6
Before
“I suck,” was the first thing Allie said when I picked up the receiver, her number appearing on the caller ID for the first time in almost a week. I was sitting on my bed reading the travel magazines Soledad had picked up for me at the bookstore, imagining myself wandering the markets of Provence or sitting on the beach in a cove in Kauai. “I totally owe you a phone call.”
“You don’t suck,” I told her, although the truth is she sucked a little. It was the end of the summer. Sophomore year started in a few days. August had seeped away in a kind of weird, lonely fugue state: I’d played an awful lot of solitaire. I’d spent a lot of time alone. “You’re busy. I get it.”
“No, I do,” she argued. “I’m the worst. I miss you desperately. Come over. My parents have some law-firm benefit thing tonight. Come on,” she said, when I hesitated. “It’ll remind you how much you love me.”
I thought for one mean second about turning her down, claiming other plans and spending another night watching Law & Order reruns with Soledad, but in the end that was too bleak to contemplate, and besides: I missed her desperately, too.
“Yeah,” I said, after a minute. I got to the end of Travel + Leisure, flung its glossy pages onto the floor. “Of course.”
*
I biked the familiar streets that led to Allie’s parents’ development, everything green and rain-forest-damp. My tires skidded slickly against the blacktop. I leaned my bike against the side of the garage and scratched idly at a mosquito bite on the jut of my collarbone as I waited for Allie to open the door.
Lauren Werner opened it instead.
“Serena!” she said in a voice like a Fruit Roll-Up, tart and vaguely sticky, nothing organic there at all. “I didn’t know you were coming.”
I stared at her for a minute, her slinky top and honey-brown hair. “Yeah,” I said eventually. I was wearing stretched-out jeans rolled up into capri pants, a white Hanes undershirt that might have belonged to my brother at some point, and a pair of Birkenstock clogs. “Ditto.”
“Allie’s around here somewhere,” she told me, leading the way into the front hall like this was a place I’d never been before, like I’d need to be pointed in the direction of the bathroom and told where to hang up my imaginary coat. I followed dumbly. In the living room were half a dozen kids I recognized from the hallways at school, maybe a grade or two ahead of us—a girl from my chem class, a guy who worked the counter at Bump and Grind. I could see a couple more people hanging out in the kitchen: not a big party, definitely, but still, being there felt like being in a dream where you’re someplace you recognize but it looks weirdly different, everything just a degree or two off from true north. “I always forget you guys are friends.”
“Uh, yup,” I said vaguely, doing my best to ignore her garden-variety bitchiness and still trying to get my bearings. The AC wasn’t working, and the air in the hallway was tepid and aquarium-damp. “We’re friends.”
Just then Allie appeared, flushed and grinning, throwing her skinny arms around my neck. “Hi!” she said, and in that second she looked so happy to see me that I forgot myself and smiled back. That was the thing about Allie, one of the reasons I loved her so much: When she made you the object of all her terrifying, kinetic energy, it was like standing in a puddle of sun. “You’re here!”
“I’m here,” I said, letting her spin me around on the tile in a swooping little dance. “You know,” I said, once she’d dipped me and, deciding that was enough dancing for now, begun to yank me gently down the hall, “maybe you could have mentioned on the phone that half of school was going to be at your house so that I could have, you know, bathed.”
“What are you talking about?” she asked, frowning. “You look adorable.”
“I look twelve.”
“You look arty and cool.”
“Okay.” I snorted. “I do not look arty or cool—”
“Hey, Reena.”
I startled, looked around, and tried not to gasp too audibly: There was Sawyer standing behind me, in jeans and a T-shirt, leather cord looped around his wrist. A plastic cup dangled by its lip from his hand.
“Hey,” I said.
I saw Sawyer pretty often, actually, hanging around at the restaurant or sitting in front of us at church on Sunday, at my house taking lessons from my dad. However much I thought about him—and I thought about him a lot—I was reasonably adept at keeping it together when he was around, careful not to tip my hand and thereby make my entire life completely unbearable.
I had never seen him in Allie’s kitchen before. I had never seen him slide a casual arm around her shoulders, one hand sifting through her wispy hair. Seeing it now felt slow and painful, like a muscle tearing. I had no earthly clue where I should look.
In the end it didn’t matter, because already he was leading her away without even trying; he just stepped back and she followed, like a magnet or a high-frequency sound. “Get a drink and come down to the basement,” she called to me, distracted. “We’re gonna play flip cup in a minute.”
And then she was gone.
I stood there for a second. I tried to look very, very calm. Finally I slipped past the two girls at the counter, out the sliding door, and across the covered patio, avoiding the bright patch thrown by the floodlight affixed to the back of the house. I made straight for the swing set, wet from this afternoon’s rainstorm, the air still so humid it felt like breathing spiderwebs.
I sat.
I wasn’t shy, exactly. That’s never what it was. I just didn’t know how to do this, is all, the clang and chatter of high school. And more than that, I didn’t particularly want to learn. My whole life Cade had teased me for my total inability to handle more than one or two friends at a time; ten minutes in Allie’s crowded kitchen left me feeling like some wild animal dropped into a completely foreign habitat, a tiger in the tundra or a penguin in the woods. I wasn’t unpopular, exactly. I was just … unequipped.
It was one thing when I had Allie around to help fight my wars, I thought as I sat there. She could do all the talking when I was feeling tongue-tied, vocalize feelings on behalf of both of us: Reena and I thought that movie was stupid. Reena and I would love to go. Lately, though, not only did it feel like she didn’t have the time or patience to parse my silences, but on top of that she’d taken the person I wanted most in the entire world.
It was my own fault, I thought again, swinging slowly back and forth without much of a long-term plan. I didn’t know how to open up to people. I didn’t know how to be the kind of person who did. I couldn’t figure out how Allie—
“What are you doing?”
Sawyer sidled across the damp, hissing grass, hands in his pockets. I hadn’t seen him coming. He’d edged around the floodlight, too.
“Um.” I groped around for plausible deniability and, finding none, had to settle for the truth. “Hiding.”
Sawyer raised his eyebrows, paused against the slide. He was barefoot and casual-looking, like someone who just lived in his body sort of carelessly, all muscle and bone. “From anything in particular?”
Everyone, as a matter of fact, but it didn’t feel like the kind of thing I could say to Sawyer LeGrande. “That,” I began instead, stalling, “is a very good question.”
“Well.” Sawyer sat down on the swing next to me and rocked back and forth a little, long legs planted, just normal, like we did this all the time. “You suck at hiding, because I found you in, like, one second.”
“Were you looking?” I blurted, and then, before he could answer: “I wasn’t so much doing it as a game.”
Sawyer considered that. “No,” he said eventually. “I guess not.” He swung for another minute, quiet. We’d never been alone like this before. “This isn’t really your scene, huh?” he asked.
“What’s that?” I asked, just this side of defensive. I felt my spine straighten up, a reflex: He’d hit a little close to the artery. My fingertips curled tightly around the edge of the swing. “People having a good time?”
Sawyer laughed like he thought I was clever, like I might have a secret to share. “That’s not what I mean. Bunch of slacker types screwing around. I don’t know. Lauren Werner.”
That got my attention, as if he hadn’t had it already. I squinted a bit, trying to gauge the expression on his face. It was frustratingly dark out here; fine for brooding, sure, but for all the world I wanted to pull him into the light and just … look. “I thought you and Lauren Werner were friends.”
Sawyer shrugged. “We are, I guess. But she’s … I mean …” He stopped. It looked like he was thinking about it, like he hadn’t totally decided how much he wanted to reveal. “You know.”
“I really, really do,” I told him, and the way I said it cracked him up again. I grinned. I tried to remember the last time I’d made him laugh—a long time ago, definitely, back when we were still little kids running around with my brother, playing tag in the grove behind his house. It used to take them forever to catch me back then. I’d freeze and go quiet among the trees.
We sat there for another minute, swinging. I could hear the frogs calling out above my head. Inside Allie’s house something crashed to the floor, followed by a spray of laughter. I winced.
“You ever wish you were still, like, eight years old?” Sawyer asked suddenly.
I blinked at him, startled: It felt like he could open up my head and see inside. I took a beat to recover, slid my feet out of my clogs and rubbed them cautiously through the cool, damp grass. “Nah.” It felt weirdly dangerous to look at him, like staring at the surface of the sun. “I only ever wish I was old enough to leave.”
Sawyer didn’t answer for what felt like an eternity. Finally I glanced up and found him looking back. Something weird and new and personal charged between us in the darkness, a gaze too long to be an accident. Another moment passed before he grinned. “For what it’s worth,” he said, and here he bumped the hard knob of my bare ankle with his own, gentle, “I think you look arty.”
“I don’t—” I started, but then there was Allie crossing the lawn, a dark swath through the pool of light Sawyer and I had both avoided so carefully, like a stage actress finding her mark.
“There you are!” she called brightly—so pretty even in jeans and a tank top, curves and curly hair. Of course he would have chosen her. “My two favorites.”
“Here we are,” Sawyer agreed, eyes on me for a single beat longer before turning his attention to Allie. “Reena was hiding.”
“That’s ’cause she’s mad at me,” Allie said, subtle as a border collie, reaching for the chain link and giving my swing a little shake. She smelled like malt lemonade and her mother’s perfume.
Sawyer cocked his head to the side. “I don’t know about that,” he told her, getting to his feet. “I’ll see you inside.” He glanced at me one more time, quick. “Later, Reena.”
“What were you guys talking about?” she asked when Sawyer was gone, taking his place on the swing set and winding around in a circle so the chain twisted up, then letting herself go in a dizzy rush. “You and the boy king.”
“Nothing,” I told her, shrugging. I slid my shoes back onto my feet a little urgently, as if I might possibly need to run someplace in the immediate future. “He just wanted to know what I was doing out here.”
Allie looked at me sideways, face screwing up a bit, like she didn’t quite trust me to tell her the truth. “What were you doing out here?” she asked.
“Seriously?” I gaped, a hot little flare of annoyance inside my chest. “I mean—seriously?”
Allie blinked, her gray eyes wide and innocent—her I don’t know how that stuff got in my purse expression, normally reserved for her parents and shopping mall security guards. I didn’t like her turning that look on me. “What?”
“You totally blindsided me with those people in there!” I couldn’t get a foothold with her lately. It felt like I was hanging on by my nails. “I came over to watch TV and eat pizza or something, not play flip cup with a bunch of strangers.”
“They’re not strangers,” she corrected sharply. Heat lightning flickered in the distance, there and gone again. “They’re all from school. And I knew you wouldn’t come if I told you Lauren was going to be here, so—”
“Yeah,” I interrupted. She wasn’t listening to me. “I know. That’s my point.”
“Well, where does that leave me?” Allie asked, huffing a little. “They’re my friends, too, Reena. I like them. They’re not, like, bad, shady people. They’re nice.”
“I never said they weren’t nice,” I argued. “I never even said they’re the reason you totally dropped off the face of the earth this whole summer, which—”
“I told you I’m sorry!” Her voice rose a little, almost whining. “If you could quit making it so hard for me to include you—”
“Maybe I don’t want to be included in this stuff, Al! I hate this stuff! I just want to do normal stuff, like always—”
“Card games and Bringing Up Baby?” Allie frowned. The air was swampy out here, oppressive. I wanted to hop on my bike and speed away. “Is that what you want to do, really? Is that still fun to you? Come on, Reena,” she prodded when I didn’t answer. “People like you. They all just think you don’t like them.”
“I mean,” I said. “I don’t like them, generally.”
“You don’t even know them!” she exploded, then, nastily: “You like Sawyer.”
And that—God. That stung.
“Okay.” I stood up then, wiped my clammy palms on the rain-wet backside of my jeans, because nope, nope, we were not going to have that conversation, not now—not when I was already feeling weird and lonely and homesick, embarrassed by everything I wanted and didn’t have. I glanced up at the row of palm trees at the property line, trying to keep it together. Suddenly even the backyard felt sinister, familiar places gone threatening and strange in the dark. “You want to win this fight, Al, you can win this fight, that’s cool. I’ll see you.”
“You’re right,” she said immediately, getting up and following me across the lawn. “I’m sorry. I’m not trying to be bitchy.”
“Oh, really?” I stopped and stared at her, hands on my hips. I wanted to hit rewind on this night and on this summer, for this bizarre alternate universe to bend over on itself again and for everything to go back to the way it was supposed to be. Ever wish you were eight years old?
“No!” she exclaimed. “I’m trying to have a conversation with you. Jesus! I miss you! I want to talk to you about stuff.”
“Really,” I repeated coldly, and Allie rolled her eyes. “Like what, exactly?”
“I don’t know.” She shrugged, almost helpless, skinny hands fluttering in front of her like dragonflies. “You know what I mean. He’s … I don’t know. He’s not what we thought he was.”
“He’s a vampire?” I deadpanned.
That made her mad. “Okay,” Allie said angrily. “You want to win this fight, Reena? You can win it. You can ice me out. But I’m just trying to be honest with you. I know you think I’m this horrible person, and I know you think I did this horrible thing, like I stole him from you or something—”
“I never said that—”
“But I did you a favor. If you can’t handle coming to my house and playing flip cup with Lauren Werner, you definitely couldn’t handle having sex with Sawyer LeGrande.”
I reeled for a second. I stood there. I thought, very clearly, of the word devastated.
“Look, Reena.” As soon as it was out there Allie knew she’d crossed some boundary, some line of demarcation so clearly marked that once she’d breached it our lives would always be divided into when we were little kids and when we weren’t, neatly bisected into the then and the now. I looked at her for one more moment, and then I turned around. Thunder rumbled over my head, loud and ominous, a storm about to break.
“Reena,” Allie called behind me, more forcefully this time, but by then I was already gone.