The Inside of Out (12 page)

I don't have an accent,
I thought, but by the time I caught my breath enough to retort, or to giggle, or to cry out “When will I see you again?” he'd already disappeared down the block.

As soon as I stepped onto school property, I felt the wrongness of this evening pulsing around me. It was Friday night. And I'd gone back to school. To watch a
football
game.

A little girl wearing a Pirates T-shirt bounced off me in her rush to join her equally fan-spangled family, and suddenly, I found myself pulled with the tide toward the ticket booth. On top of every other indignity, this was going to cost me four bucks.

The freckly sophomore manning the booth glanced up as I was trying to hand him my wadded cash.

“Daisy Beaumont-Smith?” he asked, staring at the blue ends of my hair.

“Yeah?” I shuffled, wondering if he was about to chuck his Gatorade at me, and if so, which way I should dodge.

“No charge for you.”

He up-nodded knowingly. Knowing
what,
exactly? I grimaced a smile, pocketed my cash, and continued past him, mentally reciting my new mantra:
“This is not a date, this is
not
a date, what am I
doing
here, this is not . . .”

I climbed the stands to a comfortable distance from the field, and let people fill in around me. I wished Hannah were
here. We could critique the stretching techniques of the opposing team's cheerleading squad, or share a “To Benefit the School Band” popcorn, or give each other a meaningful look and by silent assent get up and out of here.

But she was busy tonight. With someone else. Eating fried foods. Watching a movie. Probably one I wanted to see and would now have to rent by myself. Stretching out on her downstairs sofa, ignoring Mama Tan's comments about their food choices, giggling at some inside joke, building walls around themselves to keep pesky people like, oh,
me
out.

Swallowing bile, I texted her.
“You'll never believe where I am . . . cheering on the Palmetto Pirates! Woohoo?”

It took her six minutes to reply with,
“Cool!”

That wasn't much of a response. Not even an accurate one. Sitting here was the most uncool thing I'd done in recent memory. And Hannah of all people should have been the one to call me on that.

The crowd was pretty full by now. To my immediate left and right were two groups of rowdy freshmen who kept leaning over me to shout at each other. I almost offered to move, but that would have put me at the end of the row, where they might knock me off the bleachers with the force of their New To This School enthusiasm.

“Daisy!”

Sophie waved from the top row, where she was sitting with a bunch of her natural-fiber friends. They looked as out of place as I felt. I waved back, wondering if they came to every game or if Sophie was doing what I'd claimed to be doing, helping our cause by researching homecoming traditions.
That's what I had to assume Raina was up to when I spotted her two tiers down with a middle-aged gentleman in a Duke windbreaker. Her father! Raina did have parents! Come to think of it, now that I was in CIA mode, was that Jack with his family on the opposite side of the field? They looked surprisingly nice. And, way over yonder, yep—Sean Bentley, trying to politely extricate himself from a conversation with a cheerleader from the rival team.

I was just realizing that the only one missing from our club was Kyle, when I saw him clamber up the bleachers with his own family, all of them dressed in Pirates gear, his younger brother waving a school pennant.

They really were all football fans. They had authentic school spirit. Was it catching? If so, I was about to find out.

The field's speakers roared to life and everyone cheered, drowning out the mumbled announcement and generic sports music that followed. I stood with the crowd and watched our terrible football team race onto the field from the locker room.

As soon as he hit open air, QB turned to the stands. When he spotted me, his face lit up—a little. He jogged to join the team and kept scanning, his smile dropping a centimeter with every stride.

The game was what I'd expected. Lots of half standing, then sitting with a communal groan as the other team's pockets of fans went wild. We lost. We always lost, so I'd come prepared, knowing this would be more tragedy than comedy. The point wasn't the happy ending. It was the struggle.

QB looked so dejected after the game that I decided to tell him this on my way out. It sounded appropriately
inspirational. But while I was tiptoeing down the bleachers in my interview skirt, QB got the first word in.

“Daisy! Let's hang out!”

“Now?”

“Yeah.”

His teammates were trudging past, watching us with open curiosity.

QB had just lost the fourth straight game of the season. I couldn't embarrass him further.

“Okay, sure.”

QB did a gleeful hop that made me laugh. “I'll meet you out front. Just a quick shower. I promise I'll smell better in a minute!”

Thirty minutes later, the crowds had all gone home and I was sitting on the curb of the school's front drive, watching lamplight pool on the dead border hedges and listening to the crickets start up their nightly party.

When they went silent, I knew he'd walked up. His blond hair was damp from the shower. And he'd kept his promise. Even with the nightly scent of low tide and mown grass thick in the air, I could smell QB from here, a mix of clean and sweat-salty that made me want to lean in.

I refrained.

“You wanna go to that diner on Walker?” he asked. “The one that's always empty?”

And so, for the second time in less than five hours, I found myself settling into the corner booth of the Moonlight with a guy who I was most definitely not dating. Becky was still on duty.

“What can I get . . . y'all . . . ?” Pouring our waters, she glanced up—at me, then at QB, then back at me with horrified admiration.

“Just water's cool,” QB said.

“Mozzarella sticks and chicken fingers, please,” I ordered, opting to skip the salad this time. I needed to drown this awkwardness in saturated fat and fast.

As soon as Becky left, QB let out a leaden sigh. “Thanks. I needed to get away.” He balled both fists and rested his chin on them. It was like he'd seen an illustration of “sadness” and was trying to duplicate it exactly.

I stuck a straw in my water. “Don't you usually hang out with the team after games?”

“Only when we win.”
So,
never.
“And anyway, I kind of wanted to talk.”

“Sure,” I said, hoping against hope that he wanted to talk movies. TV. Anything but—

“Natalie didn't come.”

“She's probably busy. With her
girlfriend
.”

“Chief Beck was there.”

“Okay?”

“He comes to every game. With Nat. But she wasn't there.” He cradled his chin in the crook of his elbow and peered up at me. “I thought about going up to him. You know, asking what's going on? But then I thought maybe that wasn't such a good idea.”

“Good call.”

Natalie's father was the chief of the James Island police
force. He'd either express sympathy or arrest QB for stalking. I'd say the odds were fifty-fifty.

QB's head was now resting on the table. “I don't know if I can do it.”

“Do what?”

“Go on.”

“Ugh
.
”

QB sat up. Apparently I'd groaned that out loud.

“You'll be fine.” I smoothed my tone, channeling Sophie. “You're QB Saunders. You'll have a new girlfriend in a week.”

And
I instantly regretted those words.

“Call me Chris.” He stretched his hand across the table. “I like it when you call me Chris.”

“Okay,” I said, not calling him anything. We fell into a silence that grew exponentially weirder the longer it lasted. I was just about to ask him something inane like what kind of music he listened to when I realized he was crying.

Becky chose that moment to bring me my food.

“This looks great,” I squealed. “Thank you!”

She shook her head as she walked away, no doubt wondering why someone who looked like me had not only shown up with two different guys on the same night, but had somehow managed to reduce a young Greek god to tears.

And the tears, they were a-flowin'. His forehead was wrinkled, lips pressed together, cheeks streaming. After a moment of profound reluctance, I reached out and took QB's hand. He immediately started talking, like his fingers were the on switch to his mouth.

“You don't understand.” His grip tightened. “We were together for two years. She was the only one I ever thought I'd be with.”

“Ever?” I asked drily, trying in vain to lighten the mood. “In your whole life?”

“When I . . .
gave
myself to her, I thought it was because she was the one.”

Holy. Lord.

“Wow, uh, you were a virgin? I figured you guys were doing it all the time.”

And oh my God, I just said that in real life.

He shook his head, unfazed. “She wanted to wait. And I didn't screw around on her. I'm not that guy. So we waited. Until it was perfect.”

I tried to pull my sweaty fingers back, but he had a vise-grip on them. I was officially trapped in the most awkward conversation in the world.

“It was a few months back,” he was saying, his voice hushed. “We were on my family's boat. It's for fishing, but it's real nice. Fifty-two-foot. I had it planned for weeks. Champagne. Flower petals.”

“Scented candles?” I joked.

“They're not safe on a boat.” He sniffed back a sob. “It wasn't great, not fireworks or slow-mo or anything, but you know. First time.”

I nodded politely, thinking,
Slow-mo?

“I figured it would take a couple times to get good at it. And I thought . . .” His voice choked again, but he drew a breath and shrugged. “I thought we had forever.”

“Oh
.
”
I tried to imbue the word with my deepest sympathies.

“The next week, she told me she was a lesbian. I turned her into a lesbian.”

“No.” This time I was the one squeezing his hand. “No, no, no.” I shook my head. “Chris.”

He blinked at his own name, as if pulling himself out of a mental flashback sequence and back into the diner with me.

I pressed on. “You didn't turn her anything. It has nothing to do with you. Maybe it took crossing that line for her to come to terms with the truth about herself, but that doesn't mean she doesn't care about you.”

“If she cares about me, why didn't she come to the
game
? The first home game of the year! Why didn't she come?”

His fingers loosened and I pulled my own slowly back.

“I don't know,” I admitted. “I'm sorry.”

“
You
came.” He blew his nose on his napkin, then peered over it with grateful eyes.

“Yep.”

At that, he seemed to relax—and the conversation did too. He stole one of my chicken fingers. Started talking about upcoming games and ideas “Coach” had for breaking their fifty-three-game losing streak.

I smiled,
mmm-hmm
ed, and scarfed my mozzarella sticks as fast as I could without choking, praying that I hadn't just accidentally bought a season ticket to Pirates football. What would happen to the boy if he scanned the stands and neither of us was there?

QB drove me home in a gleaming Mustang saturated with
new car smell. As we pulled up to my house, I wondered whether he was going to try for a kiss—and if so, whether I would try to escape it.

But he just opened the car door for me. “I was wrong, you know, Daisy. You're really easy to talk to.”

As soon as I got inside, I texted the one person on the planet who would agree.

“Hannaaaaaah.
Are you up? You will not believe the night I just had!!”

I went to bed with my phone on the pillow, in case she wrote back.

She didn't. But someone else did. Someone with a number I didn't recognize.

“Who won?”

No amount of staring managed to make that text make sense, so I figured it was a wrong number. I'd just drifted off when my pillow vibrated again.

“What are you guys, the Pirates? Wanna make sure my facts are right.”

Facts. Huh. I propped myself on one elbow and typed.

“We are the Pirates, yes. And the other team won. The Pirates never win
.
”

“Pirates never win. I feel like there's a life lesson there. Not sure which.”

I grinned, hopeful that this wasn't some creepy stranger, just the near stranger I'd hung out with hours before.
“Crime doesn't pay? Except it totally does
.
”

“Can I quote you on that?”

“Best not.”

“Ha.”

He even
typed
a single “ha”!

The phone fell silent after that. I entered his number into my contacts as “Adam,” then added “(Reporter)” so I wouldn't be lulled into thinking we were friends. Or worse—more. He was a college guy. I was me. He'd only texted to fact-check.

I kept my phone on my pillow all night long.

The next morning, I heard Hannah's faint ringtone and dropped an open box of cereal in my mad scramble up the stairs to answer.

“What's up?” I tried to control my huffs.

Hannah paused. “Have you been exercising?”

“Not on purpose.”

“Phew.” She laughed. It was a lovely sound. “Wanna see a movie tonight?”

There was something in her voice that set alarm bells ringing.

“Sounds great.”

“Awesome. We'll pick you up at six?”

I stifled a sigh.
We.
“Yep. See you then.”

When Hannah's car pulled up outside my house at six o'clock, Natalie was riding shotgun. I'd had a few hours to prepare a fake smile, so it was fully operational—until I scooted into the back and found Dana Costas staring over at me with a pained expression, like she'd been asked to ride in back with the dog. She and Natalie must have made up. Funny how Dana outed her to the whole school and it was
water under the bridge, whereas I did absolutely
nothing
wrong and became excommunicated in perpetuity.

Hannah spun from the driver's seat to say hi. She looked especially pretty, her overgrown pixie-cut swept back in a tortoiseshell headband and her eyes framed in light makeup I'd never seen her wear before. When I said, “Hey,” Natalie turned her cheek in greeting, just far enough to avoid actually looking at me. She was wearing a dangly star earring. It reminded me of something.

Whatever it was, it made my eyes sting. I redirected them to the seat back and started racking my brain for things to talk to Dana about. History class? What brand of cloying perfume she was wearing?

Tonight was clearly intended to be some bizarro double date. Lesbians + Besties = Fun. But thank goodness, Dana wasn't interested in bizarro dating. The whole ride to Mt. Pleasant, she leaned into the middle of the car to try to talk to Natalie. Despite the fact that her coiled curls kept swinging into my face every time the car switched lanes, she didn't say a word to me until we were in line for the concession stand, where she asked in a disapproving murmur, “Did you really get homecoming canceled?”

I was seconds from replying that no, in fact, it was
Natalie's mother
who'd canceled homecoming, when I saw Hannah watching, eyes pleading.

So I shrugged. “Just the dance part.”

Dana made an old-lady clucking noise and turned away.

“It wasn't Daisy's fault,” Hannah said, bumping shoulders
with me. “I mean, it's not like she showed up and asked them to cancel the homecoming dance. That would have been a
horrible
thing to do. If that had happened.”

We all turned to stare at her.

“Anyway, two homecomings! This is my real point.” She slung an arm around me and shook. “Two homecomings are
obviously
better than just one homecoming. Especially since the first one isn't going to have a dance, right?”

“Um.” I smiled. “Thanks, Han.”

“Anytime.”

Dana didn't seem impressed by Hannah's little speech. But Natalie had finally decided to look my way. Those icy blue eyes of hers were locked on me with a strange intensity, like she was trying to figure out exactly what genus of insect I was.

Her star earrings twinkled in the concession stand lights—and I had it. Her bedroom walls. She'd had them painted to look like the Perseid meteor showers from the Giselle Chronicles, lovely little falling stars, trailed by dust. They glowed in the dark. We used to count them before we fell asleep.

“I like your earrings,” I said.

She flinched as if shocked. Looked away.

“Thank you,” she mumbled. Then she looped her arm through Hannah's, pivoting her away. “Jumbo popcorn?”

So
they
were sharing a snack. When it was my turn to order, I stared at the overhead menu as if seeing it for the first time. We usually got a large popcorn, Peanut M&M'S to dump into the bucket, a soda to share—medium, not large, so
we didn't risk missing part of the movie with a restroom run. It had taken us years to find the perfect cinema concessions combo.

“What are you doing?” Dana snapped from behind me. “Order.”

“Pretzels,” I blurted. “Please.”

The relieved cashier went to fill my order, as I thought,
Pretzels? You hate pretzels!

Too late. I shuffled away with my bland, overpriced snack, just managing to get into the theater in time to snag a seat next to Hannah as the previews started. Dana snuck in moments later and sat as far from me as possible. The first trailer looked terrible, so I lifted my hand for a thumbs-down, as per our usual routine. Hannah shot me a faint smile and a furtive thumbs-down of her own. When Natalie glanced over, she tucked her hand under her leg and didn't take it out for the rest of the previews. It felt too ostentatious to review the trailers on my own, so I stopped too.

The movie was just okay, a glossy spy thriller with a twist ending I saw coming from the opening scene. But as we were leaving the theater, Dana declared it ah-mazing.

“Don't you think?” She looked eagerly up at Natalie.

Natalie shrugged one shoulder. “Meh.”

Dana deflated.

“It was better than meh!” Hannah said, glancing between them. “I liked it too. A rip-roaring roller coaster with surprises at every turn.
Four stars way up
.”

“You mean thumbs, Han,” Natalie said, shooting her a sidelong smirk. “Thumbs way up.”

I scowled, wanting to smack the smug expression off her face. Even if she was right about the thumbs thing.

“Why not stars?” Hannah walked backward, glaring kittens at Natalie. “Stars go up too.
Way
higher than thumbs. I stand by my review.”

“Hannah von Linden.” Natalie's smirk swelled into a real smile. “
How
are you real.”

Hannah's breath seemed to catch. She smiled at her shoes and looked away. “You have to stop saying that.”

Natalie loped closer to Hannah like she was being tugged by a bungee. Their foreheads touched—gently, glancingly—and then I swear, some sort of telepathic message passed between them. They moved apart again, hands shoved in pockets as if they hadn't been about to kiss, as if that had been the furthest thing from their minds.

I felt like I was attending Visitors Day at the Freemasons—I was seeing the polite, public version of whatever went on behind closed doors and it still felt like I shouldn't be watching.

“I don't get it,” Dana said, her voice flat and overloud. “Why wouldn't she be real?”

Hannah flushed, shaking her head. “It's nothing.” She turned to me, eyes alert, desperate for a subject change. “Hey, what's your review, Daisy? You can do thumbs up or stars up, your choice.”

“Or stars down,” Natalie suggested, a few steps ahead. “Or thumbs horizontal.”

“I'm actually gonna second the ‘Meh,'” I said. “Simple and elegant.”

Natalie let out a surprised laugh, turned, and looked at me.
Her eyes on my eyes. No ice in them whatsoever, warm for a single blink—so much like fire-haired Lida, twirling across my backyard to attack me with a hug, that the sight of her hit me like a tidal wave. But then came the withering second blink, and the universe snapped back into alignment.

When we got outside, I let my steps stall behind the others, feeling like a loosed balloon. From back here, I could observe—Dana skipping every few steps to match pace with Natalie, whose stride kept veering toward Hannah, both heads bobbing low, away, low, away as they chatted.

They hardly touched. No stranger could possibly tell they were a couple. They just looked like friends. Best friends. Some strange emotion surged through me. It felt shameful, uncomfortable, a wet bathing suit on a dry body.

Then I noticed Hannah's pinkie inching out to graze Natalie's. Her chin dipping, rising, wrenching away. They weren't even making eye contact. I'd never seen
not touching
look so charged. I had to stop walking to process it. They wanted to hold hands, hold
everything,
but they weren't. Why? Because of what people would think? What was the point of being out if you played platonic even on a date?

They must not be all that into each other,
I told myself.
Otherwise there would be way more PDA.

The thought was so hollow it blew immediately out of my head.

The way home was the same as the way there. I'd nearly nodded off when—

“Beach tomorrow?” Dana's voice was like a sneaker scraping against a gym floor.

Hannah grinned back at her. “You beach'a.”

Natalie buried her head in her hands, cracking up. “Oh my God, Hannah.”

“That was supposed to be ‘you betcha'!” Hannah glanced wild-eyed over her shoulder at Dana. “I wasn't calling you a bitch. Eek, sorry!”

“I think she got that,” Natalie said, wiping a tear. “You are loony tunes.”

Dana looked blank. “So you're coming to the beach.”

“Yes!” Hannah and Natalie said in unison, then fell into giggles.

There were about seventy things bugging me about that little exchange, one of which was far too glaring not to point out.

I poked my head past Dana's maze of curls. “It's supposed to be nice out tomorrow. Sunny, low eighties.”

Dana snorted. “Um, thanks weather girl.”

“Hang on.” Natalie whirled on me from the front seat, jaw agape. “I remember this. You never liked the beach on sunny days. You always wanted to go when it was raining.”

And you always hated the beach on sunny days because you had to wear ten gallons of sunscreen to protect your freakishly pale skin
. But before I could gather the courage to say it, Natalie whipped back around. I couldn't see her smirking, but I could feel it.

“Hannah feels the same way,” I said to her headrest. “You can't even see the beach when it's nice weather. It looks like
Where's Waldo
. It's only worth going on gray days, right Han?”

Natalie raised her eyebrows, turning to her girlfriend for a response.

Hannah shrugged. “That's more of a you thing, Daisy. I'm good with the beach either way.”

I sat back. Rationally, I knew it was utterly stupid to feel betrayed about this, but it felt like a shove. Another “me thing” to add to the list of ways I didn't know I was different from Hannah. I leaned against the window while Dana jabbered on about plans for tomorrow's beach party. Which, by the way, I was at no point invited to.

But it wasn't until we turned onto my street that I realized what was bothering me most—the overarching bad vibe that had been coloring the entire outing. Hannah was being weird.

Not weird-weird. Hannah-weird.

Charming, silly, off-kilter, relaxed. She wasn't wearing her polite face around Natalie. Not even around Dana. If anything, she was even
more
herself tonight—Hannah 2.0. And it wasn't because of some magical ability I had to draw her out. It had nothing to do with me at all.

When I opened the car door, Natalie said, as if coached, “Bye Daisy. It was good to hang out.”

Hannah preempted any possible reply on my part by saying, “Call you later!”

No, you won't,
I thought.

“Sounds good,” I muttered.

Mom was asleep already, the first floor dark, but upstairs, I could hear Dad playing
Everwander
. Rather than sitting on my bed in a fog of self-pity, staring poetically at the blank wall until I passed out from boredom, I crept into Dad's cave,
pulled up a gaming chair, and grabbed a controller. He shot me an appraising glance, then without a word, restarted the game so I could join as Player Two.

I tried playing a vicious Mohawked dwarf character that Dad had created, but after a few minutes, I asked to swap to the hot elf chick. I knew she was yet another negative, over-sexualized representation of women in video games, but her weapons were better.

“I'm not sure if the story's working as well as the first
Everwander,
” Dad said, squinting at the screen. “Can't pinpoint why.”

We played at half volume with a few breaks for Dad to jot notes and me to grab us snacks from the kitchen until, at some point, I must have fallen asleep, because I woke up in the gaming chair with a blanket over me and daylight streaming through the window.

Dad was still playing. He tossed me a controller.

“Go again?”

After a few battles, Dad swiveled his chair to pat me on the shoulder. “It's nice to have somebody to play with.”

It was maybe the saddest thing I'd ever heard him say. And what was even sadder was that I agreed.