Aspen (17 page)

I force my eyes up to Ben’s face. An overwhelming sense that I desperately need to kiss his eyelids comes over me.

Ben steps back and forth, his eyes searching the gym over my head. If he bats his eyelashes one more time, I might start biting things again. I gnaw on my lip.

“You know what this dance is missing?” Ben asks.

“What?”

“Beta Particle. I haven’t heard them played all night.”

“That’s because homecoming is way too pedestrian for them.”

“Pedestrian: lacking inspiration or excitement.” Ben leans into me. “I’ve been studying my definitions.” He presses his hand into the small of my back. My heart pounds and I pull back a bit. “What’s wrong?” he asks.

“Nothing,” I choke out. Ben cocks his head to the side. “I was just wondering . . .” I pause. “What are the Ryans like?”

Ben stops dancing. My urge to bite things goes away. “They’re clean. Why?”

“Clean? What does that mean?” I ask.

Ben’s arm falls from my side. When that happens, I regret asking the question. “Mrs. Ryan was always picking up after Katelyn.” Ben’s voice is flat.

“That sounds kind of nice. Ninny never picks up after me.”

Ben wraps his arms around me again and leans down to my ear. “It wasn’t that nice.” Ben’s breath hits my ear. “Sometimes it’s good to be dirty.”

I swallow hard, my teeth clenching down.

“The flower crown suits you better,” he whispers.

I close my eyes and the people and music melt away. At this moment, if Ben asked me to clip his toenails, I would. Or give him a calf rub while he’s wearing his sweaty shin guards.

But when I look up, Olivia and Claire are staring at us, whispering. Olivia narrows her eyes on me like a girl aiming at a target. And she’s not the only one. The majority of the school has stopped dancing to watch the girl who lived dance with the perfect dead girl’s boyfriend.

Everything stops. The music. The dancing. The mingling heartbeats.

Before Ben can say anything, I leave him on the dance floor and run into the bathroom, locking the stall door. I can’t breathe. My head collapses on my knees, my eyes blurry, my body wanting to give out and fall on the floor.

When I look up, Katelyn is standing in front of me.

“Go away,” I whisper to her. But she doesn’t. She just stands, her mouth hanging open like she’s about to scream.

A fire burns so low in my stomach. I look Katelyn square in the eyes and say, “Fuck off.” I swing the stall door open. “By the way, Suzy just puked in there.”

I text Kim and Cass to meet me outside. I stand in the cold, pacing. I can’t go back in there.

“Holy hot dancing,” Cass says when he and Kim come out of the school. “Did you bite Ben, too?”

“I need to rip some aliens’ heads off,” I say.

“Nothing’s going on?” Kim pops her hip out to the side, her face scrunched up like she smells something rotten. “That’s not nothing. You were practically making out for the whole school to see.”

“Can we just get out of here?” I snap.

I stalk off as it starts to drizzle. They catch up to me. I can’t bring myself to say anything, so the three of us walk to Cass’s house in silence. I stomp my feet on the pavement. Every few feet, a flower falls out of my hair to the ground, wet and matted. Kim gives me suspicious looks the whole way, but doesn’t say anything else. She stops still at one point and says, “Shit. I totally forgot about Jason.” Then she shrugs. “He’s a fucking douche anyway.”

“A douche with a bad Asian mustache,” Cass corrects.

I open my mouth and let some rain fall on my tongue. It’s cold with the oncoming winter.

By the time we get to Cass’s, my feet are freezing and all the flowers have fallen out of my hair.

We stay up until four in the morning playing ExtermiNATION. I get pretty good at telling the aliens from the humans, and I even manage to rip a few heads off. After Cass falls asleep on the couch, controller in his hand, and Uma has picked up Kim, I slip out the back door and walk home as the sun comes up. Then I plop down on my bed and pass out in my dress.

When Ninny walks into the room the next afternoon, my head hurts. She tiptoes over to the bed and lies down next to me.

“You’re lucky I’m not a mom who cares about curfew,” she says.

“You’re lucky I’m not a teenager who cares—” I groan and roll over, “Do you really want me to finish that sentence?”

Ninny laughs, playing the drums on my ass. “The sun is up. The sky is blue. And there’s a cute boy downstairs for you,” she sings.

“What?” I sit up, my brains meeting my skull. Even my eyes hurt.

“That rhymes. I’m impressed with myself.”

“Focus, Ninny. Is someone here?”

“You should brush your hair.”

“That’s not an answer.”

She gets up. “Maybe we should try dreadlocks on you? I could have Mickey do it.”

“That’s not an answer!” I yell.

She just smiles and closes the door.

I check my reflection in the mirror. My hair is a mess: On one side, the curls are sticking out everywhere, and on the other, they’re matted to my head. “Oh God,” I mutter. I grab a pick and start pulling it through my hair, but it’s hopeless.

Sighing, I touch my sunken cheeks and pale skin. The circles under my eyes sag lower. I pinch my cheeks, hoping to bring some life back to them. Nothing. Grabbing a ponytail holder, I twist my hair into a curly bun on my head, running downstairs, still in my dress.

Ben sits on the couch next to Ninny, chatting. I stop in my tracks halfway down the stairs.

“What are you doing here?”

“Aspen,” Ninny barks. “I taught you to be more polite than that.”

“No, you didn’t.”

Ninny rolls her eyes as Ben looks me up and down. “You’re still wearing your dress,” he says.

“Why are you here?” I ask.

“Why are you still in your dress?”

“You never answer my questions.” I put my hands on my hips.

Ninny looks from Ben to me and back. “I think I’ll go to Salvador’s. It’s always good to see you, Benny.” She kisses him on the cheek.

“Good to see you, too.”

Ninny slips on her jacket and grabs the pot stashed in the kitchen before disappearing out the back door. Ben sits still on the couch, staring at his hands in his lap. “You left without saying anything last night. I was worried.”

“Well, I didn’t want to tell you this, but you’re a bad dancer.”

“I am?”

“No.” I press my fingers into my temples, trying to massage out my headache.

Ben walks into my kitchen like it’s his and fills a glass of water.

“Thanks.” I down half, and some water dribbles out of the corner of my mouth. Ben wipes it away with his sleeve. Yep, I still want to read him poetry on a bearskin rug.

Ben takes me in from head to toe. “You didn’t have to get so dressed up for me,” he says.

“I wasn’t expecting company.”

“I can go.”

“No,” I say quickly. “Just let me get changed.”

He nods and sits back down on the couch, both arms extended out on the cushions, feet up on the coffee table. I stare at him for a second.

“What are you looking at?”

“Your shoes are wet.” I point at the watermarks on the coffee table.

“Shit.” Ben sits up and wipes them with his sleeve.

I can’t help but giggle. “Ninny bought that at a dead woman’s estate sale for five dollars.”

“So you’re saying it’s an antique.” He smiles and slips off his shoes. Today, he’s wearing two different colored socks, one black and the other navy blue. No holes. I can’t take my eyes off them. And I bet they don’t even smell. I resist the urge to bend down and test the theory. “Weren’t you gonna change?” he asks.

I nod, running upstairs to my closet. Picking the first things I find, I throw on holey jeans and a red hooded sweatshirt. But when it comes to my socks, I stand in front of the drawer, debating which pair I should put on. What would tell him I feel the same way he does? I settle on socks with little pockets for each toe, like gloves. Then I splash some water on my face and brush my teeth before coming back downstairs.

Ben hasn’t moved from the couch. He sits, his feet up, playing on his phone.

“What are you doing?” I ask as I sit down next to him, peering over his shoulder.

“You changed quick.” He almost jumps, clutching the phone to his chest.

“Don’t get too excited. I didn’t shower or anything.” I set my feet up on the table next to his, displaying my socks. I even wiggle my toes. “You know, you’re wearing two different colored socks.”

“I am?” Ben pulls his feet up to get a better view. “Holy shit. I am. Are those glove socks?” He points at my feet.

I cross my legs, stuffing my feet under myself. “Maybe.”

“Let me see.” Ben grabs my leg, but I fight against him. “Are you ticklish?”

“No,” I lie, and scoot away.

“You are.” Ben’s eyes sparkle with deviousness. And then he dives towards me full speed, knocking me on my back on the couch. He grabs for my feet and my sides, his fingers finding all my weak spots. I laugh uncontrollably. This might be better than poetry on a bearskin rug. I can’t stop giggling and wiggling and feeling like I might explode with happiness.

“Stop,” I laugh. “Stop.”

Ben freezes on top of me. His lips are inches from mine. He stares into my eyes as the weight of his body presses on me.

Ben looks at my lips and moves an inch closer. My breath hitches in my throat—and then he sits back quickly on the couch, releasing me. I follow suit, pulling down my sweatshirt and tucking loose curls behind my ears.

“Sorry,” he whispers.

“It’s okay.” I say the words, even though it’s not okay.

Ben picks up his phone. “I was actually looking up the definition of a word.”

“You were?”

“I think I have Addictive Definition Disorder.”

“I hear ADD is going around.” I smile.

“It’s more contagious than herpes,” he says, a forced smile on his face. My stomach drops at the sight of it.

“What word?” I choke out.

“What?”

“You looked up the word ‘what’?” I say, attempting to bring the mood back to where it was a moment ago.

“Sorry.”

“Sorry, that was a bad joke?”

“‘Sorry’ is the word I looked up,” Ben says.

I sit back. “Why?”

“Because I owe you an apology. I’m sorry about last night.”

“For what?” I say, trying not to let disappointment seep into my voice.

Ben looks down at his hands. “I’m still not over everything that happened. It’s so complicated, Aspen.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“I do. I really do.” Ben wrings his fingers together and then stands up abruptly. “But I can’t.” He leans over to put his shoes on and picks up one of Ninny’s yoga magazines, which is lying on the ground. “Here.”

He hands it to me.

“Sorry about the mess,” I say.

I grab the magazine from Ben. An ache covers his eyes and I want to cry right here, right now. “I told you before, don’t be sorry.”

Ben walks out the front door without a look back in my direction.

My head falls to my chest as I breathe away the tears collecting in my eyes. Bending down, I rip the socks from my feet and throw them across the room.

And then all that’s left in the house is the sound of silence.

I go back to normal. Or whatever my life was before Ben. Before visions of toenail clipping and bearskin rugs. It’s all I can do. Kim and I get coffee and listen to music and dissect every college kid behind the counter at Moe’s. She asks me to pierce her bellybutton, which I refuse in the name of both regret and staph infections. I even sit in Dr. Brenda’s office and talk about my lack of motivation and let her tell me that going to college is important.

“You’re smart, Aspen.”

“Who knows what will happen by next year?” I say. “The future is unexpected and unintentional.”

“That doesn’t mean
you
have to be unexpected and unintentional.”

I nod, even though hearing her talk in her psychobabble way is as painful as slowly poking my eardrums with a sharp toothpick. But it’s better this way. That’s what I tell myself.

Olivia only accosts me once in the bathroom after homecoming, asking me what it feels like to replace a dead girl.

“What?” I ask.

She rests her butt against the sink. “Doesn’t it bother you?”

I stumble on my words and instinctually want to punch Olivia right in her big beautiful, brown eyes.

When I don’t answer, Olivia leaves, tossing her hair over her shoulder. I take it as a slap in the face, considering I can’t toss my hair anywhere. It just bounces.

On the bright side, Kim doesn’t give me any more suspicious looks, and a few weeks after homecoming, the rumors at school about me and Ben dating or banging (depending on whether you ask a boy or a girl) actually die down.

Not having Ben so prominently in my life doesn’t hurt so badly, I find. It’s kind of like losing a kidney. If I can learn to function without it, I’ll be fine. Who needs both kidneys, anyway?

The only time it gets hard is in physics when Ben is physically next to me. I’ll stare down at his calves and wonder what they’d feel like in my hands, or remember that he told me he wears boxers, which makes my eyes drift up his legs to his—and then I have to stop myself.

One afternoon during lab, Ben asks if he can borrow a piece of paper.

“No,” I say, rolling one of the toy cars Mr. Salmon gave us back and forth across the desk.

“Okay. Sorry.”

I rip a sheet free from my spiral notebook. “You can
have
a piece of paper. I don’t want it back.”