Fury (16 page)

She drew in a shaky breath. “About this,” she said, waving her hand between them. “About us. About why you haven’t said anything to Gabby yet. Or why I haven’t.”

“Em, we’ve hardly spoken to her. She called me once from Barcelona, the day after Christmas, but I barely said hello before she had to go. What am I going to do, throw it in before I say
good-bye? We didn’t even talk, she just, like, gave me a rundown of the hotel suite.”

“Yeah, but we need to say something. Maybe—maybe I should say something.”

For a second Zach’s eyes turned dark. “I thought we agreed I’d handle it,” he said. His tone of voice had an uncomfortable edge to it.

“But I need to know that you’re going to. I need to know that we’re going to do this the right way.”

Just like that, he was all gentle again. “Em, of course I’m going to. I promise. It should wait until she gets back, though. So we can talk in person?” He touched her chin, and she shivered, and he closed the door. “It’s going to be okay.”

“Okay.”

He bent down to kiss her, softly, his hand holding the back of her neck. Then he leaned away.

“You know, I like that about you. You see the big picture.” The outside corners of his eyes were slanted down in a concerned way. “Do you wanna come in?”

Em grinned. “Yeah, but I have to be home at three to meet Ch—to meet someone.” She felt a little weird telling him about her arrangement with Chase. It was a bit too hard to explain.

Zach gave her a tight-lipped smile—one that said,
Buck up, kiddo
—and kissed her on the forehead, half jokingly, before pulling her toward the TV room.

Zach was right—telling Gabby in person was better. Especially for a situation like this one. Especially for Gabby, who they both cared so much about. See? He’d thought about it. Screw JD and his condescending attitude. She knew what she was doing.

“Sorry about the mess,” Zach said, plopping down on the couch in front of several cardboard boxes. Clothes, picture frames, and books were arranged in seemingly haphazard piles around the room.

“What’s all this?” Em knelt down by a pile of cloth-bound books. She loved old books—their dusty smell, their thick pages, the random notes and inscriptions that often personalized their pages.

“Just going through some old crap,” Zach said.

“These are awesome, Zach.” Em had found a pile of old
Life
magazines, crisp and delicate, with huge black-and-white photographs.

“Yeah, those are pretty amazing, huh? They used to be . . . They were my dad’s,” he said softly.

“Oh, wow.” Em didn’t really know what to say. She remembered that Claire Lewin had been Zach’s date when his mom got remarried—really quickly, it seemed, less than a year after Mr. McCord’s death. Em had overheard Claire in the locker room saying that the whole event “felt off, like a really awkward moment on reality TV.”

“Yeah, he loved photojournalism. So there are lots of these
books and magazines downstairs. Plus his clothes . . . My stepdad wants to clear things out a little to finish the basement and make room for the new pool table. So I’m just sorting it out into what-to-keep and what-to-dump.”

Em nodded and tilted her head a bit, but didn’t say anything.

“It’s kind of hard.” Immediately, he cleared his throat. “But it’s cool we finally got a pool table down there. I love pool.”

“That’s good, then,” Em said gently.

“I’ll have to teach you to play sometime.” He grinned but didn’t look at her as he reached for a dark-blue sweater, thickly cable-knit, and held it up in the air in front of him.

“I hope you’re putting that in the ‘keep’ pile,” she said. “It would look good on you.”

Zach blinked and looked down, folding the sweater on his knees. Em could almost feel him picturing himself in his dad’s old sweater. Shit.

“Never mind,” she said. “You know what we should do? We should go sweater shopping. Get you something new! Tomorrow. We could go to the old mall, or we could even mini–road trip up to Portland. It’ll be fun!”

“Okay,” Zach said, putting the sweater aside and smiling at her. She moved to sit next to him on the couch, and he ran a hand through her hair. “I love how your hair feels. It’s so smooth and soft. I could touch it all day long.”

Em blushed and couldn’t help doing a mental comparison of
her stick-straight locks and Gabby’s bouncy curls, of which Em had always been jealous. Once, in junior high, Gabby had offered to curl Em’s hair for a dance. The results had been horrendous—Em’s longer face and big eyes looked cartoonish within the swooping helmet of hair-sprayed dark curls. “Whatever,” Gabby had said, turning on her shower. “I’d kill for your hair any day of the week.” And she’d waited, humming and dancing and retouching her makeup, while Em had washed out the spirals and the spray.

But Zach obviously liked it, her center-parted, simple cut. She felt a rush of vindication. She practically jumped on him, pressing his shoulders back into the couch and kissing him hard. He kissed her back with just as much ferocity.

Which is why it felt so terrible when, not five minutes later, she heard the trademark bouncy tune of Gabby’s ringtone coming from her phone, buried somewhere in her bag.

“Shit, I’ve gotta get that,” she said, disentangling herself from Zach.

“Aw, what’s more important than this?” He grabbed her hand, still breathing heavily.

“Zach, that’s Gabs’s ring. Lemme go.” She found the phone and picked up, breathlessly, on the last ring. She signaled for Zach to be quiet. Gabby would kill her if she didn’t pick up. Just dialing probably cost a fortune.

“I’ll be quiet as a mouse,” Zach whispered—too loudly. Em swatted at his shoulder.

“Hey, Gabs,” she said brightly.

“What’s up? What are you doing?” Gabby sounded far away.

“Oh, I’m just . . . I’m just at home, watching TV. It’s freezing outside.”

“What are you watching? I can’t understand anything on the TVs over here. Times like these, I wish I’d taken Spanish instead of French.”

“Just channel surfing.” The room seemed oppressively warm, and Zach kept poking her, tickling her, which only made it worse. The tips of her ears were burning. She got up and walked out of his reach.

“Well, I’ll be home in less than a week! Three days!”

“That’s great, Gabs.”

“Are you okay? You sound weird.”

“I feel a little weird. Must be something I ate,” Em said.

“Poor Emmie! Get JD to bring you some ginger ale or something.” And then, to someone in the background: “Okay, okay, I’m coming.” She sighed, and groaned to Em, “We have to go to a museum. Can’t wait to see you! Tell Zachie I said hi. . . . I haven’t spoken to him in two whole days!”

“You’re breaking up, Gabs. I can barely hear you. Enjoy the museum.”

“’K, love you times seven million!”

“I love you, too.” Em hung up. The phone felt like a stone in her hand, and suddenly her whole body felt ice cold.

Zach came up behind her, putting his arms around her waist and his head in the crook of her neck, but she pulled away.

“Zach, that was
Gabby
. We have to be careful. She could have heard you! I mean, do you even understand how crushed she would be if she had any idea what we were doing right now?”

Zach ran his hand through his light brown hair, which flopped right back down into place. “Em, yeah. We talked about this. No need for Gabby to know anything about us.”

“Okay, but.” Em bit her lip and tried to calm herself. “
Yet
, you mean. She doesn’t need to know
yet
but you
are
going to end things with her when she’s back. Right? I know I’m probably driving you crazy about this, but it’s just really important to me. She doesn’t deserve to be lied to.”

Zach was back to dumping sweaters into a large trash bag. “I hear you, Em,” he said.

Oh god, this was going all wrong. She didn’t want him to be mad. “Okay,” Em said. “Good. But I just need to know—we should just decide—when. I mean, I thought you said you hadn’t talked to Gabby since the day after Christmas,” she went on, keeping her tone casual, so she wouldn’t sound like she was nagging.

“Or the day after,” Zach said casually. “Whatever, it was like a minute-long conversation.” He surveyed the piles around
the room. “I gotta take some of this stuff to Goodwill. Want me to drop you off on the way?”

Em sighed and grabbed a bag. On the way to the door, he took it from her, then placed both bags on the tile floor in the foyer, so he could grab her and kiss her. She couldn’t help but melt into him, his soapy smell, his warm lips.

He grinned at her. “My little worrier,” he said. Then he picked up both bags and headed out the door, leaving Em to follow him. And she did.

Chase was sitting on her stoop, waiting for her, when they pulled into her driveway. His expression was unfocused, like he was dreaming with his eyes open. He sat there clenching and unclenching his bare fists. She wondered how long he’d been sitting there.

“What’s Singer doing here?” Zach asked.

“I’m helping him with a project,” Em said. Now was not the time to get into the whole saga of Chase and the mystery girl.

“’K, babe.” He leaned over to kiss her cheek. “I had a great time this afternoon.”

“See you tomorrow, right?” she said as she opened the door.

“You got it,” Zach answered with a smile.

Sometimes Zach seemed so oblivious. Like, not as affected by how
huge
this situation was.

She and Chase both watched as Zach zoomed away.

“Come on in,” Em said. “The next poem is . . . I kind of need to keep working on it for a little while.”

Chase wordlessly followed her inside. He hung his coat next to hers, unlaced his shoes, and lined them up neatly next to the bench in the front hall.

“Lots of salt on the roads,” he said. “I don’t want to trek it through your house.”

Em had never seen Chase so pale, or so polite. He sat tentatively on a stool in the kitchen and looked as if he didn’t know where to put his hands. His wrinkled, ratty sweatshirt was frayed around the collar and stained at the cuffs. His jeans were ripped at the knees and his eyes had circles under them. Chase Singer, preppiest of the preps, going for hobo chic? It was unheard of. But it was more than his fashion choices. Chase looked haunted, as though he hadn’t slept in days. Em kept waiting for his bravado to emerge, to hear a smart-ass comment. It never came.

“You want some hot chocolate? I could make it while you write,” Chase said.

“Hot chocolate? Sure. That sounds great.” Chase Singer offering to do something nice? This day could not get any more bizarre. “Thanks, Chase.”

Once her laptop was open, Em couldn’t stop her emotions from surging and flowing onto the page. Her confusion about Zach, about his feelings for her and hers for him, came pouring
out of her fingertips. She wrote fast and furious, banging at the keys while Chase banged around by her stove, warming some milk, digging around in her cupboards for cinnamon and cayenne pepper.

It felt almost like her fingers and brain were possessed by something else, the way the words came so freely. And although the poem didn’t name names and didn’t once say “him” or “he”—so Chase could use it too—it was clearly coming from her own experience, and that made it real. Powerful. Em could feel in her bones that it was a good poem, even better than the first. She was going to call it “Unstoppable.”

“Sometimes I feel like Ty could just completely vanish at any second.” Chase stood next to her, reading over her shoulder, holding a steaming mug of cocoa. It smelled delicious.

“Who is—oh. Ty?” Em didn’t want to pry. He’d tell her, or he wouldn’t. She knew what it was like to want to hold the heart’s truths as close as possible. To know that once you spoke them aloud, they might evaporate or tangle further.

“Yeah, Ty. She loved the last poem. Thanks.” Chase absentmindedly stirred his cocoa as Em printed a copy of the new poem and retrieved it from her father’s study. She watched as Chase removed some books from his backpack. He placed the sheet of paper between two of them and repacked the bag. “Don’t want to lose it,” he said sheepishly.

“You really like her, don’t you?” Em blurted.

For a moment Chase looked wary, and Em saw some of his usual bluster and defensiveness. But then his face seemed to collapse, and he just shrugged. “Thanks a lot, Winters. You need me to wash out the mugs?”

She waved away the offer. “I’m a master dishwasher-loader,” she joked. Chase gave her a quick smile and raised two fingers to his forehead, an old-fashioned salute. She followed him to the front door and locked it behind him.

Then she returned to the kitchen, sat down, and took a deep breath. Rolled her head around on her neck a few times, stretching. That’s when she saw Chase’s football playbook on the counter—of all the surprises Chase had pulled that afternoon, this was the biggest one. Em couldn’t believe he’d forgotten it. She raced to the front door and opened it to shout after him. But he’d gone; the yard was dim and quiet. She was about to shut the door when the tinkling sound of female laughter caught her ear. It was faint but somehow sounded nearby. She poked her head farther out, looking to see where the sound was coming from. But it was fading already. And all she could see were three dark crows overhead, circling. They looked sooty and ominous against the sky and she slammed the door against them with particular strength.

Dinner was chicken and roasted tomatoes with her parents, who basically spent the whole time discussing, without much input
from Em, why she’d be better off taking AP Bio next year instead of AP Environmental Science. Afterward, Em decided to go for a walk. “I just need some air,” she told her mom, who was loading the dishwasher and humming.

Things were so confusing. Zach and Gabby. Her fight with JD. How stony and serious Chase had looked today. She wandered down her street, arms wrapped around herself, hat pulled down over her ears. The night was silent and her footsteps echoed around the lawns and woods that lined the street. She thought about Zach’s snowplow and Gabby’s curling iron and Chase’s playbook. . . .

And before she knew it, she was at the tiny playground at the end of her road, the one shared by neighborhood families, with just a slide and a swing set and a wooden seesaw. Em swung open the creaky gate and wandered into the deserted little park, remembering how she and JD used to play here a long time ago. It looked so small now, so underused. She could hardly believe she once thought of it as vast and exciting.