Places No One Knows (16 page)

The bedroom is dingy and cramped, with one window and no curtains. Its layout is vaguely familiar from the other night, but disorienting too. Everything seems smaller with the lights on. The carpet is an upsetting shade of burnt orange.

Marshall's sitting with his back to me, hunched over a little writing desk with a textbook open in front of him. He's eating Goldfish crackers out of the bag without looking away from the page. Close by, someone is shouting.

He's clearly used to it. He's got on big DJ-style headphones, which I can only assume are noise-canceling, because as soon as I touch his shoulder he jumps and drops his pen. When he whips around and yanks off the headphones, his eyes are all pupil.

“Sorry. I didn't mean to sneak up on you.”

For a second, he sits perfectly still, staring up at me. Then his jaw gets tight and he closes his eyes. “How are you doing this?” he says, his breath catching in his throat.

“I don't know,” I tell him, when what I really want to say is
Does it matter?

And yes, I understand that it's supposed to, but it's a line of questioning that stopped feeling very important right about the time I woke up with a giant, impossible hickey. I'm Waverly Camdenmar. I've spent my whole life memorizing unfathomable things. I'm ready to follow this rabbit hole all the way down.

One teaspoon of a neutron star weighs over a hundred million tons and giraffes only need to sleep twenty minutes a day. There's a star in the Centaurus constellation that's made of diamonds, and when it snows on Venus, it snows lead. I have a bruise on my throat the size and shape of Marshall Holt's mouth. If all those things are true, why does he seem so certain that
this
isn't?

Suddenly, it feels inevitable that he'll embrace the strangeness with me. He has to. Just let go and fall headfirst, like his own personal version of compulsive running or insomnia or distant lonely moons.

“Maybe this is that soft, wobbly place where awake and asleep kind of blend together.”

He stares up at me, shaking his head. “
No.
I mean, dreams can be weird, whatever. But they don't just
blend
with regular life. Things are either real or they're not, and if you can't tell the difference, what happens is you get locked up for having a breakdown. I've watched you disappear in front of me like a goddamn magician, and that isn't real. It can't just
happen.
”

“Why do people always do that?”

“Do what?”

“Say something can't be happening, when clearly it is?” When what I want to say is,
Your mouth is the first thing I have ever encountered that's more interesting than astrophysics.
I want to say,
You have savaged my neck. What does that mean? Does it mean anything that you savaged my neck?
“We've been defying rationality for a week and a half, and now you suddenly have a problem with it?”

“Yeah.” His voice is flat, so carefully controlled it shakes. But sometimes that's the problem. The tighter you grip something, the more you betray the trembling inside. “I do. I mean, don't you get that it was different before?”

“Before. Before what?”

He looks away, shaking his head. “Look, when you're messed up, you can kind of just roll with whatever happens, but when you're normal, other things are supposed to stay normal too, or—or follow
rules.
I'm not messed up this time, okay?”

His tone is dogged, like he's proving something, but what he's saying is close to nonsensical. Things always follow rules. Just because you don't understand them doesn't mean they're not there.

He keeps going, pronouncing each word very clearly. “I'm not drunk, or tripping, or—or
delirious.
I'm sitting in my goddamn bedroom, trying to do my homework.”

Under some other circumstance, I'd passively accept his objections. I'd nod and frown, avoid confrontation, because that's what people do—force myself to fit whatever mold the world demands. But now, in this room, my shape doesn't matter. I'm a completely different person than I am in the daytime.

“Marshall,” I say, and I sound capable and brusque, like Jamie when our practice times are bad. “I get that this is out of your comfort zone—I do—but it's what's happening. You're not allowed to stick your fingers in your ears and sing
lalala
anymore. We're past that.”

He opens his mouth and I think he'll argue, even just to dispute the idea that something as pervasive and dependable as the laws of science could be called a comfort zone. But then his mouth snaps shut again. He drops his eyes to the desk and nods.

“Okay, then.” I stand with my hands on the back of his chair. “Okay.”

This is the first time I've really seen his room. It's like a museum display or an educational diorama—natural habitat of the North American stoner—with a scarred twin bed and a mismatched dresser. The rickety little desk and not much else. The closet yawns, spilling out undifferentiated clothes. His headphones are clearly the most expensive thing in the room.

I know I should do something, say something, but I have no idea what. I've spent most of my life following a set of helpful scripts and suddenly, none of them apply. How do you make conversation with someone when you've seen them kneeling on the bathroom floor? When their most private moments are yours to intrude upon at will? When they've had their hands up your shirt, and you are ninety percent sure you wouldn't mind if it happened again?

“What are you reading?” I say, leaning across him to examine the book.

“Nothing. Homework.”

“I thought you hated school.”

He flips the cover closed. “I don't hate American lit. I hate school.”

The last time I was this close to him, it was a commotion of touching. His hands, picking apart the rigid panels of my exoskeleton. His mouth, finding mine with the certainty of a meteor.

“What do you
want
?” he says, and raises his eyes to mine.

A vacuum opens in my chest. It seems crucially important, suddenly, that he is the only person who ever asks me that.

“For you to kiss me.”

I say it without blinking. I say it to his mouth and to his dark, steady gaze. The warmth of his body, the shape of his lips.

I keep waiting for him to stand and reach for me, but he just hunches over the desk. “Don't. Don't say things you don't mean.”

I rest my elbows on the back of his chair, leaning close to his bare, blushing neck. “Marshall,” I say. His name sounds strange coming out of my mouth. “I want to kiss you.”

When he still doesn't move, I take his hand in both of mine, turning it carefully, then holding it against my collarbone. It's warm and pliable and he's shaking.

“Fuck,” he whispers, unresisting.

The weight of his hand in mine is awful, and after a second, I drop it.

When he finally looks up, his expression is wide open, like I'm seeing him undressed. “Is there anyone you don't
lie
to?”

Like I am some sort of habitual and compulsive liar, like every word out of my mouth is malicious or false. As though I am not to be trusted. Whatever is taking place right now is not a sweet and tender moment. The silence that hangs between us is prickling and sharp. There is no moment.

“You,” I say, looking someplace else. “I don't lie to
you.
”

There's a certain thrill in being honest. I take a breath and keep going. Because precision matters. Because I don't get to do it much and what have I got to lose. “Or Autumn, I guess. I don't lie to her.”

He shakes his head. “Who's Autumn?”

“Pickerel. She goes to school with us.”

He laughs then—a sharp, staccato laugh. “You're kidding, right?
Autumn?
You do not hang out with Autumn.”

“You don't know who I hang out with.”

“No—no way. She's nobody. She is
way
too weird for someone like you.”

And here we are again. No matter how hard I smile, how far I run, at the end of the day, it always comes back to the question of what I am.

I hug my elbows and shake my head. Autumn is not nobody, but a real, actual force of nature. She is so much more than just some run-of-the-mill
person.
She's Bette Davis and Dorothy Parker and Madonna. Autumn is Tyler Durden and Tony Soprano. Autumn is Cthulhu, Destroyer of Worlds.

I turn in an agitated little circle, pacing the room just so I have some space to breathe. When I sink onto his bed, the mattress is low and squishy. I settle myself into the saggy middle and lie back. “Maybe you don't know her very well.”

“Are you serious right now? She was my best friend for like eight years. I went to all her birthday parties. You do
not
hang out with Autumn.”

His voice is final, and suddenly I get it. He knows those things about her—knows she's bold and scary and surprising—and what he really means is, Autumn could never be those things to
me.

I burrow into his pillow. The pressure against my face makes patterns on the inside of my eyelids. “Never mind. The point is, I'm not some rampant liar, okay?”

I hear the squeak of his chair, and then the bed sinks gently beside me.

When I lift my head, he's looking down at me. His gaze is dark and reflective, like well water or something by Kafka. It makes me feel nervous for no good reason.

After a second, he reaches over like he'll touch the side of my neck, but doesn't quite dare.

“Yeah. Thanks for that.”

“I'm sorry. I didn't think it would—” His voice is heavy, too full of feelings. He leans closer, and when he does, it's like he's sucking all the air out of the room. I wait for him to kiss me and make the breathless feeling go away.

For a second, I'm sure he will. He'll fall toward me like gravity, press his mouth to mine, and I'll finally stop feeling like I'm waiting for disaster.

Then he shuts his eyes and turns away “Waverly,” he says, and his voice is strange. Thick and unwieldy, like it's taking up physical space. “I like you.”

I don't know what to say. He doesn't sound like he's lying, but the admission is too impossible to actually be true.

“Because of the other night?”

“No,” he says, still not looking at me. “No. For a long time.”

I stare at the ceiling, trying to see through the plank and plaster to the night sky above. “How long is long?”

“Remember last year?” He says it like the question conveys some highly specific meaning.

I remember many aspects of last year. It spanned, after all, an entire year.

Marshall is undaunted by things like complex chronology. He soldiers on, watching the carpet. “In history, Mosley—he was telling us all that slang from the 1920s and he talked about carrying a torch for someone. And I looked at you. Remember?”

The thing is, I do.

It wasn't real, college-track history, just a general requirements class I had to take before I could have the good one. Marshall sat at one of the group tables across from mine. Every time I glanced up from my notes, he'd be there, but not in a way that registered.

The memory is vague, casting him as some part of the background, not a real person. He was more like areas of texture and color, something you walk right by in a museum. Next to the Warhol and Pollock, so you're not taking away from the real art. He was the lesser-known contemporary.

But on the day of the Roaring Twenties slang expo, Mosley had given us the definitions, writing them out as he went—a disordered list rolling down the whiteboard,
all wet, the bee's knees, on the lam, dolled up, the cat's pajamas.
And there at the bottom,
carrying a torch.

I'd looked up, and for a second, Marshall's eyes met mine and all the texture and the flat, neutral fuzziness were gone. All I could think was how incredibly dark his eyes were. Then he rested his chin on his hand and his gaze slid past me. He wasn't looking away out of self-consciousness or embarrassment, but simply moving on—bored and slow, like I had stopped holding his interest.

“
How
long?” I say again. “How long have you liked me?”

That day, he was unsettlingly direct, but now he's looking at the floor. “I don't know. A really long time.”

And whatever else he might be saying, by whatever scale he's measuring, I know that it's true. The sophomore history class was almost a year ago.

“Why?”
It comes out sounding confrontational, when really I just want to understand.

I wasn't charming or interesting or exciting. I wasn't nice. Not the prettiest of the pretty girls or the perkiest of the pert. I was just…there, the same way he was.

Marshall does the strangest thing with his mouth, like he's trying not to wince. It's not the face you expect someone to make when they explain infatuation.

“I saw you in the hall one time,” he mutters. “Messing with your sock. You had all these blisters, and your sock was, like,
stuck.
You were trying to peel it off. Your heel was a mess and I thought how I couldn't do that.”

“Do what?”

“Keep going after the blisters pop.”

I close my eyes, imagining—the bite of it, the metallic, satisfying sting. “It's not that hard. You just have to stop caring that it hurts.”

“I can't,” he says. He says it plainly, simply, as though it's something self-evident. As though it's nothing to be ashamed of.

“Maybe you're not trying hard enough.”

“It was this other part of you,” he whispers. “Not how you are in class. I knew I was the only one who saw, and saw that you were bleeding. I was just kind of in love with it.”

“You can't be in love with someone you don't know.”