Текст книги "Luckiest Girl Alive"

Автор книги: Jessica Knoll

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Текущая страница: 9 (всего у книги 23 страниц)

CHAPTER 8

Mom grounded me for two weeks after Dean’s party. She’s fond of timing the statement, “That’s a riot,” to the corny punch lines of Friends, and that’s exactly what my punishment was, a riot. With the performance I’d given at Dean’s party, I’d grounded myself.

Still, I was tolerated at the lunch table, and that was mostly thanks to Hilary and Dean. Everyone else just seemed relieved when I announced I was under house arrest for the rest of the month. Quarantined, they had time to decide: Were my missteps contagious?

For whatever reason, Hilary had really taken a shine to me. Maybe because I aided and abetted her trashy teenage rebellion, maybe because she asked me to read her theme paper on Into Thin Air and I basically rewrote it into an A+ assignment. I didn’t care. Whatever it was she needed from me, I would give her.

Olivia tried to act like she didn’t care when she found out about Dean’s party, like it didn’t bother her that I’d been invited and kept it secret, or that I’d hooked up with Liam, which she’d made clear was something she wanted to do. “Was it fun?” she asked brightly. Her blinking went rapid, as though it powered the phony smile on her face.

“I think?” I turned my palms up, and that got a real laugh, at least.

In the movies and on TV, the most popular girls in school are always gorgeous, with buxom curves scaled to impossibly Barbie proportions, but Bradley and other schools with a similar milieu defied this law. Olivia was pretty in the way that a grandmother would notice: “My, what a lovely young lady.” She had hair so curly it puffed up, frizzier and angrier when she turned a blow-dryer on it. Her cheeks got too pink when she drank, and blackheads pooled in the pores on her nose, collecting more oil as the day wore on. Liam wouldn’t come around to her on his own, the attraction had to be painstakingly manufactured.

Nell later taught me to tone down my beer commercial potential rather than capitalize on it. Actively striving for the traditional markers of beauty and status—the blond hair perfectly styled, the tan skin perfectly even, the brazen logo stamped all over your bag—why, it’s downright shameful. This was something that took me years to learn, because Mom had been catching my chin in her hand and applying “a little color” to my lips since I was eleven, because preening was celebrated, never mocked, at Mt. St. Theresa’s.

Like me, Liam was learning to see Olivia’s curls as charming, rather than kinky, and did her flat chest actually have more of a curve than he thought? I didn’t interfere with this. All my life, I’ve found it difficult to advocate for myself, to ask for what I want. I fear burdening people so much. I’d like to blame it on what happened that night, on what happened in the ensuing weeks, but I think it’s just part of my blueprint. Asking Liam to go with me to get the morning-after pill was about the boldest thing I’d ever done, and with that single word, “Friend,” scribbled slowly on the page like a fourth grader’s reminder to himself of the rule “‘i’ before ‘e’ except after ‘c,’” I remembered why I so rarely do it.

Olivia just needed a little time to be sure that my retreat wasn’t a maneuver. To accept it was sincere. Almost three weeks after Dean’s party, I saw her in the distant end of the Math wing. She paused as I advanced on her and said, “You look skinny.” It came out as more of an accusation than a compliment, the way even fourteen-year-old girls know to do. How did this happen? How did you do this?

I lit up inside and chirped, “Cross-country!” But the truth was that ever since that night, the only thing I could stomach was cantaloupe. I slogged through my runs, my mile time worsening rather than improving, Mr. Larson shouting, “Come on, TifAni!” Not encouraging. Exasperated.

When Hilary invited me to sleep over at Olivia’s house on Saturday, the last Saturday of my sentence, Mom said yes, like I knew she would. She said I’d been so helpful and well behaved that she would shave one day off my grounding. That was also a riot. She was obsessed with Hilary’s and Olivia’s parents, particularly Olivia’s mom, Annabella Kaplan, née Coyne, who was a descendant of the Macy’s family and drove an antique Jaguar. Mom knew not to interfere with that burgeoning friendship, the tuition’s true payoff the connections, not the education, the same way I knew to just look away when Liam looped his arm over Olivia’s ballerina shoulders, the acid charging up my throat like a linebacker.

Mom deposited me at the mouth of Olivia’s house at 5:00 P.M. on Saturday. It didn’t look like much from the front, you would certainly expect more from the granddaughter of the Macy’s guy. But it was just that it was so obscured by trees and vines and ivy, and once you walked through the back gates you realized that the house continued on and on, the yard opening up into an acre of land with a swimming pool and a guesthouse where Louisa, the Kaplans’ maid, lived.

I knocked on the back door. Several seconds passed before I saw the top of Hilary’s berry-tinted bleached head bobbing toward me. I never once saw the Kaplans when I came to Olivia’s house. Her father had a ferocious temper, which Olivia wore in moody bruises on her wrists, and her mother was usually recovering from some kind of plastic surgery. This parental amalgam—abusive and vain—only further solidified Olivia in my mind as the glamorous, poor little rich girl I longed to be for so many years after I knew her. Not even what she did to me, not even what happened to her later, was enough to quench my bloodlust.

Hilary swung open the door. “Yo, girl.” Hilary and Olivia called everyone girl. It took me years to break the annoying habit.

My eyes lingered on the slit of Hilary’s flat stomach, exposed by her cut-off T-shirt. Behind her back, the guys called her HIMary, for her broad shoulders and athletic frame. But I found her toned muscles fascinating. She wasn’t Olivia thin, but there was not an ounce of fat on her body, and Hilary did not play a sport and her mother forged a letter from her “squash coach” to get her out of gym class. It was like she had a Pilates body before Pilates was even a thing.

I’d been nervous to come. Olivia hadn’t invited me—Hilary had. Over the last two weeks, Olivia had really upped her game with Liam. I let him go without a fight. If it was between him and Olivia and Hilary as friends—we’d realized that with my name, our acronym was now HOT—well, I knew which one had more long-term potential.

“Come on.” Hilary charged up the stairs two at a time, her hamstring muscles flexing with each push against gravity. Hilary always had to do everything a little bit weirder than everyone else. It was part of her schtick.

Olivia had an entire wing of the house all to herself—a large, loft-like space with a bathroom separating her room from that of her little sister, who was away at boarding school. Hilary told me once that Olivia’s sister was the pretty one, the favorite one. It was why Olivia barely ate.

Olivia was sitting cross-legged on the floor, propped lazily against her bedpost. Bags of Swedish fish and Starbursts, a bottle of vodka, and an overturned liter of Diet Coke surrounded her like sweet casualties of war.

“Hey, girl.” Olivia pulled a Swedish fish between her teeth until the body snapped in half. She reached for the bottle of vodka. “Drink.”

We chased the vodka with Diet Coke, sinking our teeth into the candy, wincing, trying to absorb the bite. The sun tiptoed away from the window, our pupils ballooning, but we still didn’t turn on the lights.

“Let’s get Dean over here,” Olivia said, only when we’d put a safe enough dent in the vodka. When the goal is to get fucked up, Dean’s greediness must be considered.

I was woozy with hunger and sugar. Olivia grinned at me, the seams between her teeth Christmas red. “He’ll come if he knows you’re here.”

If only I could have liked Dean back, if his mere presence, the sensory memory of his sperm on my tongue didn’t make me heave, maybe everything would have turned out differently.

“He’ll come!” Hilary rolled onto her back with a laugh, holding her knees to her chest and rocking back and forth. I could see her underwear. Radioactive green, this time.

“Shut up.” I wrapped my lips around the opening of the vodka bottle and shuddered as the liquid trickled into my stomach, lava hot.

Olivia was on the phone, saying, “Just wait until it’s dark, or Louisa will see.”

If I had been with girls from Mt. St. Theresa, we would have all clamored to the mirror, feverishly rubbing our cheeks with blush, so much mascara on our eyelashes they’d look like hairy spider legs. But Olivia just pulled on the messy loop on top of her head, securing it closer to her scalp. “They have forties.”

“Who is it?” I waited, hoping to hear Liam’s name.

“Dean, Liam, Miles.” She worked her jaw through a Starburst. “And Dave. Ugh.”

“Fucking Dave,” Hilary agreed.

I said I had to go to the bathroom. I stumbled down the hall and locked the door behind me, what I was about to do more shameful than clogging the toilet: make myself up. My cheeks were ruddy when I looked in the mirror; I splashed water on my face, trying to cool down, trying to ready my canvas. I scavenged around in the drawers for eyeliner, lip gloss, something. I found some crusty old mascara and plunged the brush into the tube over and over, trying to scrape as much out of it as I could.

I heard the guys pounding up the stairs, and I locked eyes with myself in the mirror. “It’s okay. You’re okay.” I hadn’t bothered to turn on the light, and the sun’s last remaining thread fell across my face, bleaching any semblance of confidence I’d hoped to see.

When I returned to Olivia’s room, I saw everyone sitting in a circle, drinking those forties out of sweaty paper bags. There was an open spot between Liam and Dean. I took it, edging as close to Liam as I dared. Dean passed a bottle to me. I didn’t understand the difference between a regular beer and a forty, and I pushed the paper bag down to read the label: malt liquor beer. I drank it without asking what malt liquor was.

After an hour of brain-dead conversation, the words going wobblier and wobblier in my mind, Olivia announced it was safe to go outside and smoke.

We crept down the stairs, filing through the kitchen and out the door one by one, like the most well-rehearsed fire drill. We huddled in a circle by the privacy garden shielding the kitchen’s windows, the arms of a small, plush maple tree stretching toward us, waiting for a hug. I hadn’t realized that was only the second kitchen. “The maid’s kitchen,” Olivia explained, which was bigger than the one in my modest McMansion. Olivia’s parents rarely used this side of the house, she said, and we would remain undetected so long as we stayed quiet.

Dean extracted a joint from a pack of cigarettes, running a lighter underneath its belly before bringing one end to his lips and firing up the other.

We passed to the left, Olivia and Hilary going before me, neither of them able to hold the smoke in, erupting into spastic coughing fits, the guys rolling their eyes and urging them in hushed whispers to hurry up and pass before it burned out.

I hadn’t smoked pot since that night in the eighth grade, at Leah’s house. I was terrified of that feeling, the way the high slunk up from behind and closed its cape around me without any warning. Every vein in my body had engorged and pulsed, and I’d been convinced it would never go away, that I would never feel normal again. But the desire to do better than Hilary and Olivia was greater than the fear. I pulled on the joint, the end flaring like a lightning bug on the first day of summer. I held the smoke in my lungs for a long time to impress Liam, blowing it out in a slow, graceful ribbon that curled around his face.

“I need to meet more Catholic girls,” Liam said, his eyes sleepy.

“I hear they use teeth,” Olivia murmured, low, as though nervous to see how the joke would land. It invited a robust laugh, which Olivia shushed frantically, her fear of her father temporarily overriding pride—she’d steered correctly.

Dean clapped me on the back. “Don’t worry, Finny, you were pretty out of it.”

It was one of those awful moments where you have no control over your reaction, when the pain is too exposed to hide. I laughed, the sharp contrast between the sound and the look on my face only making it worse.

Once we wore the joint down to a nub, Liam said he had to use the bathroom and retreated into the house. I wondered if I should follow him as the conversation hummed on. I felt the consequences of what I’d just done, of my bravado in trapping the smoke in my chest for so long, close on my heels. My heart was marching in my ears when I realized Olivia was gone too, had slipped off without my even realizing it. I peered through the maple’s ruby leaves and over the flat green hedges guarding the windows, but the kitchen was empty.

“I’m cold,” I said, panicking when I realized just how cold I was. I was shivering. “Let’s go inside.” I needed to move, needed to focus on putting one foot in front of the other, on my hand on the cool doorknob twisting, anything but the way my body was shuddering, like one of those plastic windup toys, candy red gums and stark white teeth on a pair of feet, chattering across the table, a cardigan-wearing uncle’s idea of a gag.

“Let’s just hang for a while.” It was Dean speaking. It was Dean’s arm pulling me into him. Dean was the only one there. Where had everyone gone?

“Wait.” I dipped my head low, my forehead against Dean’s chest, anything to avoid his mouth, the angle at which it was coming at me.

Dean wiggled his finger into the crevice between my chin and my neck, applying an upward pressure.

“I’m really cold,” I protested even as I gave in to it. I swallowed when I felt Dean’s wet lips on mine. Just for a little bit, I thought. You only have to do this for a little bit. Don’t be rude.

I toyed with Dean’s fat tongue, realizing my palms were on his chest, still pushing him away. I wrapped them around the back of his hairy neck obediently.

Dean’s fingers were stumbling over the button of my khakis. It was too soon to stop, Dean wouldn’t believe me if I put an end to it now. As calmly as I could, I broke the kiss.

“Let’s go inside.” I tried to make it sound breathy, seductive, but we both knew there was nowhere to make good on my promise inside the house. Too late, I realized my play was dangerously transparent, that I’d fatally miscalculated Dean. He seized the button on my pants with such gusto my pelvis thrust forward and my feet flew off the ground. I stumbled backward, landing on my wrist at a ruthless angle, and I let out an injured-puppy yelp that reverberated through the yard.

“Shut up!” Dean hissed. He dropped to his knees and slapped me.

Even before I’d come to Bradley, even before all the evidence proved I was the one not like the others, I was still not a girl you slap. The hot hand on my cheek undid me. I was screaming, the sound guttural and ancient, something I’d never heard before. There is so rarely an occasion in this modern life when your body takes over, when you find out what it will do, the smells and sounds it will release when it’s trying to survive. That night, on the ground with Dean, clawing and screeching, a starchy sweat collecting in my armpits, I found out, and not for the last time.

Dean had the button undone and my pants low on my hips when the lights in the front of the house popped on, when we heard Olivia’s father hollering. Olivia burst out the back door and screamed at me to go and never come back. I heard Dean gasping behind me as I ran to the gate and my hands shook over the latch.

“Move!” He shoved me out of the way and released the hook, the gate swinging open. Dean charged through but paused, inexplicably holding the gate open behind him so I could escape as well. The dark driveway was shortening ahead of me when I heard the patter of more footsteps behind me, the other boys, heading for Dave’s Navigator parked on the street.

At the road, I turned right. I didn’t know where I was going, just that right was away from Dave’s car, away from the direction its nose pointed. I kept going until the light from Olivia’s house faded completely, and it was dark and I could collapse on the side of the road, my lungs sharp with the cold night air, my heart cartwheeling madly, as though I’d never run a mile straight in my life, as though it wasn’t the school sport I chose of my own accord.

I was deep in the bowels of the Main Line, the mansions set far back from the road, burning bright and smug in the trees. I slipped into the brush at the mere vibration of a car on the road, peering through the lingering red and yellow leaves and exhaling only when I saw that it wasn’t Dave’s Navigator. Adrenaline had purged my body of any high, but by the way I zagged on the road, I could tell it would be hours before the vodka and Diet Coke wore off, hours before I realized my wrist was swollen to two times its size, that it was throbbing in sync with my heart.

A plan had formulated in my mind: Get to Montgomery Avenue, then walk the straight line to Arbor Road, where I would turn right to get to Arthur’s house. I’d chuck pebbles at his window the way boys do when they like a girl in the movies. He would take me in. He had to.

I kept turning on different roads, each time so sure that was the one that would lead me to the main strip. At one point I grew so desperate that I didn’t flee when a set of headlights appeared at the top of a steep hill, the vehicle to which they belonged low and sleek, definitely not Dave.

As it rolled to a stop at the bottom of the hill, I jogged up to the window to ask how to get to Montgomery. The mom face in the window panicked, her mouth dropping open in horror and the car squealing beneath her foot. Her Mercedes shot out ahead of me, tearing into the night, in fast pursuit of the dinner party where she would no doubt regale her flaccid friends with the tale of her narrow escape of the hooligan carjacker who appeared like the boogeyman on Glenn Road.

After what somehow felt like both forever and a second, I found a turn that opened up into a long row of streetlamps, a Wawa anchoring the curve of the last quarter mile. I was so impatient I broke into a run, my hands loose at my sides the way Mr. Larson taught us. “It takes energy to make a fist,” he explained, showing us his own, clenched tight. “And you want to conserve as much of it as possible.”

I jogged under the gas station’s fluorescent lighting, shielding my eyes against their sudden, razor brightness, as though it were the sun that just burst free from the clouds. I pushed the door open with my shoulder, discovered how warm it was inside, realized just how raw I smelled now that I was in a contained space. I stopped a few inches short of the counter to keep the stench from reaching the cashier.

“Montgomery Avenue is further up on the right, right?” I was horrified to realize I was slurring my words.

The cashier looked up from his crossword puzzle, irritably. He blinked, and it was like it reset his entire face.

“Miss.” He covered his heart with his hand. “Are you all right?”

I touched my hand to my hair and felt dirt. “I just tripped.”

The cashier reached for the phone. “I call the police.”

“No!” I leapt forward, and he took a step back, still holding on to the phone.

“Don’t do that!” he yelled. I realized for the first time that he was scared too.

“Please,” I said. His finger had hit only the number nine. “I don’t need the police. I just want you to tell me how to get to Montgomery Avenue.”

The cashier paused, both hands clutching the phone so tightly that the skin on his knuckles turned white. “You are very far away,” he said, finally.

I heard the door open behind me, and I froze. I didn’t want to create a scene with another customer in the store. “Can you just tell me how to get there?” I whispered.

The cashier slowly hung up the phone, looking unsure as he reached for a map.

I heard my name.

It was Mr. Larson behind me. It was Mr. Larson’s hand on my shoulder, guiding me out of Wawa, clearing the take-out bags from the passenger seat and urging me to get in his car. There was a surrender in being found that made me lose my grip on all my secrets. All my lies—the ones I told everyone, even myself. Tears shivering on my cheeks, one split with a cut so thin and midnight dark it could have been a pen mark, I started to tell him what had happened. And then I couldn’t stop.

Mr. Larson gave me a blanket and water and an ice pack for my face. He wanted to take me to the hospital, but I became so hysterical at the suggestion that he agreed to bring me back to his apartment. The fact that he knew exactly how to handle the situation—get me to a safe place, calm me down, sober me up—didn’t surprise me then, but it does now. He was an adult, of course he knew what to do, but what I couldn’t have realized then is how new to it he was, how young twenty-four is when you’re not fourteen. Not two years earlier Mr. Larson had been skinny-dipping in Beebe Lake at Cornell with his fraternity brothers, was the only one to score with the freshman they all called Holy Shit because she was so beautiful you gasped “holy shit” when you saw her. We didn’t even look so far apart in age; if I’d been wearing makeup and a dress, we could have been going back to his apartment after a first date gone exceedingly well.

I had made it to Narberth, had walked at least seven miles from Olivia’s house. It was almost one in the morning, and Mr. Larson had been driving home from the bars in Manayunk, where most of his friends lived, where he would live if it wasn’t such a hike to Bradley in the morning. He had stopped at Wawa for a snack, he told me. Then he patted his middle and said, “I’ve been eating too many snacks lately.” He was trying to get me to smile, so I did, politely.

Mr. Larson didn’t look fat to me, but when we got to his apartment and I was able to trace the perimeter of the living room, studying the pictures on his walls, the blanket he’d given me loosening around my shoulders, I saw that he used to have that same slim, muscular build that Liam and Dean had. Muscled shoulders worked hard for in the gym, but the slender waist revealing what would be there without the bench press. I’d stopped thinking of Mr. Larson as the best-looking guy I’d ever seen in real life after he’d become my coach, after he’d started getting on my case, but these pictures reminded me of what I’d seen on my first day of school. I pulled the blanket tighter around my shoulders, suddenly feeling like the V-neck of my sweater was too low.

“Here you go.” Mr. Larson appeared in the doorframe, a soggy slice of Tombstone pizza on a plate for me.

I ate obediently. I had insisted Mr. Larson not make anything for me, I had no appetite, but as I bit into the microwaved pizza, the center still doughy and cold, a rabid hunger overcame me. I ate that slice, then three more before I finally leaned back on the couch, spent.

“Feel better?” Mr. Larson asked, and I nodded, grimly.

“TifAni,” he began, hunching forward in the La-Z-Boy chair next to the couch. He had been careful to take that seat. “We need to talk about next steps.”

I dropped my face in the blanket. The pizza had given me the energy to cry again. “Please,” I whimpered. Please don’t tell my parents. Please don’t tell the school. Please just be my friend and not make this any worse than it already is.

“I probably shouldn’t be telling you this.” Mr. Larson sighed. “But we’ve had, problems, like this, with Dean before.”

I used the blanket to wipe my face and raised my head. “What do you mean?”

“This isn’t the first time he’s physically assaulted another student.”

“Tried to,” I corrected him.

“No,” Mr. Larson said, firmly. “What he did at his house three weeks ago wasn’t trying, what he did tonight wasn’t trying.”

Even after everything was said and done, after the ashes fermented the grass, after I moved on to college and then New York City and got everything I thought I wanted, Mr. Larson was the only person who ever told me that this, none of this, was my fault. I saw the momentary hesitation even in Mom’s eyes. You give a blow job, it can’t be done to you. How can it be what you say it is? How could you go to the party, be the only girl, drink that much, and not expect to have what happened happen?

“My parents will never forgive me for ruining this,” I said.

“Yes,” Mr. Larson promised. “They will.”

I leaned back, resting my head against the couch and closing my eyes, my legs aching with all the Main Line roads I’d wandered. I could have fallen asleep right there, but Mr. Larson insisted I take his bed, the couch was fine for him, really, it was.

He closed the door with a gentle click, and I climbed beneath his duvet, dark red and scratchy with wear. Mr. Larson smelled like a grown-up, like a dad. I wondered how many other girls had slept in this bed before me, if Mr. Larson had kissed their necks while he moved on top of them, slow and labored, like I had always pictured sex would be.

I woke up in the middle of the night screaming. I never actually heard it myself. But it must have been pretty bad to send Mr. Larson panting into the room. He heaved the light on, standing over me and pleading with me loudly to wake up from my bad dream.

“You’re okay,” Mr. Larson shushed when he saw my eyes focus on him. “You’re okay.”

I gathered the blanket underneath my chin, everything covered except my head, the way Mom used to do with heaps of sand at the beach. “Sorry,” I whispered, embarrassed.

“You don’t have to apologize,” Mr. Larson said. “It was just pretty bad. I thought you might want to wake up from it.”

My bodyless head nodded. “Thanks.”

Mr. Larson was wearing a T-shirt, snug around the impressive slope of his shoulders. He turned to go.

“Wait!” I held the blanket tighter. I couldn’t be in this room alone. My heart hiccuped threateningly in the cavity of my chest, the first sign of the spin. It couldn’t go on like this for much longer, and if it stopped, I needed someone there to call for help. “I can’t . . . I’m not going to be able to sleep. Can you stay?”

Mr. Larson looked over his big shoulder at me in the bed. There was a sadness in his face I didn’t understand. “I could sleep on the floor.”

I nodded, encouragingly, and Mr. Larson continued on to the living room, returning with a pillow and a blanket. He arranged his materials on the ground next to the bed before turning off the light and crouching low, rearranging them to fit his form.

“Try to sleep, TifAni,” he said drowsily. But I didn’t try. I stayed up all night, listening to his soothing breath assure me everything would be okay. I didn’t know it then, but I had a lifetime of sleepless nights waiting for me after that.

In the morning, Mr. Larson microwaved me a frozen bagel. He didn’t have cream cheese, only a crusty stick of butter with bread crumbs clinging to the ragged end.

Even though the swelling in my face had gone down during the night, I still had that thin red line etched into my cheek. But it was my wrist that was really concerning me, so Mr. Larson offered to go to CVS and get me an Ace bandage and a toothbrush. After that, he wanted to drive me home, and he promised he would help me tell my parents what had happened. I agreed reluctantly.

When he left, I picked up his phone and dialed home.

“Hi, sweetie!” Mom said.

“Hi, Mom.”

“Oh!” she said. “Before I forget, Dean Barton called for you a few minutes ago.”

I clung on to the kitchen counter to steady myself. “He did?”

“He said it was important, um, hold on, let me find the message.” I heard Mom rustling around, and it was all I could do not to scream at her to hurry up. “What, honey?”

“I didn’t say anything,” I snapped, before I realized she was talking to Dad.

“Yes, in the freezer in the garage.” Pause. “It’s in there.”

“Mom!” I barked.

“TifAni, relax,” Mom said. “Your father, you know how he is.”

“What did Dean say?”

“I have the message right here. Call soon as possible, about chemistry project. He left his number too. He sounded very nervous.” There was the dainty tinkle of her laugh. “He must like you.”

“Tell me the number?” I found a Post-it and a pen in Mr. Larson’s drawer and wrote it down.

“I’ll call you right back,” I said.

“Wait, TifAni, when should I pick you up?”

“I’ll call you right back!”

I hung up the phone and hurriedly dialed Dean’s number. I needed to know what this was all about before Mr. Larson got back from CVS.

Dean answered on the third ring. His hello was hostile.

“Finny!” His tone changed completely when he realized it was me. “Where the hell did you go last night? We tried to find you.”

I fed him a lie about how I ended up at the house of one of my teammates, who lives not far from Olivia.

“Good, good,” Dean said. “So listen, about what happened last night. I’m really sorry.” He laughed sheepishly. “I was really fucked up.”

“You hit me,” I said, so quietly I wasn’t even sure if I’d said it or not until Dean responded.

“I’m really sorry, Finny.” Dean’s voice caught in his squat throat. “I feel sick that I did that. Can you ever forgive me? I won’t be able to live with myself if you don’t forgive me.”

There was a desperation in Dean’s voice that I felt too—it would be so much easier if this never happened, and only we have the power to make it so.

I swallowed. “Okay.”

Dean’s breath sounded heavy on my ear. “Thank you, Finny. Thank you.”

I called Mom back after we hung up and told her I would take the train.

“And, Mom?” I asked. “Do you have any Neosporin? Olivia’s dog scratched my face while I was sleeping.” Olivia didn’t have a dog.

When Mr. Larson returned I was dressed and ready with my lies. I insisted on taking the train, insisted he didn’t understand my parents, that it would be better if I told them on my own.

“Are you sure?” Mr. Larson asked. His tone made it clear that he didn’t believe one shred of it.