“Who? Steven?” Taylor looked genuinely confused.
“No. Jeremiah. You said you’d be nice.”
She waved her hand in the air. “Oh, he doesn’t care.”
“Yeah, he does. It’s just that you don’t know him.” Like I do, I wanted to add. “I didn’t think you’d ever act so—so…” I searched for the perfect word, to cut her the way she’d cut me. “Slutty.”
“I’m not a slut,” she said in a tiny voice.
So this was my power over her, my supposed innocence over her supposed sluttiness. It was all such BS. I would’ve traded my spot for hers in a second.
Later, Jeremiah asked me if I wanted to play spit. We hadn’t played once all summer. It used to be our thing, our tradition. I was grateful to have it back. Even if it was a consolation prize.
He dealt me my hand, and we began to play, but both of us were just going through the motions. We had other things on our minds. I thought that we had this unspoken agreement not to talk about her, that maybe he didn’t even know what had happened, but then he said, “I wish you never brought her.”
“Me too.”
“It’s better when it’s just us,” he said, shuffling his stack.
“Yeah,” I agreed.
After she left, after that summer, things were the same and they weren’t. She and I were still friends, but not best friends, not like we used to be. But we were still friends. She’d known me my whole life. It’s hard to throw awayhistory. It was like you were throwing away a part of yourself.
Steven went right back to ignoring Taylor and obsessing over Claire Cho. We just pretended like none of it had ever happened. But it did.
chaptertwenty-nine
I heard him come home. I think the whole house must have—except for Jeremiah, who could sleep through a tidal wave. Conrad made his way up the stairs, tripping and cursing, and then he shut his door and turned on his stereo, loud. It was three in the morning.
I lay in bed for about three seconds before I leapt up and ran down the hallway to his room. I knocked, twice, but the music was so loud I doubted he could hear anything. I opened the door. He was sitting on the edge of his bed, taking his shoes off. He looked up and saw me standing there. “Didn’t your mom teach you to knock?” he asked, getting up and turning down the stereo.
“I did, but your music was so loud you couldn’t hear me. You probably woke up the whole house, Conrad.” Istepped inside and closed the door behind me. I hadn’t been in his room in a long time. It was the same as I remembered, perfectly neat. Jeremiah’s looked like hurricane season, but not Conrad’s. In Conrad’s room there was a place for everything, and everything was in its place. His pencil drawings, still tacked onto the bulletin board, his model cars still lined up on the dresser. It was comforting to see that at least that was still the same.
His hair was messed up, like someone had been running their hands through it. Probably Red Sox girl. “Are you going to tell on me, Belly? Are you still a tattletale?”
I ignored him and walked over to his desk. Hanging right above it there was a framed picture of him in his football uniform, the football tucked under his arm. “Why’d you quit, anyway?”
“It wasn’t fun anymore.”
“I thought you loved it.”
“No, it was my dad who loved it,” he said.
“It seemed like you did too.” In the picture he looked tough, but I could tell he was trying not to smile.
“Why’d you quit dance?”
I turned around and looked at him. He was unbuttoning his work shirt, a white button-down, and he had on a T-shirt underneath.
“You remember that?”
“You used to dance all around the house like a little gnome.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “Gnomes don’t dance. I was a ballerina, for your information.”
He smirked. “So why’d you quit, then?”
It had been around the time my parents got divorced. My mom couldn’t pick me up and drop me off twice a week all on her own. She had a job. It just didn’t seem worth it anymore. I was bored of it by then anyway, and Taylor wasn’t doing it anymore either. Also, I hated the way I looked in my leotard. I got boobs before the whole rest of the class, and in our class picture I looked like I could be the teacher. It was embarrassing.
