“Okay,” he tries again, “where were you standing?”
I point in the general direction, mentally position myself and Lia, but it’s all blurry. “That way, I think,” I tell him at last, pointing to where the beach curves out of the cove and continues on. The other way turns into vegetation in the back of someone or another’s property.
“Come on,” Jackson tells me, and I follow him.
“Lia!” I call out down the beach, my voice echoing in the night. This area of the beach is abandoned, hilly with enough rocks to make it dangerous running terrain.
“She’s going to be fine,” Jackson tells me again.
I hear something then. Barely audible, a shift so small it could be a mouse. But it’s enough. “LIA!” I yell again, and then someone definitely yells back, a struggle, and I take off running despite the landscape.
“Nell!” Jackson calls, on my heels.
But nothing will stop me. I see her. She’s lying partway down a drop-off, sitting up straight with her legs out in front of her. I run to her side and crouch down next to her, grabbing on to her arm. I glance back at Jackson. “Call for help and then call Taylor.”
“What happened?” I ask, my attention back on Lia.
She grinds her teeth. “Lost my footing. Phone’s down there.” She points to the bottom of the drop-off. “Been trying to crawl to it but I think my ankle’s broken.” A tear creeps down her face. I hug into her side, burying my forehead in her shoulder.
“It’s fine, Lia,” I say, holding her. “You’re going to be okay.”
She lets me hang on, but deep down, I know.
It’s only because I’m the one there.
48
Jackson and I are sitting together in the hospital waiting room in uneasy silence. A door on the other side opens and Taylor comes through, holding two cups of coffee. He walks to us and we stand at the same time as he shoves coffee into both of our hands. I think he’d sooner be done with the pair of us.
“She’s fine,” he says. “Coming out of surgery on her ankle and then setting it. There’s nothing more y’all can do, so you can go home now.” It’s not a question. He’s sending us away. Lia doesn’t want to see me.
“Tell her…,” I start, and Taylor cuts his eyes at me. I stop. Lia doesn’t owe me anything, especially having to hear from me right now. I nod.
“Thanks,” Taylor says then, effectively ending the conversation, “for finding her. We’re all really grateful.” It’s strange to be spoken to so formally by him.
I’d tell him I’m sorry but it’s not the right time. So I let him go.
Jackson and I had ridden together in my car, which means we have to leave together. Unsure of what else to do, we walk into the parking lot side by side.
“I called Tristan to come get me,” Jackson says as the doors slide closed behind us. He takes a sip of coffee. The sun is starting to peek out, turn the lights on the night.
I continue walking down the sidewalk. “Of course you did,” I say.
“Nell,” he says. “About yesterday. Tell me.”
I stop on the sidewalk down from the entrance and turn around. It’s completely silent out here right now, no ambulance or people. We are utterly alone. The coffee cup burns the inside of my hand pleasantly.
I start counting backward. I say, “Tell you what?”
He takes a step closer to me. “Are you pregnant or not? Were you ever?”
Breathe. Keep breathing. “No,” I answer him as quickly as I can. “I thought I might be and I panicked. The test was negative. All the tests were negative. Everything spun out of control and I kept trying to tell you, but I … I couldn’t stand you and the way you kept kissing those girls right in front of me and the way you called me a slut and the way you did everything. I thought I was pregnant and you thought nothing. You felt nothing.
“I wanted to hurt you the way you hurt me. I had to do something to…” I seek out the word, but it’s right there. It always has been: “Win.”
His face goes completely blank, whitens, as he stares at me. I watch his fingers as they curl and uncurl into a fist.
“Say something.”
“I’m thinking,” he finally answers, “about how to react to the fact that you’re just as horrible a person as I am.”
“I know,” I say. “But—”
“See,” he says, “your ‘but’ doesn’t matter. Just like mine didn’t to you. It was malicious, designed to hurt. So.” He looks away. There’s a car idling in the roundabout that feeds into the hospital entrance. It’s Tristan’s. His eyes find mine again. “I can apologize again, if you want. But I don’t think you do.” He salutes me with his cup. “Congratulations. You won.” He walks away, gets into the car, and they drive off.
I won.
I only wish it hadn’t taken so much of me in the process.
49
I’m about to reach my car parked way in the back of the hospital lot when someone pulls up beside me. It’s my mother. She has on a pair of sunglasses she doesn’t actually need and is staring at me through her passenger’s-side window. I’m about to get the lecture of a lifetime.
But she just rolls down the window and says, “Come on, we’re going to breakfast.” I climb into the passenger’s side and buckle up.
She drives for almost twenty minutes, leaving Cedar Woods behind, NPR telling stories in the background. The farther away we get, the more relief I feel. She pulls into the parking lot of a Waffle House off an interstate exit and we go in together.
Mom orders me another coffee and enough food to feed a large family, much less the two of us. A couple of people are in booths, up too early or too late, but we are alone on our side of the restaurant.
“How’s Lia?” Mom asks me. I had texted her once we found Lia to let her know where I was.
I shrug. “I didn’t see her. Taylor told me she was going home later today.”
Mom nods.
I sip my coffee and stare down at the paper placemat. “It’s my fault she got hurt. I’ve been lying to everyone, and I got caught. I was horrible. She couldn’t wait to get away from me.” I grab a napkin, pressing it to hide my tears. “That’s why she was alone.”
“Nell.” Mom grabs on to my hand and I pull it away from her. I see the shock cross her face and another tear escapes.
I can’t keep staring at her and pretending I don’t know. I take a breath. “Anyway, you should know that I know you’re sleeping with Jackson’s dad, so.” I blow my nose. “So I’m having a little bit of a hard time with you right now.”
Mom’s face loses all color and that is, of course, the exact moment our waiter comes over, handing us plate after plate from behind the counter. I try to do everything I can to look normal but there’s no hiding it, which is likely why he leaves us as quickly as possible.
“You should have told me,” I fire at her. “As soon as you knew about Jackson, it had gone too far. It wasn’t just your life anymore—it never was. It was mine.” I fight to keep my voice as steady as possible but I’ve lost so much of my essential truth, a compass that’s lost its north.
“I’m sorry,” she replies in her shaky voice. “Nell, I—I can’t imagine what you must think of me.”
“That you were supposed to be smarter than that?” I reply. I violently break a piece of bacon in half. “That you always said you expected me to be smarter than that? To be better than all the other girls?”
“You must think me such a hypocrite,” she says.
“A hypocrite?” I laugh. “I think you didn’t care if I was happy as long as I was who you thought I was supposed to be. As long as I didn’t make any mistakes. But my life has been nothing but mistakes. You’re so much worse than a hypocrite to me. You made me believe in an impossible standard and all I could ever do was fall short. And then hate myself for it. I can’t let anyone in because I just see them as competitors or dangerous. I’ve been judging everyone for so long.”
She grabs at a napkin. “I neve
r meant for you to feel any of that.”
I hiccup. “But I did. I still do and I’ve been doing whatever I can to come out on top. Most days I look at myself, I feel like I don’t even know who I am.”
“But I was never saying you weren’t enough. You did it naturally. You were the best and I just—I wanted to make sure you knew it. That you used it. Because I couldn’t.”
“Don’t.” I hold up my hand. “Don’t do that. You showed me every day that you were perfect. You made no mistakes. You told me I wasn’t like other girls so when I wanted to be, when I wanted to have feelings, I hated myself for it.”
“Nell.” She almost tries to grab my hand again, I can tell, but she thinks better of it. She swallows. “I’ve been doing this my whole life, you see? I remember what my mom used to say. Sit up straight, smile more, wear makeup, find the right husband. That’s all you need to be happy, Mary.
“But that wasn’t what I wanted. And when I met your father … it was a whirlwind. I didn’t want her idea of being a woman. I wanted to be free and in love and live on a currency of happiness or whatever you think when you’re young and rebelling against everything you’ve been told to be.
“But then there was the real world. With a baby and bills and getting my first teaching job at a prep school. And I had to learn what it was like to deal with people like your classmates. That first year teaching, I was going to fail one of the big donor’s sons. He deserved it.
“But the dean of students came to me, and he told me I couldn’t. He said that boy—that teenage boy who thought the world would hand him everything—should get whatever he wanted. And that was how it started. Me realizing that I’d always be serving people like him.
“I never wanted that for you. The compromise. I never wanted you to have to go find the right husband or think love would be a cure-all. I wanted you to be a woman who didn’t answer to anyone but yourself. Who succeeded at everything you did. You would never serve them, and you would never need them. But I guess I pushed you too far. I pushed you away and I pushed your father away. We used to be happy. Now most days, I feel like I don’t remember what that ever felt like.”
“When did you meet Mr. Hart?” I ask, still not entirely sure I want to know.
She glances over my shoulder momentarily, ashamed. “Last spring. His wife was supposedly sick and he came in for a conference after something Jackson had done for attention. I saw the connection right away. Suddenly, that boy made so much more sense to me.”
I take a deep breath. “Why?”
She sighs. “Why? Isn’t that the question?” She takes a long gulp of orange juice, I think to give herself something to do. “Part of me was wondering what my life could’ve been, I think, if I…” She looks away as if resisting saying it but goes on, “I hadn’t gotten tied down so young. Or if I’d married a man like Atticus Hart like Mom wanted, if I could’ve lived that life and wasn’t always trying so hard to impress people who would never be impressed with me.
“But I think the other part of me just wanted to feel something again. Your father doesn’t see anything worthy in me anymore, and you’d stopped talking to me a long time ago. There was some connection.”
“Do you love him?” I ask her, my eyes filling with tears.
“Oh, Nell,” she says, her hands reaching across the table to cup my face. “He is a man who’s never satisfied with what he has. And I was, too. That’s all it takes.”
A tear falls from my eye and onto her hand.
“I never would’ve let you get involved in this. None of this is fair to you and it wasn’t fair to Jackson, either—I should’ve called this off when I realized you felt something for him. When you called me selfish”—she drops her gaze to the table—“you weren’t wrong.”
“He’s such a mess,” I whisper. “And I guess I am, too.” I blink another tear out of my eye.
I can’t stop staring at her. Cardigan, still in perfect shape, still with total authority. She’s perfect, I think, a line that’s always played on repeat in my head. I want to be perfect, too.
She’s not supposed to be like this, with all these harsh edges. Such a mess.
I’ve been trying to live up to a standard that didn’t exist.
She’s just a person.
I shake my head, and she drops her hand. “I’ve been wanting to hurt you so bad—not just you. Jackson, who I thought deserved it. And everyone else, too, who didn’t deserve it. Because I felt so betrayed by everyone. Everything I thought I knew. I don’t want to be so trapped in my own skin anymore.”
Mom watches me over the table, waffles going cold, butter melting into grits, and I think she’s going to say something really profound or offer redemption but instead she says, “It’s okay, Nell.”
“I did it, though. I turned it around on him, I treated him and everyone else like pieces in a game,” I tell her, wondering if she might take some small pride in it. But I see in her face that she doesn’t. “And it didn’t feel any better,” I admit.
“I know,” she says, reaching out and pushing a strand of my hair back. “But you’re not the mistakes you make. You’re my girl. And you’ve got so much time.”
It’s different but I feel it then, for just a moment. The bone-deep connection between two generations of women. Never quite enough. Always trying to live up to the person her mom wanted her to be.
And that deep connection—mine to that girl she was—I hold on to it like a balloon in the wind, afraid it might fly away, leave me alone and untethered.
And for a change, she holds on right back.
50
Lia isn’t at school the next day, or the rest of the week. The halls are abuzz with what happened at the cove. Everyone seems to have finally put together that something went on between Jackson and me over the summer but if that’s the worst they can figure, then why should I try to stop them?
I want to call Lia or go see her or even just lie face-to-face in opposite directions one more time, but I’ve lost my privilege to do that. I find Columbus in the hall between classes. He shakes his head when he sees me. “You’re acting like him, Nell. And look what he’s done to himself.”
“I know.” I look down at the ground. “I’ve got to fix myself.”
“You both do. Look, I’m not going to absolve you,” he tells me then. “That’s for Lia to decide. And she’s pretty banged up. Not just physically, know what I mean?”
I nod.
“Give it some time is all I’m saying.” He looks at me very seriously with his dark brown eyes. “Let her have her time.”
I thank him for the advice.
Friday dawns stormy, thunder jolting me from sleep earlier than usual, not even bothering to offer any reprieve from the heat. I can’t sleep through the noise so I head to school.
There’s plenty of time before homeroom so I hop on the treadmill in the weight room and plug my headphones into my phone, blowing my ears out with music in the process. I get lost in the feel of it, in my sneakers hitting the belt. So lost that I almost trip when someone slams the Stop button.
I yank my headphones out of my ears, turning to see who’s interrupted me. It’s Jackson, sporting wet hair and a damp Cedar Woods tee. I lean back against the edge of the handles of the treadmill, panting as the belt slows.
Here’s the thing: I knew he’d come to me eventually. I knew we weren’t done after the hospital—we were in shock, running on nothing but caffeine and adrenaline, and something like that can only last for so long.
Something like us always demands a reckoning.
“Get off the treadmill,” he says to me, his voice neutral. “We should be outside.”
I follow him, intrigued.
Outside is all mud and electricity, and it’ll always be where I feel most alive. I don’t need my headphones because the rumbling thunder keeps the beat. We match strides, the way our bodies are trained to do, racing like we’ve got somewhere to be. Once we get out under the trees, almost completely shielded
from the rain, I stop, panting again, my shirt sticking to my body. I feel every inch of my skin right then, all six feet of my body that is always, always completely under my control.
Except I don’t think it has been in a long time.
I shove my hand against his white shirt, and he grabs on to my forearm like he was anticipating it. “What?” I demand of him, pulling back. “Put me out of my misery.”
“You already know so don’t ask me to say it,” he answers, and I watch a raindrop slide off his face.
I nod, lacing my fingers on top of my head. “Like what I did was so much worse than what you did.”
“You wanna do this again, Nell!” Jackson yells at me then. “You wanna take out the scoreboard and see which one of us is worse? Are you going to do this forever?”
I push my palms under my eyes because I’m afraid he might see me cry. “You tossed it in my face. All of this. This summer and everything—the river and the diner and even the godforsaken boat—and those things might not have meant anything to you, but they meant something to me. You said you’d tell everyone.”
He breathes and blinks and the rain keeps falling. “Of course they meant something to me. All I wanted the whole summer was to get through that armor you wouldn’t drop. Everything I said that day was—”
“Meant to hurt me, I know,” I cut over him. “Call a girl with everything a slut and that’s all she’ll ever be. Call a boy with everything a slut and he’s the perfect package. But it wasn’t just that. It was all of the rest of it. You made a game out of my life. And then you made me feel like I was wrong. After—after you’d torn me apart, you kept hurting me a little more with the girls and your self-destructive guilt that was all about you and I never, ever knew if what we had was real. So I wanted to take whatever was left. I wanted your freedom and your happiness and that carefree thing you have that makes you all you, Jackson. I wanted you. And I didn’t care how crazy I looked when I got it.”
“What about what happens to you, Nell?”
“You said it yourself,” I answer, trying to keep my voice steady. “It doesn’t matter what happens to me. As long as you lose.”
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