Places No One Knows (22 page)

Autumn is luminous under the fractured light of the mirror ball, slow dancing with Hunter Pennington. His mouth is close to her ear. His hand on her waist is positioned a scant millimeter above someplace inappropriate.

Maribeth stands beside a giant bowl of pretzels, her finger still caught in my bracelet. I understand two things simultaneously—first, that she is desperately sad and second, that she would never, ever tell me that. At least, not in any way I'd know how to answer. I have a sinking feeling that this is the end of something. This is where I'll see her fall apart.

And then she collects herself. With a toss of her head, she leads me straight through the swaying crowd, back to the table, steering us to someplace we belong.

“
There
you are!” she says as we come up next to Kendry and Palmer, who are sitting with their heads very close together. Her tone implies that we have searched high and low and are now overjoyed to see them.

They jump apart, looking guilty, and I'm almost certain that the topic of interest was Maribeth and her philandering date.

The way she stands over them is imperious.

Palmer fidgets with a plastic hourglass. “God, so
Autumn
is really slutting it up, right?”

Maribeth shrugs like nothing has ever mattered less. “Well, I guess it's not even surprising. I mean, what do you expect?”

“Wait, what?” says Kendry. “Expect it why?”

“Well, it's just what I heard, but”—Maribeth's voice drops to a whisper—“last year she got caught behind Kroger's with the
janitor.
”

Her expression is so gleeful—so hateful—it makes me flinch. This is Maribeth wounded. Not beaten or broken, but anguished enough to tear out someone's throat. I'm almost positive her supposed insider knowledge of Autumn's sex life is grounded in nothing. Still, it is an unfairness universally acknowledged that when it comes to gossip, objective truth has no bearing whatsoever.

“Oh my God,” says Kendry, leaning across the table, wide-eyed. “What are you even
talking
about?”

“I'm serious, Kelsey Conroy used to work in the flower department. I can't believe you never heard that!”

“Gross,”
Kendry and Palmer cry in delighted unison, while Maribeth looks at me expectantly.

I know her well enough to understand the only way to console her is by declaring my alliance. She wants me to prove that I'm still hers. I wonder if I am. If I ever really was. I don't know any of the words it would take for me to choose her, or why we have no idea how to be sad together.

Kendry and Palmer laugh behind their hands, the short, stifled laughs of people who know they're doing something naughty. I look away and tug the bottom of my dress. It's not even that short, but the bareness of my back makes me feel naked. I want Marshall Holt to see my spine, and no one else.

Another fast song comes on and the couples all break apart. The sudden change in sound track is too perky and upbeat to deal with. I push my chair back and cross the dance floor, winding between bodies, shuffling through twinkling drifts of confetti until I make it to the bleachers.

The custodial crew has covered the gap at the end of the stands with butcher paper to discourage closet drinkers and clandestine lovers, but their masking tape barrier is no match for my fingernails. It's dark under the bleachers and marginally quieter. I slide out of my shoes and sigh as my feet rest flat against the floor. The pain is sharp and immediate, but bearable. I close my eyes and lean back.

Out in the gym, the music is thumping, girls are dancing, couples are groping each other like drowning people. Somewhere in the dark, Autumn Pickerel is taking everything Maribeth wants.

I didn't do this. I didn't plan or design or wish it. I just made the larceny possible. I stood in the wings and watched it happen and now I'm left with that—that deep, filthy complicity.

When Marshall materializes out of the dark, there's a cool, dreamy part of me that's completely unshocked. The sun is down, and with the sun down, nothing about the real world matters quite as much. Even the air feels softer.

My arches ache from faraway, pain thudding up my calves. I stand against the wall, cycling through all the words to describe his presence here—inarguable, impossible, insupportable—but his mouth is tentative and inviting. It's the only thing I want, and anyway, what's one more fantasy?

He ducks into the narrow gap and stands facing me. The metal folding supports are pressed against his back and his mouth is very close to mine.

“Hi,” I say, so small and cautious I'm surprised he can even hear it over the music. My voice doesn't sound like mine.

He leans closer, and I close my eyes and hold my breath, nearly trembling at the weight of his body in my space. “Hi.”

This is real. More than the lighter, more than a bruise on my neck—already fading—or some subjective, sentimental list to read aloud in class. This is the closest we have ever come in real life to acknowledging the impossible thread that exists between us. We're total strangers, and we are magicians with the intimate power to see inside each other, and we're missing all the small, crucial steps between those two things.

I have a disjointed daydream of kissing him, getting my special-occasion lipstick all over his mouth, and then I won't have to say it aloud, everyone will just know.

“How's the confetti?” he says. “Having a good time with the pretty people?”

He has me trapped against the wall, hands braced on either side of my head and I like him looming over me. I like him electrified and wide awake.

“That depends. Are you having a good time letting Heather grope you?”

“If I said no, would that make you happy?”

He stands with the insides of his shoes pressed against the outsides of my bare feet, waiting for me to say something. To tell him that
no
is the only word in the world that will make me happy, that I saw him with her and I hate it, that I
need
him to not want anyone else. But the scenario is impossible. Need is not in the Waverly vocabulary.

“So,” I say, and I say it coolly, cruelly, like nothing in the world has ever mattered to me less than this. “I take it she still doesn't know that you're using her as your own personal razor blade?”

He flinches back and shakes his head. “What are you talking about?”

“I'm talking about your penchant for finding every toxic waste site and sharp edge in a thirty-mile radius.”

“She's a person.” But his voice is hoarse. He's not looking at me.

“Are you sure about that?”

Now he meets my eyes, chin up, jaw tight. “She's a
person.
”

He means it, but not in any way I need to be afraid of. His voice is hurt, not smitten. The way he's looking at me is like I'm the only beating heart in the world.

He's inches away, and it makes me think of sleep and kissing. He smells like Heather's perfume, and who even cares? I want to climb him.

I move to press myself against him, but he pulls back. In the dark, his eyes are miserable.

“What?”
I say, sounding ferocious, even to myself.

“Waverly, I love you.”

And for a second, I stop breathing. They're just words. But they make something shudder under my skin. “No you don't. You love the idea of me.”

For a second, I'm sure he'll let me go. He'll duck out from under the bleachers and walk away and that will be the end of it. Of everything.

Then he takes a breath and moves closer.

With his mouth against my ear, he slides his hand along the side of my face, cupping my cheek. “Waverly, I know it freaks you out, but I have the right to love you if I want.”

“Stop,” I whisper, because I'm starting to feel light-headed, like I might float away.

His hands are clamped on either side of my face now, holding me so that my chin is up and I can't look anywhere but him. “Why?” he says, with no heat, no rancor.

“Just
stop
it. I don't want to hear that.”

He leans in so our foreheads are almost touching. “I don't care if you don't want to hear it. I want to
say
it.”

I'm squeezing my tiny beaded purse with both hands. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Because I've never said it to anyone. Because I just want to be able to say it when I mean it.”

“I'm not your girlfriend,” I say.

He breathes out and lets his hands fall. His face is eminently readable. “I know that. Do you think I don't
know
that?”

“Why did you even come here tonight? Were you trying to
punish
me? To make me jealous?”

“No,” he says, his lips barely moving.

“What, then? To make sure nothing
untoward
happened? To protect me from CJ fucking
Borsen
?”

He shakes his head, slow and real and honest. “Because I wanted to see you in that goddamn dress.”

He is completely sincere. He can say some mundane, normal word like
dress
and mean it more than I have ever meant anything in my whole life.

I open my mouth again, but there are no words, no corresponding declaration. After a second, he turns and ducks back out into the crowd.

I am alone.

Over the PA speakers, the DJ is playing “Fade into You” by Mazzy Star.

The truth is, it's a very depressing song.

CJ takes me home at midnight. In the driveway, he kisses me and it's soft and unexciting. When he puts his hand on the back of my neck, I reach behind me for the door.

“I have to go.”

“Let me walk you up.”

“No, really. Thank you for dinner. I'll see you Monday.”

“The food drive meeting is tomorrow.”

“I'll see you tomorrow.”

I get out of the car before he can reach for my hand or touch my face, and bolt for my house so fast that by the time I get to the porch, I'm almost running. My feet ache like fire in my slippery, shiny shoes.

In my room, I go straight to my nightstand and get out the candle. My hands are shaking and every time I flick Marshall's lighter, the flame goes out again, until I want to scream. The candle is a lumpy hockey puck, mostly melted. I measure the remaining height between my fingers—a slippery inch of comfort. It isn't enough.

When the wick finally catches, I stand over it, breathing in huge gasps, gulping down the smell. It reminds me so much of Marshall, I can half believe I'm already there. The smoke gives me something to fix on until I can find the part of me that exists beyond the dimensions of my room. That knows how to get to someplace I actually want to be.

When my heartbeat finally slows down, I yank off my dress and throw it in the corner. Autumn's version of me was stark—lovely, even—but I'm better in my pajamas, better without gash-red lips and huge, black-rimmed eyes.

In the dark I lie rigid, counting down, trying to reach the small, transcendent core that doesn't measure or calculate or obsess, exempt from matter and distance.
Be impermanent and soft,
I tell myself.
Just disappear.

It takes a long time, because every number keeps turning itself into
Marshall, Marshall, Marshall.

Razor blade.

I hate the words but I think them anyway, trying to get used to the shape.

Waverly's right. She's
always
fucking right. In the last six months, there've been so many times I used Heather because I could, for distraction or company or just to feel something else. I got so used to knowing that no matter what, she'd always just be there.

But I'm right too. Heather's a person. I can't keep jerking her around anymore.

I tell her in the parking lot, in case she'd rather get a ride from someone else and maybe salvage the evening, but after I finish my big ugly speech, she just opens the passenger door and gets in.

Ollie is MIA. He watched the little freshman with the kind of interest he doesn't usually have for anything, and when Little Ollie spent twenty minutes talking to every girl who wasn't her, then did a disappearing act, he pushed himself away from the wall.

He walked over to her through the crowd. Left me on the dance floor with Heather. She slid her hand into mine, and when I didn't squeeze back, she held my arm instead. When she stood on her toes and tried to kiss me, I had to look away.

The whole way home, Heather sits with her head against the window, like she needs to get as far away from me as possible.

“I'm sorry,” I say.

And she doesn't say anything. If she's crying, I can't hear it, and I don't look away from the road.

After a while, she digs around in her purse and lights a cigarette, but doesn't open the window. I'm nearly grinding my teeth with how bad I want one too, but I don't tell her to put it out. The smoke is everywhere and I want it with my whole body. I just stare straight ahead and keep wanting it.

When I pull up to her house, Heather drops the cigarette in the ashtray and takes one deep, shaky breath before she gets out.

“Good night,” I say, and wonder if this is the last thing we'll ever say to each other.

“She's not going to pick you,” Heather says suddenly, leaning back in through the passenger side. “Just so you know. She's not going to suddenly just
condescend
to be seen with you.”

“What are you talking about?” I say, even though there's only one direction this could be heading.

“I
saw
you follow her, Marshall. I'm not a total idiot. What did you think was going to happen? Behind the bleachers like a total slut? God, have you
met
her?”

I recognize the girl that Heather sees. The one who never cracks.

But that girl isn't Waverly—at least, not
real
Waverly. Heather's only thinking about the lie. Waverly in the daytime.

The thing that hurts is something else completely. I said
love.
She didn't say it back.

Heather doesn't slam the door or make a big dramatic scene, even though she could probably pull off a decent exit. She just walks away, and I sit in her driveway, thinking about Waverly, how she's not my girlfriend, and what that means. How I'm one step closer to just accepting the terms of what we've got, the same way Heather spent the last six months accepting I was never going to hold her hand in public.

How even in that black dress, even in the dark, Waverly was the brightest thing in the gym.

I drive home with the window down and the radio off, just being quiet and alone. Just feeling the air against my face.

When I let myself inside and close the door too hard, Annie comes shuffling out into the hall. “What are you doing? Did you just get home?”

“Yeah.”

She scrubs her eyes like she's trying to focus. “Why are you wearing that shirt?”

I look at the button-down. “There was this thing at school.”

She squints and shakes her head. “A collared-shirt thing?”

“A dance, okay? There was a dance.”

“Oh.” Nothing for a long time. Then, “Do you have a girlfriend or something?”

“No.”

For a minute, Annie doesn't do anything, just stands there, looking warm and drowsy. Chowder is huffing for my attention, butting the top of her head against my knee.

Finally, Annie nods and trudges back to her room. She mumbles something into her hand before she shuts the door. It sounds kind of like, “Have fun at your dance.”

Then I'm standing in the hall in a collared shirt that I ironed myself. Badly.

I keep smelling Heather's lip gloss, tasting it when I breathe, this oily candy flavor, choking and slick.

I brush my teeth. A lot. In the shower, I scrub my face like I'm trying to wash it off.

In the mirror over the sink, I look younger than I'm used to. I can't stand how helpless, how pleading my eyes look. I cover my reflection with my hand so all I can see is my mouth.

Right away, I get an ugly flash of how my dad will act when he sees my handprint on the glass. He'll say,
what have you been doing in there?
Like I'm some degenerate. He'll want to know why I was putting my hands all over the mirror and I won't say anything, because the reason is too weird and stupid to explain.

I was covering my eyes so that I would stop looking at myself. Are you happy now?

I was covering my eyes, because I just got home from the kind of school function I swore I'd never go to. I spent most of it with my arm around a girl who doesn't know the first thing about me, while the only girl who actually matters was pressed up against someone else. This happy, confident guy with sports and activities and
lists
—these crazy lists of all the things he's going to do and be and accomplish.

He is the person I will never be.

That isn't some angry, defiant promise.

It's just the truth.