I Take You (19 page)

In no time I was a walking cliché—the personification of lovesick teenage angst. I was anxious. I was awkward. I said all manner of stupid shit. I burst into tears at no prompting. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat.

And Teddy didn’t notice a damn thing. I was so desperate for his attention—the right kind of attention. I finally gave in to my mother’s
pleas and got a decent haircut. Teddy mocked it. One day I wore a skirt. He couldn’t stop laughing.

How could he not see what was happening? How could he not feel it too? I was so tortured. It had to change. I had to
make
Teddy love me. All I needed was a weapon.

“His name,” I tell Freddy, “was Lee.”

He was from Jacksonville. His family had moved next door to Teddy while I was gone. Lee was our age, but nothing like us. He was sweet and well mannered. A little shy. He loved to fish. He had a gap between his front teeth and a big, honking laugh. He was always smiling. It didn’t seem quite genuine—you got the sense that he was hiding something, presenting a carefully composed face to the world. Although maybe that’s hindsight.

I was tired of being invisible to Teddy. I decided to make myself visible to Lee—very, very visible—and maybe Teddy would finally see what he was missing.

So I complimented Lee. Touched him. I copied the things I’d seen my father do—the way he looked at Jane, the way he flirted. I smiled at Lee and listened to him and laughed at his jokes. Always, and only, in the presence of Teddy.

Stupid, thoughtless, typical teenage bullshit.

And it worked.

Lee began responding almost immediately. He got nervous whenever I was around. Brought me presents. Made me a mix CD of awful country music. Invited me over for dinner with his weird, humorless parents. I managed to keep him on the hook while giving him nothing in return. I wouldn’t even hold his hand. But I kept smiling and laughing and flirting.

In my mind, everything I did was okay because I was in love. It never once occurred to me to feel bad for using Lee.

Not that it mattered. My phony infatuation was having no effect. Teddy didn’t seem to notice, or care. This only made me redouble my efforts, which made Lee fall that much harder.

Love made me a total asshole.

“You were fourteen,” Freddy says. “All fourteen-year-olds are assholes.”

“Let me finish, and then you can decide whether that excuses my behavior.”

Lee was now part of our little gang, but he didn’t get the thrill we got from being bad. His family was pretty religious, so he had these scruples. And he was afraid of his parents. He became our voice of reason, talking us out of the worst stuff. Most of the time. Not always.

In early August, I walked into Teddy’s house to find him and Lee sprawled on the living room sofa, playing video games.

“Guess what?” I said.

“You’re blocking the screen,” Teddy said.

Lee sat up and made room for me. “What?”

“That house my mom is renovating? Her crew found a crate of dynamite in the carriage house.”

Teddy finally glanced up. “For real?”

I nodded.

He threw down his joystick. “Let’s go.”

“She called the county already. A bomb disposal squad picked it up this morning.”

He slouched back on the couch, defeated.

“But not before I liberated a few sticks,” I said.

His slow, delighted grin made my stomach flutter.

“What would we even do with it?” Lee asked skeptically.

“Blow shit up,” Teddy replied.

“Duh,” I added.

Lee looked troubled. “I’m not sure that’s such a good idea.”

We ignored him, and he reluctantly followed along as we planned our next act of mayhem. We soon identified a target: the naval air station off Palm Avenue.

“Hang on,” Freddy says. “A
naval
station?”

“We were fourteen,” I say. “We were idiots. Lee wanted to set it off on the beach somewhere, or in the swamp, but he was overruled. And it’s not like we were planning to take out a plane. We were just going to leave it outside the gates in the middle of the night. It was more the badass principle of the thing.”

We did some research. I became so absorbed that I pretty much
dropped my whole act toward Lee. He started trying to hide his feelings. It didn’t really work.

One Sunday morning, Teddy and I began assembling the bomb at a rickety card table in his garage. The only light came from a couple of windows high up on one wall. It was outrageously hot and stuffy in there, but we had to keep the door closed to avoid attracting attention.

Teddy held up an old alarm clock I’d found in our attic. “Do we really need this?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s cooler that way,” I said. “Obviously.”

“It’s stupid,” he muttered, but I ignored him. I was puzzling over the instructions I’d printed off the Internet at Gran’s office.

“Where’s Lee?” Teddy asked.

“Church, I guess. His dad makes him go.”

“God,” Teddy muttered. “Just kill me.”

“Seriously.”

He started poking through the jumble of screwdrivers in his toolbox. I was stymied by the directions about wiring the clock to the explosives. I remember thinking that it was too bad I couldn’t ask my mom for help—she’d figure this out in no time.

In a voice I didn’t quite recognize, Teddy asked:

“So are you and Lee like boyfriend and girlfriend now?”

My mouth was instantly dry. I kept my eyes fixed to the piece of paper in front of me.

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Do you like him?”

I pretended to search for something on the table. “Sure. Lee’s great.”

“Yeah,” Teddy said, with withering contempt. “He’s
great
.”

I said nothing.

“He likes you,” Teddy said accusingly. “He’s always talking about you. Lily’s so this, Lily’s so that. It’s annoying.”

I swallowed my anger with difficulty. “I guess he sees things you don’t see.”

“Yeah,” he snorted. “Because they aren’t there.”

I finally threw down the instructions. “What’s your problem, Theodore?”

“Don’t,” he warned me. He hated it when I called him by his full name.

“Then stop acting like a jerk.”

“
You’re
acting like a jerk!” Teddy said. “The way you are around him makes me sick! It’s all,” he tossed his hair and adopted a girlish falsetto, “Oh, Lee, you’re so funny! Ha ha ha! You’re so smart!”

“What do you care?”

“Because you don’t act that way with me!” he shouted.

The garage was silent. Outside I heard a truck rumble down the street, a lawnmower buzzing in the distance.

Teddy’s eyes were full of hurt. They told me everything I needed to know. Everything I’d been dying to know all summer.

“I tried,” I said at last. “I tried to be that way with you.”

Teddy shook his head. “Not really.”

“I tried,” I insisted. “You laughed at me.”

“Try again,” he said softly. “I won’t laugh.”

I could only stare at him. Was he joking? Was this really happening—the thing I’d wanted so badly, for so long?

It was. Teddy put his hands on my shoulders, leaned in and kissed me.

It was the first kiss for both of us.

It was awful.

Freddy laughs. “Awful?”

“We didn’t know what we were doing! His mouth was open, while mine was closed. Then I opened mine just as he clamped his shut. My lips were too dry. His were too wet. Our teeth clacked together.” I shrug and kick at the water. “It was all very awkward and sloppy and weird.”

Also?

Magical.

We finally broke apart. We looked at each other. And we both started to laugh.

We left the garage and went into his house, where we spent the next three hours on the sofa learning how to kiss. By the time we heard his mom stirring upstairs, getting ready for work, we were experts. Professionals. Future gold medalists.

Teddy and I began sneaking off together every chance we could get. Lee knew something was up. He kept trying to get me alone, but I made vague excuses. He’d call my house and I wouldn’t answer. I didn’t laugh at his jokes anymore. I was evasive. He was sad and worried. Frankly, he was becoming kind of a pain. We would have left him out of the plan entirely, but now he insisted on coming along. He was hyperenthusiastic and wouldn’t stop talking about how awesome it would be when we set off our bomb.

All to impress me.

“You should tell him,” Teddy said at one point.

We were in my room, lying together on my bed. I stared at the ceiling, at the knife marks we’d made when we were little kids. Teddy was right, but I was procrastinating. Now that I’d gotten what I wanted, I was feeling guilty.

“I’ll tell him,” I said. “Soon.”

Two nights later, we met at midnight for our grand assault against the United States military. We sneaked up to the entrance to the base and set the bomb in front of a low concrete wall near the guard booth. I never did figure out how to incorporate the alarm clock, so we just lit the fuse, then hid behind a clump of palm trees about a hundred yards away.

I remember it all so clearly. The uncertainty, the fear that we’d screwed up and wasted the dynamite, or that it was too old and crusty to work.

When the bomb exploded, the sound was deafening. Flames shot up into the night, and the windows of a couple of buildings across the street blew out. We screamed with joy and danced in the light of the fire. Even Lee was thrilled.

Then we heard the sirens.

Somehow, we had failed to anticipate the possibility of a brisk response to an explosion near a military base. Lee started running toward the city marina. Teddy grabbed my hand. We ran through a modern housing development and back into Old Town. We raced through the narrow streets and lanes we knew so well, slipping over fences and through backyards, ducking behind parked cars, avoiding the streetlights.

We finally came to a conch house on Eaton Street. My mom had
worked on it a few years earlier. I knew that it was empty most of the year. We found a loose shutter and pried it open. Inside, we took turns drinking straight from the faucet, long gulps of lukewarm, rusty water that ran down our chins. We didn’t want to turn on the lights, but we found a few candles in the kitchen and lit them.

Then we went upstairs, found the master bedroom and started taking each other’s clothes off.

I stop talking. Freddy is watching me.

“So,” she says. “Did you …?”

“We did.”

“You were fourteen?”

I glance at her. “That surprises you?”

“I guess not.” She pauses. “How was it?”

I stare at the water. “Amazing.”

It shouldn’t have been. It should have been like our first kiss, fumbling and uncomfortable. And it did hurt like hell for about three seconds. I cried out, and Teddy froze. “Are you okay?” he whispered.

“Yes,” I whispered back. “Yes yes yes.”

I was okay. I was more than okay.

He was inside me. I really, really liked it.

And we were really, really good at it.

We stayed there until close to dawn. Then Teddy walked me home and followed me up the almond tree and into my room. We undressed and did it again, moving slowly to keep the bed from creaking. Then he tucked me in and left.

I drifted off to sleep, perfectly content. Something had changed—I could feel it. I had no interest in causing trouble anymore. I had just discovered the best possible way not to be bored.

Too bad it was a little too late.

The police showed up at Lee’s house around three that afternoon. Teddy came running to find me. The massive stupidity of what we’d done came crashing down on our heads. Dynamite, outside a naval base? Were we out of our minds? Why didn’t we listen to Lee and take it out to the beach, or blow up an abandoned fishing boat? Why did we have to destroy
federal property
?

All of a sudden, the fun was over. We were potentially in real trouble—sent away to reform school, maybe actual prison. This was Florida, after all, where they love to try juveniles as adults.

Teddy and I went back to his house and waited. The police stayed at Lee’s for a long time. We watched them leave. An hour or so later, Lee’s parents left, too.

“Let’s go talk to him,” Teddy said. “Find out what they said.”

I shook my head. “Let me go alone.”

He was instantly suspicious, jealous. “Why?”

“Just let me do it, Teddy. I’ll reassure him. I’ll make him understand.”

When I went to the back door, I could see Lee sitting at the table in his kitchen, staring into space. I knocked and walked in. He turned to look at me.

“They know,” he said, in a hushed voice. “They know it was us.”

Someone had seen three kids loitering in the area before the bomb went off. With our stellar history, we were automatically prime suspects. The police had probably gone to Lee first so that Gran wouldn’t interfere.

“It’s only a matter of time,” Lee said. His words were tumbling out. He was panicked. “We have to confess. It’ll be better for us. That’s what they told me.”

I took his hands across the table. “Lee, they’re lying. They have no proof.”

“My dad is going to kill me,” he whispered.

He did have a crazy dad. Not abusive or anything, but super, super strict. A dad you don’t disappoint. Lee was terrified of him.

I told him that we had to have a united front, that we couldn’t confess, that we’d be fine, that my grandmother would take care of it. She knew the police, the lawyers. She’d get us off. They didn’t have any solid proof that it was us. I smiled at him. I stroked his hands. I tried everything I could think of to manipulate him into doing what I wanted.

“They’re trying to scare you, Lee. So what if they have an eyewitness? Gran always says eyewitness testimony is unreliable. And whoever it is couldn’t have actually identified us, or the cops would have arrested us already. All we need to do is—”

“I thought you liked me,” Lee said suddenly.

“What? Of course I like you.” I gave him an encouraging smile, praying that it didn’t look as phony as it felt.

“I saw you guys run off. Where did you go?”

“Where did we go?” I was thinking furiously. “We just, you know, we ran. We went back to my house.”