by LJ Evans
Trouble’s name was Seth, and he showed up just after Christmas my junior year. He’d moved in from New York City. And the rumors came with him. He’d been in and out of trouble back East. His parents had sent him to live here with his grandparents, yada, yada, yada. Your typical bad boy. It wasn’t normally my thing. After all, you were truly my only “thing,” and you were the opposite of a bad boy.
I will say this. He was gorgeous. Dark like you, but in a totally different way. I think his family was Cuban or Puerto Rican. He was muscled too. But more like I’ll-beat-the-crap-out-of-you muscles than jock muscles. Your five o’clock shadow only appeared at the end of a very long night and was all scruffy Southern farm boy. His five o’clock shadow seemed a permanent fixture.
He rolled in on a stereotypical bad boy motorcycle complete with a black jacket and black combat boots. He had a tattoo of a tiger on his arm that peeped out below his black t-shirt and made every single girl in the parking lot that day sigh a deep, lusting sigh. Not many high school boys in our Southern town had tattoos. And he replaced his helmet with dark glasses that made you wonder constantly what was going on behind them. He rarely took them off. Mostly when teachers demanded it, and even they seemed to be too intimidated to ask him sometimes.
Maybe it was fate that I wasn’t there when he first pulled up. I pulled up after him. And he was in my spot. We had assigned spots. He probably didn’t know that being his first day and all, but I’d paid good money for my spot in the parking lot, and I’d be damned if I was going to let him take it.
So, he was just walking away from his bike when I hollered out the window of my Jeep at him, “Yo, stupid!”
And he turned back and gave me the laziest smile I think I’d ever seen. He lowered his glasses to show off a pair of brilliant blue eyes that contrasted with the rest of his heritage and gleamed like sapphires hit by a ray of sunshine.
He sauntered up over to my Jeep and put his tan, muscled arm on the windowsill. He had his leather jacket flung over his other shoulder in a careless manner that added completely and absolutely to his I-don’t-give-a-rats-ass-about-anything persona.
“What can I do for you little lady?” And his attempt at Southern manners with his New York Bronx accent just made me laugh. Right in his face. This made his smile lower a level, and I saw a glimmer of something in his eyes before he hid the brilliant blues behind his glasses again.
“You’re in my spot,” I said with as much condescension and Southern-daddy’s-girl attitude as I could muster.
“There’s a lot of you I’d like to be in. Your spot is just one of them.”
I rolled my eyes at him and pushed his arm off the window.
“Move your bike, or I’ll have someone move it for you.”
Seth laughed. He had a good laugh. Not the baritone, tummy-rolling laugh that you had, but a sarcastic, devil-may-care type of laugh. He just smiled and started walking away.
Thank God Keith showed up with a bunch of the football team crammed in his SUV. I jumped out, explained to Keith that some a-hole had parked in my spot, and the team obliged me by picking up his motorcycle and storing it on top of one of the school’s planter boxes.
Seth watched from the steps of the school. I thought he’d be pissed, but he wasn’t. Or at least, he wasn’t showing it. He was smiling, like it was a game that he was very much amused at. When I had parked my Jeep, and got to the doorway of the school, he stepped in alongside me.
“So, I guess you’re the one,” he said.
“Pardon me?”
He just snickered and walked away. Later, I realized that that had been both a promise and a threat.
Seth was in a couple of my classes. Girls were fawning all over him like they used to fawn over you. It was sickening at the same time as it was a challenge of sorts. And I needed a challenge to sidetrack me from you. From the lack of you. We were barely texting each other a couple times a week. And they were always brief and full of stupid, faraway nonsense.
And even though Seth was a good challenge when he was around, I just played it off like I didn’t care an inch about him. But I’d watch him when he didn’t know it, and I knew he was watching me because I could feel his laser blue eyes, even through his dark glasses, watching me walk the quad.
You were smooth like a milkshake. Seth was slick like baby oil. And he was probably the only guy who’d made me look twice at anyone other than you in my entire life… and maybe Matt. But Matt had been more about curiosity and making you jealous. And I’d never looked twice at you. I’d stared with complete and utter idolization for seventeen long years.
By the end of February, Seth had already left a small chain of used and slaughtered hearts and bodies behind him. Girls were licking their wounds and yet not being able to say anything bad about him because they would have jumped back into his arms as quick as a water bug into the lake if he’d snapped his fingers.
He reminded me of Danny Zuko without the nice side. So, when he asked me out, I knew he didn’t intend for it to end well. That he didn’t intend the chain of broken hearts to end with me. To him, I’d be just another link in it. But I felt safe because there was no way he was ever going to get my heart. My heart had already been carved out and given to you years ago. Probably the day I was born.
The first day he asked me out, I said, “Hell no.” And he didn’t even care, he laughed and walked away. The second time he asked me out, I just shrugged and told him that if he could come up with something entertaining, I was in. Then I called and cancelled on him at the last minute. By the look he gave me on Monday, I could tell I’d started a battle that he was determined to win. It thrilled me a little. To know I had some power over someone when I had no power over you.
He started leaving little sayings on the windshield of my Jeep. They were sort of philosophical and poetic for a guy who looked like he was ready to knife you for your iPhone. It made me a little curious. What was behind the glasses and leather jacket? What had he done in the Bronx that had gotten him sent here when he had this side of him that seemed so wistful? True, at that point, I was thinking that he was raiding some poetry website, but he still had to find the saying to write out for me, right? Later, I found out that it was his own poetry. He was a dichotomy.
One day, he was listening to some rock band on his phone outside homeroom, and I said I liked it and asked who the band was. He told me and then plugged in earbuds so that I could hear it better. This made all the girls in the hall glare at me. Well, at least the ones who wanted to jump his bones, or already had and been dumped. The next day, he left me a CD on my windshield.
That Saturday morning, he showed up on my doorstep with my favorite Starbucks Frappuccino. I don’t even know how he found out what it was. Maybe Wynn? Maybe he’d tailed me after school because it was an addiction of mine? I don’t know. But it was my favorite. With the chocolate drizzle and everything.
When he knocked on the door, my mama eyed him up and down and I think would have said, “Hell no,” just like I had said, but I didn’t let her. I slid past her, grabbed the cup from him, and then curled up in my fuzzy slippers on the porch swing. Seth sat up on the porch rail looking completely at home, as if he’d been here a hundred times doing the same thing. He was like that a lot. Completely at ease. Or at least, like the tiger on his arm, making it look like he was at ease when really he was about to pounce.
“You’re a puzzle,” he told me.
“How’s that?”
“Well, I hear that you’re a little edgy and crazy. Willing to punch out a guy twice your age, but you look all girly and soft.”
I rolled my eyes even though I was kindof thrilled inside. To know that someone, who hadn’t known me my whole life, thought I looked like a girl. Hadn’t that been what I wanted from you for so very long? To be treated like a girl. Well, to be fair to you, I’d wanted the best of both worlds, but it was still thrilling to know that what he saw made him look twice. At least, that’s what I
read into what he said.
“And that,” Seth went on after my eye roll. “You do that, and it just drives me crazy. Like you think I’m just some annoying little flea.”
“I just think you’re predictable.”
Seth smiled at that. It wasn’t a warm smile. It was actually a smile that said I’d dared him, and that he’d accepted it. But it was also a really good-looking smile. I felt like I was playing with fire. It was an adrenaline rush. For the few moments I was with him, it made me forget about you. It was like diving. For those few seconds I was in the air, it was always just me, the wind, and the adrenaline.
“Let me take you out tonight. It won’t be predictable.”
I got up off the swing and headed for the door. “Promises, promises,” I said and went inside.
But Seth showed up at six o’clock. On his bike. I wasn’t sure my parents were going to let me get on the back of that thing with him. Mama was a little panicked. I bet she was wishing that she had you back in her living room instead of this boy from the Bronx with a leather jacket and a motorcycle.
They had a hushed conversation in the kitchen, but I could hear it anyway. Daddy knew better than to tell me a direct no. He knew that if they refused to let me go that I would be only too happy to defy it. It would be a new challenge for me. He knew my stubborn side just as well as you did. I think he thought that I’d wise up and figure out Seth wasn’t the thing for me all on my own. And he trusted me. Probably more than he should have, but he did.
Anyway, in the end, they let me go and I waved at them as I put on the helmet Seth handed me. “What, no complaints about it messing with your hair?” he asked sardonically.
I grinned because he obviously didn’t understand how little like a girl I really was. “Maybe it will be an improvement,” I said. He laughed and helped me buckle the chin strap.
We got on his bike and rode off. And the truth was, that date wasn’t predictable. He drove like a crazy man which was thrilling and scary and very much like flying through the air, but when we pulled up to a stop, it was outside the junkyard. What guy takes a girl to the junkyard on a date? Especially a first date?
I didn’t ask why we were there, which I think had to surprise him a little. How many times had I been to the junkyard on a date? Or at all? But he didn’t comment either. Instead, he greeted the guy at the gate with a handshake and a shoulder pat which made me realize he’d been there a lot. Then, with me tailing him, he started gathering different pieces of scrap metal, glass, and junk. He told me my job was to find something green and shiny. So, I wandered around for a while on my own until I found this broken plate that looked like an antique my grandma had in her house. I brought it back to him all excited like a hunting dog bringing back the duck to its owner. He took it from me, flipped it over a few times, and then shoved it into the saddle bag of his bike not seeming impressed at all.
I almost asked about it, but then he turned around, grabbed me around the waist and kissed me. And I tell you, it wasn’t soft like Matt or slobbery like Luke. And it wasn’t like your kiss that would reach my toes, but it was demanding and hard. And angry in a way. And I liked it. And I kissed him back with my own fierceness and anger. Probably directed at you, like I could get even with you by kissing this boy in the way I really wanted to kiss you.
He laughed when he pulled away. “I knew it. All fire inside,” he said and handed me my helmet.
I got back on, put my arms around his waist, and he drove crazy, like a madman again, back down the country roads to his grandparents’, house. It was a ranch not far from Matt and Blake’s grandparents. We never went in to say hello to grannie and pappy though. Seth wasn’t that kind of kid.
He drove to a barn out back, flung open the doors, grabbed his bags and went in. I followed. Not like a puppy dog this time, but because I was curious.
Inside was crazy. Like a museum gone haywire. He had statues made of wire and gems, and a whole mountain with a waterfall he’d crafted out of stone and metal and glass. It was incredible. He was a junk artist. I’d heard about it in Art 101, but never really seen it. I strolled around looking as he unloaded our new finds onto a table at the back.
“Where’d you learn to do this?” I asked.
He shrugged.
“Some of it’s amazing.”
That got his attention. He leaned against his workbench, legs crossed at the ankle, arms crossed against his chest with a sardonic smile, “Some of it?”
“Well, you know, I don’t really like the piece with the urinal. It’s kind of gross.”
He laughed. “That was a tribute to Marcel Duchamp.”
“Who?”
He smiled again and crossed the room to me. “He was the one who started all this.” He waved his hand at the room. Then he picked me up by the waist, carried me over to the workbench, and plopped me down on it. He ran his hands over my legs and then dragged my head down to his and kissed me hard. My teenage hormones that had been longing for you, jumped up and down quite a bit. He was a damn good kisser. Not you. But close.
I pulled back and grabbed the broken green plate I’d found in the junkyard from the pile on the workbench. “What are you going to do with this?”
“I’m doing a bird in a gilded cage trying to break free. This will probably be part of the bird.”
“Is it supposed to represent you?”
“No. You.”
I looked at him so surprised that I almost dropped the plate. He laughed and took it away from me like it was a precious stone he didn’t want to lose.
“Let’s go get some pizza,” he said and led me out of the shed.
♫ ♫ ♫
And that started my new relationship. Mia and Wynn hated him. They’d seen the long trail of girls he’d left behind him. They didn’t like the way he could be callous and cruel with his words to me, to my friends, to everyone. I just took it in stride. He was just Seth. Honest. Direct. Not really any games. Or at least that’s what I thought at the beginning. So… like me. He didn’t promise to be faithful. Didn’t ask me to be. But we were. But I also knew it wasn’t a requirement. If he was interested in someone else, he would have moved on.
And as I got to know him a little better, I realized he was driven by his own pain just as I was being driven by mine. I liked the adrenaline rush of a dive to help me forget. He liked the adrenaline rush of speed. The bike was always going way too fast, and it scared me to death sometimes, but I didn’t stop him. I just let him drive. Because I understood the need to do so. In that moment’s adrenaline rush, there was momentary peace. For me, it was from thoughts of you. For Seth? Not sure.
I think the whole school was waiting with bated breath for him to dump me and find the next bit of skirt. But when he didn’t, it became an interesting thing to talk about. What had I done that had snagged him when the others had been left bleeding behind him? What on earth interested me about him when I could have had any of the good Southern boys who’d wanted me?
There were a couple things I think I had done. One, was I could make him angry in a flash and didn’t back down when he was that way. I got just as angry. Sometimes it made me think of you and Brittney. The way I thought you used to argue with her just so you could make up. Because when Seth got really angry, he’d responded by kissing the hell out of me. It was weird. We’d be screaming at each other about me not calling him or him not picking me up from dive practice like he said he would, and the next moment, he had his hand at the back of my head dragging me into a kiss that said he didn’t give a rat’s ass about any of that. He only cared about kissing me.
The other thing that kept him wasn’t anything I had done, it was the thing I hadn’t done. I hadn’t let him get all the way into my pants. Not that we hadn’t gone far. We had. And God did it feel good to be touched and stroked and demanded of again. And I kissed him back hard and touched him in places you often hadn’t let me touch. It was a good exploration. I felt like I was gaining good
experience. That someday I could use it to surprise the hell out of you. And I think that’s really what stopped me from letting him go too far. Your face popping in my head. Because at the end of the day, I still needed you to be that first one.
The more I said no, the more it seemed to drive him to try. Not in a violent, threatening way, but in a tiger pursuing its prey kind of way. I knew that if I gave in, I’d be like Wynn with Pete. Like the long list of girls Seth had left behind him already.
So, we played this game, Seth and I, of pushing each other, driving each other, challenging each other. He taught me how to drive his bike, which was thrilling and crazy. I taught him how to dive off the platform at Coach’s dive school. He told me about the Bronx, his psycho dad, and the scary-as-hell life he’d lived there. I didn’t tell him much. I think he’d heard a lot of it anyway, or maybe he didn’t care. Maybe he was so wrapped up in what was going on inside his own head that he didn’t have enough room to learn about someone else’s pain. He was a twisted soul all on his own. And he was driven by so much inner creativity and anger. You could see it in his work. I could see his genius. But I could also see his dark side.
As the winter faded into spring and the air became warm again, he became my new racing partner at the lake. He didn’t fight fair. He’d cheat any way he could and declare it a win. At first, when I complained, he just laughed and said, “Little girl, haven’t you learned that life isn’t fair? Get used to it.”
But it was another good challenge for me. He had way more upper body strength than me like you had, but the same as you, he couldn’t compete with the dolphin in the water, so I could still beat him a lot. That drove Seth crazy. Sometimes, he’d get angry about it, and one time, he left me at the lake before coming back for me an hour later. Sometimes, he’d just push me into the lake off the dock. Sometimes, he’d kiss me till neither of us had any breath left.