Wicked Games (4 page)

He didn’t know Jules that well. They ran in different circles. Her friends were artsy theater people and they kept mostly to themselves, spending their time in rehearsals. He’d seen her onstage when he and Lilah had gone to see the fall musical—they’d done
Camelot
and
she’d played Guinevere—and he remembered thinking that she had a nice singing voice.

“You’re an actress, right?” Carter said, to change the subject.

“Yeah,” she said.

“And your name is Jules. I saw the show last fall. You were great.”

Jules blushed and scrunched up her nose. “Oh,” she said. Then, “I mean, thanks. Sorry. I’m still learning how to accept compliments.”

In the awkward silence that followed, Carter couldn’t help but notice how pretty Jules was. She had large, unusually expressive almond-shaped eyes that were a deep shade of greenish blue, and there was something striking about the shape of her face, something both soft and angular all at once. In the flowing red Mexican skirt that she wore low on her hips so the top of her bikini bottoms peeked out, she had an elegance, it seemed to Carter—a grace. He could imagine her dancing slowly, by herself.

“UPenn,” she said, pointing to his T-shirt, across which a big, bold, thunderstruck blue-and-red
P
was festooned.

“Yeah. How did you know?”

“My acceptance letter came two weeks ago,” she said.

“You’re kidding. Mine too. Maybe I’ll get to see you act again, up there.”

“I’ll make sure to invite you.” She flashed a smile and Carter was struck again by how beautiful she was. How had he missed all this before? Or maybe, more urgently, was it okay that he was noticing it now?

Carter stood up and gazed out at the sea for a moment, leaning over the railing, careful not to invade Jules’s space, or study her too obviously. A warm breeze lilting through the salty air. The music of the waves rocking gently beyond the dunes. A lone pelican gliding low and dark over the water. A nervous tension coiled in Carter’s heart.

“Look,” he said, pointing at a bird flying low over the water. “A pelican.”

She edged up to the railing next to him, and joined him in gazing out at it.

“Nice,” she said.

They watched it glide over the water for a while.

“I love nights like this,” said Jules. “It’s like everything’s alive and at peace with the world somehow, and you just want to stay there and hold on to that moment for as long as you can. You know what I mean?”

“Totally.,” said Carter. But he didn’t, really—not tonight. It was hard to find peace after everything Lilah had just done.

She pointed at the pelican, which had made its way south along the shore without a single flap of its wings and was now directly across from them. Carter noticed
that she’d painted her fingernails a nice shade of bright yellow. He couldn’t help comparing it to Lilah’s haphazard attempts at giving herself manicures. Lilah went for the ruby reds, and she had a habit of biting her nails when she was nervous, and picking at the polish until there were nothing more than a few chips scattered like tea leaves above her cuticles.

“Where do you think it’s going?” Jules said.

Carter wondered. “Maybe into the Everglades? Maybe it’s out hunting, trying to scrape up enough fish to feed its five insatiable chicks?”

“I don’t know,” Jules said. “I think it’s more adventurous than that. I think it’s a loner and it’s restless. It’s got it in its head that there’s more to see in the world than the other boring pelicans think there is and it’s decided to take a risk and soar out to sea. It’s getting ready to hopscotch over the keys and find a rocky island out in the Caribbean where no other pelican has ever gone.”

The vision made Carter smile. “You know what?” he said. “I think you’re right.”

He relaxed a tick. He couldn’t help it. She was so comfortable with herself—you could see it in her posture, in her easy conversation, in the way she was able to look at the things outside herself without worrying about how they related to her—that she put him at ease.

He let himself look at her. She had a mass of string bracelets in every conceivable color tied around her right
wrist, and she was wearing a tight white tank top that rode up above her belly button.

His phone—which he kept at all times on vibrate—buzzed in the cargo pocket of his shorts. Two short bursts. A text. Maybe the guys trying to find out where he’d disappeared to.

He did a quick check. It was Lilah. “WHYD U MAKE ME GO TO THAT PARTY?” it said.

Carter put the phone back in his pocket without replying.

“Everything okay?” asked Jules.

“Yeah,” he said. “As okay as it can be, anyway.” Before she could ask more, he said, “So, UPenn. It’s crazy that we’re both going there next year. It’s not the sort of place many kids from Chris Columbus apply to.”

“Yeah. It takes a certain kind of dork to risk venturing up into the snowy north for something as unimportant as an education.”

He laughed. “I know what you mean. Who’d want to do that?”

“Well, you for one.”

“And you for two.”

His phone buzzed again. Another text. It had to be Lilah. He could feel her anxiety teleporting itself into the phone. “IM SORRY, IM SUCH A MESS,” it said.

He was too exasperated with Lilah to get into an extended texting session with her. Instead, he focused
his attention on Jules. “So, if you’re going to college next year and I’m going to college next year, then we’re obviously both seniors, which is weird,” he said. “I never really see you at the parties or anything.”

“I keep a low profile,” she said. “Junior CIA. The goal is, I see you and you don’t see me . . . until it’s too late!”

“CIA, huh. So, spy, what dirt have you uncovered about me?”

Jules tapped her lip with one finger. “Well,” she said. And to Carter’s shock and amazement, she ran down a list of facts about him. His four-year relationship with Lilah, of course. But also, his taste in clothes—button-down shirts in bright, colorful checkerboard patterns, and baggy chinos worn over an ever-changing collection of kicks. He used to be on the track team—the 400-meter dash—and his best time was 1.03 minutes, back in freshman year in a race that he’d won. She knew about his love for science and that last year he and Andy had tried to cultivate a coral bed in one of the aquariums in Mr. Wittier’s biology lab.

Another
buzz-buzz
.
Jesus, Lilah!
It was like she was trying to make what had happened tonight his fault. But it wasn’t his fault. He’d done the best he could.

Forcing Lilah out of his mind, he said to Jules, “Wow, that’s a lot. You’ve been doing your job well. But now that I know who you are, I mean, you’re compromised, aren’t you? What’s to stop me from telling the whole world?”

She raised one eyebrow and nodded her head knowingly.

“Uh-oh,” he said.

“Yeah, you guessed it. Now I’m going to have to kill you.”

“Can I plead for my life?”

“Sure. But it’s not going to help. Protocol and all that,” she said.

He straightened his shoulders. “Okay, I’m ready. Take your best shot.”

Jules mimed cocking the bolt on a sniper rifle. She aimed at Carter’s heart. She made two short, sharp whistling sounds. “Twhoo-twhoo.” Then by way of explanation, she said, “We use silencers.”

Carter put his hands to his heart and made his best I’m-dying face, reeling backward like he’d just been shot. Hefell fell into one of the ornate wrought-iron deck chairs that circled the table.

His phone buzzed again. Not the short double buzz of a text, but the sustained vibration of an incoming call. He’d known this would come eventually, but that didn’t make him any less annoyed.

“Sorry, hold on,” he said.

He pulled out his phone and stabbed at the button along its side, holding it down until the phone was off. Then he couldn’t help but let out a small plume of frustration. He cocked back and mock-threw the phone out
toward the beach before shoving it back into his pocket.

“What was that?” said Jules.

“Lilah.” Though he tried to sound cool about it, Carter could hear his annoyance infiltrating his voice. For a second, he imagined her, stewing in her room at home, trying and trying to call him. Something inside of him—some buzzing feeling—collapsed in on itself. The difference between the drama with Lilah and this nice, light flirtation with Jules was too much for him. He couldn’t do it anymore, he realized. He was too exhausted by the vigilance it took to hide the cracks in his supposed perfect, loving relationship while so much of it was crumbling around him.

“I’m sorry,” he said, holding the phone up. “It’s just . . . she’s going to keep calling.” He rubbed his eyes. “It’s frustrating,” he said. “It’s exhausting.”

Jules wasn’t stupid. She could see the change taking place inside Carter—the sad expression wresting control of his face, the way he ran his fingers through his flop of sandy hair, holding them there at the top of his head like he was trying to stop his brain from exploding.

“There’s no need to be sorry,” she said, taking a seat in the chair next to his.

She gazed at him, attentive but calm, and let his mood float in the silence between them.

“You want to talk about it?” she said.

Carter took a deep breath, and though he’d never
dared to put his fears into words before, he let it all pour out. Everything. How he wasn’t sure anymore if his relationship with Lilah was going to work, and all the ways this terrified him. Who was he without Lilah? He didn’t know. He was afraid of what life without her would look like, but he didn’t know how to be with her anymore. It was horrible. He could barely remember what had made their relationship so beautiful before, and the little glimpses he did catch filled him with sadness because he couldn’t find a way to get that beauty back.

“I’ve tried so hard, for so long now,” he said, “but things just keep getting worse between us. No matter how hard I work to keep her together, she continues to fall apart. And now she doesn’t even trust me. I mean, look at what happened tonight. It’s like she’s punishing me for caring about her. And the worst part is that just
thinking
these things feels like a betrayal.”

“But sometimes, no matter how hard you try, things just don’t work out,” Jules said. “You’re not always in control of everything, no matter how much you want to be. Something I learned from doing the I Ching with my mother. Chance sneaks in and changes everything, no matter how prepared you thought you were.”

“I know that. I’ve even tried to tell Lilah something like that. She’s so anxious, though. She needs me so much.” He furrowed his eyebrows. “And she holds on so tightly that she doesn’t realize she’s . . . killing us.”

Jules felt for him. She understood his fear. Walking away from love was hard—even if the love was bad.

“I don’t want to hurt her,” he said.

She was impressed, actually, that he was working so hard to understand and grapple with his emotions. It proved the suspicion that she’d always held about him. He had an unusual amount of integrity. He was a nice guy, a kind guy, mature beyond his years. The kind of guy she’d always secretly wanted to date, if only the gulf between guys like him and the new-agey, beachy stoner culture her mother had raised her in hadn’t seemed so huge. Any other guy in school would have thrown Lilah overboard a long time ago, without even thinking about how she’d feel. Either that or he’d have been oblivious to his girlfriend’s hopes and dreams, too busy partying and posturing for his friends to realize how much trouble his relationship was in.

That’s what Todd, her ex-boyfriend, had been like, so busy playing beach volleyball and smoking pot with his buddies that he hadn’t even noticed when Jules began to wonder if maybe there was more to life than bumming around the beach and listening to The String Cheese Incident all day. They’d dated for two years, and even though she’d known she had to do it, she’d put off breaking up with him for months.

After four years together, it must be that much harder. She wished there was something she could do to ease
Carter toward the realization that, no matter how protective of Lilah’s feelings he might be, eventually, he was going to have to admit to his own feelings and take care of himself. She knew better than to push him, though. He’d figure it out in his own time.

“So if you can’t control the future,” she said, “and you can’t change the past, I wonder if maybe sometimes the best thing to do in the present is to throw your hands up and say, you know what, my fate’s going to take me wherever it takes me and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

“You have to have some sort of plan, though,” he said.

“Yeah, of course. But like you just said, if you try to control everything all the time, then you end up totally paralyzed.”

He hunched forward in his seat, listening, intrigued.

“I mean, look at it this way. We’re at a party. There’s a reason we came to this party, right? We want to have a couple drinks. We want to have some fun. Talk to some people. Maybe dance a little. Flirt a little. There’s nothing wrong with having a little bit of fun.”

“Okay,” he said. “Sure. Fun is good.”

“And if Lilah is going to assume that you’re here for some sort of nefarious purpose, there’s nothing you can do about it. Just like I can’t do anything about what Todd, my ex, might think. So best to let it go, no? You can only be you. No matter how much you might want to be the person they think you should be, you can’t change who
you are. It’s up to them to accept you. Meanwhile, you just do what you do and let it work itself out. Or that’s what I’m trying to do, anyway.”

“You’re right,” he said. “What’s the worst that could happen?”

Gazing out at the beach, he seemed to be taking this question seriously. She watched as he considered the possibilities. When he looked at her again, there was a hint of mischief in his eyes.

Which made it impossible for her to resist. “What do you say to a walk on the beach?” she said.

Carter and Jules
picked through the beach grass, along the path, over the dunes, and down toward Jeff’s family’s private beach. They walked single file at first. Then when they exited the narrow path, they allowed themselves to walk side by side—conscious of the boundaries of each other’s personal space, careful not to get too close, not to touch each other, even incidentally.