17. Sadie #5
I wanted to respond with some kind of clever comeback, but I didn’t have one.
Because, of course, she was right. Ben wasn’t a violent kind of guy, but he was a deeply mistrustful kind of guy, and he could fly into a rage in two seconds flat.
I guess, underneath all his hair pomade and bravado, he was still the insecure kid I met on the playground when we were in grade school.
Maybe Juliet had come to the same realization about Paris, no matter how perfect he’d seemed on the outside.
Insecurity can make people kind, or it can make them cruel.
I preferred to ignore how cruel Ben could be when he felt like it, but I knew other people had seen it too.
It’s harder to pretend when someone else is watching the same play you are, and what you call romance, they call tragedy.
Once Mason and I started spending more time together, it became more and more difficult to play along with the version of my life I’d built up so carefully in my head.
“Don’t worry,” Jayne said, misreading the look on my face as being the look of someone thinking about logistics.
“I still have my old flip phone from middle school before Steven let us get smartphones.” Jayne loves to call our parents by their first names.
It annoys the heck out of me, but I guess it makes her feel cosmopolitan or something.
Like our parents aren’t our parents; they just happen to be two adult roommates we live with in a massive old house.
Before I could respond, she hopped off her bed and went into her closet, digging around in the top shelf. She emerged a minute later, holding a small silvery blue flip phone.
“And it even still works,” she said triumphantly, powering it on.
I hated the fact that her response to my telling her I’d slept with the only guy she’d ever had a crush on was to offer me a phone to better communicate with him behind my boyfriend’s back. But I didn’t hate it enough not to take the phone.
The weird thing about that phone was that on the night of Trevor’s party, it was the only one I had with me.
The last thing Jayne asked me before Liz and I stepped out the door was whether or not I had my phone.
She said it with an emphasis on the word, and I knew that what she really meant was whether or not I had the phone she’d given me.
Our little secret. I knew that Mason was going to be at Trevor’s that night—kind of a big deal for him, considering he wasn’t really into that sort of thing—and that he had something important to talk to me about. So of course I had both of my phones.
But Ben asked to borrow my phone almost as soon as we got to Trevor’s, with some lame excuse that made me realize he might be getting suspicious about my…
extracurricular activities. In that moment, I was so grateful for the second phone; I handed him my regular phone with a shrug.
But I never got it back from him after that.
Until, of course, it was slipped back into my pocket at the very last minute, full of calls and texts I never saw. Calls from Jayne telling me to come home, that my parents were heading back because my dad forgot his insulin.
The insulin… Liz had told me in my room when we were getting ready for the party that she’d seen Jayne take my dad’s insulin out of his bag.
And I hadn’t believed her. I mean, why would Jayne do that?
Liz was pretty quick to drop the subject when I told her she was obviously wrong, and I just wrote it off as one more move in the petty chess game Liz seemed to be playing with my sister. Maybe not…
And the old flip phone? Who knows where that is now?
But I hope somebody found it somewhere. I’d like them to see what we had, me and Mason.
What was between us in those text messages.
Maybe someone might still figure out what really happened that night.
It all seemed so normal, so typical, until it wasn’t.
THE NIGHT OF THE PARTY
I WAS ANGRY at Jayne for ratting us out.
She claimed that my mom already knew about the party—that she’d heard about it from someone else’s mom at Whole Foods.
But I also knew that Jayne loved nothing more than creating chaos for the fun of it, and I had a hunch that she decided to tell our mom just to throw a wrench in our plans.
It might have even had more to do with ruining Liz’s good time than mine.
Jayne never quite forgave Liz for what happened between her and Ben, or at least that’s the impression she gave, and I frequently had to remind her to just let it go.
Generally, she didn’t listen. The night of the party, I even saw her messing with the “Best Friends” necklace I got for Liz.
Liz only took it off to shower, and I caught Jayne fiddling with it after Liz took it off and headed into the bathroom.
At the time, I didn’t think much of it, but I realize now she did something to the clasp.
Because, sure enough, a little while after we got to Trevor’s party, Liz realized her necklace was missing.
She was totally freaked out about it, and I just promised her that we would find it later.
I told her it was probably in the car or something, but more likely it was lost forever in the cornfield.
In that moment, I knew Jayne had definitely done something to it.
I just didn’t know why; I thought it was part of her continued petty obsession about Liz being my best friend.
Now it all makes sense.
Jayne wins.
Anyway, in the end, it didn’t matter that Jayne told our parents about the party.
They were still heading up to Chautauqua, and for some reason, they were still willing to trust us that we wouldn’t go out that night.
Jayne had been going on about some mysterious college guy she had been seeing, and she was still happy to kick us out of the house so she could have a night with him.
That’s what I can’t figure out. Jayne had it made that night.
No parents, a cute guy coming over, and her sister out of the house for the night.
It didn’t make any sense to me when I saw her walk through the door of Trevor’s house.
I was on the stairs, and she didn’t see me at first. Liz immediately went to run interference and find out what she was doing there.
She practically tackled Jayne the second she stepped inside.
The two of them talked, and then Jayne went to go get a drink while Liz came back in my direction.
But I ducked away. I was a little drunk already, and I really did not want to listen to Liz complain about Jayne and whatever had caused her to show up at the party.
Besides, I wanted to track down Mason without Ben realizing what I was up to.
After a minute of scanning the crowd for me, Liz gave a shrug and headed out the back door, probably toward the bonfire that was already blazing outside.
“Hey, Dee.” Jayne materialized at the bottom of the stairs out of nowhere.
The place was a crush of people; I have no idea how she managed to weave her way through the crowd and make it over to me so quickly.
She filled me in on why she was there and handed me one of the drinks she was holding.
“One for the road,” she said. “But not literally. You’re drinking it here before we leave.
And I’ve been trying to call you and text you for an hour to tell you about Mom and Dad coming home. Where is your phone?”
“Ugh, Ben has it.” I didn’t bother going into the details.
She gave me a look that said I told you so.
“Yeah, yeah. I know. You were right. Cute outfit, by the way.” I noticed that she was dressed exactly the same way I was. It seemed weird to me, but it was also very much like Jayne to pull something like that just to mess with people who didn’t expect to see both of us at the same party.
“Thanks,” she said, giving me a wink. “It looks better on me.”
Raising her cup to mine, she clinked the plastic together. “Cheers, dear.”
“Cheers.”
I took a big gulp and scanned the room again for Mason.
“Looking for someone?” Jayne asked casually.
“You know I am, and you know who it is.”
“Want me to help you find him?”
I looked at Jayne, trying to figure out whether or not she was being sincere.
Honestly, though, it sounded like we were running out of time before we’d have to head back home, and Mason had told me repeatedly that he needed to talk to me tonight.
It wasn’t a conversation I was looking forward to, because something told me it would mostly be him insisting that it was time for me to finally dump Ben and go public with our relationship.
It would be absolute social ruin for me, and I was not too keen on the idea of being banished to Siberia for the rest of my senior year.
And anyway, what was Mason going to do with his life, be an artist?
Not to sound cold, but I didn’t really feel like being the sole breadwinner, no matter how hot my husband turned out to be.
The more real things got with Mason, the more appealing the white-picket-fence life that Ben and I had built up in our minds seemed.
I felt like Mason and I were just spinning out into totally different realities.
He thought the fun we were having together was actually going to be something serious, and I couldn’t fathom what made him believe that.
What, just because we’d slept together? It had been fantastic, sure, but I was considering it a dress rehearsal for the real thing.
Mason seemed to be under the impression that it actually was the real thing.
In the end, Mason was the fling. Maybe Juliet should have ended up with Paris and saved herself all the trouble of Romeo.
Long-term commitment over temporary passion, you know?
That’s obviously how my parents had built their marriage, and it seemed to be working pretty well for them so far. It’s not like my mom even had to work.