Underneath Everything (3 page)

Hudson doesn’t turn around. He doesn’t miss a beat. He just walks away, like it never happened.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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CHAPTER 3

“I DIDN’T AGREE to this.” Kris locks her car and flicks at the filter of her Camel, launching ash onto the sidewalk. Her wine-red Docs thud purposefully beside me as we walk up the hill to Bella’s house, stepping in and out of streetlamp spotlights and past a few parked cars. It’s not the bumper-to-bumper scene I thought it would be, considering it’s Thanksgiving weekend. The tight grip of my ribs relaxes, releases my lungs. I breathe deeply.

“You promised you’d come,” I remind her.

“To the bonfire. Not Bella’s.”

I drop my chin to my chest and burrow into my jacket.

Most weekends we don’t park; we drive—blasting heat and music, leaking laughter and smoke through slit windows. When I’m behind the wheel we stick to Westfield. I tick off street names and lot numbers in my head as we pass them, marking and measuring the land like my ’21 Sanborn map, coloring certain plots pink and others green, cruising past Xed-out rectangles with one-word descriptions:
Butcher
,
Library
,
Post
. We drive down dead ends that don’t exist yet. We know the future.

In Kris’s car we cross the town border for roads that dip and climb and wind around mountains. We leave Westfield for the Watchung Reservation—a massive chunk of woodland that, due to its historical significance, was preserved (and saved from its fate as a neon-lit strip mall) in the twenties, around the same time my Sanborn map was created. But that’s where the similarity ends. The reservation map is no pencil-drawn grid, full of boxes and block letters. It’s like calligraphy, covered in curves and loops and wavy elevation lines. One look at that map and it’s easy to understand why Kris likes it—for the same reason all those plastic-covered plaques around the grounds tell us George Washington did: its mountains create a natural fortress. The only difference is that Washington used the Watchungs as a barrier against the British. Kris uses them against everyone.

And right now we’re in enemy territory.

“I mean,” Kris says, “I’m going to need a pretty spectacular reason to risk our fantastic, untouchable status as Nobodies.” Kris pauses at the end of Bella’s driveway—which is not so much a driveway as a mailbox next to an open mouth in the woods—and takes a long drag. She’s squinting, and not because of the smoke. She knows there’s something I’m not telling her. She always does.

So I swallow, say it—“I hung out with Hudson at the bonfire”—and brace myself. There’s a hierarchy to Kris’s hate. Jolene is the clear winner (isn’t she always?), and Hudson is a close second. I’m not saying I don’t get it. I’d hate anyone who led her on, broke her heart, and ignored her existence. And the way Kris sees it, that’s exactly what happened.

“Hudson,” she says.

I nod and wait for the Hudson speech, but Kris doesn’t say anything. Instead she wraps her lips around her cig and takes a drag that singes her Camel down to its brown filter, then she flicks it. It burns a red arc through the night—the wrong kind of lightning bug—before it lands on the pavement, under the reinforced toe of her boot. Then she starts walking again. We pick our way over a mound of protruding roots bowed like muscles over the cracked, cement-skin of the driveway. Leaves rustle deep inside trees. Scampering claws scratch high branches. Winter bugs buzz.

Kris checks her phone, pockets it again.

And just when I’m thinking Kris might actually let the whole Hudson thing go, she says, “So, what’s up with Jolene’s boyfriend these days? Are you two
friends
now?” Kris leans on the
F
word like it’s a curse.

“No.” Hudson and I were never friends. Even freshman year—when Jolene got us into senior parties and Hudson and Cal were the only other underclassmen there—Hudson kept his distance. Not just from me but from everybody. The way he stood, slanted away. The way he sized up a room, silent. Like he was guarding something. Then one night he let me in.

Then came Jolene.

Then he was gone.

“But you still want to go,” Kris says. “Even though you’re not friends. Even though Jolene will be with him.”

We’re only halfway down the tree-smothered drive, but we can already hear it: not music exactly, but a strong, rhythmic bass beat mixed with a mess of voices. The farther we walk, the fuller and more distinct the sound gets. Drums and guitar join the bass. Shouts poke through the wall of voices.

A closed part of me opens.

The memories come quick, like punches: the four of us squeezing onto Bella’s deck swing and pumping our legs in the afternoon sun; Kris sneaking cigarettes on the back porch; Bella in the hot tub; me and Jolene swinging in the hammock, limbs hot and mingling, matching words and breath. And back, before that. The beginning. Bella bringing her new neighbor the day we hiked the cliffs at the reservation, the summer before seventh grade. Kris’s voice lost to the leaves. Bella’s laugh floating back to us from between the branches up the path. Jolene and me climbing the thin strip of cliff that clung to the mountain.

Me, carefully. Jolene, surefooted. My heart skipping as her sneakers knocked rocks to the street hundreds of feet below (my safe streets, suddenly dangerous). Jolene grabbing my hand as she ran, screaming “Let’s race!” before I could say no—that the path was too narrow. Jolene running ahead as I followed. Terrified.

Ecstatic. Laughing into the sky.

“Even though Jolene will be there,” I confirm.

Kris sighs, stares up at the slate-gray sky. She never talks about the beginning, only the end: the rope around my wrists, the tape on my lips, the busted lock, the bang of metal.

“Remind me again why I’m here?” Kris asks.

“Because you love me?”

She waves me off. “Obvious.”

“Because it’ll be your choice,” I say. Because this is what she told me the night we left the manhunt game. It’s what she always says. “It’ll be on our terms.”

“Well, when you put it that way.” Kris takes out the small tin of tinted goo, rubs it along the curve of her smirking lips, and offers it to me. I shake my head. She covers the tin and slips it back into her pocket.

“Jim did say he’d make an appearance if we decided to go. And I have to admit, I’m not
not
curious about what goes on at these things,” she says.

“Oh, you know, I’m sure it’s all naked wrestling and champagne,” I say, straight-faced.

“Bubbles and bathing suits!” she cheers. And we’re laughing, because in eighth grade Bella spent most of her time imagining the crazy parties she’d have in high school. The guest lists, the bartenders, the bouncers, the outrageous themes. And we’d always laugh at her. Like that stuff ever happened. But what do we know? It’s not like we’ve been to one of Bella’s senior-year parties. Maybe we’re about to walk into a sand pit or wall-to-wall foam. Anything’s possible.

We’re just shy of the moonlight, in the last stretch of tangled branches, when the dirt beneath our feet gives way to smooth cement and Bella’s house comes into view: three massive cubes nestled together and topped with heavy, rectangular slabs. It cuts white angles into the black sky.

Parked cars pack the wide circle of driveway to our right.

Everyone who’s anyone?
I think. More like anyone at all. Half the school must be here.

We’re
here.

“Okay. Let’s get this over with,” Kris says, but she doesn’t walk toward the house. She’s waiting for me, to make sure I’m cool, even though she can barely keep her teeth from chattering. And that’s enough to get me moving.

“Let’s.”

Together we step onto the lit grass.

As we climb the long flight of stone steps stretching up to the house, I recite the surrounding street names in my head. One for each red plastic cup I sidestep:
Hillside Avenue. Breeze Knoll Drive. Roanoke
Road.
It settles the nervous spark in my chest, lengthens my breath, helps me orient. When we reach the front door, we follow the white, slate path around the house to the gate, then stop and face each other. A last check-in.

Kris raises her eyebrows.
Ready?

I force my shoulders up into a shrug.
Not really.

But I lift the heavy metal latch anyway and swing open the wide, wood door.

My body tenses. I’ve always hated walking into parties—that moment before you know exactly who’s there, how drunk they are, whether they’re staring at each other or dancing. Except for the times I’d walk in with Jolene, because to her they weren’t parties. They were movie sets, magic acts, epic quests. The skater in the corner was a stalker. The cheerleader by the fireplace grew fangs at night and hunted to kill.

The jock by the keg could break chains and escape underwater cages.

I was a queen.

And Jolene? She was God of course. She created us all.

Tonight there are no shape-shifters or illusionists, just smokers huddled together, small groups laughing on lounge chairs, and couples claiming the hidden steps that lead to the upper deck. A few of them lift their heads when we walk in, then look away when they see us. We’re not the friends they’re expecting.

Kris and I walk past the pool. It’s one of those inset, stone deals that looks like a freshwater pond someone found in the woods. Like it was here first, and everything else—the exotic plants rooted between the rocks, the tiny spotlights, the house, the party—sprang up around it. Which is exactly what Bella’s mom was going for. We heard her tell the landscaper she wanted her backyard to look like a magical forest, and Bella’s been calling it that ever since.

“Looks like you were right about the bathing suits.” Kris tilts her head forward, toward the opposite side of the yard, and I follow the path of her eyes through the hanging vines to the hot tub. You’ve got to be kidding me. There really
are
people sitting in there, drinks in hand. I burrow deeper into my jacket.

“I really hope they’re wasted. Or freshmen,” I say, trying not to stare.

“The only two acceptable explanations,” Kris agrees, peering into a floater on the table next to us. She rubs her hands together, then folds her arms across her chest. It’s near freezing, and we’re still standing in the backyard.

“You think Bella’s dad still has the man cave?” I ask. The man cave is a dark, wood den carved into the corner of the basement. It has darts, vintage video games, and a smallish pool table; and it’s exactly the type of place I always tried to find at a big party—when I used to go to them, that is. Someplace far from crowds and soaring spaces. Someplace on the fringe. Which is how I ended up on a small couch off Cal’s living room a year and a half ago, talking to Hudson. He liked those places too.

“If he’s still a man, he does,” Kris says. “Want to play some pool?” She’s already weaving around the patio furniture.

“Want to lose?” I’m close behind.

Kris is the first one in the house. I watch her. She’s good at this—blending in. She’s already at the keg, standing next to a couple of guys from our class, holding out two red cups, making some kind of small talk. As if she’s actually enjoying this instead of counting the minutes until she can leave for college and cut everyone loose. Everyone except me. Obviously.

When foam finally flows over the edge of the second cup, she holds it out to me. I grab it and follow her past the black granite island, around some guys from the lacrosse team doing a group chug, through the open kitchen, and onto the thick, white living room carpet.

I don’t see Jolene at first. I’m too busy trying to follow Kris, who slips easily between arms and behind backs while I stumble and shove to keep up without spilling too much beer. We’re snaking along a wall covered with two huge, white canvases when I catch a flash of Jolene’s honey-colored skin on the opposite side of the room. She’s sitting sideways in a corner of the oversize, ivory sectional. A corner that used to fit me, Bella, and Kris too but now only seems big enough for Jolene, who tucks her shoeless feet beneath her, props her elbow on the back of the couch, and trips and trails her fingertips along the leather. A small audience of second-tier friends and underclassmen squeeze onto the surrounding cushions, gasping and giggling every time she speaks.

I quit fighting to move forward. Kris gets swallowed by sweaters, button-downs, and sequined tops. I stop. Someone crashes into me, spills, curses. The circle of girls behind me keeps laughing and expanding until my thighs are pressed up against the glass coffee table separating me from Jolene. I’m getting pushed, squeezed. I feel like I can’t breathe.

Her hand over my mouth. Her fingers pinching my nose.

On the couch, Jolene smiles, sweeps her dark hair back to show the hint of auburn underneath and the slide of her cream-colored shirt off her bare shoulder. She throws back her head and laughs.

I kicked her under the blanket. She pressed her hand harder against my lips and laughed.

Someone knocks into me from behind, and my knees, which have gone soft, give way. I drop my cup and slap my palms against the glass table to catch myself from crashing into it. I keep my head down, not wanting to see all those eyes on me; but when I remember to breathe—when I finally sneak a peek up—

the only eyes I see are Jolene’s. They’re glassy. She’s staring at me.

The gash on my palm hadn’t healed by our next sleepover. It was the fall of freshman year. We spilled
our wishes. Kris and Bella fell asleep, zipped in bags on the floor. Jolene and I pulled the covers over
our heads—she’d scored us the bed again—and traded lines of our story.