Underneath Everything (16 page)

Hudson parks across from Lake Surprise, on a small hill I know only as a few curved elevation lines on my map. I’ve never seen it in person, and now I know why. Long, low branches and oversize leaves hang between the car and the road.

We’re hidden.

This is what I’ve always wanted: him and me. Us.

So why does it feel like it’s not enough?

Hudson cracks the window the slightest bit. For a second I go cold, until he leans toward me and I feel the heat coming from his body. “Out there on the cliff. Your laugh,” he says. I bring my hand to my mouth, remembering the strange sound. He noticed. “You laugh the same.”

“The same as who?” I ask.

“As you,” he says, fighting back a smile. “You laugh just like you used to.”

“I do?” I ask, because I don’t feel like I used to. I feel like an abandoned shell. Hollow. Ready to house new claws.

I drop my hand from my lips. Hudson’s thumb replaces it.

A car comes around the curve. Light rushes across Hudson’s face, showing the cluster of freckles on his forehead, the length of his dark eyelashes, the corners of his lip as it curls, comes closer. Then it’s dark again, and difficult to see. But I can smell his breath—that particular brand of mint—his woodsy deodorant, and, right before we kiss, the thing that doesn’t smell like anything else, except him.

I press my lips against his. I taste the dark corners of his kiss. But it’s not enough to fill the emptiness.

It’s just a dent. A tiny speck. So I tilt my head, snake my hand around the back of his neck, and pull him into me.

I kiss him hard, hungry, like I don’t give a shit.

“Wait,” he whispers, lips still so close, almost touching.

“What?” I ask, worried I’ve done something wrong. That he can see right through, to the real me. The wind picks up outside. Branches scrape the car windows. I wait for him to say it. That I’m a fraud. A fake. That I’m pretending.

“Just.”—Hudson swallows, licks his lips—“slow down.” He runs his hands along my arms and slides his fingers between mine. Then he curls and closes them—locking us together.

The song switches. First comes the rough strum of a guitar, then the voice: not so much singing as talking to me. Smooth, sincere, deep—so deep and dense it fills the space between my lungs and heart until I shake, like I’m the one singing, like the sound is moving through me.

“Okay,” I whisper, shifting my hold on his hand. The inside of my finger hits something hard. I unclasp our hands and place mine under his, propping it up so I can get a better look at the thick, silver ring.

“A gift,” he says.

“From Jolene,” I guess.

“I wasn’t going to bring her up”—Hudson glances at our hands, then back up at me—“but yeah.” He balls his hand into a fist. “I don’t know why I still wear it. Sorry.”

“It’s okay.” I don’t know if it’s the music, or the hard-core girl Hudson thinks I am, or the heady smell of him mixed with the smoky scent of early evening, or if we’ve actually altered history—gone back to a time before she lived within me and redrew the boundaries—but I don’t care that we’re talking about Jolene.

I run my thumb over the ring, then place my fingers on either side and tug. At first it doesn’t budge, but on my second try it gives a little. Hudson spreads his fingers, pulls hard in the opposite direction. When it’s off, he flexes his hand, holds it up, and turns it back and forth in the line of moonlight through the windshield. I set the ring on the dashboard and trace the pale strip of skin circling his finger. I can’t take my eyes off it, this soft, pristine piece of him. I can’t stop thinking about how it’s been there all this time, trapped underneath the ring. “We can talk about her if you want.”

She’s here anyway. In the scar on my palm, the line on his skin. We’re both branded.

“No,” Hudson says, with a brusque shake of his head. “I don’t.”

Hudson presses his palm to my cheek. He leans close, then closer; and when he’s closest, his freckles blend together in a blur. Strands of his hair fall across my cheek and tickle my eyelids as he kisses me.

His hands find my waist. The bottom of my sweater. They pause.

I lean across the console. It digs into my hip bone, but I want more of his lips and hands and the breath he takes every few seconds, like he has to come up for air. I slide my hand under his jacket and up onto the waist of his jeans. I touch my thumb to his skin. He jumps. My hands are cold. He pauses for a second, but I keep going. I’ve never done this before, but it’s like something inside of me knows what to do, and it’s taking over.

I tip my head sideways, move slowly at first, then faster. He follows my lead. I dip my shoulder, expose my neck. His mouth moves over it. I lift my chin. He unzips my jacket. But it’s still not enough. So I lean farther over the console, twisting my torso, pushing the sides of my feet against the floor until I’m almost off the seat. Hudson pushes back against me. Lips, chest, cheeks, breath. His fingertips brush my shoulder. The touch is so warm I lose my footing and sink back into my seat.

And something sinks into me, piercing through my jeans and puncturing the skin on my hip. I flinch.

Hudson pulls away immediately, balls his hands into fists, and looks away from me.

“Sorry,” he says.

“No.” I run my hand along the side of my jeans and the length of the seat. “Something just . . .” My thumb hits metal, sharp and straight. I pluck it from the dark. “Here.” I hold it up to him. “This.”

It’s an earring.

I turn it around in the dim streaks of moonlight to get a better look, even though it feels familiar in my fingers. The three small, interlocking loops. The semiprecious stones hanging inside each one: emerald, amber, amethyst. Purple for me, green for Jolene, amber to bind us. Jolene found them in a sale basket in the back of an antique shop downtown. When the store clerk explained about the amber—how insects get trapped in the soft, sticky tree resin, then smothered as it flows and hardens around them—Jolene insisted on buying them. She wore them for weeks. The earring looks exactly the same as the day she found it. The only part that’s different is the end of the post—it’s slick and red where it cut me.

“That’s hers, too,” Hudson says, reaching for it.

“I know,” I say as he takes it away.

Hudson lowers the window. The cold creeps in, and the buzzing sounds of insects. When the window is halfway down, Hudson draws back his elbow and chucks the earring as far as he can. I watch it arc through the air and land in the middle of the road. “She left her shit everywhere.” He shakes his head. The window rises behind him. When it closes, the car is warm again. At least it should be. I cross my arms tight across my chest, but I can’t shake the chill.

“Listen, you don’t have to worry. It’s over with Jolene,” he says.

It’s over.

“No. I know.” I let out my breath until there’s nothing left.

Hudson taps a soft beat on his jeans, looks at me, turns up the heat. I blink my eyes. They’re sticky.

Dry.

“When did you know?” I ask.

“What?”

“That it was over?” The words feel like they’re being unearthed, drawn out from someplace deep inside me.

Hudson’s fingers fall flat against his leg. “Which time?” he asks with a flat laugh.

“What do you mean?”

“Jolene was a huge fan of the breakup. Big fight. Silent treatment. And then the whole ‘I need you. I don’t deserve you. There’s something wrong with me. Please. I love you.’ Rinse. Repeat. You know what I mean?”

I did.

“Right. But when was it real?”

Hudson’s eyes rise to the windshield, search for something beyond it. He parts his lips and takes a measured breath, like he’s testing the air, or himself.

“When she stopped meaning it.” He loops a loose thread around his finger and rips it from his jeans with a sharp jerk of his hand. “Or maybe when I stopped needing to hear it.”

He rolls the white thread between his fingers. “She used to do this thing when we were out drinking. It was pretty impressive, actually. She’d match me shot for shot. The first time I thought it was an act, you know? There she was in front of me with the glass in her hand and everybody watching, and this thing in her eyes, like she had to prove it. And I figured, ‘This isn’t going to end well.’ But most of the time she handled it like a pro. Until this one night. I mean, even
I
was having a tough time. There’s only so many shots of Jäger a guy can hold down. So I take care of it, right? I know it’s gross, sorry. Anyway, when I come back, she’s a mess. Bella brings her over to me, and at first I think she’s just drunk since she can barely stand up; but she was . . .”

Hudson pauses.

“What?”

He shakes the thread off his hands and takes a tired breath. “You have to understand; Jolene wasn’t the hot chick or the popular bitch with me. When we first got together, she was quiet. Goofy. Sad. We were both going through stuff at home. But a few months ago she got clingy. Vicious. I thought she was just dealing, you know? We’d both been through shit before. But this time she was taking it out on me. And that night when she said she needed me—she was yelling. She was angry. That’s when I knew, I think. That she didn’t need me, she needed somebody. And I was sick of trying to prove it was me.”

She needed somebody.

“She pulled the same shit before the bonfire.” Hudson stops, shifts his eyes away, then back to me.

I nod to let him know it’s okay. I know he was with Jolene before me the night of the bonfire. Even though he still doesn’t know I took her home.

She needed me.

Hudson looks down at the dash. “Anyway,” he says, “sorry. But you asked.”

Jolene needed me that night, but she doesn’t now.

I’m not hers anymore. And she’s not mine.

I take Hudson’s hand and slide it up my thigh. Then I close my eyes. Somewhere outside, the sound of an engine cuts the night. The insides of my eyelids flash red, then go black again.

And as Hudson’s fingers skim the top of my jeans, I imagine Jolene’s earring on the street, smashed to bits, all the trapped things inside the amber set free, their dead bodies tumbling into a new century.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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CHAPTER 16

I WAKE UP the next morning before my alarm. The sun is pale, and my parents are still asleep. I swing my legs out of bed and head for my desk. Getting up this early sucks, except for the fact that I won’t have to face my dad peering at me over his computer or my mom’s questions. I managed to avoid them last night by eating as fast as I could and claiming I had a ton of homework and college-application stuff to get through. I even laid out my books on my desk, flipped open my notebook, and fired up my computer. But I couldn’t bring myself to open my Excel spreadsheet or take a colored pencil from the cup in front of me.

Since I hadn’t made my list that morning, I couldn’t decide what to do first, so I didn’t do anything.

Instead, I scanned the usual antique sites and sellers on eBay.

An 1860 Kitchell map I’d been watching—not because I liked topographical stuff, but because it had a late date for hand painting—had sold for somewhere around five thousand dollars. I did a search for

“Westfield, NJ, original maps, 1901,” but nothing new came up. Until I scrolled to the bottom and found a seller named happyelizabeth. Her entry (full of exclamation marks and bold, brightly colored block letters) shouted:

“Found these boxes in my grandma’s attic! Have to sell her entire estate and don’t have

time to sort! Boxes are labeled by year, pick one and I’ll send! Could contain antique
artwork, drawings, maps, etc! Originals! She was a collector! Find a treasure!”

The pictures showed beat-up cardboard boxes full of paper. Even if there was something valuable in there, she definitely wasn’t taking care of it. The whole thing screamed scam, except for the price. Each box was up for fifty dollars. Not bad for a long shot. Since the auction didn’t end until December 26th, and there were no other offers, I bid fifteen dollars on the 1901 box and went to bed.

I settle into my desk chair and refresh my email to see if there’s any action at happyelizabeth, but the browser freezes, so I force quit. And while I wait for the computer to fake sleep and wake up functioning, I do my weekly rotation. I lift my Sanborn map from the nail behind my bed and lay it flat on my comforter, put the 1929 panoramic from Jake in its place, center the 1868 Colton original my parents gave me for my Bat Mitzvah above my dresser, and rehang the Sanborn above my desk. If I wasn’t worried about sun-bleached spots, I’d keep the Sanborn above my bed. It’s the only one I bought myself. Not that the Colton map isn’t nice, but my parents don’t get it. My mom probably picked the Colton map because it has ornate borders and decorative lettering. Jake probably chose the panoramic because it has a cool point of view. And it does. No doubt. But that’s sort of the problem with both of them. All these mapmakers—Colton, even Kitchell—they all had an agenda. Colton was a New York publisher who used fancy metal plates for his engravings because he wanted to build a good reputation. Kitchell fought the government to finish his map because he wanted to document New Jersey’s topography. But the Sanborn maps, they’re transparent. Stark lines for streets. Unadorned boxes for buildings. Crisp block lettering, bare as bone on the white sheet. Nothing pretty. No agenda. Nothing but the real thing.

Which is why I want to find that missing sheet of the 1901 map so badly. Because even though Westfield Township was formed in 1794, it didn’t finish forming for another hundred years or so.