Chapter Fourteen
I look Seb square in the eye from our perch under the dining room table and say, “You and that weed better not mess this up for us.”
“Excuse you. Bernard Junior is an aloe-vera plant.” Seb eyes the full skirt of the bright-pink ball gown I’ve only just managed to hide under the tablecloth. “And I’m more concerned about all that fluff messing this up for us, personally.”
A factor that has put a little wrinkle in our birthday playlist–sabotage plan is that not only did Marley assign us all characters, but costumes were not optional. According to my character card, I’m a debutante named Elsie who was murdered shortly after the ball because I impersonated my own twin to go with her beau, and when she escaped from the room I locked her in she accidentally shoved me out of a third-story window, where I landed directly on my head. According to Seb’s character card, he’s a pioneer in botany named Bernard who set out on an expedition to an island to study a rare plant that then hypnotized him into killing his fellow researchers to offer as human sacrifices, resulting in his own death when the guilt drove him to jump into the sea and he was abruptly eaten by a sea dragon.
Which is to say, I’m now dressed like I’m a knockoff live-action Cinderella in one of Christina’s old Halloween costumes, Seb is carting around a succulent he brought from home, and we are both trying very, very hard not to let either of those states of being stop us from smuggling Seb’s old laptop under the table and committing our first coprank in—well, possibly ever.
Once the laptop sputters back to life we pull up Seb’s Spotify. Seb wastes no time copying and pasting Marley’s public “Resurrection Mystery Playlist,” which is currently playing from the speakers, onto a new playlist on his account, then searching Taylor Swift’s name to add “22” a lawless number of times.
“Okay,” says Seb, leaning back from the laptop and pushing it over to me. “Hook it up to the thingy.”
I frown. “Were any of those words supposed to make sense?”
“I’m not, like, a tech guy,” says Seb.
“And I look like one?” I ask, trying and failing to locate any feasible Bluetooth connection on the laptop to hook it up to the “thingy.”
“Oh, no,” says Seb. “Are the two of us just—genuinely useless in anything we didn’t compete over?”
“I hope not, for Bernard Junior’s sake.”
“Are you guys making out under there?”
We both startle so abruptly we nearly knock heads, which does nothing to give the impression of “two people who are definitely not making out under this table.” But it’s only Hadley, who yanks up the tablecloth to stare at us, the laptop, and Seb’s young plant son in bewilderment.
“Do you know how to connect an old laptop to a Bluetooth device?” I ask her.
Hadley has apparently grown both her literal and figurative backbone in my absence these past few weeks. “For five bucks, I do.”
“What if I told you it was in service of annoying the hell out of Marley?” I counter.
“Oh,” she says, taking a seat on the floor. “In that case I’m happy to pay you. ”
She assesses the playlist situation, lets out an approving “nice,” and then has the laptop connected to the speakers in the next two seconds. There’s only a brief pause in the music as it kicks Marley’s laptop off the Bluetooth, but after that we’re golden.
“How did you do that?” I ask.
“With my brain, you boomers. This is embarrassing for both of you,” says Hadley. Which are honestly choice words from someone who is wearing a full-on clown costume (Marley decided Hadley’s “death” was a circus act gone wrong; with the new level of sass she is demonstrating, I’m not sure she doesn’t deserve it). “You can get back to making out now.”
There’s a beat where neither of us will look at each other, until in a very boomer-like fashion, Seb says, “Welp.”
“Welp,” I agree.
I add nothing else, only because if I’m going to have a potentially life-altering talk with Seb tonight, it’s sure as hell not going to be under my parents’ dining room table while Evanescence’s “Bring Me to Life” plays faintly in the background and an anthropomorphized succulent looks on.
Once we’re sure the coast is clear, we follow Hadley out, leaving the old laptop under the dining room table. We spend the next hour trying to be as unsuspicious as possible, which is hard to do when you’re the only two people in the room who know you’re playing a game of playlist roulette, but not hard to do at a party with such a ridiculous theme. We go through the motions of interacting with the other “ghosts”—all four of our parents were eaten by the same tiger named Meowtwo, who escaped from the zoo; Marley’s various friends were in a pop girl band who died on an island one by one after surviving a Lost -esque plane crash; Marley’s boyfriend, Ken, is obligingly wearing ten different hats as a dead hat salesman, which is apparently something my sister is very, very into and I’m choosing not to examine too closely tonight.
But every time one song comes to an end, Seb and I quietly find each other’s gazes from across the room, eyes gleaming with the same mirth and terror.
In the end it takes a full hour for the first “22” to drop. The only reason we are not immediately eviscerated upon the first guitar strums is that Ken—poor, sweet, hat-clad Ken—immediately starts to bop to it. One of Marley’s dead–pop star friends dives to stop him while the other dives for Marley’s laptop, but both efforts are thwarted. Ken’s avalanche of falling hats prevents anyone from getting close enough to save him from his own fate, and Seb and I hide Marley’s laptop behind the breadbox in the kitchen.
“No!” says Marley, pointing her finger at Ken like a misbehaving puppy. “Stop dancing! Defend my honor! Who did this?”
A question immediately answered by Seb, whom I forgot cannot commit to a prank to save his own life. He lets out an unsightly snort from trying not to laugh, the kind that makes everyone in the room turn out of concern that he needs medical attention.
Everyone except Marley, who turns with immediate designs on his murder. Like hell I’m going to let Seb take all the credit for a Taylor Swift–related crime.
“Run!” I yell, grabbing him by the hand and yanking hard.
Which prompts Marley—who is, incidentally, dressed as a dead goth mermaid—to rip off her glittery black tail fin and let out a menacing “There’s nowhere to run !”
Unfortunately for Marley, this chase has now triggered a bone-deep fantasy I never knew I had of starring in my own Taylor Swift music video—which is to say, running at top speed with a glittering skirt billowing behind me with a boy holding my hand. We’re just one slow-motion panorama shot away from being Grammys eligible, if we survive the night.
Marley gains alarming ground on us, but at the end of the hall Seb surges ahead and yanks me into the room I share with Hadley, using the momentum to deposit me and the extremely fluffy skirt onto my bed. He slams the door, locks it, and then covers it with his back for good measure. The instant the two of us make eye contact—him covered in loose soil from Bernard Junior, me with my updo half blinding me—we erupt into breathless laughter.
Marley pounds a fist on the other side of the door. “You cretins are lucky you’re already dead!” she calls.
“That’s not very happy, free, confused, and lonely of you, Marley!” I call back.
Someone in the main room has figured out how to turn the speakers up to full volume, drowning out the rest of Marley’s threats. Seb’s laughing so hard he collapses back-first onto the mattress beside me and I turn my body toward him, curling into myself and practically wheezing, knocking my knees into his.
He turns his head toward me, too. “Good chaos?” he says.
I’m so light and giddy I feel like someone replaced my body with a balloon. “Good chaos,” I agree.
Our faces are so close that I can see the flecks of gold and brown in his eyes, can see the slight lingering crease between his eyebrows from the expression he makes when he’s most focused. All this week of my imagination running wild about this kind of closeness does nothing to prepare me for the most surprising feeling of all—the warm calm. The way my heart is pounding in my chest, but it feels deliberate and sure.
Our phones make the exact same ping! noise at full volume, and we both freeze.
“Shit,” I mutter.
“We don’t have to look,” says Seb.
My hand is already in the pocket of the dress. I pause, staring at Seb warily.
“We could just—check tomorrow,” he says.
Because we both know that ping can’t be anything other than the email from Newsbag coming in to let us know who won this round. I consider him carefully—his expression is earnest, almost nervous. I want to press my thumbs on his cheeks, want to smooth that deepening crease between his eyebrows.
“I’m sorry,” I tell him. “I can’t.”
I pull my phone out and open my email. My stomach doesn’t drop; my throat doesn’t tighten. There’s a faint disappointment, but the kind I can’t feel the full impact of, because just like Seb, I can’t help feeling proud.
“You won,” I tell him. My smile is small but genuine. I want this for him. At least, the part where he has an article published in Newsbag, one that he can show his parents. One that will help his dad trust Seb that this is what he was meant to pursue in school and beyond it.
Seb’s eyes flicker with clear relief, the kind that’s immediately chased with guilt. “Yeah?” he asks.
I reach out and press my hand into his shoulder. We’re so close that my forearm ends up against his arm. “You earned this one. Congratulations.”
Seb swallows hard. “So that means Round Three determines everything.”
I almost nod, but stop myself. “Well, not everything.”
Only then does Seb relax, a real smile curling on his lips. Then he shifts off the bed. “I got Bernard Junior’s soil all over Christina’s dress,” he says. A sentence that would have made approximately no sense two hours ago, but this is Marley’s undead world and we’re all unliving in it. “I’ll grab a towel.”
Thankfully the bathroom is attached to the bedroom, so we can safely hide in here until it’s time to scam cake. Seb shifts off the bed and I scroll down the email to the draft of Seb’s piece.
I blink at the title. “‘No Need for Us to Talk About That’: The Sex Education Gap.” The thing is, I’m used to Seb writing titles we spent hours arguing about, workshopping them to be catchier, easier to digest. But I’m stuck on this one because I’m not reading it in his voice; I’m reading it in mine. I remember the conversation we had about my lack of experience too vividly not to remember every word I said and not to recognize them right in the title of the piece.
I skim the article. It has all of Seb’s usual thoughtfulness, his usual unique slant. But it has a whole lot else in it that it doesn’t usually have—namely, me.
It isn’t just the influence of family and the gaps in their sexual education that students have to contend with, but larger cultural assumptions that come with the timing of their experiences. The word “prude” came up in one of my conversations on campus, and was a recurring theme in many others—largely, the concern of being judged for not seizing on the newfound freedom that college offers. The shame students feel about this seems to be such a driving concern that it doesn’t make room for what might really be going on behind the scenes. Some just aren’t ready for physical intimacy yet; others might find that they’re disinterested in it altogether; some are so far from even knowing their own selves that they’re not ready to be with someone else in a romantic capacity, emotional or physical, and would likely benefit from focusing less on relationships and more on the work they need to do for themselves.
“Okay, I think the worst of it was on the sleeve,” says Seb.
I look up at him and whatever expression he sees on my face makes him immediately lose the color in his.
“What?” he asks.
My blood feels cold. Like someone sucked all the late-summer warmth out of the room. “I wondered why you didn’t send me your draft,” I say, more to myself than to him. Because it makes sense now. Of course he wouldn’t want me to see it. Not when I would have every opportunity to send it back with a What the actual fuck?
Except Seb doesn’t sound apologetic in the slightest. Just concerned and confused. “One of the people I interviewed put me off until the last second.” He sits down next to me on the bed, leaning to look at my screen. “You okay?”
I shake my head, which isn’t hard to do. Most of me is already shaking. “I wasn’t one of your interviews, Seb. I thought we were talking as friends.”
I can’t see Seb’s face, but I can feel him go very, very still beside me.
“Of course we were,” he says. “I just—that conversation felt like the heart of a lot of what I was getting at, so I mentioned it in the piece. But I didn’t name you or anything.”
“Forget naming me. You went ahead and fully psychoanalyzed me.”
It’s almost worse, in a way I can’t explain. Like someone opened my chest and showed everyone the messed-up insides of me, parts of myself I haven’t even looked at yet. Parts I trusted Seb with, only to get them broadcast to the whole school and beyond.
My hands are flat on the bed, trying to ground myself. Seb puts a hesitant hand on top of one of them, his voice low. “I’m sorry, I—I mean, I should have run it past you. I see that now. But I really didn’t think you’d mind.”
I curl my fingers into my palm, moving my hand out from under his. “You told the whole world what you thought of me—which is apparently that I’m some walking existential crisis you couldn’t touch with a stick!—and you didn’t think I’d care ?”
Because that’s what this is, isn’t it? A rejection. I don’t know why I’m surprised. He already did it once, when we were onstage. It’s not just that Seb doesn’t think I’m ready—he thinks I need to do more work. He thinks I don’t know myself.
Which, shit—maybe I don’t. Because I’ve never been so wrong before. A minute ago I was thinking of telling this boy I had feelings for him, certain that he had them, too. He might as well have written in that article that he doesn’t.
Maybe this was meant to happen, then. This article was supposed to come out to stop me from making a mistake that would embarrass me even more than this. A prerejection before I had to live through a real one.
“Shit. No. Sadie.” The distress in Seb’s voice is so palpable that I can’t help looking up and meeting his eyes, which are wider than I’ve ever seen them. “That’s not at all what I think. Can we just—take a beat here?”
I shake my head again. I can already feel my heart twisting, and every thought trying to twist even faster to stay ahead of it. To stanch the tears, to stomp out the ache. To strategize, like this is just one more of the countless things I have to win over Seb. To hurt him more than he just hurt me.
Except this time it doesn’t matter. I’ve already lost. Not just the idea of Seb seeing me as more than a friend but even being a friend.
I stand up abruptly. “It’s just always going to be like this, isn’t it?” I ask, pacing over to the door. “We’re so close to each other that we just can’t help but use each other.”
Seb follows immediately on my heels. “That’s not true.”
“It is. Like you said earlier, with the tech thing,” I say, nearly laughing at the absurdity of it. “We’re shit at stuff we never competed at because the only things we bothered to learn were out of spite. Of course it was only going to lead to this.”
I unlock the door and move my hand toward the knob, but Seb shakes his head with a pleading expression. “To what? Us understanding each other?” he asks.
I fully turn from the door to look at him. “To us exploiting each other,” I say, my voice pitching with anger, with hurt. “I mean, look at this competition. We got our ideas for our first piece from each other. You used one of the most embarrassing things about me to write your second one. We’ve never had an original damn thought in our heads because every single one of them has revolved around screwing each other over and hating each other, and this—this is too far.”
“I’m sorry. I really didn’t mean for it to—I didn’t think it would be embarrassing. I just didn’t think,” he says, his voice breaking.
Seb’s eyes are red-rimmed and watering, and the sight of it suctions something in my chest. I step toward him unconsciously, the anger momentarily forgotten, but he shakes his head and clears his throat to speak.
“Give me a chance to fix this, okay? You’re my—” He pulls in a shaky breath and tries again. “You’re my…”
He hesitates, almost like he’s asking for permission, and that’s all it takes for the anger to snap right back. Not just for this, but for years we spent digging too deep, charting each other’s weak spots like a map. I’m angry at myself and angry at Seb and utterly humiliated at the idea of him sitting down and typing those words about me, and it feels like it’s all about to explode when suddenly it all funnels into a sharp, crystallized edge.
“I’m not your anything, Seb.”
My hand is on the doorknob again, but Seb’s voice stops me, quiet and thick with hurt.
“Sadie,” he says, like my name is a plea. “You can’t mean that.”
I don’t. Fuck. But that’s just it—Seb knows that because Seb sees me. Better than anyone in the world. And it’s just a searing, brutal reminder that what he wrote about me in that piece is exactly right. I don’t even know who I am. In a way that doesn’t make me fit to date or even to be a decent friend. I only managed it with Seb for—what? Three weeks, tops?
So Seb’s article is more right than he knows. It’s not just that I have “work I need to do on myself.” I’m a fuckup, through and through. I need to leave now, before I make this any worse.
Except when I open the door, I discover I already have. Hadley is on the other side of it, and I can already tell from the tears swimming in her eyes that if I don’t do something to fix this fast, we’re about to skip straight to a “ten” on the Brighton family disaster scale.
“You guys hate each other?”
I sew up my own hurt with such brutal practiced speed that it feels like I’m squeezing my own heart into submission. Seb straightens up behind me. I hate myself a little more then, because despite every awful thought screaming in my head right now, the one that overrides it is practically evolutionary instinct: Parental Mode activated. Just like that, Seb and I are back to another version of pretend.
“No. Of course not,” I say. “Seb and I were just—”
Jesus. Here come the tears. I didn’t realize I was this close to crying myself, but it doesn’t matter. I can swallow it back. Be good, responsible, quiet Sadie and push down all of these feelings, tell Hadley everything’s fine, and go downstairs with a smile on my face.
Only for the first time in memory, it doesn’t happen. I flounder. Hadley’s chin wobbles, staring at me expectantly, and I can’t summon a single damn word.
Seb steps forward. His voice is still uneven, but it’s firmer than mine. “We were just talking about the writing competition we’re in. I did something stupid and Sadie’s upset, but I’m going to fix it.”
I close my eyes and blow out the rest of the breath in my lungs. I wish he was right, but there’s nothing left to fix. He broke something, maybe, but judging from the stricken look on Hadley’s face, I may have just shattered it beyond repair.
Sure enough, Hadley shakes her head, looking at me and then looking at Seb. “I heard you. Marley always said you guys hated each other, but I didn’t believe it.” Her eyes settle on me, watering enough now that they’re starting to spill. “But I heard you.”
“Hadley,” I start again, not sure how to finish. My own hurt is still too big to deal with hers.
She shakes her head, pushing past us both. “Can you get out of my room?” she says. “You don’t live here anymore.”
The words slide between my ribs, sharp and unexpected. I stand there for a moment, stunned, and Hadley whips around and says, “I mean it. I want to be alone. Go away.”
The next breath she pulls in is deep enough that we both know she’s going to start yelling if we don’t. Seb steps out first and I follow, letting him shut the door behind us. The noise of the party comes back into focus—loud laughter, pulsing music, the clink of glasses and plates. I pull in a breath to ground myself, but it doesn’t work. Everything feels slippery and out of my control. My feelings about Seb. My hopes for Newsbag. Even my own room—without it there’s nowhere to hide from this. Just like that, it feels like there isn’t one solid thing tethering me to my own life.
Seb takes a step toward me, filling up the space between us. “I really am sorry. And I will fix it. I’ll edit the piece.”
I shake my head. “Don’t.”
“It doesn’t matter to me half as much as—”
“Don’t say that,” I say quickly. Because if he says it, the guilt already brewing in me is going to get worse. If he says it, I’m going to hate myself even more, because I don’t know what’s worse—the idea that I’m really ruthless enough that I might never say the same to him, or the idea that Seb might matter to me more than this competition, too.
Someone starts chanting the word “cake! cake! cake!” from the living room. Marley pops her head toward the hall and says, “You can come back now, you cowards.” Seb won’t take his eyes off me, and I won’t take mine off the floor.
The truth is, I shouldn’t have said anything. I shouldn’t have read it in the first place. What I should have done was keep my eyes on the prize and not let myself get distracted by Seb at all, but I did. And that’s on me, not on Seb. Seb didn’t change when we got to school. I did.
I clear my throat. “Don’t change the piece. It’s fine.”
“It’s not.”
“I’ll be angrier if you change it. Don’t,” I tell him, leaving no room for compromise. I don’t want to do anything to affect his odds. When I win this, it’ll be fair and square.
And if I’m being honest with myself—Seb didn’t do anything wrong, really. I’m not upset about what he wrote. I’m upset that he saw me before I did. That he always has. It makes it all the more personal, understanding that he knows me exactly how I am—that I know him for exactly who he is—and it’s still not enough for him to think we’re ready.
It’s still not enough to change the fact that even if we were, there will always be some kind of Newsbag -like wedge between us. We’ve never been able to get close to each other without getting too close, without knocking the other one down.
Our moms start singsonging our names to summon us for cake, the mood so happy and light in the world beyond the hallway that I already feel myself instinctively blinking the last evidence of tears, pressing my shaking palms to my dress. Seb goes through the same motions, taking a deep breath and quickly pressing a palm under his eyes.
“We’ll talk later,” says Seb.
I shake my head and finally look at him. Even in the dim light of the hallway his expression is more raw and open than I’ve ever seen it. If anything, it only firms my resolve. I’m every bit as much a distraction to him as he is to me.
“Let’s just get through the competition,” I say quietly. “Finish it up fair and square.”
Seb doesn’t say anything for a long moment. “That’s what you want?”
No. But it’s what we both need.
“Sadie! Seb! You have ten seconds to get your traitorous asses in here or I’m feeding your cake to Meowtwo!”
Like mirrors of each other, we both shake ourselves loose, set practiced smiles on our faces, and walk out of the hall. But for the first time I can remember, he isn’t matching pace with me. He surges up ahead, and it’s every bit as devastating as it is a relief. He doesn’t see a thick tear slide down my cheek, as searing and silent as the hurt in my heart.