Suffer Love

by Ashley Herring Blake

  “I’m fine. Can you come here tomorrow after school or not?”

  “Um. Sure, that’s fine.”

  “Great. I’ll text you the address.”

  “Okay, see you—”

  Click.

  I flinch and stare at my phone. Sam B. Call Ended.

  “What just happened?” Kat asks.

  I manage a weak laugh. “I’m not sure, but apparently I’m going over to his house tomorrow to work on this project.”

  Kat frowns and then releases a colossal “Ohhh.”

  I look at her. “What do you mean, ‘Ohhh’?”

  “Um. Nothing.”

  “Uh-uh. That ‘Ohhh’ was not a nothing kind of ‘Ohhh.’ It was a very loaded ‘Ohhh.’”

  She blows some air into her bangs. “It’s just—You were supposed to meet in the library?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You set that up before the whole locker thing?”

  Nod.

  “Well, I mean . . . He’s new and doesn’t really know anyone, but then he saw the locker. So what if he thinks . . .”

  “Ohhh. You think he wants to hook up with me?”

  She shrugs. “I don’t know. You said he was acting weird on the phone.”

  “He was, but it’s not like I’m acquainted with his normal MO.” My stomach somersaults as I think back to English. “Crap, he was talking to Josh before class. And after class.”

  “I heard he’s a baseball player.”

  “Ugh.” I drop my head into my hands. Did Sam really change the place so we could hook up? Not that I consider myself particularly alluring, but it is suspicious considering the whole locker debacle. I run my fingers over the top of my hand and feel suddenly nauseous. He just seemed so different. Like when I looked at him, I saw something I recognized and could understand. I’m not even sure what it was. Something about him was just . . . familiar.

  “Hadley, I hate to tell you this, but this is kind of your own—”

  “Don’t. Don’t say it.”

  She sighs. “Are you still going to go?”

  I pause, thinking. I hear my dad’s study door close downstairs, hear the clink of a glass against a bottle in the kitchen. I ball a hand into my comforter. I roll my shoulders back. “Yes. I am.”

  Kat groans. “Please don’t tell me you’re actually going to—”

  “There’s no way I’m going to let some asshole assume crap about me after reading what a bitter bitch wrote on my locker.” I snap open my vocab book and flip.

  Kat’s eyes widen, but she shuts up.

  Galvanize. Hubris. Inexpedient.

  Chapter Six

  Sam

  I click my phone off and throw it on my bed. My breath is going in and out way too fast. I can’t believe I invited Hadley to my house just to piss off my mother. What the hell is wrong with me? I rub my eyes and walk myself back through the last ten minutes. I scrolled through my iPod. I tapped on Sea Wolf. I opened my calculus book, picked up a tooth-gnawed pencil, and scanned number 11, where I’d left off an hour earlier. Then my fingers were flying over my phone and I was talking to her. Inviting her to my house.

  The entire day was one shitstorm after another. After English, the rest of school went by in a blur. I honestly can’t even remember what class I had for seventh period. Mom picked Livy and me up after school and sped like a bat out of hell to the shop to pick up my car, yammering about her amazing new job and how amazing her students are and what an amazing commitment the school has to the arts.

  After she paid for my two new tires that had finally rubbed bald on the trip from Atlanta, she went back to her job. Seriously. It’s our first day of school, our house looks like a warehouse, and the woman goes back to work—again—to finish tacking posters that say shit like Imagine and Believe to Achieve on the walls in her classroom. Livy nearly bit a hole through her lip, but neither of us said anything. As usual.

  When Livy and I got home, I started dinner. After digging the pots and pans out of a box, I put on some music and took out stuff to make pasta primavera. Easy. Livy set up at the kitchen table and started her homework. As I cut up vegetables and set the water to boil, I kept flicking my eyes to her. I wondered if she had heard the name St. Clair drifting through the hallways. She didn’t look angsty or anything, but I should probably warn her, just in case. It’s been nearly six months since everything happened, but Livy’s a little unpredictable these days. The morning we left Atlanta, she came downstairs in a neon blue wig—this sleek bob that actually looked pretty freaking cool, but still. It was a wig. It was blue. Mom spluttered her coffee back into her mug and I’m positive Livy cracked a grin.

  “So, Livy,” I said, adding oil to a skillet. “How was your day?”

  She shrugged. “Fine, I guess.” Her pencil scritched across her paper, her geometry book open in front of her. Her voice sounded like an automated recording.

  “Do you like your teachers?”

  “I guess.”

  “Did you meet any cool people?”

  “Sure.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know.” Scritch, scritch.

  I added the pasta to the boiling water, set the timer, and went over to my sister. “Livy.”

  She lifted her vacant eyes.

  “Mom’s not here.” I tugged on the ends of her blond hair. No wig today, but there is a light purple streak in the front. “It’s me, remember? Thammy.”

  Her mouth twitched at my use of her kid name for me, back when she had a lisp. And then her eyes cleared and her shoulders let go of her neck.

  “Now tell me about your day,” I said. “I really want to know. No more vague crap, okay?”

  She smiled and nodded. I went back to the stove. For the next hour, she told me everything about school. She and a girl named Annalise bonded over Evanescence (I made a mental note to step up Livy’s education on good music), a kid named Jared kept making obscene gestures at her during Biology (I made a mental note to find this asshat and break his legs), and her photography class, which she had been put into accidentally, was the only part of the day that kept her from chewing off her own tongue. Her words, not mine.

  “I think I might go to the Photography Club meeting tomorrow after school,” she said.

  “Wow. That’s serious. You’re getting involved?”

  She laughed and threw a balled-up paper at me. “I don’t know, I just really liked it. I was lucky I could get the lens cap off the camera today, but I love the whole idea of capturing these little moments and making them, like, last forever. Mr. Grayson showed us this one photo of a little girl chasing a plastic bag down an alley. I mean, that doesn’t sound very interesting, right? But it was. The way the light hit the bag and made it seem like it was alive, the way the girl reached out for it like it was . . . I don’t know. More than a bag.” She shrugged and glanced up at me. “Um. It was cool.”

  “That’s does sound cool, Liv.” I smiled. I hadn’t seen her excited about anything in a long time. “When’s the meeting over?”

  “I think around six-thirty? It’s sort of a kick-off-the-year party thing. Annalise will be there too, and she said her mom could give me a ride home.”

  I slid the peppers into the hot oil. “Sounds good.”

  Then I told her about baseball and Josh, but I had no desire to mention Hadley yet, even if her last name were Jones. Back in Atlanta, Livy was constantly on my case about why I didn’t have a girlfriend and whether or not I still talked to Nicole. I expected our time in Woodmont, or wherever the hell we were, to be no different. Livy wasn’t exactly a little girl anymore, but seriously, she’s my little sister. I wasn’t even thinking about telling her that I’d met a girl—a girl I had deemed magical, for Christ’s sake—but she’d turned out to be a blast from the past of our own personal hell.

  As soon as dinner was ready, Mom blew in the door.

  “Oh, wonderful. You made dinner,” she said in greeting.

  Hello. You’re welcome.

&nb
sp; She dropped her work bag by the fridge while I piled pasta onto three plates. Livy slammed her books closed and cleared the space so we could all sit down at the table.

  We started eating in silence. Mom refused to let us eat in front of the TV. She said dinners were family time. What a joke. I wouldn’t mind just me and Livy, so we could talk, but you add Mom to the mix and it’s like a few feet of chains have been wrapped around both of our throats.

  “How was school, Olivia?” Mom asked.

  “Fine.”

  “Make any friends?”

  “Sure.”

  “And your asthma? Any—”

  “Fine.”

  Mom pressed her lips flat. “What about photography? Will you be all right in there or do you need a schedule change?”

  Livy shrugged. “It’s fine, I guess.”

  Mom nodded and I wiped my mouth with my napkin to cover my grin.

  “Did you know we’re only about a mile from the Y, Olivia? I signed us up for a family membership,” Mom said while popping a pepper into her mouth. “You can ride your bike there—slowly—and swim a little. What do you think about that?”

  “Maybe,” Livy said, and I tapped her foot under the table. She smiled without looking at me. Dad always said Livy had some mermaid blood in her. There was rarely a time from April to October that she wasn’t in the pool we had at our old house in Nashville. Not that she was going to smack a kiss on Mom’s cheek for the suggestion, but I knew my sister. She’d find her way to the Y sooner or later. It’s the only exercise she could do that didn’t aggravate her asthma. Something about the warm air and humidity wasn’t as hard on the breathing tubes as the conditions of other cardio workouts.

  “What about you, Sam?” Mom asked.

  “What about me?”

  “School?”

  “School is school, Mom. Same here as it is everywhere else.”

  “I wouldn’t say that. Hunter Academy is so different from anything I’ve ever experienced. I wish I’d gone there as a teenager. The staff really believes in fostering individual talents. It’s amazing.”

  “Well, we don’t go to Hunter, do we?”

  Mom dropped her fork and leveled me with a glare. “You wouldn’t like it.”

  “Sure. Whatever you say, Mom.”

  “Why do you have to make everything so difficult?”

  I sat back, almost flabbergasted. Almost. “I’m not making anything difficult. I’m here, aren’t I? I moved. Again. I made your dinner. I helped Livy unpack her room. What do you want from me?”

  “A little less attitude.”

  “Sorry, I’m having a hard time knocking that back a notch. Something about being dragged away from my few friends for the second time in less than six months, with Dad up in Boston, just leaves a sour taste in my mouth.”

  She tugged on her earlobe, something she always does when she’s nervous. Or when we’re nervous. When I had bad dreams as a kid, I used to cower on her lap while she sang and ran her thumb over my ear.

  “Your father chose to go to Boston,” she said, dropping her hand. “And he chose to go alone. That’s not my fault.”

  Livy chewed on her lip, moving her food around her plate. Mom sighed and pressed her eyes closed. For a second, I really thought she was going to apologize. But she forged ahead, her hands white on the edges of the table.

  “We wouldn’t be in this situation, Samuel, if you had been a little less rash and a little less selfish.”

  My jaw tightened. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Livy’s head snap up. Mom and I stared at each other, and right there, in that moment, I almost told her about Hadley. I wasn’t positive this was the right girl, but something in my gut said I knew exactly who she was and I wanted to see Mom’s face when she found out.

  But Livy was in the room.

  So I shut up.

  But I couldn’t shake this overwhelming urge to pour all of my shit on Mom the way she’d done to me for the past six months. To change the tide, if that was even possible.

  So two hours later, I got a better idea. No big deal. Hadley and I needed to work on the project anyway. This was just a way to get under Mom’s skin a little.

  Now, standing in my room, Hadley’s voice still echoing in my ear, the prospect of her gingery smell filling up my house, that “better idea” makes me feel like a complete douche.

  Chapter Seven

  Hadley

  My legs, which I had locked into place right before I rang the doorbell, turn to water as soon as he opens the door.

  Because he looks good.

  Not in a Josh Ellison I-can-get-any-girl-I-want kind of way, but in this boyish, relaxed sort of way that makes my resolve turn to mush. His hair is sticking up like he’s been pulling on it and his light blue T-shirt hugs his trim torso. His blue eyes are wide on mine, as though he’s a little surprised I showed up.

  “Hey,” he says without smiling, but his gaze slides up my body in a flash. “Come on in.”

  “Thanks.” I give him a smile and let my shoulder brush against his chest as I pass. He smells like some cool, clean soap and . . . Is that cinnamon?

  “Sorry about the mess.” He weaves through a maze of cardboard boxes. “We just moved in last week.”

  Like this isn’t obvious. “Where did you move from?”

  “Atlanta. We lived with my grandma for the summer.” He pushes a box labeled LINENS away from the stairs and turns to face me. “Lived in Nashville before that.”

  “Really? Me too. We moved this past summer.”

  “Yeah, I know.” He rubs the back of his neck and looks away as my phone pings in my bag.

  “Sorry.” I dig it out and find a text from my dad.

  Hope your day went well, sweetie. Love you!

  I stuff my phone in my bag without replying.

  “How do you know?” I ask Sam, who’s rummaging through a box filled with paperback novels and shampoo bottles.

  “How do I know what?” he asks, standing up with a few books. The top one is a tattered copy of Romeo and Juliet.

  “That I used to live in Nashville.”

  “Oh. From Josh.”

  I fight to keep my lip from curling. “Ah. I see.” I’m sure Josh has been a wealth of information.

  He runs his hand along the tawny wood of the banister, starting up the steps. His fingers are long and slender, almost elegant. “All my books and stuff are in my room.”

  Sure they are. I follow him, glad his back is to me so he can’t see the smirk that’s taking over my face right now. I managed to go all day without talking to him. Ms. Artigas drowned us in her lecture on the power of disguise in As You Like It, and I made sure I sat in the back of the room. Luckily, my locker had been scrubbed clean and Sloane had yet to strike again, so I flew under the radar most of the day. I’m almost positive Sam is in my lunch block, so I ate in the library with an Us Weekly while the Sci-Fi Club sketched pictures of balloon-chested intergalactic spacecraft captains onto posters advertising for new members. This is my riveting social life. The only person I said more than three words to was Kat, who leveled me with plaintive are-you-sure-about-this looks every thirty seconds.

  “I mean, you’re basically going to manipulate him into thinking you want to hook up,” she whispered while we changed for gym. “You really want to be that kind of girl?”

  “What kind of girl?”

  Kat pressed her mouth flat and she busied herself with her shoelaces.

  “Besides, I’m not manipulating,” I said, pulling on a royal blue Woodmont High T-shirt. “I’m just . . . proving a point.”

  “Are you sure that point doesn’t have something to do with making the whole of the male population suffer needlessly?”

  “I’m sure.”

  By the time I got to Sam’s, I wasn’t sure about anything. I’ve never played around with guys like this, and honestly, I’m not sure I know what I’m doing. Usually I get with a guy because I want to, and then I stop things before they go too far. Even t
hough I pick guys who aren’t assholes—Josh Ellison represents a grave lapse in judgment—I’m fully aware that I’ve developed a reputation as a tease in a few short months. But it’s not a game to me. It’s not a power trip. It’s comfort without too much risk. No one gets too close. No one gets hurt. At least, not until Jenny Kalinski.

  Sam’s room is pretty much what I expected. A mess that makes my palms itch. Boxes everywhere, clothes draped over the unmade bed and desk chair. Stacks of books and magazines. Some guitar-driven music pumps out of an iPod dock.

  From his desk, he grabs his laptop and trades the paperbacks for a copy of Much Ado before settling on the floor against the bed.

  “So what act do you think we should do?” he asks, flipping through the play.

  I sit down next to him and take out my own stuff. “I’m not sure. It’s been a while since I’ve read it.”

  He flips through his notebook, a few wrinkled papers sticking out from every direction. “Do you have the packet explaining the project? I can’t find mine.”

  I open my binder and find it immediately. “It says we need a multimedia component.”

  “Can I see it?”

  “Oh . . . um . . .”

  “Thanks.” Before I can stop him, he slides the paper from between my fingers. I inhale deeply and watch him while he reads.

  A grin ambles across his mouth. “Am I seeing things, or did you correct this teacher handout?” He holds up the paper, his finger on a paragraph where several red marks bleed across the page.

  I snatch the paper back from him. “You’d be surprised how many teachers make spelling and grammatical errors.”

  He nods, pressing his tongue to his top lip, probably to keep from busting up laughing at my neurosis.

  “Oh, shut up,” I say, cracking a smile and brandishing my red pen at him. “What act are we doing?”

  He blocks my pen with his book and finally laughs, a resonant boom from deep inside his chest. “Why don’t we skim the play really quick and see what we think?”

  “Okay.”

  So we do. In silence. I watch him for a minute, waiting for a sidelong glance or a subtle brush against my arm. Nothing. He just reads and keeps checking his phone, like he’s waiting for something better to pull him from my presence.