The Last Time We Were Us (22 page)

It’s true. Innis didn’t hurt Jason until he knew he was hanging out with me.

Everything is going to be all right.

Lizzie, you are so naive.

My phone dings, and I lift it up.

hey sexy

It hits the wall with a thud, the glass turning to spider-web cracks.

I look down at the newspaper clippings in the box. I don’t think I’ve ever hated printed words so much before.

I pick them up and start to rip, and I don’t stop until they’re all done, broken, disjointed, hundreds of tiny pieces you can’t put back together.

Chapter 20

I
LOCK MYSELF IN MY ROOM, SCREENING BOTH
M
AC
K
ENZIE
’
S
and Innis’s calls, rereading
The Age of Innocence
for probably the third or fourth time in a desperate attempt to distract myself.

A little after two, I hear the double
ding-dong
, MacKenzie’s signature. Mom answers, and there are muffled pleasantries, then hushed voices as she tells her, most likely, that I’ve been in a bad mood all afternoon.

Kenzie patters up the stairs, then knocks on the door, doesn’t wait for an answer, turns it. It’s locked.

“I don’t want to talk,” I say.

“Is this about the other day?” she says through the door. “I’m sorry. Payton told me he didn’t even say anything.”

I drag myself off of the bed, where I’ve been sitting for the last hour or so, losing my place on the page. I unlock the door, whip it open.

“Payton’s a liar.”

“God.” She steps around me and inside my room. “You look horrible.” She leans over my computer, turns off the muted, weepy sounds of the most depressing band I could think of
.
“Nothing like feel-good music to get you out of a slump.”

I shut the door behind me and turn the music back on.

She puts her hands on her hips. “What do you want me to do? I’m sorry. I really am. I can’t undo it now.”

Certainly not, I think. The damage is done.

I feel my lip beginning to quiver as I try to form the words. She rushes up to me, wraps me in a hug, her toned softball arms squeezing me tight. That’s when the tears start—
again
—when my mascara runs all over her shirt and my breaths come in gasps. She pulls back and grabs a tissue from my nightstand. I don’t refuse it.

“Sit down.” She pulls me onto the bed. Her voice is low, the six-inch kind they always wanted us to use in school. “What happened?”

“Innis and I hung out last night.” I briefly consider telling her everything, but the folly of my mistake, my misjudgment silences me. I take a quick sharp breath, just enough to get the last part out. “And after he drove me home, he went over to Jason’s house, and he beat the crap out of him.”

I wait for shock and surprise, but she doesn’t flinch, just stands up, grabs another tissue, hands it to me. She waits until I’m done crying, until my breathing steadies, to speak.

“Liz,” she begins, then pauses. Her eyes are icy. “I don’t want this to come off as unfeeling or anything, because you really look upset, but I just have to ask.” Another pause. “Why are you so upset?”

I stare at her, incredulous. She is not moving to hug me. She is not putting a hand on my shoulder. She’s just looking at me, cold and inquisitive.

“What do you mean?”

She looks down at her nails, back to me.

“As far as I can tell, Innis likes you, wants to be serious with you,
is
getting serious with you, and got a little jealous.” She pauses for effect. “So I’m asking why you’re so upset.”

I feel fresh tears again, but I will them back, into myself, a part of myself she can’t see from the outside, that is deeper than she will ever know. “He didn’t just get
a little jealous.
He attacked him. You should have seen him—”

She shrugs and chuckles. A boy is badly hurt and she has the nerve to
chuckle
. “I mean he kind of had it coming, didn’t he? If someone had done something to Lyla, wouldn’t you be all over them? Wouldn’t you want to hurt them however you could?”

The thought hits me hard. Someone did do something to Lyla—Jason. But I’m not hurting him. I’m the one sticking up for him.

“Yeah, but—”

“But what? Really. What?”

“But you should have seen him.”

She raises her eyebrows. “I’m pretty sure whatever they did was still not permanently disfiguring.”

The word catches me, a slap in the face. “They?”

Her body tenses up as she realizes her mistake.

“He,” she says. “Innis.” She won’t look me in the eyes anymore.

“Right.”
My heart pounds with anger, betrayal. “Then why aren’t you surprised?”

“’Cause he had it coming. I told you.”

“Stop lying,” I snap. “Stop it. You come over here, all ‘Payton didn’t say anything,’ but you know he did. Because you know he and Innis went over there together.”

She starts picking at her nail polish, like an answer is underneath, just one coat down, if she just chips it away enough.

“I’m right, aren’t I? Payton helped him?”

She doesn’t look up.

“And you knew about it?”

Keeps on chipping.

“And you didn’t think to tell me? You didn’t try to stop them?”

“What do you want me to say?” she demands. “I didn’t
want
to stop them. You needed a wake-up call. You needed to remember who this person is. What you’re trying to give up for him.” She pauses for breath. “Don’t you realize what you’re doing? Things are going perfectly. Things are never perfect, but they are. Next year could be the best year ever. You and Innis and me and Payton. Have you even thought about that? And you’re ruining everything. For a person who you can’t even bear to be seen with in public? For someone you have to keep secret from your whole family? For someone who ruined your
sister’s
life
?
What are you thinking?”

“I don’t know.” I almost feel like I can’t breathe. “I don’t know what I’m thinking. But I am, and I can’t help it or change it.”

MacKenzie shrugs. “I don’t know how to help you, then.”

I stare at her, longing for what we had—was it only a few weeks ago?—swim, sun, flirt, repeat. How did we become so different, so quickly?

“If you’re just going to try and make me feel bad, then go. I don’t need guilt—from you, of all people.”

She stands, backs up, walks to the door. Before she goes, she turns to me, and I want her to say a million different things, but she doesn’t. “See you later then.”

She shuts the door behind her, and I feel trapped and angry and disappointed. I hear her say good-bye to my mother, then watch from my window as she walks across the street and towards her house. As soon as she’s gone, I grab my keys and head downstairs.

“I’m going out.” I don’t wait for an answer.

I leave my phone behind, but I turn the radio as loud as it goes, roll down the windows.

There are no cars in the lot of Wellesley’s Grove, so I park, hike down to the middle.

I walk beneath the trees I’ve known for years, and I think about the years since Jason left, how I got rid of Lizzie, became Liz, made myself anew.

I think of how much I traded just to be popular.

It was around April that Innis actually realized I existed—we’d been in chem together all year, sitting at those high black tables in our stools with that weird eye-washer thing dividing us, but he spent most of the class bouncing around to the different lab groups, talking to Alex about cars and fishing and parties I wasn’t invited to. And when it was time to pair up, I was always with Veronica.

Even after she stopped eating lunch with me and MacKenzie, Veronica and I stayed lab partners. It was easier to be friends in chem, without MacKenzie around. It was our second year as lab partners: We’d trudged through biology the year before. She’d made fun of me ceaselessly when I had to get a note to skip the dissection portion, because I faint at the sight of blood, something I discovered at nine, when Jason fell off his bike right in front of me. Veronica was great at lab, deftly adjusting the microscope I could never get to work. She’d observe, and I’d take notes.

It was funny how it happened—so easy, so simple and cheesy, like a script from a movie. Innis turned to me, locked his eyes on mine, and asked me to be his lab partner for the day. Maybe it was just because Alex was out. Or maybe it was because MacKenzie and I had actually been to one of the popular crowd’s parties.

But it doesn’t matter why he asked. I said yes.

I caught Veronica’s eyes and shrugged. She stared at me until I shrugged again, then knit her eyebrows, whipped around, slammed her book on the desk, and scooted her stool so it made an awful screech on the dusty linoleum. Even Ms. Philips took notice, glancing from me to her with this look, like—
girls, he’s not worth it.

I suppose I knew what I was doing in that moment—that our friendship would be over.

But it was
Innis.

I know it wasn’t my proudest moment. I know I’m a horrible friend. But when Innis Taylor looks at you with those piercing eyes and asks you a question, the only possible answer is yes.

None of our lab results matched up with Ms. Philips’s that day. Without Veronica, I was at a loss, and Innis wasn’t one for paying attention. But we continued to be lab partners for the last couple of months of the year. And since it was last period, sometimes he’d walk out with me, follow me to my locker, then to my car. I’d lean back on the Honda, he’d lean in towards me, and we’d talk about things—I don’t even remember what they were now, just things.

And then we made out at that graduation party, and even though that didn’t exactly go how I’d expected, he soon learned that Kenzie and I had fakes, and that’s around the time MacKenzie developed her plan for the Perfect Senior Year. She and Payton, me and Innis.

Sometimes, the stone starts rolling so fast you don’t know how to stop it. “Gathers no moss,” my foot. As if change is the good thing, stasis the bad. What if you move so fast, let the momentum take you, carry you, to somewhere else, someplace you never dreamed you’d be, but then you get there, and you don’t even know who you are?

W
HEN
I
GET
back to my house,
Innis’s
car is in front. My mind begins to race. He probably thought I was just being coy by ignoring him, that everything is fine.

I want more than anything to drive somewhere else, wait him out, but if I know my mother, she’ll keep him guzzling sweet tea and chatting away for hours on end.

So I park next to his spotless car, without a hood-to-trunk keying, and flip the mirror down. I look a mess, my eyes red and puffy from crying, mascara smeared along the bottom of my eyelids. I run my hands in fists beneath them, trying to make myself presentable, comb my fingers through my hair.

Lucy rushes up to me as soon as I open the front door, and I lift her up, snuggle against her. She licks my cheek.

I hear voices, Mom, Dad, and Innis. Laughing and talking loudly.

Innis is sitting at the kitchen table, as if one of the family already.

Mom looks up at me. “Where’ve you been? We tried calling you but your phone’s in your room.”

“Out,” I say. “I forgot it.”

She narrows her eyes at me, but she’s too happy to question it, sitting there, basking in the glory of having Innis Taylor in
her
kitchen.

Innis shoots me a smile straight off a magazine cover.

“What are you doing here?” I ask.

“Liz!”
Mom gasps like I’ve burped in front of the president.

Innis laughs, looks at Dad. “It’s okay, I’ve grown used to her bluntness.”

Dad laughs with him.
Look, the pretty little lady is being spunky. She’s got a mouth on her, doesn’t she? Don’t tell
her
to get in the kitchen.

I want to throw up.

Mom doesn’t laugh, at least. “Innis dropped by to see you. We invited him in,
of course
.” She emphasizes the last two words like, without her, I’d be a social disaster. Maybe I would. Who knows, maybe I am.

I force my face into a smile. “Oh,” I say.
“Cool.”
My words sound wrong, like I’m a reality-show character, trying to sound unscripted.

“Sit down,” Mom says. “Have some tea.”

I follow her orders. She pours me a glass, and I focus on it, like drinking sweet tea is my only goal in life. Innis smiles again, and I dutifully smile back.

He talks to Dad about NASCAR, about the renovations his parents are thinking about making to Crawford Hall—stuff he’d never talk to me about, because I’m not a guy—and Mom soaks it up like a fat, thirsty sponge. I sit there and watch this spectacle, trying to hold it together until I have a chance to talk to Innis alone.

I feel sick all over from the shame of how stupid I have been. I indulged in his so-called forgiveness, in MacKenzie’s excitement, in my mother’s urgings. Just twenty-four hours ago, this scene would have been my crowning achievement—and yet, even though I’m still sore from having sex with him, now everything feels wrong.

I drain my glass as quickly as I can.

“You want to go on a walk?” I ask, turning to Innis. “It’s nice out. I’ll show you the pond.”

Innis nods. “Sure.”

I push my chair back, and Innis follows suit. He says his
thank-you
s, Mom asks him to stay for dinner, but he thankfully says no, he’s got a family thing tonight, he’ll have to get back pretty soon. I grab the house key, and we’re almost out, away from them, when Dad stops him. “Well, see you in a month, then. If not before.”

I turn back. “A month?”

“Lyla’s wedding,” he says. “August sixth.
Duh
.” Dad thinks he’s so funny, that I’m so clueless.

And I have been clueless. But not about that.

“Oh yeah.” I turn up the corners of my mouth like I’m supposed to, and I force myself to walk normally to the door, not to stomp.

When we’re down the street, away from the view of my house, on the wooded path that leads to the pond, Innis holds my hand. Grabs it, really, as if I have no choice.