Underneath Everything (26 page)

“What?” Hudson stiffens. He narrows his eyes. And it’s a relief, the way he looks at me. Like I’m strange. Like he can finally see down to the darkest, dirtiest bottom of who I am.

“Jolene. I dragged her drunk from Bella’s party after you broke up with her.”

Hudson presses his lips into a line. “Listen, if you don’t feel the same way about me, fine. But don’t lie.”

“You don’t believe me?”

Hudson’s eyes go hard. His nostrils flare. He shakes his head once.
No.

Figures. I’m finally telling the truth, and he accuses me of lying. But it doesn’t matter whether he wants to believe me or not. I have proof.

“Give me my phone.” I hold out my palm. I can feel my blood race through the blue tracks in my wrist, pulse in my fingertips. Not a pounding anymore, but an energy.

Hudson backs into his desk, forearms and fists tense. He’s not going to do it. He doesn’t want to know how wrong he was, how badly he misjudged me.

For a year and a half I’ve wanted him to love me.

But now I just want him to see me. The real me.

I push my upturned palm toward him.

Hudson jerks open the top drawer of his desk. The bronze handle claps when he slams it shut and slaps the phone on my palm. It covers my scar.

I turn it on. The battery’s low, since it’s been in his desk for a while, but I don’t need much. I pull up Jolene’s texts—the entire string, beginning last year—and hand it back to him.

Hudson’s eyes move side to side, up and down, but he doesn’t lift a finger to the screen. “There’s more. You can scroll,” I tell him.

He gives my cell back and shoves his hands in his pockets. “I don’t need to see anything else.”

“So you believe me?” I find his eyes. They’re dark and light at the same time, like the ocean: turquoise on the surface where it’s shallow, layers of navy underneath where the floor’s too deep to see.

He doesn’t look away. And as I wait for him to answer, the pulsing that’s been pushing me forward stops.

In its wake is silence, like my blood itself is holding its breath, wanting him to say yes, that he sees me for what I am—not strong and hard-core, but weak and soft—and also hoping he won’t.

Because I know after this he’ll never look at me the same way.

“I believe Jolene sent you those texts. And that you never wrote her back,” he says.

I nod. Swallow.

He sits on the edge of his desk and cups one of his hands over his mouth like he’s trying to figure something out.

He still wants to believe in some other version of me.

“I didn’t write back. But, like I said, I took her home from Bella’s party, and I’ve been talking to her in study hall.”

“So you did cut her off.” Hudson’s moving his fingers along his lips as he speaks, but behind them I can see a quick curve, the beginning of a smile. It sets off the heat in me again. The pulsing.

“But she kept sending texts. And I kept reading them. She never gave up.”

“Not one of her strong suits,” he adds with a smirk. Like it’s a cute trait on a dumb puppy. Something he can laugh at. But it’s not. Jolene never gave up on me.

“Right,” I say, angry now. “You’re the one who gives up. You stopped calling me when you were with Jolene. You acted like I didn’t exist. And then you made up some story about me, and you believed it. You got me to believe it, too. But I’m not brave or amazing. And I do give a shit.” My throat hurts when I’m finished. I must have been screaming. I swallow hard and feel something hot streak down the side of my nose. I pull my sleeve over my fist and get rid of the tear before it hits my lips.

“What if it’s not a story,” Hudson says. He stands up, wipes his palms on the thighs of his jeans, and tilts his whole body toward me. “What if everything I think about you is true?”

“It’s not. You don’t love me.” I take a step back.

See me. Please.

Hudson walks forward. I can’t get any farther back. My legs are up against the bed. He comes so close I think I might fall onto the maps, or that he might push me down if I don’t. When he stops, there’s half an inch between us, maybe. I can count the freckles on his nose and see the brown specks in his eyes.

I can smell him—mint, winter—when he traces my jaw with his finger, tilts up my chin, and asks, “What if I did?”

I squeeze my eyes shut. Two more tears race down my cheek. I lick the salt from my lips.

Hudson drops his hand from my face. “It doesn’t matter, does it?” he asks. “Because you’re not in love with
me
.” Hudson clutches the back of my hand and turns it over so I can see my phone. Then he presses against my thumb and lights up the screen. Jolene’s face stares back at me. The thumbnail of her getting ready for the freshman dance. She’s looking at me over her shoulder, sleek brown hair with auburn streaks cascading across her cheek, wide lips spread in a suggestive smile. Hazel eyes rimmed in black, catlike.

But it’s not the picture I see. It’s every time she looked at me in the hall. It’s every text she sent and note she wrote. Every night in her bed. Every breath on my neck.

It’s why I couldn’t look away when she was kissing Hudson.

I feel like I’m picking at a scab. Lifting, tugging, pulling up the crusty parts that cling to my softer skin protectively. It hurts, but I keep picking, lifting, pulling through the pain. Even though I have to hold my breath. Even though my eyes sting. And when the last piece finally releases, when I rip the scab off completely—there she is, red and slick and streaming. Jolene. Underneath everything.

Inside me.

All that time I thought I was building a new skin—I wasn’t keeping her out; I was sealing her in.

I look up from my phone. I don’t tell Hudson he’s right, but I don’t tell him he’s wrong, either. And that tells him everything.

“You two deserve each other,” he says, disgusted.

Hudson drops my hand, and as it falls to my leg, carried by the weight of my cell, everything seems to make sense. As if this is the way today was always going to happen. As if it’s happened before. As if it’s the only way it could ever be: Hudson dropping his gaze, clenching his fists, turning away. Leaving.

“Find your own way out,” he says.

I pick up my bag and coat with one hand—the other’s still clutching my phone—and do what he says.

When I pull the door shut behind me, I take in the crisp night, the black sky, the spots of light; but as I walk home I grow heavy with wet heat. Bushes and town houses surround me. It’s August. Kris has gone home.

Hudson isn’t waiting. But I’m not alone.

Jolene’s got my hand, and she won’t let go.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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

CHAPTER 30

I WAKE UP in my underwear. I have a vague memory of coming home, stripping off my clothes, and curling up under the covers around some unseen center—pulling my knees tight to my chest until my body circled itself like a shrimp. I must have stayed that way all night. I’m sore and sweating.

I try to unfurl myself, but I slept on my arm and now it’s stuck, numb, a foreign limb in bed with me. I roll onto my back and wait for it to regain feeling. First, the pins and needles, then the heat. And then it’s mine again. I open and close my fist. Something’s in it. My phone. With a text from Jolene.

Two little girls all alone.

At first I think she forgot to finish the line, then I blink and see the period. She meant what she wrote.

I didn’t call her last night to tell her what happened with Hudson, but she knows.

I hook my phone up to the charger, throw on one of Jake’s old sweatshirts, and head for the shower.

The water burns my skin, but it doesn’t rinse away the dream-feeling. I get dressed, eat breakfast, turn on the ignition. But it’s like the cloud of steam from the bathroom—the cloak of sleep—follows me.

It’s not until I’m walking into school, well after the bell, that I realize I felt this way before I got in bed, when I was still awake.

I think back to yesterday, then last week, trying to find a time when I felt crystal clear—real—but each image I conjure shimmers and vanishes. None of them will hold still.

Señora doesn’t say anything when I walk through the door ten minutes late. Instead, she slides her glasses to the tip of her nose, stares me down, then pushes them back up and continues her review of the subjunctive. I’m lucky it’s her favorite tense. Señora says it will change our Spanish lives as we know it. I used to think she was taking grammar a little too seriously, but the longer I stare at the board, the more I think maybe she’s right. Maybe the subjunctive
is
the crowning achievement of language itself, the root of desire, as unpredictable as the future it describes. Maybe that’s why I can’t complete the sentences.

Because after four years of Spanish, I know how to conjugate the subjunctive. That’s not my problem. My problem is that I can’t seem to get past the part we’ve been given; the first word of each thick, white, chalk-scrawl across the board:
Quiero. Deseo. Espero.

I want. I wish. I hope.

I tighten my grip on the pen. My paper is blank, my sentences unfinished.

Because I’ve done this before.
What do you want to be, Mattie?

I stare at the thin blue lines on the page, willing the sentences to write themselves. To tell me what I want to be and what it means.

“¡Chicos!”
Señora says, bringing her hands together in a brisk clap. Heads rise around the room.

“Let’s see what you’ve done to my darling, the subjunctive!”

When the bell rings, the hallways buzz with manic laughter and excited chatter. It’s only the end of first period, but everyone’s already frantic with the idea of a week and half of freedom, like we’re on the verge of something huge and uncontrollable instead of Christmas break.

I wait for the rest of the class to shove through the doorway before making my way into the hall. When I get there, the crowd has thinned, leaving Kris. I didn’t expect to see her after what happened yesterday.

She stands up from her slumped position against the lockers. We stare at each other across the hall. Then an arm loops through mine and I’m swept away.

“Can you believe she’s here?” Jolene’s warm whisper in my ear.

“She’s my—” I don’t finish the sentence, because I can’t. What is Kris to me now?

“She was never your best friend.” My words from Jolene’s mouth. It’s not what I meant, but I nod anyway. Jolene tightens her grip on me. “She was never like us.”

The few people left in the hall are watching. They’re always watching Jolene, but now they’re also watching me. I’m not sure if it’s because I haven’t been seen anywhere near Jolene in over a year or because she’s barely been seen for the past few weeks, or if it’s how we’re intertwined; but when Jolene notices, she angles at a small crowd standing to our right, tells them to fuck off, then tilts her head to mine and says under her breath, “They wish they had this.”

I wish. We wish. They wish.

We walk. All day long, before and after class; as the anticipation of vacation builds with the end of each period, Jolene and I walk together, hand in hand, hip to hip, ears to lips. She tells me things. How the dark-haired skater hanging out in the corner proposed to her one weekend, asked her to run away to his family’s vacation home in Hawaii; how she said no because she didn’t like his nose. How the pale-faced president of student council sitting in the back of the cafeteria eats nothing but Honey Nut Cheerios; how she shows her jutting bones in the gym locker room, and stares at Jolene when they’re changing. How the quiet kid in the black T-shirt and jeans in study hall fills his notebook with hit lists.

Jolene’s words work their way around me like music.

When Hudson passes us in the halls—headphones up, eyes down, jaw set—Jolene tells me the story of a boy who loved us both but couldn’t choose and so we dated him together, twin fair maidens, and broke his heart before he could break us in two.

I turn back and catch sight of the flapping flannel at Hudson’s wrist. He seems far away, suddenly strange. I can’t remember the temperature of his skin, the feel of his hair, the sound of his voice over my shoulder after we finished but before he fell asleep.

I get the same feeling after the final bell when Jolene and I walk, clasped hands clutched between us, past the squeals and shouts in the parking lot. It’s as if the whole school—walls and windows, hoops and handles, desks and everyone who sits in them—slides away, fades to black and disappears behind our backs.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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

CHAPTER 31

WITHOUT SCHOOL TO deal with, Jolene and I fall back into our old summer routine: her place during the day, mine at night. When she leaves she calls me on her cell and then we text until we go to bed. The days of winter break pass by in a stream of stories, cinnamon, and magazines. And even though I haven’t heard from Hudson or Kris, I don’t miss them. I’m too busy. Jolene needs me for makeup consultations, breakfast decisions, company. I forgot how sometimes she wants to stay on the phone without talking so she knows she’s not alone. And I like being the person at the other end of the line. In a way, I feel like that’s who I’ve always been. Even the past year and a half, when I wasn’t texting her back, she knew I got the messages. She knew I looked at them, that I saw her. That even if we weren’t speaking, our breaths would eventually fall into the same rhythm across the silence.

Then one night Jolene doesn’t leave. The
SNL
rerun we were watching ends, and she doesn’t get up from my bed. Instead, she rolls off the edge, opens my dresser drawer, skims her fingers along my clothes, and picks out one of my brother’s oldest shirts: a soft black tee with letters so cracked and faded, you can barely tell they spell
Foo Fighters
anymore. With her back to me, she strips off her beige sweater and black bra, then slides the shirt over her head.