Underneath Everything (30 page)

Red cups. Wet lips. Mine. Moving.

“I never slept with Hudson.”

“Watch what you say.”

Hudson.
He’s here! I said his name and he appeared!
I think. It definitely looks like him—black thermal worn thin, flannel unbuttoned, dark hair pulled back, except for the strands that always seem to escape. I reach out to tuck them behind his ear, but my aim is off. My hand heads straight for his chest, but it never connects. Hudson catches it, a tight grip on my wrist. That’s when I look at his face, which is the only thing in the room that isn’t spinning, swimming.

It’s his eyes that bring me back to the surface—a cool, cerulean blue. They pull me up from a deep, dark place, gasping. And changed.

I pry my wrist away from him and stumble backward, into Jolene’s palms. She props me up.

“I’ve watched long enough, don’t you think? I’m sick of watching,” I tell him.

“It’s not their business.” His lips barely move when he speaks.

“It’s my business. And I’m tired of hiding.” I raise my cup again, and a surge streaks through me, soaks my skin. Or maybe that’s beer. My neck is wet. So is my sweater. Jolene’s sweater. “I never slept with Hudson!”

“You’ve never slept with anyone.” Kris grabs my cup and takes a long swallow, then makes a face.

“This is warm and flat, by the way.”

I stare at her and wonder if I’m hallucinating. Can combining weed and beer do that? Because, Kris.

At Bella’s party. Standing shoulder to shoulder with Hudson? That doesn’t happen. I squeeze my eyes shut, but that makes the room spin again, so I open them. But it’s still happening: Hudson, Kris, Jolene, Bella, me, the party.

Bella bends at the knees and lets out a squee “You totally came!” She stands tippy-toe on her stilettoes and throws her arms around Kris. “We’re all here!”

Now that Bella has confirmed this is actually happening, I feel another surge stun me; but it’s not the frantic energy this time, aching to get loose. And it’s not the beer. It’s Kris. It’s everything we’ve been through and everything we haven’t. It’s drives in the reservation and Trivial Pursuit games and HaFTAs and Top Tens. It’s her lying to me.

“Yes! You’re here!” I announce. Ponytails and hat brims swivel in my peripheral vision. Chatter stops in the kitchen. But the quiet only makes me talk louder. “You
never
come to parties!” I grab Jolene’s cup off the counter, shove it into Kris’s cable-knit sweater, then sweep my arm in an arc across the room. “I never come to parties!”

Every red cup in the kitchen tips up.

Kris crosses her arms. Hudson’s hands curl into fists beneath his unbuttoned cuffs. Jolene’s fingers press into the soft skin of my waist. I can feel her fingernails through the thin knit of the sweater. I can feel everyone watching. Their stares have a texture and weight I can wear. My skin pulses with it.

“It’s a game, Kris. Come on! Have a little fun! We never do anything!”

Another wave of red cups around the kitchen.

“We never do
this
.” Kris’s voice is quiet and clipped in the hush of the kitchen.

“You don’t. I do.” I throw back my head and chug to prove it.

“So now you’re lying too?”

“Nope,” I say. “That’s your department.”

“You’ve never had sex.” She’s so sure. With her pursed lips and cocked hip. She’s so sure I would have told her. But she shouldn’t be.

I drink again.

Kris’s lips peel apart and hang open. Then she clamps her mouth shut again and shakes her head.

“Fuck this.” Hudson is a blur of dark hair and flannel as he shoves his way past the keg and through the packed living room. But isn’t that how he’s always been? Even when he was right in front of me?

Even when I was touching him? Not so much a person as an idea. An apparition. A vision of what could have been. Who
I
could have been.

But not who I am.

When I step forward, out of Jolene’s hold, every open mouth and roving eye in the kitchen follows me.

They’ve eaten all my secrets, but they’re still hungry. They want what comes next, and I’m going to give it to them.

I lean into Kris. “I never ran away from everything I was afraid of.” Sip. “I never showed up at school each day wishing I was somewhere else.” Step. “I never thought I was too good for everyone, including my boyfriend.” The peach in Kris’s cheeks deepens, shifts to crimson. Not all at once but in rippling bits.

I lean closer, until my lower lip hits grazes her ear. “I never lied to my best friend.”

Kris doesn’t move.

“Come on now, Kris. You should be drinking. You know the rules, right? If you’ve done the thing . . .”

I place two fingers on the bottom of her cup and flick it up.

She jerks away from me. “We’re not best friends.”

It’s what we always said, but not the way we always said it—with a laugh in the back of our throats and a shared history etched across our memories. With a confidence so deep, so sure, it drilled down to our cores.

No. When Kris says we’re not best friends, I don’t hear any of those things. The words are flat.

Empty.

And this makes me angrier than anything.

We’re not best friends.

“Exactly.” I slam my cup on the counter and turn around.

Jolene is waiting. She snakes her arm around my waist. We make our exit together, hair and hips swinging through the white living room toward the dark, dense forest of the dance floor. But before we become a part of it, I hear a shout—three words thrown at my back, barely audible over the roar of the speakers—and unlike the last thing she said, this sounds exactly like the Kris I remember.

“Who
are
you?”

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

CHAPTER 36

THE MUSIC VIBRATES through my boots to the soles of my feet. It rattles my chest and takes over my head.

My entire body thrums with it, as if now that I’ve let everything go—cut open my dark heart and exposed the stained and shameful things I hid there for so long—a physical space has been created inside me.

I’m light. My feet leave the wood floor and I’m airborne, over and over again. My hair swings in wet strings around me. The guy with the striped shirt—the one who smoked me up—is here too. He says something to me, but I can’t hear him. We’re right in front of a speaker. I shrug my shoulders and laugh. I think he shrugs too, but it’s hard to tell in the flash of the strobe light. His movements seem separated.

Choppy. Like a robot. Which makes me laugh so hard, my eyes crinkle at the sides, my chin rises, and my neck comes unhinged. My head lands on something soft and hard at the same time: smooth yarn, solid bone. I’m surrounded by dark hair and cinnamon.

Because I’m light, but not empty. Open, but not alone.

Jolene sways behind me, her hands on my hips. The lit ball hung from the ceiling spins, and we’re covered in tiny white dots. Like strung lights. Or stars. And for a second we’re outside. We’re the sky on a summer night. It reminds me of something. But Jolene spins me around and I forget, because she’s laughing and we’re dancing.

And I’m thinking,
THIS. This is what I’ve been missing.

Then the song switches. The thumping stops. A few soaring notes fill the room. They float over us.

And we wait with heavy breaths and nodding heads.

When the bass kicks in again, so do we. For a second it’s like we’re all suspended. Then our feet hit the floor, and the dining room explodes in a fit of waving arms and flying knees.

I lift my arms and close my eyes. Fingertips skim the swoop of my waist, my breasts, grip the back of my neck. When I open my eyes again, Jolene and I are nose to nose, hip to hip, lip to lip. Smiling. Then the strobe light flashes, and Jolene’s hair flows forward. No, that’s the back of her head. She’s facing away from me. I recognize the small pull in my sweater, just above her shoulder blade. Until a boy’s hand covers it. Another flash and there are hands on my back too. They aren’t soft like Jolene’s, but they’re warm. And when they slip under the hem of my sweater and onto the slick skin of my stomach, I twist into them. They belong to the boy in the striped shirt. The girl from I Never. One of the Hurley twins. They are Kris’s fingers twined in mine. Hudson’s hand edging under the waist of my jeans. Jolene’s palm on my pounding chest. Her lips against my ear.

Lips against my lips. Sweat gathers between my shoulder blades and breasts, drips from the curve of my lip into a kiss.

It’s like now that I’ve opened myself up, I don’t want to stop opening. I’d turn myself inside out if I could; claw open my skin; expose my blood, my soft pink organs, and all the secrets stuck between them.

So I’m not surprised when my skin seems to stretch away and snap. I’m not fazed when I hear the howl of material ripping. It’s not until I feel a splash of air on my stomach and chest instead of the sweaty stick of thin knit that I realize what’s happened. Or who’s watching.

The crowd has carved a circle around us.

Me and some guy I don’t recognize. At least not with his mouth pressed against mine. I push him off me. He wipes his lips with the back of a doughy hand, and when his eyes finally focus on me, a mix of delight and confusion dawns on his half-moon face.

Jolene’s sweater hangs in ragged folds along my sides, like curtains to a show.

“Oh, shit,” he says. “Hard-core.”

Hard-core.
Not strong and sought after, but stripped down, rough, senseless.

The music turns shrill, a repeated scream. My stomach sours. Liquid climbs its way up my throat. It wants out like everything else. I swallow back a mix of bile and whiskey, but what’s left in my mouth afterward is even worse: smoke, stale and bitter, stuck to my tongue. Not the earthy aftertaste of weed anymore. Something acrid.

I grab the jagged edges of my sweater, cover myself with a tight hug, and dive into the huddled crowd that surrounds us.

For the first time tonight I don’t want to be seen. I don’t want the crowd to cleave for me. I want to melt into it.

I want Jolene.

But it’s impossible to see anything in the flashing dark other than a split-second freeze-frame of open mouths and closed eyes, nodding heads and slinking hips. Teased bangs. A shock of red curls. Bella?

Kris? I turn around and get knocked forward. A girl in a tight, white cami and loose cargo pants dances away from me, toward the boy with the striped shirt. My head pounds in time with the bass beat from the speakers. I turn sideways and shoulder my way through the moving bodies.

The air from the kitchen window cools the sweat on my forehead and tickles my uncovered belly button. Trembling, I crane my neck to see past the crowd and around the keg. Cups and hands and elbows cover the countertops, but none of them are Jolene’s. I turn back toward the living room.

I’ve been in Bella’s house a million times. I know the placement of each wall and the pattern on every floor. I try to bring up the map in my head, but I can’t see it. Between the shots and the beer and the weed and the dancing, everything’s fuzzy. I stop short of the thick, living room carpet and squint to see through all the people. I search from neck to mouth to face. I catch a flash of honey skin here and a dark-purple nail there, the slope of a shoulder, the curved corner of a wide smile, but never the whole of her. It’s like Jolene’s scattered around the room in pieces, and I can’t follow any of them. Because it’s thirty minutes to midnight on New Year’s Eve, and the sequins and Polos and cups of beer crowd closer and closer and closer together until they’re packed and pulsing and pushing.

I squeeze the fine knit of Jolene’s severed sweater in my fists and step backward. And back again.

And then I hit something solid. A seam in the wall. The invisible door. Bunching both ends of the sheer material into my left hand, I pull open the white door and slip into the damp air of the basement.

It’s quiet down here compared to upstairs, but I can still feel the music. The bone-rattling bass in my chest. The quick fades in my head. I dig my knuckles into my ribs and screw my eyes shut, but that only amplifies the sounds.

I sit down and clap a hand over my mouth as my stomach rolls, convulses. When I’m sure I’m not going to be sick, I stretch the dangling sides of the sweater across my stomach again and force myself to breathe through my nose.

In. Smoke. The sticky, sweet kind.

Out. Techno beat and DJ fades. Go away.

In. Focus on each floating stair.

Out.
Hard-core.

In. Jolene.

Jolene. Jolene. Jolene.

Where is she?

And then—as if I’m under the eave in the auditorium again, with her hands in my hair and her words in my ear, telling me—I know.

I know exactly where to find her.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

CHAPTER 37

I RUN UNDER the black-blue sky, crunching frozen blades of grass beneath my boots. One hand grips my gathered sweater, the other pumps back and forth. Icy air sweeps past me, filling my ears, until I can barely hear the faint noises from the house—a solo cheer here and there. It must be close to midnight.

When I get to the far end of the backyard, I drop the sweater, arrow my hands in front of me, and cut through the bushes. Pine needles scratch at my ribs, grab at the knit, pull at my cheeks like thin fingers.

When I’m free of them, I see her—lying on the lounge chair, legs splayed, like after the bonfire. Except this time she’s awake.

“I saw you in there,” Jolene says to the single cloud that ghosts the sky above us and the stroke of stars to its right. “Everyone did.” She circles her lips and blows her own cloud into the air above her face, watches it disappear. “Did you like it?”