Ephemeral (The Countenance) (15 page)

I suppose cluing Jen in on the fact Wes is taking me out on a date, sans herself and the cheat she hopes to spend the rest of her unnatural days with, isn’t the greatest idea. So, I say the next best thing.

I clear my throat. “Look, I didn’t want to say anything, but Casper called, and she wants me to meet her at the library.” I’m quick with the lie. It’s like I suddenly have an entire arsenal of falsehoods ready and willing to stream from my lips.

“Bring her back in one piece.” She doesn’t bother to look up this time. “I’m going to rip her a new one.”

“Will do,” I shout as I make my way into the crisp night air.

I feel horrible dragging Casper in as an excuse to go out with Wes. Obviously my escape plan wasn’t well-hatched. Then again, who knew Jen would turn out to be some Draconian authority who practically strong-armed me into using a dead girl as an alibi? God, I hope she’s not really dead.

I take an unexpected breath.

What if Casper was kidnapped? Or what if she simply appeared at another school somewhere else entirely, freshly programmed and ready for senior year? Somewhere like Cider Plains. How would that be for irony? Cider Plains High would be quite the demotion compared to Ephemeral. Here there is an embarrassment of riches, and Cider Plains is the no man’s land of couture and fashion.   

I try to shake away all thoughts of Casper and that strange note she supposedly left me along with a shiny new phone. Instead, I focus in on the fact I get to spend some serious one-on-one time with my own reprogrammed, beautiful disaster, Wes.

Outside of Austen House a layer of purple clouds stretch overhead, backlit by an enormous full moon. I don’t remember any night in Kansas looking so magical or smelling so alive with the ripe scent of pines—the sweet fragrance of white oak layered just beneath.  

A pair of headlights blinks from the far end of the grassy field, and I head in that direction.

Wes pulls up next to me in a dark metallic Range Rover. The letters are spread out evenly across the hood and it gleams with pride under the lamp of Austen House.

“Hey, beautiful.” Wes grins as I hop in next to him. The scent of new car lingers in the air. The dash looks supple, bubbling with a leathery texture, and it takes everything in me not to run my hand over it, feel the pebbly grain. The dashboard is lit up with every brand of vehicular technology—nothing but lights and backlit buttons, enough to run a spaceship.

I buckle up and a thick layer of silence settles over the two of us.

I’ve always been a stickler for wearing my seatbelt. When we were little, there was a PSA that had shown kids playing sports, practicing ballet, running in the streets, but ended by saying they would never do those things again because of their folly to secure their seatbelt. Scared the shit out of me, but it worked. I wore my seatbelt dutifully with dreams of ballet or participating in gymnastics. Turns out those things weren’t in the cards for me, but I still have my legs and my questionable life.

“I know for sure I buckled my seatbelt that day I went to rip Tucker’s head off,” I offer. Still not certain if this is the best topic of conversation, but it seems rather compulsory, and the fact I’ve already navigated us into those murky waters lends me to continue. If I don’t talk to someone about it, even someone who’s prone not to believe me, my head is going to explode.

“Is that what you think happened? A car accident?” He nods into my insanity as if he’s accepted this new version of me on some rudimentary level.

“Yes.” It comes out questionable at best. Maybe shelving the Cider Plains drama until Wes and I have officially reinstated our couple status is the right plan of action. I really don’t care if the entire student body at Ephemeral gives me hell for cementing myself into his life or if they torment me all year over the fact I’m a so-called boyfriend thief. There has to be some reason we both ended up at the same place, and I’m choosing to believe its destiny. As for Fletcher, he’s probably just a byproduct—a tagalong even in death.

“Nice ride,” I offer.

“You should like it. You helped pick it out.” He jostles my knee before looping back around toward the main road.

“I did?” Add that to the long list of things of which I have no freaking recall.

“You and Fletch.”

“What about Kresley?” I hate bringing her up so soon after I’ve swept her out of the picture, but if they were so close why wasn’t she there?

“Kres and I don’t do much outside of school.” He stretches his neck to the side when he says her name. “We’re busy—you know, sports.” He winces into the elongating road.

Sports. I bet he has no clue Kresley is interested in sports of the sexual variety, that she spends her free time practicing over at Melville House. At least that’s what Casper implied. Anyway, I don’t want to think about Kresley or Casper. I want to focus one hundred percent on Wes.

I pull his hand over and bring it up to my cheek. I can’t believe Wes is sitting next to me. It all feels like a dream, like there’s still the off chance I might wake up in an ambulance, roaring my way over to the hospital, bloodied and broken.

“You okay?” Wes dips into the steering wheel as he examines me—lowers his lids as though he suspects I’m not.

“I am now. So, where we going?”

“Driving tour.” He gives a mischievous grin. “Thought maybe we’d hit the lake.”

“Taking the orientation off grounds, I like that.”

He presses out a magnetic smile, cuts a glance over at me, and takes me in from top to bottom before reversing the effort. “I’m surprised Jen let you out.”

“I have my ways of evading her tyranny. Hey—Carter mentioned that Blaine might be cheating on her.”

“Wouldn’t surprise me.” His cheek curls up on one side, no smile.

“That’s terrible. We should do something.” Even if I don’t believe Jen is really my sister, I still don’t want someone taking advantage of her that way, especially if he’s a grade-A asshole like Tucker. God, wouldn’t it be something if it
was
Tucker? That would really mess with my mind. “It’s the worst feeling in the world to be cheated on. Do we have proof?”

“This is the first I’m hearing of it.”

“Well, I’m not going say anything unless there’s evidence. She says she wants to double date.”

“Are we dating?” The words sail from his lips each their own song. He gives an evaporating smile before glancing back at the road. There’s nothing but a wash of headlights over grey asphalt, not another soul around.

“Are we moving too fast for you?” I tease.

“Moving too fast? With Jen chaperoning our dates?” Wesley interlaces his fingers with mine. “I think if that starts up, we’ll be moving backward.”

“So there is a
we
.” A hot bite of heat detonates in my stomach. I don’t remember doing this flirtatious dance with Wes before. It was all so easy, so fluid back then, but there’s something exciting about this staccato touch and go movement, the fits and starts of passion Wesley keeps igniting. I could linger here—breathe the lust-filled air all night, its fragrance sweet like perfume.

“You have a way with words,” he says.

Wesley Parker has a way with everything. I want to memorize him like this, with the night stamped around him as he glows phosphorescent. I want to erase the last image I had of him back home, the one I tattooed in my brain just before they shut the lid on his casket.

The smile bleeds off his face, and he looks over at me with a somber expression.

“Fletch says you guys are heading home this weekend.” He gives my hand a squeeze as if jogging my memory. “He invited me to go.”

“Please come. I know nothing about ‘home,’ and I’d feel lost without you.”

“Sure I’ll go.” He glances over at me apprehensively. “You don’t remember home?”

“Zero.”

“Let’s see, you know that Jones and my mother are dating, right?”

“Did I? I don’t think so. That’s sort of weird, right? I mean, my uncle and your mom, Jen and Blaine, and…” I stop short of adding our names to the couples roster.

“And…” He tilts his head as if beckoning me to continue. “You and me?” He looks doubtful as if I should abandon all thoughts of our pairing right here in the middle of nowhere before my delusions get too out of hand.

“You and me.” I try to say it with an air of confidence but it comes out a question.

I decide to change the subject and segue back to my fabled family. “So why do people keep calling him Jones? Why not Uncle Jones?”

“He refuses, always has. Just goes by Jones. He runs the legal department at Althorpe, some big advertising company that has divisions all over the country. That, and your family’s dealings keep him busy. He and your mom inherited millions from your grandfather who passed away about ten years ago.”

“Millions? What kind of work did my grandfather do?” My mother worried about not bouncing a check. Millions was a term of exaggeration—something laughable, not a reality kept in government promissory notes that lined our bank account.

“He inherited steel. Your grandchildren will be living off the interest in the bank. I believe it was actually billions, but Fletch and I don’t talk money, so that’s all I know.”

“Steel,” I let the word roll off my tongue. “Fascinating. And, I hear I have a father.”

“That’s right, a complete set. I’ve got one of those, too. Mine lives in New York with his new family. Yours, however, is a bit more altruistic. Your parents are missionaries. They serve rice and wash people’s feet for fun.”

“Sounds like nice work if you can get it.”

“That’s what I hear.” He shakes his head at the road. “Right now they’re finishing up in Uganda. They’ll be coming in this weekend. Usually this is the part where they announce their new adventure.” Wes crimps a smile into the road. “Anything else you want to get up to speed on?”

“How did I ever not notice you before?” That alone is proof positive I wasn’t here.

“You noticed me.” He gives a dark laugh. “You threw water balloons at me from the balcony and filled my socks with toothpaste when I spent the night. You thought it was pretty funny to pass me a soda with nothing but water in it.”

All juvenile pranks I would easily pull on Fletch. I was immune to torturing Wes that way. Wes fascinated me. He let me follow him around and observe while he sketched gnarled branches, the anatomy of a leaf with all of its intricacies. In truth, it moved me to see him so passionate about something that didn’t involve sports or farming. Wes was his own piece of performance art.

“Sounds like I’m guilty of a bunch of petty offenses. All signs that point to a classic crush,” I offer.

“The real question is how did I not notice
you?
” He says it quiet, lower than a whisper.

Because I wasn’t here.

Our eyes lock for a moment. Wes bears into my soul with laser precision. Something stirs in him. It awakens him on a primal level.

“I have a confession,” he says it quiet while returning his focus to the road.

“You secretly like toothpaste in your socks?”

“Very funny,” he flat lines. “Actually—I’ve always felt something for you.” He loses his gaze straight ahead, as if simply verbalizing this births an epiphany.

My heart warms to hear him say it. Wes just declared his feelings for me, enwreathed me in a rainbow of his affection and I bask in the glory.

“I’ve always felt something for you, too,” I whisper.

He glances over at me as if he doubts this, as if he knows exactly how I felt before I “fell out of the tree house” and now my emotions are as misaligned as my memory.

We drive into a pitch-black reserve—so claustrophobically dark it’s like traveling in an abandoned portal of time, lost in a tunnel that never seems to end.

He pulls off on a dirt road and drives us down to a black lake that reflects the moon in one brilliant shock of light.

“It’s so beautiful. What is this place?”

“Charity Lake.” His eyes widen as though it just dawned on him what a blank slate I’ve become.   

“Do we have memories here?” It reminds me a lot of the lake back home. It might have had a name, but we just called it the lake. You’d get sucked down into the mud if you weren’t careful, rumor had it twelve children had been swallowed alive by the mire over the years. It’s the lake Fletch and Wes drowned in, but it’s safe to say I’m not bringing that one up tonight.

He rubs the top of my hand and frowns into me. “Come on, let’s go outside and make new memories.”

Wes comes around and takes up my hand again. Sadly, his implications feel platonic rather than romantic. A part of me wants to slap him, teach him a lesson by way of smacking him across the lips with a nice long kiss.

I shiver in next to him. It’s cold out here. Solid ice might be warmer.

“Weather changes on a dime. Watch, we’ll have a blizzard before October.” Wes glows under the splendor of the platinum moon. His soft dimples pull into perfect commas as he takes me in. If he doesn’t kiss me here, under the influence of a navy sky, with the unblemished lunar sphere blessing us from above, it may never happen. This is magic, electric—a dream within a dream.

“Sounds like fun.” I try to focus in on his words. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a blizzard.”