, and back into her house. The door stands open behind her, a halfhearted invitation.
I sigh and take it.
Claire’s house is the kind of picture you’d imagine in a Christmas card. Wood-paneled walls and carpet that squishes up through your toes and one of those huge fireplaces Hallmark scours the country for. When I thought of the word home, Claire’s house was always what came to mind.
She sits on the couch, hugging a pillow to her chest. “What do you want?” she says into the pillow. I stand there, awkward, in the center of the room.
“I got suspended because I punched someone in the face for talking about you,” I say. It’s the most convincing argument I have. “Why would I do that if I made those papers?”
Claire’s still staring at a spot on the wall across from her. I don’t know if she doesn’t believe me or she just doesn’t want to hear it.
I decide to beg. “You’re my best friend and my life is pretty shit right now and yours is too and everything sucks and I don’t know what to do if I can’t talk to you. I don’t.”
“You know what’s funny?” she asks. She glances at me to see if I’m listening, and then it’s back to the wall before I can meet her eyes. “The same people who call me names behind my back and whisper how I’m going to hell and stuff, they’re the ones who rushed to defend my honor or whatever. To throw whiskey in your face. They’re mean, Liv. They’re just mean.”
How to Break a Boy Page 23