Places No One Knows (23 page)

I open my eyes and nearly melt with relief. I'm in the only place I want to be, standing awkwardly in the corner by Marshall's desk and feeling like I've come home.

I hear him first, sense the magnetic tension as he approaches. But when he steps into the room, he moves right past me, padding across the carpet with a towel around his waist.

He'll see me in a second. He has to. His head is down, though. His eyes are on the floor, and the awkward moment when he doesn't look up just gets longer.

I stay where I am. He thinks he's alone, and maybe I've spent the last few weeks invading every corner of his life, but it's different now. He's let me see too much of him, offered more than I have any right to. He's not a stranger anymore.

At his dresser, he yanks open the top drawer. He's about to take the towel off, and once, I was in bed with him. I held him down in the dark, but this moment is not the same. It's private. Voyeuristic. When he gets out a pair of boxers, I back away, sliding furtively into the closet.

It's worse, standing in the dark like a contract killer or a movie monster. I keep my hands flat against the wall, like I might ambush whoever steps inside.

Marshall doesn't come near me, though. I can hear him out in his room, rustling around, getting ready for bed. Then he turns out the light.

In the safety of my hiding place, I stand against the wall, staring into the dark.

Out in the bedroom, his breathing has the cadence of someone wide awake, too careful.

He told me that he loved me. He has to see his grave mistake by now. Has to know that I am ice inside. I lean back and close my eyes.

After a while, his breathing loses its regimented sound. It evens out, and when it does, even the air seems softer, like the world has stopped standing guard.

I let myself relax. I don't move until the pain in my feet gets bad enough that it tingles all the way up my shins. Then I steel myself and tiptoe out of the closet.

In the dark, Marshall is a low shape under the blanket, silhouetted against the wall.

I sit by the head of his bed with my elbows on the mattress, watching him, watching his pale, fluttering eyelids and his mouth.

After a long time, I lie on the carpet beside his bed and pull my knees up. I fold my hands under my head and close my eyes until the sound of him breathing is the only true thing.

“Waverly.”

I roll over, already resigned to my room and my bed and my frantic, shrieking alarm clock.

I'm not in my room, though. I'm still on the floor and Marshall is out of bed, crouching next to me and shaking me by the shoulder. “Hey, Waverly. What are you doing?”

I feel dazed, too stupefied to think clearly. I want to be tucked against his chest, warm and safe and far away from the grinding monotony of daylight. I turn my face into the floor and can almost feel it.

“Here,” he says with his hand on my arm. “Sit up, sit up.”

When I do it, though, nothing is fine or better. Nothing is okay. I'm still chilly and untouchable. Still me.

Marshall has me by the wrist, guiding me carefully into bed and climbing in after me so he's pressed against my back.

“Don't do that,” he says into my hair. “Don't lie on the floor when you could be up here with me.”

His body is warm. Inarguable. It feels better than any moment in any given day. I pull away and roll over. I don't deserve to be comforted.

“What?” he whispers. “What are you doing?”

I adjust my head on the pillow, trying to see his face in the dark. “Are you mad at me?”

He's lying on his back now, dimly illuminated by the light from the window. His silhouette looks up for a second, staring at the ceiling. Then he swallows and fumbles for my hand. “No.”

“You should be, though.” I squeeze my eyes shut tight for a second before I say it.

I mean for what I said, for how I acted behind the bleachers, but it doesn't really matter. I could apologize for every facet and fiber of my being, and it would still be just as true.

He doesn't say anything, just rolls over and pulls me against his chest, pulls me right where I want to be.

“I broke up with Heather,” he whispers against the top of my head.

His breath on my scalp makes my heart leap and stutter.
“Why?”

“Because I don't like her that way. And I like you. I don't want to be with anyone else.”

For a long time, I just lie there in his bed. Safe. Perfectly still. “You wouldn't kiss me tonight.”

He laughs a small, helpless laugh. It isn't really a laugh at all. “I didn't want to do it and still be pretending I was there for her. It was—it seemed gross. Or like…not the way I feel.”

The weight of his voice is unbearable, so heavy I can feel it like a change in gravity, the force of it pressing on my body. My ribcage tightens and suddenly, every strange and wordless thing inside me is welling up.

He pulls me closer, squeezing tight. “Are you
crying
?”

I close my eyes, swallow down the lump in my throat. “No.”

And because I'm in control of it—because I have stopped—it's not a lie.

He tried to give me something honest, something true. He said
love,
but there's a part of me that still insists in cool, clinical tones that he can't possibly mean it, and even if he did, I'm not mechanically designed to take it. My motherboard is only wired for analysis and calculation, no place to plug it in.

“I'm not good at being loved,” I whisper. My voice is barely audible. “I'm good at being self-sufficient.”

I'm touching his bare chest and his stomach now, tracing shapes with my finger.

“That feels good,” he whispers back, and I don't know how to make him see.

He sighs as I draw the shape of my own private geography. My list of confessions:

Fine.
I know he doesn't understand—can't read my secrets on his skin—but he pets my hair anyway. He pulls me closer, close enough that I can almost convince myself this is the only thing that exists.

“I wish you could put your hand on my heart and feel it,” he whispers. “I wish you knew exactly how much I'm not going to hurt you.”

I picture it—surgical, gory, distinctly unromantic—and stop tracing. Science Waverly, reaching into a gaping chest, lifting a bloody heart in one latex-gloved hand and fighting the urge to squeeze. I have never once worried about how much something will hurt.

He's drowsy now, sinking into sleep. His body softens, forming to my contours, filling in the jagged mountain range that constitutes my outline. He is molding himself around me, making a space for me that didn't exist before.

In the past, I've always thought that people's edges either lined up or didn't. Some days, I didn't even have to work that hard to overlook the fact that no one ever lined up with me.

I assumed it was a matter of time. One day I'd meet someone who counteracted my chemical structure. We would compete for supremacy, collide until one of us was forced to yield, or else go forth together, suspended in eternal stalemate.

But my model is inaccurate. The poets are wrong.

The opposite of ice isn't fire.

It's water.

The days are strange and the nights feel like some hyperrealistic dream I can't wake up from. The candle has shrunk to a sliver now. I cradle it in my hands like a holy relic. I don't light it, because I know that if I do, my window to Marshall just gets smaller.

I spend whole class periods staring at my textbooks, flipping through the pages, not comprehending. Marveling over the perfect blackness of the letters.

In every sleepless expanse of days, you come to a point where your brain stops processing information correctly. A chapter could be written in Cyrillic and you'd still get halfway down the page before you noticed.

You start to believe that you can see the future. You stop noticing that you've been staring into space for the last four minutes. Déjà vu is a daily condition. Everything seems recursive, winding back on itself. You look at the assignment on the board and are sure that you've already done it.

In the west hall bathroom, secrets keep appearing—proliferating, overlapping. Sometimes I don't know what to say. The confessions are too heartbreaking, familiar and foreign at the same time.

There's this one:

And this:

Girls worry about their popularity, their weight, their goodness and intelligence and worth. Their stupid secret crushes.

By the sink in the corner, someone has printed the message, enigmatic, but oddly affecting:

I want to tell the confessor and the world that I understand the feeling, but instead, I don't write anything.

Near the paper towel dispenser, someone has written:

I uncap my pen, put it to the wall. Maybe it's Heather's secret, maybe not. Maybe it doesn't matter.

For Heather or Maribeth or every heartbroken girl whose chosen boy has passed them over for someone else, someone who doesn't have the common decency to appreciate what they've got, I write:

I'm sorry.

Every day, someone else's heart spills out a tiny, unvarnished truth, like the very substance of our lives is determined by whether or not we're loved.

There are eleven hundred boys in this school and plenty of them look all right, they sound all right. They buzz around the hallways, indistinct, while girls gaze and pine and lust after them.

Those girls are lucky, and sometimes I even want to tell them that, ink it on the wall in blood or sear it into the latex paint. They have a place to be honest.

In trigonometry, I open my notebook. In the margin, in pencil, I write:

He is the lighthouse; everyone else is just boats.