Her Name in the Sky (15 page)

“Yes I do,” Clay says, smacking his lips together after taking a drink. “Even though it’s not very fun with you all, since
none of you
can talk about it with me.”

“Hey,” Wally says, and in the dim porch lights, Hannah can see his blush. “You need to stop bringing that up.”

“I’m just messing with you, man.”

“Alright, Clay, I’ve got a Truth-or-Dare for you,” Hannah says.

“Dare.”

“I
dare
you to tell us what song was playing when you lost your virginity.”

“I—” Clay falters. He shakes his whiskey glass and grins down at the patio, almost in amusement at himself. “I told you that in confidence, Han.”

“And now you can tell all three of us in confidence.”

“Alright, fine. So…when it happened, Michele told me to put some music on, so I just hit play on my iPhone, and the last song that had been playing was ‘Colorblind’ by The Counting Crows. I didn’t really care what we listened to, so I just started going for it, you know, but then the song ended and replayed, and I realized I’d somehow put it on repeat.”

“Are you serious?” Baker smiles.

“I’m serious.”

“Why the hell had you been listening to ‘Colorblind’?” Wally asks.

“Dude, I don’t know, I just was.”

“So you never took a break to change the song?” Baker asks.

“I was busy,” Clay says emphatically, leaning forward in his chair. “And besides, it ended up being kind of nice. Kind of, you know, emo-romantic.”

Wally chuckles into his hand. “Oh, man, I can’t believe you never told me that story.”

“Well now you can thank Hannah for bringing it up.”

“Hey, you were making fun of the three of us,” Hannah says. “All I did was put it back on you.”

“I’m not ashamed,” Clay says, taking a long pull from his whiskey glass. “I made love beautifully that night.”

“Do you have the song on your iPhone right now?” Wally asks.

“Probably.”

“Play it,” Hannah goads.

“No chance.”

“Play it,” Baker says, nudging him with her foot.

Clay fixes her with a look; her teasing smile grows bigger until Clay smiles in turn. “Fine,” he says, making a show of fishing his phone out of his pocket. “But y’all are not allowed to laugh.”

“Why would we laugh?” Hannah says innocently.

“Can you do a reenactment in time with the song?” Baker says.

“I don’t know why I’m listening to you,” Clay says as he sets his phone on the table and hits play.

Within the first three sad, somber notes, Baker starts to giggle. She holds her hand over her mouth, much like she did in church that morning, and shakes with barely-restrained laughter. Her laughter is contagious, so that Hannah starts to giggle too, and then Wally starts to outright laugh, actually slumping back in his chair and holding his stomach.

“I’m sorry,” Baker gasps, seeing Clay’s fake-wounded face, “it’s just, like, the depressing sound of this song, and the lyrics—”

“How did you not pause it?” Hannah laughs. “What did Michele say?”

“She didn’t
say
anything,” Clay says, grabbing his phone off the table and stopping the music. “She was too busy moaning.”

“Oh, god,” Hannah says distastefully, at the same time that Baker says, “Okay, wow.”

“Dude,” Wally says, shaking his head.

“What?” Clay says. “It’s true. Someday soon you’ll all get laid, and then we’ll be able to have a real conversation about this. But anyway, it’s my turn to ask Truth-or-Dare.”

“Can we veto that?” Hannah says. “I have a feeling you’re going to keep mocking us.”

“I’ll be nice,” Clay says. He shakes his whiskey glass back and forth, and they all wait.

“Baker,” he says.

“I knew I shouldn’t have laughed,” she says, pinching the bridge of her nose.

“Don’t worry, I’ll go easy on you,” Clay grins. “Truth or Dare?”

“Truth.”

“What’s the best make out you’ve ever had? More specifically,
who
was the best make out you’ve ever had?”

Baker freezes, her mouth falling open in surprise. Hannah’s whole body tenses up and her heart speeds in her chest. She clutches her whiskey glass in both hands, telling herself to take a drink, to act nonchalant, but she feels unable to do anything other than wait for Baker’s answer.

“I should probably add that you
are
allowed to name someone here,” Clay says haughtily, raising his eyebrows.

Color floods Baker’s cheeks, and Hannah realizes that Baker feels trapped by the implication, as she never told Hannah about making out with Clay.

“Come on, really?” Clay says, his shoulders slumping.

“I—” Baker says.

“Damn,” Clay says, sprawling back against his chair. “Who was better than me?”

Now Baker looks absolutely shamed: her cheeks are tinged dark, and her whole expression seems to retract in on itself. She opens her mouth to answer Clay, looking as mortified as the adulterous woman who was to be stoned in the bible, but there’s something else in her reluctance, too: an elusive kind of hesitation, like she’s fighting inwardly against something. 

“It was you,” Baker says finally, with an air of shoving the words out if only to keep breathing. She makes fleeting eye contact with Clay before looking down at the patio stones, her mental attention clearly focused on something else. She taps her tongue against her front teeth, bracing to say something she doesn’t want to, and then mumbles, “I hadn’t told Hannah yet.”

“Oh,” Clay says, his eyes shifting uncomfortably from Baker to Hannah. Hannah doesn’t look at him. “Sorry. I told Wally, and I just assumed you told Hannah—”

“Sorry,” Baker whispers, turning her head toward Hannah. She meets Hannah’s eyes for only a flickering second.

“It’s cool,” Hannah says.

There’s a long, awkward pause, and then Clay reaches for the whiskey bottle again. “Well,” he says, his voice embarrassingly hearty, “at least I know I was your best.”

The next day, Monday, they sleep in late and don’t trek down to the beach until noon. Wally and Clay convince Hannah to swim in the ocean with them, and even though Hannah feels irrationally sore at Clay, she agrees to go with them, mostly to avoid sitting awkwardly on the beach with Baker. They bob in the waves, scraping their toes against the mushy layer of sand that coats the bottom of the ocean, and Hannah’s senses turn themselves over to everything saltwater: saltwater on her tongue, saltwater in her nose, saltwater stinging a half-healed blister on her ankle.

“I have to take a piss,” Clay says, sweeping a hand through his wet, dark hair. “I’ll be back.”

He swims away from them, toward an open spot in the ocean, leaving Hannah and Wally to themselves. “Is he just gonna go in the water?” Hannah asks incredulously, straining her eyes against the sunlight.

“He’s been doing it all week,” Wally laughs. “Luke, too.”

“Please tell me you haven’t been doing that.”

“I’m not saying anything either way.”

“Ew.”

“Everyone pees in the ocean, Han.”

Something moves against Hannah’s calf, startling her. She looks down to the water but can’t see anything past the surface. Then Wally starts to laugh in that small, shy way he has.

“It was just me,” he says. “Don’t worry.”

Hannah extends her arm outward, to the side, and sweeps water into Wally’s face. He sputters and throws his arms up to shield himself, and Hannah starts to laugh.

“It was just me,” she says. “Don’t worry.”

“Yeah, I see that,” Wally says, his mouth curved into a smile, his eyes large and bright and vividly green in the absence of his glasses.

“Yo,” Clay says, swimming back toward them. “Pretty sure I just unleashed about a liter of Jack Daniels into this ocean.”

“You’re disgusting,” Hannah tells him.

“So Han,” Clay continues, as if she hadn’t said anything, “now that you know about Baker and me—”

Hannah’s stomach knots in on itself.

“—What do you think I should do to get with her again?”

“What?”

“Come on, I like her. And I think she likes me. Or at least it seemed that way when she was making out with me.” He waggles his eyebrows.

Hannah stares at him, unable to respond, feeling his words drop through her chest and sink all the way down to her stomach.

“So?” Clay prompts. “What do you think?”

“I don’t—I don’t know. She hasn’t talked to me about it.”

“Not even last night?”

“No.”

“You should just talk to Baker directly,” Wally says.

“And say what, Wall?” Clay says. “‘Hey Bake, I think you’re hot, wanna hook up again’?”

“Is that what this is?” Hannah says, her voice sharp with emotion. “You just want to hook up with her?”

Clay’s entire countenance changes in an instant. His eyebrows draw together and his eyes narrow with scrutiny. He stares intently at Hannah, as if searching something out in her, and she remembers, with startling accuracy, the way she felt when they first became friends: that he possessed some secret truth she had never known, some kind of raw power that enabled him to understand people, to detect their insecurities, and ultimately to sway them to his side.

“No,” Clay says finally, the intense look still present in his eyes. “Of course not. I think she’s the prettiest girl I’ve ever seen—I’ve thought that for years—and I want to hook up with her again, yeah, but it’s more than that. There’s just something about her that makes me want to know her better. But I’m not sure how to do that. I’m not sure how to move beyond the physical stuff.”

Neither Hannah nor Wally responds. Hannah feels a weird looseness inside of her, like her muscles have gone slack. Clay continues to look at her with his intense eyes, but there’s a shade of uncertainty to them now, a tinge of pleading.

“I don’t know,” Hannah says after a moment.

Clay sighs in frustration and runs a hand through his hair. Hannah studies him—his tree-dark hair and eyes, his firm mouth, his strong jaw—and thinks inexplicably of the primordial Adam.

Clay shakes his head back and forth. “She’s so hard to figure out. It feels like I’ve known her forever, but I still don’t
get
her. I don’t even know, like, the little shit about her. I mean, you know that stuff, Han. Like, her favorite book and color and everything. Don’t you?”

Hannah looks away from him.

“Han?”

“Perks,” she says.

“What?”

Her chest swells. “
The Perks of Being a Wallflower
,” she says, unable to keep a sharpness from her voice. “She named her dog after it.”

“Oh. Yeah. And what’s her favorite color?”

Hannah looks at the sun until it blinds her. Then she looks back to Clay, but she can no longer see him through the imprint of the sun on her eyes.

“Yellow,” she says. 

“Yellow,” he repeats. “Got it.”

“I still think you should just talk to her,” Wally says.

“Maybe,” Clay says, his eyes focused on the water. “We’ll see how it goes at Tyler’s party tonight.”

They eat a late dinner with the Landry’s—Mrs. Landry cooks pork chops—and then shower in preparation for the party. “So you’re telling me there’s going to be no drinking there?” Dr. Landry says in an accusatory tone, staring Clay down when they’re about to leave.

“Not that I’ve heard of,” Clay says innocently. “If there is, we’ll come home.”

“Be back by one.”

“One?”

“You want to make it 12:30?”

“No, sir.”

“Stay together,” Mrs. Landry says. “And
be good
.”

They walk through the cooling night air, down chalk-white sidewalks and past patches of grass so green they almost look fake. Clay and Baker take the lead, both of them dressed with social precision, Clay in a salmon-colored Polo shirt and Baker in her favorite navy sundress. Luke and Joanie walk behind them, swinging each other’s hands loosely between them, Luke pointing out which beach houses he’s going to buy when he’s older, changing his mind on every new block. Hannah and Wally follow last, both of them quiet, an easy current of companionship between them.

“That one’s just
lovely
,” Luke says, pointing to a flamingo-pink two-story. “I can buy that when I go through my gay phase.”

“We should live here all the time,” Joanie says, swinging Luke’s hand with exaggerated silliness. “Let’s just quit school and get jobs lifeguarding.”

“We should all agree to come down here in the summers,” Clay calls back to them. “You know, during college and when we’re in our 20s and everything. We can all rent a house together.”

“You and your fantasies,” Joanie says. “It’s like you think we’re in a sorority or something.”