All Unquiet Things (15 page)

“If you want to preserve your relationship, you might want to get over the need to have the last word,” I advised.

“That’s it?”

“I don’t know what else to tell you.”

She grimaced. “I hate when people say that.”

I shouldn’t have been so dismissive of Audrey, because later, when Carly began to act similarly toward me, Audrey
wasn’t disposed to offer me any solace. But by the time I had become desperate enough to seek Audrey’s sympathy, things had gotten completely out of my control.

As the months passed, Carly and I began to fight. She darted away from me faster than I could pursue her, and soon I started to see her less frequently outside of school. Entire weekends would go by without a phone call, and I would go places in town—anywhere, really, that she might have gone—in the hopes of running into her, of catching a glimpse of her as if she were some rare bird in the jungle.

I knew what she was doing. She told me herself.

“I missed you this weekend,” I said to her one morning, catching her hand. “I called you. Where were you?”

She shrugged. “I went out with Audrey and her friends.”

“What, you mean Cass and all them?”

“Yeah, Cass and Audrey and Adam and Lucy,” Carly said, acting as though it were no big deal.

“Adam? You’re hanging out with
him
?” I bit the inside of my mouth anxiously. “I wouldn’t do that, Carly. He’s bad news. You know, he’s a drug dealer.”

She shook her head. “He’s fine. He’s great, actually.”

“You aren’t—doing drugs, are you?” I asked cautiously.

“Excuse me?”

“Hey, I had to ask.” I held my hands up in surrender.

“Oh, really? What is that, like, Question Number Five in the Jealous Boyfriends’ Handbook?”

“You’re avoiding the question,” I pointed out, knowing what
that
meant.

“That’s because it was offensive,” she snapped. “I don’t do drugs, and, in case this was Question Number Six, I don’t
cheat
.”

“I wasn’t accusing you of—”

“Yes, you were, or you were about to. Either way, I can’t have this conversation with you now. We’ll talk later.”

“Yeah, we will,” I said stiffly. We turned our backs on each other and walked off in opposite directions.

Things steadily deteriorated. Carly spent more time with Audrey and her group, and I started to hear people whispering about her and Adam Murray. Adam was by far the worst person I had ever met, and it made me sick to think of her with him, but every time I asked her about it she brushed off the rumors, telling me that I was being paranoid.

“We’re just friends,” she would tell me. She had started dressing differently—she wrote off her old clothes as frumpy and put thousands of dollars of tight, expensive jeans and low-cut tank tops on her father’s credit card. She cut her hair, which had once reached way past her shoulders, and started highlighting it—streaks of mustard yellow, which looked like tarnish over her natural dark color. She began to wear more makeup, and one day I mistook her for Audrey from far away. She took it as a compliment.

Then she stopped talking about her mother. Right after Miranda died, we would have long conversations where Carly would tell me stories about what it was like growing up. Miranda had always seemed kind and generous, but Carly remembered her differently—a little judgmental, cold on occasion.
Everything Carly did as a child was meant to impress Miranda, every decision was weighed against what her mother would do or say. Carly missed her mother desperately, but part of her re-sented being left behind, and that part refused to canonize Miranda just because she was dead.

But now, when I tried to bring her mother up, Carly would give me a dark look, like I had betrayed her.

I let it go on far longer than I should have, but it’s not hard to see why. Carly wasn’t just my girlfriend; she was my best friend. She changed my life. The shy, anxious, and lonely boy I used to be had grown confident because of her; I began to see value in myself because she saw value in me, and if all I had to do to keep the illusion of that feeling was turn my head and ignore who she was becoming, well, that was something I was willing to do. It wasn’t easy at first, but then I started running; I pushed myself harder and faster every day, and the pain and exhaustion of suddenly becoming active after years of sloth was a welcome distraction from my tangled relationship with Carly.

About a month before the end of our freshman year, however, things started getting better. Carly spent more time with me than with anyone else; her partying days were a thing of the past, and she assured me that she was on my team again. She didn’t go back to the way she used to dress, but she toned down the makeup and let the highlights grow out, and she started working hard in school again. I felt that I could finally stop worrying about what was happening to her, because she had come back to me.

I don’t know how she convinced me to go to Cass Irving’s School’s Out for Summer party. I wasn’t used to denying Carly anything, but it wasn’t something I would ever agree to under normal circumstances. I hated Cass and Adam and their whole gang, and I could think of nothing worse than hanging out poolside with my classmates while they puked in the bushes. But I wanted to make Carly happy.

“It’ll be fun,” she promised, brightening when I said I would consider it. “Don’t think too hard—just say yes.”

She even drafted Audrey for the cause. “You should come to Cass’s party, Neily,” Audrey said to me suddenly in the hallway the day before school let out for the summer. “Cass’s brother, Jerod, is coming up this weekend from L.A. and promised to buy all the alcohol—he’s getting us three kegs. It’s going to be so great.”

“Sounds like it,” I said, unconvinced.

“You need to lighten up,” Audrey told me, leaning up against a bank of lockers. “You’re always so serious. How much fun is that?”

“Tons, actually. You people are idiots, and I get to sit back at a distance and watch all your stupid drama unfold.”

“That’s pathetic.”

“It was a joke, Audrey. I don’t care what you guys do. Have your party, drink your three kegs—I just don’t want to be a part of it.” I closed my locker and walked away.

“That may be true,” Audrey said, following me. She leaned in and lowered her voice. “But if you don’t start spending time doing what Carly wants, you’re going to lose her, and you’ll have nobody to blame but yourself.” She smiled and shrugged. “Have a good summer, Neily. Maybe I’ll see you at the party.”

In the end, I was convinced. Carly bought me a shirt for the occasion, one of those trendy faded, slightly wrinkled T-shirts with a moose screen-printed on the front. It was brown, and it fit, so I didn’t say anything, but looking at my reflection depressed me. Carly had a full-length mirror on the back of her bedroom door, and she positioned me in front of it, turning me around with her hands. I looked at myself and considered how much I had changed since I met her. I had grown about seven inches in those two years, now standing six foot two, and I had gained weight, mostly muscle from all the running and lifting I was doing in gym. Carly had convinced me to get my hair cut, and she seemed pleased with the result.

“You’re handsome,” she said. She put a hand on my shoulder, and we both gazed at my reflection. Carly smiled a little and kissed me. “I’d almost forgotten.”

“What?”

She shook her head. “Nothing. Ready to go?”

I shrugged, throwing on a hoodie for warmth. “I guess.”

“Just give me one sec,” she said, unclasping the bracelet I had given her and putting it away in the bottom of her jewelry box. It was the first time she’d removed it in a year and a half.

“Hey, why are you taking that off?” I asked, kind of hurt.

“All the other jewelry I’m wearing is gold—it wouldn’t match,” she told me, as if it were completely obvious. How was I supposed to know you couldn’t wear gold and silver at the same time?

As we walked out the front door, I asked, “Where did you buy this shirt?”

“Abercrombie,” she said.

“Did you know that Abercrombie used to sell sporting
goods? Back in the eighteen hundreds,” I told her. “Now they sell fake thrift-store T-shirts at fifty bucks a pop. It’s truly tragic.”

“Fascinating,” she said. A car pulled up in the driveway, brights blazing. We shielded our eyes with our hands and walked over to the driver’s side of the car.

It was Adam Murray. I glared at him as he rolled down the window of his mother’s brand-new green Durango. He wasn’t even old enough to drive. “What are you doing here?”

“Just came to give you two a ride,” he said, answering my question but looking at Carly. She smiled at him and looked over at me.

“No, man,” I said. “We’re just going to walk.”

“Well, I’m here now,” he snapped. “Just get in, Think Tank.”

“Actually …,” I began, unsure how I was going to finish that sentence without physical violence. I’d never wanted to hit somebody so badly as I wanted to hit Adam Murray.

“Come on, Neily.” Carly pouted. “You really want me to walk all the way to Cass’s house in these shoes?” She was wearing four-inch heels.

“Fine,” I said.

“In the back, Think Tank,” Adam called out. Carly jumped into the shotgun seat, and I did what he told me.

“What are you even doing driving?” I asked peevishly to the back of his head. “Aren’t you fifteen?”

“I’ll have my permit in a few months, and my mom could give a shit,” Adam said, taking a turn sharply. He glanced at Carly. “How you doing, Car?”

“Fine,” she said sweetly. “Everything’s fine.”

“You hear about Luce?”

“No, what about her?” Carly leaned in, eager to soak up the gossip.

“She’s got some kind of boyfriend, some college guy. Her parents caught them doing it in their bed last weekend, and now she’s grounded. Can you believe it?”

“She’s not coming?” Carly asked.

“Fuck no, she’s coming,” Adam said. “You think being grounded could keep Killer Miller from having a good time?”

Carly laughed. “So true.”

“Killer Miller?” I asked.

“You know Lucy Miller,” Carly said dismissively.

“Yeah. Okay, whatever.”

To get to Cass’s house, we had to pass the overlook. It was a long stretch of road that skirted the edge of the foothills, offering a view of the valley unimpaired by trees. A blond girl whom I recognized as the daughter of one of my father’s neighbors was walking her dog, a slightly overweight beagle, along the edge, but other than that the overlook was empty. The sun had set less than an hour ago, and the whole valley lay below us, glittering like a jumble of Christmas lights. I could have stood there and picked out my mother’s house by following the free-way as it cut through town and headed off in the direction of the Livermore wineries.

“Wow,” Carly whispered, as if she had never seen it before.

“Yeah,” I said. “Sometimes I forget how nice this place can be.”

Adam scoffed. “Whatever, dude.”