Varsity Heartbreaker, page 15
I’m being unfair.
I’m overreacting.
We had one kiss, and maybe it doesn’t mean anything.
He’s keeping me a secret.
So many secrets.
“Your dad is having an affair,” I blurt out. I cup my mouth quickly, wishing I could swallow the words before their sound meets his ears.
His eyes flare.
I wait for him to counter my accusation, to explain it away or deny it. He does none of it, though. All he does . . . is leave.
Chapter Fifteen
That’s not how I wanted any of this to happen. I never wanted to hurt Lucas with the things I came to know, but that’s exactly what I did. I hurt him. And that hurt us.
There’s no more keeping a lid on things when Abby picks me up. I held myself together through the rest of my shift and then fell apart in her car to the point she had to pull over and just stare at me. We’ve been squatting in this sketchy abandoned convenience store parking lot for the last hour while I blubber through the whole story over and over again. No matter how many times I tell it, the end is always the same.
“Are you sure you saw what you saw?” She’s asked me this once already. I wish my answer was different. I could even argue that I didn’t get a good look at Mr. Fuller’s face pulling out of the D’Angelo garage, but the truck was undeniably his.
“It was him, Abs. And I just ruined Lucas’s life.” I feel sick because I told him the truth out of spite. Because I was jealous.
“Well then, you should talk,” she says, turning to put her seat belt back on and shift her car into drive. I do the same, fumbling with the buckle because my hands are jittery all of a sudden.
“What, like . . . now?” I say.
“No, I was thinking maybe you could wait another two years, then show up at his dorm at MIT or Tennessee or wherever the fuck he ends up going.” She’s gotten too good at sarcasm.
“That’s not fair,” I protest.
“Look, I’m driving you home. If you decide to go inside and hide in your room until school on Monday, that’s on you. But if you want to see a change, well . . . to quote the inspirational sign in our principal’s office—‘you must be the change you want to see.’” She’s proud of that speech. She lifts her detox juice drink from her center console and puckers her lips on the straw as she sucks up the last few drops.
“One day, you’ll need my advice, and I’ll be right about something you won’t want to do. It’s going to feel really good.” I slump in the passenger seat and cross my arms, pouting out the window.
“Probably not, but okay,” my friend says. I try to hold in the laugh, but I end up spitting it out despite myself. Damn her, so self-assured.
The closer we get to my house, the tighter my chest becomes, my lungs squeezed by the invisible elephant rocking into me. By the time we’re a block away, I realize that even avoiding Lucas won’t get rid of the massive anxiety knot caught in my throat and making me sick. The only thing that can get you to the other side of the circle of fire is walking through the flames.
Abby pulls into my driveway, stopping near the end. I figure she does it so I have to walk the extra distance and really consider my options, but when I look up, I see that’s not why at all.
Lucas is sitting in the bed of his truck with the tailgate down, his back resting against the cab, ankles crossed. He’s wearing a cut-off pair of sweats, the ones he usually wears when he goes out for a run, and the same black hoodie he had on earlier. His hair is tousled and sweaty and his cheeks are red from the cool air. He runs when he needs to think. He’s been doing that since junior high. I could never keep up.
“I guess that makes my decision easier,” I groan, lowering myself in my friend’s seat just a little.
Her lights shine on him, but he doesn’t bother to shade his eyes. He draws one knee up and pulls a water bottle into his hand, twists the cap off, and gulps most of it down.
“He doesn’t really look like he wants to talk,” I say. More excuses.
My friend turns her head and I feel her heated stare on my face seconds before I let my head fall to the side to meet the reckoning of her gaze.
“I know,” I say, unhooking my seat belt to let the strap slide up and over my shoulder.
“It’s not like things between you can get any worse.” Damn her for being so on point tonight.
I nod and get out of the car, untucking my Eight Lanes shirt from my skinny jeans as I drag my zipper jacket along the ground at my side. I feel as if I’m in trouble. My heart drums to the rhythm of a death metal band, and to kick things up a notch, my friend beeps her horn as she pulls out of my driveway.
“Shit!” I jump and clutch my chest, glaring at her as she drives away, and hoping like hell Lucas is laughing at me when I turn back around.
He’s not.
“What’s up, Maybe Mabee?” He uses the nickname Tory has for me on purpose. I guess he gets jealous over things, too.
“I’m sorry.” I ran through a dozen different methods for getting into this conversation with him during my trip home. Now that I’m staring into his sad eyes, the light completely dim behind them, I decide direct is best.
He nods. “Okay. Thanks,” he says, drawing the bottle to his lips and tipping his head back to drink it dry. He screws the cap on and throws the empty plastic container into the middle of his driveway. I shuffle over in its direction to pick it up.
“Let my dad pick it up. Maybe I’ll throw the rest of his shit out here too.”
I stop where I stand and evaluate his face, the lethargy of his limbs and the crushed spirit emanating from behind his eyes. I’ve been that disappointed in someone before, too. Ignoring his wish, I pick up the bottle and walk it over to the recycling bin my mom put near the curb this morning.
His eyes meet mine when I turn around again, and as tempting as making a break for my house is right now, it’s less of an option than it was a few minutes ago.
“Can I climb in there with you?”
His eyes remain blank at my question, but when I lean into my steps, attempting to move toward him, he stiffens.
“Can’t.” His back teeth clamp down hard. “This”—he pauses, pointing at me and then himself—“does not happen in front of people.”
Undeterred, I move forward anyhow, because who’s going to see besides his dad pulling in late from who knows where? Or his mom, who never leaves the house after she’s home. Before my palms touch the back of his truck, he gets to his feet and vaults over the edge to the ground.
“Just get in,” he huffs. His keys jingle on their way out of his pocket.
I push up the tailgate and do as he asks, climbing in and buckling up, then studying his every tick and nuanced motion as he revs his engine and backs us away from our homes. We get a comfortable six or seven blocks away, near one of the preserves and out of view of streetlights or passing cars. He pulls to the side of the road and flips on his hazards.
“Tell me how you know,” he demands, his hands rolling against the steering wheel with a strong enough grip that his skin squeals against the rubber.
I’m speechless for a few long seconds, working out what order to say things in. There really isn’t a way to protect everyone involved, which means Tory will be hurt by this too. I’m instantly thrown back into my own parents’ divorce, the way my mom hung up the phone and just stared at my father, knowing that whatever the person on the other end of the line told her was true.
“I hate that I’m the one who knows this, Lucas,” I begin.
“I understand.” He’s strangely calm, and I wonder if he had his suspicions. Drawing in a long breath, I steady myself and simply talk, like a well-rehearsed witness on the stand.
“There are details that are hard—”
He cuts me off mid-breath.
“It’s all hard. I know. Just . . . just tell me,” he begs, his voice a mix of frustration and maybe suspicion, as if on some level he knows what I’m about to say.
“I was dropping something off at Tory’s house while you all were at practice. I’d just put my car in park when I saw their garage open and a truck pull out.”
Again, when I pause for a breath, he interjects his own reasoning. “Lots of people have trucks,” he says.
“They do,” I respond. His body is fully relaxed, but his hands still cling to the steering wheel. “Not ones with license plates framed in gold with Tennessee Forever etched on the top and bottom.”
His throat moves with the harsh swallow of truth. I twist in my seat to face him more directly as I continue.
“I saw them kiss, Lucas. Your dad and—
“Don’t,” he interrupts, shaking his head. There’s a coldness in his tone, and a definitive essence to his request. I don’t know if I expected him to get angry, to cry, or what, but his reaction is almost robotic.
His eyes are still fixed on the empty roadway ahead.
“I don’t want to know too much. Details have a way of becoming nightmares and they poison everything.” His eyes glance downward, and his hands fall to the sides of the wheel.
I suspect he doesn’t want this to become a permanent wedge in his friendship with the twins, Tory especially.
“Just promise me that you are sure.”
I let the request linger in the quiet of the cab, my concentration on the perfect syncopation of his clicking hazards and the on and off of the red glow that comes with them.
“I wouldn’t have ever said it if I wasn’t one-hundred percent sure, Luc.” My hand makes a move toward him, but he’s still closed off so I leave my palm flat on the seat between us.
Squinting, he leans forward and looks up through the windshield.
“There’s supposed to be a meteor shower tonight. They said on the news that the best views are after midnight.” His profile glows from the moon and the lights of the car. The quiet on the surface of his face covers a lot of other junk, but peeling masks off takes time. I still wear mine a lot. It took Abby and her push for me to actually enjoy my senior year for me to even try wearing different ones. I still don’t think I’ve found my own yet.
“I don’t have anywhere to be,” I say, my voice devoid of the unease from a moment ago.
“We need full dark,” he says, leaning back and turning his head to face me slowly. Our eyes meet in the glowing red moments of the flashing lights.
“We should keep driving then.” My gaze is met with a slow blink before he turns to face the road again, shifting the truck into drive and killing the hazards as he pulls us back onto the roadway.
I count the mile markers on the roadside, though both of us are familiar with the route. We rode our bikes out this way one summer. My tire blew, so Lucas let me sit on his handlebars for the rest of the way. From the thick trees, there’s an open field where the abandoned drive-in theater used to stand. One day, it will be bulldozed and turned into fancy houses. That hasn’t happened yet, though, and the only question that I’m pretty sure nags in each of our minds is whether the radio boxes are still standing on their posts.
I count five miles before I stop keeping track and dare to push the power on his stereo. I brace myself to be assaulted with heavy bass, but the volume is surprisingly low. The familiar riff of Mustang Sally pushes my smile into my cheeks. What are the odds that I hear the same Wilson Pickett song twice in the same month. I mouth the words out of habit, but when Lucas’s voice utters the lyrics along with me, I let my terrible voice go and sing at the top of my lungs. We’re both grinning by the time he pulls onto the dirt road and through the unintimidating trespassing warning signs covered in graffiti.
“I heard this song last week with Tory,” I say. Lucas drops off from the chorus and glances at me as we rock along with the tires on the rough terrain.
“Oh, yeah?” There’s a tinge of jealousy in his voice, and I quickly try to fix it.
“He didn’t know the words,” I add in, laughing. He just nods, and when he looks away I squeeze my eyes shut, feeling daft because the song has nothing to do with his reaction. It’s that I was sharing one of our songs with Tory.
Lucas flips his high beams on so we can tell where we’re at and whether we’re going to run into remnants of the old screen and the sound box posts. The landscape looks almost exactly the same as it did after that long bike ride, only more of the wood has rotted away and vandals have taken care of other bits. The radios, though, still seem intact.
“They’re still here,” I say, the delighted voice of a ten-year-old coming out of my mouth. “Stop the car. Let’s see if any work,” I say, unbuckling quickly.
Lucas skids to a stop and we both jump out, searching with the help of his truck’s brights. The first three boxes I find are missing cords, and even though Lucas finds a few that are connected, he can’t get power to any of them. Stubborn and unwilling to quit, he and I scour the lot until we’re out of the shelter of his truck beams and are now fumbling in the moonlight. When I find one that lights up when my thumb presses the button, I squeal.
“Oh, my God!”
I can barely see Lucas’s form, but I hear his steps along the ground nearby.
“Don’t let go. I’ll find one, too,” he says, rummaging through a few more boxes before reaching the final row, closest to where the screen used to be.
The dark surroundings close in on me, and I consider giving up or asking Lucas to pull his truck closer so we have some light. My fears dissolve the second I hear Lucas’s voice pipe through the radio in my hand.
“Breaker niner-niner,” he jokes. It’s the only trucker lingo we know and it’s probably not even accurate.
“I cannot believe we found two that work!” We laugh with a mixture of nostalgia and exhaustion.
The twins taught Lucas this trick when we were younger, and he’s the one who talked me into riding our bikes all the way out here one day to try it out. For whatever reason, the old radios have a setting that turns them into makeshift walkie talkies. It’s more of a channel, like what the police use, my dad explained when we told him. We didn’t care what it was. For us, it was like having a cellphone when our parents said we weren’t old enough. Of course, we could only talk to each other. And we had to ride our bikes out into the boonies to make the calls.
“It’s so dark, I can barely see you,” I say into the intercom.
“Mwahaha.” He drags out a devilish laugh that crackles through the microphone.
“Don’t be a jerk. You know I don’t like the dark.” I squat down and pull an abandoned crate close enough to sit while we talk.
“I wish someone would reopen this place,” I lament.
“Maybe I do that instead of go to MIT or Tennessee. Look, problem solved.” A bitter laugh slips out.
“I think you really want to go to MIT,” I say.
There’s a long pause before he breathes out a “Yeah.”
“Your dad has even less of a right dictating now.”
He coughs, and I can tell it’s forced.
“We can talk about other things.” I’m not sure what else there is, so I wait for him to lead.
“I’m sorry I was a jerk,” he finally says.
I was one, too, but I’m not ready to admit that to him quite yet.
“I miss us, Lucas.” I cup the radio in my palms and stare at it, willing him to say the same words through the microphone.
“What happened?” I wipe away a quick tear and wait again. The only sounds I hear are his occasional breaths from yards away over a barely functioning line. I don’t know why it’s easier to talk like this. It always was. The first time my parents had a blow-out argument that ended in my dad storming out and staying at a hotel for a week, I confessed it here and only to Lucas. And when he threw all our best glasses to the floor and told my mother she was a tramp . . . we talked about that here too.
“Do you think you could help me with something?” His ask feels heavy, partly because of his tone but also because he purposely avoided the things I asked. I kind of want to force a trade, a favor from me for a truth from him.
“One date,” I say.
His silence tells me it’s either a no or he’s confused.
“With me, I mean. I want to go out on a real date, in front of people.” I grip my bottom lip with my teeth and brace myself for rejection. I expect it, and if he does say no then at least I’ll know what this is and where I stand. I’ll know that our kiss was a moment of weakness on his part, and I’ll quit trying to break inside his toughest parts.
“One date,” he repeats, and I sit up straight, muscles tight at the thought that he’s actually considering it.
“Yes. That’s my offer. Take it or leave it.”
The quiet lasts a little longer this time, and the dead space is filled with the occasional crackling sound of our connection. After a few final pops, the small green light on my device flickers off. Whatever residual electricity I was drawing on is gone.
“Went dead!” I shout, waving my hand.
Lucas drops his box, and it swings from the cord, banging into the post. I wait for him to come back, but he hasn’t moved. I can tell he’s standing, and his hands are either rubbing at his neck or on his face. The lack of response to my offer is starting to make me feel desperate, and the more seconds that pass without him moving or speaking, the less I want a yes at all.
I’m about to shout “never mind” when his voice cuts through the cool air.
“I get to pick the place,” he yells.
His body shifts, the shadow of hands falls to his sides.
“So you can pick somewhere nobody will see you with me?” I let out a guttural laugh after my fair question. I don’t want to be a secret. And I refuse to believe that kiss was anything other than real and honest. Whatever he’s afraid of in this world, it can’t be me. It can’t be us.
I can tell his head is bending down as he moves closer. He’s still too far to hear the crunch of his feet on the dirt, but with every stride he takes, I’m given a new detail. His right thumb is hooked in the pocket of his torn-up sweats. His brow is heavy and his focus is on the ground before him. His mouth is closed, but the usual tightness is gone.
