Sam gives me a half smile and strolls off toward Josh and Jenny. My stomach finally freezes over. Sam told me about his conversation with Josh a couple weeks ago. When I see Josh in class and in the hallways, he has looked fairly miserable. Aside from nasty glares, Sloane has finally grown tired of her crusade against me, but I can’t seem to release my anger. So he had a fight with his girlfriend. Big freaking deal. But I can tell there’s something about Josh that Sam just understands or at least tries to understand. They’re not exactly friends, but they’re not not friends either. Honestly, it irritates me like sand in my swimsuit.
When I look up, Kat is staring at me. “What?” I start packing up my book and wrapping up the crusts from my sandwich.
“Nothing. It’s just . . .” She shakes her head. “I just never thought I’d see you with a boyfriend.”
“He’s not my boyfriend.”
“Right. Because that whole starry-eyed, red-cheeked thing is the same way you look at Josh Ellison.”
“No, I save that for you,” I say, batting my lashes.
Kat ignores me. “If he’s not your boyfriend, what is he?”
I sit back, the cold from the cheap aluminum chair piercing through my shirt. I grab for the right words, but there are too many and not enough to choose from.
“Sam and me . . . we’re . . . he’s . . .” Oh, who am I kidding? I have no idea what I’m doing or what’s really happening between us. At first it was scary, letting Sam in my life like this, but now . . . I don’t know. Sam and me—we just are. Being together is terrifying and easy all at once.
“He’s just Sam.”
“Yeah, I know who he is. The weird thing is who you are when you’re around him.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I can tell you’re nervous and scared about liking him, but at the same time, you’re not. You’re happy. It’s totally bizarre.”
I swallow, but manage to keep my expression blank. I don’t want Kat to know how accurate her assessment is—how unmoored and content I feel with Sam. “It’s hard to describe. I mean, why do you like Ajay?”
Immediately, I wish I could suck my question back into my mouth. Kat’s face falls and I know she’s not thinking about Sam anymore. “I don’t like Ajay.”
The bell rings and I sling my arm around Kat’s shoulder as we wade through the masses toward the hallway. I breathe in her familiar smell—orange Tic-Tacs and fruity shampoo. It feels good to have my Kitty Kat back. “I’ll be your date anytime, baby.” I smack her cheek with a loud kiss.
“Thanks, honey, but you’re really not my type.” She reaches around me and pinches my butt. “Then again . . .”
We laugh our way to Music Appreciation, a fluff senior class during which we do nothing but listen to our own iPods while completing personal music preference surveys. Kat’s laughter is short-lived. I can hear Adele crooning from her earbuds, see a definite slump in her shoulders. Rob was only ever a dream, and therefore pretty much innocuous. But Ajay is flesh and blood, capable of wreaking emotional havoc on my best friend.
Despite my misgivings, it’s nice to think about things like Kat’s crush and my date tonight. God, it’s all so normal.
At the end of the day, the bell rings and releases us for the weekend. I push through the sea of bodies and head toward Kat’s locker. When I get there, she’s grinning and bouncing on her feet with a large cup in her hands. It’s a combination of a honey-toned wood and some silver-colored metal, welded together with zigzags of shiny copper. It’s strange and totally incredible.
“What’s that?” I ask, relieved to see her smile.
She looks up, her eyes wild with excitement. “Oh my God, Had, look!” She thrusts the mug under my nose, and a little oink greets me.
“Holy crap!” I yelp and jump backwards. “What the hell is that?” A few kids stop their mad scramble for the exit to look at us. I step closer to Kat, ducking my head.
“It’s a pig! A teacup pig!” She gazes into the cup, crooning. “Aren’t you the cutest thing? Yes, you are. Yes, you are.”
I peer into the cup and, yes, there is a pig curled up at the bottom, staring up at me with Wilbur don’t-eat-me eyes. It’s wrinkly and pale pink with black spots, and its tiny, shiny snout is about the size of my thumbnail.
“That’s actually a living thing? It’s so cute.”
“I know. Oh my God, can you believe it? Do you think my mom will let me keep it? I’ve read about these little guys and they only grow to be, like, five pounds. That’s doable, right? That’s smaller than a cat. Totally doable. Oh, I need to get food and a crate and a maybe a heating lamp and—”
“Um, Kat?”
She startles, her euphoric eyes focusing on me. “What?”
“Where did this adorable, impossibly small pig come from?”
“Oh.” She strokes the pig’s head with one finger and it snorts. “He was in my locker, in this cup, just waiting for me. Were you waiting for me? Yes, you were. Yes. Someone knew you were just what I wanted. Yes, they did.”
Immediately, I know who put the pig in her locker. The only person capable of this kind of quirky, designed-perfectly-for-Katherine-Johnson grand gesture.
“Ajay.”
Her head snaps up. “You think?”
“Well, he knows about your pig obsession, and who else has the time to break into your locker in the middle of the day? Who else is crazy enough to tell you he likes you with a teacup pig?”
She blushes and smiles and then blushes and smiles some more as she hugs the cup to her chest. “Oh my God. If he did this, Hadley, if he really did this, I’m totally in love.”
I laugh as she kisses the pig’s snout and throw an arm around her shoulder. “Kitty Kat, if Ajay did this, I think I’m in love too.”
Chapter Twenty-three
Sam
Livy’s room is a total mess. Glossy black-and-white photos strewn everywhere, magazines and books and homework and what looks like her entire wardrobe covering every surface. I think she might have tried to turn her closet into a darkroom, but I don’t really want to know. Nothing has a place. Total opposite of Hadley. Total opposite of the way Livy used to be. As I shove aside a crumb-filled plate and sit on her bed, I feel a weight settle over me, as if her room is a glaring and chaotic metaphor for our exploded life.
“What’s up?” She’s sitting on the floor, leaning against her bed, a thick photography book propped up on her knees. Lately I’ve barely seen her without a camera around her neck. She even wears it in the house. Hadley and I fell asleep on the couch last week, and I swear I heard a click and then footsteps fading away. She disappears for hours on her bike, skulking around town like some voyeur. When I ask her what she’s doing, she waves me off and says it’s for her project. I would worry, but when she delicately tells me to piss off, she’s smiling her old smile.
“Listen, Livy. I know I said I wouldn’t tell Hadley about all of this, but things are different now.”
Her fingers freeze on a page in midflip. My eyes slide around the room and locate her inhaler on her desk. Just in case.
“I have to tell her and I’m going to do it soon.”
“You mean . . . you’re going to tell her tell her?”
I sit down to floor next to her. “Yeah.”
Livy lets her knees drop. Her book thwacks as it hits the floor.
“I have to, Liv. I feel like I’m lying to her.”
She nods, then lifts her eyes to me. They’re surprisingly dry. “She’s going to hate you. Hate all of us. And what about Kat? Ajay’s going to lose Kat before he even had a chance to get her, and you’re going to lose Hadley and then you’ll be miserable again and then I’ll be miserable again and then everyone will just be miserable. What’s the point?”
“Liv—”
“You can’t let her hate you. Not you, Sam. Please.”
She stares at me, her blue eyes wide and pleading. I know what she really wants me to do, but I’m not even about to open up
that can.
Just then, the doorbell rings and Livy’s eyes get even wider.
“Tonight?” she asks as I get up.
“I don’t know. Maybe. But soon.” When I reach the door, I turn back to look at her. Her shoulders are squared, jaw set. She looks so different from how she did even a month ago. Stronger. I feel my resolve tighten.
That resolve crumbles into nothing when I open the front door to find Hadley standing on my porch. She looks almost transcendent. Dressed all in black, wrapped in the coppery light of the late sun. Her hair is pulled back and her eyes literally light up when they land on me.
She’s here an hour before I’m supposed to meet her, but I’m not really surprised. I know she hates being at home right now. Honestly, it’s a bit of a relief—I still hadn’t figured out how to pick her up for a date without coming face-to-face with her dad. Talk about a mood killer.
My arms go around her and she sort of melts into me. I rest my cheek on her head and we just stand there, wordless. I let myself imagine a different life with her, free of knots and lies and little slips of paper. I let myself believe what feels true—that she’s just a girl and I’m just boy and we want to be together. We couldn’t not be together, because being together was the only thing that made sense. The only thing that kept us both from disappearing.
I glance at Hadley in the passenger seat for the gazillionth time since we left my house. Her expression is relaxed and even a little excited. Every time she catches my eye, she sort of grins and her hand tightens on mine and the voice in my head screaming Dumbass! on a constant loop gets a little louder.
“What are we doing here?” Hadley asks as I pull into the parking lot of the Rock Your Face climbing gym.
“This place has a great snack counter. Thought we’d grab a soft pretzel here before we meet up with the baseball team for some beer-pong.”
She whacks me on the arm, but cracks a grin. I grab my pack full of my own climbing gear, barely used for the past several months, and lead her inside.
“What size shoe do you wear?” I ask after I pay a guy with a poofy beard and a tattoo of Jesus Christ smoking weed on his neck. No shit.
“Seven.” Hadley’s eyes roam over the climbing walls, dotted here and there with climbers reaching for solid holds. One guy is bouldering on the low climbs, and the place smells like sweat and exercise mats and the mustiness of chalk.
“Need both of y’all to sign waivers,” Toking-Jesus-tattoo guy says, handing us each a clipboard. The name tag on his shirt reads Scott.
I sign the sheet while Hadley reads every word of the waiver, her brows all wrinkled up in concentration.
“You guys cool?” Scott asks, motioning toward the walls. “I’m short-staffed tonight, so if you don’t know how to belay, it’s gonna be a while.”
“We’re good, man,” I say. “We’ve done this a million times.” I feel Hadley’s eyes flick to me, but I keep mine on Scott.
He scratches at his poofy beard, surveying the busy walls. “All right. I’ll circle around and check on you. But seriously, make sure you know what you’re doing before you get up there.”
“Sam, I don’t—” Hadley starts, but I cut her off.
“Will do. Thanks.”
Scott nods and Hadley shuts up, finally signing the damn waiver. If her thoroughness wasn’t so damn cute, I’d totally rag her about it right now.
“Sorry,” I tell her as we take her shoes and head over to a free space of wall. “They’re pretty strict about safety at these places.”
“Can’t imagine why.” She cranes her neck to watch a lady climbing about thirty feet off the ground.
“Don’t worry. I know what I’m doing.”
She nods and sits to change her shoes. I remove two harnesses, two belay devices, extra ropes, a chalk pouch, my shoes, some extra carabiners, and two full water bottles from my bag. Then I step into my harness and secure it around my hips.
“Your turn.” I hold up the other harness.
“What about my soft pretzel?”
“If you keep looking at me like that, we won’t get any climbing done,” I say.
“Why’s that?”
I catch her hand and press a kiss to her palm. Her fingers curve softly into my cheek. Somehow, those two little movements—the action and reaction—feel so intimate, it almost knocks the breath out of my lungs.
Hadley smiles softly and I kiss her hand once more before I secure the belay devices to our harnesses. I take the rope hanging from our section of the wall and thread it through the device. Then I hook Hadley into the other end of the rope.
“Ready?” I hook the chalk bag onto her harness with a carabiner.
She pops up her eyebrows and looks around. “Um. You do realize I’ve never done this before, right?”
“Yeah, I caught that.”
“So what do I do?”
“You climb.”
She smirks at me and I laugh and then explain about belaying. “I’m not holding you up. I’m just providing support if needed as you climb. When you’re ready, you say ‘On belay’ and I say ‘Belay on.’ That means everything is in place to keep you safe. When you’re about to climb, you say ‘Climbing’ and I say ‘Climb on.’ Then you climb. You just do it. Stretch yourself, think through a move, visualize yourself executing it. Use the chalk to give you some grip.”
Her eyes study the wall. After a minute, she dips a hand into the chalk bag, brows furrowed and lips drawn taut. I plant my feet as she slaps her hands together, sending puffs of white into the air.
“Um.” She glances back at me. “On belay?”
I grin. “Belay on.”
She turns back to the wall. “Climbing.”
“Climb on.”
She hikes her leg up, plants her foot on a hold, and is off. I watch her, threading the rope through the belay device as she gets higher, and try not to look at her ass. This is nearly impossible considering that’s all there is to really look at and my eyes have taken on a mind of their own.
“You’re doing good,” I call. She grunts in response, pausing as she realizes there are no holds within easy reaching distance.
“Want me to beta?” I ask.
“To what?”
“Beta. Offer you advice on moves to try. Some people hate it. Think it’s a crutch and that it disrupts the natural flow of the climber’s state of mind or something like that.”
“And what do you think?”
“I think that’s bullshit.”
She laughs, a little out of breath. “Beta on.”
We talk through some holds. She slips once and I lock up on the rope, but she gets back on pretty easily.
“You’re like a cat up there,” I say.
She stretches out a toned swimmer’s leg and uses her quads instead of her arms to push herself up. I swallow hard and lock my gaze on the back of her head.
When she reaches the top, she lets out a cute little whoop. I don’t even have to explain about rappelling down. She just does it. Her feet hit the ground and her eyes are all fiery.
“Nice job,” I say as I unhook her from the rope. “Did you like it?”
She nods, and takes a slug of water. “Amazing.”
“You ready to belay me?”
She lifts her eyebrows and I feel the tips of my ears bleed pink. I unhook my own rope, threading it through Hadley’s device. I show her how to weave the rope to provide slack before I approach the wall.
“Do you climb a lot?” she asks as I grab my first hold.
“I used to, back when we lived in Nashville. My dad was big into climbing. We went to the gym there a lot, but we also took trips to climb outdoors. Whole different experience, climbing natural rock. I haven’t climbed much since he moved, though.”
“Do you miss it?”
I pause, my knees tucked under a crevice. I think about my dad, about baseball and climbing and camping and all the things he taught me how to do and love. Everything that seemed to disappear, at least in some f
orm, when he left. I swing my body out, airborne for a brief flash before my hands hook around a hold.
“Not at the moment,” I grunt.
Hadley whistles below me and I don’t even try to keep the smile off my face.
“Can I ask you a question?” she says when I stop halfway up to catch my breath.
“Shoot.”
She remains silent and I crane my neck around and down. “Hadley?
“Yeah. Just . . . um.” She bites her lip. “Why do you hang out with Josh?”
I frown and turn back to the wall. “I wouldn’t call it hanging out, exactly. We talk at school. Play ball.”
“And?”
I exhale and reach for a hold, anything to keep moving up. “He did a dumbass thing, but he’s not a bad guy.”
The rope pulls up on my harness with a ball-cracking jerk. Hadley’s got the rope anchored at her hip, her mouth a hard line.
“Hadley,” I squeak. “Come on.”
She purses her lips and lets go. I rappel down and walk over to her, widening my stance in front of her so we’re eye level.
“What?” I ask. “What do you want me to say?”
“You don’t care that he used me?” She folds her arms but lets me put my hands on her hips and pull her closer.
“Yeah, I care. He and I have had words on the subject. Trust me, when I first found out what happened, I wanted to string him up by something a hell of a lot more painful than his thumbs.”
“But?”
I loop my fingers through her harness belt and hold on. “Hadley. Didn’t you do the same thing? Use him, I mean?”
She stiffens and tries to pull back, but I’m hooked in.
“I’m not judging you, Hadley. I’ve been there . . . I’ve . . .” Nicole’s face flashes in my mind, her clear green eyes laughing and nonchalant.
“I didn’t lie,” Hadley says.
“I know that. But . . .” I wipe my forehead on my arm, suddenly pouring sweat. “I mean, people don’t do stupid shit just to do it. Don’t you think there’s always more to it?”
“You’re saying that he had a good reason for lying?”
“I’m saying . . .” Think, man. Careful. “That Josh was going through some crap and he acted like a dick. It’s not an excuse, but that kind of stuff has to be taken into account when we’re dealing with other people and trying to find a little meaning behind all the bullshit.”
Suffer Love Page 17