She explained how to get to Riva Corley’s
house. That girl didn’t have a lot of friends. It had taken half
the morning to find someone on IM who knew where she lived. “Look,”
she told Declan, “I don’t want to hang out in the house today.
Maybe we can hit a movie after I do this errand?”
“Sure,” Declan said, though he sounded
disappointed. He touched her arm. “Or how about the beach?”
Yeah, you just want to see me in a
bikini.
Jo smiled more. “I have work later. We can go
to the beach another time.”
When had she started doing all this fake
smiling? Daisy teased her about changing boyfriends more than most
people changed their socks, but she’d always done that because she
liked a lot of boys. She wasn’t used to this going through the
motions thing.
Declan obediently drove them to Riva Corley’s
place. It was a nicer neighborhood than Jo expected, nicer than the
one where her own dentist parents lived.
“What’s going on here?” Declan asked.
“Can you wait in the car? I just need to talk
to this girl for a minute.”
He shrugged, already playing with his phone.
“Sure.”
Jo took a deep breath and marched to the
front door. She didn’t see Daisy’s car, thank God. That made this
easier. But maybe Riva wasn’t home. She wasn’t about to try this
twice.
She rang three times with no answer and was
just about to go back to Declan when the door swung open. Riva was
standing there, chest heaving like she’d just run down the stairs.
Her hair wasn’t done, and her clothes didn’t match. Jo raised an
eyebrow slowly and enjoyed watching her disapproval sink in.
“Jo Quang?” First and last name, like Jo was
a celebrity.
Jo suppressed a grin and tossed the greeting
back, ironically. “Riva Corley?”
“Uh, Daisy’s not here.”
“Good. I want to talk to you. Let me in.”
Riva stepped back, obviously not sure how to
deal with Jo’s aggressive manner. Jo barreled into the house after
her, shutting the door behind her.
“What sick game are you playing with my best
friend?”
Riva’s mouth opened and went nowhere, like a
character in a streaming video suffering from a stuttering internet
connection. Jo didn’t give her much time to respond.
“Daisy is a
great person
. She’s a
sweet girl
. She’s got
high standards
. I don’t know
how you talked her into this twisted…
shit
, but she doesn’t
deserve anything your stupid, ugly, douchebag boyfriend has to
offer her. You proposition the school lesbian and fail, so you
corrupt my best friend? I don’t know what’s the matter with you.
You think this is going to make him love you?” Jo laughed bitterly.
“You think he hasn’t already found other girls at college? I’ll
tell you what this is about. You’re not enough for him. He’s
tricked you into helping him find more victims, and you decided to
make Daisy into one of them.”
Her parents wouldn’t have recognized the girl
she had become—almost no one would have. She thought about the
angriest cook at the restaurant where she worked, and how she’d
reacted when the manager had accused her of stealing from the
walk-in freezer. Jo pretended she was that woman, and she had to
focus to make sure she lit into Riva only in English. Since she’d
started at the restaurant, Vietnamese felt way better in her mouth
when she was angry.
Jo was much smaller than Riva, but the other
girl fell back several steps with each sentence. Soon, Jo had her
pressed up against the side of the staircase, their toes together.
She shouted in Riva’s face, and she didn’t ease up, not even when
she saw tears starting in Riva’s eyes.
Jo’s hands were shaking. This felt good. She
yelled some more, repeating herself. Riva was crying in earnest,
muttering some kind of weak defenses. Finally, she slid down the
wall into a squatting position and just put her face into her
hands.
Breathing hard, Jo closed her mouth. She felt
like an action hero who’d taken on a whole room of bad guys. Dimly,
she knew she was angry at a lot more than Riva—maybe at a few
things she didn’t want to admit, not even to herself—but she was
angry at Riva, too, and this girl deserved every bit of Jo’s fury.
She shouldn’t be getting Daisy into trouble.
“I…I really like Daisy,” Riva was saying,
over and over again.
“Yeah? You don’t act like it. You think that
girl needs what you’re giving her? She’s never even kissed anybody.
Not once. You want her to have her first kiss while some
beer-guzzling, mouth-breathing frat boy watches her? You want to
watch him kiss her?”
“Benton isn’t—”
“Isn’t he?”
Riva’s eyes went wide and her body stiff. Jo
rolled her eyes and laughed again, no humor in her voice at
all.
“You have no idea what’s going to happen when
you get Daisy into a room with that waste of flesh. He told you
some stuff about what he wants? He’s going to want a lot more once
he’s there with you and Daisy. He said some beautiful nonsense
about how girls are so pretty together? I promise you this isn’t
about what’s
pretty
.”
Riva’s head snapped up. “How do you know?
You’ve never met Benton. You don’t know me.”
“I know what Daisy told me. He just
really
wants
this from you. So much that he’s got you running all over
school, humiliating yourself.”
“Some people
like
doing stuff like
this. There are whole communities online—”
“He told you that, too, right?
There’s
nothing wrong with this
. But do
you
like this? Is this
what
you
want? Is this whole thing about how much
you
want to make out with Daisy? He doesn’t care about anybody but
himself.”
Riva was reduced to spluttering. It sounded
like she was trying to claim that she
did
want to make out
with Daisy, but Jo just rolled her eyes.
“You should cancel these stupid plans. And if
you care about Daisy, you should stay away from her. You’re just
messing up your life. The last thing she needs is to waste her time
with a screwed-up girl who’s got no friends.”
Okay, that was a little mean.
But it’s
true, right?
Jo pushed down the pang of guilt she was feeling,
turned on one heel, and walked back to Declan’s car.
There was so much adrenaline in her body that
it was hard to control her movements. It took several tries to get
the passenger door open, and she gripped the handle of her purse as
hard as she could, hoping Declan wouldn’t see what was happening to
her hands.
It didn’t feel bad, though. Her head felt
clear. This was something she’d been needing to do.
“Whoa,” Declan said when he saw her. “You
doing okay, Jo?”
“Yeah,” Jo said in a sharp voice. “Of course
I am. Why?” She muttered a few insults in Vietnamese and then, as
though it was happening to somebody else, she burst out crying,
right there in Riva Corley’s driveway.
Jo told herself there wasn’t any need to cry.
She was angry, not sad. But the tears wouldn’t stop. Declan asked a
few questions that she couldn’t answer, then seemed to make a
decision. He started the car again and drove, and Jo didn’t bother
to ask where.
She sobbed for the ten minutes it took to get
to the edge of a small park dominated by a dirt track that ran
around a set of manmade ponds.
“Is this okay?” Declan asked, his voice
anxious. “I know you said you wanted to go to the movies, but I
thought you might not want to go right now.”
“Yeah, this is fine.”
“Or I can take you home.”
Jo shook her head.
“Then what do you want? I can go for a run
and leave you alone for a while. Or you can come with me. We, uh,
don’t have to run. We could walk.”
She lifted her head, surprised by how nice he
was being. She remembered telling Daisy he was “just an ordinary
tool,” and felt sorry for it. “I’ll come with you. Walking.”
“Cool.” Declan came around and opened the
passenger door for her, then offered her his hand.
Jo took it and let him lead her silently to
the dirt track.
“I’m not trying to make you stop what you
were doing,” he said.
“Crying?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t really want to cry, you know.”
“Yeah, I know.”
Jo buried her face against the side of his
arm. She realized it had been a long time since she’d let a guy see
something real about her. She wasn’t sure she liked it.
They walked around the pond four times, then
Declan drove Jo back to her house and made no move to come in with
her.
“I’m sorry about all the crying,” Jo told
him.
He shrugged. “It happens.”
She knew what she was supposed to do next. If
she wanted to keep him interested, she needed to flirt a little,
let him know they could make out again soon. But Jo didn’t have the
energy for that.
Maybe she could like him, but she didn’t feel
excited about that the way she used to. Anger flickered at the
edges of her mind again. She didn’t want to think about it anymore,
but she didn’t know if she could hold it off. For a second, she
thought about flinging herself at Declan and asking him to help her
forget.
That wasn’t right, though.
“Thanks,” Jo said.
“It’s cool.”
She was supposed to promise something. Tell
him when she’d text again. Jo didn’t. She just got out of the car
and went inside and up to her bedroom, where she curled into a ball
in the corner next to her closet. She pulled out her phone and
scrolled to Daisy’s name in the contact list, but she didn’t press
call
.
* * * *
“Jeez, baby. You’re not ready yet?”
Riva glanced down at herself and sighed
deeply. She already hadn’t known what outfit to put on for seeing
Benton, and, later, Benton and Daisy. Being yelled at by Daisy’s
friend Jo had pretty much done her in. Benton was lucky she’d
washed her face and fixed her makeup before he showed up, even if
he didn’t seem to know that.
“Give me a minute. I’ll find something to
wear.”
“You know,” Benton said, “this isn’t the
attitude I expected from you when I decided to come down over
Spring Break. You’ve barely got time for me. You’re sending me out
by myself so you can hang out with Daisy. Then, on this day we’re
supposed to spend together, I come to pick you up and you look like
you stood in your dark closet and got dressed with one hand.”
“I’m sorry! Okay?” Riva started up the stairs
to go back to her room. Half the contents of her closet were on the
floor. She’d still been sorting it out when Jo had made her
unexpected visit.
“Right, and that, too. You’re acting like
everything I say is a huge pain for you. For someone who says she
loves me, you don’t show it very well.”
For a second, Riva couldn’t breathe. Her
chest squeezed with so much anger, she thought she would choke on
it.
How do you let that out?
She thought of Jo, who had
stalked in like she was twice as tall as her body seemed to be, and
four times as wide. Riva just didn’t know how to move like that or
talk that way, especially not to Benton.
“Benton…” Her voice sounded timid, not true
to what she was feeling at all. Riva cleared her throat and tried
again. “Benton. What do you think this whole thing with Daisy is
about? That’s me showing you that I love you. Right?”
“I guess, but you’re acting like she’s more
important than I am. She can hang out with you anytime, but you
know this is my only chance to be with you until summer break.”
Riva knew that should have made her heart
soar. That was the sort of confession she’d spent months looking
for. Benton wanted to be with her, to spend time with her. Instead,
she turned toward him and sat on the stair step she’d been standing
on.
“What do you want from me?”
His face took on a wounded expression, and
that still lanced through her, piercing her with nearly unbearable
guilt. “Babe. You know what I want from you.”
She took a deep breath, looking at her hands
so the downturn of his lips didn’t make her stop talking. “No, I
really don’t.”
He joined her on the stairs and pulled her
into his arms. “I want your love and trust. I want to help you be
the best version of you that you can be.”
That sounded so romantic, so
right
,
but Riva couldn’t get Jo’s ugly words out of her head. Nobody said
anything good about Benton, and all the criticisms piled on top of
each other and took up more and more room in her head.
“You want me to seduce a girl for your
entertainment.”
He stiffened against her. “I told you about a
personal fantasy I have. I
shared
that with you. And I don’t
see you being too upset about it. All I’ve heard this trip is
Daisy, Daisy, Daisy
.”
Riva pulled away from him. She forced herself
to look into his green eyes, because this was the sort of thing a
person had to say bravely. “Then maybe we shouldn’t do this.”
Her stomach dropped at the thought. After
last night, she knew how much she wanted to kiss Daisy, but she and
Benton didn’t need to talk about that just yet. For now, the most
important thing was putting a stop to this before it became even
more of a disaster than it already was.
“Now you don’t want to do this for me.”
Benton’s voice was cold.
“Listen to yourself!” Riva tugged away from
him and moved a couple steps down from where she’d been sitting
before. She rubbed furiously at the carpet on the stairs, ripping
fuzz away from it. “Benton. Either this is for you or it’s for me.
You don’t get to have it both ways.”
“It’s for both of us.”
“No, it’s really not.”
“So you’re getting nothing out of it? All
that hanging out you’re doing with Daisy is totally innocent, all
for me.”