Twelve
After the third time Cella reached for the passenger door handle to leave—and also, coincidentally, the third time I stopped her because, “Wait, this song is so good”—she lost her patience.
Given, she did get sidetracked first, turning up the music and winding up her window so she could thrash her head to “Jesus of Suburbia” in private. But four minutes into the song, she abruptly shook herself, cranked the volume down, and demanded, “All right, what’s the damage?”
“What damage?”
“Your damage,” she said. “If we don’t leave in the next two minutes, we’ll be late again. They’ve been doing those tardy sweeps. Also, Mrs. Garroway’s angry eyes scare me.”
“No damage,” I said. True, we had gotten to campus with fifteen minutes to spare and were down to five, but . . . “I’m cool.”
“You are so unbelievably uncool right now. You haven’t looked at me once since I got in this car. You’re playing your emo playlist.”
“I always play this!”
“No, you play the emo station.”
“Not loving these labels.”
“This playlist is just . . . It gets dire, dude. What’s going on with you? You keep disappearing, and you’re acting weird, and you didn’t watch a single salamander edit I sent you all weekend, and now you’re stalling.”
True, I had noticed Mason’s car in his spot when we arrived, but, “I’m not stalling.”
“I know it has to do with Mason. Being in the same room as the two of you drives me batshit. What happened?”
Panic blew hot bubbles in my chest. I had been both dreading and hoping for this, a direct question that would force me to tell the truth.
“Can you stop thinking about telling me and just tell me? It’s not great, watching someone decide whether they should lie to you.
” An irritated Cella reminded me of a bird spreading its wings to look twice its size, her cheeks puffed like ruffled feathers.
“Why are you keeping things from me? I thought we didn’t do that? ”
Confessing to two handsy make-outs was so much worse than confessing to one. Why had I not told her before the second happened?
There was never supposed to be a second to begin with.
I was a terrible friend. The worst.
Which was why, despite the guilt squirming in my gut, I told her, “We got into a fight.”
I was instantly relieved, which made me feel even shittier.
Cella’s eyes bugged. “A fistfight? When?”
“Two Thursdays ago.”
“In the equipment room?” She gawked. “Why?”
I gave her a pointed look.
“Oh . . .” she said. “Damn. I used to dream about this. Boys fighting over me. I usually pictured a dragon slayer and an effeminate but sturdy man-witch, but I guess I’ll take—” She broke off, horrified, and said, “You could’ve flatlined him!”
“He’s pretty tough.” I shrugged. “It didn’t go on very long, anyway. You and Lara showed up.”
“Damn,” she repeated. “You won’t let that happen again, though, right? It isn’t like you.”
“I know,” I said. None of this was. That was the worst part, how Mason had me all twisted around. “I won’t. It wasn’t worth it, anyway.”
Far away, the school bell chimed.
“We’re late,” Cella sighed.
“Guess we are,” I said.
“It really is awful sitting between your whole mess for two hours a day.”
I side-eyed her. Cella side-eyed me back.
She buckled her seat belt.
Fighting a smile, I rolled the windows back down.
“Where to, milady?”
“Day trip to Portland. Forest Park. We’ll look for salamanders. We’ll photograph them. We’ll leave no trace.”
“You are so strange.”
“You may don my sun hat, Your Majesty. You’ll have to sneak in through the back door. Use your stealth or my mother shall slay us both.”
“I think I’ll do without.”
“You have to tell me about the fight on the drive there. In vivid detail. You’re welcome to exaggerate. Make it one of those fights where shirts go flying. Can your character have an eight pack?”
“My abs are magnificent as they are.”
“There aren’t eight of them, though.”
Guilt was tangible and everywhere, a quicksand shadow sucking at my feet with every step. One kiss, one step, one lie, one step, another kiss, another lie. I was in too deep to turn back. But I could drag myself out, maybe. Starting with the salamanders.
***
I took a long, steaming shower that night to melt away the muggy grime on my hands, wrists, face, hair, and neck.
I raised my cheeks into the spray and imagined that the too-hot water was burning away a layer of skin, erasing every trace of Mason.
I scrubbed harshly. My hips, my waist, my shoulders, my collar, everywhere he’d ever touched, scalded clean.
I stepped out of the shower feeling determined to become brand-new. My skin was red. My hair was a fluffy mess when I dried it. I changed into basketball shorts and the baggiest sweater I owned, gray-striped and woolly.
Cella was already sending me more salamander edits, this time ones she’d made herself with the videos she’d taken at Forest Park.
I sat in my window nook, legs stretched out across the black tufted cushion, and watched them.
Lots of death metal music and dramatic zooming and little doodles of bows and cigarettes.
The video cut off when a call came in. My head immediately felt warm. I stared at the screen while my phone buzzed in my tight grip. On the last ring, I decided to answer.
“Oh,” said Mason. “I didn’t expect you to pick up.”
“Then why bother?”
“I know you skipped because of me. And I’m guessing you’re not going to make it easy to catch you at school. Can we talk? About Friday?”
His voice. I leaned my hot cheek against the glass.
“Just . . . forget about it.”
“Don’t do that again,” said Mason. “It’s so stupid. It’s like we’re playing make-believe. I don’t want to believe it didn’t happen. You know that, don’t you?”
I could see his face. In the glass, I saw his jaw working as he spoke, sharp and stubborn. The window grille was the perfect grid on which to measure out his wide shoulders. I squeezed my eyes shut.
“I said forget it.”
The image persisted behind my eyelids, golden-brown skin.
“How am I supposed to do that?” asked Mason. I could see his lips curving around his words. They were good lips. Full. And giving. “Have you?”
My hand twisted in the fabric of my sweater. My knees curled toward my chest. “What is it you want me to remember?” I asked, speaking quietly. It felt like the whole world was trying to listen in. “It was . . . good. Hot. Wrong, which made it hotter. So you like danger.”
“I like you.”
I hugged the phone to my chest for a second, hiding my face in my knees.
“You like the thrill. You don’t know me.”
“You won’t let me.”
“Bullshit,” I mumbled. “This is nothing, Mason. It’s empty space. All we do is fight, and you expect me to believe you want me? You want to hook up in secret and run back to your girlfriend.”
“You’re the only one running. Every time.” I could hear him breathing. I thought I heard crunching leaves too. He was outdoors, maybe pacing. Maybe prepping for a run. “And she isn’t my girlfriend.”
“Is that how you make yourself feel better?”
“She doesn’t have to be my anythi—”
“Don’t finish that sentence unless you’re trying to piss me off.
I’m not doing that to her.” I wanted to hit him again.
My fist to his nose, skin to skin. “I’m going to say this once: drop this while you’re ahead, because it’s never going to happen.
This is so much bigger than Cella. I don’t like—I can’t stand what you are.
It doesn’t matter if we have . . . chemistry.
You want to talk chemistry? There was bad blood between us before we were born.
That’s a dead end, Mason. I don’t like you that way, or any way, and that won’t change.
You had the right idea last week: there’s no reason for us to talk now that the project’s over. We’ll stay out of each other’s way.”
The sounds of pacing had stopped. And, I thought, the breathing.
“Yeah,” he said after a long silence. “Got it.”
***
Mason kept up his end. He didn’t talk to me. I was pretty sure he didn’t even look at me, though it was hard to tell when I was trying not to look at him.
Keyword: trying. Somehow, every time I walked into a class we shared, there was the top of his head or his profile, right where I was looking. As if there was a string running from the tip of my nose to Mason’s everything. My head turned his way like a marionette.
He didn’t seem to have the same problem. He didn’t have any problem at all.
I didn’t know what I’d been so afraid of since his call. That he’d pick a fight, or he’d try to flirt? Or this: he’d focus on his work, his friends, his phone, and I still wouldn’t be able to focus on anything.
He really did make it look easy, and I’d been afraid of that too. The confirmation that those feelings he’d insisted on, the proclamation that had kept me up the night over, had been as shallow as I’d suspected.
It was better this way. It made things simple.
It made me right.
It made me want to lock myself in my room—away from everyone’s eyes, from the sun, from Mason’s awareness, which I was not a part of. I was humiliated in my own head.
He pulled Cella after drama class to talk alone, and I thought, Yes; I thought, One good thing will come out of this.
Mason would stop using her, and I would stop betraying her just by existing inside of my mind, where I couldn’t get a second away from him.
I waited just outside of the building. Several minutes later, Cella joined me, red in the face.
She didn’t immediately tell me what had happened. We were parked in her driveway, watching a bird try to fight its way into one of the four shapeless birdhouses Diane had built since the finalized breakup. Cella blurted that Mason had asked her to be his girlfriend, and she had agreed.
***
When I called, I told myself it would be the last time.
Mason took his time answering. Furious, I asked what he thought he was doing.
He asked in turn if this counted as staying out of each other’s way. The borrowed blood in my veins crawled up to my neck.
I asked how he could get with a girl not a full day after saying he could end things with her just like that. He asked why this had to be a phone call.
I didn’t know. I only knew his voice in my ear, addressing me for the first time that day.
I asked him what that sound was. That cranky bleating in the background of the call, like a sheep.
He said, “It’s a sheep.”
And he said, “I don’t see your problem. You told me it’s never going to happen.”
“Cella isn’t someone for you to fall back on!”
“You rejected me, but I can’t be with anyone, is that right? I came to a dead end, and I have to just sit there.”
“You can wait and find someone you haven’t already betrayed to ruin. You can be alone.”
“For how long?”
“More than a day!”
“A lot more?”
“I hate that you’re always messing around.”
“Finally earned ‘hate,’ did I? That’s your problem, you always assume I’m joking. You know everything, so if something doesn’t make sense to you, it can’t be serious. You have no idea what you’re talking about.”
He said, “Cella is a decision I get to make. You can’t understand how I treasure her for that.”
I ended the call without warning. Then I deleted his number to make sure I wouldn’t call again.
When I showed up at Annalisa’s door, she took one look at my face and ushered me inside with a pitying frown.
I asked her, “Do you want to go to a party with me?”