Wicked Games (10 page)

“No. Of course not,” he reassured her. “Why would you think that?”

“You know. Jeff’s party. My cannonball off the roof.”

“The voting for these awards took place long before that,” said Carter. “Anyway, everything worked out, right?” He hoped that the reassuring smile he sent her way looked convincing. “Don’t we deserve this?”

“Yeah,” she said. “We totally do.”

Lilah clutched Carter’s hand like she was afraid it would fly away as they made their way toward the stage. She didn’t let go as they climbed the steps, even though holding hands made the climb more difficult, like they were tied together in a three-legged race.

The award meant something profound to her. It was more than just a cheap hunk of wood with their names on it. It was proof. It was validation. She wanted the world to see that Carter was all hers. She wanted Jules, especially, to see this.

Ms. Robison, the principal, had handed them their plaques and patted them on the shoulders. Carter could feel the pressure of his classmates’ eyes on him. He leaned in and kissed Lilah on the cheek. It seemed like the right thing to do, and he knew it would make her feel extra special.

For a few seconds, they stood there, staring out at the audience, all their classmates together in one place. Seeing them together, a big, united group, brought up sentimental thoughts about how soon they’d be going their separate ways.

Carter scanned the room, putting names to the faces. He wasn’t looking for anyone in particular—or he didn’t think he was—but when his eyes found Jules, he paused there and savored the sight of her. She had such a glow to her. He couldn’t help but get lost in her beauty and wondered what it would be like if she were standing on stage with him rather than Lilah.

She nodded at him. A tenderness passed over her face, and he sensed that she could see through him.

He grimaced, ashamed of himself and suddenly feeling like a huge fraud.

She gave him a big thumbs-up, then her sideways smile broke over her face and her eyes danced in that laughing way of hers.

Lilah, possessively attentive to Carter’s every move, already prickly from simply having had to see Jules onstage earlier, caught what was going on between her boyfriend and the girl. And though the smile plastered to her face was as unmovable as that of a Miss America candidate, a little part of her heart curdled; a few more of her internal organs were blackened with the hatred that had invaded her body after Jeff’s party.

Her grip on Carter’s hand clenched. Then she caught herself and regulated her breathing, controlled the muscles of her face. No matter how bitter and panicked she might be feeling, she had to keep it hidden from Carter. She had to present herself to him as sunshine and
lightness and joy, hide her true feelings, protect what was hers, take care of the problem behind the scenes, and make sure her man thought things were all fine.

When the ceremony was finally over, Carter said good-bye to Lilah and raced off to find Jeff and the guys.

Lilah didn’t protest. This had always been the plan. He and his friends were headed off to the Sunnyside Diner to get burgers and make sugar sculptures on the table. Whatever. With him out of the way she could show Jules exactly how things were going to be.

Lilah thought of
weasels. How they snuck in and foraged through one another’s dens, stealing what they wanted, trashing one another’s homes. It was up to you, if you were the one being preyed upon, to sink your sharp claws into your opponent’s belly and tear out her internal organs before she succeeded at destroying the little you had to call your own.

She could see Jules walking alone down the hill away from the theater, her head slightly bowed, that long, black hair blowing over her shoulders and her worn leather book bag heavy on her shoulder, looking so innocent, so scrubbed clean, an all-American girl, if you didn’t know, like Lilah did, how scheming and
blackhearted she really was. Didn’t she have any friends? But why would she.

She was headed toward the parking lot across the street.

Lilah picked up her pace, making up ground. By the time she got to the parking lot herself, she’d halved the distance between them.

She could see the car that Jules was targeting, a beat-up green Honda Civic with a cracked windshield—it must have been at least ten years old. Didn’t it just figure. The girl probably thought Carter was rich and that if she could pry him away from Lilah, he’d give her all the things that her poor daddy couldn’t. Well, too bad for her. Except for the charity he hardly ever got from his father, Carter had nothing to give. And even if he did, Lilah reminded herself, his gifts belonged to her.

Lilah walk-ran, moving as quickly as she could. The crushed shells crunched and gave under her sandals. Broken pieces of shell kept finding their way in and stabbing at her bare feet, forcing her to slow down and shake them out.

Jules, in her oh-so-precious low-top pink Chuck Taylors, didn’t have this problem. She was almost at the car now. Lilah’s window of opportunity was closing on her. Her only advantage was that Jules didn’t know she was chasing her.

Slipping off her sandals, and running barefoot toward
the Honda, Lilah called out, “Hey! Hey, actress!”

The car was so old that it had to be unlocked manually, and Jules had just inserted her key into the door when she heard Lilah’s calls. Jules could tell, more by the directedness of the sound than from the words themselves, that she was being summoned. When she saw that it was Lilah, and that she was limping barefoot toward her across the rough surface of the parking lot, she smiled and waved and continued what she was doing.

“Don’t you dare run away. I need to talk to you.”

Jules flung the door open and leaned on it, bracing herself for the antagonism to come. She took a long breath, calming herself.

“Do you know who I am?” said Lilah. She’d caught up to Jules now. She was within punching distance.

“Uh-huh. Lilah, right?”

“I don’t mean my name. I mean
do you know who I am
.”

Wary of being trapped, Jules said, “Uh—”

“I’ll give you a hint. You saw me onstage, like, half an hour ago holding Carter Moore’s hand.”

“Okay,” said Jules. She stretched the word out to convey her skepticism.

“So . . .”

“So, what? You’re Carter’s girlfriend. That’s great. I’m happy for you. He seems like a really great guy.”

Lilah’s heart rate surged. This coyness from Jules was
intolerable. Didn’t she know when she’d been caught? “Don’t play dumb,
Jules
.” She spat the name out like it was a piece of rotten fish.

“I mean it,” said Jules. “He seems like a nice guy. I wish you all the best.”

Lilah threw Jules’s words back in her face. “
I wish you all the best
. No you don’t. Don’t give me that. If you wished me all the best, I wouldn’t be having this conversation with you.”

“Are you threatening me?”

“No. I’m saying, just so you know, Carter would never be interested in a skank like you. You might as well give up now. Find some other guy to give your gonorrhea to.”

Jules couldn’t believe that this was really happening. She found it hard to believe that Carter would have told Lilah about their night together. He’d wanted to protect her. So why this, now? Where was it coming from?

“Look,” she said, “I don’t know what’s going on between you and Carter. I don’t really care, actually. It’s none of my business. He’s your boyfriend, not mine. I’ve only ever talked to him, like, once, for five minutes. But really! Look at yourself. No wonder your relationship is a mess.”

“How would you know if my relationship is a mess?” said Lilah.

“Why else would you be chasing after random girls
and accusing them of . . . whatever you’re accusing me of. I don’t even know.”

Lilah’s rage surged through her like a tidal wave, drowning out any comeback she might have found for this. She stared at Jules, her hate boring into the girl. “Stay away from him,” she finally said. “Just stay the fuck away from him.”

Jules flinched. Then trying to shrug it off, she settled herself into the driver’s seat of her car and said, “Whatever you say. If I were you, I’d spend less time harassing me, and focus on fixing things with Carter.”

She turned the ignition of her car and it sputtered to life.

“You going to move so I can get out?” she asked Lilah.

Reluctantly, Lilah stepped out of the way of Jules’s car and watched as it rolled away and turned out of the parking lot. She wasn’t sure now what she’d been hoping to achieve, but she knew she hadn’t received satisfaction.

Jules was sitting
on the hardwood floor of one of the rehearsal rooms in the theater building an hour later, her legs extended in an impossibly wide V as she stretched for dance practice. She was trying hard not to be shaken by her confrontation with Lilah, but her pulse was still racing. While she’d leaned on her acting skills to make Carter’s girlfriend think she had nothing to hide, nothing could be further from the truth. As Jules leaned over and grabbed her ankles, her lower back extended. She held the position until her body relaxed and her mind cleared.

When she rolled back up to a sit, she looked to her
friends Lauren and Peter, who were stretching next to her, touching their noses to their knees and locking their hands like stirrups around the soles of their bare feet. She went back and forth in her head about whether or not she should confide in them—could she trust them to keep her secret? She hadn’t really needed any help, but now with Lilah getting up in her face, she was beginning to doubt herself.

And feel kind of alone.

“So, what if you had a friend,” said Jules, “who’d fallen in love with a guy who had a girlfriend and was pretty sure he’d fallen in love with her, too? What are the rules on that?”

“A friend, huh?” said Peter, leaning back on his elbows so he could look at her. He’d pulled his shaggy blond hair out of his face in a rhinestone-encrusted headband.

“Yeah. A friend.” Done stretching, Jules sat up and tucked her legs in yoga style so that one calf rode over the other.

Peter arched his eyebrow in the villainous way he’d perfected junior year for the school’s production of
Ten Little Indians
. “Do we know this friend?”

Jules turned beet red. “A friend of my mother’s,” she said quickly.

“So this is entirely hypothetical?”

“Sure. Let’s say it’s hypothetical,” said Jules.

Rolling onto his stomach, Peter propped his chin on his hand and asked, “Who did this friend fall in love with?”

“Just answer the question.”

“Jules! Give us a hint at least. You have a
friend
who’s fallen in love with a married man. You can’t just tease us like this, right, Lauren?”

He looked to Lauren, who was leaning against the floor-to-ceiling mirror with a smirk on her face. She was a reserved girl who liked to get all the facts before she made a judgment. She was silently taking the conversation in, like she often did. “I don’t think she said a married man,” she said, correcting Peter.

“Please. Boyfriend, married—either way, it’s
scandalous
!”

“I’m trying to be serious,” said Jules. Then she added, “Hypothetically.”

The teasing grin on Peter’s face said everything she needed to know about how useful he’d be in helping her figure out how to deal with her situation. She knew he couldn’t help himself. If the gossip was juicy, he just had to know everything. And usually, she’d have been happy to fill him in. But this time it was too personal.

“Lauren,” she said, “you have any advice?”

Lauren stretched her spine. She pulled the band off her ponytail, shook out her hair, and put the band back
on. “It depends,” she said. “How well does your friend know this guy?”

“Pretty well. They’ve hung out a few times.”

Peter flopped up and impulsively slapped the floor between him and Jules. “Hung out, or hooked up?”

“They’ve maybe kissed a little bit,” said Jules, downplaying the reality of her and Carter’s steamy night on the beach. “But more importantly, they’ve had these deep conversations. The kind where you feel like you really connect with each other.”

“How long has the guy been with his girlfriend?” asked Lauren, scooting over to sit nearer to Jules.

“A while.”

“A while, like—how long?”

“Forever,” said Jules.

“And does he love her?”

“It’s complicated.”

“She’s his girlfriend,” said Peter. “So, duh.” He stood up and adjusted his black stretch pants. “What music should we use today?” he said. He hunched over his iPod, studying his playlists as he headed to the corner where the sound system was set up.

Jules and Lauren shot him annoyed looks and then ignored him.

“My friend doesn’t think he loves the girlfriend anymore, but he won’t leave her. She’s
going through something
. That’s what he said. He’s afraid of what would
happen if he broke up with her, I think.”

“And is she? Going through something, I mean?” said Lauren.

“She’s a little . . . disturbed, maybe,” said Jules, unsure if she was downplaying this detail.

Glancing back from across the room where he was fiddling with the cords of the sound system, Peter called out, “Does she know about the hooking up?”

“Hanging out,” Jules corrected him. “Hard to tell. There’s no way the guy would have told her about it, but . . .” She resisted going into the whole thing with Lilah, but she couldn’t deny it was bothering her, so she went on. “She’s sort of volatile. She, like, confronted my friend in this really angry, freaked-out way.”

Peter gave her a pointed look. “In that case, I wouldn’t touch that with a ten-foot pole.” He pushed a button, and the horn intro to “On Broadway” began piping through the speakers hung around the room.

Jules and Lauren stood up and got into position behind Peter. The three of them struck identical poses, one knee cocked, elbows sharply out, hands spread like fans in front of their faces.

“He’s right,” Lauren said, turning briefly to shoot Jules a sympathetic look. “Unless the guy comes to your friend and says he’s ready to leave the girlfriend for her . . . it sounds like the sort of thing that might explode on you. You don’t want that drama, do you?”