Chapter 12 Avery
Avery
The storm outside seems louder somehow now that Caulder and I are alone.
Rain batters the roof and slashes against the one window.
I walk over to it, hoping for some fresh night air, but it’s locked.
I look back, taking in the room. There’re bookshelves lining most of the walls, the smell of old paper in the air, an enormous red rug woven with intricate designs at the center, and a large, ornate chair in the corner.
If this were any other time, I could grab a book and settle in, listen to the rain.
I might even get some peace for the first time after this disastrous week.
But obviously, that’s not why we’re here.
“You don’t have to kiss me,” Caulder says.
“I know that,” I say, unable to hold back the bite in my voice. But didn’t he make it perfectly clear out there that he didn’t want to kiss me?
As if that would be so awful. As if we haven’t—
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell him to shut up sooner.”
I blink, surprised by the apology, but more than that, surprised by the anger in Caulder’s voice. He’s sitting on the heavy desk on the opposite side of the room, his arms crossed over his chest, head bowed so that his light brown hair falls in front of his face, hiding his eyes.
“Oh,” I say. “I could’ve told him to shut up. You don’t have to do that. And besides, it’s Emerson. That’s just…who he is.”
Caulder snorts. “Sure. But I still should’ve stopped him, and I’m sorry. You don’t owe him anything.”
I flush. “I know.”
“I know you know,” Caulder says, exasperated. “I just—”
“Why’d you lie?”
Even though the chances of being overheard are slim, I keep my voice down.
I know what Emerson was hoping for when he locked us in here together.
He stirred the pot, and now he wants to watch it boil over.
But he doesn’t know—none of them know—everything that happened at the debate competition.
They don’t know what really happened last night.
Caulder does, though. I see it in how he shifts away from my question.
“I’m not saying I don’t appreciate it,” I say. “But—”
“It wasn’t a lie,” he says.
I watch him carefully then, examine the way he meets my stare with his own. Has he learned how to lie better after all these years?
“You weren’t there with Jay and me,” I say. “And you told them you were.”
He shrugs. “Fine. It was a small lie. I did hear you talking to him, though.”
His eyes never leave mine. A bolt of lightning outside splashes the room with light before plunging it back into darkness.
“How much did you hear?”
Caulder’s gaze doesn’t shift. “Enough. I heard him telling you that you’d regret what you were doing or whatever. That you…”
“Wouldn’t win,” I finish for him. “And to give up.”
Caulder nods. “Yeah. I heard that.”
I worry my lip, still dry but no longer bleeding, and sit down on the edge of the chair in the corner. It’s a dance, what we’re doing, giving each other scraps of information because neither of us trusts the other with anything more.
In a blink, I’m back to orientation. I’m back to staring at him, at how he’s changed, but my heart’s filling up like a balloon because I think I do have a friend in this place. He’ll be back in my life, and everything will be like before. I’m walking up to him and tapping him on the shoulder.
He’s turning around. His eyes are the same, soft and warm, and they sweep over me.
I’m telling him, Hey, I can’t believe it’s been so long.
The other ninth-grade guys next to him are looking from him to me, whispering something about, Who’s the girl?
I’ve done my hair in space buns, but they’re wobbly and uneven, and suddenly, I’m self-conscious.
And then he’s asking who I am, the other boys are laughing at me for daring to approach him, and I want to die.
From that moment on, I hated Caulder. First, for rejecting me.
We never talked about it after that moment, never acknowledged who we had been for the other before.
I knew he’d recognized me. And when I’d cried to my sister, she’d told me he’d probably just been trying to be cool for his friends.
And maybe that was true. But he never apologized.
He just became a Caulder Grant I didn’t know, easily taking the crown of class favorite.
It didn’t matter that I ran down to the office to get my teachers’ copies made during class or did every single extra credit assignment or knew the answer to every question they ever asked.
My kind of participation was somehow grating and unwelcome, but Caulder’s was exactly what they wanted.
They were hungry for it, for the easy way he navigated every project or class discussion.
He didn’t have to work for it. And they loved him for that.
Maybe it could’ve just stayed bitterness and that moment of betrayal.
But then came co-captain and valedictorian, and it all crystallized into something sharper.
Because now I’m going to spend all of fall applying for every scholarship I can possibly qualify for, and Caulder will get handed one for baseball.
It doesn’t matter that he occasionally stands up for me, like he did just now. None of it can erase our history. But I also don’t need him to think that I was trying to seduce Mr. Jay. The thought of it brings up bile in my throat.
“I wasn’t trying to hook up with him,” I tell Caulder. “I was just trying to talk to him about what happened.”
When I messed up in our final round. When I lost the entire competition because of my own inability to hold it together.
“This is why I voted for you to not be captain,” Mr. Jay had said when I followed him out of the end-of-competition celebration, the banquet-slash-dance that was meant to be a finale of the weekend.
I hadn’t known he’d been the one who’d cast the vote deciding to take away everything I’d been working for since I was a freshman, so finding out then when I was broken and ashamed was a slap in the face that sent me reeling.
“What do you mean?” I’d insisted. “You always said I was a natural. That you were proud of me. That—”
“You think you’re better than everyone,” he’d said, trying to wave me off, breathing alcohol into the air as he spoke.
“But no one likes you. You can’t rally this team to save your life.
You fall apart when it matters. And Jesus Christ, you still think it’s about how smart you are, Avery.
It’s about charm and charisma. Two things you’ll never have. ”
No one in my life had ever said anything like that to me. Not even my parents during their lowest moments—and with their messy divorce dragging on and on, there had been plenty of those.
I knew he was drunk, but it didn’t matter. I could tell, under the slurring, he was telling the truth.
Mr. Jay’s words didn’t just hurt. They burned. They stung. And then he left me there with those open wounds, not realizing—or not caring—how they would undo me. What I would do next as a result.
“I know,” Caulder says, drawing me back into this room and the present. “I know you wouldn’t do that. Especially since…”
He makes a vague gesture, and I nod, cutting off any further elaboration. We don’t need to talk about that now. Now would be the worst time, actually.
“Why would Emerson even ask that?” I say, shivering. It’s colder in here, like all the warmth got sucked up by the rest of the house.
“Because he’s an asshole,” Caulder says.
Down the hall, a song starts playing, the melody dulled by the heavy wooden door standing between us and the rest of the first floor.
I recognize it as “Give It Up,” an ’80s, disco-style song, one of the songs Dad made me memorize the name of when I was little.
He’d quiz me on the titles so that I was the only kid in a two-hundred-mile radius who could recognize something by KC and the Sunshine Band.
Now the upbeat melody has turned sour. I don’t remember the last time my dad asked me about a song.
“What’s that?” Caulder asks. “I thought there wasn’t a TV.”
“Someone must have started the record player,” I say, shrugging. “Maybe it’s part of someone’s dare. I hope it doesn’t wake up the teachers.”
“But what is this?” Caulder asks, scrunching up his nose. “This is stuff my grandma likes.”
I bristle, even though he’s right. Dad’s passion for the old and classic is something he passed down to me, and I hate it almost as much as I hate the fact that I inherited his freckles and his round face.
I got his hair texture, too, wavy-but-not-curly, no matter how much mousse I use.
But the color’s Mom’s dark brown, and my green eyes are hers, too.
My pale cheeks that turn red under any amount of pressure are also because of her genetic pool.
Even now, they’re heating up, and I turn away from Caulder so he doesn’t see it as I move toward the door, reaching out to touch the wood.
“I doubt this place keeps a lot of modern options around,” I say. “Sorry it’s not Tyler, the Creator or whatever else you listen to.”
He scoffs but doesn’t argue. Someone turns the music up. I imagine the rest of the team’s maybe dancing or singing. Or, more likely, they’re all huddled near the door, trying to hear what’s going on in here. I wonder what they think we’re capable of. What they think is happening.
“How much longer?” Caulder asks, glancing at the mantel clock on one of the bookshelves. “I forgot to check the time when we came in.”
I didn’t. I checked the time and set a timer. I glance at it now, seeing that we have four minutes and thirty-eight seconds left. I try to focus on the muffled music outside, the words “everybody wants you” floating through the wall. I tune them out.
I feel Caulder’s gaze on me, so I turn around and focus on the window as if it’s the most interesting thing in the room. It’s so dark outside that it’s hard to see anything at all.
“Avery,” Caulder says, and I stiffen at the use of my name. “If something happened and you need to talk about it, you can.”
I look over my shoulder at him. Caulder makes everything sound so easy.
For him, life is easy. His parents aren’t divorced.
No, he has two wonderful, perfect dads who love him.
Plus, his dads are so damn likable. They don’t show up late to parent-teacher conferences or mix up his teachers’ names.
In fact, both of his dads are always at our local debate competitions and wave at me every time.
Meanwhile, I might remember the songs Dad played when I was a kid, but he hasn’t been to one of my competitions since tenth grade.
Maybe it would be different if I were able to go home and call Dad and tell him I pulled out a win in my first tournament as co-captain. But instead, I proved that I’m just as much of a disaster as he is.
“Nothing happened,” I say. “You heard what Mr. Jay said. I messed up. He wasn’t wrong, was he?”
Caulder sighs, running his hand through his hair. “He wasn’t right, Avery. And what he said—”
“I’m not saying his delivery wasn’t…wildly inappropriate,” I say. “But he wasn’t wrong. I fucked up. I lost us this competition. I did that.”
“We can still make Nationals,” Caulder says. “This was just our first—”
“I’d like to go back to not talking,” I say, striding over to the bookshelves. I run a finger along an old leather spine. Anything to hide my shaking hand and the tears threatening to surface.
“Well, my preference would be to talk,” Caulder says. “So looks like we’re at a stalemate.”
Not a stalemate. Not really. Because he thinks he’ll win this, just like he wins everything else.
“I told you back at the hotel,” I say. “We both need to forget what—”
A thump from above interrupts me, and I look up toward the sound. I wait for more noise, but there isn’t any. I wonder if the others got bored and we can leave our prison early. I check my phone, and we still have roughly two minutes left.
“Right,” I say. “As I was saying—”
But I stop again. Caulder’s jumped off the desk and is heading for the door. He presses his ear up to it.
“It’s quiet,” Caulder says.
“Only because you finally stopped talking,” I say, even though I was the last one to speak. I wait for him to call me out on this, but he just keeps his ear to the door, eyebrows knitted together.
“It’s too quiet,” he says. “And something weird’s happened to the song. Do you hear that?”
I roll my eyes, but then I hear it. It’s like the words are being dragged out, like taffy being pulled. It makes me shiver.
“Probably a problem with the record player,” I say. “They’ll fix it in a second.”
We wait, but nothing happens. The song continues, and now it sounds haunted as it echoes through the enormous house.
“Avery,” Caulder says. “Something’s not right.”
“I’m telling you, they just—”
My alarm goes off, marking our seven minutes, and I don’t want to stay here a second longer than we have to. I don’t hesitate—I go to the door, nudge Caulder out of the way, and throw it open.
Aside from the creepy music, it’s quiet, and the lights are out. We step out into the hallway, and I can’t help but expect everyone to spring out from the dark to scare us.
But no one appears.
“Lucas?” Caulder calls, his voice loud. “Marlene? Kaitlyn? Javi? Emerson?”
“Shhh!” I elbow Caulder. “What about the teachers?”
Caulder listens. “They must still be asleep.”
I wait, holding my breath, but still, the only sound is the stretched warble of the record player. Caulder walks out and down the hall to the living room and gasps. I hurry behind him, to see what he’s seeing. The couches, the rug, are littered with clothes. Shirts, sweatshirts, socks.
“What the fuck?”