All We Left Behind (6 page)

Annoyance shoots through me and I have to resist the urge to go over and mess with her. To not lean against her locker and mention how I couldn't stop thinking about her wet, dripping body. I'd love to watch her face if I said that.
That
would get the smart to quiver right on out of her.

Not that it's the smart that scares me. Not that she's the type of girl who could—

“Medford!”

I spin to see Conner walking up with that girl I don't know. “This is Sarah,” he says, half winking and all teeth.

“Sarah.” I nod, checking out the rest of her. Bleached hair. Tight jeans. Some chunky necklace that would look
better in a magazine. Conner waits for me to react. She's cute, but I'm not sure what he's up to.

“Sarah was at the bonfire the other night,” Conner says, watching me like that means something.

“Uh-huh?” I stare at him.

“
And
she's a blonde.”

“Wow, did you figure that out all on your own?” I mock. “Or did you need her to help you?”

Conner narrows his eyes, playing detective, and Sarah flips her hair like it might turn her hair more blond.

“
And
she likes to swim,” he says.

“Does she?” Suddenly this makes sense. I steal a glance over his shoulder to Marion. Thankfully she has her back to us. “Blondes. Swimming. You on some crazy goose hunt, Conner?”

He grins like he won a prize.

“Wait, what is—?” Sarah's not quite following, her mouth hanging half-open, and I want to smack Conner for being a shit.

“Sarah, I don't know what he told you,” I say, trying to apologize, “but don't believe a word he says. And please, as a personal favor to me, go tell all your friends he has a small dick.”

Conner points at Sarah, and using his amazing powers of deduction, he says, “So not this one?” I roll my eyes and walk away. “Hey!” he calls as I start up the stairs. “Whoever she is, she's blond. I know that much.”

I spin around to deny it, but Marion's staring at them.

At me.

I stumble on the step and Conner waves a finger in my direction like that was an admission.

“Blond hair, Medford.” He laughs, and I kick myself for hesitating. “I've got witnesses.”

Marion's eyebrows pinch together and I don't know what to make of her. I drop a shoulder and head up the stairs. Conner hoots as I turn my back on them and tell myself he doesn't know anything. Blond hair isn't much to go off of. And there's
no way
I'm telling him about Marion. Especially with her right behind him. Not that she's a secret. Not that she's anything.

Before the top of the stairs, I check down the hall for Marion, but what I see is all I wanted to see in the first place.

Empty hall.

The afternoon sun shimmers in
chemistry, sending silver light streaming through beakers of glass. Kurt's chair sits empty three stations behind me, and I haven't seen him since this morning, when he disappeared up those stairs without a second glance. When he shows up, will he look at me? Speak to me? Do I exist as anything more than a shadow splashing into the water behind him?

I open my notebook and hope he skips class.

“Do anything interesting this weekend?” a male voice asks, and I turn to sun in my eyes.

“Sorry?” I say, raising my hand.

“This weekend,” he repeats, haloed in light. It's my lab partner, Abe. “Do anything interesting?” He sits down beside me and light bounces off his curls and for a second he looks like a knight in a Waterhouse painting, eyes and armor shining perfectly.

“Define ‘interesting.' ”

“Sex, drugs, and rock ‘n' roll?” he offers, tapping his
thumb against my chemistry book. “Or maybe a cheap movie? A good book?” He flashes me his adorable boy-next-door smile, and I flush, happy he chose me to be his lab partner five weeks ago and we're talking again. I swear I smell apple in the air, and my eyes fall to his neck, where iridescent hairs glow like dandelion fluff. It reminds me of freshman year, when we sat under his apple tree and I made a wish before covering him in dandelion seeds. Just one wish before he kissed me with tiny parachutes in his hair. It was my first
real
kiss, nothing fancy, nothing uncomfortable; just two kids studying math under the apple tree in his backyard, learning the geometry of two and one.

“I'm boring,” I say, finding my eyes on Kurt's empty chair.

“Did you go to that lake party?” Abe fishes, and I doodle in my notebook, trying to decide if I should tell him I went or not. Not that it should matter if I tell him. We broke up ages ago;
we
aren't anything anymore. It's been two years of silence since I went
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
on his heart and we broke up. I don't want to say the wrong thing and mess this up again. “I heard Lilith talking about it this morning,” he continues, and my pen gets slippery as I realize I'm glad he
wasn't
at that party. That he didn't see me in that water with Kurt. “Lilith said something about bonfires and—”

“Swimming?” It slips out and he looks up surprised.

“You went swimming at the party?”

“No, I just—” I stumble, flustered by how much I don't want him to know about this, and not sure if that means I still like him. The last thing I should be thinking about is us as an
us
. Only sometimes, I find myself wishing on invisible seeds and catching him stealing looks, like right now, like maybe, possibility . . .

“I, um . . . I heard some people went swimming,” I continue, but then the classroom door opens, distracting me.

Abe follows my gaze, and I hate that he's noticed. But now I'm staring at my notebook and I don't know why I've covered the page in so many stars. I feel the heat of Abe's gaze, but my pen keeps on blotting out the ruled lines and white.

I don't look up as Kurt passes.

I don't want to admit that he unsettles me in a way I'm sure Abe never could.

I focus on the page and trace the outlines of the stars over and over, so I don't have to see Kurt look away and pretend he doesn't know me. Or worse, have him look into me, where he can see just how much I want to smell the lake in his hair.

*  *  *

In gym class we're sent outside to run the fitness trail around the school. The ground is covered in pine needles the color of rust and the air smells like mulch. Lilith lingers behind me, flirting with the four boys on the path near her.

Abe is one of them.

I could be a quarter of a mile ahead by now, but I've slowed to eavesdrop on Lilith, letting the orange needles stick to my sneakers. The fog hangs on the branches like tufts of cotton candy from the county fair, spun with weightlessness, and my mind drifts to Abe's fingers as we sat on the Ferris wheel freshman year, his lips stained sugar blue. His thumb rubbed the elastic strap of my bra, and my insides went queasy with the idea of him touching me, like he had the night before. How I didn't tell him not to. How I wasn't sure how to outline an invisible boundary, or if such a thing could even be drawn.

Abe didn't say anything about Kurt in chemistry class, and I'm thankful I've been able to avoid both of them. Not that I know what to do with either. Kurt doesn't look at me, and Abe, Abe is like the echo of something I started and ran away from before the fog could stick. Before the whisper of hands could ruin.

Kurt would be better. Kurt's a clean slate. His hands are distant, pumping through the water, less intimate.

“Marion.” Lilith snaps me back to the present, only she's addressing the boys. “You have no idea,” she says, laughing. “I kiss Marion all the time.”

What? That isn't true! My neck warms and I pick up my pace, refusing to look back, like I didn't hear.

We've only kissed once. And it wasn't a real kiss. Nothing's a real kiss when you're ten. We used to stay up late at night watching our favorite romance movies. Only we
didn't watch them so much as fast-forward through all the boring stuff until we got to the kisses: slow, hard, tongues, lips. It was a fascination. Only one night Lilith locked her bedroom door and asked if she could kiss me instead.

“You know, so we can understand how to do it,” she explained. “Like practice.”

I gripped my pillow, wanting to watch the movie and forget this.

“I don't know,” I said, because I didn't. “You mean open our mouths and use our tongues?”

“Yeah.” Lilith nodded, sitting on the bed beside me. “It'll be like a science experiment.”

I didn't move.

“It'll be easy.” She nodded again. “We'll just lean in and move our tongues around and see what happens.”

“Just move our tongues around?”

“Like they do in the movies.”

“And we won't tell anyone?”

“Of course not!” Lilith's eyes went wide.

I pressed my hands into her pink bedspread. I wanted kissing to be special, but I wanted to be good at it too. And this was Lilith.

If I could trust anybody, it would be her.

“Okay,” I whispered, looking at the floor. “What do I do?”

“Close your eyes!” she squealed, and I shut my lids.

I felt the bed shift as she shuffled up next to me. It was quiet and I waited, but she didn't do anything. I held my
breath and my body stiffened with the cold thought that she was playing a joke on me.

But then her mouth hit mine. It was solid and dry and I couldn't react before her lips opened up like a fish's, globing wide and rubbery. I opened my mouth and we twisted our faces back and forth, jabbing our tongues at each other. She moaned like the ladies in the movies and gasped for air before pressing her hand against my chest and pinching me through my shirt. She pushed the fabric up and rubbed her hand over my front and I think she wanted me to touch her, too. She'd already started to grow in that area. I had nothing but flatness and skin.

When she stopped kissing me we both sat at the end of her bed in the awkward quiet. I ran my toes against the zipper of my Disney princess sleeping bag on the floor. The metal felt jagged and grounding.

“Did you feel anything?” she asked.

I stiffened, not sure what she meant. “Did you?” Panic spread in my gut. I tried to think of a lie, something that wouldn't hurt her feelings despite the slobbering and the moaning and whatever that was.

“No,” she said. “I guess it's different with boys.”

She got up and unlocked the door, as if nothing had happened. As if I wasn't sitting at the edge of her bed with my shirt half off and my lips still bruised with the taste of her.

A branch smacks my face and I wipe it away, hearing Lilith behind me.

“Oh, you know it's true,” she says, and I peek back to see they've caught up. “We're best friends,” she continues, catching my eye and taking my hand. “We share everything.”

“Yeah, right,” says Mark, the tallest, egging her on. “I'll believe it when I see it.”

“I'm sorry,” I say, pretending I don't know what this is about, trying to untangle my fingers. “What are we—”

But Abe's look unsettles me. His eyes are dark and intrigued, like I've swallowed a secret and he wants to unfold it.

“Seeing is believing, you say?” Lilith says, fluttering her lashes at Mark. She ignores what I said and twirls me into a wooded nook.

“Lilith! What are you—?”

“Just play along!” she coos in my ear, and the boys fill up the space behind us. The whites in their eyes go wide and I can't look at Abe. I'm too embarrassed with Lilith mussing up my hair. Maybe he knows I'd rather her hands were his.

“Come on, Marion,” Mark says. “Admit it. You've never kissed Lilith before.”

My mouth is dry, but a hot pulse shoots through me from the eagerness in his voice. And I don't know if it's the safety that Lilith's a girl or the power to tease him that makes me brave.

“Oh?” I say, and the fact that it's true makes it easier to say. “I wouldn't be so sure about that. You want me to lie to you?”

The boys whoop and Lilith cackles, rubbing her thumb against my ear in approval. But it's the anticipation in the boys' eyes, pooled wet in their pupils, that makes me feel powerful.

“You want a show?” Lilith asks, and I almost tell her to stop. But it's the boys' eyes—
Abe's eyes—
on us, that flood me with heat, down to my stomach and below. I nuzzle my face in Lilith's neck and she purrs, pulling me closer as the air cinches tight.

One of the boys whistles and I hope it isn't Abe. I don't know if I like the idea that he's into this, even though it makes my skin prickle. Lilith laughs, and her neck smells of peppermint.

“You're just a tease,” Mark says, but Lilith lifts my chin.

Our eyes meet and her breath is soft as she strokes my neck. She hesitates, perhaps wondering if I'm okay with this—but then her mouth is on mine. Lips blooming. She's gotten better at this. Much better.

Whistles flood my ears, singing fiercely and pushing us together. I shiver, like I'm being unfolded and don't want it to stop. But it's not Lilith and the taste of her that excites me.

It's
them
watching. It's
Abe
watching.

It's their eyes on our mouths and on our hips pressing one-two and against. It's the rush that comes with hearing the whistles and “hell yeahs” that rocks me, and scares me, and holds me hard against her—

Wishing I could do this with Abe. Or Kurt. Or anyone. But knowing I'm only brave enough when it's Lilith. Knowing her kiss isn't dangerous.

But I want to keep this heat. Want to keep this power, that Lilith can harness with a breath, that makes them pant and want and sweat. I press into Lilith, tasting the sweet of her mouth, knowing this power isn't mine, and that I've only temporarily borrowed it. Knowing that soon—