CHAPTER 14
The ride home from Alderton-Du Ponte was silent.
Daisy had driven to Ms. Jennings’s birthday party, so as soon as I’d fled the coat closet, I’d found her in the hallway and had gripped her arm hard. “Can you take me home?”
I’d meant for it to come out normal. It hadn’t.
Daisy hadn’t even hesitated. Thankfully, somewhere between walking away from the coat closet with Carter and when I’d found her, they’d parted ways.
I couldn’t face him, not with my pulse still misfiring.
And I couldn’t meet his father for the first time, either, with my mind so thoroughly scrambled.
Jamie met us outside a minute later, slipping into the backseat with his book like this was any other night. Like I wasn’t trying to piece myself back together from nearly falling apart.
We had an unspoken rule about things like this. When something was wrong, we didn’t push. So Daisy drove, while Jamie turned a page in the backseat, using one of the overhead lights to read by.
I sat in the passenger’s seat, thinking and rethinking my words, and refusing to think or rethink anything else. I refused to close my eyes, too, because every time I did, I was suddenly back in the closet with Beck. With his hands on my skin. With my palm to his mouth.
I straightened slightly in my seat, smoothing a palm down my jeans, rubbing away a nonexistent wrinkle. P-E-R-F-E-C-T.
Daisy punched in the key code to our neighborhood and then continued on to the house.
Her headlights bobbed on the garage door as she pulled into the driveway, putting the gearstick into park.
Daisy tapped the steering wheel, waiting.
I had a feeling she was looking at me from the corner of her eye.
I couldn’t look away from the garage door.
Squeezing my phone in my lap, I finally confessed, “I kissed Beck.”
“What?” they both exclaimed at the same time.
“You kissed Beckham Jennings?” Daisy screeched at the same time Jamie demanded, “Again?”
Daisy’s head cracked toward Jamie. “What do you mean, again?” Then she looked at me. “What does he mean, again?”
I couldn’t quite explain why it suddenly felt so important to tell her. A few days ago, the thought of admitting it all to Daisy would’ve made my stomach turn. Now, keeping it to myself felt worse.
I drew in a slow breath. P-E-R-F-E-C-T.
Except when I whirled to face Daisy, the perfect facade shattered.
“I used to have a crush on Beck when I was little, and the night of the garden fire, I kissed him.” My words rushed out fast, nearly running together.
“And I was the one who destroyed the garden and started the fire. Not Beck. But everyone blamed him anyway, and I didn’t stop them. ”
Daisy’s eyes were still saucer-wide, and filled with alarm. She stared at me, as if waiting for more word-vomit from her best friend. “Oh.” She blinked. “Why?”
“Why did I destroy the garden? I—I was overwhelmed. And hurt. And I just felt like—I felt like a shaken pop bottle about to explode, and I had to take the feeling out on something. Have you ever felt that way? Like so much happens all at once, and if you don’t scream, you feel like it’ll swallow you whole? ”
The expression on Daisy’s face shifted, something serious taking its place. “Yes.”
“That’s how I felt.” I squeezed my phone tighter, knuckles aching under the pressure. “It was my parents, and Destelle, and just… everything.”
“So… you lit the serenity garden on fire?”
“On accident.” I explained to her the whole situation—how Beck handed me the lighter, and we first just lit flower petals on fire. How I’d started to burn a rose on the bush, but thought I’d blown it out. “I didn’t realize the fire caught. And then it… all went up in flames so fast.”
“And they just assumed it’d been Beck?” Daisy asked, hands hanging off the end of her steering wheel. Her voice had lost the shocked edge, turning to something softer. “Did you say it’d been Beck?”
“No,” I rushed out, voice catching. “Mrs. Johnson did. He was holding the lighter, and… people already expected it of him, you know? Troubled. That was what they’d called him.
It must’ve been him. Eleanor was barefoot, and her fingers were dirty, but she wouldn’t do something like that.
She was a good girl.” I swallowed, thinking back to quiet Beck, who just sat outside and looked at the stars. “And Beck was a bad boy.”
And I hadn’t corrected them.
That, right there, was the worst part of it all. Destroying the garden, kissing Beck, lighting a bush on fire—it all paled in comparison to the lie by omission. Shameful to admit aloud, a choking pressure around my throat.
“I’ve seen what my parents look like when they’re disappointed,” I went on, my confidence slipping away, the pressure on my chest becoming tighter.
Harder to breathe around. “It’s like something in their face changes.
Like—like you stop being who they thought you were.
They looked at Destelle like that. And she hadn’t cared—she never cared about what they thought—but if they looked at me like that… it would’ve broken me.”
Wordlessly, Jamie laid a hand on my shoulder, giving it a squeeze. The weight caused tears to prick my eyes, because I didn’t deserve his silent encouragement.
Daisy, too, reached over and gripped my knee. “You were just a kid, Nellie,” she said softly. “Kids are allowed to make mistakes. Even ones like kissing a boy and accidentally setting fire to an award-winning rosebush.”
“Not me,” I told her. “Not ever.”
“You put too much pressure on yourself.” Jamie let out a small sigh. “Mom and Dad, if they knew the truth, they’d—”
“No.” My voice was flat and final, and I blinked the stinging in my eyes away.
“They don’t need to know the truth. Beck’s back home, unbanned from Alderton-Du Ponte, and the rosebushes are blooming again.
It’s fine. It’s all in the past.” I laid my hand over Daisy’s.
“I just wanted to be honest with you. I should’ve told you the truth from the start. ”
Daisy pressed her lips together. In the dimness of the cab, it was hard to see the exact emotion in her eye. I was almost afraid to look too close.
“Jamie,” Daisy murmured before I could say more. “Can I have a moment with Nellie?”
Jamie blinked, because now that the truth about Beck was out there, what else was there to keep a secret about? “Sure,” he replied after a beat, popping open the back door. “I’ll, uh, see you later, Daze.”
She gave him a nod, but turned back to me when he closed the door behind him. “Tell me the truth,” she said, lowering her chin. “Do you still have feelings for Beck?”
I should’ve told her about what had happened in the coat closet. How close I’d come to slipping and making another stupid decision. But she didn’t need to know that part. “I can’t have feelings for him,” I told her. “Liking him won’t impress my dad.”
“Nellie,” she said on a sigh, dropping her head to the side. “There’s more to life than impressing your parents.”
There wasn’t. Not right now. Not when everything felt like it was already slipping out of place.
I pressed my lips together, shaking my head slightly, like I could physically push the conversation away.
“There’s something else I want to talk to you about,” I said, forcing my tone lighter. “I want to talk about… Dalton.”
Daisy’s forehead wrinkled. “Dalton?”
Safer. This was safer. “Jamie said I should’ve asked you more about it the other day. He said it was clear you wanted to talk about it.”
“Uh.” She blinked several times, turning away from me to lean back into her seat. “No? I mean, I don’t know. I’m not… I don’t know.” Her fingers fluttered around the steering wheel. Nervous. “It’s kind of like how you didn’t talk to me about Beck. You weren’t ready. I don’t… think I’m ready.”
“I knew it. Jamie thinks he knows you better than me.”
That made Daisy chuckle. “He’s just a worrier.”
“No, just a know-it-all.”
Now we both laughed. She tipped her head to look at me. “Raelynn was so mad when I went up to her tonight. She said, ‘What, do you secretly like him?’”
“You should’ve said yes. Get her off his back.” I thought about it again. “Fake dating Jamie for the summer might not be so bad, in the grand scheme of things, you know. It’d help in ticking Dalton off.”
Daisy’s lips spread into a grin. “That does sound nice, doesn’t it? Nah, I need someone swoonier than Jamie. No offense to James, but Dalton would see right through it.”
I nodded, understanding. Swoony was not a word I’d used to describe him, either. “Well, I’ll keep an eye out. And hey, if things with Carter fall through…”
Daisy swatted at me. “You should go in,” she said, jutting her chin at her windshield. “Someone’s feeling left out.”
Instead of going inside without me, Jamie was waiting at the front door, watching us from the stoop, like a little puppy left out in the cold. Despite the heavy conversation, I couldn’t help but smile a little at the sight. “See you Monday?”
She saluted me, and I climbed out of her car.
Jamie didn’t ask what Daisy and I had talked about, which surprised me, given that he looked so pouty on the porch. He swung into the kitchen and grabbed two cups from the cabinet. “Tonight has been eventful,” he said, going to the fridge and pulling out a two-liter of orange soda.
I sat down at the breakfast bar, propping my head on a fist. I felt far too wired to go up to my room. “Did Daisy pull out any of Raelynn’s hair?” I wanted to see what he’d say about it.
“She was about to.” Jamie set my cup in front of me. “Raelynn took my book and was going to use it as an excuse to talk to me again. Or, that’s what Daisy said she was going to do. It’s funny how fired up she gets.”
“Zero to one hundred, our Daisy.”
“Our Daisy,” Jamie agreed quietly, seeming to get lost in thought.
I sipped at my pop. “Hopefully our birthday party is more lowkey. And that there are no adults doing shots to T-Pain in the background.”
We turned eighteen the day before our high school graduation, and Mom had rented the ballroom for our party. Jamie cringed, tipping his cup back and draining his soda. He moved toward the dishwasher. “I can’t believe you want to have a party. At the country club, no less.”
“Of course I want a party.” This is the last year it’d be normal. Next year, who knew where we’d be? Where all the kids our age would be? “Maybe Dad will come.”
Jamie didn’t reply, but I knew exactly what he was thinking. Don’t get your hopes up too high. He took my now-empty cup and placed it in the dishwasher before closing it.
I didn’t get up from the breakfast bar, just watched him start to walk out of the kitchen. At the last second, he paused in the doorway. “I meant it, though,” he said, not quite looking at me. “I think you put too much pressure on yourself. Perfection is impossible to achieve, Nell.”
“Doesn’t mean I shouldn’t try.”
Jamie didn’t have a rebuttal for that. Something strange passed over his expression. “Beck said he’s going to Stanford.”
“Yeah?”
“The spring quarter at Stanford doesn’t end until the beginning of June.” And then, guiltily, he added, “I checked.”
That was strange. If the spring quarter wasn’t over, Beck should still be in classes. “You think he lied? About going to Stanford?”
“Why would he? He doesn’t care about impressing anyone.”
True. Besides, the adults at Alderton-Du Ponte wouldn’t have considered it impressive, not as much as the bigger Ivy Leagues.
“Maybe he finished early?”
Jamie shook his head. “Not a whole month early.”
Ms. Jennings had said that the last quarter of college had been rough for him. Maybe there was more to that than she was letting on.
Jamie excused himself for the night, and I sat at the breakfast bar for a long time after that, tracing the streaks in the marble countertop, skin tingling.
Or crawling. Tingling felt too positive a word—it was definitely crawling.
The plan I’d had for the night had fallen apart before it could really even begin, and I knew that once I checked my phone, I’d find messages from Carter, asking where I was.
I’d bailed on him, and the guilt of that soured my stomach.
And then I thought about Carter and Lydia.
And then I thought about Beck.
I couldn’t keep doing this with him. It was time to pull the plug and make a clean break.
You spelled it wrong, he’d murmured. D-E-L-U-S-I-O-N-A-L.
With a rough sigh, I laid my forehead down on the cool marble, throat tight with an emotion I refused to name.