Underneath Everything (11 page)

—trying to hide the heat prickling my cheeks, the same flush I felt as I rushed home with all the windows open.

When we’re finished eating, my dad curls his fingers around his coffee mug, my mom spins her rings, and I get the lecture I was expecting. The one about curfew and coming home on time and calling when I think I might be late and being respectful and not making them worry. The one I’ve heard them give Jake a million times. The one they’ve never had any reason to give me. My dad jams his finger into the old wooden table and spits as he speaks. My mom purses her lips and nods in agreement at all the right places, while trying to steal looks at me. Because even though she doesn’t like when I come home late, I know a part of her is happy. That I went out. Possibly to party. But I don’t meet her eyes.

I stare out the window, where the floodlight in our backyard illuminates the tree behind our patio. I watch the leaves bob up and down under the weight of the rain, like they’re taking hits. When my dad stops speaking, I nod and shrug my shoulders and say I’m sorry.

But I’m not.

I think of the past year. Me and Kris. Our Thanksgiving rituals: HaFTA, Black Friday shopping spree, Trivial Pursuit Saturday, Blue Sunday. I still feel like a shitty friend for ditching her Wednesday night, but I don’t regret it. Because for the first time in fifteen months, I did something new.

What do
you
want to be, Mattie?

My dad has reached the part of his speech where he draws invisible lines on the table and reiterates the rules. I’m still looking out the window. The rain is easing up now, the leaves are done taking a beating. They’re dripping.

Maybe I’m not hard-core yet. Maybe I’m not all the things that Hudson sees. But as I listen to my dad in the homestretch of his lecture, I think:
Maybe. Maybe I can be.

When my dad’s finished, he leans his big, barrel chest forward and hits his elbows on the table. It slants toward him. “Do you understand?” he asks.

“Absolutely,” I say, placing my palms on the arms of my chair and pushing myself up. “Are we done?”

“Guess so.” He reaches back to the counter behind him for his laptop. My mom looks at him, expectant, but his eyes are fixed on the screen when I turn to leave.

I spend the rest of the night locked in my room with my physics homework, reading about how light bends and moves through lenses. It makes me wonder if people move the same way: if we bend and change, if we get redirected when we meet a curved surface. I think of Hudson’s body curled around mine, and I picture myself, a ray of light, refracted, traveling in a different direction now that he’s held me.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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CHAPTER 11

MONDAY MORNING AFTER Thanksgiving I stand in my underwear and examine my open drawers. I flip through oversize sweaters, concert tees, long-sleeved V-necks, and faded boy’s jeans, even though I know exactly what’s in each drawer and in what order. They are the clothes I’ve worn every day and night for more than a year, but they seem like someone else’s. A girl I used to be.

I lean over my top drawer, arms open wide like I’m going in for a bear hug, lift up the neatly folded stacks, and launch them onto my bed. Then I do it again and again and again until all my drawers are clear and my room looks like it’s been ransacked. Until all the cleaning I did the day after the bonfire is completely undone.

Then, still breathing deep from the effort, I sift through my things looking for new combinations of shirts and jeans. But everything is too tight, too itchy, too dull, too big.

Nothing fits.

And the blue numbers on my alarm clock stare at me: 7:15 a.m. Kris will be here soon.

My eyes drop to the drawers beneath my alarm clock. I haven’t opened them in ages. I tug at the top one. Old maps and notes spring out. Most of them are from intermediate school, before I got my first cell phone. Except for the piece of folded pink paper resting near the edge. This one is from junior year, when I wouldn’t answer Jolene’s texts. I unfold it along the old creases. “Are you mad at me? Love you.

(Still.)” It’s from the first day she walked into school with Hudson, looking all lovestruck, waving to me, like
Can you believe it?
As if I was supposed to be happy for her. As if she didn’t have everything she wanted already. No, she had to have him too.

I shove the note back in the drawer and slam it shut. When I do, the bottom drawer rolls open an inch.

I pull it out the rest of the way. It’s stuffed with tops I used to wear when I went out: a fitted green shirt, a navy-blue button-down. They’re still cute. But when I slip them over my head they don’t fit right, either. I might not have Jolene’s cleavage, but I’m not as flat as I used to be. Plus, the shape of these shirts is all wrong now: too short, too narrow. I keep digging through the drawer. At the bottom I find my old jeans.

Dark hip-huggers. Boot cut. Button fly. Jolene used to tell me they were too loose. I figured it was just because I didn’t have her hips.

But when I pull them on, I realize Jolene was right. They must have been big before, because now they hug my body perfectly. I smooth my hands over them, and remember Hudson’s fingers spreading out into a starburst on my knee, his cold hands on my cheeks, my shoulders, my waist. Which is still naked.

I walk over to my closet and sweep aside the button-down shirts and holiday skirts, but all I find are old dance recital costumes. Sequins and satin isn’t going to cut it. I’m about to slam the door when I spot something blue in the corner: a gift bag, full of once-fluffed turquoise tissue paper. A birthday present from my mom. I completely forgot about it.

I pick up the blue bag by its hot-pink ribbons, push the tissue paper to the side, and run my fingers over the fuzzy edge of the sweater. Kris was over the first and only time I tried it on. She refused to call it a sweater, actually, on the grounds that a sweater should, by definition, keep a person warm. I poke my fingers through the loosely knit yarn and remember her suggestion—that I should layer it with a black tank.

But since my favorite one is stretched out from sleeping, I pluck an old one from the pile on my bed and pull it over my head. It’s tighter than I remember. Clingy. My skin spills over the curved neckline a little, like I actually have cleavage.

I thread my arms through the delicate sleeves of the sweater, tug it gently over my head, and catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror. It’s like seeing a stranger. I watch the girl in the glass straighten her neck; it’s long and graceful. She faces me full-on and smiles, just the tiniest bit.

This isn’t one of Jolene’s games. This isn’t magic or a movie set. I’m meeting Hudson sixth period.

Me.

In the bathroom, I rummage through my mom’s makeup bag until I find black eyeliner. My hand shakes as I slide the thick pencil along my lash line. When I’m done, I smear the jagged marks into a smoky smudge, throw the pencil back into the quilted bag, and rifle through my mom’s lipsticks; but all I find is peach. Five shades of it. I’m double-checking the color of the last tube when I knock over the Vaseline.

It’s not perfect, but it’ll do. I pop the lid, glide my finger across the gooey surface, and smooth a clear sheen onto my lips.

Then I push open the bathroom door and run into Jake. Literally.

“Watch it! Some of us are fragile in the morning.” He adjusts his flannel pajama pants. His short hair is flat on one side, and he can barely open his eyes.

“Didn’t you leave yesterday?” I say, trying to shove past him.

He blinks and stretches, blocking my way. “I was working on a doc review all night. Didn’t sleep.

Which might explain why I’m hallucinating, because it looks like you’re wearing makeup.”

“Shut UP.” I elbow him in the ribs.

“Ow,” he whines, doubling over. But I can tell he’s faking it. We used to wrestle all the time when we were little. I slip past him and skip down the steps.

My mom pokes her head out from the kitchen. She’s wiping suds off her hands and arms with a towel.

When she sees me and my makeup, she raises an eyebrow.

“Something special happening at school today?”

“Nope.” I tear my jacket off its hanger and throw my backpack across the floor. It hits the front door.

“Well, you look nice,” she says with a smile.

“Thanks.” At least I don’t look hideous. But considering she’s my mom and she bought this sweater, maybe I do. Not that it matters. There’s no time to change. I push my arms through my jacket sleeves.

“You know,” she says, cupping my chin, “I could help you fix that eyeliner. Clean it up a little bit. If you just let me get—”

I twist out of her grip. “I like it that way.”

“Okay.” She sighs, and wipes her hands on the dish towel again, even though they’re dry.

I pull on my boots. Kris is going to be here any second. I’m never this late. Usually before school I get dressed in five minutes, scan some select map sites and eBay sellers for new merchandise, then make my to-do list for the day; so when Kris shows up, the list is folded and snug in my back pocket.

“You’ll be home after school?” my mom asks.

“I don’t know.” I heave my bag onto my shoulders. My backpack rubs at the skin between my sweater and jeans. These are lower than my usual Levi’s and don’t have pockets big enough for folded paper.

“Are you going out with Kris?”

I face the narrow window next to our front door, willing my mom to walk away. I don’t want to get into it with her, about what happened. I’m too busy trying to figure out what to tell Kris about this weekend, but nothing sounds right, because Kris isn’t the person I call when I get home; she’s the person I just left. I don’t know how to tell Kris anything. She just knows.

“Kris is grounded. I might hang out with Hudson.”

“Who’s Hudson?”

“A boy.”

A honk blares from the street. Kris swerves toward the curb in front of my house in her rusted-red Corolla, the one she inherited when her sister got caught driving while high.

I open the front door. A cold draft rushes past me.

“Wait!” my mom says, and I do—one foot in the house, one foot out. “Have a good day.” She gives me a conspiratorial smile. “But not too good. You know how Dad gets. Don’t be late, okay?”

“Okay.” I let go of the door and run across the lawn. When I get to the car, Kris is already halfway through her cigarette.

“Okay. I’m the worst friend ever,” I tell her as I climb into the front seat and slide my backpack between my knees.

Kris lifts her eyebrows, tilts her head, finishes her drag. Then she opens her window and taps some ash to the ground. “Don’t go giving yourself any awards just yet,” she says, tucking the cig between her lips and pulling into the street. She painted her nails over the weekend. Red. They match her hair. “It’s not like you locked me in a shed,” she says, glancing at me.

The shed. Kris’s fists. Bursts of sound drowned out by summer screams. “Manhunt!”

(Slam. Bang. Clickclicklick.)

Sweat bursts into small beads on the back of my neck. For a second I think Kris knows, as if somehow Jolene has left traces of herself on me—the scent of her shampoo, the glint of her sparkly lotion on my fingertips—then Kris cracks a smile.

“No,” I say, shaking my head. “Not in a shed. But I got you locked in your house. I suck.”

“Yes,” she says plainly. “You do.”

“Runner-up then?”

“Runner-up,” she agrees, taking the turn too fast. Our bodies slide to the right.

For the next few minutes we don’t speak. I watch tiny drops of rain collect on her windshield, fading the colors of the cars and the street, softening their edges, smudging their borders until I can almost pretend we’re actually passing from the moss-green rectangle of Division 14 to the cornflower blue of Division 11, which juts up against the high school. Kris doesn’t turn on her wipers. She taps her fingers on the steering wheel, nods her head, ashes her cigarette. She drives us to school like it’s any other day.

I rub my palms on my jeans and lean back in the seat, squinting through the watercolor windshield, looking for the piles of leaves Kris likes to drive through.

“Nice jeans, by the way.” Kris doesn’t look at me when she speaks.

“Thanks.” I wait for her to ask where I got them, but she doesn’t. “On your left,” I call.

Kris spins the wheel with one hand. Gold and crimson leaves hit the windshield. When we’re on the right side of the street again, she takes a long pull on her Camel and starts an old conversation, one we should have had yesterday. “Top Ten Plays.” The words come out coated in smoke.

Kris and I usually commemorate the last day of Thanksgiving break by doing our homework, eating massive amounts of chips, and counting down the Top Ten Plays of the holiday. That’s what Blue Sunday was supposed to be: bitching about the depressing prospect of lockers and hallways, and laughing about our fucked-up families. Not getting each other grounded or hooking up with people on our Do Not Call lists.

“You want me to go first?” I ask.

“Unless you want to hear the top ten shittiest Thanksgiving movies on cable,” Kris says, exhaling through the thin slit of open window.

“Okay,” I say. “Number ten,” I start, then stall. I still don’t know where to begin. The weekend rewinds in my mind: the cold breeze rippling the pond; Hudson’s warm mouth pressed against my neck; the things he said after the soccer game, in the basement, at the bonfire—about who I am, and how I left Jolene.

Jolene, who still smells like cinnamon, even when she’s throwing up; whose weight I carried across the lawn; who looked up at me, so drunk she could barely see, like she was expecting me.