Wicked Games (2 page)

He blushed. “Really?”

“Yeah.”

“I find that hard to believe.”

“It’s true, though,” she said. “You’re different from the other boys in Dream Point. You’re, like, a gentleman.” Then she felt a kind of shame, like she’d spilled an important secret and if he knew there were options, he’d lose interest in her and find some flighty, sexy other girl to spend his time with.

“Well, they can’t have me,” he said.

“You mean that?”

“Yeah. Here. I’ll prove it.” He took a Swiss Army knife out of his pocket and started carving in the bench between them. He shielded what he was doing with his left hand.

“Breaking the rules again,” teased Lilah as she watched him work.

Looking up and smiling in her direction, Carter said, “Yeah, well, I’m learning.”

When he was done carving, he revealed what he’d written:

“That’s a promise,” he said.

“You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

The serious expression on his face was so intense that she had to believe him.

“Okay,” she said. She dug her iPhone out of her purse and snapped a photo of the graffiti. “But I warn you, I’m going to hold you to that.”

“Are you sure
you’re okay?” said Carter.

“Yeah. I said before, I’m fine. Everything’s fine,” Lilah responded, tucking her crossed arms more tightly across her body.

It was the first Saturday in March of the last semester of their senior year, and they were cruising in Carter’s black BMW convertible up Magnolia Boulevard toward his friend Jeff’s luxurious Spanish-style mansion on the north side of town, for what promised to be an epic, “What happens at Jeff’s house, stays at Jeff’s house” party.

“You don’t seem okay.” Carter waited for Lilah to say something in response, but she just stared up at the tops of the palm trees streaming past one by one, and rolled
her eyes. “If you don’t want to go, it’s okay. I can take you back home and go by myself. I won’t be mad.”

“I want to go. Look. I got dressed up and everything.”

She was wearing a white halter-top sundress with small, red embroidered flowers along the hem and a pair of thin-strapped sandals. She looked elegant, but anxiously so, like she’d worked too hard to give this appearance. Carter knew she’d be the most dressed-up person at the party. He himself was proudly wearing the gray T-shirt festooned with the blue-and-red UPenn shield that he’d bought on his campus visit last fall.

“You sure? ’Cause you’re acting sort of like you don’t want to go.”

“I want to go and I don’t want to go. Don’t you ever feel that way?”

Carter didn’t push it.

He kept his hand on Lilah’s leg, twirling his finger on the smooth skin of her knee. He could feel the tension in the muscles as he rested his palm on her thigh. They hit the red light at Pelican and as Carter rolled to a stop, Lilah peeled his fingers off of her skin and emphatically placed his hand on his own lap. She seemed, if anything, to be becoming more resentful and nervous by the second.

“Are you ever going to tell me what’s going on with you?” he said.

“There’s nothing going on,” she said with a clipped voice.

“But there is. You’ve been acting weird ever since your parents took us to dinner to celebrate us getting into UPenn.”

“I haven’t been acting weird.”

“Really? Lately it seems like absolutely everything makes you angry. And like you don’t want to talk to me anymore.”

“We’re talking right now.”

“You know what I mean. It worries me when you try to shut me out.”

Lilah spun in her seat and leaned forward against the seat belt. Her face was red with rage, an angriness heating up in her freckles. “God! Carter! So I don’t want to go to a stupid party with your bozo friends. Is that a capital crime?”

Carter took a deep breath and held it for a moment to keep himself calm.

“It won’t just be them. Everybody’ll be there. The whole school, probably. That’s not the point, anyway. I’m trying to say, I’d hate for what happened last time to happen again.”

“It won’t,” said Lilah, spitting the words out with a great deal of spite. She hated herself when she was like this, hated especially that she couldn’t control it. She
turned again, this time to face the window. She sunk low in her seat and stared at herself in the passenger-side mirror.

The light turned and Carter drove on. He tried to concentrate on the warm wind whipping across his face, but he couldn’t stop thinking that her behavior now reminded him of junior year. For a few weeks there, Lilah had stopped sleeping. She’d had a particularly tough swim meet against a girl named Melissa on the team from Coral Gables. Melissa had beaten Lilah badly, worse than she’d ever been beaten before, and as she stewed over her loss, Lilah had flickered with a rage Carter had never seen in her before. Over the following two weeks she couldn’t talk about anything—not a single thing—except this Melissa girl and how she must be doing steroids. In her manic exhaustion, she searched down the phone numbers not only of Melissa, but also of the Coral Gables coach and the principal of the school. She’d called them so many times that they’d reported her to Coach Randolph and Lilah had been kicked off the team.

“I mean,” he said to her as they reached the dead end where Magnolia ran into the beach and turned onto Shore Drive, “you haven’t gone off your meds or whatever, have you?” he asked quietly.

Lilah’s face fell in disbelief. “Are you really asking me that?”

“Like I said, I’m worried about you,” Carter said.

“Well, don’t. I can take care of myself.”

It occurred to Carter that she hadn’t answered his question. “But have you?” he said.

Lilah didn’t answer. In fact, Lilah didn’t say a word to Carter for the rest of the ride to Jeff’s place.

They made their way up Shore Drive past the neon-lit entrances to the glitzy hotels, and on to the north side of town, where the beachside mansions and the weathered gates leading to their private beaches paraded past.

When they pulled into Jeff’s circular crushed-shell driveway, they had to navigate around the tangle of everybody else’s cars, and then seeing that all the good spots were already taken, they looped back out and parked a ways away down the sand-strewn street.

“We’re here,” said Carter.

“Looks like it,” Lilah responded sarcastically.

They sat there, neither of them moving for a moment.

“So, listen,” Carter said. “Before we go in, I want to say—” She was fiddling with the red plastic bracelet she’d been wearing every day since she’d gotten her job as a lifeguard last summer. “Will you look at me a sec?”

She did, and Carter caught her chocolate eyes and held them. She seemed so fragile, so scared, in that moment in the car. He took both her hands in his and held them out in front of himself.

“The girls from the swim team might be here, and—”

Lilah’s head bobbed forward and she covered her face with her hands but Carter pressed on.

“—I know you think they hate you, but really, they don’t. I promise you. Just . . . try to relax and let yourself have a good time. And if you can’t, then let me know it’s too much for you and we’ll leave.”

“Okay,” said Lilah, glancing back up at him with a sharp glare. “Are we gonna go in, or what?”

“Yeah. Let’s go in.” Carter carefully tucked a loose strand of wavy light brown hair behind her ear. He cracked a sad grin. “This is going to be fun. You’ll see.”

Inside Jeff’s house,
the party was blazing at full speed. The music—Nelly and Mac Miller and Nas—blasted from the surround speakers mounted in the corners of the cavernous, arch-ceilinged main room, and the whole senior class seemed to have already arrived. People Carter and Lilah recognized and people they didn’t raced barefoot around the swimming pool, pushing one another in, swatting at one another with neon-colored pool noodles.

She squeezed his arm, hoping he’d notice her insecurity and buck her up again like he’d done in the car, but he was preoccupied with searching the faces in the crowd, looking for Jeff, probably.

“I’m gonna go find the drinks table,” she said.

“Lilah,” he said, the concern for her showing all over his face, “you know you can’t mix—”

“I’ll have a Diet Coke, Carter. Stop monitoring me already.”

The worry on his face relaxed. “You’re right,” he said. “Sorry.”

“You want something?” she asked.

“Yeah, sure. A beer?”

“Where will you be?”

“I don’t know—” Carter was up on his tiptoes, ducking his head back and forth to see over the crowd. “Oh, wait, there he is.”

He pointed across the house and out the window, to the backyard patio where Jeff was stationed with a bunch of other guys. He was wearing a pair of gargantuan red sunglasses—each lens must have been six inches large—and doing some sort of goofy dance that had the other guys buckled over with laughter.

“I’ll be out there,” Carter said.

Before she could say, “Okay, I’ll meet you in a minute,” he was gone from her side, down the marble steps and ducking around people on his way toward the sliding glass door that would lead him outside to his comedian friend.

Lilah made her way into the massive open-plan living room. As she headed toward the kitchen island
where the drinks were set up, she saw that a Ping-Pong table had been erected in the corner of the cavernous space, and Kaily and Teresa, her old swim-team friends, were playing a girls vs. boys doubles match against two guys from the football team who’d carved their uniform numbers into the sides of their faux hawks.

Her heart sank.

Before she could duck and hide her face with her hair, Teresa saw her. “He-e-ey!” she shouted, her almond-colored face breaking into a smile. She pointed her Ping-Pong paddle out toward Lilah like a gun. “Look who’s decided to grace us with her presence.”

Kaily looked, too. “
L
to the
ah
,” she said. “Where’ve you been? Get yourself over here, girl! We need help whipping these guys’ asses!”

Lilah waved. She forced herself to smile. Part of her felt the urge to take Kaily up on the offer.

One of the football guys, number sixty-four, beat his paddle rapidly against the table and said, “Come on. It’s your serve. Are we playing, or what?”

Kaily unleashed her long red hair from its hair band and bent forward to throw it in a wave over her head before rebanding it loosely behind her back again.

“Oh, are we ever playing,” said Teresa. She held the ball up and readied herself to serve. “Zero-six,” she said.

And just like that, both she and Teresa forgot about Lilah.
Figures.
Lilah knew that they didn’t really want
her to join them. They’d been inseparable when they’d all been relay partners together, but they’d barely spoken or even texted with her in over a year, not since she’d been kicked off the team and gotten so depressed.

Feeling slighted and a little bit humiliated, Lilah slunk over to the drinks table.

She still wasn’t up for this, she realized. She felt totally trapped. And despite Carter’s many reassurances that he wouldn’t be upset if she wanted to stay home, she knew—she just knew—that he would be. She wanted to please him, but the more she tried to do so, the more she resented the effort it took. What if this was the night when everything fell apart for good? She couldn’t bear the thought. But she couldn’t get rid of it, either.

Squeezing through the throng, she pushed herself to the front of the line.

She knew what she was going to do, even if she wouldn’t admit it to herself. She was going to get drunk. If the alcohol mixed wrong with her antidepressants, well, she just didn’t care. Not tonight.

Jeff had really stocked up for this party. There were two kegs of beer, and a whole mess of bottles of vodka, rum, gin, and bourbon, along with any mixer she could have possibly wanted. There was even a bottle of Moët champagne.

She poured herself a Captain Morgan and Coke and poked a straw into it. Then, knowing she’d need even
more fortification, she splashed an extra dose of rum into her cup.

Carter would want beer. He wasn’t a big drinker, and one beer, hidden inside a red cup, could last him for hours.

She staked out a place in the scrum that had formed around the kegs, and waited for Paco Bermudez, a cool kid who was already making money spinning records sometimes and who dressed just a little more fashionably than anyone else in the senior class—tonight he was wearing a Gucci fedora and a pair of clear Ray-Bans—to finish pumping the foam out.

While she waited, she sipped at her drink, sucking it through the straw she’d stuck inside. Then, still waiting, she realized that her drink was gone, and she wasn’t feeling any different, so she ducked out of line and poured herself another.

By the time she’d managed to get Carter his beer, her second drink was almost gone as well.

Finally, a slight buzz had kicked in. But looking around the room, she saw all these people, her classmates, kids from all walks of life—from the lowliest stoners in their torn army jackets and heavy-metal T-shirts to the slickest, most glamorous, Prada-wearing divas in school—having fun together like they actually liked one another. It was all too unbearable. Especially Kaily and Teresa over there, flailing after the Ping-Pong
ball as it soared past their paddles, pretending that they didn’t know how to play in order to impress a couple of linebackers.

She pushed past Paco Bermudez and squeezed back up to the drinks table, refreshing her rum and Coke one more time.

A drink in each hand, she slid the screen door open with her foot and stepped out onto the patio to deliver Carter’s beer to him. She had to watch out for flying beach balls and diving revelers as she walked past the pool, and each time she stopped, she took the opportunity to gulp down another swig of her drink. Part of her worried that by the time she got to Carter, her cup would be empty again. And then what? She’d be left with her worries and nothing to knock them out.