Tell (10 page)

Andy pushed the shako off his head.  It clattered to the floor.  “Come on, Lucas.  Don’t be an ass.”

“It won’t take me long to change, Andy,” Melody said, making sure her uniform was secure on its hanger.  “I’ll be back in like five minutes.”

Andy sighed irritably but did not say anything as she walked off.

Lucas looked at him strangely.  “So I guess you’re forgoing that whole ‘be yourself’ attitude to fetch women.”

“I want to look good—so what?”

“So stop being a butthead to Melody,” Lucas shot back.  “I don’t even think she wants to go to this stupid party.  And she asked her sister to drive you guys, so she did you a favor.”

“Why wouldn’t she want to go to the party?  She was the one who asked me.”

“She’ll probably regret it once you get to the party and you ditch her.”

“I’m not going to
ditch
her,” Andy argued.  “I’m just going to strategically split my time between hanging out with her and trying to talk to Amanda.”

“Does she know this?”

Andy waved his hand dismissively.  He stood there in silence for a few moments as Lucas continued changing out of his band uniform, then said, “Do you think I should pop my collar?”

“No,” Lucas answered immediately.

Cadie felt a sense of foreboding as she parked the Ford on the street in front of Stacy’s house.  The driveway was full of cars already.  There were two kids sitting on the front stoop with a cloud of smoke surrounding them.  Cadie hoped all they were smoking was regular cigarettes.

She did not feel comfortable with Melody and Andy, either.  She felt like a third wheel.  Melody was completely caught up in Andy, and Cadie had absolutely no idea what Andy’s agenda for the evening was, but she had a feeling it had nothing to do with Melody.

As they approached the door, she noticed that the two of them had both slowed down their paces considerably.  They both looked over their shoulders expectantly at Cadie.

“Yeah, I got it,” she said, pushing past them and approaching the door.  It seemed like they should not be allowed to attend a party where they were too afraid to open the front door.  “Excuse me,” she said to the two guys on the porch, whom she recognized as Mike Thompson and Shawn Beaver.  They moved out of her way without a word.  Cadie decided against knocking or ringing the bell; somehow she felt this was not a situation where announcing her presence was socially appropriate.  She turned the knob and opened the front door.

It was like being hit with a wall of sound and heat.  Cadie was not entirely sure she had ever seen so many people clustered in a foyer in her life.  People were almost shoulder-to-shoulder, which made it difficult for the three of them to wedge themselves into the house and for Andy to shut the door behind them, but somehow they managed.

Once they had forced their way through the orgy in the foyer, the room was less crowded.  Apparently everyone had just arrived and was milling in the entry way.  The living room was still crowded, but much more tolerably so.  The stereo’s speakers loudly pumped My Chemical Romance directly into their bloodstreams.  Cadie looked around for Stacy.  When she did not see her, she turned to look at Melody and Andy, who looked petrified.

“I’m going to go find Stacy,” she said.  She almost had to shout to be heard over the music.

Melody and Andy did not respond.

She folded her arms impatiently.  “Are you going to be okay?” she prompted.

After a moment, Andy nodded.  “Yeah,” he shouted back.  “We’re not kids.”

“Then stop looking like this is your first big-boy party,” Cadie advised before turning and walking away.  It had been several years since she had been to Stacy’s house, but she still remembered where everything was.

She made her way into the kitchen and was relieved to discover Stacy, who was in the middle of asking a couple of kids to put the liquor bottles back where they had found them. 
Good luck with that,
Cadie thought sarcastically.  “Stacy,” she said out loud from across the room.

Stacy turned and caught her eye, her face brightening into a grin.  “Hey!” she said excitedly, crossing the room toward Cadie.  She gave her a big hug, catching Cadie off guard.  “You decided to come!”

“Yeah,” Cadie said lamely.

“Did you want a beer?” asked Stacy, pointing her thumb over her shoulder.  Cadie saw a silver keg sitting upright in a plastic tub surrounded by ice.

“I’d better not.  I’m driving.”

Stacy rolled her eyes.  “Cadie, it’s only a quarter after ten.  You won’t have to leave for at least another hour and a half.”

“Yeah, but—”

“It only takes an hour to burn off one beer,” Stacy interrupted.  “We learned that in health class in ninth grade.”

Cadie sighed disparagingly, but she shifted her weight to her other foot and eyed the keg.

“Come on, Cadie.”

“Oh, all right,” Cadie agreed.

Stacy clasped her hand and pulled her over to the keg.  She pumped the tap a few times, then filled a blue Solo cup and handed it to Cadie.  “It’s Miller Lite,” she said.  “I hope that’s okay.”

Cadie took a sip of the beer without responding.  She had only had beer on several occasions in her life and would no more be able to tell the difference between beers than Susan could tell the difference between a groundhog and a woodchuck.  She drank it without tasting, forcing it down before it could spend too much time with her taste buds.  “Where is the rest of your family?” she asked.  Stacy’s parents were suspiciously absent, along with her two younger sisters, Brittany and Chelsea, who were eight and thirteen, respectively.

“They went to my grandmother’s in Pittsburgh,” Stacy responded, refilling her own cup.  “I’m meeting them there tomorrow.”

“That’s convenient,” Cadie remarked.

Stacy grinned.  “I know, right?  We rotate who holds the party every week and I knew my parents weren’t going to be here, so I volunteered for this week.”

Cadie looked around.  “Do you think you’re going to have enough time to clean everything before you go to Pittsburgh?”

Stacy laughed and shook her head.  “No.”  She took a long swig from her beer.  “So, what are your plans for the rest of the weekend?” she asked.

“Not too much.  I’m going to the mall with Felicia tomorrow.”

Stacy rolled her eyes.

“What?” Cadie asked defensively.

“Oh, it’s not you,” Stacy said quickly.  “It’s just… Felicia.”  She waved a hand as if she needed to waft Felicia’s name away from them.

“She’s not so bad,” Cadie said.  “You just have to get used to her.”

Stacy shook her head, looking out into the family room.  “She thinks she’s better than everyone else,” she said.  “I don’t mean to insult her or anything, because I know she’s your friend.  But I’ll just never understand how you can be friends with her.  You’re really down-to-earth.”

“Felicia’s down-to-earth.”

“Felicia has never been on the earth because she’s been up on her high horse since middle school,” Stacy shot back.

Cadie did not know how to respond.

Stacy grabbed her wrist.  “I’m sorry,” she said emphatically.  “That was pretty rude of me.  I’ve gotten to that stage of drunkenness where I think it’s okay to say everything right as I think it.”

“It’s okay,” Cadie answered automatically.  Truthfully, she was thinking about how strange it was to be on the opposite side of this conversation.  She could not accurately remember how many times she had argued with Melody about her friendship with Susan; now she was defending her friendship with Felicia to Stacy.  It was surreal.

It seemed so natural to want to object to Melody’s friendship with Susan, because of how much of an asshole Susan was.  Melody always protested that she was a good friend, and Cadie had never understood why.  Now, standing here talking to Stacy, she wondered what Stacy saw in Felicia that made her object to their friendship.  She also wondered if her friendship with Felicia was as good as she thought it was, or if she was being shortsighted by defending it.

Stacy excused herself to go find Will, with a kiss on Cadie’s cheek that made her smile.  She sipped at her beer, drinking it quickly to forgo the taste.

Cadie remembered why she and Felicia had become friends.  They both had a dry, sarcastic sense of humor.  They had similar interests and opinions.  They were both pretty imaginative kids and they always had a good time together.

But how close were they really?

The past few months, Cadie had tried to stay close with Felicia, but Felicia’s main interest had been Brian’s imminent departure from high school and, eventually, their lives.  At one point in time, Felicia had let on that Brian had been suggesting that the two of them have sex, but Felicia had turned him down.  However, that had been at the beginning of the summer; by now things might have changed.  Cadie thought that since he was moving next weekend, the two of them had probably started a sexual relationship.  She found it hard to believe that they would not.

After all, it was after Cadie had learned that Tom was moving that she had had sex with him.

Cadie mulled this over as she moved out of the way of a football player named Kevin Bauer reaching for the tap.  She had never told Felicia that she had had sex with Tom.  That was a conversation she could not picture having with her.

She wished she had been able to tell someone about it; it was a secret she still had to this day and she had gone through it entirely alone.  Cadie and Tom had started dating about a year ago, during September of her junior year.  They had been dating for about three months when Tom told her that his father had accepted a job in Harrisburg and they would be moving in March, not even able to wait until the end of the school year.

Cadie had liked him a lot.  She might even have been in love with him, though that was something that they had never said to one another.  They went to the winter formal together in December, and afterwards, she had snuck him into her house through the silent sliding glass door in their family room, and they had lost their virginities to one another on the sofa bed in her den.  This had been kind of risky, but she had told him ahead of time that she was not going to lose her virginity in a car, and they could think of no other alternative.

Three more months passed where they had sex fairly regularly—at least once a week.  They returned to the sofa bed from time to time.  They also made appearances in her bed, his bed, the couch in his family room, and eventually his car, which was not as unpleasant as Cadie had originally anticipated, though she preferred being inside an actual building.

Felicia never knew.  Cadie thought that Melody might have suspected, if only because they shared a wall, but her sister had never said anything.  Felicia never knew.

Tom’s family moved in March.  They talked about trying to make a long-distance relationship work, but they were both more realistic than most juniors in high school and came to the conclusion that the only thing in the cards for them was a breakup.

Tom’s departure had made a severe impact, more than probably even he knew.  At the beginning of her junior year, Cadie had begun writing a novel.  She had written in it periodically before she and Tom started dating, but once their relationship began, it seemed she had the motivation to write in it every day.  They dated for about six months, and during that time, she had added to the novel almost every day—admittedly some days were more productive than others, but it had grown exponentially in length and she knew the writing was good.

The day he had left, she had stopped writing.  From time to time, she opened the document on her computer and read over it, sometimes editing it, but she had not written anything further in it since Tom had walked out of her life.  All that she had managed to write since then were a few lousy poems that others praised and she detested.  It was why she always told everyone that she was not working on anything special, because she really was not.

Cadie did not go to her junior prom.  Felicia, only a sophomore at the time, had gone with Brian, as it had been his senior year.  Cadie felt that the only thing more depressing than going alone would have been playing third wheel to them all night, so she opted not to go at all.  Instead, she sat at home, played cards with her sister and her dad, and thought about Tom and how she might have been in love with him.

Cadie blinked away her tears and hid her face behind her blue Solo cup as she continued drinking her beer.  The original question—how close were she and Felicia really?—still loomed.  How close could she be to someone who did not even know anything about the biggest chain of events in her life?  During the time that she was (maybe) in love with Tom, and having sex with him, and having him disappear out of her life forever, she never spoke a word of any of it to Felicia.  And now as she thought back on those times, she could not recall if Felicia had ever even asked.

Nine

Melody and Andy took some time touring the house, as they, unlike Cadie, had never been there.  The house was enormous, with high ceilings and spacious rooms.  The first level consisted of two huge sitting rooms (one of which had a big screen TV), a kitchen, and a half bath.  The staircase that led to the second level had bright yellow caution tape across its threshold; they determined that this must have led to the master bedroom upstairs.  Downstairs, they found three bedrooms that must have belonged to Stacy and her sisters, a full bath, and a rec room that had a pool table and a card game going on.  The house also had a double-level deck that looked over their backyard, which was a very steep downhill slope into the woods below.  It could be accessed by sliding glass doors off of both the rec room and one of the sitting rooms upstairs.

Eventually they found their way upstairs again, and Andy suggested they go into the kitchen and get a drink.  Melody agreed.  She was hesitant, but she did not really want to say no to any of Andy’s suggestions.

One of the football players, a senior named Zack Myers, was at the keg as they approached.  She thought this was probably for the best; she saw that Andy was watching him intently and knew that, like her, he had never worked a tap before.  She was briefly reminded of Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson with the computer in
Zoolander.

The football player stepped back away from the keg.  “All yours, bro,” he said to Andy.

“Thanks,” Andy answered coolly, taking the nozzle.  He looked around the kitchen and pointed to the counter nearest to Melody.  “Could you get me a couple cups?”

“Sure.”  She pulled two blue Solo cups out of the opened package on the counter and handed them to him.

He filled the first and handed it to her.  She took it unenthusiastically, but waited for him to finish filling his before she drank.

They walked toward the living room, drinks in tow.  Melody glanced down at his free hand, which was only inches away from hers.  She had been tempted to touch his hand all night, but she could not seem to come up with the courage to do so.  Reluctantly she took a sip of her beer, making a face at the taste.  “You know, we’ve been here for about twenty minutes now,” Melody began, “and we have yet to see—”

As if on cue, Susan appeared across the room and caught sight of them.  She lifted her hand in a greeting and started to cross the room toward them.

“—Susan,” she finished lamely.

Andy gave her a look.  “You just had to jinx it,” he said.

She smirked at him.

“Hey!”  Susan hugged Melody first, then Andy, clearly catching him by surprise.  “When did you guys get here?”

“About twenty minutes ago,” Melody said.  “Where have you been?  We didn’t see you.”

Susan gestured behind her, waving her hand frantically toward the sliding glass door.  “I was outside,” she said.  “They have a stereo set up out there.  I was dancing.  A lot of people are dancing.”

She was pretty well blitzed already, Melody realized.  She glanced at Andy, but he seemed completely u
ninterested in the conversation, which was not uncommon when Susan was around.  He was staring across the room and drinking his beer.  Melody turned her attention back to Susan.  “Are you okay?” she asked.

“Actually, now that you mention it, I kind of have to go to the bathroom,” Susan said.  “Will you go with me?”

“Why do you need me to go to the bathroom with you?” Melody asked.

“I don’t understand that, either,” Andy said, finally joining in the conversation.  “Guys go to the bathroom by themselves all the time.  Is that not something they teach girls while they’re being potty trained?”

Susan grabbed Melody’s wrist and started dragging her in the direction of the bathroom.  “I’ll be back,” Melody called over her shoulder to Andy.  “Ow, Susan, you’re pulling my arm out of the socket.”

“Sorry.”  Susan loosened her grip.

The half bath on the first floor was occupied.  The two girls made their way downstairs, where they found the other bathroom mercifully vacant.  Melody intended to wait outside for Susan, but she got pulled into the bathroom with her, and Susan shut the door behind them.

“Seriously, I don’t know how much help I’m going to be,” Melody said.

“Come on, Melody, I didn’t really have to go to the bathroom.”  Susan set down her cup and started checking out her reflection in the mirror over the double sink.  She finally tore her eyes away from herself to look at Melody.  “I wanted to know how things are going with Andy.”

Melody shrugged.  “I don’t know.  We just got here.  Did you really bring me all the way down here just to ask me that?”

“You didn’t
just
get here,” Susan contradicted.  “You’ve been here for twenty minutes.  What have you been talking about?”

“Nothing, really,” Melody admitted.  “We pretty much just walked around the house to see what was going on, then went and got beers, and that’s where you found us.”

“So you haven’t said, ‘Hey, Andy, I like you, and this is a date’?”

Melody pretended to think about it carefully.  “I don’t think so,” she said slowly.

Susan went back to examining her reflection.  “
Weak
.”

“I still have an hour,” Melody said defensively.  She looked around the bathroom.  “So what am I doing down here with
you
?  I’m going back upstairs.”

“Good luck,” Susan called as Melody left the room.  She was deeply engaged in fluffing her chestnut brown ringlets.

Melody made her way back up the stairs and into the living room where she had left Andy, but he had disappeared.

Shane had drawn an inside straight.  He was not sure how good he was at bluffing, but he hoped nobody could read his expression when he raised Ryan Hostler’s bet by two green chips.

Obviously they could, because everybody folded.  Shane’s straight had won him a very meager pot.  He sighed as he
passed the cards to Ryan, who was dealing the next hand, and gathered up the chips in the center of the table.

The football team had managed quite a win that evening.  Actually, to be more accurate, it had been a complete slaughter.  By the end of the third quarter, the score had been 34-0, and an assortment of first-string players, including Shane, had been taken out to allow their second-string players to finish the game.  The final score had been 47-10.  It was not
an unexpected win—their opponents were notoriously bad—but Shane had still felt lucky leaving the stadium, which was why he had decided to sit in on the poker game at the party.

Their poker game consisted of Shane, Will, Ryan, and three other guys by the names of Tyson Claar, Zack Myers, and Adam Benson.  Mostly they were playing Texas Holdem, but Adam had a strange fascination with five card draw, so every time he dealt, that was what they played.  Shane had thought he was a decent poker player, but this theory was being contradicted more and more with every hand.  His pile of chips was slowly diminishing, and on the rare occasions when he got decent enough cards to actually win a hand, he played so badly that somehow he ensured that the pot was next to nil.  The game had
had a five-dollar buy in, with twenty dollars going to the winner and ten to the one who came in second.

The next hand was Holdem.  Everybody anted.  He was dealt the king of diamonds and the jack of spades.  The cards showing in the middle were a seven and a four.  Shane tried very hard not to roll his eyes at his own bad luck.  Zack won that hand with two pair; he had had a seven and a four dealt to him.  A few more of Shane’s chips found their way into the hands of another.

Tyson stood.  “Let’s take a break before the next hand,” he said.  “Anybody else need a smoke?”

Adam did.  The two of them slipped out the sliding glass door onto the lower level of the deck.  Ryan took the opportunity to go to the bathroom.  Shane started gathering up the cards on the table and shuffling them, since the next hand would be his deal.

“Don’t stack those cards,” Zack warned.

“Zack, if I knew how to stack cards, do you think I would be doing as badly as I am?” Shane shot back, gesturing at his winnings, pitiful as they were.

“Maybe you’re hustling us,” Zack responded with a wry grin.

“I wish.”

The sliding glass door opened again.  Shane was expecting Tyson and Adam to come back from their smoke break, but instead, Stacy came through the doors with a cup in her hand.  Shane was surprised beyond belief to see that Cadie Dawson was with her.  She stopped for a second when she caught his eye, but recovered quickly.  The two girls came over to the poker table, and Stacy leaned forward to wrap her arms around Will’s shoulders.

“Are we winning?” she asked him.

“We’re not losing,” Will responded.

“Not like me,” Shane offered.  He glanced at Cadie.  “Hey, Cadie,” he greeted her.

“Hey, Shane.  You look surprised to see me.”

He put the deck of cards down on the table.  “Oh, good.  That makes for a very profitable poker game, you know, when everyone can read your expression.”

Cadie shrugged one shoulder.  “You looked like I did when I saw you walk into AP calc,” was all she said.

The sliding glass door opened once more, and this time it was Tyson and Adam returning.  Ryan came back downstairs at the same time; he had had to venture to the upstairs bathroom.  “Are we ready to play some
poker
?” he shouted loudly, clapping his hands together.  The three guys took their seats around the table again.  Shane started dealing another hand of Holdem.

“Oh, isn’t this cute, Cadie?” Stacy remarked, putting her arm through Cadie’s.  “The boys are playing cards.  Could I get you boys some cigars and brandy?”

“No, but I’ll take a refill, if you’re offering,” Tyson said, tapping the empty blue Solo cup that sat beside him on the table.

Stacy pulled the black scrunchie off her wrist and flung it at him.

Five more hands were played.  Shane did not win one of them.  He leaned forward and rubbed his forehead in frustration, watching as Ryan pulled in another massive pot.

“Shane, did you want me to get you a refill?” asked Cadie
suddenly, reaching for his cup.

Shane looked at it.  “Actually, I think I’m still—”  Before he could even finish the sentence, Cadie’s fingers hit the cup at exactly the wrong angle, and it upended into Shane’s lap.

The guys started laughing hysterically.  Stacy clapped a hand over her mouth, trying to cover her own smile.  Cadie looked mortified.

“Shane, I am
so
sorry,” she said as he stood up, causing a flood of beer to drip onto the floor.

He held up a hand.  “It’s okay,” he said.  He put down the cards that he had just been dealt.  “Give me a few minutes to get cleaned up, okay?  I’ll be right back.  Don’t look at my cards.”

“Maybe if we look at your cards, you’ll start winning,” Zack remarked, to another round of raucous laughter.

Shane was trying hard not to be annoyed at Cadie.  He knew it had been an accident, but on top of the fact that he was close to losing five dollars, he could not help but feel like this was just icing on the cake of a lousy party.  He turned and started heading toward the stairs, to get paper towels out of the kitchen.

“I’ll come with you,” Cadie said, setting her own cup down on the table.  “Stace, I’ll get some paper towels and clean this up.”

Cadie was right behind Shane on the stairs.  Once they reached the landing, Cadie reached out and hooked her index finger through one of his belt loops, pulling him to a stop.

He turned and looked over his shoulder at her in alarm.  “How much have you had to drink?”

“You keep looking at your cards,” she said.

He turned around to face her.  The landing was away from the action of the party.  No one was in sight and it was relatively quiet.  “What?” he asked irritably.

“Whenever you get a good hand, you only look at your cards once at the beginning, and then you put them down for the rest of the hand.  But when you get a bad hand, you keep checking them right before you bet.  That’s how they know that you’re bluffing.”

Shane stared at her, his aggravation dissolving.  “Are you serious?”

She nodded, then glanced down the stairs to make sure the poker game was well out of earshot.  “Adam leans back in his chair every time he bluffs.  And Ryan taps his fingers on the table whenever he has a good hand.”

“You could tell all this after only five hands?” Shane demanded.

“Well, if you weren’t sucking so badly, I could have waited longer and told you more,” Cadie responded defensively.  “But I figure the way you’re going, you only have about three hands left.”

Something occurred to him.  “You spilled the beer on purpose,” he said slowly.

“Yeah.  Sorry,” she said again.  “I couldn’t wait for you to finish your beer.”

A group of people started thundering down the staircase.  Shane took Cadie’s arm and steered her toward the wall, out of the way.  “How do you know all this?” he asked her after the group had passed.  He could not get his mind around the fact that she had deliberately spilled beer on him just to have the chance to help him win this game.