12
Three Doors Down
Nash
Somebody knocks on the door. Rafe and I glance at each other.
It’s a soft knock. Not the demanding pound that Koda does.
I’m at my desk with a pencil in my hand, in shorts and a shirt with cut-off sleeves. Rafe is on his bed with his laptop on his stomach, watching something with the sound low.
The soft knock comes again. Rafe lifts his head and looks at me, and I look back at him.
“You gonna fucking get it?” he says.
The knock comes a third time, and underneath it, there’s a voice in the hallway, then another one, and the second one is definitely telling the first one to shut up. Girls, at least two. There’s a shuffling sound, like somebody’s being shoved.
Rafe raises his eyebrows. “Did you call Jules over and not tell me?”
I shake my head. I’ve been ghosting her all week.
I get up and open the door. Blondie is on the other side with her hand still raised to knock again, turned halfway around, arguing with somebody at the corner of the hallway. “—go,” she’s hissing. “Oh my God, go.”
Then she turns back, sees me, and stops. Her eyes go down to my arms, then to my chest, then back up to my face, and for about two full seconds, she doesn’t say a single word. She just stares at me, dumbfounded and at a loss for words.
I’ve known this girl for maybe two weeks now. She’s called me an asshole multiple times, accused me of cheating on a girlfriend I don’t have, told me I’m always in the way, and shoved napkins across a table at midnight. She has never once run out of things to say.
“Lost?” I ask and hang on the top of the door frame. “Greeley doesn’t live here.”
Something moves at the corner by the stairwell, and there’s a burst of laughter, quickly smothered. I lean out past the door to look, and Paige takes off running.
Kylie goes pink. “Sorry. Do you—” She pulls at the sleeve of her hoodie. “Do you have a minute?”
I step out into the hall and pull the door most of the way shut behind me.
I give her a minute, and in the first five seconds, I learn that she’s bad at this.
She stands with her weight on one foot, her ankles crossed, pulling the cuff of her sleeve down over her hand and pushing it back up.
She keeps looking down the hallway toward the corner where her friends are hiding like somebody’s supposed to be holding up cue cards.
“Sorry, I didn’t really plan how I was—” She stops and starts again. “Okay. So tonight I was at the rink. With Declan.”
I glance down at the Woodbury logo on her sweatshirt, then back up to her face. “I saw.”
“Right. You saw.” She nods too many times. “And the whole time I kept getting this feeling. Like an icky feeling.”
“The ick,” says Rafe, through the four inches of open door behind me.
“Shut up,” I tell the door.
She looks at the door and takes a breath. “It felt like Declan was being fake,” she says slowly. “Like it was all a show. He asked me these weird questions about you. And the whole thing at the library on Tuesday felt like—” She waves a hand. “I don’t know. An ambush.”
I watch her. She won’t stop moving. Her hand goes to her hair and back to her sleeve, and she looks down the hall again without seeming to know she’s doing it.
“And I know it’s none of my business,” she says, faster now.
“And I know I’ve been a bitch to you every time I’ve ever seen you, so you don’t owe me anything, and honestly you should probably tell me to go away.
But I just got out of a three-year relationship, so maybe I’m—” She presses the heel of her hand against her eye.
“I don’t know. Na?ve. I don’t think I want to date him.
He’s nice. But something feels weird, and I thought maybe you’d know why. ”
She lets out a breath like that cost her something. I want to make sure I’ve got it right. “You thought I’d know about your weird gut feeling?”
“Yes. No. Oh my God.” She laughs nervously. “I sound insane. I told Paige this was stupid.”
From around the corner, Paige yells, “It’s not stupid! Tell her, Nash.”
Kylie closes her eyes and goes a brighter shade of pink. I look down the hallway, then back at her. She’s got her arms crossed now, holding her own elbows, looking at the carpet. Two weeks of her, and this is the first time I’ve seen her small.
“He’s using you,” I say.
Her head comes up. “What?”
“He told me. In the kitchen, Saturday night.”
The door behind me opens all the way. Paige comes around the corner at a full clip. “I knew it! I fucking knew it!”
“That’s what he said to you?” Rafe is standing in the doorway now, and he isn’t laughing anymore. “In the kitchen? That’s what the whole thing was about?”
Then the two girls from the diner are there too. I run my hand through my hair and look at the ceiling.
“What did you do, Kylie?” Rafe says to her.
“She didn’t do anything,” I tell him. “This is Greeley.”
“Declan?” Kenzie says.
“Yes, Kenzie,” Paige hisses. “Greeley is his last name. Declan Greeley.”
“Okay. My God. Sorry.”
Kylie has gone very still in the middle of all of it. “So he’s been playing me.”
Paige grimaces. “Sorry, girl. That’s why I made you knock.”
Kylie ignores her. “Wow. Okay. Really? What the hell?”
The stairwell door bangs open at the end of the hall, and Koda comes down from five with a bag of chips under his arm and his headphones around his neck. He stops when he sees all of us.
“Are you throwing a party and didn’t fucking invite me?”
He nods at Paige on his way past, grinning at her like they have a secret, which they do, except everybody in this hallway knows about it.
“What’s going on?” he asks, looking at Blondie.
“He punched Greeley over the blonde,” Rafe says.
Koda’s whole face lights up. He points at Kylie. “No fucking way. Mystery solved.”
“That’s not why,” I say.
Paige scoffs. “You literally just said—”
“It was part of it. He told me he was going to take everything I have, one piece at a time, and he started with her because he thought something was there.”
Koda looks right at Kylie. “He thought you and her? Oh, that’s great. He doesn’t know about Jules, does he?”
The hallway goes quiet.
“Who’s Jules?” says Kenzie.
“Jules?” Paige says.
Koda opens his mouth to explain, happily.
Kylie is looking at me with her arms crossed, her chin up, and her face has gone from pink to something else.
She isn’t asking who Jules is. She’s standing in the middle of six people after telling a guy she barely knows that she thinks she’s being played, and now there’s a name on the floor in front of her that has nothing to do with her, and she looks like she’d like to be anywhere else on the planet.
I meet her eyes. “Can you guys give us a minute?”
Nobody moves.
“A minute,” I say again.
Paige grabs Kenzie’s arm, and the other girl’s already walking.
Rafe leans in the doorway with his arms crossed and doesn’t go anywhere until I look at him, and then he goes back inside.
Koda follows and shuts the door loud enough to make a point, and through it, I can hear him already starting on Rafe.
“Kylie,” I say. “Come on. Let’s walk.”
“Where?” she asks quietly.
“Anywhere.”
“The stairs,” she says, and I follow her.
The third-floor stairwell is cold and gray and smells like concrete, with a strip of lights down the middle of the ceiling and one of them out.
She goes through the door ahead of me. It swings shut behind us, the sound of the building cuts off, and she just stands on the landing with her back to me.
I stop three feet away, near the railing, and don’t say anything, because I don’t have anything. I’ve never been good at this. Koda could fill this silence in half a second with something stupid, and it would work. Rafe would know what to say without thinking. I’m not like that.
Her shoulders come up, and I think she’s fucking crying.
“Sorry,” she says, turning away from me. Her voice is wrong. “I can’t believe I’m crying. It’s so—”
“It’s fine,” I say because I don’t need her freaking out.
“It’s not. I don’t even like him.” She wipes her face with the heel of her hand, still turned away. “I don’t even know why I care.”
I wait.
“I just feel stupid.” She turns around. Her eyes are red, there are two wet lines down her face, and she’s furious about them.
“God. It’s too soon. That’s what it is. Everybody’s telling me it’s normal to go out with somebody, and it’s been a week, and the first guy who was nice to me was—” She laughs, and it cracks.
“He was nice to me. That’s all it took. He handed me a drink in a kitchen and asked what my major was, and I thought, oh, there’s a good one. ”
I put my hands in my pockets. At least she sees it.
“He doesn’t deserve your tears,” I say.
She looks up at me.
“Don’t cry over a guy like that. He isn’t worth the salt.”
That’s my mom’s line. I’ve heard her say it to my aunt twice and to a neighbor once, standing in our kitchen with her arms folded, and it comes straight out of my mouth before I know it’s coming.
Kylie makes a sound that’s half a laugh. “You don’t have to be nice to me,” she says, wiping her cheeks.
“I’m not.”
She wipes her face again with her sleeve, and then she sits down on the top step all at once, like her legs are done, and puts her elbows on her knees.
“I’m so stupid. My boyfriend of three years said there was nothing wrong with us while he was texting someone for two weeks and telling me I was weird for asking, and I apologized to him.
And now I’m sitting in a stairwell because a guy I met at a party turned out to be running some—” She flings a hand out.
“Whatever this is. Some hockey revenge thing.”
“That’s not you being stupid. That’s two guys lying.”
“It’s the same girl both times, accepting the lies.”
I stay against the railing with my arms crossed, because I don’t know what else to do with them. The light over the landing hums. Somewhere above us, a door opens and closes, and somebody’s music gets louder and then quiet again.