Wicked Games (18 page)

“I don’t want or need you to protect me.”

She pled with him. “Carter, please. You have to believe me.”

“I believe that you
think
you’re protecting me, Lilah. I believe that you’ve got yourself so twisted around in your head that you seriously believe that this is what you’re doing, but you’ve got to stop. And I want you to leave Jules the fuck alone.”

A fresh surge of outrage went tumbling through her.

“She’s a total whore,” she said. “Here. I’ll prove it.”

She climbed to her feet and whipped her phone out of the waistband of the shorts she wore over her swimsuit and cued up the video that Todd had given her. As the
video began streaming, she shoved the phone in Carter’s face. He tried to grab it, but she yanked it away, held it above her head taunting him with the writhing, jiggling image of Jules on its screen.

“You see? Carter? You see? Internet porn. She’ll be doing videos for the Bangbros by the time summer’s over.”

The emotions were swirling around on his face, changing shape and texture. He seemed about to cry, and she interpreted this as proof that he finally understood she was—even in his betrayal—looking out for him, shielding him from the dangers in the world, loving him.

But this wasn’t at all what was going through Carter’s mind. He wasn’t going to cry. The emotion Lilah saw on his face came from a place of horror—at himself, at her, at the fact that after all the time he spent trying to be good to her, Lilah was way beyond his or anyone’s help.

The video itself wasn’t so disgusting. It was just a sweet, slightly awkward girl exploring her own sexual boundaries. That Jules had dared to try this made him love her more. But Lilah had taken something private and innocently misguided and turned it rancid and ugly. In Lilah’s hands this video became something frightening, a bunker buster aimed at Jules’s future.

“Give it to me.”

“Ha.”

He leaped forward, grabbing at her hand, and waving the phone above her head, she took a step back.

“Lilah, give me the fucking phone.”

He jumped and slapped at her hand until finally he connected and sent the phone sailing across the beach. Scrambling, they both dove for it. Carter got there first. Holding it out like a live grenade, he ran into the surf, high-stepping through the water in his shoes and socks, and he threw the phone with all his might into the ocean.

He kept his distance from Lilah as he turned back to the shore. She was clearly stunned. Her mouth hung open and she had that cock to her head like she got when the events she was witnessing overwhelmed her sense of what was possible.

He jabbed his finger at her as though this would somehow make his words stick more successfully. “I’m serious, Lilah. If I find out you’ve got another copy, I’ll report you.”

As she watched him trudge away in his wet, sand-caked Adidas, this refrain circled through Lilah’s brain:
Don’t you understand, Carter? I love you. I love you. Carter, don’t you understand? I love you.

She’d make him understand—and everyone else, too.

Graduation day finally
arrived.

The auditorium had been decked out in the red and gold school colors. After dark, rolling clouds threatened early, the sun had come out and the humidity and heat sank to levels that seemed almost miraculous for South Florida. It was a perfect day for the pageantry and pomp that marked the life change everyone was about to make.

People’s spirits were high. Parents sat in back, brandishing their cameras and video cameras. The hipper among them held their smartphones in the air. They found their friends, waved, mouthed their
wow
s and their
Can you believe they’re so grown up already
s. Carter’s mom had brought her best friend from work, Sue,
so she’d have someone to sit with, someone to lend a hand that she could clench when her son walked across the stage and she was inevitably overcome with emotion. (His father, true to his word, had skipped out on the proceedings.)

Jeff’s parents came dressed like they were at an art opening—his father wore Tom Ford, and perfectly round, plastic tortoiseshell glasses; his mother wore a Stella McCartney pantsuit that women half her age might not be able to pull off. Lilah’s parents had arrived two hours early to stake out seats in the front row of the balcony, and once the ceremony began and the seniors marched in, they clutched the railing, tracking her every move below them like if they lost track of her, even for an instant, she’d somehow get lost and not end up graduating. Jules’s mother, laid back in a diaphanous pastel-blue dress, kept herself apart from the other parents. Watching her daughter graduate—and go to college, no less—was a special gift and she wanted it all to herself.

The 462 graduating seniors, penned in like chickens in alphabetized rows in the orchestra seats, squirmed under their robes and fidgeted with their caps and joked and rolled their eyes through Ms. Robison’s corny, quasi-uplifting speech. It touched on all the usual points about how special this particular group of students was, and how much they’d be missed, and how, though they maybe didn’t know it now, their lives would continue
after they graduated, they’d go on to have all sorts of interesting experiences, and eventually, maybe they’d come back to Chris Columbus having accomplished things they couldn’t even dream of now. It was a fine speech, if a little rote, and though they pretended they didn’t care about the words they were hearing, the students were glad to be told these things today.

Finally, it was time for the diplomas to be handed out. The school had done something special this year. Instead of having Mr. Cruz, the gaunt and awkward assistant principal, read people’s names off as they marched across the stage and shook Ms. Robison’s hand, the A/V department had jimmied together a kind of video slide show through which each student could introduce him-or herself from the big screen hung above the stage.

Joseph Accevedo

Bethany Adams

Rebecca Amato

They said their own names, and sometimes they waved for the camera, or smirked, or in the case of Ranjit Aranjun, otherwise known as Reed, bugged their eyes in inspired goofery.

Lilah Bell

There she was, smiling demurely, just the smallest nervous glance off camera to signify her discomfort.

Paco Bermudez hadn’t bothered to take his sunglasses off for the camera. The Paco on-screen threw
some sort of hand sign, and the real Paco walking across the stage below him threw the same sign simultaneously.

On and on it went.

Andrew Drucker

Macalia Finnegan

Teresa Hernandez

Carter Moore

Friends and enemies and people Carter and Lilah and Jules had somehow never noticed the existence of traipsed across the stage and got their diplomas.

Peter Talbot

According to the program in Jules’s mother’s hand, there were nine more names before Jules took the stage. Her seat wasn’t the best. She was wedged into one of the back two rows and the man in front of her must have been six-foot-five. As she angled for a better view, and finally slid and climbed over people’s knees out to the aisle, where she could stand and watch, the roll call continued.

Then it was finally time. Jules strode toward Ms. Robison. Tears of pride welled in her mother’s eyes.

And on the screen, Jules’s face smiled out at the camera.

Something was different, though. She didn’t say her name. Instead, she blew a kiss and ran her tongue lewdly across her upper lip. And she wasn’t in front of the same bland, marbled background as everyone else had been.
She was in her room—her mom recognized the
Book of Mormon
poster on her wall.

This was wrong. Something was wrong. From her place on the stage, Jules didn’t realize it, but her mother could see that this wasn’t right at all, and she grew suddenly very, very afraid.

The video continued. It didn’t have any sound. Jules stepped back from the camera and it was revealed that she was naked from the waist up except for a black lace bra. She swayed her body seductively, licking her lips. She pointed at the camera and curled her finger as though she was enticing it to move close and kiss her. She shimmied her breasts and ran her finger seductively along her smooth, flat abdomen.

Carter searched out Lilah. She was eight rows in front of him, and he could barely see the back of her head. For Jules’s sake, he feared what was coming next: the big reveal, the public shaming. He would have stopped it if he could have, but there was nothing he could do but sit there and feel responsible.

When her name wasn’t announced and the applause didn’t come, Jules looked out at the audience, and it was then that she registered that she was in trouble. All of them—every single person in the room—were staring at the screen above her head. The expressions on their faces told her all she needed to know. Such ugly expressions. Some enthralled, some disgusted, all of them captivated
by her humiliation. She glanced at the screen above her head to see herself unlatching the strap of her bra.

Lilah’s heart tumbled with delirious glee as she watched the scene transpire. She smiled. She couldn’t help it. She grinned like she’d just won a trip around the world.

It was obvious to everyone, even the people onstage, that this was a cruel hoax of some sort, but no one knew what to do. Ms. Robison was blinking up at the light booth, waving her hands futilely, shouting for Arnold Chan, the hapless sophomore who was still stationed there, to cut the video. “Turn it off! Turn the damn thing off!”

But it didn’t turn off. The Jules on the screen peeled her bra from her body, and there were her breasts for the whole world to see.

Jules went from shocked mortification to piercing tears. She felt invaded, assaulted. She felt like her life and everything it had ever contained were crashing down and burying her alive. She was beginning to hyperventilate. She ran. She didn’t even get her diploma; she just ran. Peter Talbot tried to take her arm and console her, but she shoved him away. She ran and ran. If she didn’t get outside soon, she’d suffocate.

By the time
they got the video turned off, chaos had broken out in the auditorium. The parents in the balcony were crushed toward the ledge overhanging the orchestra, shouting in outrage at Ms. Robison, who could think of nothing more effective to do than stare up into the stage lights and call up—in a voice drowned out by the rabble—at Arnold Chan in the booth. Some of the seniors were hooting at the screen, reveling in Jules’s embarrassing exposure. Others seemed to be in shock, disgusted. All of them were out of their assigned seats, searching for friends with whom they could squeal and vocalize their disbelief.

In the midst of all this, Carter climbed over the
aisles, squeezing past his early-alphabet classmates; past Reed and Andy, who wanted him to join them in their witticism competition; and finally, lunging for Lilah, sitting prim in her seat, not speaking to anyone, not even pretending to be surprised by the craziness happening around her.

He slid down in the empty seat next to her. “What the hell?” he said. “Lilah, what the fuck?”

She turned in her seat and gazed at him, the delirious smile still frozen on her face. After a beat, her grin widened even farther, and then she giggled—not in a demonic way, no—what was spookiest about her behavior was that she seemed almost innocent, naïve, and gleeful.

“We’re not gonna do this here,” he said. He grabbed her wrist, maybe a little too roughly, and pulled her to her feet. “You’re coming outside with me.
Now
.” Then he dragged her through the throng and down the aisle toward the exit, ignoring Ms. Robison’s pleas to the crowd to take their seats again so the ceremony could continue.

Lilah went willingly. She was getting what she wanted: attention from Carter, if not exactly in the form she’d hoped for.
I’ve got him now. At least there’s that. I’ve got him now.
Every time the thought went floating through her mind, she’d break into a new bout of giggles, and Carter’s grip on her arm would tighten.

Outside the theater building, he surveyed the campus—first for Jules, who he couldn’t find, and then for a secluded spot where he could lay into Lilah without being disturbed by the entire senior class and their parents.

There, at the bottom of the hill, behind the flowering hibiscus bushes that divided the soccer field from the classroom quads. That would do.

“Where are we going?” asked Lilah.

Carter told her to shut up. He marched her down the hill, trying to think of what he could possibly say or do that would convince her to accept reality, or at least stop trying to alter it.

And so, there they were, behind the hibiscus.

Carter let go of her arm and scowled at her. He was pulsing with rage, too angry for words.

“She totally deserved it,” said Lilah. “And now everyone knows.”

“Everyone knows what?” His words were taut and clipped.

“That she’s not the cool, glamorous actor girl she pretends to be. That she’s a whore and a home wrecker.”

“No, Lilah. No. She’s not a home wrecker. Look at yourself. You think I wouldn’t have broken up with you regardless?”

“I don’t know why you’re so angry with me, Carter. I’d think that now that you know what kind of girl Jules
really is, you’d understand that it’s not worth throwing what we have away for her.”

Carter was dumbfounded by the logic Lilah could have possibly followed to come to this conclusion about her actions.
“You have to stop this.”

“I don’t understand why you’re being like this, Carter.”

He let out a howl of frustration and rage. “Because you’re trying to destroy someone who didn’t do anything to you!”

“Are you kidding me? She knew you had a girlfriend.
Everyone
knew. We’re class couple! People shouldn’t go around stealing other people’s boyfriends.”

“She didn’t cheat on you, Lilah. That was me. You understand? That was
me
. So why aren’t you taking this shit out on her?”