Wicked Games (17 page)

This had to stop. It had to.

She’d never felt murderous before in her life. She was a nice girl. A kind girl. She was charming and witty and she tried not to take life too seriously. If this went on much longer, she was going to lose the best parts of herself. She’d become bitter and angry, a paranoid mess. She could feel the change happening already.

She ached for someone—anyone—she could talk to. Not for the first time, the thought of calling Carter went through her mind. She was sure that he’d understand how she was feeling and know what to do about all this. But that just reminded her of the sexy video she’d made for Todd. It had seemed so playful and fun when she’d filmed it. Now as she remembered the images it
contained, she couldn’t help thinking that Carter would hate her forever if he saw it. The whole thing seemed filthy and ugly, a powerful and cruel blade hanging over her, ready to chop her head off if she made one wrong move.

And what if the sound file was right? What if she was all alone and no one cared? What if she really was the disgusting girl that Lilah was trying to make her feel like she was? She admonished herself:
Shake it off, Jules. Be tough. Don’t let the hater get to you.
But no matter how often Jules told herself to be strong, Lilah
was
getting to her. Big-time.

As Jules jogged
across the quad and neared the bank of lockers outside Mr. Wittier’s biology room, the air thickened and became sticky with a rancid smell. She covered the bottom half of her face with her shirt, but the smell seeped right through, gagging her. A smell so powerful that it was a physical force, heavy and damp and revolting.

She wondered what Mr. Wittier could possibly have going on inside his classroom to create such a smell. It hadn’t been here three hours ago, when she’d stashed her backpack in her locker before graduation practice. Mr. Wittier was a weird guy—there was something musty and vaguely autistic about him, and he wore the same
stained brown cords every single day—so she wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d brewed up some sort of evil-smelling mushroom concoction in his lab, but this quickly? And hadn’t she seen him running crowd control in the auditorium during the rehearsal?

She held her breath and soldiered on. She just wanted her yearbook. A quick in and out and then she’d race back to the theater building to collect her signatures. She could find someone there to tell. God, it was gross.

Gulping air through her mouth, she ran the combination on her lock. She threw the door open, and it was like she’d opened the gates of hell. The intensity of the smell quadrupled—it was coming from her locker.

The stench was overwhelming, acidic and sweet and putrid like rotting meat. It made her light-headed. Her stomach rioted and she willed herself not to throw up.

She could barely see straight, it was so intense, but she could see enough to know that someone had been inside her locker. On the shelf where she stacked her schoolbooks this someone—and she knew who it was—had lodged a leaky plastic bag full of heavy, orangey-brown liquid. It was dripping all over her yearbook, down the stack of books under her yearbook. It pooled on the shelf and drizzled down the wall of the locker.

There was a sheet of lined notebook paper taped to the bag. Someone—Lilah, it had to be Lilah; goddamned Lilah, again—had written on the sheet, block
letters in ballpoint pen. Jules could see the force of her rage in the way she’d traced over the words, heavy scribbles and stabs.

It said:

EAT MY PUKE, BITCH!

The rage and despair surging through Jules’s body were so overpowering that the things she did next were more animal instinct than considered choices.

She whipped the bag of vomit out of her locker and threw it with all her might across the lawn, out into the middle of the quad. As it flew, its nasty liquid contents were let loose in a spray, like from a runaway hose. Flecks flew everywhere. They got on her shoes, her legs, her skirt.

It was revolting. Her stomach turned over like something angry and alive was kicking inside her, trying to get out. She could feel the acidic taste working its way up the back of her throat.

And she realized then that waiting and hoping was never going to make Lilah stop.

She pulled her phone out of her purse and made the one call she’d been resisting all these weeks, the one she both most and least wanted to make, the one that terrified her because it required a trust she wasn’t sure she could believe in—it could easily solve her problem, and just as easily make it worse.

She called Carter.

“You smell that?”
Jules shouted, while Carter was still half a quad away.

“Yeah, what the hell?”

“You see that plastic bag there? Go pick it up.”

Carter did what she said. He fought through the stench and wandered out to the bag and picked it up by the tied handles. Then, realizing what it was he held in his hand, he dropped it with a shudder and looked back at Jules.

“Nice, right?” she said. “Welcome to my life.”

When Jules had called, she hadn’t told him why she wanted to see him. She’d just said, “Come to my locker. I have something to show you.” He hadn’t imagined that
this was what she’d meant. Since the incident with her car in the parking lot, he’d resisted contacting her out of respect for what he thought were her wishes. He knew nothing about the torture she’d been through since then, and throughout the walk across campus his head had been full of visions of her maybe having some kind of a peace offering for him. He’d hoped that this would be his chance to explain his feelings to her and maybe find out why his texts had made her so mad.

“Where’d it come from?” he asked her.

“It was in my locker.”

“Jesus.” He ran his hand through his hair as he tried to come up with the right thing to do in this situation. “This is horrible, Jules.”

“‘Jesus? This is horrible?” That’s all you’ve got? Weak, Carter. Very weak.”

“Jules, I swear, I would never do something like this,” he said.

“I know it wasn’t you!” She was shouting now. Carter couldn’t quite tell if she was mad at him specifically, or blind with rage at the whole situation. “It’s your fucking girlfriend. You want to know what else she did? She took a baseball bat to my car, and then she broke into my car a second time to write nasty notes in lipstick for me to find. And she sends these awful texts. My God, you should see the texts.”

As Jules rolled through the rest of the list of Lilah’s
crimes—the various confrontations they’d had, the stalking in the theater, all of it—feelings of horror and shame surged through Carter’s stomach. He berated himself. How could he not have known? How could he not have guessed that Lilah would do something like this?

“I’m so sorry. I didn’t know,” Carter said, his pulse racing. “I wish I had. I would have stopped her.”

He tried to take Jules’s hand, to comfort her, but she was worked up and didn’t trust him to console her. She yanked her arm away.

“Why didn’t you tell me about all this before?” Carter asked.

He caught her eye and held it.

“Why would I do that?” she said. Tears were brimming below the surface, but she swallowed them down. “You chose her.”

An ache plunged through Carter’s heart. There’d been so many misunderstandings. So much misplaced ill will. How could he ever begin to peel it all back and allow the deep caring buried beneath to show through again?

“But I didn’t,” Carter said, finally. “I broke up with her. I mean, it took me longer than it should have, but . . . that’s what I’d been hoping to tell you that night when I went to your house and—” He caught himself. Now was not the time for declarations.

For a moment, the two of them stared at each other.
The miscommunications of the past few months hung between them in balloons of regret. Jules’s rage had melted a little, but Carter sensed that she still didn’t want to be touched.

“This is all my fault,” he said.

She shook her head. “No. It’s not, but . . .” She didn’t see any way to ensure that he understood how cruel Lilah had been without telling him about the video. “Look, there’s this stupid video I made last summer. It’s—it’s X-rated, okay. It’s a video of me touching myself and whatever. It was stupid. The second-stupidest thing I’ve ever done. And Lilah somehow got her hands on it. She’s been threatening me with it.”

She yearned for him to tell her that he didn’t judge her. Her every muscle was tense with the effort to hold herself together.

Carter placed his hands on her tanned shoulders, holding them firmly but tenderly.

At his touch, Jules flinched. She felt like she might turn into a puddle of water.

“That’s terrible,” he said. “I wish you would have told me.”

“You don’t think I’m a slut?”

“No. Why would I?”

“I thought, because of the video . . .” She wanted to give in to his warmth, to let him comfort her, but she knew she couldn’t—she shouldn’t—not right now, not
like this. She could feel her body pushing itself toward him.

Jules looked away, out toward the plastic bag leaking into the lawn. Then she lifted his hands off of her and said, “I’m not sure I can trust you right now, Carter.”

“I’ll get the video back,” he said. “I promise I will. But you just have to understand. Lilah’s—she’s very unstable. She must have stopped her treatment or something. And her parents are pretty clueless. I doubt they even notice anything’s wrong.”

Carter didn’t want to sound like he was defending Lilah at all—he just wanted Jules to know that she hadn’t done anything to deserve this.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Jules asked, her voice cracking.

Carter knew he had to back-peddle here or risk losing even more of Jules’ trust. “I’m so sorry. I should have. From now on, let’s tell each other everything, okay?”

Jules recognized that disarming earnestness on his face, that sense she’d had before of his inherent goodness, his desire for all good things to be given to her. All the things about him that tugged at her heart. She wanted to believe in him. She didn’t have any reason
not
to—no reason except her fear of Lilah.

“I’ll get her to stop,” Carter said, with a sudden vehemence. “I swear to you, Jules, I won’t let anything bad happen to you. Ever again.”

Lilah could tell
that the shadowy figure trudging across the beach toward her was Carter long before she could make out his features. She recognized his adorably slouchy posture, the cute way he kept his hands buried in his pants pockets, the way he periodically pulled his mop of hair across his forehead.

When he was finally close enough for her to make out his features, she stood up on the platform of her lifeguard chair, waving at him, willing the pitter-pat of her heart to stay calm. He’d returned to her like she knew he would.

There was worry on his face, a wary nervousness. But of course. After everything he’d put her through in the
past few months, he must wonder if she would ever forgive him.

Didn’t he know she would?

Didn’t he know there was nothing he could do in the whole wide world that she wouldn’t eventually forgive him for?

She’d dreamed of this moment. She’d always known it would come. If she just waited him out, if she held sturdy and tight to the rock of their love—it was a mountain; it was immovable—he’d come slinking back carrying his regret and shame heavily on his back.

He was her prince, and he’d made her a princess. Finally, he was remembering that.

She did a quick survey of the people on the beach: a couple of middle schoolers whipping a tennis ball back and forth in the surf, a prematurely balding dad building a sand castle with his daughter, a large group of Cuban twenty-somethings camped out under a tangled mass of umbrellas, blasting their reggaeton and drinking something out of red cups. The Frisbee throwers. The boogie boarders. There were a lot of people here this afternoon, actually. But she didn’t care. They’d have to fend for themselves. She had bigger concerns today than their physical safety.

Hopping down from the lifeguard stand, she ran to Carter. In her mind, she’d already forgiven him, they’d already made up, the tears had already been shed, and the
apologies had already been accepted. There was nothing left to do but embrace each other now, wrap each other up tight and kiss and kiss and kiss, press their foreheads together and gaze into each other’s eyes and promise and swear that nothing—not Jules, not college, not anything in the world—would ever again come between them and their love.

When she was close enough to touch him, she leaped and clasped her arms around his neck, wrapped her legs around his waist. He instinctively held her up and she went in for the romantic, end-of-the-movie kiss she’d been rehearsing in her mind over these past few weeks.

“It’s okay, Carter,” she said. “I’ve been waiting for you come back to me.”

And nothing. Carter’s lips didn’t part for hers. They tightened, actually. They clamped shut. He didn’t whisper
I’ve missed you
or
I’m sorry
or
I’ve finally realized I can’t live without you
. He leveled a cold, hard stare at her. He went stiff under her grasp and released her thighs from his hands, and she fell under her own weight to the sand.

Then he didn’t help her up. He dug his hands back into the pockets of his pants and gazed down at her with an expression on his face that scared her. There was no love there—just a cruel, hard, and spiteful bottled-up rage.

For a brief instant Lilah was in shock.

“What the fuck, Lilah?” he said.

“You’re not happy to see me?”

“No, I’m not fucking happy to see you.”

She didn’t need to be told what he was angry about. Part of her had known that he wouldn’t understand the fierce beauty in what she was doing for him. Before he could build his case against her, she launched into her defense. “She’s going to cheat on you. You know that, right? Jules is a sex addict. She sucked off the whole football team last year—I know because her ex-boyfriend told me. Todd Norris. He told me how disgusted he was when he found out.” Why wasn’t he responding? When had he started hating her so much? “I’m protecting you, Carter. Don’t you understand?”