Wicked Games (12 page)

“You broke up with her?” asked Lilah.

“Naw, she dumped me.”

“That sucks,” said Lilah.

“It’s cool. Whatever, dude. I mean, yeah, it sucks, but . . . that was way back in January. I’ve traveled on.” He illustrated his “traveling on” with his hand, gliding
it slowly forward across a flat plain of salt air in front of him.

“Tell me,” Lilah said. “What did she do?”

“January second. The day after New Year’s. It was like a resolution or some shit.” He hadn’t been able to tell this stuff to anyone, not without totally losing his cred. But he didn’t mind telling Lilah—she was too far off the radar of his surfer buddies to matter.

“Is that what she said? A New Year’s resolution?” Lilah asked. “What happened? You don’t make a New Year’s resolution for nothing. They’re not just totally arbitrary.”

“She’s a diva. Who knows what she was thinking. What she
told
me was that she was ‘getting too attached.’ Getting too attached! Dude! That’s supposed to be a good thing, last I checked. Not to her, I guess. She blabbered about college and early acceptance and whatever. ‘Long-distance relationships never work,’ she said. Whatever. Like what happens next fall has anything to do with what’s going on now.”

“Where’s she going?” asked Lilah, leading him on.

“Fuck if I know. Some school in Pennsylvania. She got an arts scholarship or something.”

Maybe Todd, whose whole world consisted of this beach, didn’t understand, but Lila knew exactly what “some school in Pennsylvania” meant.

“University of Pennsylvania,” she said.

She was careful not to show the way this information pierced her. She thought of that photo on Carter’s phone. Then she flared deep inside and pushed the photo out of her mind.

“You think she was, maybe, cheating on you?” she asked.

“Oh, I don’t know, man,” said Todd, blowing another bubble. “Her friends are all gay.”

Lilah had been trying to control her rage so that it wouldn’t all come out in one violent burst, but she couldn’t hold back any longer. “’Cause I think she was cheating on you.”

Chuckling, Todd said, “Yeah. Sure. Not likely.”

“You know Carter Moore? My boyfriend?”

“Maybe, I guess. I don’t know.”

“I think she was cheating on you with him.”

The turn in the conversation had Todd flipping his gum around on his tongue. This wasn’t what he’d expected to hear when Lilah had waved him over to the lifeguard stand. He’d been expecting something more like a compliment on the way he’d cut through the waves, maybe a little flirtation. He’d thought she was digging him. That’s why he’d played up the sympathy vote.

“Wait, is he that rich, preppy dude?” he said.

Lilah cocked her head and pursed her lips in a tight smile, egging him on to imagine the possibilities.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Todd said.

Lilah lifted her sunglasses from her eyes and perched them on her forehead. She gave Todd a long, hard stare. “Not kidding,” she said. He was chewing his gum quickly with his front teeth, like it was the only thing keeping him from losing his cool. “Sucks to be you, doesn’t it?” she said.

He shook his head. “Sucks to be me?” he said. “You’re the one who’s still dating that asshole.”

“Exactly,” Lilah said. She took a gamble, a calculated risk. “What I want to know is if you’d maybe want to help me get even.”

As Todd thought about her request, Lilah grew conscious of how long she’d been talking to him. The shadow of her chair stretched out in front of her. She’d barely glanced at the ocean all this time. What if someone had drowned? She wouldn’t have noticed and she didn’t care.

“I’d make it worth your while?” she added.

“Yeah?”

“Sure,” she said with a half grin.

“How so?”

She stood up and stretched her arms behind her back, pushing her chest out as she did. Then she sat on the edge of the platform, dangling her naked legs over the edge so he could check them out.

“What would you have in mind?” she said, flicking her foot suggestively in his direction.

She couldn’t believe she was really doing this. She felt like a criminal. It was kind of exhilarating, actually. And it’s not like she would feel guilty for whatever might come next—after all, she was doing all this in the name of holding on to her guy.

Todd blew another bubble, considering the implications of what she was telling him. A smile rose up from deep inside of him and he shook his head in disbelief.

“You know what,” he said. “I think I might have the perfect thing for you.”

When she returned
from the back room where Waxidasical’s surplus product was kept, Jules saw Lilah lingering up front, half-hidden behind the twirl racks of sunglasses.

She played it cool, trying not to let Lilah see how her presence rattled her. After a pause to assess just what Lilah might be up to, she pretended to ignore her. Anyway, what was she going to do? Go up and push Lilah out of the shop? Not her style. Better to act like she thought that Lilah had just stumbled in, oblivious to the fact that Jules worked here. For now all Lilah was doing was trying on sunglasses, peering into the tiny mirrors mounted above each rack before rejecting pair after pair.

The six boxes of Mr. Zogs Sex Wax stacked in her arms weren’t easy to carry. They required attention. Walk too fast, turn too suddenly, and they’d tip and tumble. One of the boxes would inevitably break. Hockey pucks of wax would go rolling everywhere. They’d skid under the raised shelves and get jammed there. They’d disappear behind the surfboards and boogie boards leaned against the walls. Jules would have to race around after them with her butt in the air like a crazy lady trying to herd cats.

She carefully walked the boxes to the front of the store and slid the stack onto the flat surface of the counter. Then she pulled open the box on top and started arranging the wax disks in the display shelf, not even bothering to glance at Lilah.

Eventually, Lilah sidled up to the counter with a pair of rhinestone-clad sunglasses in her hand.

“Jules, wow, I didn’t know you worked here,” she said. Her grin was too wide for this to be coincidence, her exclamations of surprise too emphatic for her to be here by accident.

“Well,” Jules said, “now you do. Will this be all? Do you want a croaky for that?” She pointed to the rack of Day-Glo glasses strings next to the register. “I like the purple.”

“Oh, no thanks,” said Lilah. Her smile curdled, just a little. “There is one thing, though. Is your manager here?”

Jules braced herself. “It’s just me today, actually.” She strained to hold on to the veneer of professionalism she’d adopted. “Why? Did you not find what you were looking for? Was there something wrong with your experience at Waxidasical today?”

“No, it’s just . . .” Lilah glanced around to see if anyone was listening. When she saw that the store was empty except for her, she leaned in and said, “I found this crazy thing the other day. I thought you’d get a kick out of it. It’s a little not-safe-for-work, though. Wanna see?”

Jules could sense a trap, but she saw no way out. “Uh, sure.”

“Here, hold on.”

Whipping out her phone, Lilah stabbed at it and then perched her elbow on the counter, angling the screen between them.

It didn’t take two minutes for Jules to understand what she was looking at.

There Jules was, alone in her bedroom, wearing an oversized red-and-white plaid shirt and shimmying her shoulders, vamping for the camera. Her hands stretched out in front of her, beckoning. She—the version of her in the video—unbuttoned a button, vamped some more, unbuttoned another. She was wearing a black bra, and she teased the camera, leaning in to give a quick glimpse of her breasts.

The sound was off, thankfully. Jules didn’t have to
hear herself say, “Don’t you wish you were here with me?”

“Turn it off,” she hissed.

“Wait, though,” said Lilah. “We’re just getting to the best part.”

Jules’s heart was beating out of her chest. She knew what came next. She didn’t want to see her shirt come off. She didn’t want to see the lacy red panties she’d worn that day, or the way she’d debased herself for the camera. She’d made the video herself last summer—she didn’t know why now—and given it to Todd as a birthday present.

Fucking Todd.

“Turn it off,” she said again, more insistently. She grabbed for the camera but Lilah whisked it behind her back before she could catch it.

“So,” said Lilah, “what do you think? It’s hilarious, isn’t it?”

Jules glowered and waited for Lilah to show her hand. She knew this was about Carter—how could it not be?

“It’s just so good,” said Lilah. This fake bubbly thing she was doing made Jules want to slap her. “I bet if it got out it would go viral in like a second.”

“And why would it get out?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Why don’t you ask Carter? Or maybe you shouldn’t. I think maybe, definitely you shouldn’t. I bet, actually, that if you asked Carter—or
if you ever talked to him again at all—he might, I don’t know, tell Jeff, and then, well, you know Jeff. I don’t think Jeff could keep that news to himself. I mean, do you?”

So there it was. This was absurd. If this had been a competition, which it wasn’t, Lilah would have won weeks ago. Since their nondate, Jules had barely seen Carter—a brief glimpse across campus here and there, a wave as their cars passed each other on Magnolia Boulevard. She’d taken Peter and Lauren’s advice to heart. She hadn’t even responded to his texts.

“Has he seen this?” Jules asked.

Lilah tipped her head and let her smile turn coy.

So, no, then.

The possibilities raced through Jules’s mind. Her classmates one by one receiving the video, gathering in groups and gawking at her embarrassingly naked body, pausing, rewinding, watching her hands. The snickers of the boys in school as they passed her in the quad. The lewd, mocking gestures they’d flash her way. And then finally the call from Ms. Robison’s office. The walk of shame. Then tense, tearful conversation. The cops would come. The news trucks. She’d be all over the TV. Nationwide, probably. Conservative-leaning networks would dedicate whole hours to what a whore she was and how she represented everything immoral about today’s youth. She’d lose her scholarship to UPenn. She’d probably go to jail like that girl in Oregon who got caught
sexting naked photos of herself. And more than that, whatever slim chance there was now that Carter would change his mind and choose her instead of Lilah would be gone forever. Her life would be ruined.

It took every ounce of effort she had to hold it together. “You know what, Lilah,” she said, “I’ll give you some advice. Don’t show that video to Carter. Or anybody else.”

An emphatic hoot of laughter shot out of Lilah’s mouth. “Okay, Jules,” she said. “Whatever you say.”

“It’s mine,” Jules said. “You understand what I’m saying? It belongs to me. And I didn’t . . .” She searched for the most frightening word. “. . . authorize you to have it. If you distribute it, Lilah, you’ll be breaking the law. I’m only seventeen. You know what that means?” She was winging it. Hoping that maybe what she was saying was true. “It means that you’re in possession of child pornography. And if you
distribute
it . . . Lilah, if you
distribute
it, that’s, like, a major, major felony.”

Lilah didn’t even flinch. “You’re the one who made it, Jules.”

“You don’t know that. Has it occurred to you that maybe I’m the victim here?”

“I don’t think it will matter to anyone who the victim is when they’re all watching you get yourself off on camera.”

Jules felt like she was going to explode. Or implode.
Or melt into a puddle behind the counter. “Maybe I should call the cops right now,” she said.

Lilah shrugged. “If that’s what you want.” She was so smug. It was intolerable.

Jules pulled out her phone and stared at it. Then she set it down.

“You know what? I’ll wait. I’ll give you a chance to do the right thing. You need to get over this idea you have in your head about me and Carter, though. It makes you sound crazy. You know that, right? If I wanted to be with your boyfriend, you’d know, okay? ’Cause I’d be with him. And you wouldn’t.”

“Yeah, Jules,” Lilah said sarcastically. “You keep telling yourself that.”

Jules could tell she’d hit her target, though. Lilah was no longer smiling.

“You know what?” Lilah said. “I don’t think I want these sunglasses after all. Thanks, though. They’re a little, I don’t know, trashy. Maybe you should buy a pair for yourself.”

As Jules watched Lilah hustle out onto the promenade, she realized she was shaking. She wondered if she’d been shaking this whole time and if she’d ever stop.