The Art of Lainey (29 page)

I want to ask if he and Amber are officially back together now, but I’m afraid of the answer. “Did you come out here to smoke?”

“Nope. I haven’t smoked all day,” he says.

“That’s awesome.”

“Amber thinks it’s crazy. She smokes at least a pack a day, not to mention a substantial amount of weed.”

“Is that what you got arrested for?” I can feel beads of sweat forming on my forehead. I blot at them clumsily with my left hand.

“Her, not me. I don’t smoke weed anymore.”

I am still staring at my hand, at the way Micah has it pinned to his leg. If I fold my fingers just so, his will slip into the spaces between, and we will be linked. I have never wanted anything so much in my whole life. “So then what did
you
do?”

“You really want to know?” The low voice again. The one that makes me think of rainstorms and stained-glass windows and rock songs with violins.

“Yeah. Tell me,” I say, even as I realize I don’t care. I don’t care about who Micah used to be. I only care about who he is now, about the cracks gluing themselves back together in my chest. Nothing else matters. Maybe I shouldn’t do this. So what if he’s attracted to me? Amber is right for him. But
my fingers start to fold anyway. A surge of warmth rushes through me as Micah gently squeezes my palm.

And that’s game over. I start figuring out how to make it work—Micah and me.

Kendall will never approve, but she’ll have to deal. Or not deal. I don’t care. I’m not worried about her. I’m worried about everything else—about messing things up, about getting hurt, about hurting him. But I have to try. The way I feel in this moment, that’s worth fighting for. All those lines in
The Art of War
about choosing one’s battles wisely suddenly make sense to me. Not everything is worthy of great risk and possible sacrifice.

Micah is.

I won’t be a coward. I’m done worrying. This isn’t reckless—it’s real. Amber might have more in common with him, but that doesn’t make her feelings worth more. This. This is my “fall like a thunderbolt” moment and I am not going to waste it.

“You remember how someone graffitied the old airport terminal?” he asks.

“Yeah.” My chair squeaks as I inch closer to him. My heart is thudding so loudly I can barely hear my response. “The news people said it was gang members or something.”

Micah rests his head against my shoulder. “It was me.”

His hair smells like peppermint shampoo. Soft pieces of it brush against my cheek. “Seriously? Graffiti?” I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t vandalism. It’s so random. “Why?”

He rubs his thumb back and forth over the pointy bone in my wrist. “It’s hard to explain. Did you ever want to scream, but when you open your mouth nothing comes out? Like you have all this shit trapped inside of you and you’ll go insane unless you get rid of it?”

“Stuff about your dad?” I want to look into his eyes, but our heads are too close and I refuse to pull away from him.

“About a lot of things,” he says. “Like how terrible is it that I want to leave my mom and sister to go to college in New York? They need me. I should stay, but I want to go. . . .” He shakes his head in disgust and his hair tickles my cheek again. “I’ve done such a crap job taking care of them. Even now, I can’t do the one thing I know would make my mom happy and quit smoking. I feel like my dad would be disappointed in me.”

“Micah, that’s not true. Your dad wouldn’t want you to give up your dreams, and neither would your mom or Trinity.” I turn toward him slightly. Our faces are almost touching. I wish I knew what to say to make him feel better. “You can’t be so hard on yourself.”

I feel his mouth smile against my shoulder. “Sorry,” he says. “Didn’t mean to get all heavy. Now you have to tell me one of your secrets so we’re even.”

Well, I couldn’t ask for a better setup than that. Here goes nothing. “I like you,” I blurt out. And even though Micah doesn’t say anything right away, even though tears form out of nowhere and I’m shaking and my heart is threatening to explode, part of me feels like I’ve just lost fifty pounds.

And then he angles his head toward me. “I like you too,” he murmurs in my ear, his lips hovering dangerously close to my skin.

And then it’s like the song from The Devil’s Doorstep is playing again. “Wake Up Dreaming.” But the only music is the sound of our breathing and I know that if I turn just a few degrees to the right that Micah will twist inward toward me, and our lips will touch. A real kiss, more than at the soccer game. A kiss we can’t take back or justify as part of some silly plan.

I’m still shaking, but it’s like someone else is controlling my body. She’s telling me nothing matters except for the way I feel this second, how once I start kissing Micah I’m never going to want to stop. She’s turning my head for me, slowly, tilting my chin ever so slightly. I can feel him sliding around to face me. Any second now . . . I reach my left hand up and skim it across the top of his mohawk. He exhales slow and hard, his breath condensing on my lips. I hear a rushing, a roaring in my ears. My blood, my heartbeat, pounding throughout my whole body.

And then someone coughs.

I spin around so fast that my chair slams into the flimsy table leg and sends the table skating a foot across the patio. Micah drops my hand like it’s a tarantula. Amber is standing outside the back door of the club.

We are so busted.

“D
on’t let me interrupt,” Amber says. Her blue eyes are icicles, frigid and stabbing in the summer heat.

Before either of us can speak, she disappears. The door slams behind her.

“I have to go.” Micah pulls away and I feel instantly colder. He scrambles to his feet and heads toward the club.

“Yeah. You do that,” I whisper.

He hears me and pauses with one hand on the door. “I came here with her. I shouldn’t have—I’m sorry.” His voice is heavy with grief.

Regret.

As he disappears back inside the club, I crumple my soda cup with one hand and throw it against the side of the building with all my might. It bounces limply off the bricks and falls to the ground. I want to scream. I clearly don’t understand guys. If Micah is so into Amber that he ran after
her like a puppy dog, what was he doing out here holding hands with me? Is he no different than Jason? Am I just a “vacation” for him?

I rest my cheek on the metal tabletop. The tears come fast. Wrapping my arms around my head so that no one who comes outside will be able to see my face, I sob quietly into the fold of my elbow. Phrases about being decisive and long delays dampening my army’s ardor float around in my head. But no, that’s bullshit. Talk is cheap. If Micah wanted me, he would be with me and not Amber. He would have walked away from her the way I walked away from Jason.

The patio door squeaks open and then slams shut. Wiping my eyes on my sleeve, I sit up and try to pretend that I’m just tired or feeling sick, that I’m not some crazy girl crying at the dance club.

But it’s Kendall, and she’s a tough one to fool. She’s at my side in a second. “Laineykins, what happened?”

I can’t get into it with her because if I do I’ll start crying again and she’ll start telling me how Micah doesn’t matter and then the tears might never stop. “It’s nothing,” I say.

“I saw him and that girl come inside. What did they say to you?”

“Nothing.”

Kendall stares me down. “
Nothing
would not have made you cry.”

I hang my head. “Just forget it, okay? It’s over.” It’s so over. I don’t know what I was thinking. That’s just it—at some point I stopped thinking. I wasn’t strategizing. I wasn’t
justifying. I was just responding to the situation. And it felt right. Except Micah came here with another girl. And now he’s probably leaving with her.

“No. Screw that.” Kendall is up and heading back inside the club. Good. I want her to go dance or something. Leave me alone. I want everyone to leave me alone.

Too late, I realize what her plan is.

“Kendall, wait.”

I leap from my seat and clatter after her in my platforms, stopping just long enough to pick up my crumpled cup and toss it in the trash can outside the door. Inside, Amber and Micah are standing against the far wall. It looks like they’re arguing, but the music is too loud for me to hear what they’re saying.

Kendall is cruising across the dance floor, a skinny blonde missile, a tornado bent on destruction.

“Stop.” She’s not listening. I hurry after her, half limping, wishing for once I had worn more sensible shoes.

Amber wipes at her eyes, and Micah enfolds her in a hug. I die a little inside. I try to stop staring, but can’t. I’m slowly losing control. I have been all night, but I don’t care. I don’t care about anything right this second.

Except Micah.

And the way he’s got his hand on Amber’s lower back as they head toward the exit.

Kendall reaches the two of them before they can escape out into the parking lot. Her hand clamps down on Micah’s shoulder. I can only watch in horror as he spins around, a
confused look on his face. She starts screaming. The music is too loud to hear what she’s saying, but from the way she’s tossing her head and waving her arms around it’s not too hard to fill in the blanks. Amber’s mouth falls open in shock.

For a moment, I consider sneaking past all three of them and out into the night. But no, I’m the cause of this scene, and even if Micah might have earned a little of Kendall’s wrath, Amber doesn’t deserve to be sliced and diced with her razor-sharp tongue.

I reach Kendall’s side and tug on her arm. “Come on. Let it go, please.” At least the club is dark. Hopefully Micah and Amber can’t tell I’ve been crying.

Kendall glances over her shoulder and then pulls free of my arm. “I will
not
let it go. No friend of mine is going to get treated like shit by anyone, let alone some loser thug.” She turns back to Micah. “She liked you, you asshole, and you made her cry.”

I have no idea what Micah’s response to this is, because I can’t bring myself to look at him. I will probably never be able to look at him ever again. I wish I had walked on by like I first considered. Better than that, I wish the pulsing lights were lasers that would vaporize me.

“Please, Kendall.” I try once more to steer her away. My eyes are still trained on the floor. “It’s not worth it.”

Now Amber is screaming too, calling Kendall a psycho-bitch, telling her to back off. Somewhere between them I hear Micah telling Kendall he’s not afraid of her and that
she shouldn’t speak for me. Their voices encircle me like snares; they stab me like spikes. My head is throbbing from the smoke and the lights and the thudding bass. I barely notice a small group of people beginning to cluster around, hoping for an actual fight.

“I can ruin you, you know that?” Kendall shouts. “I can make sure that no one ever speaks to you.”

“Stop it, Kendall. That’s enough!” I give her wrist another vicious yank. “Quit being a bitch.”

She looks at me in surprise, rubbing her wrist where I grabbed her. “No. It’s not enough. No friend of
mine
is—”

Of course. Once again Kendall is making my problems all about her. “This has nothing to do with you,” I say. This time she finally lets me drag her away.

“What has gotten into you?” she asks. “Did you really just call me a bitch? I was defending you, in case you didn’t notice, since you seem incapable of doing it yourself.”

The comment hurts but I’m in no mood to make an even bigger scene. “I told you to stop.” I have to shout so she can hear me over the pounding bass. “He doesn’t matter to me. I used him, okay? That’s all it ever was.” Of course the music picks that moment to cut out so my words explode across the club like a machine-gun blast. Micah and Amber are halfway out the door, but they hear every word. I can tell by the way Micah stumbles, just barely.

Nearby a voice I don’t recognize yells, “Damn, that was cold, even for her.”

Micah turns halfway around to face me. Once again I
wish the lasers would vaporize me on the spot. His eyes sear into mine, with what? Surprise? Hurt? Both. And then all of the expression fades away until he looks dead. More like a ghost than a real person. Everything goes blurry, like I’m watching the events unfold through a fish tank. I barely notice the pale circles, faces of people still staring at me, hoping for more theatrics. My eyes see only one thing, the dark outline of Micah’s back as he disappears through the front door of the club, with Amber at his side.

I
’m supposed to work at Denali the next day, but I tell my parents I’m sick. I can’t face Micah. I have no idea what he might do. Maybe he’ll go off on me in front of the whole coffee shop, reduce me to tears as Jason did at the beginning of summer. Only this time it’ll be worse, because this time the whole crushing feeling will be totally deserved. Or maybe he’ll quit talking to me completely, freeze me out like I don’t exist.

I pull the covers up over my head. I want to go back to sleep so I don’t have to think about it.

A few minutes later, my mom pops into my room with some mail. An issue of
Soccer Illustrated
and some letters from college athletic departments that I should probably open right away. But they’re all small Division II and Division III schools and even though I should be glad anyone is interested in me, it just feels like one more big, fat failure on
top of everything else.

“Just put it all on my desk,” I say. “I’ll look at it when I’m feeling better.”

She stacks the letters neatly on top of the magazine and comes to sit on the side of my bed. Reaching out, she feels my cheek with the back of her hand. “You don’t feel feverish.”