Tell Me a Secret (2 page)

Coming home after almost three months was like walking into someone else’s house, all dressed up to look like ours. Same shiny wood floors speeding through the entry and into a bright, sunny kitchen; same white trim on white paneling; same whispered challenge to find a speck of dust or trace of actual humans living there—except for my own reflection in the mirror as soon as I crossed the threshold.

I looked at my face to see if anything had changed, if my secret was written there for anyone to read. But it wasn’t. Grimy with camp dirt, bedraggled, tired—three sessions of summer campers left the only signs.

“Wait until you read my script, Mandy,” my mom was saying as she pushed her way through the front door, dragging
a summer’s worth of my clothes on wheels. “I am so close—I was hoping to finish before you got home but ran out of time. You know how these things go. So much to do around here.”

“I know,” I said. It was all coming back to me. The notes. The scripts. The to-do lists. The never-ending cadre of people to impress.

All the way home, Mom had talked about her new script for this year’s Christmas montage.
Almost finished, can’t wait to get your opinion, will be the best one yet
, Mom went on. I wouldn’t be seeing much of Dad—nothing new about that. The summer remodeling season wasn’t over, then there would be the interior remodeling season, then set-building season, then the winter remodeling season. As if I needed an explanation after years of Dad never being home. I kept waiting for some sign of quiet rebellion, some indication he might one day break free and boogie. Either that, or ditch us for good.

“And the best part,” she continued, brushing the hair out of my face and then wiping her hands on her skirt, “is what I’ve been writing for you—” A pause, for maximum effect. “—the
starring role
.”

Once, there was a time when I might have been thrilled to hear those words spoken to me and not to my sister. We each had our parts to play in the perfect family drama: Mom, the director; Xanda, the actor; Dad, the builder; me, the backdrop. I had painted more sets than I could remember—living rooms, war zones, hospital corridors. Only once had I acted in one of Mom’s plays—the year Xanda died.

“God, Mom, you don’t have to force everybody into your lame-ass play,” Xanda had said when Mom announced I would be the daughter of a traumatized soldier, the lead role originally meant for Xanda. Onstage, she could be the kind of daughter my mom wanted—the kind I already was, if only my parents would notice. But this year, Xanda refused the part.

“I’m not forcing you,” Mom said. “I was asking Mandy.”

“So you’re forcing Rand instead. Do you even realize what a control freak you are?”

I stood there, trying to shift myself into part of the wall. They were like the angel and the devil, arguing over my soul. Good Mandy, Bad Rand. Or was it Bad Mandy, Good Rand?

“Mandy,”
said Mom, her teeth clenched as the word pried its way out. “I’m not forcing you, am I?” The question uncloaked me.

Xanda turned to me expectantly. “Well?” she demanded. “Do
you
want to be in the show?”

“I—I guess so.”

Mom looked smug. Xanda looked utterly defeated. I felt like a traitor.

“Congratulations,” Xanda sniped. “It looks like you’ve successfully created your own puppet government.”

It didn’t occur to me until much later that the role Mom offered had never been about me—only about getting to Xanda. I wondered what my mom had in mind now.

I smiled wearily. “Thanks, Mom. I’ll be upstairs.”

“You must be exhausted from the trip. Take a shower first though, huh? I just washed everything.” She rolled my suitcase down the hall with two fingers, checking the floor for skid marks as she went.

I could hear her unzipping and sorting as I climbed the stairs, the squishy carpet familiar under my feet. I passed frame after frame of my drawings and paintings—all labyrinths. The same labyrinths that had brought Kamran and me together.

After the junior class art exhibit came down, a note tumbled out of my locker, written in tiny staccato handwriting:
Meet me under the plum tree
.

I read the note over and over, floating through the rest of my classes like plum blossoms. When the last bell rang, I found Kamran there, his helmet in one hand and a second one in the other, motorcycle standing by.

“I have a surprise for you. Hop on.” Before I had a chance to ask where we were going, he fitted the helmet onto my head and slung on his own, then strapped our bags to the back. He mounted the bike and I wrapped myself around him, drinking in his musky smell with the faintest hint of sour-sweet.

As we wound our way through the streets, I couldn’t stop thinking about my body against his or the warmth I felt through every layer. We crested Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, where the past met the present in a violent tumble of
brownstones and mansions, transients and transplants, infinite varieties of colors and art and self-expression. We nearly collided with pedestrians, odors exotic and taboo, and a thousand visual feasts.

“That’s my parents’ restaurant,” he shouted, pointing to Café Shiraz, a hole-in-the-wall place with cinnamon and garlic scents emanating from the open door.

“Is that where we’re going?”

“Later, maybe.”

“Where, then?”

He grasped my hand with his nimble and smooth one. “Ask no questions, I tell no lies.”

Commercial buildings blurred into brick apartments then towering evergreens near Cornish College of the Arts. He turned into the campus parking lot and led me through the heavy doors and stained glass to the current art exhibit: Travels through Space and Time.

Later, over kebabs and hummus and his mom’s famous stuffed figs, we talked about light sources and vanishing points, MIT and Baird. He told me about his parents leaving everything to come here and start a restaurant, I told him about my parents disappearing into their work. I asked about physics. He asked about art. I stopped short of telling him about Xanda.

The office and basement were lit when we pulled up to my house—each of my parents in separate domains. Kamran and I sat on the curb under the rhododendrons, exactly the place where Andre parked his green Impala and Xanda disappeared into the night. We watched the sky turn from gray-gold to
gray-plum, an echo of the paintings we’d seen at Cornish as we wandered the corridors, hand in hand. He was so close, I could feel the roughness of his jacket brushing up against my skin.

“So you never told me about your poetry.”

“Ah, right.” He grinned. “You mean when I was copying your artwork.”

“Yes, as a matter of fact. So where is this so-called poem, inspired by my labyrinths?”

“Oh, that.” He ran his fingers through rumpled hair, olive eyes squinting through dark, dark lashes. “You don’t really want to see that.”

“Oh, but I do.” I felt out of my depth. Xanda would have pulled him close, felt the skin under his T-shirt, his waistband…for me, it was enough to be touching his sleeve.

He rummaged through a folder in his pack for a sheet of graph paper swirled over with that same tight handwriting. Sentences began in one corner and spread out like branches in a tree.

He held it aloft. “I don’t know if I want you to see this—it’s not actually a poem. Well, sort of. It’s more like…strings of possibility.” He sat down next to me, tracing his finger over the lines. “It’s all the things that could bring a person to this point—”

“A person?”

“W-well, two people.” Leaning over his shoulder, I caught only fragments:
She follows a path, a labyrinth
…
A landscape of mystery beneath her lines…A girl seeking shadows, past and
future…What secret she seeks, unfolding lies…

The sentences curled away from each other until I reached the top, the one that nearly stretched off the page:…
paths cross, time stops
…
then she and I would meet.

Those sentences uncloaked me, the same way I felt when he lost himself in my mazes—like he already knew me. The thought both excited and terrified.

“To what point?” I asked, my voice unsteady. I could almost taste the figs lingering on his breath.

Then our lips met in our own mad, messy kiss, tender and fruity, pomegranate fireworks, his hands cupping my face and mine warm under his jacket, noses bumping and chins tilting until he pulled away, the two of us existing in a moment of perfection.

It was then that I knew I could tell him anything—about Xanda, the labyrinths. Someday I might even tell him about Andre.

Need to talk
, Kamran’s text had said. We’d barely spoken since I left in July, only a few clipped conversations and a backlog of unanswered messages—his and mine. I would have to tell him when I saw him. It would be his secret, too.

I shut myself in the bathroom. Stripping down had become a ritual at camp: hoping, checking, nothing. Delaney once said, “I don’t worry too much if I only miss one.” What if I’d missed two?

If it doesn’t happen today,
I thought,
I’ll take a test
. But I’d have to see Kamran first.
Be wrong.

Downstairs, my mom typed away on her laptop. “…Then the narrator, he’ll be telling the backstory at this point, drumming up sympathy for the grand finale, the final moment when she reveals…oh, yes!” The sound of her whispering lines had exactly the same effect as a cheese grater on the back of my neck.

“Mom, can I use the car? I’ve gotta run some errands.” Kamran would probably be at Big Boss now, or at his parents’ restaurant.

“Okay, honey,” she said distractedly. “Pick up a new toothbrush, will you? After two months at camp, yours is probably disgusting.”

“Sure.” The drugstore was already on my list.

“Oh, I forgot to mention—Delaney called,” Mom sang as I reached the front door. “Back from her trip to Amsterdam?” She sure did like that Delaney girl. I would have to call her when I got back.

A half hour later, I steered around the massive Big Boss parking lot. A woman with a toddler rolled a cart piled high with diapers to an SUV while the car in front of me flipped on a blinker.

“Come on,” I muttered, swinging wide with the Lexus.

That’s when I saw him, looking not quite like himself in the red Big Boss vest and chasing down stray shopping carts, but entirely like the person whose body and soul had touched mine. I didn’t even realize how much I’d missed him until now.

Only he wasn’t alone.

He was with her. Delaney. Wearing a matching vest, hips
peeking out over her jeans as she slapped him on the butt.

The ground started sliding out from under me.

He laughed.

Collided a cart into hers.

Sent everything reeling, fissures cracking until I could no longer stand the pressure of my body, certain to implode at any moment.

I peeled out of the parking lot before either of them could spot me. There was a drugstore to find, a toothbrush to buy.

Not to mention a pregnancy test.

Things could have been different if Delaney had chosen Brielle Peterson to show her around school last spring instead of me.

She landed in my first-period class in the empty seat next to me, a left-handed desk relegated to the back corner of the room. While the teacher droned on about world events and our role in them, I decorated my notes with an epic, convoluted network of lines and swirls.

“Psst.” The new girl leaned over her desk to get a closer look. “What are you drawing?”

“Just…drawing,” I mumbled. In fact, I was trying to remember the exact shape of the poem Kamran had shown me, the words curling from one branch to the next. She sat back again, scrutinizing her iPhone.

I’d heard about Delaney Pratt. Getting the boot from View Ridge Prep gave her instant mystique, especially at Elna Mead, home to a small army of punkalikes who were collectively spellbound by her hoarse laugh, street style, and ability to attract the attention of any straight male in the vicinity. Rumors swirled around her. Her dad was a Boeing exec, so whatever she’d done to get kicked out had to be huge.

When the bell rang, the teacher reached out for Brielle, junior-class president and leader of tomorrow. Delaney stood next to me, her hair falling in ripples over a shredded silk jacket, coiling around her limbs like nubby snakes. Something about her seemed terribly, wonderfully familiar.

The rest of the class scurried out the door while Brielle sized her up. As I gathered my book and papers, Brielle was saying, “Sure, I’d be happy to show her around.”

Delaney’s footsteps slowed. “Oh, thanks, but I already found someone to give me the tour.” To me, she whispered, “What’s your name again?”

“Rand.” The teacher shrugged. Brielle rolled her eyes and stalked out.

“God,
thank you
.” Delaney was rifling through her oversized bag as we walked out together.

“So, um, I guess I can show you to your next class. Do you have a list?”

She found her keys next to a pack of Marlboros and put a cigarette behind her ear and the keys between her teeth. “Not likely,” she muttered. She started toward the parking lot as the last of the students trickled into their classrooms,
leaving me standing in the hall. “Coming?”

Essence would be waiting in chem but would forget all about me once she landed in drama with Eli. Kamran would be waiting for me after the last bell rang.

“Sure,” I said, just before I caught up.

We wound our way around Lake Washington Boulevard in Delaney’s Audi through a corridor of eight-foot laurels. A few sweeping estates spilled down the hill to the edge of the lake, just the sort of property my mom would have traded an eye for. Delaney’s dad owned one of them.

In the granite-and-steel kitchen, Delaney poured herself a drink. She took one look at me and laughed. “If you think this is wild, you should meet my big brother, Dylan. He throws the most outrageous Halloween parties—come October, I’ll take you. It’ll crack open your universe.” She took a gulp of her milky amber concoction. “Want some?”

“Won’t your dad notice?”

She snorted. “I’d have to throw myself off a bridge for my dad to notice.”

I knew exactly what she meant.

After my trip to Big Boss, I couldn’t face my mom alone. I couldn’t face anyone. I drove around numbly until I found a random drugstore to buy the test. And, of course, the toothbrush. But no amount of brushing could scrub away the hurt and panic I was feeling.

Kamran called twice that week, but I didn’t trust myself to talk to him. Not now.

When I got home from the drug store, I’d hidden the test in the secret passage between Xanda’s and my rooms. No one would look for it there.

What if he was only calling to break up with me? Telling him now would be like playing a trump card but losing the game. He had to
want
to fly away with me, like Andre did with Xanda. I could tell him then. I would take the test and we could figure out what to do together.

After his third message, I called back.

“You’re home.” Just hearing the crack in his voice threatened to break my resolve.

My throat caught with the words I wanted to say.
I miss you
. And I drew a breath to say them when he cut in.

“I need to talk to you…” He trailed off as a girl’s laughter crackled in the background.

“Who’s that?” I asked, trying to sound casual.

“I’m at work.” Static whirled like a wind tunnel. “Hey, I can’t really talk now. I’m trying to cram in hours before Monday. But I can call you later, or—”

Another voice muttered in the background, something starting with “Dude…”

“I need to talk to you, too. When can I see you?”

Kamran came back on the line. “A bunch of us are going to Chop Suey tonight.”

“A bunch of us?”

“Yeah. Me, Delaney…”

“Delaney? Back from Amsterdam?”

“Yeah. About that…”

I knew all about that. While I finger painted and kept middle graders from sneaking off into the woods, Kamran spent the summer loading family reunion–sized bags of pretzels and motor oil with Delaney. Maybe he was wooing her with descriptions of the space-time continuum. Maybe she had caught him in the sphinx’s gaze of her perfect chest. Maybe I should stop before I drove myself crazy.

“…she didn’t go to Amsterdam.”

“Really.”

“Her dad found out about us crashing at his cabin, so he canceled her trip, made her get a job—”

“That’s what she said?” I felt myself shaking. “And neither one of you told me?”

Pause. “Wait a second. Why are you getting all worried about this?”

“Maybe because you didn’t mention it?”

“I didn’t mention it because…” He stopped himself. “You’re right. I should have said something. I figured Delaney would have told you.”

I knew what he would say—I was being insecure. Why did I worry so much? What did I think Delaney had that I didn’t? Wasn’t she supposed to be my friend?

“You don’t even
know
her,” I said hoarsely. Maybe I didn’t either.

“You don’t have to come tonight,” he said. “I just thought…” The static went quiet again until I could hear the sound of his breath.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll see you there.”