Underneath Everything (10 page)

He’s halfway across the big field when I start following him. My blood pumps, my muscles loosen up, the sound of my breath surrounds me. Soon I’m jogging after him, desperate he’ll blend into the charcoal night and disappear and I won’t get to say it.

“Hudson!” I call out. “Wait!”

He stops between two large rocks that mark the old park boundary, where the blocks once divided, and turns around. As I get closer, his features come into focus. Wavy brown hair, wet with sweat. Dark eyebrows, drawn together in question. The right corner of his lips turning up the tiniest bit. I slow to a walk, but I’m still panting when I reach him at the rocks.

“You’re here.” Hudson pulls a hand through his hair, scratches his head.

“Yeah.” I grit my teeth as the words rise in my throat, like bile. I swallow, catch my breath, steel myself. “Listen, I—”

“That’s cool,” he says.

What?

He presses his lips together, hitches the ball up against his waist. “I wanted to see you.”

I search his face in the low light, looking for the half smile, the mischievous squint of his eyes that’ll tell me this is a game to him, that I’m the sure thing in his back pocket, something to play with in between stints with Jolene. That I’m second place, always have been. But there’s no longer a smile on his face, no upturned lips. Not even a hint. Instead, his look is searching, intense. It’s pulling me in. I look away, before I’m lost in him and I forget how to say all the things I need to, starting with:

“You didn’t call.”

“I know.” Hudson steps toward me.

“You didn’t text.”

“I know.” He comes closer. I can see beads of sweat running down his neck.

“You said—”

“I said I’d find you. But I guess you beat me to it.” He’s right in front of me now, so close I can smell him. Sweat and wood and pine. He smells more like winter than the trees on either side of us.

I turn toward the tall spruces to give myself a minute. All those angry words are stuck in my throat, choking me. My chest, so tight with rage a second before, has changed its consistency. I look for the hard place inside me that hates him for what he did; but it’s soft now, as if being near him, sharing space with him, has melted it. I hate what he does to me. But I keep coming back. Because he keeps saying things like that. I stand there, staring. I don’t know what to do. But Hudson does.

He takes my hand. I can feel the folds of skin between his fingers, the warmth of his palm. I fall into step next to him, and we follow the path around the pond, across the old dividing line, into Division 18.

At first we walk in silence. This is how our conversations always start. But as the birds sing a series of staccato chirps above us, I start to wonder: if Hudson wanted to be with me, why didn’t he call or text?

It’s not like I asked him to show up at my door on a white horse, but he could have gotten in touch. He could have said something.

Why do I always wait for him to talk first?

“So, tell me again why you didn’t text?” I try to keep my voice light, but it rises too quickly at the end.

I lower my head, study the pavement.

Hudson looks my way for a second, then squeezes my hand and keeps walking. “Couldn’t,” he says.

“Don’t have a cell.”

“What?”

Hudson smiles wide. It’s so rare for him, I almost trip. His hand tightens around mine.

“No email, either. Nothing digital,” he says, his smile easy and big now, like I’ve never seen it. He looks down, laughs, like he’s proud of himself.

“So, you’re hiding from the FBI?” I ask.

He shrugs, looks at me again—his lips a tight smile, like he’s trying to keep it from spreading, his blue eyes flashing recognition. “Sort of.”

“Do tell.”

“My dad works in government security,” he says. I remember his dad. Good-looking for an old guy.

Scary. Always serious. Always in a suit. “He thinks he can track anyone. At first I quit the grid just to piss him off. Which totally worked.” Hudson lets out a soft laugh, shifts his grip on my hand. My whole body flushes hot. I keep walking. We’re halfway around the pond now. The sky has moved through gray to flat black.

“At first?” I ask.

“Yeah.” His steps slow down, his hand gets heavy. “I meant to go back on, but Jolene was so pissed.”

Jolene.
Just when I’d finally forgotten about her, here she is.

“Not because she couldn’t talk to me,” he says, sneaking a glance in my direction, “but because she couldn’t talk to me online. She couldn’t tag me in a picture. She couldn’t update her status with a message to me if I wasn’t on there to write back, or like it, or whatever. I was sick of it.” He pauses. “What we did

—what I do—it’s not for anybody else.”

We stop in front of the rock that marks the farthest edge of the park. There’s nowhere left to go.

“I get it,” I say, my eyes on the pond, the trees, the sky, anything that’ll get the picture of them together out of my head.

“I knew you would. You always did. You’re not like that.”

“Nope,” I say. No Instagram fan club here. My body tenses and shakes, an involuntary shiver.

“You’re cold,” he says. “Come here.” Hudson unwinds his fingers from mine, puts the ball down at his feet, and pulls me to him. My cheek is near his neck; I can feel the heat rise off his skin, the movement of his chest through his sweatshirt. I don’t want to move. But when he slides his arms down to my waist, instead of him I feel Jolene guiding my hand under her shirt, across her stomach, over her skirt. I see the lawn chair, her legs everywhere.

Hudson said he broke up with her. But is it ever really over with Jolene?

I pull away from him. He presses his lips into a line, sits down on the large rock, and steadies the ball with his cleat. I sit next to him on the hard, sloping surface, our thighs touching, our arms wedged together.

Neither of us speaks. There’s only the wind, the stray scratch of a dry leaf blown across the cement, and the thing I haven’t told him: that I took Jolene home from Bella’s party.

“Anyway,” Hudson says, rolling the ball back and forth with his foot, “after being off the grid for a while, I didn’t really want to go back. I liked the quiet.” Hudson shrugs. “I quit social stuff first, then email. I got rid of my cell last. That part was inspired by you.”

“Me?”

“The night you left your phone at the manhunt game,” he says.

“Right,” I say. I dropped it in the basket at the beginning of the game; we all did. And then later, Kris and I left. We didn’t go back—not for our phones, not for him. Not for anything. It’s like my life cracked that night, like it split. He went in one direction. I went in the other.

“I kept it, you know,” he says.

“Kept what?” I ask. I’ve gone back to that night so many times, wondering if I could have done something different; but each time I make the same choice. I walk away from Jolene. She ends up with him.

“Your phone,” Hudson says. He stops the ball with his foot, looks at me.

“Really?” It’s the one thing I didn’t mind losing that night: the screen was shattered, and my parents had refused to buy me a new one. The day after the game they marched me to the store, got my old phone deactivated, and gave me a new one, along with a speech about responsibility and consequences.

I’d always thought Jolene had taken the one I left at the manhunt game. She loved collecting things. My things, especially.

Hudson runs his hand down my jeans and spreads his fingers out over my knee like a starburst, like he used to. An old part of me aches.

“I kept thinking you’d call it, maybe,” he says. “It was stupid, I guess, waiting.”

“No,” I say, less a word than a sound, pushed straight up from my heart through my throat. “Not stupid.” If he had any idea how long I’ve waited for him. How much I’ve hated and wanted and wished things were different. How often I’ve gone back in my mind to the time before him and Jolene, when it was him and me.

He waited for me.

Moonlight moves through the clouds, falls in flat shadows around us. Hudson turns toward me. We’re face-to-face.

“I’ve been waiting,” I say. “Every day.” Saying the words—out loud, to him—does something to me: unties strings, seals cracks, fixes splits. There’s only him and me and us and this. I never left. He never met her on the steps. It’s like I can finally, truly breathe. The wind blows. It’s not cold, but new and fresh on my skin.

Like his hand on my cheek. I close my eyes and lean into it. Then his hand is through my hair, circling my head, cupping my neck. I think he’s going to draw me in, but instead he pauses, looks at me. My heart beats slow and heavy.

And then we kiss. Not beneath stampeding feet at some party or on a stoop with a group of friends in the distance, but alone. And we kiss like we’re alone. Slow. Careful. Curious. Hudson traces the curve of my lips with his, from the corner to the small dip in the middle of my upper lip, where he pauses, his breath ragged and quick. Then he runs his mouth along my cheek before coming back for me. And when he does, his kiss is soft but urgent, his tongue searching. And I’m tugging him toward me, picturing him in my head, even though he’s right in front of me, breathing him in and out like he’s life, because that’s what he’s given me: the last fifteen months undone. But it’s not enough now, never has been, really. I want the rest.

The part we didn’t get. I move my hand along his neck, slick with sweat, and pull him closer, tighter. He grabs my hair, kisses me hard, desperate, deep, like he’s trying to find the same thing in me: all the things we thought were lost.

I lose track of time. At some point Hudson pulls his mouth away from mine, drops his head so that our noses touch and our foreheads press together. His hands cradle my cheeks. Our mouths are open. Our breaths are deep. We heat the frosty air between us.

I lean back into him—just one more kiss—but before I get the chance, my phone vibrates in my pocket. I let my lips linger for an extra moment in front of his—so I can memorize it, that amazing feeling of being on the edge of him—before sliding my phone out. Because I know it’s late, and I know I’m supposed to be home.

I check the screen. My mom’s cell.

“I’ve got to go,” I say, with half a voice.

“I know.” He threads his fingers through my hair.

“I don’t want to.”

He smiles. “I know.” He moves forward, a fraction of an inch, enough for our lips to touch. Then he’s standing up, and I’m beside him, and we’re making our way back along the path through the park in the dark. Hudson’s arm brushes against mine. Our palms meet; our hands lock. We walk.

It’s not until we cut through the two large rocks that the panic sets in. What if when I get in my car everything goes back to normal? What if the small part of Tamaques Park that crosses into Division 18 is the only place we can erase everything that’s happened?

“I wish you’d kept your phone,” I say, taking care to keep my voice steady. “This whole off-the-grid thing is really inconvenient. I can’t even text you.”

“You see, you’re thinking about it all wrong.” He lifts our hands to his lips and blows hot breath on them. “No one can text me when I’m with you, either. No interruptions. This”—he holds our intertwined fingers up between us—“is just for us.”

“That part I like.”

“That’s what I thought,” he says. We reach the edge of the field. Hudson’s cleats click when we step onto the concrete. “You should try it.”

“I don’t think I could.” I click my cell on and off in my pocket with my free hand and consider it. Who actually texts me? My mom. Kris, when she’s not grounded. Jolene . . .

“But you’ve already done it. You and Kris. You guys disappeared, dropped off the popular cliff.”

“That’s not the same thing. We didn’t cancel our email or take down our Twitter or Instagram accounts. We didn’t ditch our phones.”

“Nope, you just left yours for me.”

“Exactly.” We cross over to the small parking lot backed by woods.

“Well, if you change your mind, I’ve got a drawer in my room that’s perfect for holding phones that don’t ring. You never know. You might like it.”

“Maybe.” I’m standing in front of my car, but I don’t want to get in. “This is me.”

Hudson nods, closes his hand hard around mine one last time before loosening his grip, letting me go.

“So, I’ll see you,” I say, shoving my hand into my pocket.

“See you at school,” Hudson says, flipping up his hood.

School. Another planet. A different dimension. I try to imagine it—Hudson and me in the halls instead of him and Jolene—but I can’t, and it shows on my face.

“It’s not as bad as all that,” he says. “They do serve lunch.”

“Are you trying to cheer me up with the cafeteria?”

“Never,” he says. “Bike racks are much better. Meet me there, before the end of sixth period.”

“Before the end of sixth,” I agree, trying to find his eyes. But it’s dark, and darker under the shadow of his hooded sweatshirt.

All I see is the half smile on his face as he takes two steps backward, lifts his chin, and turns around. I watch him walk away—his shoulders hunched, his head down, his cleats clacking over the pavement. I feel a pull, a tug toward him. My heart stretches thin, but I don’t follow him. I don’t tell him the truth: that no matter how far I dropped from popular, Jolene was still with me.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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CHAPTER 10

BY THE TIME I pull into the driveway on Cherokee Court I know I’m late. I walk into the kitchen in the middle of dinner. My mom freezes her fork in midair and shifts her eyes to my dad, who exhales loudly and reaches across the table for more bread without acknowledging at me. I sit down across from Jake’s empty seat—he must have gone back to the city—and place my napkin in my lap. We eat. Glasses hit the table hard, silverware screeches on plates. My parents exchange looks while I sit—head down, chewing