“I’m just going to the bathroom,” I assured him in my sweetest voice, the one I used on my mother when I was trying to convince her that I wasn’t really the demon child she believed me to be.
On my way back from the washroom, I passed Dustin going the other way down the hallway. On impulse, I grabbed his arm. “Hey, Dustin.”
“Lexi,” he said, happy to see me. “What’s going on?”
Glancing around, I hastily dropped his arm. A few people had witnessed him practically groping me on his basement couch a few weeks ago, and I didn’t want anyone to think we were about to do it again. Especially with my new boyfriend a mere few feet away. Carefully, I leaned in just close enough to be heard over the music. “Is Tyler Flynn coming here tonight?”
He pulled back and looked at me, confused. He’d been so drunk last time, he probably didn’t even remember that Tyler had been here. “No,” he said, and then a light blinked on in his eyes as he caught on. “He doesn’t do that anymore.”
“He doesn’t? Since when?”
“I don’t know. A couple weeks, maybe?” Dustin’s dimples appeared. “Why? You want something? Because I know another guy who can—”
“No,” I said, backing away from him. “I was just wondering.”
Relieved, I went back to Ben, who was still stationed on the couch, talking to a new set of admirers. I took my place next to him, and he reached out to encase my hand securely in his, holding me there.
Chapter Seventeen
Shortly after I found the stash of liquor in the fridge, my mother started coming home with wine on her breath again. By the end of May, she and Jesse had begun spending an excessive amount of time lounging around our house, watching TV and drinking and who knows what else. I wasn’t sure who’d fallen off the wagon first, or if they’d tumbled off together, but I wasn’t about to stick around and figure it out. Dating someone with an extremely active social life came with some advantages. I was always on the go, rarely home.
Ben had reasons to avoid his house, too. His father’s new girlfriend, a ditzy party-girl type who was just five years older than Ben, had started spending weekends at their house. Ben couldn’t stand the girlfriend or her miniature Yorkie dog, which she insisted on bringing with her even though it yipped constantly and wasn’t quite house-trained. Ben and I, both only children of immature parents, shared a common goal—escape our houses as often as possible until college.
We had plenty of excuses to get out. Final exams were creeping up, and since neither of us could get much studying done at home, we spent hours in the local library, sprawled out on the plush sofas with our books. I loved to watch Ben study, loved the little crease that appeared between his eyebrows when he was puzzling over a particularly tough math problem. He never noticed my staring; Ben worked the same way Nolan drew—viciously focused and totally in the zone.
When we weren’t hitting the books, we were hanging out with friends or participating in fundraising activities for student council. Always busy, always moving, always surrounded by people. On the rare occasion we did manage to squeeze in some private downtime, we spent it in his parked car. Just as I’d predicted, the physical side of our relationship was moving at a snail’s pace, likely because I’d somehow given Ben the impression that I was sexually inexperienced. It wasn’t deliberate . . . he’d just never asked, and there never seemed to be a good time to set him straight. As far as he had witnessed over the years, I’d dated occasionally but hadn’t been involved in any serious, long-lasting relationships. Because of that, he assumed I was selective with guys. And possibly a virgin. I didn’t correct him. In fact, I found myself perpetuating the idea, even going so far as to stop him when his hands started exploring. I kind of enjoyed playing the part of the chaste, innocent girl, and it was surprisingly easy for me to slam the brakes with Ben. Brakes had been nonexistent with Tyler, and even if they had existed, I would have been too preoccupied to notice them, let alone slam them.
I tried not to think about how it had been with Tyler. Every thought of him was like a stick poking a sleeping animal inside me, rousing it, making it stretch and growl and try to claw its way out. Back when I’d loved Ben from afar, I’d been so sure that if we ever got together he’d be enough for me, that I’d no longer crave the release of those moments in my bedroom with Tyler. But I never stopped craving, and the pressure kept building. I missed the exhilaration and buzz I felt around him, even when we were fighting. With Tyler, even conflict was satisfying, in a way.
Conflict with Ben, on the other hand, was entirely different. Fighting with him left me feeling small. Stupid. Wrong. His eyes didn’t burn when he was angry; they cut. Winning an argument against him was virtually impossible. He never yelled or lost control of his emotions. Instead, he acted infuriatingly calm and rational, which made his opponent seem like a crazy person in comparison. He’d learned this tactic during his two years on our school’s debate team, and he’d never lost a debate. Not one.
Ninety-nine percent of our arguments had something to do with Nolan. The amount of time we spent together, how we acted with each other, how we looked to others. For example, one day in the first week of June, I made the grievous mistake of flaunting my friendship with him in the school hallways for everyone to see. Meaning, he walked me to my locker after physics class, like always. Ben was at my locker waiting for me and saw us together, laughing over a private joke and looking—at least to Ben—entirely too chummy. It wasn’t that he was possessive, exactly. It was more that he was acutely aware of how others viewed him. He was popular and visible, which made me popular and visible. Therefore, whatever I did reflected upon him. And the spectacle of his girlfriend walking and talking and giggling with a misfit loser like Nolan Bruce did not reflect well on Ben at all. Or on me, for that matter.
As for Nolan, he knew exactly what Ben was thinking as we approached him at my locker, but Ben’s opinions had zero impact on Nolan. He behaved as usual, squeezing my shoulder and saying, “Catch you later, Lex” before disappearing down the hall.
Beside me, Ben quietly seethed. “Do you even care,” he said calmly, “that it bothers me?”
Things had been so much easier when Ben spent his lunch hour in various meetings. Now that senior year was winding down, most clubs had disbanded for the year. The abundance of free time meant he’d shifted his full attention to me.
I shoved my books in my locker, feigning ignorance. “What bothers you?”
Ben never rolled his eyes when annoyed or impatient. Instead, his face and neck turned pink and blotchy, as if he’d suddenly broken out in hives. An allergic reaction to cluelessness. “You and him.” Each word was slow and deliberate.
“There is no ‘me and him.’ We’ve gone over this a million times already.”
I spotted Shelby over his shoulder, standing in front of her open locker and watching us, one hand on her protruding belly. Our eyes met and she gave me a brief, sympathetic smile, reminding me she’d been on the receiving end of Ben’s discontent once or twice, too. But this is different, I thought, flicking my eyes back to Ben’s. He’d dumped Shelby for getting drunk and dirty dancing with Evan. I’d done nothing but spend time with my best friend.
“Be reasonable, Lexi,” Ben said. Be reasonable was his go-to phrase, a precursor to whatever well-thought-out, valid point he was about to make. “The guy hates me. He’s always hated me, and now I know why. He’s jealous.”
I shut my locker and bent over the combination lock, letting my hair cover my face as I snapped the lock into place and spun the dial. Ben wasn’t used to being disliked, so naturally he assumed the fault must lie with Nolan, but jealousy had nothing to do with why he didn’t like Ben. He thought Ben was a phony. Nolan thought the same about Emily . . . and me too, when I was with them. He tolerated my school image only because I’d never let it spill over into my relationship with him. He endured the other Lexi with the made-up face and altered reality because he knew, deep down, she only had one true friend and he
was it.
But that wasn’t the Nolan Ben knew. The Nolan Ben knew was distorted by two years of bumming rides and deliberately antagonizing and the fact that he shared a long, anonymous past with me. Those were his crimes, and Nolan had been tried and convicted for them.
“People say things about you two,” Ben went on, his voice low and close in my ear. “Everyone thinks your friendship is weird. Everyone. They think something’s going on between you guys and that I’m just too blind to see it. But I do see it. I see the way he looks at you, Lexi. And I don’t like it.” He reached up and tugged on one of my curls, just like Tyler used to do.
I felt myself soften.
“Maybe it’s me who’s jealous,” Ben said, lowering his hand. His fingers brushed against my cheek, light as air.
I looked up at his beautiful face, the face I used to gaze at and dream about and wish I could kiss whenever I wanted. Now I could. The pressure inside me dissolved, along with all the words I longed to fling at him, words about my life and my past and everything I’d been through, and how Nolan and his parents had been there for me the entire time, supporting me, the only family I knew.
But Ben wouldn’t fully trust me, I realized, until I showed that I trusted him. So later, when we were alone in his car together after school and I felt the pressure start building again, secrets straining to get out, I set one free. I told him everything I knew about my father.
“Lexi? Hi. Thanks for calling me back.”
“Sure.” It was crazy, how I was starting to get used to Eric’s voice. We’d spoken on the phone four times, and like the emails, each time it got a little easier. The animosity I felt toward him was always there, lingering in the background and sometimes surfacing in my tone, but that never seemed to discourage him. He just kept calling, kept trying.
“I know last night wasn’t one of our scheduled calls,” he continued. “But Renee and I had a discussion yesterday and I have something I want to run by you.”
He sounded nervous, like a young boy gathering the courage to ask a girl to dance. I leaned back on the couch, waiting. I was at Nolan’s house again, but I was in the family room instead of his bedroom. Less private, yes, but also less weird. And instead of Hugo in the room with me, I had Gus, who was snoring away on the blanket-covered couch cushion beside me.
“Okay,” I said after a long pause.
“So we had an idea. Well, Renee had an idea and I agreed with it. That’s usually how it works with us. She’s the brains in this marriage. But anyway.” He cleared his throat.
My father, I’d learned, tended to ramble.
“How would you feel about coming to visit us this summer?”
I bolted upright. A visit? Actually see him? I was still getting used to talking to him on the phone. A visit would be too much. Too soon. I wasn’t sure how to respond. Ironically, even though I felt bitter toward him, I didn’t want to hurt his feelings or disappoint him, this man who’d let me down over and over my entire life. What the hell was wrong with me? Low self-esteem and need for approval, Emily would tell me, another nugget of wisdom from her psych teacher mom.
Answer. He wanted an answer. After a few moments, I finally settled on, “I don’t think so.”
He let out a breath. “I understand if you’re not ready for that. No pressure. Just throwing it out there. But it’s a standing offer, okay? If you ever change your mind, just let me know and I’ll send you a plane ticket right away. Anytime. I’d love to see you.”
He dropped the subject, and we talked about other things for a few minutes before hanging up. Our phone calls might have been getting easier, but my body still felt depleted afterward, like a battery drained of its voltage. While I waited to recharge, I flopped back on the couch pillows and reached for Nolan’s sketch pad, which was on the end table next to me, and started idly flipping through it.
Faces peered back at me, some smiling, some not, each of them an almost perfect replica of the subject. A couple were newer ones of me wearing expressions Nolan had taken notice of and felt the need to recreate on paper. Me with a serious, haunted look in my eyes. Me with my lips gently curving up, cautiously happy. And with freckles. Always with my freckles.
I turned a few more pages, pinching the far corner of the paper so I wouldn’t smudge anything, until I came to some older sketches at the back of the book. One was of Shelby, her face way less bloated than it was these days, and several of Amber with shorter hair. When I flipped the page again, another familiar face greeted me, a face I hadn’t seen up close in a while and certainly didn’t expect to ever see in Nolan’s sketch pad. I stared at it, my tired body suddenly zinging to life.
Footsteps pounded down the stairs and Nolan appeared in the family room, his eyes bloodshot from studying all day. Exams started next week. “You done?” he asked, sitting on the other side of Gus. He gaze flicked to his sketch pad, which I held facedown against my chest, before settling on my face. “What’d he say this time? You look really pale again.”
“He wants me to visit him in Alton this summer,” I said without looking at Nolan.
“Really?” He paused, digesting this news. “Are you going to?”
I glanced at him and shook my head. “I still feel like I barely know the guy.”
He nodded in understanding. “He can’t expect you to trust him right off. He has a lot of years to make up for.”
I looked away, my fingers clutching either side of the pad. Nolan was undoubtedly wondering why I had it, but he said nothing. Gus’s snores grew louder, and out of the corner of my eye I could see Nolan’s fingertips, smudged with graphite like usual, sliding along the dog’s shiny coat. Trust, I thought. Nolan could do anything to that dog, even dress him up in tight, itchy sweaters, and Gus would never lash out. He trusted his owner that much.
“Nolan,” I said quietly as I turned the sketch pad over and tilted it toward him. “What’s this?”
He glanced at the page and then back down at Gus. “It’s a sketch of Tyler Flynn. Good, right? I added a copy of that one to my portfolio when I applied to art school. I needed to show I could draw entire people and not just faces.”
“I know it’s a sketch of Tyler Flynn,” I said. “My question is why do you have a sketch of Tyler Flynn? And like this?”
Nolan cocked his head at the drawing, scrutinizing it. I didn’t have to look at it again. It was already tattooed into my brain. Tyler in a crouching position on a dead patch of grass, elbows resting on his knees, face angled downward, dark eyes gazing at something unseen at ground level. The background was shaded to represent nighttime, but Tyler himself appeared to be illuminated, as if he’d been caught in the beam of a flashlight. Or the glow of a nearby window. In the foreground stood a desolate lilac tree, its branches spindly and bare. Just like the one in my front yard, before it sprouted flowers.
The sketch was good. Amazing, in fact. It wasn’t hard to see why Nolan had been accepted into a local art school, even with his so-so grades. What was hard to understand, at least for me, was why he’d drawn a picture of Tyler Flynn outside my bedroom window. Nolan only drew things he’d observed with his own two eyes.
“I just thought it was interesting,” he said, raising his eyebrows at me.
I dropped the sketch pad on the coffee table in front of us. “How long have you known about this?”
“About you and Tyler Flynn? Since November, I guess. One night I couldn’t sleep so I took Gus out for a walk. I saw him just like that,” he said, gesturing to the sketch. “At first, I thought he was breaking into your house and I almost called the cops, but then I saw you opening the window for him.”
“Why didn’t you ever mention it to me?”
“What was I supposed to say? ‘Hey Lexi, it’s come to my attention that you’re having a secret affair with the school drug dealer?’ ” He shrugged. “I assumed you had your reasons for keeping quiet about it, even though I don’t get why you would.”
I studied the sketch again. A depiction of Tyl
er through Nolan’s eyes, captured from an angle I’d never seen. He was the one thing I’d managed to keep hidden from everyone in my life, even my closest friend. Or so I’d thought. And now my secret was exposed, literally documented in black and white.
“You know why, Nolan,” I said, my tone harsh and impatient. I rarely spoke to him that way, but it seemed like he was being purposely obtuse. He went to Oakfield High. He was aware of the social hierarchy there, how tenuous it could be. He refused to play the game, but he still knew the score. “How could you draw this?”
He stopped petting Gus and stared at me. “What’s the big deal? You’re not in the picture. No one would ever connect it with you.”
“That’s not the point. It’s—” I sat up straight, head throbbing as my blood—along with everything that had transpired in the last half hour—rushed to my head, overwhelming me. “It feels like I’m in it. To me. You must’ve known how embarrassing it would be for me to see this sketch. To find out you . . . know what you know.”
“So what if I know? It’s me, remember? I’m not gonna shun you for hooking up with someone who’s not on the A-list.”
I knew that. Knew Nolan would never judge me for Tyler. Still, it made me uncomfortable at times, how easily he saw through me. The Lexi he saw was still the same girl I’d spent the last three years trying to transform. A girl who ran to him for security and trusted him with her sad, ugly truths. A girl whose shame and weaknesses were so strong, they sometimes leaked through her perfect veneer and claimed her, reminding her of who she really was. A girl I hated.
Nolan’s sketch pad was just loaded with that girl. I picked it up, making Tyler disappear as I turned to the newest sketch of me. Why did he draw me like this? No makeup, frizzy hair. He’d even added the zit I’d had on my forehead at the time. Did he try to make me look awful?
“I draw you the way I see you,” he said as if I’d asked those questions out loud.
“Well.” I tossed the sketch pad back on the table and looked at him, sitting there in his blue OPTIMUS FOR PRESIDENT Transformers T-shirt, watching my expression carefully, storing it away for future reference like always. “Maybe I don’t like the way you see me. I’ve changed, Nolan. I’m not the same pathetic girl who used to sit around playing video games with you all night. I have a life now. Friends, a boyfriend.” Ben’s face filled my mind, and my next words popped out as if the image of him had possessed my vocal chords. “And while we’re on the subject, Ben doesn’t like the way you see me either.”
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