B0160A5OPY (A) (16 page)

“I am the Chili Queen. You concede defeat?” Although the air moving down my throat is its own kind of torture, I am pleasantly surprised that my voice still works.

“Never! I shall never surrender. But I am delighted to have found a worthy opponent.” Luke scoops up a larger portion of the evil green fire. “To your health, and mine,” he says, lifting the chip in a toast before eating it with every semblance of pleasure.

“There is perspiration on your brow, hombre,” I tell him.

“You, too, are sweating, querida.”

I
am
sweating. Like a pig – a real hog, not a sample swine like Christmas. But I state haughtily, “You are mistaken, señor. Horses sweat, and gentlemen perspire. But ladies merely glow.”

“You glow most beautifully.” Wait, did he just say I was beautiful? “Let us fan the fire of your glow,” he laughs, pushes the bowls closer to me and I repeat the self-inflicted torture. We take it in turns to insult and show up the other – it’s like a drinking game, only we’re getting high on pain-induced endorphins rather than alcohol – and the chilies are finished by the time our food arrives and we agree to an honorable tie.

We chat about school and friends and swimming and movies. I give him a brief account of my father, then we steer clear of further discussion of family. There is no mention of the big A. And while we talk about PC technology and find out that we both hate Facebook, we do not talk about cell phones. I find out that the three things he hates most in the world are dishonesty, cruelty and cheating. We discover that neither of us likes limiting ourselves to favorites (colors, music, food), and neither of us likes Perkel.

“I can’t stand it when he takes on L.J., especially when he compares us,” he says.

“I hate that, too.”

“It was great that you stood up to him that time – ‘comparisons are odious’. That’s really true. No-one should be made to feel second-best compared to someone else.” He says this fervently, like it’s personal.

I excuse myself to go to the restroom – all that lemonade! – and pay the bill en route. In the restroom, I check my teeth for food while I wash my hands with anti-bacterial soap from a tube I carry around, and reapply my lip-gloss sparingly. My eyes are bright and my cheeks flushed. Maybe chilies
can
make you drunk.

Outside the early evening light has turned the greenish-yellow of an impending storm. The sky is bruised with heavy clouds, and there’s the smell of rain in the air. Luke drives me home as lightning cracks the sky but, this time, he gets out and opens my door for me. We stand outside the circle of bright light at the entrance to the building. He holds both my hands and looks deeply into my eyes, as if searching for the answer to some vital question there. I’m lost in those eyes, falling, drowning.

My heart is in manic-depressive mode, lurching forward in a rapid rhythm and then stopping altogether as he cradles my face in his hands. I lean into him. He tilts my face upwards, then lowers his mouth and finally – finally! – I am kissing Luke Naughton.

29

Storm

I wrap my hands behind his neck, twist my fingers into his hair, melt into the hands that pull me tight against the heat of him.

Luke’s kiss tastes of lime and salt and hope. It makes my bones melt, my fingers tingle and my head dizzy. It starts an ache in the pit of my belly and a plea in my heart.

Please,
I want to say,
please, please, please.

But I have no breath to speak and, when he lifts his head from mine, neither has he. We stare at each other for an endless moment.

Please.
Am I begging him, or God, or fate?

A sudden deluge of rain breaks the spell, drenching us and driving us inside. We pick up where we left off on the elevator ride up, and the kiss continues in my apartment – first up against the news wall, then on the sofa. The storm streaks the sky with veins of white and pelts the window with rain as we touch each other, running our hands over hair and under clothes, blindly exploring angles and curves, hollows and swells, rough and smooth, hard and soft.

“Wait, stop. Time-out.” I come up for air, gasping.

I would love nothing more than to sink back into the delirium, but if I don’t hit the brakes, this is going to wind up where it’s headed, and I’m nowhere near ready for that. He looks as stunned as I feel. He runs his fingers through his hair. I give a shaky laugh.

“Coffee?”

He nods and I go to the kitchen to make it. My legs still feel weak – I never realized until now that ‘weak at the knees’ is a literal description – and my hands tremble as I make the drinks.

We sip for a while in silence, pressed up against each other on the sofa. He studies the photograph of my mother on the shelf opposite. I should probably offer to move it to where he isn’t confronted by it.

“Luke –” I begin, just as he says, “Sloane –”

“You first,” I say.

“I’ve been thinking a lot lately, about you. And your mom, and the accident.”

My heart kicks, but it’s not the delicious race that was the pounding rhythm of our kisses. It’s unpleasant and frantic; suddenly, I’m scared. It’s all too good to last.

“For a long time, I’ve been bitter and twisted up into knots from the loss of my brother. He was a great guy, you know? Everybody loved him. He was bright and kind and funny. Just the best.”

“He sounds kinda … perfect.”

“Maybe I’m idealizing him. He could be an irritating know-it-all, and he couldn’t catch or hit a ball to save his life. But he was a genius, a real one – he got accepted to Harvard pre-med, with a great financial assistance package thrown in … He was everything I’m not.”

Something clicks in my mind.

“Not_A – your online name, is that what it means? Not Andrew?”

“Yeah, I was feeling kinda sour and sarcastic when I made the name up. He was special, and so good that you felt bad to envy him. My folks were so proud of him – he was their golden boy, you know? When he died, they seemed to lose … their way. So did I. We all gave up in some way. But I’ve learned something from you: we can’t choose what happens to us, but we can choose how we respond. What happened to me, to my parents, was not our choice. But who we’ve become since, is.”

“Luke –”

“Hang on, I’m trying to say something important here. I’m trying to say that we Naughtons don’t have exclusive rights to grief and misery. You lost a lot, too. Your mother, and your swimming. And you were badly injured – I know you’ve suffered. But you didn’t give up, you’re trying to move on. You keep living and fighting – that takes courage. I admire that. I admire you.”

He takes my hand, squeezes it.

“I’m not the only one who has suffered – that’s what I’ve realized. And it’s time to let go of what was, and deal with what
is
– now, in the present. He’s not coming back – I’ve got to accept that. And I’ve got to accept what your mother did, and know that she didn’t do it on purpose. I’m ready to forgive her, Sloane.”

But is he ready to forgive me? I need to know.

“And what about –” I begin to ask, but he’s not finished.

“It was an accident. That’s the long and the short of it – it was an accident. Yeah, she was on the cell and she should
not
have been. That was wrong. But if she’d just gone straight, she wouldn’t have hit Andrew. Your mom swerved to avoid those kids and there wasn’t time to swerve again to miss him. In a weird kind of way, my brother took a bullet for those kids. He saved their lives. Huh, just like him to be the hero.”

“But … but…”

Doesn’t he know? A black hole of terror and loss is opening up behind me. Just a few words will push me into it, but I have to speak them.

“Luke, in the accident, it wasn’t really her – my mother, I mean – who swerved …”

“Yeah, I know – it wasn’t a conscious decision, it’s like your instinct and reflexes take over. Like another part of her was behind the wheel.”

He doesn’t know. I just assumed he knew the details. Knew that I am the one who was indirectly responsible for Andrew’s death. I thought that he was growing to like me in spite of it. But he doesn’t even know. And if this is how angry and bitter he’s been with me when he thought my mother was to blame, how will he be when I tell him it that my hands were the last ones on the wheel? I’m going to lose him. The panic rises inside, a hot red tide.

“Luke, I need to tell you something. Something important.” My heart is in my throat now, I can hardly speak past it.

“Me too. Me first.” He looks at me and his eyes are intense and full of tenderness and a peace I’ve never seen in them before. “I’m falling for you, Sloane. I’m falling deep and fast.”

He kisses me then and God forgive me but with his mouth on mine and his hands tangled in my hair, I cannot find the words or the courage or the will to tell him the truth. I have to tell him, I know I must. But I don’t.

I can’t bring myself to kill the joy that transforms his face, or the happiness that has transformed my life. Until just a few months ago, it felt like I had lost everything: my mother, my talent, my future, my health, my beauty, my hope, and any sense of feeling truly alive. I can’t survive losing him, too. Not when I’ve just woken up from the deadness and the pain.

He leaves when the storm ends outside; inside of me it continues unabated.

30

Heaven and hell

I’m in heaven.

And I’m in hell.

Heaven is going out with Luke. (It’s official now.) Heaven is sitting in the couples’ loveseat at the cinema, watching him watching a movie. Heaven is going for long walks in the park beside the lake and having a pizza picnic in the last of the Fall sun. It’s waking up on a Saturday and knowing I’ll be spending most of the next two days with him. It’s the smile of delight that lights up his face when he first sees me in the morning, and the lingering last kiss when we say goodnight. Heaven is talking for hours and holding hands and staring at his beautiful eyes whenever I want to. And it’s his hugs, which make me feel safe and calm and wanted, like I’ve come home.

Hell is the guilt which termites holes into my happiness, and which cripples my hope with fear. Hell is holding onto the secret which has the power to destroy my heaven. It’s the deceit and the hidden and the unsaid which holds me back from completely letting go. Hell is the terror of knowing that I will lose him if I’m ever brave and honorable enough to tell the truth, and it’s knowing that unless I’m brave and honorable, I’m not worthy of him.

I’m a coward. I’m still clear on what I should do, and I still can’t bring myself to do it, especially now that I know how he feels about deceit and cheating.

And it is a kind of cheating – not telling Luke the truth. I’m betraying him into liking, maybe even loving, someone he would hate if he knew the whole truth about her. I know what I must do, but the heaven is so good and the hell of losing him would be so bad, that I do not confess. I concentrate instead on life at school, and my aunt Beryl, and Sienna’s blog, and anything else that will distract me. It’s easier to focus on someone else’s problems or bad behavior than my own.

L.J. is back at school and Perkel wastes no time getting on his case, picking on him to answer questions in class, checking his (and only his) homework on a daily basis, keeping up a steady barrage of snide comments, and reading L.J.’s every English exercise aloud to the class. I don’t think L.J. writes too badly at all, actually, even though his essays and poems are filled with zombies and violence and something he calls the “bliss of non-being”. But Perkel reads them in such a sarcastic and belittling tone that they wind up sounding moronic.

L.J. is still a walking contradiction. One moment he’s unexpectedly thoughtful or kind, and the next he’s being repulsive again. The other day, for example, he saw me walking down the hallway to Miss Ling’s room, struggling to keep all my art supplies balanced in my arms, and he offered to help me carry them. He even opened the door of the classroom so I didn’t have to touch the handle. But when I thanked him, he said, “I can think of much better ways you can thank me, Munster.” When I told him to shut up, he laughed and said he was just kidding, but I wasn’t sure. I can’t read him and that makes me feel off-balance around him.

I’m worried about him, though. At lunch yesterday, I saw him intently reading something on the cafeteria notice-board. I checked what was posted there on my way out. Unless L.J. is planning on auditioning for the school’s new acapella singing group, or has lost a pair of jazz shoes, or wants to volunteer as a mascot for the upcoming basketball tournament, then he was reading a poster about teen suicide prevention.

The Jaysters still haven’t given up their quest to discover L.J.’s real name though, for a while, they are completely distracted by the mind-blowing reality of Luke and I hooking up.

“Her?” Juliet exclaims loudly in perfect range of my hearing when Jane tells her the news. “Luke Naughton is dating her – the scar monster? I don’t believe it!”

“She must be putting out big-time. What else could the attraction be?” says Jayweedledee.

“Yeah,” says Jayweedledum. “I bet they spend a lot of time in bed at night. He can’t see her face in the dark.”

Juliet glares at me whenever she sees me. When she is confronted with the evidence of Luke and me sitting together in the cafeteria at lunch, or holding hands and sneaking kisses in the hallway between classes, she comes up with a new theory.

“It’s pity – that’s all it is. He feels sorry for her. Luke’s all about community service and helping the less privileged and taking care of ugly dogs. She’s an ugly bitch, too. She’s just, like, his latest project.”

I suspect that a lot of other people probably think the same thing. Luke is hot property, and he’s out of my league, no question. Hell, it’s a mystery to
me
why he likes me. The more time I spend with him, the more I discover how wonderful he is. He’s strong and talented and admirable. He’s a truly good person: kind and thoughtful and generous. He’s also smart and funny, despite his theory that only his brother possessed those qualities. And, of course, he’s so gorgeous he makes my eyes water.