“Feels like forever.”
I have a light feeling in my stomach, like champagne bubbles rising. “Do you want to go?” I ask.
He nods.
I slip my bag over my shoulder and close the door. He doesn’t move to let me pass by, and I’m suddenly aware of him next to me. Of the way he smells—like expensive cologne, like Paris—and how it makes me want to move closer. How I want to put my hand around the back of his neck and pull him in.
He takes my hand.
“I thought we could walk a bit after,” he says.
“After the movie? I should probably start my English paper—”
He swings me around. Fast. My words get lost on the way. “No,” he says. “After this.” He lets go of my hand and loops his arms around my waist. Then he draws me toward him and places a hand on my cheek. He runs his thumb there and then moves his lips over mine. We start kissing. I disentangle my arms from my sides, and then I’m grabbing at his hair, his neck, his shoulders—whatever I can reach. His hands reach around me, travel up my sides. His lips on mine feel hot, frantic. When we break apart, we’re both breathing hard.
“Not bad,” he whispers.
He leans his forehead to mine; I angle myself so I’m pressed against his chest.
It doesn’t make sense. I barely know him. It shouldn’t make me feel this good to be close to him. Like I want to slip underneath his shirt and breathe against his skin. But I do.
“Maybe we should skip the movie,” he says, planting a kiss by my ear.
I lean back and look at him. Raise my eyebrows. “But what would we do?”
He smiles. So do I.
I take his hand and lead him back inside. Past the foyer, up the stairs, down the hallway, and into my room. But when we get inside, I’m actually not sure what to do. Trevor is the only guy besides Peter who has even been in my bedroom, and as soon as I open the door, I think maybe I’ve made a mistake bringing Astor here. I’m acutely aware of the voice in my head, the one that was silenced for a while by his kisses, the one that is now reminding me that I hardly know him.
“So, this is it,” I say. I stand holding the doorknob, like at any moment I might need to bolt.
“It’s nice,” he says.
He picks up a glass figurine of a ballerina that’s sitting on my desk. Something Claire bought me at an auction a few years ago. Some of her father’s photos were being auctioned. Claire just liked raising her paddle, and eventually she won something. I kind of love it. It reminds me of her.
“Ballet?” He asks.
I shrug. “It was a gift.”
“I see.”
I wrap my arms around me. Something about the way he’s prowling my room, like he’s looking for clues, makes me feel exposed. There is a lot he could find out about me here.
He sets the ballerina down and comes over to me. “I like your room,” he says.
He runs his eyes over my face. His gaze feels hot—I swear it might even burn me. And then he reaches forward and takes my face in his hands and starts kissing me again.
We end up on my bed. He slides his hands down my sides and underneath my shirt. They feel warm against my skin, and I reach up to pull him closer.
He holds my waist with his palms and then backs off a little—kissing my neck, my nose, the bridges of my eyebrows.
“You’re too much,” he says.
“Me?”
“Yes, you,” he says. He props himself up on his elbow and runs a finger in a figure eight over my stomach. I shiver. “I didn’t think I’d find you at Kensington.”
“What did you think you’d find?” I ask.
He lifts his finger. Touches my shoulder. “Abigail, maybe.”
I exaggerate a shudder. “You’re pretty lucky, then.”
“I’d say so.”
He kisses me again.
“Tell me something,” he says.
“Like what?”
“Something about yourself.” He trails a flat palm down my arm.
“That’s pretty broad.”
He kisses my ear. “Try.”
“I used to ride horses,” I exhale.
He pulls back and looks at me. “Better than that.”
“I never had braces?”
“I heard you saved a girl’s life last year.”
All at once his hands on me feel like ice blocks. My blood has frozen in my veins.
“Did I say something?” he asks.
I sit up, nudging him off me. “It’s fine,” I say.
He knits his eyebrows together. “Something tells me this isn’t just you being modest.”
I hug my knees to my chest. “There isn’t anything to tell. People made a big deal about nothing. I don’t like to dwell on it.”
He nods but doesn’t say anything.
“It happened and it’s over and everything turned out okay. I don’t see the point in talking about it.”
“I think it’s pretty cool,” he says. He leans down so we’re eye level.
“It’s not a goal,” I say. “She was just . . . there.” The familiar guilt blooms in my stomach. Acid. Bile. It makes me want to vomit up the truth fast.
“Still,” he says. “Saving someone . . . doesn’t it make you feel like there is a reason for all of this?”
“All of what?”
“Life.” He looks me square in the eye. “Tragedy.”
In that moment I know he knows about Hayley. I’ve gotten good at spotting it. The way people’s eyes twitch, like their pupils are dilating. The way they can’t maintain eye contact for more than a moment or the way their body goes slack, like they’re responding to the news themselves. It’s easy to tell when people are thinking about Hayley.
“How do you—?”
“ ‘The Caulfield granddaughter drowns. Life mirrors art. Allie and Hayley: the lost Caulfield children.’ ” He spouts out the headlines, the ones that graced the papers for two full weeks after she drowned.
“Right.” I nod. I sit back against my headboard.
“It’s okay,” he says. “You don’t have to talk about it. I just didn’t want you to think you had to hide anything from me.” He moves forward, cups my chin with his hand. “Cool?”
I shake my head yes. “Yeah,” I say.
“Hey.” He doesn’t remove his hand. “Look at me.” I glance up, and his gaze holds mine. “You don’t have to talk about it. You don’t have to talk about anything.”
People have told me so many times that I don’t have to talk about it. Friends, neighbors, teachers. They’re always
saying, “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.” But what they really mean is
I expect you to answer all my questions. I expect you to cry. I expect you to show me the way you feel.
Astor is the first person that when he says it, I believe him. Something in the way his eyes look into mine makes me know he’s not going to push me on it. It makes me relax against him. Into him.
He kisses me again, and then he lies down next to me, so we’re both staring up at the ceiling.
“I used to think I understood life. That I sort of had it figured out.” He turns his head to look at me. “Do you know what I mean?”
I nod. “Yeah. But then everything—”
“Fell apart.”
I exhale. “That’s how it goes. One minute you’re aboveground and the next you’re under.”
“I’m sorry,” he says. I feel him take my hand.
My phone rings. I groan and roll to my side, snatching up my bag. I bounce out my phone. It’s Claire, calling from home. I look at Astor propped up on one elbow on my bed, his blue button-down barely crinkled. Claire would understand, I think. I hit ignore and roll back toward him.
“I like that,” he says.
He sits up and starts kissing me again. I kiss him back. I move myself closer to him, and he reaches up and snaps me
against his chest. I let my head fall to the side and feel him start kissing my collarbone, then up to my neck, then—
My cell phone rings again. I lurch back, but Astor is still working on my ear. “What’s wrong?” he murmurs.
I move off him and snatch up my phone from the floor. Claire again. I silence it once more, but this time I feel bad about it. She’s pretty persistent, and it has never been an emergency. Claire once called me four times in a row, and when I finally got out of the shower and called her back, she just wanted to tell me she had found her first split end. But I still feel bad. I don’t usually screen her calls.
“You should go,” I say.
We’re not touching anymore, but I can feel him next to me. Like the air between us is charged—that thick, unstable space right before magnets lock.
“My mom’ll be home any minute, and I really should return that,” I say, but I make no solid effort to stand. To get off the bed. It’s like there are two opposing forces inside me—one I’ve been fighting for a long, long time and one I just learned was there. I’m not sure which to listen to.
He gets up first. “Okay. Can I see you tomorrow?”
“Yes.”
He leans down, touches my arm. “Other than at school.”
“I know what you mean.”
I watch him leave from the spot on my bed. I don’t get up
to walk him to the door. I don’t move at all. When he’s closed it behind him, I lie back down. I curl up into a ball, on my side. I shut my eyes.
There it is again. Our beach house. The pool. Kristen on the rooftop. If I could empty my mind out, shake it onto the floor and let the memories fall like pennies from a piggy bank, I would. But I can’t. Instead I try to replace them. I think about Astor here, just a moment ago. About his lips on mine. His hands on my back. About his black eyes and cool palms and the weight of his gaze.
The next day I drag my feet to the
Journal
offices after school. It’s the same office that runs the school paper—a small computer lab on the second floor of our main building. The walls are covered in bulletin boards that have news clippings and short stories from the
Journal
that have won awards. I put most of those up there. Me and Trevor, anyway. I couldn’t possibly count how many hours we’ve spent in here over the last two years. There were plenty of nights Trevor and I would stay so late that we’d have to lock up the main school building. We’d order in greasy Chinese or Thai and work off side-by-side computers. Claire would stop by postdate and fill us in on whatever artist or billionaire’s son she was currently seeing.
Sometimes we’d do dramatic readings of particularly bad student submissions. The best was this one time Constance submitted a poem. It was under a pseudonym, but she printed it on her own letterhead—she must have forgotten when she turned it in. The poem was titled “Sunday,” and it was clearly about Tripp. She didn’t even bother to change his name much. The repeating line went like this:
Troy, you’re my best friend’s boy.
Trevor sang it like a really bad pop song, and I remember looking at him and thinking,
God, I seriously love this kid.
“I don’t know,” Trevor said when he finished. “I think we should print it.”
“Funny,” I said.
“I’m serious. I think we’d be doing Troy a really big favor.” He smiled, leaned down over me. I was sitting in a swivel chair, my feet tucked up, turning side to side. He put his hands on the arms of the chair and stopped me from moving. Then he leaned down and kissed me.
Kissing Trevor was pretty epic. You know the moment in the movies when the music swells, right near the end? Kissing Trevor was like the end of a movie. Every single time.
“I bet Abigail wouldn’t even notice if we printed it with Constance’s name on it,” I said when he pulled back.
“Troy could also mean Trevor, you know.”
“Do you wish you were Constance’s boy?” I asked, running my hands through his hair.
“Desperately,” he said, kissing me again. “The only reason I date you is to get close to her.”
“I figured.”
“She’s pretty hot,” he said.
“Yeah?” I asked, bringing my lips up to meet his.
“Mm-hmm,” he whispered. “She’s cute. And sexy. And she’s got these little freckles right below her ear.” He lifted my hair then, and kissed me on the neck.
“Constance doesn’t have freckles,” I corrected. “She spray tans.”
Trevor slapped the back of his hand against his forehead. “That’s right. I must have been thinking about you.” He brought his lips so they hovered right above mine. “Funny how that always seems to happen.”
* * *
“You’re going to the
Journal
?” Claire says. She called as I climbed the stairs, and I picked up, despite the fact that I’m already late. I still feel bad about silencing her yesterday and then not calling her back.
“Yes,” I say. I can tell she’s smiling. Claire is pretty easy to read, if you want to know the truth. “Just trying to make you happy,” I say.
Claire scoffs. “I never told you to go back to the
Journal
.”
“You’ve been pushing me out of pajamas all summer,” I say. “Turns out you have to get dressed for this activity, so I thought you’d approve.”
“True,” she says. “You know what? I will take full responsibility for your emotional progress.”
Emotional progress. I open my mouth to tell Claire about Astor, but something stops me. I don’t know why. She’d be thrilled, I think. She was the one who pushed me toward him in the first place.
“Shocking,” I say. “But I gotta go.”
“You’re so busy lately,” she says. “I never see you.”
“So come uptown.”
“You know I don’t go above Fourteenth Street anymore,” she says. Going above Fourteenth Street isn’t actually hard to do, but since Claire moved downtown, she’s really embraced the lifestyle. There is silence on the other end of the phone for a moment. “Have you seen Kristen?” she asks.
It makes me stop on the steps. “She goes here,” I say.
“Right,” she says. “Yeah. I was just wondering how she was doing.”
“She’s fine,” I say. The words have to fight through my teeth. I picture Kristen in class, her tiny frame, small voice. And she is fine, right? She’s fine. My stomach just keeps tightening. My brain immediately starts the familiar tirade:
You
were wrong. You were weak. You ruined someone’s life just so you wouldn’t have to fess up to what a failure you have become. What a phony.
I hear Claire exhale. “Okay,” she says. “I miss you. Don’t forget who was here first.”
We hang up before I can tell her what I want to—that she was here first until she left, which isn’t my fault. I open the
Journal
office door to find everyone already there, sitting in a small circle. Mrs. Lancaster, Whitney Davon—a Columbia professor—and Trevor. He smiles when he sees me, and I can tell it’s one of relief. I showed. He’s got his Kensington blazer off again, and one of his cotton T-shirts stretches against his chest. I feel my face heat up. I look away. Try to shake the cold voice from my head.