by Jen Klein
“Then where?”
He places his hands on my waist and lifts me onto the hood like I weigh nothing at all. He swings up—because apparently that’s the easiest thing in the world to do if you’re Oliver—and looks at me. “Is that yours?”
I realize what’s been in my hand the entire time: the bottle of tequila. “No,” I tell him, and he laughs.
“At least we got something out of this party.”
But he doesn’t take the tequila. Instead, he clasps his hands beneath his head and leans back against the windshield, looking up at the night sky. He’s as beautiful as always, because it’s not like starlight makes people less attractive, for crying out loud. I scoot over and recline against the windshield beside him.
“I know Theo deserved it, but I’m glad you didn’t punch him. It wouldn’t make you feel any better about Ainsley.”
There’s a rustle beside me. Oliver has propped himself up on his elbow and is facing me. “Wait, you think I wanted to hit Theo…why?”
“Because he’s…whatever he is…with Ainsley?”
I think it’s a duh, but Oliver looks bewildered. “June, what the hell.” He shakes his head. “It was because of what he did to you. That thing he did. The gesture.”
I stare at him, because of course that doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. “Theo always does stuff like that to me.”
“I know. I’ve tried to get him to stop. I’m sick of it.”
“Wait.” I peel off the windshield and sit cross-legged on the hood of the behemoth. “Isn’t that why you came here? Because you found out about Theo and Ainsley?”
“No.” Oliver sits up also. He faces me on the hood of his car. “I needed to get out.”
“Why?” The second it comes out of my mouth, I realize I already know the answer.
“It’s been weird at my house. Like all the air has been sucked out and the three of us are rattling around in this big, empty vacuum, but I haven’t known why.” I nod, dreading what he’s going to say next. “Tonight, I found out. My dad is cheating on my mom.”
“He is?” Like, he’s still doing it?
“Is, was, I don’t know. He definitely did it—more than once—and he admits to it. I guess he and Mom are trying to work it out, but today they had a big fight. I came downstairs as he was driving away and she was pouring his most expensive bottle of scotch down the kitchen sink.”
Sounds about right.
“Then what happened?” I ask him.
“Mom told me about the cheating.” Oliver shoots me a wry look. “I think she was drinking some of the scotch before she dumped it.”
I swallow hard. “Did she say anything else?”
“Just highlights from the divorce chapter of the parent handbook. It’s not my fault and everything will be okay.” He shakes his head. “Dad always seemed so in love with her. I can’t believe he did it. I thought…”
His voice trails off and I finish the sentence for him. “You thought he was better than that.”
Oliver nods. Our knees are touching and I want to slide my hand over to hold his, but I don’t. I can’t.
I’m scared.
Oliver’s gaze slides to the bottle leaning against the windshield. He picks it up and scans the label. “You stole Kaylie’s tequila.”
“I don’t know about stole,” I tell him. “Borrowed, maybe. I borrowed Kaylie’s tequila.”
“There are people in there who are going to be really mad if they don’t get to do their body shots,” Oliver says. “You’re disappointing the masses.”
“The masses already saw me do one.” I immediately wish I hadn’t said that, as something passes over his face—something I can’t quite pinpoint.
“Who did you do it with?” His voice is careful, deliberately casual.
“Shaun,” I tell him, and watch his body relax.
“I didn’t get a chance to do one.” The way Oliver says it makes the night air hang hot and thick and still around us. My eyes go to the tequila bottle in his hands, then back up to his face.
“Really?”
“Really.”
It’s only one word, but it carries all kinds of meaning. A question. A wish. A promise. I stare at Oliver’s shadowed eyes, and the smooth heat of the car beneath me increases, radiating up through my thighs and into my abdomen. Something between us has changed, become charged. He lifts the bottle and his posture shifts so his knees bump against mine. My normal reaction would be to scoot backward, to give him space, to put a barrier between us.
Instead, I lean forward just a little. My knees press into his.
Oliver smiles.
I smile back.
“We don’t have a lime.” It’s a last feeble effort at self-protection, at preventing what I know is about to happen. What I want to happen.
“Remember when we were in my basement?” Oliver asks me. “When we pretended we were in the car?”
“Yes.” It comes out in a whisper.
He cocks his head, just a little, and I realize that even though I haven’t made a conscious decision to do it, I’m tilting my head in the opposite direction. I’m lining myself up for him.
“Where should I put the salt?” His gaze dances down my face, skims over my torso.
I raise my hand, because that’s what I did with Shaun, but then it’s moving of its own accord and my index finger is pointing to a spot on my collarbone.
“Good choice,” Oliver says, not in his usual joking manner. He slides his own finger over the place where I touched. “Lime.” He lifts the imaginary slice, lightly touching the corners of my mouth when he places it there. I part my lips to accept what doesn’t exist. Then Oliver shakes his hand over that spot at the base of my neck. “Salt.”
He moves even closer and now he’s looking straight into my eyes.
“Yes,” I say again, answering what he hasn’t asked out loud. He dips his head. I feel the tip of his tongue touch my collarbone and trace an inch along it. Even though his mouth is warm, even though it’s hot outside, I shiver.
Oliver lifts his head. “Still okay?” This time I don’t have the voice to answer him, so I only nod. He tips the tequila up to his mouth, pretending to drink from the unopened bottle, then sets it back on the hood of the behemoth. He looks at my mouth. “I’m supposed to have the lime now.”
Slowly, I reach up and take the pretend lime out of my mouth and wave it at him. “It’s right here.” I mime setting it back where it was.
Oliver smiles and I lean forward. He tilts and then his mouth is against mine, warm and soft and tasting not at all like tequila and limes, but instead like mint toothpaste and cherry ChapStick. All on their own, my lips part under his. All on their own, my arms wrap around him and my hands slide up his back, feeling the ripples of his muscles beneath his shirt. It’s so different from kissing Itch, from kissing Ethan, from kissing any other boy, because this boy is Oliver, and even though he’s completely familiar, I’m discovering him with every tiny movement we make.
He leans back against the windshield once more, but this time he takes me with him, pulling my entire body on top of his, and we kiss for a thousand years or maybe only five minutes. I can’t tell, because the whole world has turned into Oliver. It confirms what I already knew, what I’ve shoved away and buried over and over again.
Oliver means everything to me.
Oliver is everything.
Warm sunlight stripes my face and I roll over in my bed. The clock on my nightstand tells me it’s morning but not so late that I have to get up. I can sleep some more, because it’s the weekend and weekends mean sleeping in.
So the first thought that goes through my head is this: More sleep, please.
The second thought jolts me upright. It brings my shoulders to my ears and my hands to my mouth. That second thought is this: Oliver kissed me.
My third thought of the morning comes almost immediately. It is abrupt and shocking and loud inside my head. It is this: OH, SHIT.
• • •
It’s almost noon when Oliver calls. I’m sitting alone at the kitchen counter, trying to force some cheese and crackers past the knot in my chest, when my phone shivers. I see his name on the tiny screen, and I don’t even hesitate before touching the button to silence it, silence him.
I can’t talk to him.
Not yet.
What I can bring myself to do is listen to his voice mail.
“Hey, June. It’s Oliver. Flagg.” He lets out a self-deprecating chuckle. “Which you already know, because I’m calling on your cell phone and cell phones broadcast the caller’s name, so basically everything I’ve said up until this point is completely worthless. I should hang up and start over, except that then I’d be calling twice in a row and that’s super weird and creepy, so…June Rafferty”—he takes a deep breath—“I would never dream of asking you to prom. It would be an insult to your intelligence. That is why…”
This pause is the longest of all.
“That is why I want to let you know that if a certain strong-willed, brilliant feminist intellectual just so happened to take it upon herself to invite a certain behemoth-driving jock to prom…that jock would say yes. He would say it very, very happily.”
The knuckle on my right ring finger hurts, and I realize it’s because I’m clutching the phone so tightly. I loosen my grip and listen to the end of Oliver’s message.
“So I hope she asks him. I also hope she calls him back, because Saturday was…”
A mistake, a mistake, a mistake.
“…the best.” I can hear his smile through the phone. “Call me.”
And then he’s gone. I’m alone with the knowledge that I’ve opened a door that can never be closed—one that leads to a place holding my greatest vulnerabilities, my biggest weaknesses, and everything that terrifies me the most.
No.
• • •
Early Monday morning, Mom parks in one of the employee lots on the U of M campus and we get out into the cold morning air. I trudge behind her, sending Oliver a text as I walk.
came in w/Mom today so no need 2 pick me up. srry hvnt called yet. super busy
He writes back immediately.
no problem! see you at school.
Mom has office hours, so she lets me into one of the galleries, where I sit on a bench and stare at a wall of turquoise canvases. I decide that both the bench and my life are hard, and that both the art and my heart are inscrutable. I sit there, feeling self-congratulatory about those poetic thoughts, until it’s time to walk to school.
• • •
It starts in homeroom when Lily plops down next to me. “How was your weekend?”
“Fine.” It’s not completely a lie.
“Was the fine part when Oliver almost punched Theo, or was it fine when you rolled around the back of a pickup truck with him?”
“It wasn’t a pickup truck. It was the hood of Oliver’s car.” I drop my head into my hands.
When homeroom is over, Shaun finds us in the hall as we’re all on the way to English. “How was that tequila?”
“We didn’t drink it.”
“They were too busy,” Lily tells him.
“I know,” says Shaun.
“Everyone knows,” says Lily.
“I think I have a migraine,” I tell them, and bolt.
• • •
After lying around the nurse’s office for a couple hours, unable to produce either a fever or some vomit, I get sent back to class. I consider ditching—just walking off campus and away from school, my senior year, graduation, life—but can’t bring myself to do it. After all, true escape is so close on the horizon, and then I’ll never have to see any of these people again. Only a few more weeks.
I just have to get through them.
Everyone would have stared at me anyway, because it’s natural to stare when a student walks into class totally late and drops a note on the teacher’s desk, but today—as Mrs. Nelson glances at the slip from the office and dismisses me with a nod—I feel all those eyes like they’re heavy objects dropping on every inch of my skin, turning it hot, pressing against my body.
Judging.
Even though I don’t look toward the back of the classroom, I know that two of the eyes belong to Oliver and they are the heaviest and the hottest of all. I can’t meet them with my own.
Because there’s nothing else to do, I sit by Ainsley, slinging my backpack onto the floor beside my chair. Given that even people who didn’t attend Saturday’s party have heard that I spent it kissing Oliver on some form of vehicle, I know there’s no way Ainsley isn’t in the loop. I take a deep breath before turning to her.
She’s smiling.
At the front of the room, Mrs. Nelson fiddles with a remote control. She’s experiencing some technical difficulties with the movie we’re supposed to watch about momentum and collisions. Apparently it gives the class license to talk, so Kaylie hops up from her lab table and drags her chair to us. “Hey, kids.”
Ainsley and I both tell her hello. My tone is wary; Ainsley’s is chipper.
“So how about that party?” Kaylie waggles her eyebrows up and down at me. She’s about as subtle as Theo.
“I know, right?” says Ainsley. “Thanks for taking one for the team, June.”
I stare at her, trying to figure out her angle.
“Oh, is that what that was?” Kaylie asks.
“Yeah, he got a little crazy about Theo and me,” says Ainsley.
“Typical,” says Kaylie.
“Thanks for distracting him,” Ainsley says to me.
“He just needed his ego stroked?” Kaylie says.
“Yeah, his ego.” Ainsley makes a suggestive gesture with her hands.
“Right.” I pull out my textbook. “That’s totally what it was about. Oliver’s ego.” Even with Kaylie’s minimal intellect, I’m certain she can’t miss my sarcasm. I shake my head and make a show out of opening my book. I ignore Ainsley and Kaylie. I shut them out.
I can feel rather than see the glances they exchange with each other. “What’s her problem?” Kaylie whispers.
I keep my eyes firmly fixed on the page.
Ainsley and Theo deserve each other.
• • •
It turns out even a superfast athlete can be avoided if one leaps from one’s seat and sprints away when the bell rings, especially if one then takes off in the opposite direction of how one usually goes, and hides in the girls’ bathroom until after the next class has started, even though it means one is then counted as tardy. However, it also turns out that if, an hour after that, one takes one’s lunch to the library and squirrels away into one of the study carrels, one might not be as hidden as one thinks.
I’ve just unwrapped my sandwich when the chair next to me clunks away from the adjacent carrel. Oliver drops into it. “Running, hiding, changing locations. It’s clever. You’re like a rabbit.”
“Thanks.” I don’t think my voice shakes, but I’m not completely sure. “I was actually just leaving.”
“No you weren’t.” He reaches over and turns my chair so I’m facing him. His smile is faint and his eyes are sad, and it’s stupid but I feel dizzy, like I might fall off my seat and right onto him. “I’m aware that it’s lame to ask if you got my message.” I nod and Oliver spreads his hands wide. “So…?”
“Sorry. I was just really busy yesterday.” It’s transparent and flimsy and awful, but it’s all I’ve got. I feel exhausted, but like the exhaustion is happening in my brain instead of my body.
Apparently I’m not hiding it well, because Oliver leans toward me. “June, are you okay?”
“I’m fine.” I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to think about how he kissed me, and how I kissed him back, and how everything was perfect and held such promise. I know—I know—that it doesn’t matter, that none of this matters, that promises break and people lie and we’re all going to be moving on to other places.
And I know that when I’m in that other place, Oliver’s no
t going to be there.
“You deleted your account on Mythteries,” he says, and I shrug, because that’s an easy one to answer.
“I was spending too much time on it.”
A look of relief washes over Oliver’s face. “I was worried you didn’t have wireless anymore or something.”
Heat rises inside me, a mixture of embarrassment and anger and memories I want to erase. “Like we didn’t pay our bill? Like we got cut off?”
“No!” It pops out of Oliver’s mouth too loudly, and I hear a shush from across the library. Oliver lowers his voice. “I just meant it was weird, that’s all.” He swallows, leans in—“June, let’s talk about it”—and I jerk to my feet.
“I have to go.”
Oliver stands, too. He clasps his hand around my elbow, but gently, like he could break my bones.
Or my heart.
“I’m sorry,” he tells me. “I should have asked before I kissed you. But with the lime and everything, I thought it was clear. I thought you wanted to—”
“I did,” I say, but only because I’m aching at the thought of Oliver thinking I didn’t want it to happen when I was the one who led him outside, who pretended to put a lime between my teeth, who tilted my head. “It’s fine, it’s nothing, I wanted to do it. Tequila and starlight are a powerful combination.”
“Tequila and starlight,” Oliver repeats. He stares into my eyes, searching for answers I can’t give him. “How much tequila did you have before I got there?”
“I lost track,” I lie. “And then you arrived and everyone’s emotions were running high.”
Now Oliver looks annoyed. “Are you talking about the thing with Theo? I told you I don’t care about him and Ainsley. It wasn’t about that.”
I make a gesture of dismissal. “I meant the end of the year approaching. Teetering on the precipice of real life, adulthood, everyone leaving. It’s like the days are turning sepia-toned all around us.”
“You’re saying it was nostalgia.”
“Nothing has to change. In fact, I should be thanking you.”
“For what.” The way it comes out of his mouth is flat, not a question. He’s angry. Or hurt.