Love Edy (9 page)

“Yeah?” Edy said with looking. She slung her
Chemistry book on the top shelf, grabbed a gray notebook from
there, shoved it in her backpack and zipped up the bag.

“I need to ask you something,” she said.
“So, please. Don’t take my head off.”

The image of Chloe looking from Edy to
Hassan returned. Edy stilled, too aware of her own breathing.

“Ask,” Edy said. “Otherwise, I need to get
to class.”

Chloe nodded and a sweep of dark curls
tumbled into her face. She tucked them back with manicured
fingers.

“You,” she said. “Don’t have anything with
Hassan, do you?”

A sound leapt from Edy’s throat. A choked,
startled something that she stuffed back into the hell it
abandoned. She opened her mouth, found it too dry, and turned back
to her locker for cover.

“Why would you ask something so silly?” she
said and concentrated on deep even breaths.

“It’s only . . . ” Chloe’s voice drifted
alongside her gaze. Edy followed it to a pack of girls. Aimee the
redhead, Sandra Jacobs and Eva Meadows. Sandra lifted a hand and
waved, before the three erupted in giggles.

A match lit under Edy, engulfing her in an
unreasonable fury.

She was there for
them.
She was one of
them. No matter how many days they rode to school together, Chloe
Castillo was one of them. Edy wouldn’t forget it again. Not
ever.

She ripped Chloe’s headband from her hair,
heard the audible tear, and tossed the hairpiece to the floor. It
in were thin strands of dark locks.

“Learn your place,” Edy said. “You’re
Lawrence’s skank; not one of us. We don’t have to humor you when
you talk.”

Edy slammed her locker and strode off,
pushing past Chloe on her way to class.

~~~

At lunch, Edy took her seat with Wyatt, gaze
boring into the three girls first to arrive at the “it” table.
Aimee, Sandra and Eva. They sat huddled together with Caesar salad
on each plate, talking without the slightest flicker of hunger.
When Sandra looked up and saw her, she gave a little wave of
fingers meant to annoy. Aimee followed it by puckering up her lips.
That’s right, Edy remembered, she’d been eager to brag about
tasting Hassan. Maybe she’d be interested in a fork buried right
through those lips. Edy sighed. So much for pacifism.

Hassan, Lawrence and Kyle arrived as a set,
went for the lunch line, came away with double helpings and sat
with the girls. All three went erect at the sight of their cattle,
with Sandra going so far as to tease her curls with fingers.

“I called you last night,” Wyatt said. “I
was concerned when you didn’t respond.”

Edy blinked. Tried to think of something to
say. “I wasn’t available,” seemed snarky, yet it was all she could
come up with. She turned to her food. Nothing special that day,
just twice warmed butter chicken, leftovers because of Rani’s
headache the night before.

“I have a class with him,” Wyatt said.

Edy looked up. “Who?”

“Him,” he nodded in the direction behind
Edy.

She turned to see Hassan approaching with
his tray. Back at the “it” table, Lawrence, Kyle and the twins
gathered their things.

A mass exodus, Edy realized with a twist of
a smile. A mass exodus for her, she wanted to tell the queens of
primping.

Except, not quite.

The twins dropped down on either side of
Edy, while Hassan and Lawrence sat down to bookend Wyatt.

“Edy,” Hassan said without looking at her.
“Could you excuse us for a second?”

She half expected a camera crew to appear
and taunt her with jeers. “I will not,” was what she said.

The twins sighed as if exhaling from a
single pair of lungs. No doubt, they’d elected Hassan to deliver
this idea that she should get lost.

“You move,” Mason said in her ear. “Or this
gets real embarrassing for your boyfriend. You know, with us
dragging him to privacy and all.”

“Oh, for God’s sake!” Edy snatched her lunch
bag and stood, scanning a still life of what should have been a
bustling cafeteria. Every pair of eyes watched, thirsty for drama
and banking on it.

Then Edy realized it. The one place open,
the one place she could sit was the “it” table. She dropped down
next to Chloe, never bothering to look up.

“Edy—” Chloe said.

“Please,” Edy said. “This day has already
exhausted me, and there’s still detention to look forward to.”

And that she’d slept almost none the night
before.

~~~

Across the aisle, at the table Edy used to
occupy, Wyatt looked from one Dyson brother to the next, before
settling on Hassan. An irrational swell of claustrophobia
threatened to swallow Wyatt.

“Where’d you come from?” Hassan said.

Wyatt dropped his gaze. He knew boys like
this, guys with easy looks and hulking muscles, who took failure as
a personal challenge. His failure to answer would be seen as
motivation to get an answer. Wyatt wasn’t keen on motivating
them.

“Rhode Island,” Wyatt said. “Chaterdee,
Rhode Island. You probably never heard of it.”

“Why’d you come here?” Hassan said.

Not why he’d moved, but why Wyatt had come
there specifically. A subtle but powerful difference that had Wyatt
giving Hassan a closer look. He’d heard of him, of course, and not
just because Edy led up his fan club. Football titan
extraordinaire, drool extractor of girls, and smart enough to
manage an advanced placement class or three.

“My dad wanted to move here. That’s all,”
Wyatt said. He didn’t look up to see if the answer took.

“And that scene with Sandra? What was that
about?” Matt said.

Wyatt shrugged, feeling like a turtle shoved
into its shell. “Nothing. Just a misunderstanding.”

“I don’t like you,” Hassan said. “And I
damned sure don’t like the way you look at Edy.” He looked him
over, jaw tightened with thinly veiled contempt. “If you think this
is over, you’ve got another thing coming.”

It occurred to Wyatt that while the twins
were older, bigger, and presumably the alphas of their group,
Hassan stood at the head of this expedition.

Hassan was the one to watch.

~~~

Detention ran long for Edy and Chloe and
short for the boys, who had the excuse of practice for a winning
team to get them out. By the time Edy had been freed, ballet
practice had begun and there was no way she could put a respectable
face to that sort of tardiness. She decided to walk home. Why Chloe
joined her in those stupid heels, Edy would never understand.

Except, understanding came with the next
breath.

It used to happen all the time in middle
school. Girls cozying up in the hopes of catching an eye from one
of the boys—Matt, Mason, Hassan, Lawrence. Sweet smiles and
lukewarm compliments, all made as they looked elsewhere. Just as
Edy got ready to tell her she wouldn’t be used, Wyatt came tearing
out of the school, closing the half block they’d crossed quick.

Cold winds slapped his cheeks red and left
his blond hair flapping in the wind.

“I’ve been looking for you,” he said.

Edy raised a brow. “Since school let out?”
She shot a look at Chloe. Her face stayed smooth as marble.

“Yeah, well, you didn’t answer your
cell.”

Edy started off again. “No phones in
detention.”

“Ah,” Wyatt said and fell in step.

The three headed for the end of the street,
with Chloe’s heels as sound and sure as their steps.

Edy looked at her. “How are you doing that?”
She nodded toward her feet.

Chloe shrugged. “I could show you
sometime.”

“I’d rather you didn’t,” Edy said.

Who said she needed heels and makeup and all
that other silly stuff? Once a year she pressed into it, pressed
into because it made her father happy. Even if it felt absurd.

“I think Edy looks great the way she is. She
doesn’t have to try as hard as the rest of you,” Wyatt said.

Chloe shot him an acidic look.

“And I thought the boys would’ve
straightened you out about that,” she said.

Edy jumped in. “About what?”

Chloe picked up selective hearing.

“About what?” Edy pressed and put a hand on
Wyatt’s arm.

She thought she saw him flinch.

“Nothing. It’s just your—whatever they
are—set a few boundaries.” Wyatt smirked. “For some reason, they
don’t seem too impressed with me.”

Edy snorted. If those standards worked both
ways, then the boys find themselves in scant company indeed.

“You really should watch it, Edy,” Chloe
said. “You’ll have people thinking you’d never be friends with
someone like me when we both know better.”

Edy dropped Wyatt’s arm, which she didn’t
realize she’d still been holding, and forged ahead of the pack. If
that dimwitted cow wanted to bring up the past, she could do it to
him. As far as she was concerned, they had never been friends, they
had only been childhood playmates for a spell, and then Chloe had
decided in the sixth grade that pretty girls should unite, or
whatever. She promptly forgot Edy. And Edy forgot her, end of
story.

So Edy was content to leave their story
right there.

Seven

Two weeks past their ice cream dinner at Max
Brenner’s and four since depositing underwear on Edy’s feet, Wyatt
had become Edy’s faithful escort to six-days-a-week practice
sessions. Each night, he faded to the back, bewitched by every bend
and bow, every leap and private smile she fed him.

Enraptured. Inescapably so.

Her friends could do nothing about it. These
moments were his alone. With them perpetually at practice, they
could never intervene, never intercept. Ballet was Wyatt’s to
have.

He sat on a pale pink bench at the back of
the studio and extended fingers across the thin leather cushion. A
wisp of white ran from knuckle to wrist and back again, old
scarring from waking his mother prematurely from a night terror. On
the opposite side, a valley of furious pink ran parallel to his
palm’s life line, remnants of another mother-father fight, also
rendered unknowingly. He ceased to exist when they fought, which
meant mostly that he ceased to exist.

Half a dozen dancers, all female, extended
onto a barre before him, bodies lithe, supple, stretching without
hesitation. Each was thin and serious-looking, in leotards of black
or white, hair pulled into prim buns, emphasizing an assortment of
tight mouths. Only Edy varied from the scheme, hair burgeoning like
a fountain, skin warm—rich brown near pale pink, mouth full, pouty,
playfully coy.

Once, as a boy, Wyatt saw an ebony butterfly
at the place where the waters of Bishop Cove met Swan Point
Cemetery. It was the day of his grandmother’s funeral, his mother’s
mother, and as far as he had been concerned, they couldn’t put her
in the dirt fast enough. Wyatt had stood, wedged between a
theatrical red-eyed mother and a father still reeking of last
night’s whiskey, when the butterfly fluttered upwards before him,
drawing his attention with its beauty, singularity, and mystique.
Gaze pinned, Wyatt had followed, hypnotically at first, frantically
next, sliding on mud, gripping at scrub, never daring to look away.
Never had he seen the flutter of black silk and never had he seen a
butterfly in winter. When Wyatt had reached it, his hands and pants
were caked in filth. He’d extended a hand, brushed it, and gasped
in horror, remembering that butterflies were supposed to die if
touched. To hurt a thing so beautiful had to earn God’s wrath. It
had stuttered through the air, dropping once, twice, and then
soaring for the heavens.

Wyatt’s dad had snatched him from the
water’s edge and smacked him upside the head, asking if he meant to
ruin the old lady’s sendoff. Later, in secret, his father admitted
to wishing he’d gotten up the nerve to do something, at the very
least write an “F— you” on the casket and fertilize the soil with
his waste.

The black butterfly’s image stayed with
Wyatt. When he mentioned it to his father, he called it a moth. His
mother hadn’t even seen it. No matter, Wyatt knew better than them
both. He always knew better than them both.

~~~

The sun had long since set when Edy and
Wyatt stepped out of the ballet studio. A chill seized the air,
sawing to the bone as they walked. She zipped her goose parka up
and yanked the fur-lined hood to her brow before giving Wyatt a
grieved look. His polyester-lined trench coat stood as a pitiful
first and last defense against an arctic New England winter well
underway.

“You know, we’re still considered children,”
Edy hissed. “If I told my mom—”

“Don’t.”

They fell into an awkward silence after a
now familiar conversation.

He hated for her to see him like that, cold,
and needing something basic. It made him seem weak, piteous, not a
thing to be desired. He decided to redirect.

“You were beautiful today,” Wyatt said. “And
you always stand out. They’re nowhere near your caliber.”

Edy snorted. “That’s because I belong in
advanced classes. Mom’s still warming to the idea. Rani’s pressing
it, so it should happen any day now.”

Rani Pradhan. The jock’s mother. It seemed
she came up nearly as much as Hassan. The thought gave him
another.

“You speak Hindi?”

“And Punjabi.”

He imagined the hours she must’ve spent in
the Pradhan household to learn their languages. “It must’ve taken
forever for him to teach you.”

Edy spasmed. “For starters, my Hindi’s
better than Hassan’s. The first word I ever said was
dada
and the second was
duppar.
Hassan had two dozen English
words before he even gave another language a try. An omen, Rani
says.”

Duppar.
For some reason, he suspected
he wouldn’t like the meaning, but had to ask anyway.