Wicked Games (6 page)

“Sure.”

“You and I stayed up watching old episodes of
Futurama
on Hulu. Piece of cake.”

Jeff was right. It was that simple. The complicated stuff was all inside Carter’s heart. He closed his eyes and felt the morning sun, warm on the backs of his eyelids. He was suddenly exhausted. He’d been up with Jules until four, at least. He’d barely slept at all the night before.

“Whaddya say, bro?”

Carter reluctantly nodded. “Sounds like a plan,” he said quietly.

“All right, cool,” said Jeff. Then, splashing a plume of water at Carter, he said, “I gotta say, though, man—you’re one lucky dog.”

Slowly lifting himself from the edge of the pool, Carter wandered back into the pool house and laid down on the unmade futon. He could smell Jules’s scent on the sheets—peaches and rosewater. He remembered his face buried in her hair the night before, breathing
her in, gulping down these smells. Images from their hookup flooded his head—his hands running up her smooth legs, the devilishly playful expression on her face as they’d chased each other up the beach toward Jeff’s house, and then the warmth of her skin when he’d covered her body with his own. An enticing, lingering memory of the night before.

Was it possible that Jeff knew what he was talking about? That the problem wasn’t with what he’d done the night before, but with the fact that his love for Lilah was disappearing? And then what? What would happen to Lilah if he up and left her?

The possibility disturbed him. He imagined her spiraling into a depression like she had after the swim-team fiasco. Hurting herself, maybe seriously. It made him sick to his stomach.

In a sudden panic, he leaped up and stripped the bed, crumpling the sheets into a ball and stuffing them deep in the hamper in the bathroom.

Back on the futon, he closed his eyes and tried to calm himself. If he could just somehow get back to sleep, maybe he’d wake up in a world where he wouldn’t have to worry about any of this.

In the three
and a half years they’d been together, Carter had never once neglected Lilah’s calls. Never once failed to return a text.

If only she hadn’t gotten drunk, if only she’d tried a little harder to enjoy Jeff’s party and not made such a spectacle of herself. She should have remembered how fragile things were in their relationship. She should have been more careful, more attentive, less selfish. She should have put Carter’s needs before her own.

She regretted every single thing she’d done, and her regret made her hate herself and her self-hatred filled her with an uncontrollable need to hear Carter tell her that everything was okay.

Now he’d gone AWOL. And it was all her fault.

At 8:30 a.m., unable to stand it any longer, she called the landline at his house. Maybe his mother would be able to get him on the line. And then Lilah could say she was sorry, and everything would be okay again. She could hear her heart beating in her throat as the phone rang and rang.

Finally, Carter’s mother answered, and the sound of the sweet Georgia drawl she’d picked up while they’d lived in Savannah almost broke Lilah in half. “Hi, Mrs. Moore. Is Carter there? Can I talk to him?” It took all of her self-control to squeeze the words out.

“Oh, Lilah, no. He’s at Jeff’s house,” Mrs. Moore said.

Lilah refused to believe that this could be true. “Are you sure?” she said.

“Sure as the sunrise.”

“So . . . he’s okay?”

“He seemed fine when he called to say he was sleeping over,” said Mrs. Moore. “Are
you
okay, honey?”

Lilah definitely wasn’t okay, but she didn’t want to make the mess she’d created any bigger. “Yeah. I’m . . . I’m okay,” she said. “Just, he’s not answering his phone.”

“You know Carter,” his mom responded. “It’s Saturday. He’s not going to be awake till noon.”

“He didn’t answer last night, either, though. I called him, like . . .” Afraid she’d said too much already, and not wanting Carter’s mom to think she was crazy, Lilah
stopped herself. “I called him. And I sent him some texts. He’s, like, disappeared.”

“I’m sure his phone just died,” said Carter’s mom. “You sure you’re all right, sweetie? You sound a little—”

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Moore. I’ve got to go. Thanks!”

Lilah hung up before Carter’s mom could probe any further.

In a daze, she stared at the pink walls of her room, at the line of intertwined roses her father had painted along the baseboards, at the white dresser and the white bedside table and the white carpeting on the floor. She studied the poster of Allison Schmitt—an action shot of Allison bobbing out of the water, with her arm stretched in front of her as she won her gold medal in London—that she hadn’t had the nerve to take down after her own dreams of Olympic competition had combusted.

Then, finally, her eyes drifted to the huge, round mirror above the antique cherrywood dressing table she’d inherited from her grandmother. Among the photos she’d taped there was one she especially cherished. CARTER + LILAH carved to that bench. “Forever,” he’d said.

But did
forever
really mean forever? Maybe not, after what Lilah had done last night. She couldn’t help but wondering if he’d taken the first steps toward leaving her—if he’d hooked up with some other girl after she’d left, it would explain why he hadn’t been answering his phone. The old familiar hurt tickled the edges of her
heart, that dark hopelessness she sometimes felt when she was alone, the flip side of her manic behavior the night before. She felt herself moving across the room, sitting on the stool in front of the mirror. Staring at that photo like she was in a trance.

Her hand reached down and opened the bottom drawer of the dressing table. It was like she was in a dream, like she was watching herself do this. She rummaged through the old lipsticks and mascara cases there, digging around until she found what she was looking for. There it was: the tiny cartridge of razor blades she’d managed to keep hidden from her mother.

As her fingers touched them, she shuddered, horrified at herself.

“Stop it,” she told herself. “Don’t do it.”

She threw the cartridge back into the drawer and slammed it shut.

Throwing on a pair of baggy gray sweatpants and a black sports bra, she slammed out of her room and stomped down the stairs and through the bright sunlit kitchen of her house.

“Mom, I’m taking your car,” she called out.

Then, before her parents had time to surface from wherever they were and interrogate her, she grabbed the key to her mom’s Dodge Caravan off the hook by the garage door and headed off to Jeff’s house in search of Carter.

Jules took her
time walking home.

She lived on the southern side of town, in a neighborhood called the Slats because all the houses there were the same gray clapboards, perched on stilts, lined up tight next to one another. It was a three-mile walk from the ritzy opulence of Jeff’s neighborhood, but today Jules didn’t mind.

She swung her sandals in her hand and brazenly trespassed through the five or six private beaches between Jeff’s house and the hotels, watching the perfect rows of red and blue umbrellas lined up above the sun-bleached chaise lounges grow incrementally closer. She waved at the strangers parked under these umbrellas—the few
who were out at this early hour. She tracked the waves as they tumbled and crashed. She watched the early-morning surfers catching waves, the seagulls hopping along the shore, and a few bright-eyed families setting up their chairs on the gleaming white, glimmering public beach.

She couldn’t stop grinning. The sun felt warm and alive on her skin. She was electric today, tingling all over. Her brain fizzled with a sensation of uncontrollable freedom. She knew she should feel guilty for having slept with Carter, but she just couldn’t find room for the guilt inside her.

Life, the world, it was all so beautiful. She had to keep checking herself, stopping herself from imagining a life in some hazy future where Lilah didn’t exist anymore and she and Carter were an actual couple. It felt wrong but it also felt unfathomably right.

By the time she’d made it to the Slats and cut in the three blocks from the beach, walking along the sandy side streets of her neighborhood toward the little house where she lived with her mother, she’d almost given up on trying to care about the damage she might have wrought in Carter and Lilah’s relationship. He’d seemed so miserable. She hoped that when he thought about what they’d done, he’d see her as a force for good in his life.

Her mother was already up, sitting at the table on the deck of their house. She looked free and easy as ever, her blond-streaked hair hidden under a floppy straw sun hat,
her hands around a warm cup of herbal tea. Enjoying the moment. Practicing her Buddhist presentness.

They waved at each other as Jules made her way up the creaky wooden stairs, and Jules felt lucky again that her mother was more a friend than a parent, the kind of person who let her come and go as she wanted.

Flopping into the chair across from her, Jules closed her eyes and drank in more of the sun. The female singer-songwriter music her mother liked so much lilted softly through the open window from the kitchen. The Shawn Colvin Pandora channel, Jules suspected.

“Good night?” her mother asked.

“The best.”

Her mother scooped some organic strawberries into a bowl and slathered Greek yogurt over top of them.

“Here,” she said. “Breakfast. Tell me all about it.”

She could honestly say that her mom was her best friend. Her dad had died six years ago of a heart attack, when she was eleven, and since then it had been just the two of them. They talked about everything. Her mom never judged. And through her, Jules had learned that the world had a way of working things out as long as you didn’t try too hard to war against it.

Jules picked at the fruit in front of her. “Well, there’s this boy,” she said.

A wisp of a smile floated across her mother’s face. “Of course there is.”

Jules laughed. She’d had this very same conversation with her mother many times before, but from the other side, listening to her describe her excitement about this or that new guy in her life.

“But he’s one of the good ones. He’s funny. And kind of goofy-cute. But there’s, like, a seriousness to him. I’ve told you about him before, actually.”

“Oh?” The hint of a smile, just a ripple across her lips that was so hard for Jules to read, emerged on her mom’s face.

“You remember way back in sophomore year . . . that party I went to on the beach?”

“Weren’t you already hanging around with Todd by then? It seems like there was always some party or another on the beach.”

Jules couldn’t help making a sour face at the memory of all that wasted time with Todd and his surfing buddies. “No, before that. With Lauren? It was like a bonfire with a bunch of upperclassmen. Remember? I came home just totally upset? I had to beg you not to report it to the school?”

She was talking about the time she and her friend Lauren had gone to a beach bonfire and been harassed by a bunch of guys who thought it was funny to paw at them and pull at the drawstrings of their bikinis. They’d actually managed to get Lauren’s top separated from her body. And then they wouldn’t give it back. It
was all a game to them. Keep-away.

Her mom’s gaze narrowed as she remembered being told about this. It was like she was looking through Jules into some place deep inside her that she didn’t know how to protect. “This guy was involved with that?”

“No—no, that’s not what I mean. Seth Kruger was the guy who stole Lauren’s bikini top. Carter was the one I told you about, who raced down from out of nowhere shouting, ‘What the fuck, assholes,’ and dive-bombed Seth to get Lauren’s top back.”

“Thank God,” her mom said, relieved.

“And last night, we just talked and talked. It was all so effortless. He was so sweet. And . . .” Jules drifted off into memories of the touch of his lips on hers. She’d thought about what it would be like to kiss him for years and the reality was so much better than she’d imagined.

Her mom reached across the table and patted her tanned hand with her own. “You really like this guy, then,” she said.

Jules looked down at her yogurt, suddenly embarrassed; then she glanced back up at her mother and crinkled her eyes. “Yes,” she said, blushing.

“I sense a
but
coming,” her mom said.

“He’s got a girlfriend. And . . .”

As Jules outlined the parameters of the situation—glossing the details of what exactly she and Carter had done, but not hiding them, not lying about them—her
mother listened carefully, looked her in the eyes, took in not just her words but her vibrations as well, all the subtle physical clues that communicated more than her words ever could. She didn’t push Jules or try to steer the conversation. She just listened and watched until Jules was done.

“Is that a bad thing?” asked Jules.

“No,” her mom said. “Not bad.” She put her hands to her lips like she was praying, and thought for a moment. “First, you should know—’cause you’re going to be worried about it later—you’re not responsible for the things he does. If he chose to fool around with you last night, something must be very wrong between him and his girlfriend. It’s not your fault.”

She reached across the table and covered Jules’s hand with her own.

“Did you hear me?” she said. “It’s not your fault. You don’t have to own problems he’s created for himself. Okay?”

Jules nodded.

“But,” her mom said, arching her eyebrows, “be careful. Guys with girlfriends . . . they have no idea what they want. And they’ll charm you into thinking that it doesn’t matter. You should know that by now, given the example I’ve set for you.”

“I know,” Jules said. “You’re right. It’s just . . .”

She gazed off between the stilt houses to the sliver
of ocean they could see from their porch and thought about her mother’s tumultuous love life, the way she fell in love so quickly, and allowed herself to believe again and again that whichever new, cool, brooding, muscular guy she’d met this time would be different from all the other ones she’d dated. She was so wise about how relationships worked, but so terrible at taking her own advice.