“There’s a Walmart right around the corner. Should we go get you one?”
“I just showered. And I don’t feel like swimming.”
“Of course you feel like swimming. Can I come in?”
“Fine.” I take a step back. He’s right. A swim would be perfect right now, but I need to be alone for a few hours. I need to be able to worry about Emilio without Marcel reading my face.
“Nice outfit,” he says, flopping down on the bed.
“There’s one in your room too, I’m sure.”
“Yeah, well, I’d go change into it, but I don’t think lover boy Emilio would want me lounging around your room in a bathrobe.”
I ignore him.
“Although, you’re both keeping plenty of secrets from each other already—what’s one more to add to the pile? Let me guess, he’s the jealous type.”
I close my eyes and rub my temples.
“That means yes. Ironic considering he’s the one who—”
“Marcel.”
“What?”
“Enough.”
“Fine. So you think he’d be all right with us hanging out in our matching bathrobes? You
know, I may not be the greatest boyfriend, but I’m very good at taking care of other people’s girlfriends. Gifted, really.”
“Marcel,” I repeat louder.
“Valentina.”
“Back. Off.”
Silence settles around us, heavy and uneasy, full with a new understanding. Friendly teasing is over. Friendly everything is over.
I close my eyes, because I can’t look at him while I say what needs to be said. “I’m in love with Emilio, and you need to . . .” Stop flirting with me. Stop looking at me like that. “After tomorrow I’m not going to, you know . . . we’re not going to see each other.”
He laughs. But it doesn’t sound like the Marcel I’ve become used to. “Oh, don’t worry about me, princess.”
I open my eyes.
He’s not lying on my bed anymore. He’s sitting up, arms crossed, face set and unreadable. “I’ll be fine. And you’re welcome for the lift.”
“No, it’s—” I stammer. “It’s not that I don’t appreciate everything you’re doing for me. I do. But I feel like you’re doing it for the wrong reason, and that—”
He cuts me off with another laugh, even louder, even harsher. “And that I’ll be left heartbroken? No offense, but Emilio’s sloppy seconds aren’t exactly my thing.” He stands. “I’m going swimming.”
He’s gone before I can think of anything to say. The door slams with a finality that vibrates in my bones. The end.
I don’t move. I stare at the faded brown curtains and convince myself that this sloshy sick feeling in my stomach will go away. It’s there because hurting a friend sucks, and Marcel has been my friend.
I move to the bed, curling into a miserable ball of damp terry cloth and overstuffed pillows and regret. I turn the TV back on in hopes that something banal will swallow me up, but it’s all flat images telling flat stories that I don’t care about. I turn it off and watch the phantom images fade from the screen where the picture used to be.
This has to be fixed. I can fix this.
I get up, rifle through my bag to find the shorts and tank top I brought to sleep in. Not exactly swim attire, but it’s unlikely the Holiday Inn police are going to yank me for it, so I throw them on and grab my room key on the way out.
According to the sign inside the elevator, the pool is on the second floor. The elevator spits me out in front of the change rooms, which I bypass, following the arrow and the humidity and the smell of chlorine to a glass door entrance at the end of the hall.
Luckily, I hear it first. Giggling. Female giggling.
I stop just shy of the doors and take a single step backward. I’m out of view behind the safety of a dusty plastic fern, but I crouch anyway to peer through the edges of the fogged-up glass. He’s there. In the hot tub. And his arm is draped around the bony shoulders of a blonde in a gunmetal bikini. She’s got huge, laughing, fuchsia lips spread wide enough to fit my fist through.
Grinning, he leans in and whispers something into her ear. She giggles again, louder even, tipping her head back. Mascara smudges are melting down her cheeks, and she’s glistening like roasting meat.
Well then.
I take a few more steps backward before I turn and walk quickly back to the elevator. I punch the button again and again and again, willing the elevator to come quicker. Not that there’s any chance he saw me, or that he’s anywhere close to getting out, judging from the way he was looking at her when he leaned in to whisper.
I don’t know why I’m surprised.
The elevator opens and I get in, but it isn’t until the doors thud soundly shut in front of me that I realize my heart is racing. I’m more than surprised. I’m angry. No, not angry. Disappointed. But why would cleaning up his act include abandoning his man-slut tendencies? Emilio warned me about him.
I jab the four over and over, like that’ll make the elevator move faster. How long has he even been down there—thirty minutes? And he’s already just one giggle away from second base with a complete stranger in a hotel pool? Nice work, Marcel.
It wasn’t the girl, though. It was the look on his face more than the giggling or anything else. That look. Eyes half-closed. Old Marcel.
And I was worried he was falling for me—I would laugh at myself, but I’m too drained. If old Marcel is back, a little dirty-blond hot tub action is probably the least depressing part of it, and I don’t even want to think about what that means. Marcel isn’t my responsibility anymore. Actually, he never was.
Once I’m back in my room, I brush my teeth and my hair without looking at myself, turn off the lights, and slide beneath the taut, scratchy sheets. It’s only nine thirty, but I don’t want to think. I want to be asleep already. But with my eyes closed, lying perfectly still, I see her in that gunmetal bikini, just skimpy triangles tethered with string. And her lips. The giggling. And his lips barely an inch from her collarbone.
These sheets are straitjacket tight. I yank them free on one side but still feel strapped to the bed. I pull out the other side too and throw my head back down into the pillow. It sinks too far. I’m suffocating, and all I can think about is that blond hair falling over Marcel’s wet bicep. Her head tipped back, her throat pushed out. So much sweat. His chest too, slick with it.
Stop it, Valentina!
By tomorrow night I’ll be wrapped in Emilio’s loose, soft sheets and warm brown arms, and none of this will matter. It doesn’t matter. It never mattered.
I repeat that over and over. And eventually, I fall asleep in a tangle of itchy sheets.
The giggling finds me in my dreams, melodic and seductive. It’s me. I’m laughing. My lips are fuchsia and open, but then I close my mouth and the sound keeps coming. That’s when I remember I’m sleeping, but the giggling isn’t coming from inside my dream. It’s coming from the other side of the wall.
I open my eyes. The clock says 2:37. And there it is again, muffled but unmistakably her.
Unbelievable.
I have to make it stop. In the dark, I fumble for the remote on the bedside table. It’s not there. More giggling. Anger burns away my grogginess, and I’m instantly alert, twisting the knob on the bedside lamp and tossing the extra pillows around until I find the remote wedged between the headboard and the mattress. More giggling. I press power, flip to VH1, and plant my thumb on the volume button until it’s blaring loudly enough to cover everything else I don’t want to hear.
I don’t fall back asleep.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
..................................................................
TWENTY-SEVEN
Marcel knocks at exactly five to seven.
“What?” I call through the door without opening it.
“Are you ready to go?”
I am, but I definitel
y didn’t think he would be. I peer through the peephole. He looks showered, dressed, refreshed. Disgusting.
I open the door a crack without removing the chain.
“Did you just wake up?” he asks, ignoring the chain and my glare.
“No.”
“So let’s go.”
“Give me a sec.”
I close the door, pick up my bag and mandolin, and give myself a glance in the mirror. I look haggard and cranky, like I’ve spent half the night being screamed at by music videos. One more day.
The lobby smells like burned waffle and boiled eggs. Marcel checks out, while I scan the continental breakfast offerings. The muffins look okay, if oddly shiny, so I put one in my bag along with a banana and a carton of chocolate milk.
“Grab me something, will you?” Marcel calls from the front desk. “I’m going to go get the car.”
I turn back to the breakfast spread, stewing over the fact that whatever anger he had for me last night is gone, and that all this food looks like it’s been waxed and polished. Based on the way he stomped out of my room before he went swimming, I was sure there would be chilliness this morning, but the rest of his night seems to have erased all the earlier unpleasantness with me.
I take a fork, stab a doughnut—the half-mangled one with the least frosting—and scrape it onto a paper plate. I add two sulfur-reeking eggs, which immediately roll around picking up doughnut crumbs and frosting, and a box of grapefruit juice for him to wash it down with. I hope the combination makes him puke.
I wait outside, his plate in one hand, my things in the other. The air is crisp, but the cold doesn’t pour into my lungs and burn like I’ve grown used to it doing. By tonight, I’ll be walking around with bare legs, no goose bumps.
Marcel pulls up. I get in the back and hand his plate over the seat to him. “I’m going back to sleep.”
“Um, okay.”
I don’t give him the satisfaction of hearing me acknowledge that I spent the second half of the night wide awake. He has to have heard the TV blaring from my room. He has to know why. Instead, I curl up with the blanket and let the hum and sway of the car lull me to sleep.
We do drive-through for lunch. Taco Bell. His choice, which is my own fault for refusing to offer my opinion when asked. It reeks up the car, but it’s better than sitting across from each other and staring into our steaming burritos in silence. I eat in the backseat, not even caring that I have no excuse for still being back here, and he eats without once glancing at me in the rearview mirror.
“Do you need me to drive?” I ask after a particularly disgusting Texaco bathroom in Valdosta, Georgia. It’s midafternoon. He has to be tired.
Marcel twists the gas cap on and starts toward the Texaco store. “Nah. You want a magazine or anything? A snack?”
I shrug. He’s not mad at me—he’s made that more than clear. He just doesn’t care about the fact that I’m mad at him, and maybe I shouldn’t even be mad at him. He is what he is. It’s not his fault I got confused and thought he was any different. “A magazine.”
“Which one?”
“I don’t care.”
I get in the backseat, change my mind, and climb up into the front seat, change it again and am in the process of climbing over into the back again when Marcel returns with InStyle and People.
“Thanks,” I mumble, sliding back down beside him. Whatever.
I read both from cover to cover. It’s something to do—read words, turn pages—but none of it means anything anymore. Beauty, fame, fortune, scandal. It seems funny that these worlds used to be interesting, that I would lie on the beach with my sisters, scouring glossy page after glossy page because this season’s eye shadow trends mattered and celebrity cellulite battles were entertaining. And now it’s nothing. It’s sand. Stand up, brush it off. Or wait for it to be rendered pointless by the heaviness of real life, a single wave.
I put the magazines down.
Outside, everything is changing again. Yesterday was nothing but winter under a bruised sky, snow-cloaked farms melting into gray. I’d started to feel like we’d never escape the dying grass and naked trees again, but today the hills have been slowly lightening. It started while I slept this morning, the sun seeping into individual blades of grass one at a time, and now I see green. Actual green. Leaves, grass, trees, bushes.
Marcel leans forward and turns on the radio. The static is so loud after so many hours of silence that I jump. He rotates through the stations, never staying on one for longer than five seconds. It’s incredibly unsatisfying, only listening to bits of songs, but he doesn’t seem bothered.
“Are you going to pick something?” I ask.
“Maybe.”
He cycles through the dial several more times, and out of nowhere, I wonder what he said to the blonde to make her laugh. What was he whispering in her ear when I saw them in the hot tub? And in his room? He turns off the radio, runs his hand through his hair, and yawns.
“Tired?” I ask.
“A little.”
“You want me to drive?”
“I’m okay.”
I reach around to the cooler, pull out another energy drink, and hand it to him.
“Thanks,” he says. “Hopefully you can’t overdose on these things.”
Overdose. Overdose. Overdose. At least this time he was the one who stumbled into it.
He snorts, finally hearing what he said, then adds in a voice that barely even sounds like him, “I still can’t believe it, you know? It’s such a . . .”
A shock. A waste. A tragedy. All of them, really, but I don’t know which one Marcel will pick.
“It’s such a joke. A stupid way to kill yourself. It doesn’t even work half the time.”
“Oh.”
“The Lucien I knew would’ve put a gun in his mouth. Less pain, more drama. Then again, the Lucien I knew loved himself way too much to commit suicide.”
I know he’s right. I’ve always known it. “Maybe he didn’t.” I close my eyes, wishing the words could be sucked back in.
“It wasn’t an accident. There’s only one reason you take dozens of sleeping pills and painkillers and antidepressants, and it’s not to get high. Still. I’d never in a million years have thought a fight with my dad, or a stupid art show, or a fight with me . . .”
His voice breaks, but he doesn’t cry. I don’t look at him. To our right, the sun is just about to touch the earth. The whole sky glows with all that orange energy, and I wish I could stare into it without hurting my eyes. I feel dangerous, like doing something dangerous, or saying something dangerous. “It wasn’t you.”
“I don’t want a pep talk.”
I owe him the truth. I owe it to Lucien too, but when I open my mouth the words aren’t there, and I realize it’s not simply what he deserves and what I owe. I can’t do it. “It was me.”
“What are you talking about?”
I’m blushing already, embarrassed by the lies I’m about to tell. “He kissed me. He told me he loved me, and I was so—” I stop and shake my head weakly. Maybe I can’t tell him the truth, but I won’t leave him thinking it was his fault for the rest of his life. “I was so mad and tired and drunk, and I said . . . I said the cruelest things. I felt trapped and used, which isn’t an excuse, but I didn’t mean for . . . I didn’t know. I’m sorry.” That choking, thickening-throat feeling surprises me, and the first tear slips out before I even realize it’s there. It’s strangely satisfying to be crying; it’s the truth beneath my lies, because if Emilio killed Lucien, I am sorry. I’m so, so sorry. The guilt squeezing my heart is so tight, I feel like it might stop beating.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Marcel asks slowly, cautiously. I can’t tell how angry he is. Not yet.
“I was afraid you’d blame me, but I don’t care anymore, because you should blame me. It had nothing to do with you. You know that—you two argued all the time. He was upset because I broke his heart and told him he was a fake and a creep and I insulted his art. .
. .”
I don’t want to go on. That should be enough. I shouldn’t have to dig up all the names I ever wanted to call Lucien. I wipe my cheeks with my palms.
When I finally get the courage to look at Marcel, his face is ice. He hates me. It’s for the wrong reason, but it’s a relief.
“I’m sorry,” I say one last time, but I don’t want him to forgive me. It’s best if he hates me forever.
“I don’t want to take you to him,” Marcel says softly.
“What?”
“I can’t take you to Emilio.”
“So what, you’re going to just dump me on the side of the road? I didn’t know Lucien would—”
“I don’t want to talk about Lucien anymore.”
I pause, confused. “But you won’t help me get to Emilio because I made Lucien kill himself.”
“Nobody made Lucien do anything,” he interrupts. “And I’m not a priest. I don’t need your confession, especially a fake one you’re only giving so I won’t feel responsible.”
I wipe my cheeks again, but the tears are already gone. My cheeks are hot.
“I don’t want to take you to Emilio,” he says again, this time more forcefully. He’s angry, but not in the way he should be. “He’s not someone you should be with.”
“Don’t,” I say, finally understanding. “Not again. You don’t know the real Emilio, and I’m tired of hearing what you think you know about him.”
“I’m worried about you. You’re being naive and stupid, and you don’t know what you’re doing.”
“You don’t get to worry about me!” I yell. “Worry about yourself. Worry about diseases you picked up from the skank in your room last night! Worry about your crazy parents and getting your screwed-up life back together, but don’t worry about me!”
The sun is gone. It happened so fast, I missed both the moment it kissed the earth and the moment it slipped under.
Marcel doesn’t speak again. We spend our last hour together in perfect silence, as the shimmer drains from the sky. The gold becomes purple, the purple becomes black, and the stars should be shining, but the lights of the cities—West Palm Beach, Fort Lauderdale, and finally Miami—steal the glory. Their glitter is all electric. I recognize the rainbow of neon lights on downtown’s towers, gaudy and gorgeous and fake. Home. It’s a hollow sort of relief.
Kiss Kill Vanish Page 22