His mouth turned down, fiercely unhappy, and he said, “Nothing. I have to go.”
He pushed past me and took the stairs, race-walking toward his red Nissan Armada.
“Go where?” I called after him.
He didn’t so much as glance over his shoulder. He threw the bag into the SUV and climbed in after it. I hovered on the porch, cake carrier in hand, my original mission shattered. Part of me wanted to slink home, but after Jake’s bizarre behavior I had to check on Rachel and Lavender. I tried the door, and it wasn’t locked.
I stepped into Rachel’s vaulted foyer, and immediately I heard her running toward me from the kitchen, shrieking, “I said get out, you motherffffuuuu—”
Rachel sputtered out mid-profanity when she came into the archway and saw that it was me. She skidded to a stop just inside the dining room. She was barefoot, which Rachel never was. With crazy, tangled hair, which Rachel never had. And two black eyes.
“Rachel!” I said, my heart rate jacking, horrified. I was still trying to process this sudden alternate dimension in which Rachel would shriek the F-word at her husband, and now I was in a completely impossible universe, one where JJ would hit my stepsister.
Rachel blinked and fluttered at me, and even though her eyes were swollen, I realized it was only mascara and liquid liner, wept off and rubbed into black raccoon rings. Then I could breathe again. Barely. Poor Digby got instadrunk on the panic chemicals that had been dumped into my bloodstream. He fizzed like a shot glass full of 7-Up at my core.
After a fraught pause, Rachel’s hands went to her hair, trying to smooth it, her chest heaving. It was funny in an awful way, because her hair was the least of it. Everywhere my eyes went, things were wrong, so many things that I couldn’t catalog them all. The huge mirror over the serving bar was shattered, shards of green glass and what looked like red wine splashed all over the mirrored slivers. One of the dining-room chairs lay on its side, the others catty-whompered. All eight were usually spaced with mathematical precision around the table.
Rachel gave up on her hair and stepped to me, taking the cake carrier in a parody of a gracious hostess. She turned and plopped it onto the table and took the lid off.
“Is this your grandmother’s recipe?” she said.
When I nodded, she reached out with one bare hand to tear a huge hunk off. I watched in disbelief as this strange, black-eyed creature who had replaced my stepsister started eating it, methodically, like it was a punishment.
That’s when I knew that Jake was cheating on her.
Unfathomable. Rachel was the prize, longed for, fought for, reached at last. Sixteen years of marriage, and as late as last week his eyes still tracked her, greedy, whenever she was in the room. He looked at Rachel as if at any second he would grab her willowy waist, swing her up, and set her on the mantelpiece—the finest piece of art placed at the room’s focal center. But he was cheating. I would have bet a million dollars on it.
Perhaps only because he’d called me Lay. In that single syllable, history had reared an ugly head so ancient it felt like mythology. My understanding rose from that sweaty, urgent, single incident of clasping that had passed between us, back when we were kids.
The day after his dad died, JJ came weeping down to find me in the basement. I took him in my arms, and he burrowed and clung, his hot face pressed into my neck, his tears scalding. He was a sad, soft animal, urgently snuffling and rooting at me, racked with shocked grief. I pulled him even closer, holding him so tight it was like I was trying to tuck all that desperation up inside my skin and soothe it. No matter how tight I squeezed my arms and legs around him, his unwieldy body squished out around my clamping, his sorrow much too large to be contained. Then we were kissing. It was sad and wet and frantic, his face slick with tears and snot, but I didn’t mind. I felt a huge, ballooning love.
We shoved bits of clothes up and aside, pressing close and closer until I was taking him in. It hurt, a little, but I felt calm and welcoming and something else. The only word for it was “powerful.” Powerful but not superior, not above him. It wasn’t like that.
It was like I’d stepped off a cliff and found myself standing on air in an effortless, surprising hover. I’d always had this secret power, and I used it without thinking, without knowing that I always could have. Used it for good, I’d thought, to help my wounded friend.
It wasn’t romantic. I’d never girl-crushed on him in some silly, ain’t-he-dreamy way. I only loved him, whole. He was my best friend. He knew all my secrets, and he’d told me all but one of his. I’d cried facedown in his lap after my cat died. He was the last person I talked to every night, on the phone, and he was the first person I wanted to see every morning; we picked up our endless and ongoing conversation on the bus, between classes, at lunch, and after school at my house, with no need for segues or greetings. Now here he was in my basement, ruined in my arms, and it was good to wrap protectively around him as he rooted and pushed and sobbed his guts out.
Then he gasped and stiffened, and I felt it all come out of him. All that writhing misery, I pulled it right out of his body into mine. His rigidness relaxed into peace, and I felt a swell of pride that I could do this for him.
We lay in each other’s arms for a dozen heartbeats, perfectly still, and still perfectly together. In that silence I felt something starting, and it was the story of me and JJ.
I teetered on an internal edge, feeling us tip toward the beginning of a whole, real life. First comes love, I thought, and even though I was only seventeen, I knew all the things that would be next. I could imagine me and JJ at college, at our jobs, at our wedding, all the way up to a baby we would make exactly like this. Somebody with his nose and my deep-set eyes. There was one next after another for us, so obvious and easy, and with no need to hurry. It was ahead of us, and we were paused, complete, our bodies linked, on the brink of our beginning.
Then he was scrambling away from me and trying to get all his clothes straight, his cheeks staining even redder when he saw the smear of blood on my inner thigh. He mumbled something about needing to get home. He wouldn’t look at my face.