by Russo, Jessa
Get a grip, Holland! Not on the market, remember?
Jenna waved at us as we exited. I swear I caught her giving Mick a thumbs up as I turned away. I smiled to myself; maybe they really did like me and weren’t just marveling at the freak show.
Once outside, I led Mick to my car, our hands still linked between us. A warning signal went off in my head somewhere, but I ignored it. As we reached my little red car, I was tempted to explain why I loved Penny so much, but then realized it didn’t matter if Mick saw her for the character she was. He’d only be riding in her this one time.
“What year is this?” he asked, climbing into the driver’s seat.
“She was born in 1992.”
Mick laughed. “Was she now?”
“Yes. Her name is Penny. Yes, she’s old. Yes, she knows it and so do I, and no, I don’t care.”
Mick put his hands up in surrender. “Hey now. I wasn’t asking you because I was ragging on Penny. My mom had a thing for Volkswagens. She would have loved this car.”
“Oh, okay. Sorry. I get a little defensive. My brother is constantly teasing me about her.”
“That’s what brothers are supposed to do.”
I almost asked him if his mom was dead, since he’d said she would have loved this car, but then I remembered it didn’t matter. We were getting a quick bite to eat, then he was driving me home, and that was that.
I couldn’t date Mick—I couldn’t date anyone. After what happened with Rod and Leslie, I’d never trust guys again, but worse than that…I couldn’t trust myself. Whatever was happening to me, I couldn’t involve someone else until I knew what it was.
So, regardless of how hot Mick was, or how safe I felt around him, I wouldn’t see him again after this.
I’m not on the market.
I’m not dating material.
Holland
After demolishing a Moons Over My Hammy and a chocolate shake at Denny’s—the only place open at this hour—I realized I was completely at ease around Mick. More so than I’d been around anyone but Cam for a while. Although, the way Mick made me feel in other ways was anything but what one feels for their brother.
The awareness of these facts made my chest tight.
He wouldn’t stop staring at me. The attention wasn’t creepy, but definitely intense. No one had bothered to barely even give me a second glance since the fire, and now I sat across from someone who couldn’t take his eyes off me.
Had I been on the market, I would have allowed myself to be flattered.
We were the only people at Denny’s, and the waitress had left us alone for a while. Mick sipped on his coffee, and I finished my water. We’d have to leave soon, since my curfew was two-thirty on the weekends, but I was enjoying being out.
“So…” Mick hesitated, holding my gaze.
Here it comes. It didn’t take long in most cases, and since Mick’s sister went to my school, he’d probably already heard the rumors. I took a deep breath, and braced myself for the inevitable.
“How do you deal with all those morons at your school?”
Huh. That hadn’t been what I expected.
Did you do it? Why did you do it? How did you do it? Those were the questions I was used to. Mick caught me a bit off guard.
“Um,” I stammered, trying to answer his question when it hadn’t been the question I’d been prepared to answer. “I guess I don’t really. I pretty much keep to myself. I bit your sister’s head off when she first tried to talk to me.”
“Yeah, she kinda mentioned that. But you’ll learn about Ro—she’s nothing if not persistent.”
He laughed and stretched back in his seat, arms crossed behind his head. His black thermal shirt pulled up a bit, and I caught myself admiring the inch of skin above his belt buckle. I quickly brought my eyes back to his and caught a smirk pulling up at his lips. Fantastic. That was twice he’d caught me checking him out now.
“She told me the stories about you, as I’m sure you guessed, and obviously I remember the news and everything.” He shook his head. “But seriously, I’m a bit perplexed that you have to deal with it even though no one actually died, and they couldn’t prove you did anything.”
I shrugged. “Well, I guess that’s high school for you.”
“Yeah, I don’t miss it. But, hey, at least you’re almost out. What are you doing after you graduate?”
“I—well—I don’t really have a plan.”
Anymore. I didn’t have a plan anymore. “I imagine Rod and Leslie are still headed off to ASU together in the fall, but I’ll no longer be completing that trifecta of doom.”
I’d never considered much else because that had been our plan for as long as I could remember. Graduate high school, move to Tempe, go to ASU. The three of us had it all figured out. Or so I’d thought.
“Wow. So, Rod and Leslie, those are the people you supposedly killed?”
Shoot. How much of that had I voiced out loud? Way to go, Holland. I cleared my throat. Might as well talk to him. He probably already knew everything anyway, so what could it hurt?
“Yeah. Leslie was my best friend. Rod was my boyfriend. We’d all been best friends since we were in diapers, basically, but sometime in middle school…well, Rod and I became more.”
I took a breath, trying to ignore the sinking feeling in my stomach that always accompanied this story. I wished I could change it, but the ending was always the same.
“So, just barely into our senior year—what should have been the most important and memorable year of our lives thus far—after the three of us have been best friends our entire lives, and Rod and I had been together for almost five years, something changed.”
“He cheated on you. With her, right?”
I hated that word. Cheated. He didn’t cheat on me. This wasn’t a pop quiz during third period Biology. He betrayed me. It could have been anyone else. He could have hooked up with one of the other cheerleaders on the squad. Or even Sana, Cam’s ex-girlfriend. But no. He chose the one person in the world—aside from him—who I trusted more than anyone.
He didn’t cheat on me.
He destroyed me.
“Yeah, he cheated. But it’s not like they had a quick hook-up one night at a party after a few too many Jell-O shots. They fell in love behind my back. Or, more likely right in front of my face. Two days before homecoming, he broke up with me. No reason, no explanation, just done. The friendship, the relationship, everything. Done. He walked away from me like we hadn’t been together in one shape or form for our entire lives.”
I inhaled a deep breath, realizing I’d forgotten to breathe while telling my story.
“Hey, Holland, we don’t have to talk about this if you don’t want to. Really. It’s cool.”
“No. You’re going to hear about it—already have, right?—so I might as well tell you the truth. I called Leslie to cry to her, to lean on my best friend for support, and I got nothing. She’d gone as far as taking her house phone off the hook, and turning off her cell phone. She knew. She had firsthand knowledge that he’d broken up with me—probably even helped him plan it—and then ignored me when I called her for help.” I laughed…a humorless sound. “You know what’s better? I didn’t know it at the time, that she was avoiding me, so I worried. I stopped thinking about my broken heart and started thinking something had happened to my best friend.” I shook my head and laughed another bitter laugh. “Can you imagine? Here she is, going behind my back with my boyfriend and then ignoring me when I call her for help, and I’m worried about her. C’est le bazar.”
Mick tilted his head to the side, his eyebrows drawn together.
“Oh, sorry. I meant what a mess.”
“Parles-tu français?”
“Oui. J’aime la France.”
Mick’s eyes widened ever-so-slightly. “You’ve been to France?”
“No,” I said, looking away from him. “But I will go. Someday.”
“I’d love to go as well. My family is originally from Rou
en.”
“Seriously? You’re from France?”
“No, my family is from France. My parents met in Paris. I was born here.”
“Wow. What a romantic place to meet.”
“You’d love it there.”
He held my gaze for a few seconds longer than I liked, unspoken promises in his green eyes, so I continued my story to change the subject. I didn’t want him making promises.
I didn’t want to believe them.
“So, anyway, I’d gone from my entire world revolving around these two people—my past and my future consumed by them…to having no one.”
My shoulders fell, from both relief and sadness. I’d shared the story out loud—in its entirety—only once before, and that was forced during an appointment with a court-ordered psychiatrist after my incident.
Mick opened his mouth to speak, so I stopped him by raising my hand. If I paused for too long, I’d lose my nerve.
“When Rod’s family’s beach house caught on fire, all eyes were on me.”
Mick’s breath caught, barely loud enough for me to hear, and his arms came down from behind his head, hands falling into his lap. I’d expected him to recoil when I hit this part, so the action, however subtle, didn’t surprise me.
“Regardless of the fact that no one could prove that I’d done it, or that I’d even been anywhere near the beach house, word spread fast.”
“So why did they think you’d killed them?”
“Oh, that’s the best part. That’s actually how I found out Leslie and Rod were together. They’d been away for the weekend, and told their parents they would be at the beach house. They went somewhere in L.A. instead. A little romantic weekend in Hollywood or something stupid. Whatever. It doesn’t matter where they were or what they were doing. The fact of the matter is that someone burned down the beach house, while they were supposedly staying there. So the whole world thinks they were inside, and now they’re gone, and I start getting accused of killing my ex-boyfriend and his new girlfriend in a jealous rage.”
I paused to take a breath.
Mick’s gaze held mine expectantly.
“Jealous rage,” I whispered again, shaking my head. “And the joke’s on me, right? I didn’t even know he had a new girlfriend. Turns out, his new girlfriend was Leslie. My best friend! So, after the news of the fire comes out, and the rumors start to fly, people begin looking at me in a new light. Suspicion. Fear. Anger. Even the teachers saw me differently. I hated it. It didn’t matter that Rod and Leslie were both alive and accounted for—the rumors were too big to squash. Everyone thought I was a killer, or at the very least, an attempted killer. And anyone who didn’t think that of me, well, they looked at me with pity. Poor pathetic Holland Briggs.
“I felt completely alone, and—I—I slipped into this really dark place.” I paused as the scars on my wrists seemed to throb their forever reminders. I gauged Mick’s reaction before continuing. “I became really depressed. I started thinking I should die. Like, that would be easier, you know? I mean, why would I want to go on if my entire life was a sham? If my best friends were never really my best friends? Who wants to live in that kind of place? Like, had they ever even loved me?”
My wrist twitched. I stopped playing with my heart ring to rub my thumb over one of the scars.
“Holland, I’m sure they—”
“No. Don’t do that. Don’t try to tell me they cared about me. I know they did, once upon a time. I get it. Hell, Leslie apologizes to me every single day. But I didn’t know it then. I didn’t think anyone had ever really loved me because if the two people I’d trusted more than my own parents could betray me like that, then had anything ever been real?”
The telltale signs of tears stung behind my eyes, so I paused to take another breath. No need to cry. No need to cry. I squared my shoulders.
No. Need. To. Cry.
Mick leaned forward, resting his forearms on the table. He reached for me, slowly, hesitantly, and I pulled my hands into my lap.
“So? Are you going to ask me, or what?” I crossed my arms over my chest and waited for the question I knew was coming.
“Ask you what?”
I scoffed. “Are you serious? Ask me if I did it, obviously.”
“I hate to break it to you, since clearly you want me to ask, but if I thought you were the kind of girl that goes around burning houses to the ground, I wouldn’t have taken you out on this fancy date.” He spread his arms out, indicating the less than fancy digs.
“This isn’t a date.” My palms began sweating. I wiped them with the shredded napkin in my lap.
“Regardless. I know you didn’t do it.”
Something about the conviction in that statement made my shoulders tense up. There were times I still wondered if my own family felt that sure of my innocence. How could this total stranger just waltz into my life and have so much faith in me?
“Excuse me.” I stood, then headed for the bathroom.
After making sure I was alone—though I hadn’t needed to check since we were still the only patrons in Denny’s—I allowed a few tears to fall. How had he gotten me to talk about all of this? How had he made me feel so at ease? No one made me feel at ease but Cam.
The thickening feeling in my chest, that I experienced more and more frequently lately, began growing. The tension and dull ache centered on my lungs. I closed my eyes and took a breath, wondering if this was it. If I would finally see what waited for me, what made me feel more than normal, more than just myself…like more than I resided inside my own body.
I leaned forward, my fingers gripping the sink, and peered into the mirror. I stared into my blue eyes.
I know you’re in there.
I felt it moving around beneath the surface. The façade of my pretty face and long blonde hair covered the presence well. But I knew. Something waited. Lurking. Counting down the days. My skin was oil floating on top of water. Something was coming.
I was changing.
I closed my eyes again and inhaled, bracing myself to leave the restroom, to face him again. He’d called this a date. Twice!
And he believed in me. Why? He didn’t even know me.
I needed to get home, and then I’d nicely tell him I couldn’t see him again.
It was as simple as that.
Holland
When the phone rang Sunday afternoon, I knew who waited on the other end before I even picked up. Something tugged at my heart, pushing me to answer the call, something I couldn’t ignore, even if my mind told me to ignore it.
I shook my head, irritated that my brother obviously gave my number out.
I picked up the phone, ignoring the odd feeling that tugged at my chest. That would have to be addressed at some point, but so would the ever-evolving grayness in my eyes, the feeling of spinning out of control that I often fought, and frankly, I hadn’t a clue how to go about analyzing any of it.
“Hello?” I crossed my fingers, hoping that I’d waited long enough to answer, and that by the sixth ring, the caller had given up.
“Hello. May I speak with Holland, please?”
No such luck. Ugh. Just as polite on the phone as he was in person.
“This is she.”
“Hey Holland, this is Mick Stevenson—Rosemarie’s brother?”
“Are you asking me if you’re Rosemarie’s brother?” I couldn’t help but giggle.
“Wow. Ah, no. I’m definitely Ro’s brother. No doubt about that.”
I took a seat on the chaise lounge in the living room, waiting for Mick to continue.
“I hope you don’t mind, but your brother gave my sister your number, and—”
“Yeah, I kinda figured that.”
“Do you mind?”
Yes. “No.”
“So, well, I just wanted to tell you that I think you’re pretty amazing, and I—”
“Let me stop you there, Mick. I appreciate the compliment, I do, but I have to be honest with you: I’m not on the market.”
/> “Oh. Really?”
“Yeah. Sorry.”
“You have a boyfriend?”
“No.”
“Hmm. You’re celibate?”
“Oh my God! Um, no. But that’s not your business!” I giggled again, in spite of myself.
“You hate men?”
“No!” I stretched my legs out and leaned back into the seat, surprised as my body relaxed. My smile grew. Damn. I’d have to hang up soon. “I don’t hate men, Mick, but thanks for asking. I’m not…looking for a boyfriend, okay?”
“Well, that makes two of us.”
I couldn’t help but laugh at his retort. I settled further into the chaise cushions, cursing myself for not hanging up, and knowing I wouldn’t be saying goodbye to Mick any time soon.
I threw my arm across my eyes.
I was screwed.
Mick
Ro spent most of Saturday with Holland’s brother, fueling my irritation. How could she so easily start something with Cameron when Holland was the one in trouble, the one who needed us? I needed Ro’s help in this! I’d paced most of the afternoon, probably wearing a path in the carpet, and working off of less than three hours of sleep. I’d done nothing but toss and turn after the cab dropped me off around three this morning, so the exhaustion wasn’t helping.
When Ro walked in the door late Saturday night, I just about flew out of my desk chair to meet her.
“Whoa! What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Where have you been?”
She cowered slightly, and I backed up a step. I sucked in a deep breath. I wasn’t really mad at my sister; I was mad that I’d somehow scared Holland off last night, or that my plan was ruined. I’d spent years creating the steps, the vision of how I would save her…
After she came out of the bathroom at Denny’s, she wouldn’t meet my eyes, and she didn’t say more than a few words to me on the way home—just enough to give me directions to her house, and a curt goodnight. While I waited for a cab, I debated knocking on her door. Or finding her window and flinging pebbles at it. Or…well, had it been earlier, I would have just knocked and asked her what I’d done to upset her.