Wicked Games (8 page)

“So you don’t want to talk.”

She looked at him pointedly. “Go ahead, talk if you want,” she told him. Then she went back to her game.

“Can you put the game down, then?”

She ignored him.

In the silence that followed, Lilah’s punching and
sliding at the screen became more and more emphatic, like all of her anger and sadness and fear were trapped in her finger, trying to get out. It took Carter a moment to realize that she was trying to hold back her tears.

“Lilah?” he said, trying to show his concern with the tone of his voice.

“I mean, you could have at least answered the phone,” she hissed.

“I was busy!”

“Yeah, Jeff said. Busy watching
Futurama
.”

“I guess so, yeah.”

“You didn’t have one second to say hi? I was trying to say I was sorry!”

“Lilah, I was upset. I mean, think about it. You’d just told the whole school that you thought I was an asshole.”

“God,” she sighed. “I must be horrible. I must be, just, a horrible human being, if you’re afraid to even talk to me on the phone.”

Carter winced. “I’m not afraid to talk to you on the phone. It’s just . . . the things you do and say sometimes. It’s like you don’t
want
things to get better.”

“I do,” she said softly. “I do want things to get better.”

She struggled with all her might to stop the tears from falling down her cheeks. She understood that he felt he had been wronged. But didn’t he understand that she’d been wronged, too? She ached all over from how badly she’d been wronged.

“Do
you
want things to get better?” she asked, her lower lip quivering.

He wasn’t sure how to answer that. Of course he wanted things to get better. But he wasn’t sure that was possible anymore. And he couldn’t get the memory of the night he’d spent with Jules out of his mind.

Lilah suddenly seemed so fragile up there on her red wooden stand, so exposed. Her freckles had proliferated from the hours she spent in the sun. They covered her arms and shoulders in a heavy patchwork of brown. Her legs, too. If he was honest with her about the doubts he was feeling, this might be the last time he ever looked at her this closely. He tried to memorize this image of her so he’d be able to hold it in his head years later when he thought back on his high-school years and his first love.

Then he noticed that there were small, one-inch-long scratches on her thighs. Six of them. Two tight parallel rows of three.

“Lilah,” he said. “What happened? To your legs?”

She quickly covered her cuts with her hand. “I thought you were going to leave me. After what I did,” she said.

The thought of what she might do if he broke up with her sent a cold spike plunging through his heart.

“I do want to try to make things better,” Carter said, trying to convince himself that he meant it. “I’m not going to leave you.”

“Really?” she said. Her voice broke with the word and the tears finally began to stream down her face.

“Yeah,” he said. “But, Lilah, if we do this, you have to be honest with me, okay? It can’t be like the past few months. You have to talk to me. And . . .” He nodded toward the cuts on her thighs. “You have to find a way not to go to that place in your head anymore. Can you promise me that?”

She nodded.

He reached up and held his hand out to her. He gave her fingers a couple quick, comforting pulses and then let go.

“I should be paying attention to what’s going on out there on the waves. Don’t want anybody to drown on my watch,” she said, glancing out toward the kids on their boogie boards.

“You’re right,” said Carter. “Lilah, just remember. It’s all going to be okay.”

Standing on her lifeguard chair, Lilah watched him go. As he grew smaller and smaller, his blue-and-green striped polo shirt shrinking into just a speck of color at the edge of the promenade, she wondered why she hadn’t mentioned Jules’s name to him. Why hadn’t she asked him about the photo on his phone?

She’d been afraid that if she did so, she’d make everything worse. Now that he was giving her another chance,
she swore to herself that from here on out she’d be the best girlfriend ever. She’d find some way other than pressuring him to vigilantly protect what was hers. And, who knows, maybe she really had misinterpreted the photo.

Maybe . . .

A week later,
Carter waited for Jules on a bench under the massive iron sculpture of the Seminole warrior wrapped in blankets and cocooned in a canoe, about to be sent off to sea by his mourning tribe. It towered over the lush green mall where Shearwater circled around and met the beach. He felt he owed it to himself—and to Jules—to make good on his promise to be friends with her. He’d told Lilah he was going to be hanging out with his “buddies”—not quite a lie, but not the whole truth, either.

When he saw Jules heading down the boulevard toward him, dressed casually in a tight aquamarine top and a pair of low-rider jeans that she’d cuffed high and
turned into waders, he was struck again by how beautiful she was. The desire he’d tried to forget came flooding back. He could feel it in knees and his elbows, a tingling weakness. Reminding himself that he needed to control these feelings, he stood up and waved.

“Hey there, friend,” he called.

She made like she had a pistol in her hand and aimed it at him. “Ptewt-ptewt,” she said, imitating the sound of a silencer.

Identical grins cracked over their faces. Then they glanced away, Carter staring at the toe of his red-and-white old-school Air Jordans, Jules biting her lip and flipping her long, black hair over her shoulder.

When she reached the sculpture they struggled to negotiate their greeting. Carter went to shake Jules’s hand at the same time as she leaned in for a hug. Then, each of them seeing what the other had done, Carter went for the hug and Jules for the handshake.

“Well, whatever. We tried,” said Carter. “How long has it been since you’ve been to Harpoon Haven?”

“I can’t even remember. I used to hang out there in middle school, I guess. You?”

“I’ve been there once. Freshman year.” Carter paused, unsure if he should say more, but in the service of friendship, he felt he should be honest. “With Lilah.”

Jules secretly winced, but she didn’t push the topic.

As they wandered up the promenade toward the
lights of Harpoon Haven, they made sure to keep a couple feet of distance between themselves. They breathed in the warm salt air, soaked in the cool breeze coming in off the ocean.

Then, once they were inside and making their way through the first arcade of games that ringed Harpoon Haven’s small collection of rides, they let the carnival atmosphere carry them along.

Jules pointed at a stand surrounded by children. “The goldfish game!” she yelped, and she raced ahead of Carter toward it. They put all their energy into getting the Ping-Pong ball into the goldfish bowl, taking turns, lobbing the balls at various arcs and angles, laughing and cursing each of the balls as it ricocheted off the lip of another bowl.

And when they gave up on that they moved on to throwing darts at balloons, dropping basketballs into the undersized hoop, shooting the cutout ducks with the air rifle. Jules pretended that she wasn’t as touched as she was by Carter’s careful, protective way of navigating her through the throngs clogging the alleyways, that she took less joy than she actually did at watching Carter flare with competitive spirit as he tried to get the beanbags into the fifty-point hole.

“You don’t understand,” he said. “I really, really, really want that AC/DC mirror.”

“These games are all rigged,” Jules said with a laugh.
“Let’s go do the Tilt-A-Whirl and see if we can make ourselves throw up.”

And off they went.

An hour and a half later, having exhausted the rides, they ended up in the food court, standing at a high, round table near an ivy-covered wall of the Harpoon Haven food court, a cardboard box of popcorn between them.

“So, if you could be anywhere in the entire world, doing anything you wanted right this minute, where would you be and what would you be doing?” asked Carter.

Jules tapped her lip with one finger and thought about this. She plucked a few kernels of popcorn from the container and dropped one of them onto her tongue.

“Eventually?” she said. “I’d want to be on Broadway, starring in
Wicked
. Or the next
Wicked
, whatever that might be. You know? Working with the writer and the director to develop and put on a new amazing show.”

“You don’t want to be a movie star?”

Jules shook her head. “No.” She dropped another piece of popcorn onto her tongue. “I mean, I wouldn’t turn it down, obviously. But I don’t know. There’s something so narcissistic about Hollywood. I’m not so interested in being famous.” She studied his face for a reaction. “I know, you think it’s stupid. Everybody does. They say, ‘Why do you want to be an actress if you don’t care about being famous?’”

Carter bobbed his head slightly as he contemplated what she was saying. The seriousness with which he listened to her was disarming. She wasn’t used to guys taking the time to try to understand the nuances of her hopes and dreams. “I don’t think it’s stupid,” he said. “But what do you like so much about acting?”

“The craft, maybe? Like, the work. Just being in the room. Exploring the play or musical and working through the hundreds of decisions that have to be made to turn it into a great work of art. It’s hard to explain.”

“I think I get it,” said Carter. “It’s like what happens when I’m deep in an experiment. I see this goal out there ahead of me, like, this possibility that I can’t quite reach. And it’s like time disappears. It’s like
I
disappear. I can spend hours standing over the microscope, taking notes on every little change going on in the petri dish and putting together all the ways these changes do and don’t prove my hypothesis. The only way I know that time’s passing at all is that I have to choose a new album on my iPhone.”

“Exactly. That’s what happens to me when I’m onstage. There’s a presentness. Like I’m right there at that moment and nothing else exists.”

She looked up at the white lights strung in loops above the food court and realized that right now she was feeling the same presentness she’d just described. She took in this moment, with Carter across from her,
amazed at how easy, how natural it felt. She would have been happy if it never ended, and she wondered if Carter was feeling the same thing.

“I’m so glad you get it,” she said. “Todd used to just laugh when I talked like this. He’d tell me I should stop thinking so much.”

Their eyes found each other and she sensed some sort of fire burning in Carter.

She couldn’t stop herself from saying, “Hey, can I ask . . . is this . . . are we on a date?”

Carter blushed. Then he winced and she knew she’d gone too far. A sadness flushed through his face and the skin between his eyebrows furrowed with nervousness.

“Can we call it hanging out? Doing stuff together like friends?”

They locked eyes and a charge of emotion flowed back and forth between them, strong enough for them both to feel it gripping their hearts.

“Sorry,” said Jules. “I shouldn’t have asked that.”

“No, it’s . . .” Carter searched for a graceful way to navigate out of this awkward moment.

He picked up a handful of popcorn and shook it like dice. Then with a glimmer in his eyes, he lobbed one at Jules.

“Popcorn war!” he said, lobbing another one.

Jules grabbed a handful of her own. “Is that how it’s gonna be?” she said. She threw two kernels like darts at
Carter. He caught them with his free hand and threw them back. Then he was up, ducking and weaving around the rapid-fire assault of popcorn she was shooting his way.

They were both laughing now. The awkwardness had passed.

Earlier that evening,
Lilah had gotten a sense—an intuition—that Carter was hiding things from her again. Hanging out with his “buddies” was just too vague.

She’d been following him from a distance ever since she’d seen him lingering around the Native American sculpture on Shearwater. She’d seen him stand up and awkwardly say hello to Jules. She’d watched them walk along the promenade, chatting, listening so sickeningly intently to whatever each other was saying. She’d watched them turn into the Harpoon Haven amusement park and play carnival games and eat popcorn and laugh at each other’s jokes.

She’d watched and watched and watched and even
though they never did anything overtly, never kissed, never held hands, never even really touched each other, there was something in the way they looked at each other, some shyness, some overcharged nonchalance, like they were consciously
not
touching each other, avoiding the thing that they wanted most, and it made Lilah sick to her stomach. Literally. Her body felt weak and dehydrated. Her stomach acid rode at the back of her throat. She was nauseous.

And yet, she couldn’t turn away. She couldn’t leave. She felt compelled to punish herself for as long as it took for Carter and Jules to prove all her worst fears true. When they did, she’d explode. She’d spontaneously combust, like those Buddhist monks in Thailand or Cambodia or wherever.

When the moment came it was so subtle that she almost missed it.

Carter and Jules had been leaning against a bright-pink, low cement wall, talking—who knows what about. Something had been decided—that was clear from their body language. They’d reached the end of whatever it was. And Carter had looked down his hand for a second; then he’d looked back at Jules. She’d begun digging in her purse, in search of something. He watched her. He just watched her, not saying a word. And then he’d reached up, slowly, and with one finger, he’d tucked a loose strand of her hair behind her ear.

That was it. That was all it took for Lilah to realize that Carter was falling for this girl. That he was no longer hers.

What she felt was fear. And rage. And a despair so huge and heavy she felt like it might smother her, weigh her down, pull her into the ground, where she’d be buried forever. She was dizzy with it. She couldn’t breathe.