Four-Letter Word

by Christa Desir

  “I like you, Chloe. I trust you. I don’t tell anyone stuff about me and I told you. I don’t even know why I did, except I know you wouldn’t use it to hurt me. I saw it in your face this afternoon.”

  I looked at my hands, then back up at him. “Of course I wouldn’t. Ever. I can’t imagine how hard your life has been. And . . .” I started to put my finger back in my mouth but stopped myself and slipped both hands under my thighs. “I like you too. Which I guess you probably already know.”

  He smiled and my gaze moved to his lip piercing, two little silver balls nested up against his lip with a ring connecting them. I wanted to see the inside of his mouth to see how it looked. I wanted to feel the inside of his mouth. The little cocoon around us made me excited and flustered at the same time. Afraid I’d do something stupid to ruin it, pretty sure I would, but still so hopeful about things with Mateo. Not scared. In that way, Chloe Donnelly was right. The game did make things better between me and him.

  “Yeah, I already know you like me,” he said, but it wasn’t cocky like a lot of guys could be. Would be. It was him clearing the air so everything was honest with us.

  Silence drew around us like a pulled-tight rubber band and it took every muscle in my body to resist biting my nails or hiding behind my hair curtain. He leaned forward again, halving the twelve inches between us. He smelled like earth and sweat, but not in a gross way, in a way I bet tasted salty and the right kind of tangy.

  “I don’t have a lot of experience,” I blurted. “And I’m sometimes nervous. But I’m not nervous . . . with you. Or, at least, not nervous in a bad way.”

  He grinned wider. “Shh, Chloe. I know this is all new to you. You told me it scared you.”

  Oh God. He’d probably talked about how much of an amateur I was to Josh. Maybe the whole baseball team talked about it. My cheeks burned, but he rubbed his thumb along my jaw and then kissed me. Kissed me, kissed me, the real way. With his whole mouth and the press of his whole body against mine. He definitely had a lot of experience. Or maybe he was naturally good at it.

  Soft lips and a wet tongue and just the right pressure and tilting my head. And his lip ring was this tiny bit of cold metal contrasting with all his warmth. Holy crap, Mateo could kiss me forever. I wanted him to. I considered moaning, but that seemed dumb and fake and I didn’t think I could make any noise because I was concentrating so hard on what his tongue and teeth and lips were doing. He used all three in tandem, this perfect balance. Mateo was a varsity-level kisser. All I did was open my mouth and try to do exactly what he was doing without tugging too hard on his piercing. I kind of wanted him to touch me other places besides my face, but at the same time I was not ready for his hands to move. That would require some Zen-level meditation for me to be ready for.

  He sucked on my tongue then pulled back and licked his lips—licked his lips!—and said, “Chloe.” Sort of breathless. Chloe.

  “I more than like you,” I said, blurted, licking my lips too because they felt all raw and tingly like my fingers sometimes did when I’d just bitten the cuticles and then put my hand in a bag of salty chips.

  He laughed then and curled his hands around the base of my neck and tipped his head forward so our foreheads were touching. I tried not to think about how oily my forehead was or wonder if he could feel the acne up there. His smell seemed to be all over me, like I’d taken on his scent as my own. It felt all swoony and soap opera-ish, and I thought this was maybe how all varsity-level kissers did stuff. “I more than like you too,” he said. “But . . .”

  I pulled back and took in the pitying look on his face. Oh God. Oh God. Oh God. It couldn’t be, could it? That look. This was part of the game. Again. He wanted my letter. How could I be so stupid? His varsity kisses were meant to stun me, manipulate me. “Don’t even say it.” I stood.

  “What? Say what?”

  “Say that you want my letter. That I can have you. This.” I waved my hand between the two of us. “If I give you my letter.”

  I was ready to bolt, but he stood and grabbed my arm. “Chloe. Chloe. Look at me.”

  I turned, bracing myself for that pity look again, but instead, his expression was hurt. “That’s what you think of me? You think I’d do that? After everything I told you.”

  “Umm . . .” I bit the inside of my lip, the one he’d just been licking, and tried to unfog my brain.

  “This isn’t my game. I don’t want your letter. That’s not what this is about. Hell, you can have my letter.”

  “Then why the but?”

  “The but?”

  “Yes. The but. The I more than like you too, but . . .”

  He pulled me back down on the bench and took my hand. “I more than like you too, but I don’t need Chloe Donnelly using this—us—against you.”

  “She’s on my team. How could she?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it’s not always girls versus guys. Or maybe she uses you as another thing against me. Or maybe she wins the platinum favor and asks me for something I don’t want to give her. Regardless, she’s collecting secrets about all of us and it’s dangerous. What you and I have together leaves both of us exposed.”

  “What we have together?”

  He laughed in this sort of shy way. “Yeah. I mean, that was you kissing me back, right?”

  I looked down. “Right.”

  “So now it’s a point of vulnerability for her to use.”

  It was ridiculous and so full of drama I almost couldn’t believe it. All this over a game. But the secrets Chloe Donnelly had were serious—more than I’d even told Mateo—and if they got out, they could affect people’s futures. A whisper in the back of my head, my mom’s voice: This is how it starts. You play a game called Gestapo and this is what you get.

  I pulled my hand away from his and crossed my arms, careful to keep my fingers from straying to my mouth. “Fine. I just won’t play anymore. Then what we have together won’t be a problem.”

  He dragged a hand through his hair and it stuck up in a bunch of different directions, and then he said, “I don’t know if you quitting the game will help. She still knows about me. I’m kind of stuck.”

  I looked at his THIS IS THE END shirt and wanted to cry.

  I hated this. Hated how so many of us were somehow trapped by this game and this girl. I wanted to forget Gestapo. I wanted to go back to kissing Mateo and having him tell me he more than liked me. Which was maybe stupid and junior high, but I’d been waiting for him forever. And now I knew why he was so guarded and closed off. He was protecting his family and himself. But he’d let me in. He’d told me the truth. And it made all the fear I’d had wrapped around me ease. It felt like an assurance that he wouldn’t leave.

  I was about to tell him all of this—maybe brainstorm how we could have the game over and done with for good—when my phone pinged with a text from Eve.

  I’m at Burling. What’s up?

  No explanation of where she’d been and who she’d been with. I could almost hear the irritation in her text. I looked at Mateo. “I have to go. I have to fix things with Eve.”

  His brows went up. “I thought she was the one who was hooking up with Cam. What do you need to fix?”

  “She was, but I bumped into Holly and blurted everything out. About Eve and Cam.”

  “Chloe.” And there it was, the tone of voice that told me he didn’t approve.

  “I know, I know. But I wasn’t gossiping. Holly was just being such a bitch”—I winced when I said the word, my mom’s stern voice in my head reprimanding me about perpetuating sexism through my linguistic choices—“and she’s always been a little awful to me, though tonight was really bad. It’s like she’s determined to get Eve to drop me as a friend completely. And, yeah, I get that she has stuff of her own she’s dealing with, but her parents are divorced, not dead, and it’s hardly a reason for her to treat me like crud.”

  My phone pinged again.

  Other Chloe?

  God. Now Eve was texting my
otherness. Part of me wanted to let her stew and deal with the Holly fallout on her own, but there was no way I could ignore the mom voice in my head if I did that. Sisters before misters.

  I kissed Mateo fast—that earthy smell, so yummy—and said, “I’ve got to go. We’ll figure this all out. I promise.”

  Then before I decided to climb on his lap and camp out there forever, I forced myself to jog back in the direction of Burling Library, wondering if he was watching me the whole time but too afraid to look back and check.

  17

  I arrived at Burling Library to find Eve and Holly in what the dumb guys at school would call a “catfight.” Though no actual claws were out, Holly’s fists were clenched at her side and her hair was a little messed up and wild. Both their charm bracelets were broken on the ground. Eve held both hands up like she was waiting to be smacked.

  “What do you mean you didn’t know it was Cam when you kissed him? How could you not know?” Holly screeched.

  “I was drunk. He had Aiden’s hoodie on. He was trying to trick me,” Eve whined. She glared at me when I stepped into the light, and I immediately dropped my hair in front of my face. “Why would you tell Holly I was hooking up with Cam?” she snapped, her voice full of so much hate I flinched.

  “I didn’t say you were!” I protested, though I as good as implied it and my denial was a weak foundation to stand on.

  “Tell her exactly what you saw,” Eve hissed. “Tell her how he tricked me.” What you saw, not what I told you. Oh crap. So Eve somehow knew I’d been there that night. That I had watched and not done anything to stop Cam. Did she know the whole time she sat at my grandparents’ house drinking room-temp water? Was that a test? God, maybe I deserved her ultimatum and her wrath.

  I looked at Holly’s furious face then back at Eve and then to Holly again. “He did trick her. She didn’t know. She thought he was Aiden.”

  Holly raised her overly plucked eyebrows and then said to Eve, “And what about getting into his car after school on Tuesday?”

  Eve gave me an even worse death glare. Our friendship was done. There was no way she’d forgive me now. She turned back to Holly and her voice changed, all soft and innocent sounding now. “Other Chloe is lying. I didn’t get into Cam’s car on Tuesday. I was with Aiden, watching his baseball practice. He drove me home afterward.”

  I swallowed down a yeah, right. She hadn’t been with Aiden. Aiden had an away baseball game that day, not practice. And he never drove Cam’s car. But there was no way I could point this out. If there was any chance at all to have Eve forgive me, it was by me telling a lie here. I closed my eyes for a second, considered if it was worth it, knowing that Eve was all I had left as a friend. I breathed deeply through my nostrils and blurted, “I might have gotten that part wrong. It could’ve been Aiden. I didn’t see them up close.”

  Lie. Lie. Lie.

  Holly huffed. She tried to curl her lip in disgust at me, but it looked weird because her lips were big to start off with and looked even bigger now, as if she’d spent the last half hour chewing on them. “You’re trying to stir up trouble, Other Chloe. That’s awful. What kind of friend are you?”

  And just like that I was back to being a plate of crap that no one would ever want to dine on. Eve ignored me completely and said to Holly, “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about Cam tricking me last Friday. It was stupid. I was so drunk. And he was just trying to win the game.”

  I took a step forward. “Wait a second. Hold on. You’re giving Cam a pass here? After he . . .” More dagger eyes from Eve with a shut the hell up wrinkle line popping on her zit-free forehead. “I mean, it was sleazy and unethical. How can you let him get away with this when he’s treated you both like garbage?”

  Holly crossed her arms. “You can spare me the lecture on ethics, Other Chloe. Cam was playing a game. He’s competitive. You’re hardly a model for how to treat people.”

  “Oh my God. You’re serious? He handed out safety condoms to the guys. How do you see him being innocent here?”

  Where the hell was the girl code? Cam cheated on his girlfriend by lying to her best friend and somehow I was being called out for not knowing how to treat people. That was rich.

  “This is Cam’s fault,” I said, slower, like maybe it would sink in this time.

  “He was playing a game,” Holly said again, with a finality that made me realize no dirt would ever stick to Cam, at least not when it came to her. He was untouchable. The whole thing made me want to claw his eyes out with my stubby fingernails. I wondered for a second if he had a secret that Chloe Donnelly could use against him—he almost deserved it—but then I shook myself for being stupid. I didn’t want to deal in secrets anymore. I was carrying too many of them and they were dragging me down. I just wanted out.

  “We should quit the game,” I said. “It’s causing all this tension. No platinum favor is worth this. Look what happened with Cam. It almost tore you two apart.”

  I thought I was being generous, magnanimous even, all things considered, but Eve said, “You almost tore us apart.”

  So that was how things were going to be. I was the scapegoat. God, I should have given up her Tuesday rendezvous with Cam, but it didn’t matter anymore. Holly wouldn’t believe me. I snapped my mouth shut and tried to think of Mateo. I shoved my thumb into my mouth and tore off the newly healed cuticle, tasting a little bit of blood on my tongue. Then I released my thumb and tucked my hair behind my ear. I tried again. “We should still quit the game.”

  “She’s right,” Holly said, and I blinked. Could she actually be agreeing with me? “I’m kind of done with Gestapo. It’s wasting time when Cam and I could be hanging out just the two of us.”

  Eve’s shoulders drooped and her eyes got wide in relief. Thank God. She was done with Gestapo too. “Yeah, maybe we should quit. It hasn’t really been as fun as I thought it would be. The practice game was so much better than how it’s actually turned out.”

  Understatement of the year.

  “We need to find Chloe and tell her we’re done,” I said.

  “Let’s call her.”

  “She doesn’t have her cell. Remember?”

  Holly shrugged. “Well, she can’t be that hard to find.”

  Eve nodded, then leaned down and retrieved the broken charm bracelets. Probably they couldn’t be repaired, but I was sure they’d get replacement ones by next week. “Yeah, we’ll split up. Holly and I will take South and East Campus; you take North Campus, Other Chloe.”

  “Stop calling me Other Chloe,” I snapped.

  “No,” Eve said with barely a pause. “Now go on. North Campus.”

  I shook my head, completely baffled. I couldn’t believe I felt guilty about giving her up. All her worry about what Holly would think and they were tight again after barely a scuffle. And we were splitting up, so I could be the odd one out. Again.

  “Fine,” I said, hoping at the very least I’d bump into Mateo and tell him all the girls were bailing on the game so he wouldn’t have to worry about Chloe Donnelly anymore.

  I didn’t even wave good-bye before I took off for North Campus. Not only was I done with the game, I was done with my friends. Not one of them was worth the headache of all of this. Maybe I would stop by Melissa McGrill’s house tomorrow and start working on mending fences with her. I had to have more in common with a girl who’d miscarried on the locker room floor than with Holly, Eve, and Chloe Donnelly.

  I searched for Mateo by the place I’d left him, but he wasn’t anywhere near the old bookstore location. I pulled out my phone and texted.

  Where are you? Have you seen Chloe Donnelly? I need to find her.

  He didn’t respond, which bummed me out more than it should have. He didn’t live on his phone like a lot of guys did. Probably he didn’t even have it powered on. Maybe. I ignored the sense of dread curling in my stomach. Chloe Donnelly couldn’t have found him in such a short amount of time, could she?

  I walked faster, past the dorm wher
e my parents told me they’d met, past a group of college students in the loggia sharing a joint between them, past the place where my parents said there used to be a nonfancy, North Campus dining hall before the big one in JRC replaced it. I made my way toward the one ugly dorm on the very north end of campus and then stopped at the covered end of the loggia near the bike racks when I heard Josh’s voice.

  “Will you just listen to me?”

  “Josh.” Aiden was with him. But his tone wasn’t warm and sweet and protective like it had been the other day when I’d caught them kissing. And he wasn’t serious and somber like he’d been with me. But exasperated. Almost angry.

  “If you can’t be who you are, then maybe you shouldn’t go to the Naval Academy. Don’t you want to be somewhere you’re accepted?” Josh’s words sounded strained with frustration and defeat.

  I wanted to announce my presence, but they were clearly in an argument, and I didn’t want to interrupt and make things worse.

  “Where is this coming from, babe? You told me a few days ago I should wait to say anything. You said plebes have it hard and you didn’t want me to be hazed any worse than I already would be. You reminded me that being a pilot in the navy is something I’ve wanted more than anything else in my life. You told me not to give that up.”

  I ducked behind the bikes, far enough away that they couldn’t see me. I felt like a creeper again, but I didn’t know what else to do.

  Josh moved closer to Aiden. “I know. I did say that. But . . . I don’t know now. I guess I’ve just been thinking and this all feels so heavy and I’m not sure it’s worth it.”

  “I’m not giving up the Naval Academy,” Aiden said, his tone hard and uncompromising. “It’s everything I ever wanted.”

  “I thought I was everything you ever wanted.”

  “Don’t be dramatic and turn this into a thing. I love you. You know that. But this isn’t an either/or situation. I can make both work.”

  Josh slumped down on a bench and Aiden moved next to him. “They’re going to change you,” Josh said, his voice low enough I had to strain to hear him. “You’re going to come back different and I’m still going to be here in this crappy town. Still going to be the same me.”