Underneath Everything (18 page)

“Sí,”
I say. “
Estoy perdida.
”
I’m lost,
I tell them. As the words leave my lips, I feel it again. I jerk my head up, and there she is: her dark hair hanging so straight it looks wet, her hazel eyes locked on me, her palm pressed against the square of glass, her scar darker than it should be. I blink my eyes, raise my own hand without thinking.

One of the sweater vests sighs in front of me, cocks her head. “Are we doing this or not?” she asks. I look at her, then back to the door again. Jolene’s gone.

“Or not,” I say. I cut through the conversations of stilted Spanish and wrestle my bag from the pile on the windowsill. The strap burns when I slide it over my bare shoulder, but I don’t wince. I don’t give a shit. The bell rings. The sweater vests split as I walk through them.

I steel myself in the hall on the way to history.
I am not shiny and pink.
Gym.
But a scab on top of
new skin. .
Psychology.
I am sealed.
Physics.
She can’t get in.

I don’t see Jolene.

By the time I’m walking to lunch, I feel okay again—solid all the way through to my center.

Hard-core.

I toss my hair and hitch up my bag, feel my shirt rise, showing an inch of skin along my stomach. I know it’s pale next to Hudson’s black T-shirt, not because I’m looking, but because they are; every backpack-carrying, book-switching, makeup-fixing kid in the hall pauses when I pass. Their stares blaze.

But after a year of invisibility, it’s a warm, welcome weight. I wear it down the center of the hall and throw open the door to the cafeteria.

The air is heavy with meat and grease, burned bread and sweat, but today there’s something sweet mixed in.

“Mats!” Bella calls over the crowd, giving me the beauty queen treatment: tight-lipped smile, rotating wave. She’s spun halfway around in her seat, talking to a junior from the football team, arching her back, laughing. Across from Bella, bent over a messy pile of loose-leaf paper, her dark-red curls spilling onto the table and down the back of a fitted, striped sweater I don’t recognize, is Kris, in her old seat. I drop my bag on the floor and sit down next to her, into mine.

“Hey.” We’re not phantom limbs anymore but the real thing, back in our original places, at our original table. Well, almost. One seat is empty.

As Bella air kisses the junior good-bye, Kris looks me over—Hudson’s cut shirt, my low-rise jeans, the stretch of exposed shoulder where my split ends hit my collarbone—and raises her eyebrows.

I lift my chin in response.

Neither of us speaks. But that’s how it’s been lately. First because Kris was grounded and then because when her week-long sentence ended, my afternoons with Hudson didn’t. And with Bella joining us in the car and the cafeteria, the only time we have left is a few free minutes in the journalism room before the bell each morning, but for the past week I’ve been using that to finish homework. She doesn’t even know I left my phone at Hudson’s last week.

Kris curls her hands around her Coke and turns back to Bella.

“I’d totally make up with Jolene,” Bella says, dropping her enormous studded purse on the table and diving in with both hands and half her head. Tucks and folds of leather and gold expand and contract as she rummages through it and, finally, emerges with a compact. She clicks it open. “. . . if she’d just apologize. Hell, I’d probably even kiss her if she said pretty please.”

“Might not want to tell Cal that,” Kris says.

“Whatever,” Bella says from behind the compact. “We’re just hooking up. And anyway, he loves it.”

Bella and Kris banter like I’m not even here. It’s amazing to me how quickly they fell back into the old rhythm—Bella’s sing-song laugh, Kris’s cutting commentary—and how quickly Jolene fell out of it. But then, that’s the answer, isn’t it: now Kris and Bella share a common enemy.

“I think you need to practice some anger encouragement,” Kris says to Bella. “Like, some people need anger management. And you need the opposite.”

“I hate fighting.” Bella blinks her eyes, blows herself a kiss, snaps her compact, and shoves it back inside her bag. “What’s the point? My mom’s angry enough for the whole world when she’s sober. Which Jolene totally knows. Which is exactly why I need the apology.”

“Which is why you need to get the hell out of here as much as I do.”

I let their voices recede into the banged plates, shouts, and shoved trays around us until it’s all a solid piece of sound. My eyes drift toward the door. The square of glass, just like the one in Spanish class. I see her hand again—our scar—pressed flat against the pane. I run my thumb over the raised line on my palm

—a reflex—before folding my hand into a fist.

“How’s
your
list coming, Mattie?” Kris asks. I pry my eyes away from the door and toward her voice.

“What list?” I ask.

Kris pulls a yellow pencil out of the curls coming loose on top of her head and taps it against a sheet of blank paper.

“I mean, I don’t see what the big deal is,” Bella says, filling in the crack in the conversation. “My parents both went to Ivy League colleges, and look where it got them. They don’t even talk to each other.

Make me a list of schools ranked by fun and then
maybe
I’ll consider one.”

Kris sketches something as Bella runs through the endless list of qualities she’s considering in a college: fraternities and sororities, parties, holiday celebrations (
hello! Halloween!
), Division I sports teams (for cheering purposes), location (spring break opportunities). . . . Kris lifts her pencil and spins the piece of paper into the middle of the table. Bella twists her torso to look.

“You just did this?” Bella asks Kris. “It’s, like, an actual list of schools for partying you just pulled from memory?”

“Makes sense, since Kris picked a college in fifth grade,” I say.

“True.” Kris sticks the pencil back through her curls. “But I’m still considering all my options.” She pushes the paper all the way across the table. “Here. It’s yours.”

“Really?” Bella scans the page with her pointer finger, moving her freshly lined lips as she silently reads Kris’s notes, which are printed neatly across rows and down columns.

Kris presses her stomach into the table and seesaws toward Bella so she can glide her finger across the upside-down grid.

“I circled the safe schools, squared the average, and starred the reach.” Kris swings back until she’s sitting on her seat again.

“You really think I could get into Rutgers?” Bella asks.

“Why not?” Kris shrugs. “You’re captain of the cheer squad, and you won some of the drama competitions at the Paper Mill Playhouse last year, didn’t you? And even though you don’t try in school, you did decent on your SATs. Anyway, even if you didn’t have all those things, it’s a reach. Someone’s got to get in.”

“I’m totally someone!” Bella jokes.

Kris raises her Coke like she’s toasting.

My eyes drift toward the cafeteria door again.

“Which applications have
you
finished?” Kris asks. It takes me a second to realize she’s speaking to me—that Bella’s back behind her compact with her entire stock of eye makeup lined up on the table in front of her.

“None,” I tell her.

“Deadline’s coming up.”

“You’ve said.” For as long as I can remember, Kris has been waiting for this—December, our senior year—the month she can finally send in her applications and start disengaging for real.

Kris finishes the last sip of her Coke and sets down the can with a hard
click
.

“Is it him?” Kris asks, her voice barely audible over the overlapping conversations in the cafeteria. If I didn’t know it so well, I might not have heard it. But I do. And I did.

I lean over the table, lower my voice to match Kris’s. “Is
what
him?”

“Is Hudson the reason you’re wearing those clothes, ignoring your phone, and talking as much as a first-year foreign exchange student?”

“No.”

“Because he’s not worth it.”

“And Jim is?”

“I didn’t change anything for him,” Kris says, tapping her empty can on the table.

“Maybe that’s the problem.”

“Jim and I don’t have a problem. He knows it’s over when we graduate.”

“Do you think that changes the fact that he’s in love with you? Or do you just not care?”

Kris looks over her shoulder, then back at me. Her lips move like she wants to say something, but instead she sits up and sighs. It’s a rare victory, to leave Kris speechless, but it doesn’t feel like a win.

“Just—don’t tell me what Hudson’s worth, okay? You don’t know him.”

“Fine. I don’t know him. But I know that no guy is worth it.”

I don’t argue with her. On this we agree. We always have. That’s why it’s so disappointing that she can’t, for a second, believe me.

“I told you. It’s not about him.” Kris has been friends with Bella again for a week, and she’s telling her she can get into Rutgers. She’s been mine since grade school, but she can’t imagine me reaching for anything. Being different. Better.

“Weird timing then.” Kris shrugs.

I grab my bag from the floor before she can say anything else. “See you at the car,” I say, with a quick wave. Bella blows me a kiss from behind her compact, but Kris keeps quiet as I head for the doors and what I know is beyond them: brisk wind, warm sun, red cheeks, dark hair, deep breaths. Someone who believes there’s more to me.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

CHAPTER 19

I TAKE QUICK steps across the gray pavement toward Hudson. He’s in loose jeans, soft at the knees, and a flannel shirt, cuffs unbuttoned, collar flapping. Dead leaves spin at his feet, lift up into the field, and flatten against the surrounding trees, whose branches blow into impossible curves before snapping back against the strength of the coming storm.

He’s looking down when I push his headphones off his ears and press myself against him with a hard kiss. He pulls away at first, surprised. But I keep my hand on his neck, my eyes closed, and my mouth open, until his stiff lips soften and his head tilts. I kiss him until the only thing I can hear is my heart and his breath and the music—something acoustic—floating up from his headphones. And when I’m finished

—when our noses touch and we’re taking fast, white breaths—I try to kiss him again, but he closes his hands around my shoulders and holds me where I am, his expression as dark and tight-knit as the cloud cover above us.

“What?” I ask. It’s not the first time he’s stopped me, or himself.

His grip tightens before he lets go of me completely and leans back against the bike racks. I shove my hands into my pockets, find my lighter, and form a fist around it.

He shakes his head. And as he does, the wind kicks up. Whistling. Whispering.

Jolene.

I wonder if he’s heard it too—the two syllables, so familiar, springing from people’s lips like a hiss, a hush, a secret. Or if his headphones block that out as well.

“Tell me,” I say, my voice pushing back since my hands and lips can’t.

“Nothing. You just . . .” He pauses. His shoulders rise and sink, like he’s made a decision. “Just nothing,” he says, and starts walking toward the building. I rush to catch up. The first bell rings as I follow him through parked cars.

“Hudson.” I grab his hand at the top of the steps. He stops and faces me, his fingers rigid, his expression solemn. “Is this about what everyone’s saying?” I ask.

Is it about her?

“Yeah.”

“Oh.”

Hudson shakes his head. “I mean, no. It’s about everyone, but I don’t give a shit what they’re saying.”

“Right,” I say. “Me neither.” I lift my eyes to his. I try to make them hard, to be the girl he sees when he looks at me. The one he’s certain of. But Hudson’s not looking at me. He’s not really looking at anything. He’s thinking. And no matter what he says, I’ve got to believe it’s about Jolene. He was certain of her once, too. He’s got to be wondering how she is, where she’s been.

There’s a bang behind the door. It shakes, like something’s trying to escape.

Hudson sets his deep-sea eyes on mine. Behind him, a cloud shifts, shadowing his face, darkening the sky. “Later, okay? Not here,” he says. “Come over.”

“Come over,” Jolene said, her voice thin, shaking.

I nod.

The second bell rings. We go in.

“Jolene?” My voice came out thick and slow, heavy with sleep. I took my phone away from my cheek
and squinted at the time: 12:30 a.m. Then I shut my eyes again and pressed the phone to my ear.

“Sneak out. You can walk to my house.” I could hear her breath, quick and close to the phone.

“Now?” Lying in the dark, listening to Jolene’s voice, was confusing. It had been a month since the
ropes, since we’d spoken.

“Leave your parents a note, tell them you went for an early walk. I know they sleep in. They’d
never notice. Just—come over.”

I blinked myself awake. It may have been a month, but I hadn’t forgotten what Jolene sounded like
when she needed me.

“Okay.”

“I’m in my room,” she said. Then she must have hung up, because the call ended.

I got up, threw on clothes, splashed water on my face, and hit the road.

Outside, the streets were the way I’d always imagined them: clear, cold, open. The road unfolded
before me. I crossed blocks and divisions, walked over numbers and through colors, toward the center
of Sanborn’s 1920, where Jolene’s street sat, dressed in cardboard brown and adorned in hand-drawn
letters. It wasn’t until the tip of my nose started to sting ten minutes in that reality set in. I wasn’t
walking a map in my head. I was outside, and it was freezing.