“No. He gave me a quick lesson on driving her. Then he left in his car, which a friend had followed him over in.” All true. The definition of “quick lesson” probably wouldn’t hold up under scrutiny, and they didn’t need to know that the friend left for quite a while and then came back for Stick. But yeah, no lies or anything.
Lily eyed me suspiciously, but Syd was lying on her back on Lily’s bunk and seemed not to pick up on anything.
Not that there was anything to pick up on.
“Well,” Lily said, “if there’s anyone to teach you how to drive, it would be Stick. That guy knowsa lotabout cars.”
“One would assume that, given his nickname,” Syd said, as she checked her phone, then laid it on top of her stomach and put her arms behind her head.
Don’t ask, I told myself.Donotask.
“Yeah, right. Hey, Lily, do you even know that asshole’s real name?”
Yeah, I guess I did have a Stick tell. Lily rolled even closer to my bed, her eyes narrowing. “No, I don’t. But I could find out if you wanted.” She started to reach for her phone.
“No,” I said, maybe a bit too forcefully. “Don’t bother. Who cares, anyway? I just thought Lucas might have called him by his name or something.”
She took her phone from her desk but didn’t do anything with it, just held it out, almost like she was daring me. “No, Lucas has always only called him Stick.”
“I bet he calls him a lot more than just ‘Stick’ since he was arrested. Oh, wait, he probably doesn’t even talk to the guy anymore.”
Lily shook her head, confused. “Why wouldn’t Lucas be talking to Stick? And he is. They’re together all the time, when Lucas isn’t working or…”
“With you,” I said, nodding pointedly to Lily’s bed, where Syd was texting on her phone, seemingly oblivious to Lily and me.
A flush came over Lily’s perfect face. God, she even blushed beautifully.
I wasn’t jealous of Lily’s beauty often. I had come to terms with my looks—offbeat, quirky, but attention-getting—a long time ago. I’d had to own myself early on, or my mother would have created a mini-me, and there was no way I was going to let that happen.
“In fact,” Lily said, “Lucas and Stick seem even tighter after the whole arrest thing.”
“How can that be? Doesn’t Lucas blame that asshole for even being arrested?”
“Maybethat’shis real name…That Asshole. You sure call him that enough,” Syd said, not taking her eyes from her phone. Apparently shewaslistening.
“Lucas doesn’t blame Stick for what happened,” Lily said.
“Why not? He should.”
She shook her head. “That’s not how he sees it. Lucas totally owns what he did.”
“Well, yeah, he should. But he should still see who put him in the position in the first place.”
Lily shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t know all the details of how it went down, but I know Lucas doesn’t hold Stick responsible. At all.”
She seemed so nonchalant about the fact that her boyfriend had a Past. I didn’t want her to read anything into my question, but I had to ask. “How do you deal with the fact that Lucas has…done stuff in his past?”
A pained look crossed her face, which she quickly masked. So, not so nonchalant after all. “I don’t know. It didn’t seem to matter at first because it was all…crazy attraction, and just needing to be near him. I wasn’t thinking long term enough to where his past, his life before me, would come into play.”
She looked away from me, out the window, into the dark night. I noticed Syd’s fingers stilled on her phone, and her head tilted in Lily’s direction, watching.
“But then,” Lily continued, “when I knew it was going to be something more, something…deeper, I had to really think about it. About how I would deal with it, how I would let it affect me.”
“And?” I coaxed when she’d said nothing for a moment, just stared out into the night.
She turned back to face me. “And…I realized that, hokey as it sounds, his past was what made him who he is right now. Am I happy that he had a drug problem? No. Am I proud of the fact that he was involved with Stick’s car theft operation? Absolutely not. Do I believe that both of those things are firmly behind him? Yes.” She took a deep breath, then let it out. “Am I so deeply in love with him that I’m able to let go of his past? Absolutely.”
“But what if you weren’t as certain as you are that he’d put that all behind him? Could you still—”
