Avalon High (11 page)

Marco never got to finish his sentence. Because Lance, without Will to hold him back, flung himself at Marco with all his might. The two of them crashed to the deck of the
Pride Winn
with enough force to cause the boat to lurch. I had to grab on to some rigging to keep from falling overboard at the impact of their bodies.

By the time I righted myself, Lance had managed to subdue Marco. All it took, apparently, was a single blow to the face. Marco lay in a ball, moaning.

I can’t say I felt too sorry for him.

But Will. Will, on the other hand, my heart went out to at once. Because he had fallen back onto one of the boat’s padded benches as if his legs had simply given out
beneath him, his face as white as the sail snapping above us, despite his tan.

“It’s not true,” Jennifer was saying to him. She had hold of both his shoulders, and was crying. Really crying. And not prettily, either, the way the cheerleaders at my old school had cried after losing a game or whatever. There was actual snot involved.

“He’s lying,” Jennifer was saying, in an impassioned voice. “We would never do that to you. Would we, Lance?”

When Lance didn’t answer right away, Jennifer flung a nervous glance at him.

“Would we, Lance?” she repeated. “Lance?”

But Lance still didn’t answer. That’s because he was standing in the middle of the boat deck, his fists at his side, staring at a point just between Will’s feet. As I stood there watching, Lance slowly lifted his head, as if he were straining beneath a great weight, until, finally, his gaze met Will’s.

And then Lance said the words that were to change everything forever after:

“It’s true.”

One of Jennifer’s hands flew to her mouth. She swung her stricken gaze from Lance to Will—both of whom were completely immobile—and then back again.

No one spoke. No one breathed. The ocean breeze snapped at the sail above our heads, but that was the only sound on the
Pride Winn
…except for the tinny noise from the radio Marco had been playing with earlier.

Finally Jennifer took her hand away from her mouth and said in a voice I will never forget, it was so filled with genuine sorrow and remorse: “Will. Will. I’m so sorry.”

Will didn’t even look her way. He was still staring at Lance.

“We couldn’t help it,” Lance said, with a shrug of his heavy bare shoulders. “We tried not to. Honest, Will.”

Jennifer, tears running freely down her face, said, “We did. Really. We were going to tell you. But with everything—well, with your dad, and…Well, there just never seemed to be a right time—”

“Is there ever a right time?” Marco inquired nasally from where he lay with his hands over his face. “To tell a guy you’re scamming on his girl, I mean?”

“Shut up, Marco,” I said.

Marco took his hands from his face and looked at me with a lopsided smile. One side of his mouth was rapidly swelling.

But I had no interest in whatever he was about to say. I had eyes only for the scene unfolding in front of me.

“Will.” Lance still stood where he was, his gaze never having strayed from his friend’s face. “Say something, man. Anything. Or hit me. I don’t care. I deserve it. Just…do something.”

Will was the one who lowered his gaze first. He looked down at his bare feet. He hadn’t yet had a chance to put on the shoes he’d shed to dive overboard and save the Crew-cut Kid’s life.

When he spoke, his voice was devoid of any emotion
at all. It was still as cold as the sea.

“Let’s go back,” he said.

And he got up to start undoing the main sail.

The ride home was terrible. Terrible and silent. Well, except for Marco, who complained bitterly about his split lip, until I fished out one of the cooler packs and handed it to him, just to shut him up.

There’s as much to do, it turns out, when you’re coming back from a sailing trip as when you’re heading out on one. So we wrapped and tied and cleaned and put things away, all in utter silence—except for when Will asked one of us to do something…and Marco, of course, who continued to whine about his lip and how everyone shoots the messenger—until finally, when the
Pride Winn
was safely anchored in the harbor, Will said, “Let’s head to shore.”

So we climbed into the motorboat and headed for shore. We were probably the soberest group ever to head down Ego Alley. As the afternoon had worn on, more and more people had gathered in the deck chairs belonging to the bars around the dock. I could feel the tourists’ envious gazes on us as we motored by. They all sat there in their white slacks and loafers, clutching beers and diet sodas, with no idea that in our boat—the one going by them right at that very moment, the one they were so jealous of—three hearts were breaking.

I wasn’t counting my own heart, even though it seemed to hurt a little more every time I looked at Will’s
drawn face. As Marco put it, when he turned to help me from the dinghy once we reached shore, “Don’t look so stricken, Lily Maid. This doesn’t have anything to do with you and me.”

“Which is exactly why,” I said to him, “you should have stayed out of it.”

“Hey, you had your chance at Lancelot,” he said. “It’s not my fault you blew it.”

How was I even supposed to reply to that?

Behind us, Will was lashing the boat to a nearby mooring post. Jennifer reached out and tried to touch his shoulder.

“Will,” she said, in a voice that—in my opinion, anyway—could have melted the hardest heart.

But Will just turned away and started walking toward his car.

He and Marco had apparently come in the same vehicle together, since the latter gave me a courtly bow and said, “It was a pleasure, Lady Elaine,” before trailing after Will’s departing figure.

Which left me alone with Jennifer and Lance, neither of whom seemed to be able to look at me…or at each other.

“Um,” I said. Since it seemed like someone needed to say something. “Well. I better go. So. Bye.”

They didn’t even acknowledge me. I left them standing there together by the statue of Alex Haley. I don’t think I’d be exaggerating, either, if I said it looked to me as if the bottom had just fallen out of both their worlds.

I called my parents from a pay phone on the corner and asked them to come pick me up. They seemed surprised to hear from me so soon…it was only a few hours since I’d left, and I’d led them to believe I’d be gone through dinner.

But when they asked me what had happened as I climbed into the car, I just shook my head. I didn’t want to talk about it. I
couldn’t
talk about it.

They didn’t press me…even when, five minutes after getting home, I came down the stairs from my bedroom and walked past them in my bikini, headed for my raft.

To give them credit, they didn’t say anything like, “Not again,” or “I thought we’d finally moved on from the floating thing.”

Instead, Mom just went, “Pizza for dinner okay, Ellie?”

And I nodded my assent.

Then I went outside.

The sun had disappeared beneath a towering column of gray clouds, but I didn’t care. I climbed onto my raft and lay there, staring up at the leaves above my head.

I couldn’t believe what I’d just witnessed. I really couldn’t.

The thing is, stuff like that just doesn’t happen to me. I mean, not that any of it had anything to do with me—Marco was right about that, anyway.

But the fact that I’d
been
there…that I’d seen it all happen. That was what I couldn’t believe.

I knew why Marco had done it. And I couldn’t say I blamed him, really.

But to have done it like that—in front of Lance and Jennifer…in front of me. Well, that hadn’t really been necessary.

But then, Marco probably felt that way about the death of his dad.

I hoped Will was going to be all right. But really, what could I do to help him? Nothing, I guess. Except be his friend. Except be there for him. Except—

—go to the ravine, where I was sure he’d have gone after what had happened, and ask him if there was anything I could do.

Yeah, that was it. I needed to go to the arboretum. Now. Right now…

But no sooner had this thought occurred to me than I’d opened my eyes, and saw Will sitting on top of Spider Rock, looking down at me.

I didn’t scream this time. I can’t even say I was all that surprised to see him. It seemed almost natural, in a way I couldn’t explain, that he’d be there.

He’d changed out of the wet clothes he’d worn on the boat. Now he was in jeans and a different T-shirt.

But he was wearing the exact same expression he’d had the last time I’d seen him…an expression completely devoid of any emotion whatsoever. I couldn’t see his eyes, because he still wore his sunglasses, even though the sun was hidden behind the clouds.

But I suspected that even if I could have seen his eyes, they’d have been as unreadable as the rest of his face. Even his voice, when he finally spoke, seeing that
I’d opened my eyes at last, was totally neutral.

“Did you know?” he asked me tonelessly.

No “Hi.” No “How are you, Elle?”

Not that I supposed I deserved one, since I had known and hadn’t told him. Still. I wasn’t going to lie to him. He’d been lied to enough. So I said simply, “Yes.”

No reaction. At least, not any that I could see.

“That’s why you were acting so weird last night?” he asked me. “At the party. Outside the spare room. You knew they were in there?”

“Yes,” I said, though it felt as if the word had been wrenched from me.

But what else could I say? It was the truth.

I leaned up on my elbows, expecting recriminations…prepared for them, even. I deserved them. If nothing else, Will and I were friends, and friends don’t let friends…well, not know that their girlfriend is cheating on them with their best friend.

But to my surprise, he didn’t say any of the things I expected him to. There was no demanding
How could you not have told me?
or
What kind of person are you?

I should have known there wouldn’t be, of course. Will wasn’t like everybody else. Will wasn’t like
anybody
else I’d ever met before.

Instead, he said, in that same neutral voice, “It’s weird. I feel like I already knew, in a way.”

I blinked at him. This was not what I’d expected him to say. “Wait,” I said, thrown. “What? Really?”

“Really,” he said. “While it was happening, I was kind
of like…
Oh, yeah. Sure. Of course.
To tell you the truth—I kind of felt…relieved.” He took off his sunglasses then, and looked at me.
Really
looked at me.

And I could see that he didn’t look hurt, or devastated, or even sad. He just looked sort of…thoughtful.

“That sounds screwed up, doesn’t it?” he asked. “That I felt relieved. That my girlfriend and my best friend are sneaking around together behind my back. Who would feel relieved about finding out something like that?”

I didn’t know what to say. Because I knew exactly what he was talking about.

What I didn’t know was…well,
how
I knew this.

“Maybe…” I said slowly, feeling my way. “Maybe you felt that way because you know, deep down, that they’re meant for each other. That it’s…right? Lance and Jen, I mean. Don’t get me wrong—she really does love you, Will. Lance, too. More than anything. You can tell. But that also might be…well, why they belong together.”

I glanced at him to see whether or not he agreed with this—or if he even understood it, because I wasn’t sure I did.

“Not that you and Jen didn’t make a good couple,” I added, because he still hadn’t said anything. I was probably babbling, but what else was I supposed to do? I mean, he had come to
me.
Of all the people in the world he knew, he’d come to
me
in his hour of need. I had to say
something
. “I mean, Jen’s totally nice, and stuff. But—”

“I could never really talk to her,” Will interrupted.
“Not about stuff that mattered. It was like she didn’t want to hear it. Gossip and clothes and stuff. That was fine. But when it came to talking about how I felt about things—things like…well, that stuff you and I talked about, my dad, and the woods, and the widow’s walk…things outside of football and school and the mall, or whatever—she just…she just didn’t understand.”

He didn’t add,
the way you do, Elle
.

But that was okay. He’d come to me, hadn’t he? He was sitting here with me. In my backyard. Next to my pool. On Spider Rock.

And okay, maybe he was only here because I’m a virtual stranger, and it’s easier sometimes to talk about stuff with strangers than it is with people you know.

And yeah, probably he only thinks of me as a friend—a friend who makes him laugh—and not the way I think of him—as the man with whom I want to spend the rest of my life someday.

But that’s okay. That’s totally okay. Because with Will, I was willing to take what I could get. And if friendship was all he had to offer, well, it was more than enough.

So when he asked what he did next—which was, “So what are you doing for dinner tonight?”—in a voice that was completely devoid of self-pity or anything, really, I said, “I don’t know. I think my mom’s ordering pizza,” in a kind of stunned way.

To which he replied, “Do you think your parents would mind if I took you out? I know a place that makes a mean crab dip.”

“Um,” I said. “No, I don’t think they’d mind.” Not that I’d have cared if they did.

They didn’t. Which was how I found myself dining with A. William Wagner once again. How I made him laugh over the plate of steaming hot crab dip we shared at Riordan’s downtown, by doing what I considered a brilliant imitation of Ms. Schuler, the track coach. How I almost made him choke on his Moose Tracks ice cream at Storm Brothers while I told him the story of the time I stuck the red hot up my nose when I was four, just to hear him laugh again, and then about the time I decided to cut my own hair and ended up looking just like Russell Crowe in
Gladiator.

Then, because I had trig homework, and he said he had physics, we went back to my house and sat down at the dining room table to work together, since he showed no signs of being ready to leave for home.

Not that I blamed him, really. I mean, what did he have to go home to, really? A father who wanted something for him that Will didn’t want for himself, and a stepbrother who’d taken absolute glee in revealing something that, yeah, maybe had needed to be revealed…but not the way he’d done it.

My dad came in at one point while we were working and asked me if I could pull a staple out of his thumb, because Mom was in the shower. It was only one of those mini staples little kids use, because those are the only ones we keep around since everyone in my family is so accident prone, so there wasn’t a lot of blood. I pulled the
staple out, and my dad went away again. I started to go back to my homework, then realized Will had stopped writing. I looked up, and caught him staring at me.

“What?” I asked, lifting a hand to my nose. “Do I have something on my face?”

“No,” Will said, with a smile. “It’s just…the way you are with your parents. I’ve never had that with anyone, let alone my dad.”

“Because your dad is probably capable of stapling something without getting his thumb in the way,” I pointed out dryly.

“No,” Will said. “It’s not that. It’s the way you talk to each other. Like you—I don’t know. Actually care about what happens to the other person.”

“Your dad cares what happens to you,” I assured him, secretly feeling that I’d like to grab Admiral Wagner and shake him a few times. “Maybe not in the way you want him to. But, I mean, that’s the whole reason behind his wanting you to go into the military. Because he cares about you and thinks that’s what would be best for you.”

“But he wouldn’t think that,” Will insisted, “if he’d ever bothered to get to know me. If he knew me at all—if he had ever bothered to stop and talk to me on the way out to one of his millions of meetings—he’d know that I think that…well, that bending an enemy’s will through military force is the absolute
last
way a nation ought to go about solving their problems.”

I couldn’t help feeling a stronger rush of admiration than usual for Will at that moment. I mean, bending an
enemy’s will by force? Problem solving? The guy was discussing stuff I’d never heard anyone close to my own age talking about before. Geoff and his friends had always talked almost exclusively about Xbox and whatever girl in school was wearing the shortest skirt at the moment.

“Have you ever told your dad that?” I asked him. “I mean, that you feel that way? Because he might surprise you, you know.”

Will just shook his head. “You don’t know him,” he said flatly.

“What about your stepmom?” I asked. “Do you two get along?”

“Jean?” Will shrugged. “Yeah.”

“Well, why don’t you tell her,” I suggested, “what you told me? Then maybe, if you can get her on your side, she can work on softening up your dad. He may not want to listen to you, but he’d probably listen to his wife, right?”

Will’s eyes seemed to glint an even stronger blue than ever as he gazed at me.

“That’s a good idea,” he said…and don’t think I didn’t blush at his praise, although I ducked my head, hoping my hair would hide my cheeks. “I can’t believe I never thought of that.”

“Well, you aren’t used to having two parents,” I said. “When you’ve grown up with both a mom and a dad, you learn how to play one against the other. It’s something of an art.”

“I can’t imagine,” Will said, with a grin, “your dad
ever saying no to you about anything.”

“He doesn’t, really,” I agreed. “But my mom…she’s a lot tougher.”

Then I felt something warm and heavy fall across my fingers. When I looked up, I was surprised to see that Will had laid one of his hands over mine.

“Like you,” he said.

“I’m not tough,” I said, thinking that if he knew how his mere touch had made my heartbeat stagger, he’d realize how not tough I really am.

Will’s fingers didn’t loosen their hold.

“It’s not a bad thing,” he said. “It’s one of the things I like best about you, in fact. I wouldn’t want to get on your bad side, though.”

As if you ever could,
was what I wanted to say. Only I couldn’t, because I was too stunned. Not just by what he’d said about liking me—he said he likes me!—but by what I’d felt, the moment his fingers touched mine, which was the exact opposite of the coldness I’d felt at Marco’s touch—a sudden jolt of white-hot electricity that had raced up and down my arm….

I didn’t know what kind of connection the two of us had, if any—why he’d thought he’d known me, when we’d never met before, and why he felt he could tell me things he couldn’t tell anyone else…or why I loved him so fiercely, I was ready to protect him from anything, even himself.

But I wasn’t about to question it. Especially not now that he was free. True, I’m no cheerleader. I’m not blond
or perky, and the only reason I turn heads when I walk into a room is because I’m generally the tallest girl there.

But out of everyone he knew, Will had come to me. Whether he’d felt the jolt when he touched my hand or not—whether he thought of me as just a friend or maybe something more—nothing would ever change the fact that
I
was the one he’d come to when he’d needed someone most.

He let go of my hand after that, and said, holding his pencil like it was a cigar, and doing a very, very bad imitation of Humphrey Bogart from
Casablanca
, “Elle, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful thing.”

“Friendship,” I corrected him, trying not to let him see how deeply his words had thrilled me. “The line is—”

“Whatever,” Will said, in the same bad Humphrey Bogart imitation. “Get to work.” And he tapped my homework with his pencil/cigar.

Grinning, I bent over my logarithms. I don’t think I’d ever been happier in my life.

What I didn’t know then was that what he’d said about this being the beginning of a beautiful thing? Yeah. Not true.

It was actually the
middle
of something that had been going on for a long time…something that most definitely wasn’t beautiful. Something that was about as ugly as can be.

And something that was about to snowball beyond anyone’s control.