White Rabbit

by Caleb Roehrig

  I had been silently agonizing over my frustrating crush for weeks before a fateful day in February when the two of us found ourselves alone in the office of the Front Line. Unprompted, and after a long, curious silence, Bash rather awkwardly announced, “I broke up with Lia again.”

  “Oh?” I looked up at him from the screen of my laptop, where I’d been toggling between two photos I was considering for the next issue, and tried to sound nonchalant. “Um … I’m sorry.”

  He shrugged, the motion stilted and off. “It’s okay. I mean, it’s … like, we’ve split up before? But this time I think it’s for good. You know? I mean, I think I want it to be for good. I’ve started thinking … I don’t know.” He took a breath, and for a long, speechless moment, he seemed inexplicably terrified. He licked his lips, took another breath. “I think … I think maybe I’m kind of into somebody else?”

  The whole time he’d been speaking, he’d been fumbling with his phone, twisting it around and around in an agitated motion, like he couldn’t figure out which way he wanted it. And then he glanced over at me, and I saw something in his eyes that made my stomach wonky and my neck hot. We just looked at each other for what felt like a hundred and fifty years, my heart thumping so hard my eardrums almost blew out; and then he moved closer, until I could smell his citrus and vetiver cologne … and then he kissed me.

  It was a revelation. I was one of, like, three openly gay kids at our dumb school, and I had literally never had a real kiss before. It was almost aggressive, like he was afraid I would bolt and he wanted to make sure it happened before I could escape; and then he drew back and we just stared at each other some more in startled silence.

  And then he kissed me again, and it was even more aggressive, and my pulse went so fast I could hear it hum, my lungs empty and full all at once, and in my head I just kept thinking, This is real, this is happening, I can’t believe this is really happening.

  A second later, we heard footsteps outside the door, and Bash jerked away from me just as Mr. Cohen entered the room. I was dumbstruck, the afterglow of our kiss burning on my lips, while Bash snatched his backpack up from the floor like a thief startled by flashing blue lights.

  “I gotta run,” he announced in an unnaturally thin voice. “See you later.”

  And then he was out the door. I was so thrown by what had happened, my thoughts such a maelstrom of hope and glee and confusion that I couldn’t concentrate on anything Mr. Cohen asked me for the next ten minutes. I ended up choosing one of the photos at random, my heart smashing around my ribcage like a wrecking ball.

  * * *

  That was only the beginning. After that first amazing kiss, Sebastian was always finding excuses for us to be alone together, pressing his mouth to mine the second we had a little privacy, and not stopping until both of us were lightheaded and short of breath. He wasn’t ready for people to know yet, and begged me not to tell anyone about us. Eager to make him happy—and not especially anxious to deal with the added attention such news would bring me—I promised him it would be our secret.

  In a way, the clandestine nature of our relationship made it even more exciting. The coded glances in public, the way his foot would find mine under the table during meetings for the Front Line, the way we’d arrange to request bathroom passes at the same time so we could meet behind the theater and make out—all of it felt supercharged and sexily dramatic. It bothered me that Sebastian still flirted openly with girls, even right in front of me, because I knew he still actually liked girls; but I also knew why he felt the need to do it, and I believed all the things he said to me in private—how special I was, how happy I made him, how good he felt when we were together—and so I plastered over my jealousies and let myself fall into him.

  It feels pitiful to admit it, in retrospect, but I never thought he would dump me—not the way he did, and certainly not so he could get back with Lia again. He’d told me so many stories about their squabbles and embedded resentments that I honestly thought he’d worked his way free of their mutually destructive relationship for good. And to find out about it like I did, to have to hear it from the ecstatic mouth of Ramona fucking Waverley and not even from Sebastian himself … it tore me in half.

  So it’s with malevolent pleasure that I look forward to seeing him confront Lia now—to watching him face her with the fact that she’s been cheating on him with Arlo. I’m not proud of it, but it’s the truth.

  The Santos family turns out to live in a tidy Cape Cod–style house on the south side of town, in a neighborhood of similar homes that all seem eerily desolate. It’s just midnight as we pull up, and even on a national holiday, there are precious few signs of life. Light, however, flickers in one of the dormer windows facing the street, and Sebastian shifts apprehensively behind the wheel. “That’s Lia’s room.”

  “So she’s here?”

  “Looks like.”

  We all stare out from the Jeep. Suddenly, I’m wondering what we’ll do if she refuses to speak to us; she has no reason to give me the time of day, and if she’s been seeing Arlo behind Sebastian’s back, she probably isn’t too eager to face him, either. A glance up and down the street shows me no signs of the tattooed miscreant’s motorcycle, so at least he doesn’t appear to be here with her.

  From the backseat, April violates the silence of our indecision with a grousing sigh. “Are you waiting for her to come out and confess, or what?”

  “Text her,” I instruct Sebastian. “Tell her you’re out front.”

  With obvious dread, he pulls out his phone and thumbs in a message, which I read over his shoulder: Need to talk. Can you come outside? I’m at the curb.

  He sends it and we wait, watching the flickering light, seconds stretching into minutes. From the backseat, April murmurs in a devious undertone, “Maybe she’s avoiding you.”

  Sebastian tries again. Lia it’s B and I’m outside your house. I’m not going home till you come out here.

  “Are you serious?” I ask him incredulously. “You sound like a stalker—she’s gonna call the police!”

  “Not if she killed Fox,” April interjects, but I’m already grabbing the phone from Sebastian’s hand and typing in a message of my own.

  I know where you were tonight. Either you come outside or I bang on your door till your parents wake up and I tell everybody.

  A half second after I put the phone back in Sebastian’s hand, the light in the dormer window vanishes. Three more minutes pass—during which time I picture her doing everything from calling Arlo for help to slipping into some MILFy lingerie to greet her cuckolded boyfriend—and then the front door eases open, and Lia Santos starts down the front walk.

  She’s one of those girls who’s so wildly beautiful that it’s almost frightening—all bee-stung lips and smoky eyes and flawless brown skin; even the way she moves is impressive somehow. Wearing a rumpled T-shirt and cotton running shorts, her thick, black hair swinging loose in her face like velvet curtains, she still looks like she’s storming the runway at New York Fashion Week, and there’s unmistakable fury in her stride as she approaches the Jeep.

  “Stay in the car,” I command April. “Don’t let her see you. We don’t want anyone to know you’re awake yet.”

  “I get it.” She frowns peevishly, but ducks down out of sight as Sebastian and I open our doors.

  Lia, who was clearly not expecting her boyfriend to have company, draws up short when she reaches the end of the walk, standing in the darkness that pools between streetlights. “What the hell do you want?” she hisses, her arms and shoulders tensed. Then, recognizing me with a startled look, “And what the hell is he doing here?”

  “Nice to see you, too,” I offer, but she ignores me.

  “What the fuck does this text mean, I know where you were tonight?” She thrusts her phone into Sebastian’s face. “This has got to be the saddest, most pathetic attempt you’ve made yet to get my attention, Bash Williams. Seriously, truly pathetic.”

  The air practical
ly crackles in the silence that follows, Lia’s eyes flashing in the shadows as she stares daggers at the two of us. Sebastian lets her outburst ring in the air for a moment. “Are you done?”

  “Screw you,” she spits.

  “Great. We’ve got a couple questions—”

  “You know what? Fuck your questions, Bash! I am so sick of you jerking me around, making promises and messing with my head! I’m done with all of it, so … you know, whatever this is, you can shove it up your ass.”

  She turns to march back up the walk to her house, and I blurt, “Where’s Arlo?”

  Lia freezes and pivots back around, eyeing me warily. “I’ve got no idea. Why are you asking me?” Then, as if she’s suddenly confused, “You mean Arlo Rossi?”

  “Oh, gimme a break,” Sebastian scoffs. “You mean Arlo Rossi? You are the worst liar.”

  “You would know,” she shoots back, immediately venomous, “lying was always your special talent!”

  “Stop it, both of you!” As much as I’m enjoying their tiff, I’m anxious to get to the point; Fox is still lying dead in a cottage some twenty-five miles away, and every other second I seem to have a different, heart-stopping vision of the police finding out about it before we have a chance to tell them ourselves. “Listen, Lia, this is actually important. We know you and Arlo went to a party together tonight, so just level with us, okay?”

  “We didn’t,” she returns adamantly, flustered again, just as bad at lying as Sebastian pointed out. “I’ve got no idea what you’re talking about. Who even told you that?”

  I weigh my options. “April. She was texting me about Fox’s party, and said she’d call me when it was over, only now she’s not answering and I’m getting worried.”

  Lia actually squints at me. “Why would she call you?”

  “Because I’m the only other person she knows who’s still into Supernatural, and she wants us to write some fanfic together,” I retort acerbically. “What she wanted to talk to me about is none of your freaking business, but you were with her tonight, so I want to know what happened.”

  She looks between the two of us, vibrating like a tuning fork, and directs her next question to Sebastian. “So what are you doing here? What do you have to do with this?”

  “Just answer him, okay?” Sebastian sighs. “Please?”

  “She’s probably boning Fox.” The answer comes quickly, and with purposeful bluntness. “Nothing like a little make-up sex to keep you away from the phone, right? Hope that doesn’t scandalize you.”

  I’m trying to figure out if this is a real guess, or if she’s simply trying to distract me with the unwelcome mental image, when she gives her long hair a defiant toss, exposing her face fully to the light for the first time. A nasty purple contusion arches along her left cheekbone and eye socket, stippled with broken blood vessels, and she only seems to realize what she’s shown us a second before Sebastian reacts, lunging forward. “What the hell happened to you? Did Arlo fucking hit you?”

  “No.” She shoves him away, ducking her head down and letting the shadows conceal her injured eye again.

  “Don’t lie for him!”

  “I’m not lying!”

  “I’m gonna fucking kill him,” Sebastian fumes, his face darkening with rage, and I watch as his fists tighten and veins pop up along his forearms. “Where is he?”

  “Oh, get over yourself, Bash!” Lia suddenly snaps. “This ‘jealous protector’ crap isn’t gonna work, so you can just drop it, okay? I am so sick of you thinking you can totally ignore me when we’re together, and then make some great big gesture once we’ve broken up, and that that’ll be good enough—that I’ll just take you back because I’m that desperate for some dude to validate me.”

  “That’s not—”

  “I told you the last time that we were over for good and I meant it.” She makes an emphatic gesture with her hands. “I wasted enough of my life dating you, and you can literally go fuck yourself for all I care.”

  Crickets saw away into the charged stillness that follows, and I turn to Sebastian in surprise. He and Lia broke up again? He won’t look at me, though; he’s still glowering at his—apparently—ex-girlfriend. Through gritted teeth, he says quietly, “If you think the only reason I’d go after a guy who hit you is because I want to impress you, then you don’t know anything about me. Any guy who beats up girls deserves to get his fucking ass kicked. I don’t need another reason.” Then, “And, for the record, I don’t want you back, anyway.”

  “Great, then we finally agree on something,” Lia snaps, although her relief doesn’t seem entirely genuine. “Besides, like I was saying, it wasn’t Arlo—and it wasn’t even on purpose. Arlo and Fox got into a fight, I tried to break it up, and Fox hit me by mistake. No big deal.”

  “What were they fighting about?” Sebastian asks next, and then stuns me by suggesting, “Drugs?”

  A security shutter drops down in Lia’s eyes, and she takes a step back. “I’ve got no idea what you’re talking about. You’ve got no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Please. Everybody knows Arlo and Fox deal shit,” he says, totally matter-of-fact, but I give him another wild-eyed look because—of course—I knew no such thing. As I digest it, though, the statement isn’t so hard to believe; Arlo’s family isn’t wealthy, and he only works part-time at a grocery store, but he’d managed to buy himself a very expensive motorcycle a few months back. I’d never bothered to wonder how he’d pulled off such a trick. And Fox … well, I’ve overheard him and his friends make enough casual re-marks to understand how disturbingly fluent they are with drugs.

  “I’ve got nothing to say about that,” Lia avows firmly. “Arlo is a good person, okay? And if he and Fox got into a fight about … that, then it would’ve been because Fox was trying to do something shady and Arlo didn’t want any part of it. But I didn’t say that, because I don’t know anything about any of it. Okay?”

  “Understood.” With thoughts of Lia’s bruise in mind, I shift out of the light myself. My shorts are still clammy with moisture, and I’m aware that I have bloodstains on my tank top. “So did Arlo leave after the fight?”

  “Yeah, basically.” If she finds the question odd, she doesn’t challenge me on it. “He went to go cool down and stuff, but the party … it kind of broke up a little while after that anyway, and we all left.”

  “All at the same time?”

  Now she seems baffled. “Pretty much, yeah. What difference does it make?”

  “I’m worried about April,” I repeat, as if that explains it.

  Lia sighs extravagantly. “Race took off first, and then Peyton, and then Arlo and me a few minutes later. We passed both of them on the road.”

  “So where’s Arlo now?”

  “At home, probably.” She’s clearly tiring of the conversation. “Not like I keep tabs on him, but that’s where he said he was going when he dropped me off. Why?”

  “I don’t want to go all the way out to Fox’s lake house if it turns out nothing’s up, so I just want to hear what Arlo has to say first. Where does he live?”

  “He’s not going to have anything to say except for what I already told you. And April was hitting the bottle pretty hard tonight, you know? She probably passed out.”

  “Humor me,” I propose. “Give me his address, and we’ll leave you alone.”

  “Promise?” She asks sarcastically. It does the trick, though, and she directs us to a neighborhood that’s conveniently close by. With a pointedly coquettish smile for Sebastian, she purrs, “Tell him I said hi, okay?”

  There’s still one thing I don’t understand, though. Something about the timeline that’s coming together doesn’t quite add up, and it’s begging for attention like a mosquito bite. If Arlo got kicked out, and was so pissed he needed to “cool down,” then why was he last to leave? “It’s not like Arlo to just back down from a fight like that. To let Fox kick his ass and walk away.”

  A curious thing happens; Lia goes complet
ely still, her eyes flashing open wide for a split second before she gets her reaction under control. Her tone is so casual it’s almost flippant when she asks, “What the hell would you know about it?”

  “Considering that I’m one of the guys he beats on the most, let’s just say it’s something I’ve noticed about him,” I return coolly, studying the forced blankness in her expression. There is no smoke without fire, or so they say, and Lia’s shabby performance of indifference is giving off smoke like a few hundred acres of smoldering California brush. “Arlo doesn’t like losing face. He’s a score settler.”

  “Oh, please, like you’d even know.” She speaks quickly, tossing her hair again, an agitated gesture. “They got into a fight. Boys fight sometimes. They got into it, he got over it, we left, and we came straight here. Ask him when you see him—he’ll tell you the same thing.”

  I’m sure he will, I think, but do not say out loud, because you’re going to text him the second you get back inside your house.

  “Thanks for answering our questions,” I reply instead.

  “Don’t come back,” she instructs imperiously. And then she spins around and sails up her front walk without a backward look.

  6

  Sebastian is quiet as we turn and start for the Jeep, his eyes downcast and troubled. Before I can stop myself, I blurt, “You and Lia broke up?”

  It sounds so needy and weak that I curse myself the second the question is out of my mouth, but Sebastian doesn’t even look at me. “Yeah. A few weeks ago. It was kinda ugly.”

  I set my jaw. If he wants sympathy, he’s not going to get it; I spent the entire month of June indulging in lurid, punishing fantasies about Sebastian and Lia groping each other and sharing their Starbucks and shouting a lot right before they went back to groping again, and the whole time I was wishing a plague on both their houses. Finding out their reconciliation barely lasted until summer break should feel rewarding, but in fact it does nothing to assuage my anguish. I still hurt inside.