Equilibrium (11 page)

Chapter 13

N
ick pulled away from the curb, and Darcy took a good hard look at his light blond hair, curling up at the ends, and full lower lip. His double layer of shirts, short-sleeved brown over a long-sleeved beige jersey, got her craving coffee ice cream and chocolate sauce. Got her craving him.

Nick turned a corner and caught her staring. “What? Do I have food on my face or something?” He checked the rearview mirror, scrubbed a hand across his chin, picked at imagined remnants of meals gone by, and flicked them onto the floor.

Darcy smiled. No, he was perfect. She could climb on top of him and lick his face, bite his yummy lips and eat him up like a hot fudge sundae.

“So what’s with the secret meeting place?” Nick asked.

“I kind of sneaked out of the house, left one of my mom’s friends guarding an empty bedroom.”

“How’d you manage that?”

“Fire escape.” Darcy made climbing motions, getting a secondary rush from the memory.

Nick issued a low whistle through his teeth. “You are in deep.”

Well worth the risk, considering the alternative of hanging around for more doom and gloom. She’d had more than her fill. Nick careened through the hokey small-town square, past the statues of children reading on the green, nearly clipping the curb by the drugstore that still served ice-cream sodas to customers twirling on vinyl-covered stools. Elle wasn’t working today, but the usual cast of characters would be wandering the brick-lined sidewalks.

Darcy slid down in the bucket seat below window level, far enough to evade detection. Nick tossed her a questioning look. “My mother knows half the town,” she said by way of explanation. Her mother not only knew everyone in town, but also kept them in her employ, hiring them as unpaid freelance kid watchers. Darcy couldn’t make a move in Hicksville without her mother receiving a full report, complete with eight-by-ten color glossies, like the photos featured in “Alice’s Restaurant.” Every Thanksgiving, Mom made her suffer through the song. Family tradition.

God, she was tired. She closed her eyes, a trick she’d learned long ago for heightening the other senses. Cool air brushed her cheek, and her mouth fell slack. The car engine shook, vibrating through her body, starting at her bottom and working outward in a series of unbroken waves. She smelled rain and lightning, and a sour taste puckered her tongue. Nick’s heat opened her eyes.

No more acting like a baby.

She reached past the stick shift until her hand hovered above his lap in temporary indecision, then she dared herself and went for it big-time. She let her hand fall to the lap of Nick’s jeans and spread her fingers across the folds.

“Darcy.” Nick not so much spoke her name, as breathed it. He adjusted her hand and wriggled beneath her massaging fingers, his gaze on the road. If he looked down, he would’ve seen her whole arm shaking, a current running from her shoulder to her fingertips. She couldn’t believe she was really and truly touching a boy. “I was going to suggest a movie, but this is way better. Hang on,” he said.

She nabbed the door-side handle in time for an impromptu hairpin turn Nick navigated, jostling her hand from between his legs. She walked her trembling fingers back to his lap, and he kept her hand at bay, lacing his fingers between hers. “Not yet.”

Back roads whizzed by, and Nick drove with one hand on the wheel. What did it matter where they were going? She had exactly what she needed sitting right beside her.

The car bumped along unpaved streets. Nick turned down a dirt driveway, avoided a major pothole, and jammed the stick shift into park. The sky hung heavy with swollen clouds. Strands of electricity rippled neon white. She could see them now, and her electrified hair stood on end. Beyond the treetops, clouds clashed. The first shock of lightning startled the air. The sky brightened. Her lips puckered.

“One, Mississippi. Two, Mississippi,” Darcy counted, and Nick joined in, estimating their distance from the storm’s center, the way Daddy had taught her. They barely reached six, and the sky exploded, the storm within a mile’s reach. Darcy shrieked, even though she’d expected the noise.

Rain splattered against her T-shirt, and she rolled up her window. A tiny blue beat-up house, not much larger than a double-wide trailer, stood at the end of the pockmarked driveway. Sickly evergreens dotted the front yard, and pine scent gave rise to the associated taste of peppermint candy canes, staple ornaments for the Klein family Christmas tree. Daddy, a devout atheist, never begrudged Mom’s winter holiday with all the trimmings.

“Grandma’s house,” Nick said. “You okay with this?”

Nick asked her over to his house at least three times a week, where his two-job mom rarely lurked and his one-job grandma left him to his own devices. Where they’d be left to their own devices. No turning back.

Darcy licked her tingling lips. She leaned across the seat and kissed his mouth into a smile. “Thought you were gonna make me wait forever,” he said.

Nick came around to open her door, and she kept one hand over the red foil packet in her pocket. Probably, Nick thought she was Little Miss Sexually Experienced, that she’d slept with half the boys in the school, or at least gotten them off. She was going to have to tell him the truth. Until Nick, she’d always stop boys when they tried to touch her.

She’d never let a boy get her all worked up. She’d never let a boy see her like that.

Nick followed her gaze to the ramshackle house. “You sure about this? We can find another place. . . .”

“This is fine.” Did he think she was some kind of snob? She of the psycho family had visited her father in a variety of locked wards, so a shoddy bungalow didn’t even register on her snubbing scale. She hurried out of the car and touched Nick’s arm, morphing his scowl back into the dimpled smile she adored. Her vision fuzzed before her open eyes into a cascading zigzag pattern.

“You okay?” Nick took her arm, steadying her, as if she were a little old lady needing assistance to cross a street. Only he wasn’t exactly the Boy Scout type.

“Sure.” Her brother’s mental health was cracking, her dad was rotting in the ground—his choice—and her mother was a control freak. Even the Mad Hatter wouldn’t stick around for her father’s warped anniversary. “Let’s go inside.”

The tentative raindrops had already doubled in size and number, splattering the grassless front yard, and tilling the soil into a seed-ready medium. The earth aroma she loved mingled with the rain smells, blending until she could no longer single out each distinct scent. This year, she might actually create the garden she’d tried last spring when nothing would grow.

“Wait.” Nick pecked her cheek, a ploy for getting a good hold around her waist and sweeping her into his arms. Her stomach somersaulted with the sudden change of position, and the rain’s patter heightened into a downpour. She nuzzled into his neck, the only dry spot, and dared a tentative nibble at the tender underside of his chin.

“You’re not making this any easier.” Nick stumbled across the rock-strewn yard, mud sucking at his sneakers, and then placed her lightly on her feet when they reached the front porch overhang. “Geez, you’re light.”

Stacks of boxes were piled high along each side of the tiny porch, and she squeezed through the cardboard-scented passage, eyes on her prize.

Nick fumbled through the keys on his keychain till he found the one for his house. “Ta-da. Beats the hell out of me why Grandma insists on locking the door. It’s not like we’re in the city. Not like anyone would want her stuff.” He released the dead bolt, and the flimsy-looking door flung wide and knocked into the wall. He laughed, shaking his head at yet another pile of junk. More boxes snaked through the living room. Darcy spied a pea soup–green and pumpkin-orange flowered sofa that she could’ve sworn she’d seen on the side of Underhill Road.

Last week, she and Heather had watched a TV show about a woman who couldn’t throw anything away. The pack rat even kept used Band-Aids, in case she wanted to revisit an old scab for its sentimental value. Darcy and Heather had screeched with laughter, trying to gross each other out over made-up collections: bloody tampons, dingle berries, earwax. Now evidence of a hoarding addiction didn’t seem the least bit funny.

Nick knelt by the doorway leading to the rest of the house. A skinny black-and-white cat padded down two steps, and then lay down at his feet. One look from Nick, and the cat started purring. Nick picked up the cat, held it to his cheek, and stroked it beneath the chin. The purring grew louder. In Darcy’s limited experience with cats, they ran the gamut between complete owner loyalty and utter disinterest. She’d never seen one purr so readily though.

Nick let the cat down. “There you go, Sissy.”

A girl. That explained the cat’s over the top enthusiasm for Nick.

Nick leaned at the doorframe, picking long cat hairs off his T-shirt. “Want something to eat?”

She shrugged. She didn’t want to seem rude, but Nick’s grandmother’s house didn’t exactly pique her appetite. The smell of cigarette smoke made her a little queasy. The surroundings dampened her more personal hunger, too. “Some water would be great.”

Nick led her up two steps to the kitchen and tickled her palm with his fingertips, rushing her blood flow to lower ground. If only she could block out the pack rat–infested house.

She looked past a sink full of soaking dishes, wilted nachos floating atop cheesy water. She chose not to notice maroon sauce splattering the stove top or the strands of burned spaghetti hanging from an open pot, like dried twigs ripe for snapping. But she couldn’t ignore when something squished underfoot. She bent to pull noodles from her sneaker treads and crumbs dug beneath her fingernails.
Gross!

Nick clattered through the sticky-looking cabinets, searching for two clean cups. “Ick, yuck. How embarrassing.” Well, at least he was with her on that one. He produced two cloudy glasses, scrubbed them at the sink, and then held his hand under the tap, waiting for the water to run cold.

He handed her a slippery glass, and she dipped her tongue into the tepid water and pretended to sip. Nick chugalugged his water, gulping until he’d drained the disgusting liquid, and came up gasping for air. “Sorry, I get thirsty when I’m nervous.” He tried looking her in the eye, then broke off his gaze. “To tell you the truth, I don’t know if I can do this. You’re, like, too pretty.”

“Thanks.” Okay, he thought she was pretty and they were going to have sex, the real deal, going all the way. So what was the problem? Didn’t he like her?

He set his glass on the countertop behind her. “I can barely even look at you at school. I get so worked up, I think maybe I’m gonna lose it right there in front of my locker.”

The image in her mind’s eye of Nick standing in the middle of the high school hallway, scrambling to conceal a wet mess oozing down the leg of his jeans seemed as real as the solid boy in front of her. She couldn’t say a word. She just stood there blushing like the virgin that she was while Nick played with her hair. He kissed her, and an unmistakable bulge pressed through his pants. Nick might’ve thought he was shy, but his body had other ideas. “I have something to show you.”

Her mouth itched, like when she’d jam her pillow into her mouth to keep from crying. He’d better not pull it out right here, right in the middle of the filthy kitchen. She wanted to do it, sort of, but not like this, not like some kind of skuzzy whore.

“Oh, my God, I scared you. You’re shaking.”

“No, you didn’t.” Maybe she should leave, break up with him right now, and forget about the stupid prom. Who cared about limo rides and floor-length gowns with delicate spaghetti straps? Who cared about dance contests and prom queens? Happy endings belonged to other girls, those whose fathers didn’t shove gun barrels into their mouths and blast their heads into a million little pieces.

A million little pieces.
The bullet that killed her father must’ve scrambled her brains, too. Whatever she felt, whatever she thought she felt, kept changing like the weather.

“Darce, I just wanted to show you
my room
.”

Yeah, she bet he did.

What the heck was wrong with her? Did she want to give it up or not? She’d better decide fast. Sometimes, she was certain equal and opposing forces lived in her, battling until she couldn’t feel anything at all, couldn’t be certain of her own name.

Nick examined her face, as if trying to figure out what she was thinking. Good luck with that. “I would never do anything you didn’t want me to,” Nick said. “I’m not like that. I’m not my—I’d never hurt a girl.”

She nodded, and Nick’s flash of annoyance vanished. “Follow me.”

Imagination offered up way too many guesses as to what Nick had in mind, if not sex. Maybe he’d show her his latest marijuana seedlings angling toward a makeshift sunlamp. Maybe his claim that he wouldn’t hurt her was a joke, the standard lie of a serial rapist. Maybe he’d butchered the mail carrier, buried the bloody pieces beneath the floorboards, and slept to the rhythm of his victim’s telltale heartbeat, an Edgar Allan Poe copycat murderer.

Her
telltale heart pounded in her chest. Maybe Nick wanted to share some really strong weed he’d hidden under his pillowcase. That’d work.

Nick opened the closed bedroom door and stepped back to let her enter first.

“Wow.” She hadn’t meant to say it out loud, but really, wow. Walking into Nick’s bedroom reminded her not of Edgar Allan Poe’s gothic
The Tell-Tale Heart
, but of C. S. Lewis’s mythic Narnia tales. She’d made her way through the jam-packed wardrobe of his grandmother’s house, and now found herself entering another world.

Unlike her messy bedroom, no clutter obstructed Nick’s tiny room. She could see clear from the doorway to the windows outlining the opposing wall. A bed with a gleaming pine headboard and a clean—she couldn’t get over that one—shearling comforter nestled beneath two windows. A cable ran between and across the two windows’ frames, and faded denim curtains gave the illusion of a single jumbo window. Air billowed the curtain and helped dry the freshly painted robin’s-egg-blue walls. The wind’s direction was on their side, and not even a mist trickled through the screens.