Emmy & Oliver

by Robin Benway

  “You have to come tonight,” I told him. “It’ll be fun, and Caro and Drew and I will all be there.”

  “Yeah, but I don’t know anyone else.” He scratched at his arm and looked down at his board, avoiding my gaze. “I mean, I barely know them.”

  “Well, you’re not going to get to know them if you stay home with your mom and Rick and the twins,” I pointed out. “And they’re great, but I can’t lie, it’s not exactly Social City over at your house.”

  Oliver stared out at the horizon.

  “Just come on,” I urged. “You said yourself that you didn’t want to be stuck at home with the twins watching you. Look, if you hate it, we can leave. If people are mean to you, I’ll beat them up.” I lifted my arm and flexed my muscle. “See? I’m pretty strong. And intimidating, too.”

  “Really.” Oliver seemed both amused and deeply unimpressed.

  “Really,” I told him as we bobbed in the water, listening to the small waves crash behind us.

  “Fine,” he finally said, then pushed himself back up on his board. “You win. I’ll go. Now c’mon, the towering surf awaits!” He gestured toward the (very flat) ocean and I hopped up on my board next to him.

  “You really do suck at this,” I teased him as we started to paddle out farther. “I’m just taking pity on you.”

  “We shall see!” he yelled. He paddled faster, just out of my reach, the way he always seemed to be.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  After surfing, we went over to Caro’s so I could give her a ride to the party. “Come up!” she yelled from her balcony, half her head in hot rollers and only one eye completely made up. “I’m not ready yet! Tell David to let you in!”

  “Caro’s older brother,” I filled in when Oliver gave me a questioning look. “He’s cool. He’s mostly stoned.”

  “Ah,” Oliver said as David opened the door. His eyes were heavy, like a basset hound who desperately needed a nap. “Hey, dudes,” he said to both of us. “Oliver! Cool. Good times.”

  Oliver looked at me again but I just brushed past David, grabbing Oliver’s wrist and dragging him behind me. “Hey, David,” I said, then whispered to Oliver, “Hurry, before he starts a conversation.”

  “He can have a conversation?” Oliver asked.

  We went upstairs to Caro’s room that she shared with her older sister Heather. There was a pile of laundry in the hallway, right next to an empty laundry basket. We stepped around it and went into Caro’s room.

  It was always easy to tell Caro’s side of the room: it was organized to an alarming degree. Drew once asked Caro if she used a ruler to make sure everything was at right angles. When she just blinked at him and said, “Obviously,” we became a little worried. But if you shared a room with Heather, you would probably be a complete neatnik, too.

  Because Heather, like I said before, is a natural disaster disguised as a human being.

  “Welcome to hell!” Caro said cheerfully, waving us in and around a pile of shoes, none of which matched. She gestured to a bottle of hand sanitizer that was on her desk. “Use it if you feel like you have to,” she told us. Oliver was still in the doorway, his eyes wide as he took in the scene. “I know,” Caro said when she saw his face. “It’s a lot to contemplate.”

  “It’s like watching two movies at the same time,” he replied.

  “Right?” Caro cried. “I mean”—she gestured to Heather’s side of the room, where there was a huge pile of sheets and blankets that presumably hid a bed—“she could have a family of kangaroos under there and I wouldn’t know. If I don’t show up to class next week, just assume that it’s because I’ve been stampeded by kangaroos.”

  I gingerly stepped around the shoes and went over to Caro’s side, sitting on the floor next to her desk. (The bed was so neatly made that I was afraid of mussing the hospital corners.) There were pens and pencils lined up in alternating order on her desk and highlighters in ROYGBIV formation in a plastic cup next to them. I didn’t need to open the drawer to know that her Post-it notes were organized in the exact same way.

  “So, are you so psyched?” Caro said, heading back to the bathroom. “First school party, Oliver. Get ready for . . . well, nothing really. We just hang out. It’s not like the movies.”

  “Can’t wait,” he said. I could tell he was still a little freaked out by the difference between the two bedroom halves and I patted the floor next to me. “It’s safe down here,” I said.

  “I’m actually afraid to touch things anywhere,” he whispered, stepping around the shoes. “Do any of those even match?”

  “Nope!” Caro called from the bathroom without even looking to see what he was talking about. “If Heather’s limbs weren’t attached to her body, she would just leave them lying around wherever. It’s a little frightening. And she has a driver’s license, so steer clear.”

  “No pun intended,” I added, tracing a circle with my fingertip into the worn carpet. The room had been Caro’s older brothers’ before they moved out, and it showed. There were even some Batman stickers on Caro’s bed frame, which she had artfully hidden with pillows.

  “I’m counting down the days until one of us moves out of here,” Caro called from the bathroom, then stuck her head out the door and pointed at me. “You plus me plus community college equals apartment.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Please. Like my mom would ever let me move out. You should hear her speech about how dorms are dangerous because of meningitis. It’s a party-killer.”

  “Your mom loves me,” Caro said, ducking back into the bathroom. “Tell her I’ll have hand sanitizer in every room. No one’s getting meningitis, not on my watch.”

  Oliver was still making his way through the room and I started to say something when I saw him pick up Caro’s old baby doll. Alice had been around since Caro’s first days on earth and it also showed: there was a skid mark on her nose from where one of Caro’s brothers had used her in a game of catch (and missed); a coffee stain on her cloth arm; and one button eye completely missing, thanks to their old Labrador, Noodle, who apparently had a thing for buttons. Caro never said this, but I knew she put Alice on the bed with her good eye facing Caro’s side of the room, sparing her the indignity of having to spend eternity staring at Heather’s disaster area.

  “Alice,” Oliver said.

  Caro immediately stuck her head out of the bathroom door, her eyes wide as she looked at me, then Oliver. “You remember Alice?” she asked.

  Oliver nodded, carefully smoothing down Alice’s threadbare dress before setting her back down. “You brought her to show-and-tell,” he said, then huffed out a little laugh. “Sorry, I just made things super weird, didn’t I?”

  “No, no,” both Caro and I started to say. And he hadn’t, but I still felt a tiny chill run across my arms, like a seven-year-old Oliver had hovered in the doorway for a second and I had only just missed seeing him.

  “It’s not weird,” Caro continued. “It’s sweet. Alice appreciates it.”

  It’s weird, Oliver mouthed to me as he sat down on the floor. “Sorry.”

  “It’s fine,” I whispered back, making room for him. “Don’t worry so much.”

  “What happened to her other eye?” Oliver asked, but before I could answer, Caro came back in the room.

  “Ems, what are you wearing?”

  I looked down at my jeans and top. “This? We just got back from surfing and I already know everyone at this party, so I don’t have to dress to impress.”

  Caro gestured to her closet. “Feel free to borrow something. Please.”

  I sighed and got up. At least she wasn’t saying anything about my hair, which was still damp with salt water and up in a bun. “Fine. Where’s that sweater you got last week?”

  Caro poked her head out of the bathroom again, this time with an eyelash curler clamped around her left eyelashes, and jabbed a finger in the direction of Heather’s bed. “Don’t even talk to me about it,” she muttered.

  “What is that?” Olive
r suddenly asked.

  We turned to look at him as he gestured to Caro’s eye. “Are you, like, plucking out your eyelashes or something?”

  I was the first one who started laughing. Caro, out of self-preservation, waited until she had released the curler. “What?” Oliver said, smiling a little like someone who suspected there was a hidden camera nearby. “Is this something I should know?”

  “It’s an eyelash curler,” Caro told him. “It makes your eyelashes . . . swoopy.”

  “It’s sort of redundant to define ‘eyelash curler,’” I pointed out. “It’s pretty evident what it is from the name.”

  Oliver got up and walked over to take it from Caro. He was taller than both of us and in the bathroom doorway, he seemed impossibly large. Didn’t she feel crowded? “This is medieval,” he said, opening and closing it. It looked a lot smaller in his big hand than it had in Caro’s. “You actually use this? What if you blink?”

  “You don’t,” Caro and I chorused.

  “What if, like, someone slams the door while you’re using it and you blink just because that’s what you do when someone slams the door?”

  “Then your eyelid is bald and you have a psychopath living in your house,” I said, taking it back from him and giving it to Caro.

  “That is some Game of Thrones–level shit right there,” he said.

  “You’ve seriously never seen one of those before,” I said. “How is that possible?”

  He shrugged. “Two guys living together for ten years without a mom or sister. You do the math.”

  “You had a mom!” Caro called out from the bathroom. I could tell from her voice that she was applying mascara now, blithe and oblivious to Oliver’s small wince. “You just didn’t know where she was!”

  Time to intervene.

  “Can I borrow that after you?” I yelled to her, examining my nail polish.

  “My mascara?”

  “Yeah!”

  “You’re not supposed to share eye makeup! What if I have pinkeye?”

  “It’d be an honor to share pinkeye with you, Caro.”

  The tube came flying out of the bathroom a few seconds later.

  “Thank you!”

  Finally, after Caro had finished her eye makeup and I found a shirt in her dresser (folded as neatly as an envelope, of course), we were ready to go. “What about me?” Oliver teased, holding out his arms. “Now I’m really self-conscious about how straight my eyelashes are.”

  I tugged at his shirt and rolled my eyes as we left behind the half-Pollock, half-Mondrian bedroom. “Embrace your uniqueness,” I told him. “And watch out for those shoes.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The thing with Drew’s house is that it’s sort of ridiculous.

  It’s in Canyon Crest, which is this really nice neighborhood set on a hill a few miles away from my and Oliver’s neighborhood. My dad’s theory is that they set it on a hill so that no matter where you are in our town, you can see the mansions, which sounds about right to me. “We enjoy watching the serfs,” Drew said when I floated that theory past him, and I’ve known Drew long enough to recognize the sarcasm in his voice.

  I can’t say that’s not how other Canyon Crest residents actually feel, though.

  We drove past Drew’s driveway, which was U-shaped and long, and Oliver glanced up at the Tudor-style windows that seemed to be glaring down at us. “I feel like I should be remembering this,” he said.

  “You don’t?” I asked.

  “Nope.” He shook his head as he looked out at the neighborhood.

  “Where are you going?” Caro asked from the backseat, where she was struggling to buckle her open-toed high-heeled sandals.

  “I’m not going to park my car in the driveway!” I told her. “What if my parents drive by and see it? Or friends of my parents?”

  “You live your life like you’re under surveillance,” Caro muttered, now propping her foot up on the passenger seat.

  “Those look painful,” Oliver commented, trying to avoid Caro digging her heel into his shoulder. “Why does everything you do look like it hurts?”

  “Because!” Caro huffed with a final shove. “You guys want us to look natural and there’s nothing natural about looking natural.”

  I could see the confusion cross Oliver’s face and stifled my own smile.

  “Those shoes don’t look natural,” Oliver pointed out.

  “Yes, but they’re three-inch heels, which make me look like I’m an average height of five five. See?” she explained. “Natural.”

  “Why do you want to be average?” I asked her, scanning the street around the corner for a place to park. I wasn’t the only person who had had that brilliant idea, apparently. I recognized more than a few cars from the school parking lot.

  “I said natural, not average.”

  Oliver and I exchanged glances, both of us trying to hide our amusement.

  “How far away are we?” Caro looked out the window as I parallel parked the minivan. (Which, might I add, is not easy to do, considering that the trunk is big enough to hold a few surfboards.) “Do I have to hike in these spikes?”

  “Naturally,” Oliver said, earning himself a gentle shoulder shove from Caro.

  “But it’s dark and there’s gravel! What if I trip?”

  “Just act natural,” I told her, and Oliver cracked up as we both climbed out of the car. “Here,” he said, bending down a little. “Climb on.”

  Caro looked wary, but jumped up on his back and wrapped her arms around Oliver’s neck. “This is both super weird and really helpful,” she said, trying to pull down her skirt in the back so that she wouldn’t flash half of Canyon Crest.

  “You’re welcome,” Oliver said. “Can you, um, loosen your grip a little, though? My neck.” He coughed and winced.

  “Oh, sorry, sorry.” Caro readjusted herself, then looked down at me and grinned. “You look so little from up here.”

  “You’re, like, six inches away from me,” I pointed out as the three of us (well, two and a passenger) trekked it toward Drew’s house. The last time we had all gone to Drew’s house, it had been for Drew’s fifth birthday party, but I could still picture Oliver, Caro, and I trudging up the driveway, gifts in hand.

  “It’s a dramatic change,” Caro told me, unaware of what I had been thinking. “You don’t understand because you’re average height.”

  Oliver just hefted her higher onto his back. “Caro, your shoes. Ow.”

  “Oh, sorry, sorry.” She dug her heels out of his sides. “My bad.”

  We hiked up Drew’s driveway (empty, of course) and I almost slipped in the loose gravel, grabbing Caro’s ankle at the last second to steady myself and almost pulling the three of us down to the ground in the process. “If I die . . .” Caro warned.

  “If you die?” Oliver said, trying to right both himself and me. “Who makes driveways like this in real life? Why is it so long?”

  “Because if you can afford this driveway, you can afford the car that’s good enough to drive on it,” I said. “It’s a show-off thing.”

  “Well, where’s Drew’s car?” he asked, looking around.

  “In the garage,” Caro said, gesturing a little without actually letting go of Oliver.

  “Stop talking, we’re almost there,” I said.

  Drew gets a little twitchy when people talk about his parents’ money. “It’s not even mine,” he says whenever someone brings it up, then he changes the subject.

  Sometimes, the things people don’t say are louder than the words that come out of their mouths.

  “You should’ve seen the moat they tried to put in,” I whispered to Oliver in a not-very-whispery voice as we climbed up the (massive, seriously) front steps. “Zoning laws and all that, but trust me, it could have been epic.”

  “Well, an alligator is one thing,” Oliver said without missing a beat. “But when you need five or six, that’s a different story.” He grinned down at me as Caro slid off his back.

&nb
sp; Caro noticed, though. “He’s picking up what you’re throwing down,” she whispered to me as Oliver started to knock on the door. “Wait, no, what are you doing?” She interrupted him, reaching up to stop his hand before he knocked again. “This is a party, you just go in.”

  “Lead the way,” Oliver said, but Caro took an extra second to give me a Meaningful Look before plowing through the front door.

  It looked like things were already in full swing. I could hear Drew’s brother, Kane, laughing from somewhere deep inside the house—or maybe it was just in the next room. Drew’s house was so large and the ceilings were so high that it made the acoustics weird, like that whispering spot at the US Capitol. (We took a field trip in eighth grade. And yes, my mom was a parental chaperone. No surprise there.)

  “Hey!” I heard Drew yell, and he appeared at the top of the stairs, already on his way to very drunk and with a bottle of something in his hand. It was actually a double staircase, one on either side of the foyer that met at the landing at the top. We recorded ourselves acting out a scene from Romeo and Juliet on that balcony for an English assignment back in freshman year, when Caro swooned so much that she nearly fell over the railing. “A-plus for effort,” our teacher had said when he saw the footage, but we ended up with a B-minus, anyway.

  “Remember?” I grinned, turning to Oliver. It was instinctive and accidental, like my brain could place him there even though he hadn’t been there at all.

  “Remember what?” he replied. His eyes were sort of wide and I realized that Drew’s house was probably a smidge overwhelming, what with the staircases and the noise and the total strangers.

  “Nothing,” I said. “We should get something to drink.”

  “A-fucking-men,” Caro echoed, and we went past some of Kane’s friends and into the kitchen, where a keg was sitting on the kitchen floor, with dozens of beer bottles and red cups scattered on the granite-topped island.

  “I see Kane brought the refreshments,” I said, taking stock of everything. There was a bowl of Cheez Doodles on the counter next to a spilled cup and I grabbed it and held it to me. “Grab snacks when you see them,” I said to Oliver when he raised an eyebrow at me. “Otherwise they become victims of beer-pong games gone wrong.”